Episode Details
Back to Episodes“Numb mental state shifts” by KatjaGrace
Description
There are different mental states that feel different. Those are relatively obvious. For instance, being angry or drunk or frustrated or besotted.
Then—for me at least—there are different mental states that don’t immediately feel like anything, but where in acting I notice that my behavior is different, or different things feel easy or impossible. For example:
-
If I’m in a lot of pain or distress alone, I might feel like I couldn’t compose myself. But in fact if company shows up, it becomes natural to pull myself together.
-
If there's a time limit, I will often find a vast well of motivation that was otherwise non-existent. The day before a deadline I will smoothly (if with a lot of effort) do ten times as much as on a normal day.
-
On some days at least, if it's 8pm, things will become possible that I could only have dreamed of at 11am.
-
Riding my bike to the station, then taking it on the subway, then riding it again to get to a party seems like not a big deal with a friend, but like a prohibitive ordeal [...]
---
First published:
May 21st, 2026
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3uDvQivMiGAtn5qen/numb-mental-state-shifts
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.