One of the common end points in stories about twenty-year-olds is the discovery that he or she doesn't know what they want. On advice forums, for example, young people often wonder why a relationship is struggling or why they can't find career satisfaction, and the response commonly takes the form of, "know what you want."

"Why did you break up with her?"
"She didn't know what she wants."

I sensed the importance of this mantra early on, and so I tried to offset these issues ahead of time, by figuring out what I wanted. I created lists of everything I wanted, and numbered from 0-10 how much I really wanted them. And then I re-measured these weights over time to see if and how they changed, until eventually the numbers stabilized and I could figure out exactly what I wanted.

But looking back now, I think "know what you want" may not mean something static. It's not like we have an internal TODO list and all you have to do is read it. I think it may be a tonic activity, something you do everyday, sometimes every minute. Oftentimes understanding your more immediate wants eventually leads to satisfying your more long-term wants. For example, when it comes to relationships, it may not be as important to have a clear sense that you eventually want a family and a house with a white picket fence, as it is to know that the person in front of you is someone you want to flirt with, or that this person is someone you need approach more slowly. The person who "doesn't know what they want" flirts with everyone indiscriminately, rushes arbitrarily into some relationships and is unnecessarily coy in others.

Or when it comes to cultivating your career, having clearly stated career objectives is often not as important of knowing when to say "yes" and when to say "no." Some people at work are always at peace, because they only wear the hats that suit them, or if they wear many hats, they only go as deep as suits them. Whereas others always seem overwhelmed and burdened by the tasks assigned to them, and often its because they're driven either by an ambitious impulse or an irrational sense of responsibility.

"Know what you want" has more meaning to me rephrased as having an "awareness of your will." In a way, this is the essence of emotional intelligence.

One of my earliest applications of self-programming was to prevent myself from making mistakes, especially social mistakes. I was age 16 when I became determined to develop extraordinary tact. My strategy was to attack the root of the problem, which I identified as losing myself into the social milieu. I felt that being carefree and incautiously letting my inner monologue exit out my mouth was when mistakes would happen the most. And so I came up with a imaginary object to focus on as a recurring wake-up call. I imagined a floating, spinning mesh orb above my head that would remind me to have a moment of awareness. This orb is very similar to the plumbob used to designate player control in The Sims:

If I could always keep this object in mind, then couldn't I eventually be flawless? The way I saw it, my problems all stemmed from insufficient self-awareness.

At the onset of this method I felt totally in command of my person for a whole day. The next day, I kept focusing on the orb, and I felt an even greater sense of empowerment. I started to notice others noticing a change in me, and I felt I had discovered the secret to socializing. But on the third day, I could only bring up the orb half as often, and by the fourth day, it took a significant strain to conjure it for even a glimpse.

Clearly some kind of placebo was what bolstered this method initially. I think this was the first time I had a self-programming method collapse on me, and I anguished over having only had a taste of ideal social composure.

In retrospect, trying to force myself to be more self-conscious made being a teenager much worse. My repeated attempts later to maintain social self-control made me feel fake and stilted. It took me a handful of years to eventually let myself loose in socializing again.

So I was thinking the other day, that the experience of bad events can be broken down into two components. The first component is an initial onset experience that is standard across most people. For example, if your car breaks down, it will be a major bummer to you, no matter whether you're a neurotypical or a neurotic. The second component is the extended negativity that comes from cultural norms and your internal machinery, such as your temperament or neurotic disposition.

And so if you were to reduce your suffering, by using tools like cognitive therapy or positive thinking, what would you attack? I'd say attacking the original onset of negativity is futile, while as so much can be done to minimize the second part.

My goal with self-therapy has been to reduce my experience of negative events to just the onset experience. I've noticed that 10% of the problems in my life are caused by the problems themselves, and 90% are the extended negative experience I build up in my head.

If someone slights you, it should bother you initially, but only so. It shouldn't bother you that you're bothered, nor should you dwell on what was said. You integrate whatever that initial onset negativity was supposed to feed you, and then you move on.

I remember life before introspection. In the first couple years of High School, when I still hadn't become fully self-conscious, there was a certain time delay to everything. I'd act first, reflect later. I'd open my mouth and then retroactively rationalize what I'd say later. If I made a social blunder, I wouldn't recognize it until the consequences boomeranged back. I'd then have to hazard a response to save face, and somehow integrate that I made a mistake.

Until one year, I made a clear effort to make no more mistakes. When I came home, I berated myself in notes to stop and think. I told myself to practice certain tricks, like to every ten minutes just stop and reflect on what I'm doing to make sure it's how I really wanted things to be conveyed.

I miss the fluidness of the pre-aware days. Days would just float by and I'd only come up for an air of reflection like 5 minutes in the afternoon, and then I'd go back to eating my PB&J sandwich or work on my homework. I questioned nothing about what I was doing. Then again, I was more like an animal. I'd get angry or frustrated and I wouldn't have the simultaneous awareness that I was acting on anger or frustration. I was like on a kayak zooming down some current, and the only way to control myself was by paddling rapidly to just slightly adjust the extrapolation of my emotions.

One of those problems I keep working on is trying to figure out exactly what Stephen Covey means by "principles" in the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. What is a principle? Is a principle like "measure twice, cut once?" That seems more like an adage. The principles he's referring to are self-realization principles. A principle that references a philosophy of life that you adhere to. When you hear this kind of principle stated, it creates an emotional surge in your body that says, "Yes, that's me." For example, if you have a principle that says, "Nobody on their death bed wishes they had spent more time at work," you might have this burst of self-identification.

After enough cognitive therapy sessions, I have come to believe that introspection itself is the problem. There's inherent flaws in the medium of introspection that cognitive therapy tries to correct. For example, it's cognitively easier to just tell yourself, "you're a failure" than it is to flesh out an accurate reflection: "I made a mistake filling out paperwork yesterday, and that's the second mistake this week. Although it doesn't appear to be part of a larger pattern, it happened twice, and people may start to notice. I won't get fired unless I really screw up, but I should keep on my toes, especially in this economy."

But since we don't have the capacity to say those kind of spiels to ourselves in our head, the next easiest thing is to be perpetually skeptical of our inner monologues.

Cognitive therapy dictates that it's not external events that affect your emotions. Rather it's your thoughts or interpretations of those events that make the difference.

There is some truth to that. Even if you catch your lover having an affair, it's the thoughts in your head that matter: "This is someone I love, this is something they shouldn't do, therefore this is an injustice, and I need to respond."

But to what extent can we control these automatic thoughts? Many interpretations of reality are so ingrained in us that they create an immediate visceral response, similar to how a pinprick will go straight from stimulus to feeling, skipping any thought process.

So if we take a page from cognitive therapy, the rule "adversity = thoughts" probably shouldn't be viewed in black and white.

Can you go from being less perceiving to more judging? Perhaps, as I've noticed myself change after cognitive therapy.

Before cognitive therapy, I would read my emotions literally. If you asked me, "Are you scared?" I'd simply inspect my emotional state, find fear, and reply, "Yes, I'm scared." But through the ingrained disputation practices of cognitive therapy, I now vet these emotions. If you asked me today, "Are you scared?" I'd first acknowledge my emotions, then I'd think about whether the offending object was something to be scared of. If the answer came back "no," then my internal dialog would change, and I would say, "No, I am not really scared of this. I may be spooked or rattled, but only so."

Are New Age treatments, like acupuncture, a scam? Are patients simply feeling placebo effects?

This one acupuncturist flipped the argument on its head by retorting that the scientific discovery of the placebo effect was actually the most profound finding in the New Age movement!

While on the surface this sounds like creative rhetoric on her part, I think I actually agree. If your belief in a positive outcome can have salutary effects to your body, then isn't that proof positive of the existence of mind-over-matter?

Just as there's the 80-20 rule in business (80% of your company's work is done by 20% of its people), there's a 90-10 rule in psychology. In the How of Happiness, Sonja Lyubomirsky shows that only 10% of your happiness is determined by external factors like money, while as 90% is determined by internal factors like temperament and intentional happiness activities.

Similarly, what I noticed in my cognitive therapy sessions, is that 90% of my negative thoughts were all in my head, and could be easily disputed and moved past. In the other 10% of cases, the disputations led to insight and then action items, such as choosing new directions for my career, and taking a new tact with a relationship.

Where else in psychology could this 90-10 rule apply?