My understanding is that the BeWellTuned blogger author died awhile ago … if you know otherwise, please correct me, since it involves this post [which I had calendar-embargoed] … there’s a ton of good stuff on the BeWellTuned site, I don’t know how long the site will be maintained, but it was still there today …

Deaths in the blogosphere are going to happen … just like linkrot … kind of reminds me why I strongly, Strongly, STRONGLY encourage open sourcing all materials … it’s also WHY I try to go further in to aid and abet the “theft” of useful ideas by GitHub-ifying repos AND using Copilot, so that it has to eat what I write … so good ideas get found and shared and so that forking entire repositories even easier than copy-pasting. IDEAS should be FREE!

I’m going to try to quasi-clone [for my own purposes, without corrupting it too badly] the outline of one example,Tune Your Cognitive Strategies just by copy-pasting it … and then editing/revising for MY purposes… this example [or at least the general structure of it] was particularly helpful for me in thinking about developing suggesting for meditative practice as a daily discipline … it helps ME for ME to make notes and re-write ideas, in order to read or BETTER FOLLOW THE THINKING of others … in this case, I have been trying to practically implement some of the concepts of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) as daily disciplines in my own life … this is nothing especially woke or nebulous – it’s just the practical material, you’re reading here part of my GitHub Pages social journaling. It’s done in public as sort of an adapted approach to practice some Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) on me.

Beware of any corruption of idea; I have made edits to the BeWellTuned post, for my own clarification; the edits also help me enable hyperlinking for my own deeper dive in certain topics, but it’s mostly just plagiarized work of BeWellTuned site originally intended for my own use but also intended for anyone who comes across this. Fork at will!

Text of original BeWellTuned article with MZB edits/corruptions follows:

Tuning Your Cognitive Strategies

What do you get out of better awareness of your cognitive strategies?

• The Good
  • Not just better, but MUCH better productivity of ALL of your thinking time.
    • Your cognition is much more powerful than just the part you have conscious access to, and it’s crucial to make good use of it … it’s not JUST about managing your time, it’s about ensuring you don’t waste time on putting yourself in hell by hating people who see things differently than you do OR impoverish yourself by working for stupid desires or bills that happen because you haven’t thought through Life OR by frittering your life away either watching teevee/Netflix/YouTube OR not optimizing one’s health, time, money OR worse mindlessly doomscrolling without a specific plan/purpose for staying in touch with your communities.
    • The SMALL, teensy tweaks to how your brain processes information, in a general sense … or, in particular, how your mind processes pain/discomfort and goes into the pain and uses the information, rather than treating it something EXTERNAL to be ignored or medicated away … are going to be worth far, far more in your life than significant upgrades in your conscious skillset … this does not mean that taking part in some sort of class, intensive bootcamp or longer-term training regimen won’t be useful, but it means that better awareness of your own cognitive strategies will help you get more out of that time as well.
  • Goal-oriented thinking.
    • When working on real-life problems, your peak performance matters less than the ability to simply think useful, ordinary, common everyday thoughts. One example already alluded to is the example of pain management or RESPONDING to stress, rather REACTING to it and hiding from it. Another example, if your current top priority is “I am going to start my own company”, but most of why you are thinking that’s what you want is all about hate-filled insanities like “what I’ll say to my current boss when I finally quit”… well, there’s a reason why ONLY COMPLETE IDIOTS are going to put any capital into to your HATE ANCHOR.
  • Improved, although still imperfect but very useful, ability to fix cognitive biases.
    • To the extent that other approaches work, it’s because, even when that’s not their intent, they manage to GET YOU TO SERRENDIPITOUSLY THINK ABOUT your cognitive strategies. It’s much easier when you know that your objective actually is to SCIENTIFICALLY OBSERVE your own cognitive strategies as they are unfolding in your own FULL CATASTROPHE life.
  • More creativity and good ideas just “popping into your head”. Once you understand how the process works, it can be optimized for any purpose you choose.
    • There’s not really magic to it! It’s mostly just about being finally able to get the fuck out of your own way!
  • Less anxiety and more humor about performing well in higher-pressure cognitive endeavors … Why? Because ‘Fuck’em!’ that’s why! You are not on trial; you don’t have to impress anybody; you can do it or you can’t.
    • Once you realize exactly what is and what isn’t under your conscious control, you stop beating yourself about not doing the impossible.
    • You can get up on stage, or whatever your performance venue is, and just perform … obviously, you still need to PREPARE as a professional would … but you can afford to JUST LET GO and let your performance FLOW … because you can also think on your feet.

• The Bad

  • Uncanny valley.

    • Most people already have a naive thinking style, which they are VERY comfortable with, because it has served them well from a lifetime of hard work and lessons built on top of a mountain of excessive conscious cognitive effort.

      • This often involves relying on an almost infinite amount of forgotten side-effects of verbal and conscious thoughts and tons subconscious processing, while mistakenly assigning the full credit for results to simple, deliberate effortful einsteinian E=mc^2 thought process, ie “I experienced A, then I thought B, then I reasoned if A + B, therefore it’s simply C” … whereas the REAL cognitive process was something like “I experienced Z,W,O,Q,B,S,F and lost track of the barage of everything else on the teevee or my Twitterfeed; then, as I was driving, I thought M,K,Z and a bunch of other things while I was switching through radio stations and making calls on my cell, then I reasoned if M^Q + K/Z -Q, but then somebody on YouTube I came across told me C = B + A, so I looked for A, put it with my B, and sure enough, my answer was C; just simply C”.

      • When you already have some conscious/verbal thoughts, it is tempting to imagine they are the only result of your thinking … and then try to just re-create your your process … but, since we actually don’t understand our cognitive strategies, this is based on limited or even delusional recall … because the REAL power is in the full PROCESS of trial and error, especially in the PAIN! It’s probably the pain that STICKS in our memory, because it provoked some sort of VIOLENTLY different realization, which was REACTION to the pain, but also something we never processed because we hate pain as something that believed to be an external enemy … so, as our cognitive strategy, we never push our thoughts into our pain to understand it, ie we just reach for the bottle of aspirin … thus, we still don’t exactly understand to solve the problem, but we came through it and survived, so the result of our thinking is captured in the artifact of the final output.

    • As you tune your cognitive strategies you’re likely to lose the comfort that comes from naivete of that thinking style. Ignorance is BLISS … but it’s also potentially dangerous.

      • While rebuilding from better foundations is certainly a good idea long-term, you’ll probably need to slow down and re-learn some old tricks from the ground up in a new framework … and this may cause the rest of the cheap sweater you rely upon to cover your thinking to unravel itself.

  • Control anxiety.

    • Controlling anxiety is good, but this is placed under The Bad heading because some, perhaps many, people actually enjoy out-of-control anxiety or maybe even need to feel more aggravation and than just the daily grind eutstress level of aggravation.

    • Being very smart, able to think very well, to rapidly process information coming at one faster than the pinball in a pinball machine and take decisive action while making all of this happen effortlessly and automatically is great! … it gives one that heroic feeling of being in control, weathering the storm of chaos that everyone else cowers from …

    • Well, that’s NOT SO great if you are an out-of-control, manipulative control freak who is addicted to the dopamine hit control freaks get from catastrophizing themselves and everyone around them into a state of hyperarousal and also trying to whip the non-aroused people them into their constant state of hypervigilance … in which case, you’re probably already used to getting told to ‘Go fuck yourself!’, but you really should go Tune Your Emotional Processing before even reading this page on Tuning Your Cognitive Strategies.

    • In a nutshell, we should all recognize why the part of our brain that is *being the elephant or engaging deliberative heavy-lifting kinds of thinking tends to overestimate its own importance … and MAKE WAY TOO DAMNED MUCH NOISE ABOUT HOW HARD IT’S WORKING! Especially, relative that part of our brain that is riding the elephant or looking far ahead at the task on the horizon while quietly, calmly directing the elephant WHICH THE RIDER HAS HOPEFULLY TRAINED. It is THE RIDER of the elephant that will be the deciding factor in determining whether or not we actuall accomplish our objectives, but the elephant part of our brains still need to be loved and given what it needs to be able to do the heavy lifting.*

How to tell if you have your awareness of your own cognitive strategies?

NOTE: Everyone has developed their own cognitive strategies, even if they weren’t aware they were doing that; your brain not only learns but it has to learns how it learns new things, it learns how it thinks … but we’re all unique … different individuals will necessarily think in different ways. Pretty much everyone has informally developed some awareness of their own cognitive strategies, although, it’s common for people to imagine that there’s no other way to think or, worse, that others should think the same way they do. Challenging yourself with intellectual activity pf refining that awareness of your cognitive strategies tends to “sharpen the saw” or radically improve cognitive ability. For example, mathematicians tend to be EXCEPTIONALLY good at a certain classes of creative thinking strategies, which are far beyond simple math or algebra or even logic, ie intuitive thinking which cannot be rationally explained; mathematicians, like any professional, mathematicians get better at their cognitive strategies by their own awarness of their thinking process, but they also continue to improve upon this through the quasi-competitive social contact with mathematicians, in seminars or formal settings or just with serendipitous meetings in the hall with other mathematicians in their building, as well as through virtual connections with mathematicians around the world. When the contact with other mathematicians ceases OR when the mathematicians stop thinking about sharpening their awareness of their own cognitive strategies, ie maybe after they have tenure and can just coast, their ability to think declines [maybe rapidly]. We all have similar resources to engage our own minds as well as the minds of others to improve upon our cognitive strategies; we all suffer from cognitive decline, partially driven by that lack of awareness. The cognitive strategies which we rely on might be VAGUELY somewhat similar to something like rapidly executing a proven algorithm … we know just it just works, ie like flipping a light switch that works – until it doesn’t, and then, if we want [artificial] lighting, we’ll have to figure out why the switch doesn’t produce light anymore, ie it probably needs a new bulb, although we probably don’t need to re-invent the light bulb to get one AND if the bulb is good, we might need to check the circuit, ie, it’s probably a tripped breaker, but we might not NEED to go any further than that …. however, human thinking is much, much, more important than just a circuit or just a nifty algorithm. It is extremely unlikely that any human can really reach their full potential by just thinking like a computer, processing thoughts as if they were just doing something routine like executing a gradient descent algorithm.

You already know how to think without “trying hard”.

The cost you pay for high quality thinking is in the meditative time … whatever mediation looks like for you; for me, it’s WALKING, not just walking, but walking in order to THINK about walking the best walk I’ve ever walked … and sort of “LaterCanning* whatever comes to mind, KNOWING that it’ll all keep until I get back from my walk UNLESS IT’S SO IMPORTANT THAT I NEED TO RUN BACK TO MY HOUSE NOW! … but almost nothing is THAT important … so it’s mostly time, which needs to be free from other concerns/distractions, ie no cellphone … THINKING-about-THINKING meditative walking time is just about the discipline of letting go.

There will be nothing but GAINS in terms of available focus, effort, ambition, willpower.

With mindfulness DISCIPLINE, your thoughts don’t get “stuck” in the subconcious clutter when you most need the thing that you’r forgetting.

You can recognize and deal with every situation in which your mind stops generating useful output, whether it’s because of going blank, spinning in circles, or going off into fantasy lands.

There’s a constant stream of GOOD ideas occurring to you … and you have absolutely NO PATIENCE anymore with any thoughts of hate or desire for being young again or reasons not to be helpful … that extends to the people who you engage with … you call out hate-filled morons OR backward-looking past-loving orientation OR with people who have no empathy for others, ie you let people know that ONLY good ideas and good humor are welcome in your presence.

If your brain is well tuned, it is going to produce useful output whenever it is feeling fresh and has a spare minute or two … if you RESPOND to the root cause of stress, you will find that the objectionable part is less than when you hide from it or medicate it.

How does your awareness of your own cognitive strategies work?

Consider this metaphor:

Imagine your mind as a giant bubbling cauldron full of “thoughts”, including “feelings”, “ideas”, “words”, “concepts”, “memories”, etc.

Some of those “thoughts” rise to the top of the cauldron, and get picked up by your conscious attention.

If the conscious “you” is like a cook standing over the cauldron, then the cook has only a very small spoon at their disposal. They can only taste whatever has bubbled to the surface.

Your creativity and thinking power come from the full depth of the cauldron.

The rules of how thoughts interact and form new thoughts are the same, regardless of whether those thoughts are conscious or not.

When you don’t like whatever has risen up to the top of the cauldron, the last thing you want is to try to “fix it”.

You only have access to the topmost layer, so it would be hopelessly ineffective anyway.

But it’s much worse than that - by attempting to “fix” your cognition, you stop being able to see how it works.

How well your cognition works is shown not by what thoughts you have at the moment, but rather by the pattern of how one or more thoughts combine into a new thought (“cognitive strategy”).

Instead, you want to learn as much as possible about the differences (“deltas”) between each thought and the next, as they occur to you.

Your brain already has the ability to update its cognitive strategies (this is called “meta-cognitive reinforcement learning”). However, the usual mechanism works with unnecessary levels of indirection, as in:

Cognitive strategy -> Thought -> Action -> Reward or punishment

You get rewarded or punished for what you do (as measured by your brain’s chemical responses). Good thoughts are more likely to be followed by good actions. Good cognitive strategies are more likely to generate good thoughts. On average, your brain will slowly update its cognitive strategies in the right direction.

Cognitive strategy -> Thought -> Reward or punishment You have learned to be happy or unhappy about having certain ideas, even when you don’t yet know how they apply to the real world. Now your brain gets rewarded or punished for thoughts, and on average good thoughts are more likely to be generated by good cognitive strategies. Your brain can update cognitive strategies faster, according to heuristics about what makes ideas “good”.

However, by carefully looking at the “deltas” between conscious thoughts, we can get rid of the last remaining level of indirection (this is the key insight of this whole page!):

Cognitive strategy -> Reward or punishment You have learned to perceive your cognitive strategies as they happen, and developed some heuristics that tell you whether they are good or bad. Now your brain can update cognitive strategies immediately, and do it regardless of the topic of your thoughts.

Even when you generate a useless idea from another useless idea, you can still track whether the cognitive strategy behind it was sound, and learn from the experience.

How to learn/develop awareness of your cognitive strategies?

NOTE: Awareness of cognitive strategies is like a muscle; everybody has it, but some never develop their awareness; others had that strength at one point in their lives, but they may have let that awareness atrophy. Time spent trying to see your thoughts is not just time well spent, it’s essential to spend the time to maintain that awareness, regardless of the degree to which you succeed at getting any specific results.

Step 1: basic sanity checks.

For practice, we’ll start with improving some simple local efficiency heuristics. They definitely aren’t the final goal, but will later be useful regardless of what goal you have.

Pick a small problem, question or thinking puzzle of any kind.

It’s best to use something that you think you can solve in at most a few minutes, and which makes it easy to see how well you are doing.

Choose something outside of your area of expertise. In areas where you have a lot of experience, your thought process will be faster and more automatic.

Beware of “school trauma”: think about whatever you want to think about, not things someone else would like you to think about.

If you bend to external pressure, you’ll just reinforce the pathological pattern that thinking tools are your enemies, because they limit your freedom.

If you don’t have any ideas, you can always pick “picking a puzzle” as your puzzle.

Notice a thought chain.

Load the puzzle into your memory, and let go.

Instead of focusing on solving the puzzle, focus on the question “where do my thoughts go when this puzzle enters my attention”?

At minimum, try to notice a sequence of two thoughts (the shortest possible “chain”): the initial question you asked yourself, and the first thought that occurred to you afterwards.

It’s very important to focus on what feels like very quick, atomic transitions. Do not wait until you have a full word or sentence formed in your mind!

Aim for sub-second timescales. In fact, you can easily have a chain of 5 or more conscious thoughts in one second. If you think you can’t, you’re just missing skill in noticing it.

Repeat as necessary to get a clear read - just trying to do this is already valuable cognitive training.

Definitely change the topic when it gets too boring, which is when you no longer expect to be surprised by what you notice about your thoughts.

Example: just now, my thoughts:

looking at the typed word “Example:” -> wanting to know what to type next -> flash of dread at not having anything prepared -> noticing that flash of dread -> noticing that I noticed it -> looking at the whole thought chain so far -> noticing I executed the technique -> realizing I can use this as an example -> picking a grammatic form to describe it -> …

Extract the pattern of “deltas”.

After you become aware of at least one micro-scale thought chain, you can reflect on the principles that generated it.

This probably shouldn’t be a very detailed or time-consuming analysis - your advantage here is that you have lots of raw data, so you don’t need to be very parsimonious with it.

In fact, the act of reflecting on a thought chain will necessarily generate dozens of a new thought chains. It’s basically impossible to run out of data to reflect on and learn from.

Think which “deltas” are doing good work for you, and which aren’t.

This will send a signal to your brain to learn and update the corresponding cognitive strategies.

Do not try to assume forceful control over what you think! This applies both to thoughts and “deltas”.

All you ever need to do is notice useful deltas, and have that little “oh, nice!” reaction. That’s it. Really.

The delta which moves you into noticing your deltas is very useful. Give it the reward it deserves!

Example 1:

After someone asked me to add examples here, my thought chain was roughly:

feeling of not wanting to bother -> checking reasons to do it -> noticing a cached thought that it’s good to give examples -> doubting if this makes sense -> what happens if I just stop doing it -> intuition that this would be bad for BWT clarity -> flash of reasons why I care about writing BWT in the first place -> wanting to make a quick decision -> deciding to add an example -> …

The deltas “planning X -> question reasons to do X” (appeared twice) and “suspicious belief -> try to negate it” seem useful.

There was also a pair of deltas “reasons feel shaky -> investigate” and “reasons feel solid -> use cache” which made me go off on a tangent once, but not in the other cases.

This means I’m also tracking in the background what it means for reasons to feel “solid”, and already have cognitive strategies in place which update this information. This is all very useful.

Example 2:

On the other hand, a large amount of low-hanging fruit can be extracted from noticing deltas which are obviously broken, like in this thought chain:

blank mind -> noticing having a blank mind -> verbal thought “my mind is blank” -> feeling of despair -> blank mind -> …

More examples of useful cognitive strategies, and common low hanging fruit:

If you hit an impasse (no new useful thoughts), relax and let your mind wander to related but different topics.

If your mind wanders too much, check why you even care about the problem.

If you think the same thought again, change the topic.

If you know what you are going to think, think something else.

If you think with lots of effort, remember it’s useless and just watch your thoughts happen.

If you don’t know in which direction to think, pick whatever seems fun.

Step 2: make sure to win.

Notice thought chains you generate naturally as you go about your life.

While local efficiency (not getting stuck etc.) is useful, it hardly has the power to change how you play the game. The biggest challenge in an open environment is knowing what to focus on in the first place.

This means that more than anything, you need to learn cognitive strategies that connect you to your goals, and means of achieving them.

For example, you can notice thought chains when you: choose the next task to do, do better or worse than expected, plan your day or week, process emotions, change the topic in conversations, accept or reject offers.

It’s recommended to do it without setting up external reminders.

A far better solution is to reinforce cognitive strategies which would make you naturally remember at the right times.

E.g. one or two straightforward deltas can take you from “feeling of mild dissatisfaction with decision” to “wanting to know how to think better”, from where it’s close to remembering to reflect on your thought chains.

Get the deltas.

Reconstruct as much as you can of how your mind went there. In real life, you are not restricted to the micro scale.

Try to identify both low-level and high-level patterns, such as key insights, emotions, changes of topic, and inspiration.

How does your emotional state influence your deltas?

You probably have a different cognitive style when excited, angry, happy, anxious, overwhelmed, content, scared, restless etc.

Keep your goals in mind.

Warning: this is definitely not about “policing” your thinking. You should never try to put restrictions on the content and style of your thoughts.

Do not use this under pressure (when someone or something tells you what goals you should have).

Also do not fall into the trap of rejecting vague, dreamy thoughts as worthless.

The best use of your brain when tired is probably to let it unwind and think relaxed, creative thoughts.

How well have these particular deltas performed in the past?

This amounts to maintaining a rough “track record” for all of them.

What are they optimized to do?

You’ll often find goals which you don’t necessarily feel proud of, e.g. feel better, impress someone (who?), prove something to yourself.

However, trying to attack those goals would be a terrible mistake - they are there as a result of your real preferences.

If you are surprised by this, it just means you didn’t know enough about yourself.

You need to understand where the patterns come from, and what you really want to achieve in any given situation (see also Tune Your Emotional Processing).

How well do you expect to do if you continue the current trend?

What would it be like to do better than that?

Further Progress

• Turn the skill on itself.

  • In other words, use your meditation practice itself to work with the very challenges that arise in your in your meditation practice.

  • Turning the skill on itself reinforces and deepens your meditation practice and all of the disciplines that depend upon wisely responding to situations, rather than reacting,over-reacting, counteracting, and getting depressed,anxious, or overthinking.

  • Here are a few examples of how you can turn the skill on itself:

    1. Mindfulness of thoughts:
       • As you practice mindfulness, you may notice that your mind frequently wanders or gets caught up in distracting thoughts.
       • Instead of getting frustrated or discouraged, you can use your mindfulness skills to observe these thoughts without judgment, acknowledging their presence and gently redirecting your attention back to your intended focus.
    2. Mindfulness of emotions:
       • During your practice, you may experience various emotions, such as boredom, anxiety, or frustration.
       • You can turn the skill on itself by bringing mindful awareness to these emotions, noticing how they feel in your body and how they change over time, without getting caught up in their content.
    3. Mindfulness of physical discomfort:
       • While sitting in meditation or engaging in mindful movement, you may experience physical discomfort, such as pain, itching, or restlessness.
       • Instead of reacting automatically to these sensations, you can use your mindfulness skills to explore them with curiosity and acceptance, breathing into the discomfort and observing how it shifts and changes.
    4. Mindfulness of resistance:
       • At times, you may notice resistance to your practice, such as feeling like you don’t want to meditate or convincing yourself that you’re too busy.
       • You can turn the skill on itself by bringing mindful awareness to this resistance, acknowledging its presence without judgment, and gently recommitting to your practice.
• Reinforce cognitive strategies that will help you with reinforcing cognitive strategies, and finding better ways to reinforce cognitive strategies.
• The skill will then quickly bootstrap itself into your most powerful and general thinking tool.