Comment by N_Lens

Agree. My personal take on this is a boring one: Like all things, it's a balance.

I'm introspective by nature (I'm sure many of us on this site are) and metacognition can be a very comfortable trap. It's a space where you can convince yourself that you can solve your life problems by spending enough time and effort thinking about them, the same way many of us approach engineering problems or other aspects of life. This is even worse in the era of AI, where you can have a helpful assistant to talk through your problems with and encourage analysis even further.

Turns out that's not true. You can spend as much time as you want thinking about your life, circumstances, emotions, experiences, etc. Eventually, you'll have to actually do something and go have some contact with reality.

It's helpful to examine your life and engage with your problems, but taking it too far is just another way of escapism. At least it was for me, YMMV.

I’ve been wondering the same thing about meditation: it is “known” that is is good for you in the long-term, but I wonder if spending time focused on a point in your mind is a very good idea for people that spend a lot of time stuck in their own minds and thoughts. In periods of solitude, I’ve found meditation to increase feelings of depersonalisation and solipsism, that I can easily imagine could precipitate into psychosis for some people. I don’t do much of it any more, and for people like me, I believe physical exercise to be a much better counterweight to too much thinking.

We push these one-size-fits-all suggestions, but we are never told who have they modeled from; not everybody is the same, and our minds are even more diverse than our biology.

Also, re: running on autopilot: the goal of mindfulness is to be aware of every waking moment, yet our biology is very much tuned to running on autopilot because it is so much more efficient and frees CPU time for higher processing—you don’t want to be focusing on every muscle when you walk now, do you? Is it such a great idea to overrule our energy conservation protocols our brains depend upon?

(Sorry for the off-topic, your comment was too interesting)

There's some healthy self-reflection, and then there's spiraling and overthinking / overanalysing.

I wouldn't say "stop thinking / run on autopilot" per se, but more that it's healthier to set a limit. Finish a sentence, get it out of your head, and move on. Rest and sleep help with processing the thoughts that you can use journaling for to get in order.

I don't know if I can "will" myself to go on autopilot. It seems like if there is a conflict in some meta-reasoning level, in values, life principles or general beliefs, I might be experiencing more depression-like symptoms until I try to resolve the conflict. Sometimes I can resolve the conflict myself, reflecting or journaling, and sometimes I need a professional therapist to guide the process. So, I'd say it's not that reflection leads to depression; more likely it is depression that leads to reflection, or some internal conflict that causes both depression and increased reflection. Then reflection by itself does not consistently solve the problem, but only a specific kind of reflection.

Great point, I completely agree. Reflection can be powerful, but like any tool it can slip into rumination if overused, especially for those prone to anxiety or depression. Appreciate you pointing that out.

I always assumed that general advice targets the average person, without accounting for potential mental health problems. I cannot imagine myself trying to tailor an advice for all neurotypical people out there, because everyone can only share their own experience with the world.

>Turns out just running on autopilot most of the time is the healthier human experience.

I cannot believe that you'd argue for mindful nuance only to end up in such a blatantly general statement that contradicts everything you advocated for. That's without even bothering to argue how much of the time is "most of the time".

I see you are engaging in meta-metacognition.

I won't take some time to reflect on that.

And now of course we also run all life problems by ChatGPT.

> some people experience too much metacognition/reflection and that is actually correlated with depression/anxiety.

That's a misconception pushed for profit. It pops up a lot in different forms like "don't be such an individual" and makes marketing and mass psychology so much easier.

tl;dr: the problem is not problem, it's your attitude, dude.

Your brain is "cultured" and was wired to echo voices and opinions of peeps who seemed to have more fun when you were having thoughts and doubts about the things in discourse and you held back for one or more various reasons ( most times it's false pity or unjustified disgust because you were too proud of your own opinion, but you don't notice at all or way too late ) and so your brain ends up hallucinating depressive/anxious versions of unspoken things and reactions that never got to manifest.

It has NOTHING to do with intelligence, but the higher proportion of HN readers still falls into this category because the bulk of people under any slice under the bell curve falls into this category.

You can be as meta and reflective as you like, while meditating or not, just don't make the mistake of being nice or holding back. You don't have to be brutal or radical but in most cases, even when you are, someone or some train of thought will easily keep you grounded, albeit sometimes, someone (again, or some train of thought) will attempt to candygrab you onto their (your) cutesy little roller coaster. (Just vomit all over them/it, as soon as you notice and get back to your self.)

If you don't hold back any thoughts, feelings, perspectives about what makes you feel depressed or anxious, you are going to have a good time. Letting go can work but when it comes to some (micro)-(traumatic) experiences, it's better to resolve "their" and your arrogance about the experienced and the never lived, never said, never heard. That way you, even though you don't break the loop right away, you create a simultaneous bypass or parallel circuit that fires up bunches of synaptic connections that find better, less crippling ways to deal with whatever the loop is focused on or around.

You don't read about this because even your favorite teachers are "cultured".

If talking to LLMs about stuff like that, make sure they are local and your system is secure. And you have to make sure your LLM doesn't sugarcoat you or any problem. Especially if you fine tune it for psychology. It's an LLM but it learned from texts of people who are for profit and who will go at lengths to self-preserve who they are and what they learned. Your LLM needs to be radically honest with you and the variety of ways one can think about stuff, which is not something they do by default or anywhere in the top 30-70% of the weights.

PS: Whatever gets to any company will be used for profit and to update profiles of entire population segments. It's not necessarily systemic but there are always individuals inside the companies, inside gov. institutions and MITM everywhere.