[jrvarela56]

Useful concept. I used to call them 'signals': like alarms going off that I should pay attention as they may be telling me something. Specially when the alarm goes off for no good reason: my mind is trying to tell me something I'm not aware of (anxiety/depression are some of these).

Learning about my emotions is the only other thing that has changed my life for the better comparable to learning about computers. 10/10 would recommend trying to understand how to deal with you 'inner monkey'. You've been rooming with it in your mind since the day you were born and how you relate to it shapes every aspect of your life.

[mock-possum]

Yep, sometime after college I sort of settled on this method of visualizing my emotions / feelings - take what I’m feeling, hold it in front of me, and look at it as it’s own thing, outside and aside from ‘me.’ And then ask myself: 1) what is this that I’m feeling, and 2) what does it make me want to do.

‘Why’ I’m feeling is interesting, whether I should act on a feeling is obviously necessary to consider - but really just those two things, “what is this and what does it make me want to do” is usually enough to move me into a position where I have agency, sidestepping emotional outbursts and ill-considered or unhelpful behavior.

It’s incredibly empowering to find yourself coming out of a situation, thinking “when I was a teen this would have been awful, but now as an adult, it’s just something to roll my eyes at and move on.” Not everybody gets to do that so easily, I feel very lucky to have figured at least this little bit out for myself.

[Obscurity4340]

This sounds very similar to Internal Systems Therapy, which you (possibly unknowingly) have roughly described quite well from my understanding.

[jstarfish]

I think Scribblenauts (and maybe The Sims) implemented emotions in a similar way. When a character feels Hungry, their directive becomes "find food." Hunger is going to take precedence over Boredom's directive ("find toys").

I don't know if they're technically signals or states or something else; there seem to be conditions by which some are triggered, and circumstances by which some just become True/False when other conditions are met/unmet.

So your theory seems to work. The only exception is anything depression-related, because what are you supposed to do about it (it's a nebulous emotion whose drivers we cannot fully articulate, which makes "find joy" as useless a directive as "overthrow capitalist society," "take SSRIs" and "touch grass").

[roguecoder]

I saw an interesting theory that "depression" is a set of signals pointing us to solve a problem: it lets us skip eating, because we don't feel hunger, and sleep, because we have insomnia, and other things we would otherwise want to do, since we have trouble caring about anything. It lets us think about one problem for a long time without being distracted, because we ruminate on it. We don't get discouraged by failures, because we don't care about anything the way we usually would.

It's sort of like a computer down-clocking when it is overheating.

The problem comes because there are a lot of different mechanisms that can trigger that set of circuitry. So when depression is triggered by grief over a death, for example, no amount of time and energy and not eating is going to bring them back. And sometimes it wasn't kicked off by anything in particular at all, or our brain gets stuck in that mode even after whatever kicked it off gets solved. At that point there is a tendency to look for a problem that is so overwhelming it can explain why we ought to stay in that mode, whether or not it is being useful to us.

I like this explanation because it matches my experience. Personally my depression was because I had undiagnosed ADHD: I was constantly grieving my inability to accomplish things I wanted to do and enjoyed for no conceivable reason. And in this case it even actually kind of did its job: I stuck with the medical profession through an unbelievably long journey to getting that diagnosis and the easy and extremely effective treatment, because I had trouble caring about anything including my repeated failures to get any help at all from what medical professionals offered.

[jrvarela56]

I think something like depression is just one of these signals ignored for long enough that it becomes a constant state of mind. At that point it's literally a blurry signal to 'change something'.