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Comment by Erlich_Bachman | Hacker News Reader

So the main point of the article is that mental and emotional processes, especially stressful, take a toll on the body, in terms of energy and other resources used up?

How do you live a good life past like 10 years old without knowing this? Isn't this a basic understanding of your own body that you get after your first stressful moments and notice that you don't feel as sharp or energetic, even though you didn't do anything physical?

Isn't that the same exact thing that all the doctors talk about whey they say "less stress" to recovering patients etc.? What is the new thing here?

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What you've written is indeed obvious, but IMO that wasn't the point of the article. Consider this quote:

"Consider what happens when you’re thirsty and drink a glass of water. The water takes about 20 minutes to reach your bloodstream, but you feel less thirsty within mere seconds. What relieves your thirst so quickly? Your brain does. It has learned from past experience that water is a deposit to your body budget that will hydrate you, so your brain quenches your thirst long before the water has any direct effect on your blood."

IMO the point she tries to convey is that the budget doesn't track actual, objective resource use, which also means that individual budget constraints are not only constrained by the actual physiology, i.e. with training (mindfulness and so on) one can move the baseline and thus e.g. stress resistance.

Not a new point either, but you'd be surprised how many people don't know their own feelings. My psych professor told countless anecdotes of patients who didn't know that the disquieting feelings they experienced when e.g. being inside an elevator were actually a panic attack.

>but you'd be surprised how many people don't know their own feelings.

Probably grew up in abusive-ish households where the parents didn't respect the child's emotions. I only found out I have severe anxiety when I was like 27 years old. It took me a year of having full blown panic attacks to realize what it was. I thought I was just being "weak", because that's what I was taught my whole life.

It's not even that. It's that we don't teach people what a lot of that stuff feels like. You don't need to go through some big trauma to be ignorant of your own feelings.

Sure, but in a healthy upbringing, it only takes 1 panic attack for a normal person to realize "oook, something's not right". Messed up people think "I'm being weak".

Being conscious doesn't give you the understanding of your own psychology. We are mostly completely unaware of the causation of emotions or responses.

Being a new father, I disagree. It's pretty clear most of the time what's happening with the kids: something happens they don't like, they cry. Something happens they do like, they laugh and smile. Pretty simple. Yes, as infants sometimes they cry without an apparent cause (although it always seemed to turn out to be a bubble of gas!), and certainly toddlers seem to melt at the slightest provocation. But the process is hardly random, in ourselves or in others.

Of course, it gets trickier as you get older, accumulate experiences. Now the same event can carry a unique meaning for every unique individual that experiences it, and that meaning is sometimes very difficult to infer by simple observation.

A tired, cranky kid will pretty clearly be unhappy, but he won't know it's because he's tired and he might even argue with you about it.

Yes, but the irony is you're making the same mistake by calling them "messed up". Something is not right with them, too. It's almost like attacking people is the wrong thing to do, no matter what they do to deserve it!

Most of the time what's wrong with them is simple. They are being lazy in their thinking, or they are ignorant of the importance of empathy and acknowledging people's experiences, and helping them through it, even if we don't approve of (or even understand) why they are having that experience. That's not an obvious lesson, and its not "written on the tin" of any baby I've seen!

(Caveat: A very tricky case is when someone seems congenitally devoid of empathy or self-reflection (e.g. NPD, or generic sociopath). In that case you're better off not engaging them emotionally at all, and treat them as a rational actor responding to incentives. A variant, the rational actor who clearly understands the power of emotions, who can learn to simulate them, and has no scruples about doing so--this is the nightmare person because not only are they "manipulative", their existence makes life harder for the rest of us with real emotions, who sometimes get accused of being them. BTW I've read some really interesting stuff about successful psychopaths who are totally open about their qualities, good and bad, and have decided to integrate with society in a classically healthy way! So even here, there is hope.)

> Not a new point either, but you'd be surprised how many people don't know their own feelings. My psych professor told countless anecdotes of patients who didn't know that the disquieting feelings they experienced when e.g. being inside an elevator were actually a panic attack.

That doesn’t surprise me at all. Why would anyone instinctively know the terms a psychologist would use to categorize their feelings?

That’s like saying you’d be surprised at how many people don’t know the key of their favorite song.

The examples of my prof were way more basic: It's fine that they didn't know the term panic attack, but they should be able to know how fear feels. The person in my example said they started so sweat, had high heart rates and was feeling somehow unwell every time they had to enter an elevator. An adult usually is able to verbalize that experience as fear, though the actual trigger may not be known to them. The person in question first went to a general practitioner, who found no physiological cause and transferred the patient to a psychologist.

Or names of individual stars in the sky.

> It has learned from past experience that water is a deposit to your body budget that will hydrate you, so your brain quenches your thirst long before the water has any direct effect on your blood.

We have learned over the last decade or so that there are some rather significant direct connections between gut and brain via direct neural signalling. Chemical signalling can occur within about 60-90 seconds--ask a smoker how quickly nicotine can hit their system.

It is not proven/disproven AT ALL that the brain isn't responding to direct neural/chemical detection of the water by both the mouth and the stomach.

If that is the case, no, this CAN'T be trained.

That's most likely true, and there are probably a lot of people like that. It is just hard for me to understand how they live and why it has become like that. And maybe there are some ways in which I am in the same way, perhaps regarding other obvious things?

Absolutely, I myself am obviously procrastinating right now, I know it doesn't exactly help me achieve my goals for today, yet here I am, replying to you instead of doing the work I should :)

The problem I see is that there is no institutionalized way to educate about emotions. For abstract knowledge and training rational thinking we have schools and universities. For feelings/emotions, though, we were are all effecively just getting homeschooled: We can learn from our parents etc., but that's pretty much it.

Perhaps there should be something like a school for feelings. This obviously is a hot topic, though, with different cultures having different ideals etc., especially when it comes to things like purpose in live, like we could already experience in another thread :)

It might be a good idea to figure out how to teach something like that before making a school for it. How would you teach different feelings and emotions?

I find one of the fundamental ones is pain. It's not an emotion, but it's not that easy to classify what is actually painful and what isn't. Holding a phone in my hand isn't painful, but at some point I managed to do it so much that it did become painful. I don't know how to describe the pain, but I know that I am apprehensive of holding a phone in my hand for extended periods of time.

Another one is stress. People might not know they are stressed, but they are. They just can't recognize what stress is.

What I'm getting at is that a lot of things aren't taught explicitly. We don't even know how to teach some of that, because we don't have a good classification system for the feeling/emotion.

Good points! The research and practical experience for many of these aspects is already there, though mostly only in the context of therapy, i.e. in cases where people already experience problems to a degree that it negatively affects their personal and/or professional lives.

What I mostly meant was similar to your stress example. Many people don't actually know what stress is, how it manifests, and most importantly, what you can do about it. Many also don't know that people can have very different thresholds of tolerable amounts of stress, and that those thresholds can siginificantly differ for the same person doing different kinds of work/studying etc. (e.g. some people have very low tolerances for arguing/discussions in work groups but can effortlessly dig themselves into research for 8 hours, others can do meeting marathons but have problems with physical work affecting their mood and so on).

In these cases many aspects of both the basic knowledge, ways of prevention and methods of coping with stress are well known, they just aren't taught in regular school. There is slow progress, though. In my country there often are e.g. social pedagogues in primary and secondary schools, helping with these kinds of things - though often only when they already manifest themselves as problematic behaviour.

When I was 10 years old there was a copy of "the sky is the limit" lying around the house.

In this book you could read that "your thoughts are your own and your feelings come from your thoughts and nobody can think for you and you may have feelings but it's ultimately your thoughts about it that matter and that you control so you control how you react to everything and anything under the sun, thus your feelings are entirely under your control and your responsibility. Isn't that liberating ?" You are a musheen, Harry.

Being exposed as a kid to this kind of reasoning can distort things. It was written by an adult and read by adults.

There's a lot of coaches out there who still put out those kind of reasoning. People try to behave like cold machines and then they break down.

I wish people were treated more like machines.

Big expensive machines, which require training to operate, and have big manuals full of pages and pages of "Danger: failure to follow correct operating procedures may lead to injury or death."

I would really love to have a custom manual showing correct min/max/optimal operating parameters for sleep, warmth, hugs, food, etc. Especially if people would have to keep to it.

And then instead of getting angry when someone doesn't do what they want (or getting angry at themselves for failing) , people would have to accept that they violated the commonly accepted operating procedures -thereby exceeding the tolerances of the system- and should do better next time.

Wouldn't that be a huge improvement over how things work now?

For a lot of us here, I think so. The downfall is that this approach assumes the reader already understands systems and how they often play together, which our community takes for granted as a skill.

I do personally like it, though. Explaining how, for instance, your food intake has tolerances which can be exceeded in either direction temporarily but will eventually catch up to you is exceedingly useful.

I'm always surprised how many adults think they can "just push themselves" to get more out of their life, whereas studies are pretty clear you only get a few weeks before regressing not only to the mean, but below it.

Yes, and it would be a big help for new parents, responsible for the care of a new small human who did not come home with such a useful manual.

Do you not believe that feelings come from thoughts and that your thoughts are not your own? Or do you believe in a more connected and behaviour based approach?

I more than believe that it depends on what your definition of "own" is. Both feelings and thoughts go hand in hand. Chemical state in your body causes negative feelings and also negative thoughts. You could inject anyone with heroin and they would feel happy and have positive thoughts. Same you could inject anyone with something negative that causes feelings of horror and same with thoughts. Same with external situations causing certain chemical releases in your body, for instance you see someone attractive and then you feel aroused and think "wow they are attractive".

"Feelings come from thoughts" is pretty much the basis of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Fairly well-understood. Of course it's not a universal technique but it's often very helpful.

I think both come from chemical state, but can influence each other to an extent. There is clear evidence in anyone's life for that. Can you think yourself to feel absolutely anything?

If you are in love with someone did your thoughts cause that love? Or did feeling of love, arousal cause those thoughts?

The chief purpose of the article is to remind the reader of these connections and encourage them: “ We’re all living in challenging times, and we’re all at high risk for disrupted body budgets. [...] it’s possible to acknowledge what your brain is actually doing and take some comfort from it.”

Secondarily, the article lightly advocates for holistic medical care, using the negative example of the same pain being treated by different specialists depending on the circumstances. I do not believe that approach is obvious to many people, or agreed with by most people aware of it.

I'm reminded of John Medina, neuroscientist, "what's obvious to you, is obvious to you."

Same, I don't see anything new that the author really adds to the discussion

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