Executive functioning and self-regulation
jrjones9933
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Joined: 13 May 2011
Age: 57
Gender: Male
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Location: The end of the northwest passage
08 Jul 2016, 3:04 pm
I've tried a number of things to regulate my behavior, focus my energy on achieving goals, and meet deadlines. Many years ago, I came up with the idea that in pursuit of honesty, I should stop doing anything (or neglecting to do anything) that made me feel ashamed. Then, I'd have no incentive to particularly hide any of my life, although to be clear this did not mean that I felt compelled to share everything with everyone or even close. I just want to avoid setting up situations where I might lie to someone in my life when they ask a question that's reasonably their business to ask.
Simultaneously, I started examining things that made me feel ashamed, and why. When I started living on my own and noticing how much of a mess would accumulate if no one did any housework, it took me a while to learn to feel ashamed of having a messy house and move to clean it up. Other things that made me feel ashamed, like occasionally feeling attracted to other men, went into intense review. In that case and others, I decided that I had no reason to feel ashamed of myself.
It also caused me to spend more time thinking through my interactions with people and observing them to discern how those interactions impacted them. I find it quite reasonable to feel ashamed if I hurt someone; call it contrite if you prefer.
About a year ago, I read The Righteous Mind, which examines our current theories about moral psychology. YMMV, but I took away the idea that my ethics influenced my political positions entirely through the moral sense of avoiding harm to others. In terms of my personal feelings, though, I utilize the other moral senses which Jonathan Haidt describes in the book. During my stressful first year as a PhD student, my house got pretty messy, but I continued to care a lot about not harming other people. Perhaps I had so much to do regulating the balance between studying, eating, and sleeping that I couldn't spare that time to wedge in a little mopping. I doubt it. I wasted enough time beyond what I needed to rest my brain that I suspect something else as the proximate cause.
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"I find that the best way [to increase self-confidence] is to lie to yourself about who you are, what you've done, and where you're going." - Richard Ayoade
12 Jul 2016, 3:23 pm
Im unfamiliar with the book you refer to but found this TED talk by Jonathan Haidt about the 5 moral values that liberals and conservatives tend to honor most.
The moral roots of liberals and conservatives
Below are extracts from the transcript, which explain the 5 values.
The second foundation is fairness/reciprocity. There's actually ambiguous evidence as to whether you find reciprocity in other animals, but the evidence for people could not be clearer. This Norman Rockwell painting is called "The Golden Rule," and we heard about this from Karen Armstrong, of course, as the foundation of so many religions.
The third foundation is in-group/loyalty. You do find groups in the animal kingdom -- you do find cooperative groups -- but these groups are always either very small or they're all siblings. It's only among humans that you find very large groups of people who are able to cooperate, join together into groups, but in this case, groups that are united to fight other groups. This probably comes from our long history of tribal living, of tribal psychology. And this tribal psychology is so deeply pleasurable that even when we don't have tribes, we go ahead and make them, because it's fun. (Laughter) Sports is to war as pornography is to sex. We get to exercise some ancient, ancient drives.
The fourth foundation is authority/respect. Here you see submissive gestures from two members of very closely related species. But authority in humans is not so closely based on power and brutality, as it is in other primates. It's based on more voluntary deference, and even elements of love, at times.
The fifth foundation is purity/sanctity. This painting is called "The Allegory Of Chastity," but purity's not just about suppressing female sexuality. It's about any kind of ideology, any kind of idea that tells you that you can attain virtue by controlling what you do with your body, by controlling what you put into your body. And while the political right may moralize sex much more, the political left is really doing a lot of it with food. Food is becoming extremely moralized nowadays, and a lot of it is ideas about purity, about what you're willing to touch, or put into your body.
I'm not sure what type of response you were hoping for?
In relation to executive functioning, for me it wasn't a case of self regulation while studying, it was more so prioritising the demands on my abilities, things like the housework were almost at the bottom of my priority list, the first two values of harm/care and fairness/reciprocity would have been consistently a part of my life during this time though.
