I read eight books on reflection this month. I chose to explain the topic quite extensively, and my reading covers not only thinking about myself, but also therapy, meditation, diary, and philosophy.
Those interested in the first seven reading lists of my one-year foundation project can check them out here:
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- Outreach
- sleep
1 minute summary of what I learned
In the long term (good thinking means good decisions and better responses) and in the short term (you should be aware of). This makes reflection one of our most important foundations.
But changing the habit of thinking is difficult. Begging myself to “try not to think of the white elephant!” immediately leads to compositional albinism. Telling yourself to think and feel some way often backfires, we fall into a pattern of depression, anxiety, anger or subclinical or subclinical (but still important) poor motor thinking.
Despite these difficulties, you may think better. So far
- Cognitive Therapy – This is by teaching us to try to capture the role of our thoughts, not contradicting them, but to open up their doubts and self-experiment.
- Mindfulness – Mindfulness does not doubt or experiment, but teaches us not to envelop thoughts and feelings at all, but to see them as feelings that are disconnected from specific judgments and reactions.
Writing something, though not a panacea, is a way to create spaces that improve our way of thinking.
Eight books I’ve read
1. Daniel Kahneman’s thinking, fast and slow
Kahneman considers two different systems that rule our lives:
- System One Fast, easy and intuitive. It is good at pattern matching and stereotypes, but also likes to swap tricky questions like “How happy am I in life?”, and easier people like “How do I feel right now?”
- System 2 Work hard and calculate. It enables us to apply abstract rules and integrate information. System One is our default value – when intuition is significantly failed, we only switch to System Two.
This is my second reading of this book. My first time reading thinking When it comes out. I read some of my proximity in cognitive psychology, especially Philip Johnson-Laird’s second reading for the second time in psychological models, ACT-R and other developments in cognitive psychology.
In this book, Kahneman illustrates the mistakes in our reasoning, but his greatest contribution here is to figure out why these mistakes tell us about how our thoughts actually work. Just as visual fantasy is more about how vision works than when we see the “right” things, cognitive hallucinations teach us more about our psychological mechanisms than people usually get the right answers.
2. Julia Galef
Galef compared two ways of thinking:
- Soldiers trying to defend and win arguments.
- Boy Scouts trying to understand objective terrain.
Most of us defaulted to becoming soldiers – trying to prove we were right and they were wrong – than the Boy Scouts who just wanted to investigate the terrain.
I love Galeff’s book, and she does a great job of dealing with the basic objections of more ideals, such as false beliefs that self-deception is politics, success or happiness is necessary. However, I couldn’t help but notice the meta-self-binding of a soldier book, carefully defending the Boy Scout mentality to prevent attacks from all forms of self-deception.
3. The changing characteristics of Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson
Will long-term meditation practices have a lasting impact on the way your mind works?
This is a question that Goleman and Davidson want to answer in a positive way, while trying to pay attention to the biases and research design that influence many enthusiastic mindful research.
Finally, they found that it was indeed the case, with some of the most compelling evidence coming from brain scans of expert meditators. However, enlightenment is not cheap, but it takes more than 10,000 hours of meditation to see the most compelling effect.
I suspect this book will have a great effect on persuading mindfulness fans or skeptics, but I do find it a useful overview of the research conducted (although proposed by two larger mindfulness advocates). My own experience with meditation is that mindfulness is valuable, but it is obvious that the benefits of daily meditation can reach to the evidence bar to use it as a universal prescription.
4. Julia Cameron’s Artist Road
Release the creativity given by your God by allowing God’s energy to flow through you and release your creativity.
Usually, books using this framework disappoint me. But I found myself loving this classic despite encountering it.
Cameron’s advice is essentially about how to overcome one’s own fears and internal obstacles through more spontaneous and inhibitory. In many ways, this is the opposite mentality of Galef – allowing more systematic thinking to do both supervision and monitoring with fewer systems. However, this may be good advice for areas of creativity or any areas that rely on fluency rather than control.
I especially like her advice on spontaneous writing and “artist dates” where you can do a small outing for inspiration.
5. Tristine Rainer’s new diary
I have always preferred the word “diary” over “diary”, probably because of the latter’s feminine meaning, and it’s because I linked “diary” to my grandmother’s long-term practices to dutifully record the mundane events of the day. For me, keeping a diary never records it, but solving my thoughts to solve the problem.
I found Rainer’s book very much in the spirit of my original diary work, although she made me take more features that provide diaries, from emotional publicity to role-playing, creative free connections, and exploration of ideas and drives that may not be publicly shared.
6. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy by Jason M. Satterfield
Last year, I delved into CBT, which I shared in this article. Instead of rereading Judith Beck’s book, I chose to listen to this course by Jason Satterfield.
While the materials and concepts are very familiar, I found that the accompanying snippet of therapy courses helps to actually look like what CBT actually looks like, which is much more than I have seen transcripts elsewhere.
Given the impressive evidence base that supports CBT, I think it is a pity that fundamental theories and methodologies have not been taught and understood more widely.
7. What can you change, what can Martin Seligman not change
I remember reading this book decades ago in paperback, but I decided to listen to a review of the abridged audiobook version. Seligman covers many well-studied areas and ranks them in terms of ease of modifiability.
Mood disorders, such as depression and anxiety, can be largely altered. Sexual behavior can be changed, but sexual and gender identity are more rigid. Diet doesn’t work, so losing weight is a daydream.1
8. Marcus Aurelius’s Meditation
Aurelius is a classic Stoicism that invites readers to see life, pursue justice, and remember that we will die soon anyway, so don’t worry.
I didn’t know that this book was a diary, which was spoken to by Aurelius, not an imaginary future audience. Knowing that it will change the reading experience. Instead of standing out like we preach, we see a person who is obviously trying to follow his advice and wants to keep reminding ourselves of his ideals.
This book doesn’t do much for me. Where they overlap, I have always preferred the Buddhist goal of human experience over Stoicism. Both seem to be based on denying fantasies, avoiding desires and maintaining equality. But Stoicism always shocked me, a more negative approach to the problem, trying to get rid of weakness without fostering the positive qualities of compassion found in Buddhism.
Maybe I was wrong with me. Aurelius often weighs two possibilities of competition: or the universe is all Logo or all atoms. He weighed both options, but eventually lived based on belief in the former. But since I think the Democrats are right at this point, I find it harder to put comfort in Aurelius’ conclusions.
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That’s it. Next week, I will share some personal updates from my diary every day (almost) this month and share some updates about my previous seven basics.
footnote
- Apparently, this book was written before the emergence of GLP-1 agonist drugs such as Semaglutide.
