Psychotech 07: Worry Futilization

Function: a reminder that worry is not useful and need not be clung to; the permission to let go of one’s worries and cease to justify their existence.

Use cases: anxiety, worry, fear, insecurity, stress, panic

This one is called Worry Futilization – a reminder that worry is not useful and need not be clung to; the permission to let go of one’s worries and cease to justify their existence. Here is how I introduce it:

Much of our suffering is perpetuated by false and destructive metacognitive beliefs, or beliefs about our own thinking. For example, you may be under the impression that worry is useful. You think worrying helps to motivate you. You think worrying is akin to planning and problem-solving. You think worrying makes you a good person in some way. But data suggests that worry is a bad motivator. It is fundamentally different from planning, problem-solving, or care. And it can backfire and make problems worse. Worry is a useless and repetitive cycle of mental noise. Whether a problem is within your control or outside of it, worry serves no one and solves nothing. Do not cling to your worries. Let them pass, and let them go. Embrace the futility of worry, and watch life go on as your anxiety disappears.

And here are a few examples of this psychotechonlogy being deployed in spiritual, psychological, and philosophical contexts:

“If the problem can be solved why worry? If the problem cannot be solved worrying will do you no good.”

– Shantideva, Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life

“If worries ever had some important, useful information, you’d probably be more inclined to welcome them, but worry usually has a terrible track record for accuracy. If your worries were useful even a small percent of the time, you probably wouldn’t be reading this book! Worry predictions aren’t based on what’s likely to happen. They’re based on what would be terrible if it did happen. They’re not based on probability—they’re based on fear.”

– David Carbonell, The Worry Trick

“He suffers more than necessary, who suffers before it is necessary.”

– Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

But what are we actually talking about here? To my surprise, Miriam-Webster actually has an entry on psychotechnology. It defines it as:

psy·cho·tech·nol·o·gy

1: the application of psychological methods and results to the solution of practical problems especially in industry

2: an application of technology for psychological purposes (as personal growth or behavior change)

Now the first meaning here refers to the use of psychological knowledge to inform product/software design, and the second refers to physical technologies to improve one’s mind, like the Neuralink implants that are totally not going to result in a dystopian nightmare. But neither of these definitions captures what I mean when I use the term.

I’m interested, first and foremost, in the cultivation of wisdom. And I have argued that the further advancement of physical technologies and gadgets, even those intended to enhance the mind, will not improve our lives and may expose us to new risks, if they don’t emerge from within truly sapient systems.

But in a 2008 paper, Surviving and Thriving With Psychotechnologies, Thomas B. Roberts explores the concept of psychotechnology in a bit more depth. He points out that technology can refer to any “standard technique, method, way, or craft-skill for… solving problems.” and discusses how things like psychedelics and yoga can be seen as technologies for mind-enhancement.

Cognitive psychologist John Vervaeke also makes use of the term, and in his “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis” lecture series, he provides a definition for his usage:

A socially generated and standardized way of formatting, manipulating, and enhancing information processing that’s readily internalizable into human cognition, and that can be applied in a domain-general manner. …It must extend and empower cognition in some reliable and extensive manner and be highly generalizable among people. Prototypical instances are literacy, numeracy, and graphing.

This is getting much closer to what we mean. Literacy and graphing are solid examples of these standardized methods that reliably empower our minds. Vervaeke even compares psychotechnologies to pieces of software that run on the hardware of the brain and greatly enhance its functionality, which my readers will know is a pervasive metaphor in my work.

He says, “just like humans are born without physical tools, they are also born without psychotechnologies. For example, humans are not born literate, but first have to learn this psychotechnology.” So just like any other technology, psychotechnologies are human artifacts that serve human needs.

Better yet, Vervaeke expresses interest in using psychotechnology to “bring the cultivation of wisdom into the educational domain” and argues that “wisdom is an ecology of psychotechnologies,” a brilliant articulation that aligns perfectly with my understanding.

He speaks broadly about cognitive and metacognitive tools like rationality and meditation methods. And thinkers like Chris Perez and Euvie Ivanova, host of the Future Thinkers podcast, have shared articles explaining how everything from L-theanine to fasting to ecstatic dance, all fall into this category, and are essential for humanity’s current stage.

I am hoping to further build upon these conceptions of psychotechnology. In my recent work, I have been most interested in what you might call micro-psychotechnologies. The smallest, individual units of wisdom.

I might define this use of psychotechnology as:

The practical application of conceptual artifacts that utilize cognitive, behavioral, or somatic processes to solve psychological problems or enhance psychological health.

I’m also quite fond of Ivanova’s much shorter “methods of soul-craft.” My use of the word “psychological” emphasizes a central focus on human health, well-being, and values – not on technical, industrial, or instrumental functions.

In Designing the Mind: The Principles of Psychitecture, I state:

There are tools that can be unlocked right now, by anyone, without any external technology. We might call these tools psychotechnologies. The most powerful way to improve the brain at this point in history is through its software: Through your thoughts and actions.

I go on to write:

A psychitect is a collector of adaptive mental mechanisms—a craftsman of strategic psychological structures. He comes to see unwanted negative emotions as inefficiencies in his programming. Wise ideas and principles come to be viewed as snippets of open-source cognitive code.

These “snippets” can be contained within text, and are often referred to simply as “quotes.” For example:

“If the problem can be solved why worry? If the problem cannot be solved worrying will do you no good.”

– Shantideva, Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life

It’s easy to trivialize an excerpt like this as mere “wise words” – the kind of content that quote websites pump out on a daily basis. But of course, psychotechnologies are not simply “quotes.” If you are experiencing anxiety, simply reading these words has a noticeable, positive effect on your emotional experience.

This insightful quote, on the other hand, has no reliable effect on the psychological experience of the reader:

“The net force on a body is equal to the body’s acceleration multiplied by its mass or, equivalently, the rate at which the body’s momentum changes with time.”

– Isaac Newton, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy

The significance of psychotechnologies is in the way they plug into our existing qualia, or psychological experiences, and change them in some useful way. And the real magic of psychotechnologies is not the comfort they provide when we read them in a quote book, but what happens when we internalize them.

In a Mindform article called Thought Triggers, I argue that:

“Most proven methods for improving your well-being boil down to what you might call thought triggers: Creating if-then relationships between certain thoughts in your mind.”

I point out that healthy traits like gratitude, hopefulness, and equanimity can all be understood in terms of these if-then relationships in our minds. For example, the trait we call “resilience” ultimately comes down to habitualizing thoughts like this:

“If I have the thought “I’m not good enough to do this,’ then trigger the thought “just because I failed this time, doesn’t mean I can’t get there.'”

In Principles, I argue that our psychological habits, or algorithms, are what determine the ongoing quality of our subjective experience and our character. Much of the difference between perpetually happy and unhappy people has to do with the connections of their psychological algorithms:

Bad/maladaptive algorithms are those that result in distorted views, negative habits, or suffering.

Good/adaptive algorithms are those that serve our ideals and tranquility.

We engage in psychitecture to transform algorithms that don’t serve us into those that do. But how is this transformation actually initiated, on a micro-level?

In this diagram, we see a negative algorithm on the left, with a distorted belief (I’m never going to get a good job) resulting in negative emotion (despair). On the right, we see a good algorithm, where the negative belief has been replaced with a clear one, and the negative emotion a positive one: