Tuesday 29 January 2019

Mental Strength Testing

What is a potentially effective method for strength building of mental capabilities?

To continue from my last post about ways to implement learning by using conscious awareness and subconscious drive to their advantages, another method for boosting mentality should be an aspect of strength building. By intentionally testing your limits in a controlled environment, with the confidence of capabilities to handle the circumstances, useful skills can be learned.

By mentally testing yourself, this should allow a simulation of a potentially risky situation, but to gain knowledge of the cause and effect of influencing factors. Besides the conscious knowledge, positive results of controlling the circumstances should additionally contribute to influencing your subconscious that controlling the situation is a positive result, therefore causing you to be more inclined to repeat that positive result of control.

As an aspect of “Self-Conscious Self-Coercion”, intentionally putting yourself in a difficult situation that tests your abilities to handle the situation, should create positive results, as long as the test is not too difficult. With the positive results, you can then implement the methods of “self coercion”, by being consciously aware of the positive result, and or by rewarding yourself, to influence your subconscious and steer you toward obtaining that positive control without you even knowing it in the future. In order to test yourself without making it too difficult (and potentially failing, with a counteractive result), you can analyse what your capabilities are at the present time, based off of past results. Then, place yourself in circumstances where you are confident you will be able to handle the test.

The test can often be circumstances which you dislike, but want to have better control over, so it will often take that initial conscious comprehension of intentionally testing yourself for the purpose of building strength. Also, it should take will power to overpower your subconscious preference, in order to force yourself into the testing scenario. 1 example is attempting to control social anxiety. I used to have fairly significant social anxiety, and subconsciously preferred to avoid social situations, as well as acted nervous while in social situations. After consciously analysing this annoying mental disorder of social anxiety, I hypothesized that conditioning myself could be an effective way to overcome it. Then, after intentionally putting myself in social circumstances, despite my subconscious or instinctual utter despise of such a setting, I slowly gained conscious knowledge of affecting factors, and perhaps more significantly, influenced my subconscious to associate positivity with a social environment, from repeated positive results.

After you’ve tested yourself successfully, you can incrementally increase the difficulty of the test. Each time you accomplish the intended result, you can consciously comprehend various factors, in their cause and effect on you or the other factors in the circumstances. This will give you valuable information to predict similar future circumstances more accurately, as well as potentially apply that knowledge to further testing of increased difficulty. The accomplishment of each stage of testing, should additionally make it easier to conquer the circumstances via subconscious desire to succeed, which will likely be a driving influence behind actions, even when you don’t know it. Subsequential tests of increased difficulty should build mental strength to control similar circumstances for the future. Even without increasing difficulty, testing should still cause similar (though, likely less) strength building, by repetition more strongly affecting subconscious drive, and consciously remembered causes and effects of factors.

Another example of mental strength building, could be; testing control over addiction. I’ve also done this myself with addictive substances, such as caffeine, alcohol, and nicotine. The tests involved intentionally subjecting myself to the substance, then quitting for a minimum time period. The quitting period would be the opposite of my subconscious desire (as addiction is virtually entirely subconscious appeal), so forcing myself into the dis-preferable quitting period of the test took some will power, but the success caused my subconscious to be more geared toward the ability to stop when I consciously decide to.

Intentionally putting yourself into uncomfortable circumstances is the contrary to your subconscious inclination, but using that as a test to consciously control the situation can be effective. Using a situation which you’re confident that you will be able to control, should cause a positive result of success, to counteract your subconscious drive to prefer control, as well as gain conscious knowledge of various causes and effects of the situations. Your subconscious is an important muscle, which can be worked out, to test and build strength.

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