basicbrain

[basicbrain]

Emotion + Insight Log: January 5 - 11, 2019

Preamble:  Every day I record my mood and insights for the week. I’m leaving them here as a record. INFP e9 SO/SX Most prevalent emotions this week: - Distraction, lack of focus - Happiness, cheerfulness, upbeat energy - Fogginess, heaviness, resistance to goals - Anger Summary of Insights from the Week: * Unmet needs for intimacy, challenge and variety are the reason I experience more boredom and loneliness than normal. Nobody is holding me back from those things except me. Changing the way I’ve structured my life will help address this. * Embrace learning as an antidote to shame. There is no shame in learning. * Don’t try to intellectually and emotionally transcend problems. We move out of pain by moving through it. * Seeing the good in myself will lead to deeper independence, greater personal investment in my life and greater engagement in my world. I am worth my own time and energy. * Anger sometimes fuels passion and creativity. Do some creative thinking when you’re angry. * Energy and charisma increase together. And it is often in my power to chose an energetic, assertive frame. People respond well and are positively influenced when I do this.

[basicbrain]

Guidelines for Tritype/IV Evaluation

1.      Desires and Fears

1s desire perfection and fear unworthiness

2s desire love and fear abandonment

3s desire success and fear failure

4s desire specialness and fear normalcy

5s desire knowledge and fear incapability

6s desire security and fear instability

7s desire stimulation and fear entrapment

8s desire autonomy and fear enslavement

9s desire peace and fear disruption

2.      Order

The first fear and desire are those of your core type

This is followed by your wing

Then by your first fix

Then by your second fix

Then by your first fix’s wing

Then by your second fix’s wing

3.      Instinctual Variants’ Effect

Sp 1 turns its critical eye towards itself and thinks itself is in need of perfection.

So 1 upholds itself as a banner of virtue for others to follow as a mentor.

Sx 1 turns its critical heat and anger towards the outside world and thinks the outside world is in need of perfection.

Sp 2 acts in a childlike fashion to endear other to it.

So 2 helps the broader environment and takes on tasks to endear itself to others.

Sx 2 seduces an individual with a special relationship to endear itself to that person.

Sp 3 acts against vanity and overfocuses on its work and letting it speak for itself.

So 3 focuses on networking and presenting its polished image to as many people as possible.

Sx 3 tries to live up to a masculine or feminine ideal and make a strong attractive impression on others.

Sp 4 acts stoically and focuses on suffering in silence.

So 4 chronically compares itself to others to develop its identity.

Sx 4 focuses on sharing its powerful personal experience with others through emotional rawness and aggressive honesty.

Sp 5 focuses on hobbies and a safe space they can retreat to.

So 5 plays an advisor role to others and collects helpful information.

Sx 5 collects darker information and shares secrets or interesting information as a method of connection.

Sp 6 focuses on material safety and obsesses over details to keep itself secure.

So 6 ties itself to systems, organizations, and social roles to keep itself secure.

Sx 6 desperately ties itself to ideals of strength and bravery to keep itself secure.

Sp 7 focuses on lifestyle and personal, often permanent, pleasures (nice houses, fast cars, sex, etc.) as opposed to outside stimulation.

So 7 focuses on a utopian and idealistic image of the future and gives to others in the optimistic assumption they will give back.

Sx 7 focuses on new and sensational ideas and distractions with a focus on fresh experience.

Sp 8 acts as a survivalist and gathers the resources it needs to exist entirely independent of others.

So 8 acts as a protector to those around it and tries to remain powerful by shielding those less powerful.

Sx 8 acts in direct rebellion and emotional rawness against others, testing itself against others to find an ideal partner strong enough to surrender (often this search is unconscious.)

Sp 9 focuses on gathering resources so that it can remain stationary and uninvolved.

So 9 acts as an active peacemaker and works towards helping others to avoid conflict.

Sx 9 searches for an ideal partner to remain in stasis with, who will not disturb them or have conflict with them.

4.      Example

My friend is a 3w4 7w8 1w2 sx/sp

His core desires go:

Success>specialness>stimulation>perfection>autonomy>love

His core fears go:

Failure>normalcy>entrapment>unworthiness>enslavement>abandonment

His 3 is attractiveness focused with a side of work focus.

His 7 is fresh experience focused with a side of lifestyle focus.

His 1 is zeal focused with a side of self-criticism focus.

5.      Making the connections

This is a more intuitive (not iNtuitive) process. Make the connections from the basic core fear and desire (example: the core fear of failure feeds into all these other fears as a root cause and all these other fears in combination feed these behaviors)

Look at how the single core fear plays into every other behavior at play and every other fear at play. Flavor each attitude and behavior and fear based on every other factor.

And in conclusion, you have your type evaluated. Congratulations. Go forth into the world in full glory.

[basicbrain]

INFPs: Do You Know Your Hidden Genius? (Introverted Feeling)

Nowhere is the self-deprecating humour of the INFP more astutely expressed than here, on the internet. Here is where we trivialize Introverted Feeling (Fi), pitting it against the logic of Thinking (T) functions and the outer-world fixation of Extroverted Feeling (Fe). For fun, obviously. These annoying, low-key patronizing jokes are for fun.

But like all trivial matters, well, let’s move swiftly along. ;)

I’m happy to see us laugh at ourselves, but that convinces me we still haven’t truly understood our unique genius. We still apologize and blubber about our ineptitudes. We project our insecurities about ourselves onto other types by criticizing them. We form “cute” attachments to the least healthy expressions of our Fi without exercising its strengths. No wonder we’re miserable!

Oh, and can we stop equating the genius of our Feeling function with sentimentality? There’s something to that, but that’s actually the real DANGER of never finding an objective outlet for your Fi. Self-pity, puerile sentiments, and fields full of puppies and rainbows that go on forever, do not comprise a healthy Fi. I’m here to tell you what does.

Here’s a clearer picture of what the gift of Fi looks like. Knowing it will help you harness your native abilities and be a happier person. It’ll also help you appreciate that every function has its blessings and curses - that’s what makes each one beautiful and useful in the world.

Ready, Freddie? Clearance, Clarence? Okay, lez go...

- Whereas T types are effortlessly attuned to what is logically consistent/inconsistent, the F types are dialled into ethics and ideals. In Fi’s case, these ideals are subjective (individual) rather than objective (social). You’ll know what your ideals are because they ring true for you, straight to the core of your being. And I bet only a few values do that for you. The few things that really matter to you, deeply and intensely matter.

- An Fi users sense of ethics is similar to their idealism: they go by subjective ethics. Someone who studies cognitive functions defined the Fi’s ethics as “what gives life.” That doesn’t mean you’re necessarily a pacifist, or pro-life. After all, Fi is a subjective function, and every Fi user has their own sense of what “life” means to them. So, whatever that is, you’re constantly feeling out and evaluating the ethical problems (both universal and situational, important and mundane) of the world around you with a sense of “what gives life” as the north star. 

- While ethics differ from person to person, Fi’s ethics are humanitarian in nature. Fi cares deeply about promoting human welfare and nourishing the human spirit so that humanity can realize its fullest potential. 

- Another often overlooked Fi superpower lies in its ability to hold incredibly complex relational problems in tension, seeing all sides of the issue and the emotional truths behind it. With acute self-awareness comes the ability to empathize and perceive the unspoken motives of others. Fi users can harness these awarenesses to their advantage or the benefit of the whole by responding in a way that establishes common ground and even disarms a triggered opponent. After all, the end of conflict is not about winning or losing but about making peace between both sides.

- Fi’s have a rich inner emotional life. It’s important to remember this isn’t an end in itself; we need to find outer-world fulfillment (expression) of our inner riches if we expect to mature and be fulfilled in our unique selves. Ignoring our need for self-expression leads to a rut of self-pity and naive, delusional thinking. So, give time to express yourself - on Tumblr, in a sketchbook, through music, in relationships, in writing or speaking or dance - honour your subjective wisdom and find relief from the intensity of the emotions inside you by letting them out in healthy, productive ways. :) 

Did you like this post? No? Great! Give it some love and/or follow my page. It would really help me out. Thanks so much <3 

[basicbrain]

INFPs: What’s Important to You?

For the next seven days, I’ll be sharing something very near to my heart (since it’s a Tumblr post, those things will probably be values, concepts, and more abstract stuff).

Why am I doing this? 

I spent years of my life believing a lie, and that lie was this: I am unimportant as I am. 

What does that mean? It means I believed my own thoughts, feelings, wants, needs, and convictions about right and wrong were somehow not important enough to be asserted in the world. It meant outsourcing my desires, deferring my dreams, giving away my power, and suppressing my authenticity.

I know that probably sounds a little extreme, but I think many, many other people fall into this trap like I did. 

If you’ve ever lost yourself in a relationship, surrendered your agenda to support someone else’s, or have been afraid to share your true nature with a group of people, then you probably know what I’m talking about.

As an INFP, claiming your authentic self is the foundation to fulfillment and self-actualization. This means:

- Getting in touch with what YOU want

- Noticing how it feels when you’re blending in or conforming to outside demands/asks/culture 

- Distancing yourself from relationships and situations where you’ve lost your authenticity or sovereignty

- Actively seeking out new experiences

- Stop outsourcing your purpose, beliefs, and mission

- Start looking for your own personal purpose, beliefs, and mission

- Start sharing what you really think and speaking up about your real convictions with trusted people  Reclaim your authentic self. It’s what makes you beautiful, powerful, potent in this world. And it’s your right as a human being. :-) :) :

Hey, did you like this post? Consider following basicbrain (that’s me, babes).

[basicbrain]

INFP Productivity Best, er, Helpful Practices

Disclaimer: You never know whether these hacks will work until you try them and find out - heeeyyyy, this is really working! - or - ehhh, not so much.

My type on the Myers-Briggs scale is INFP, so I’m making a leap here and suggesting that what’s worked for me will likely work for other INFPs. Am I right? Well, let me know! :)

1. Establish pre-work and post-work rituals to a) savour every moment, and b) set boundaries for yourself so you don’t end up working/procrastinating from 9:00 to 22:00. (For an example, see #4).

2. Stay mobile! This is important if you work at/from home. Instead of sitting inside all day, get up and go to the library or a coffee shop and work there for however long until you feel like leaving. If you really feel like staying at home, then take a break where you run an errand on your bike, or briskly walk somewhere. If you don’t work from home and have to sit at a desk all day, then make time outside of work for some kind of exercise.

3. Switch gears frequently. Maybe this is just me, but I like to switch between tasks, or feel like I am. So I’ll sit and work for an hour, or until I finish a task, and then switch to standing at the counter and working. Or I’ll abruptly leave to buy groceries or make coffee. 

4. Schedule a commitment or outing in the evening, forcing you to pack up your work day, get out and relax.

5. Write a to-do list if you want, but don’t chain yourself to it (it’s futile).

6. Do the hardest tasks/project in the morning, when your brain has the most fuel.

7. If your work for the day is less than exciting, make sure you still give yourself a time slot to work on a project you are super-passionate about. It should be something that will motivate you to “leap” out of bed knowing you’ll get some time to work on it.

8. The moment you find yourself pulled towards a distracting habit, i.e. checking email and social media, researching random things on the internet, DO NOT do it. Instead, pick something in the outer world to help you reset your mind to work. Like, instead of Googling the invention of pickles, which would likely get you sucked into web-surfing mode, get up and wash some dishes. Go for a walk. Take out the trash. You’ll feel better and won’t lose the same momentum that you would when you distract yourself online.

9. If you keep doing work that sucks your soul dry, is nearly impossible to focus on or take pride in... FUCKING QUIT! This is God/Zeus/the Universe/Oprah telling you you’re out of alignment with your true interests and/or temperament. It might mean looking for new work (or not), or it might mean looking for a different type of client....the idea is you want to treat your own boredom as a signal to tweak the course of your ship just a notch - if that’s all you’re ready for at the moment.

10. Live a life of “creative decadence” outside your job-job. Jobs need to have rules, politics, limitations, pressures, all that stuff. That’s part of why we get paid so much to do them. But what we do with our free time is completely up to us. So, if you want to (I think you should!), release your inhibitions (feel the rain on yo-ur skin!) and take time to explore outside of work. Write poetry no one is allowed to read, dive into life drawing or painting, create an anonymous blog and rant away, design a product and sell it - just to see what’ll happen. Be free, uncensored, and maybe even impractical. 

Hope this helps

[basicbrain]

My Body Would Appreciate a Little More Respect Around Here

Meditation helps people like me get into their bodies. Sometimes it literally feels like my body is something that “I” am sinking and settling into, like a warm bed.

I don’t think you can ever meditate and not become painfully aware of your body sensations. For me, I am usually noticing my bad posture via pain in my back, and random itches that entice me to move my hands and interrupt my mind. Today, I noticed hunger. At that moment of noticing, the following ideas struck me:

My body is doing its own thing right now. It’s a thing I have no conscious control over. I did not turn on the hunger; I can only ignore it or respond to it. 

And another thing: I thought about how much we over-ride our bodily processes, our “wisdom of the body.” Overeating or depriving ourselves of sleep are two common ways. Another more positive example is how we’ve invented healing agents that speed up our bodies’ natural healing processes. 

But to be honest, I find it more interesting to think about the (potentially) harmful ways we over-ride our bodies. When we allow some external routine or expectations to determine how we treat our bodies - or whether we listen to them at all! Sometimes I wonder whether the hyper-regulated, sedentary system we’ve built for society would be better suited to robots than people.

No wonder westerners love to meditate, do yoga, run, weight lift....

Beyond good mental and physical exercise, these activities allow us to ease into the “flow” of our bodies. 

Each of our bodies has its own rhythm. If we pay close attention, without letting that little voice get drowned out by the noisy world, and resisting the pressure to live and produce robotically, we can align ourselves with the body’s rhythms, and allow them to influence how we operate in daily life. 

I continue to be amazed that my body was formed, is constantly changing through the development and aging processes, and will eventually decay completely, all presumably without my conscious control. Yet I have some agency in this process - after all, it’s “my” body - and I can influence it with patterns of behaviour to help it, and me as a whole, thrive. 

But for the most part, my body does its own thing. And it’s really all I’ve got in this world. Maybe I should listen to it more.

[basicbrain]

Veering into weeds (because “Ramblings” was a cliched title)

These are the ramblings of basicbrain. Read them at your own peril.

They relate to things I care enough about to throw up on this metaphorical wall: personal purpose and meaning, personal philosophy, and any question that invites deeper thinking. So, let’s dooooo this.

The question I’m thinking about: if there existed a universal “dream of humanity” which didn’t involve anyone being converted, assimilated, or dominated in such a way, what would that be? (or, more accurately, what would basicbrain like that to be ;))

Okay, so I think about this question a lot. Not because doing so will make me the next Nobel Prize winner (obviously), but because it energizes me to think about complex human problems on a global scale. And again, I have no pragmatic reason for doing so, but that’s not the point.

“Everybody wants to rule the world.” 

Those are some lyrics to a fairly enervated eighties song that reminds me of smoggy highways and a dingy strip mall covered floor to ceiling in chocolate brown ceramic tile (sorry, Tears for Fears fans!). It comes to mind because on a certain level of development, I think every people group probably will want or has wanted to achieve the best for itself, which necessarily involves dominating everything in its proverbial field of vision.

An island tribe of 50 people wants control of the resources it needs to survive and thrive, just like a community of Mennonites wants to preserve its humble slice of pastoral paradise. Western civilization has arguably been the most destructive and unethical in its pursuit of dominance. Industrialism and the spread of religious ideology are part of the mammoth cultural force that is/was westernization. But let’s not forget Hitler and other dictators, who each wanted to propagate their very specific version of the best reality. On the flip side of the coin, individuals we widely consider compassionate and beneficial, MLK and Ghandi to name a few, were propagating their idealism in hopes it would become mainstream. The point is, every level of human development wants sovereignty.

The problem becomes how to honour sovereignty in a globalized world where the competition for resources between human groups is so fierce. 

We could propose a solution, but I don’t think there really is an answer. At least not one we can control. That would be like trying to control the growth of a tree, which is actually a great metaphor of human development. Maybe I want to create an answer that sounds nice in my head because then I could think about how the world ought to develop according to my moral ideals. But meh. Ain’t gonna happen.

[basicbrain]

How to Activate Your INFP Superpower

I wrote the following as a response to a conversation with someone online. We were talking about the superpower of the INFP in the Myers-Briggs system. It is something Antonia Dodge of Personality Hacker helpfully calls “emotional aikido,” which is the INFP’s ability to use words and other cues to instantly change the mood of a situation or person into something more desirable to the INFP.

Both of us are INFP types, but she wasn’t sure if she possessed this “secret ability” and wanted to know how to use it.

Here’s what I wrote:

1. Think of some kind of human interaction you want to be better at, or engage in with more personal equanimity. E.g. I want to be better at comforting people, diffusing toxic online debates, defending/discussing the nuances of my worldview with someone who doesn't share it and seems to have a narrower perspective than me (which sounds pretentious, but maybe it's actually true?), etc.)

2. Identify "problem" or "block" you normally experience in these interactions (e.g. I can't help my friend feel better or gain perspective, I get triggered by online disagreements and have unfollowed everyone but my grandma, I keep my convictions to myself even though my guts are literally burning in protest, etc.

3. Use memory + introverted feeling! Apply that problem or blockage to your own experiences. For example, think of a time when YOU were the broken friend, the caustic, triggered commenter, or the closed-minded simpleton/blindly dogmatic holder of opinions. Also (most importantly) recall an interaction with someone wiser than you (or, if you can't recall, think of when you witnessed this happening between other people) whose words, actions, or demeanour disarmed you, transformed your emotions in a heartbeat, made you go "HUH" or "WOW". (e.g. I was sulking one day and my friend laughed and said "You are so loved" and I instantly felt the profound truth of that statement...lol. Or, I was interacting with someone smarter and more articulate than me about a worldview I did not share, and felt intimidated, expecting him to make fun of my worldview. Instead, I was shocked at how gentle and friendly he acted, and how he took the time to establish common ground with me and didn't push his arguments on me. I instantly gained respect for him and was suddenly more curious about what he believed.)

4. Remember the key turning-point feelings/shifts in perspective (encouragement, surprise, the destruction of a previously held stereotype), and their associated actions (being told one is loved, establishing common ground with someone you disagree with) and their associated contexts (this response is potentially helpful for when someone feels unwanted or isolated and I am a trusted person in their life; this will potentially help me diffuse hostility.)

Disclaimer for the above recipe: sometimes you will try aikido on people and it won't work. Sometimes, it will backfire. I think aikido works best when addressing the emotions of a given situation. So if you try to use it in a situation where emotions aren't even on the table, it's just not going to do anything.

And obviously, your strengths shouldn't be used merely to "get your way" or to satisfy your ego. They are not a form of passive-aggression nor a substitute to good communication skills. But again, I don't even need to say this.