Scrupulosity Sequence #6: Intuitive Eating

Tags

diets cw, food cw, ozy blog post, scrupulosity sequence, \Tere

[content warning for discussion of food, dieting, and moralizing around food]

To the best of my knowledge, the only place that my approach to scrupulosity has been independently worked out (by a person who is not an effective altruist) is food/dieting, under the name “intuitive eating.” It makes sense that that would be the case: food and dieting are something a lot of people have dysregulated shame and guilt about. So in this post I’m going to write about intuitive eating as a case study, and then expand it in a later post.

Many people have a very, very unhealthy relationship with food. They might try diet after diet after diet, searching for the one that will cause them to finally lose weight, or they might stick to a single rigid diet, or they might feel constantly guilty about how they should be on a diet (but somehow that never actually stops them from getting the second slice of cake). They might restrict food for weeks or months, but then it’s a holiday or a vacation, or they feel like they “deserve it,” or they’ve given in and had one cookie and now their diet is Ruined. They might not feel able to refuse food that they don’t want; they might feel guilty about eating the food they don’t want, especially if it’s “unhealthy.” They might eat without intending to, or feel like they have to clean their plates. The very thought of a diet might make them eat until they’re stuffed; after all, they might diet tomorrow and then they won’t get any of this again!

Diet is a very personal matter and lots of different things work for different people. I don’t mean to say that the thing I describe is right for everyone. I have no particular expertise in eating disorders; if you have a history of anorexia, bulimia, or binge eating, talk to someone who knows more than me before deciding to eat intuitively. But one thing that works for many people is intuitive eating.

The core of intuitive eating is unconditional permission to eat. If you want to, you can have ice cream for dinner. You can eat a six-course meal and clean your plate every time. You can have whatever your forbidden food is: Twinkies, hot chocolate, cheese, bread, fettucine alfredo. And you can have salads, steamed broccoli, tofu stir-fry, and boneless skinless chicken breast.  You can turn down Aunt Ida’s disgusting meatloaf even if it will make Aunt Ida sad. You can have a bite of dinner and decide actually you’re still full from lunch.

If you’re good at intuitive eating, you can do some things that look a little bit like restriction: for example, I notice I compulsively eat certain kinds of candy when I keep them in the house, so I walk to the store when I want them. But if your relationship with food is a batshit mess, people who practice intuitive eating usually recommend you go to pretty extreme lengths to communicate to yourself that food is actually unrestricted. Buy the foods you used to not let yourself eat in enormous quantities, far more than you could actually eat, and whenever you run low restock. Carry a bag of foods you like around with you so that you can eat whenever you’re hungry. If you want fried rice for breakfast, pull out the wok and make some.

Now, maybe you’re the sort of person who, if you’re granted unconditional permission to eat, will proceed to eat nothing but brownies for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I don’t mean to argue with people’s experiences of themselves; I’m just describing one strategy that works for many people.

But many people will eat enormous quantities of brownies for a while– maybe a few days, maybe a few weeks. And then they will finally understand, on a gut level, that the brownies are always going to be there. This is not the last hurrah of brownies; there is not going to be a diet and then no more brownies ever again. You don’t have to save up brownie-eating experiences because someday you will never get to have another brownie. You will always get to have another brownie.

And once you’ve left the Brownie Scarcity Mindset, you can notice things. Like… eating until you’re stuffed actually doesn’t feel very good, it actually makes you feel kind of sick. And “brownies for breakfast, lunch, and dinner” leaves you feeling kind of shaky and unsatisfied. And maybe you’re never going to be a big fan of kale, but you find yourself eyeing the cucumbers and going “you know, what would really hit the spot right now? A big salad with a bunch of different vegetables, drizzled with olive oil and covered in nuts and cheese.”

The question a lot of people are going to ask at this point is “but do you lose weight?” In my anecdotal experience and the experience of people I know who practice intuitive eating… sometimes? If you have been eating past the point of hunger for a long time, or eating on autopilot when you’re not full, then you might find yourself losing weight when you stop doing that. If you have been ignoring your hunger signals and undereating for a long time, then you might find yourself gaining weight. But most people seem to settle at a stable equilibrium which may shift permanently after medical events such as pregnancy or serious illness.

On the other hand, that is exactly the result most diets give people too. And intuitive eating has a lot of other advantages. You get to have brownies, which is important. The diet you’ll wind up eating is probably healthier. You’ll enjoy your food more. And most importantly of all you get to take all the shame and guilt and self-hatred you’ve associated with food, all the emotional energy you have wrapped up in your diet, and just… stop. You can do something else with it.

There’s a common framing around food where everyone is constantly tempted to make the worst diet choices possible. If left to their own devices, everyone would eat nothing but pizza topped with cheesy chicken nuggets topped with pasta with alfredo sauce. The only way to have a healthy diet is a constant effort of will where you nobly resist even having a bite of donuts, and whenever you do eat a donut you self-flagellate appropriately. (Be sure to comment a lot about how bad the food is and how fat you are while you eat it: punishing yourself for eating “bad” food is the only way to make sure you don’t do something horrible like enjoy it.)

And, in fact, you can just… not? There is no Food Police who will arrest you for having a hamburger. The food you eat doesn’t have to mean anything about your worth as a human being, unless you decide it does. You don’t have to feel shame or guilt about what you eat. And if you choose not to beat yourself up about food choices, you will probably not have some pizza/chicken nugget/pasta chimera for dinner every night, because… that’s kind of gross actually?

It is actually just okay to eat the food you want and that makes you feel good. Maybe that will cause you to eat more chocolate than is best for ideal health, but over time it will probably result in a reasonable and balanced diet. You don’t have to hate yourself.

Scrupulosity Sequence #5: Restorative Justice

Tags

all cops are bastards, ozy blog post, scrupulosity sequence

I am, in many ways, an unusually a bad person.

I have a personality disorder, it comes with the territory. If anyone who has been diagnosed with a cluster B personality disorder tries to tell you they haven’t ever done anything really really wrong, they probably aren’t self-aware enough to be safe being around.

So it is important to me to come up with a system that handles people who have done unusually wrong things well.

Throughout this particular post, I am talking about relatively serious wrongdoing– violations of common-sense morality, things that will make your wisest and most ethical friends go “what the fuck?” Much of the advice in this post is overkill for ordinary-scale wrongdoing that people do every day, and you shouldn’t apply it for that. Wait until later in the series.

This post is not going to be relevant to most of the people reading this. Most people don’t do things that are really really wrong. But I feel it would be irresponsible to address the issue of dysregulated guilt and shame without addressing the issue of feeling dysregulated guilt and shame because you actually did something awful.

A few years ago, I was coming to terms with the fact that I did The Worst Thing I’ve Ever Done In My Entire Life. Although I’m not going to share the details here, for obvious reasons, this is not a scrupulosity thing; I’ve run it by several sane friends with upright moralities and they’re like “wow, Ozy, that is in fact exceptionally bad. Don’t… don’t do that again.”

Naturally, I struggled with a lot of guilt and suicidality at the time. I’m naturally a pretty guilt-ridden and suicidal person, but I think pretty much everyone feels guilty when they have done a Very Wrong Thing, and perhaps has a passing thought of suicidality.

At the time, I read a Tumblr post by my longtime Internet friend Cliff Pervocracy. (Sadly, his blog was lost to the great Tumblr purge, so I have to reconstruct the post from memory.) Someone had asked him what to do: they’d discovered their friend had committed a rape a few decades ago, and they didn’t know the victim, and as far as the person could tell the friend hadn’t committed any rapes since and he had multiple exes who had nothing but positive things to say about him and so on. Should they stop talking to their friend because he was a rapist?

Cliff’s response was that he felt it was okay to decide not to be friends with someone because they committed a rape. It’s a normal preference, one that’s widely shared among many people, and one of the consequences of committing rape is that sometimes people don’t want to be your friend. But he said that he thought that you don’t have to. Solitary confinement is torture for a reason; people need friends. The ex-rapist doesn’t have the right to make people interact with him, but we as a society should say that it is okay to interact with him if you choose.

And, god, at the time that meant a lot to me, because I am less bad than a rapist, and if rapists deserved to be able to have friends and enjoy themselves and not self-flagellate for eternity, then by extension I must also deserve to be able to have friends and enjoy myself and not self-flagellate for eternity.

So I think that is the first part of a humane approach to people who have done really wrong things. There are some things you are entitled to that are completely non-negotiable, no matter how bad a person you are, no matter what you have done, no matter if you are Ted Bundy or Pol Pot or Thomas Midgley Jr. You have a right not to be tortured. You have a right not to be assaulted or killed, except when necessary to defend others. You have a right to food and water and shelter. You have a right to human interaction (but not to force unwilling people to interact with you, and that sometimes means sufficiently disliked people are doomed to loneliness– but it is a tragedy, every time). You have a right to fun and pleasure and recreation. You have a right to learn things if you want to, to make things if you want to, to exercise if you want to, to see the sun if you want to.

(Guess, from these beliefs, my opinion on the US prison system.)

And this means there are some things that ethics cannot demand from you. It cannot demand that you kill yourself. It cannot demand that you cut yourself. It cannot demand that you isolate yourself from everyone (although it can demand that you communicate honestly with other people and let them make their own choices about whether to interact with you). It cannot demand that you never watch a movie again.

All of those rights are important. But there is one right that I think is the most important right of all.

You have a right to a life that isn’t all about the worst thing you ever did.

Restorative justice is a big topic, and I’m only going to be able to glance at it here. For example, I’m not going to have the space to talk about restorative-justice alternatives to the prison system, or about the roles of community members and victims. I highly recommend The Little Book of Restorative Justice for a readable introduction, if what I’m saying whets your interest.

Restorative justice is a system that has three principles:

1. Crime (or, as I’m using the concepts here, wrongdoing more broadly) is fundamentally a harm to people, as opposed to a violation of a law or rule.
2. This harm creates certain obligations on the part of offenders and communities.
3. Justice should seek to heal people and put right what went wrong, as opposed to determining blame and inflicting pain on the guilty.

The Little Book of Restorative Justice says our system of justice should provide the following things to offenders:

1. Accountability that addresses the resulting harms, encourages empathy and responsibility, and transforms shame.
2. Encouragement to experience personal transformation, including healing for the harms that contributed to their offending behavior, opportunities for treatment for addictions and/or other problems, and enhancement of personal competencies.
3. Encouragement and support for integration into the community.
4. For some, at least temporary restraint.

I think this is a good framework with which to approach serious wrongdoing that one has committed.

Of course, there are some ways in which a restorative justice approach applied to oneself is different than a restorative justice approach applied to society. For example, outside of a restorative justice system, it is often not possible to arrange to speak face-to-face with one’s victim and come to an agreement about appropriate means of restitution. (Indeed, for many sorts of wrongdoing, the victim would find an attempt to do so frightening or upsetting. Do not try to talk to victims of your actions against their will.)

But I think a broad framework of accountability, personal transformation, and reintegration is a useful tool for thinking about how to deal with having done wrong.

There are many ways to take accountability. A single sincere apology (ONLY IF YOUR VICTIM WANTS TO TALK TO YOU) is often appropriate. You should almost certainly tell at least one person what you did, honestly and completely, without leaving out any details or trying to make yourself look better than you are. In some cases, it may be appropriate to write a public confession.

If you have committed a violent felony against another person, in my opinion, accountability generally requires turning yourself in to the police. In countries outside the United States, accountability may also require turning yourself in for lesser crimes, but the United States prison system is batshit enough that I’m not willing to say that here.

I realize among some of my readers this recommendation may be controversial, since the US prison system violates the human rights of its inmates. I myself lean towards prison abolitionism. However, abolishing prisons would involve a fundamental restructuring of society that has not happened yet; it cannot happen willy-nilly by individual people choosing not to go to prison. In the meantime, the justice system has options for restraining people that everyday people do not. Taking accountability for a violent crime means putting yourself in a position where you actually can’t do the violent crime again.

Another important aspect of accountability is trying to repair what you’ve done wrong, as best you can. For example, if you have stolen something from someone, you should give back the value of what you stole, with interest. If you have destroyed someone’s reputation, you should set the record straight. It is usually not possible to repair the harm entirely, but it is often possible to do something. Repairing the harm may require significant emotional or material sacrifice, but it is absolutely necessary.

In actual restorative justice procedures, the victim and the offender often agree on a symbolic means of repairing the harm, such as community service. That can help victims feel like their emotional needs are being taken into account. This seems like not a very good course of action to recommend outside of an actual restorative justice procedure. Scrupulous people may end up using this as a reason to self-flagellate. If the victim is consulted, it may scare or upset them or make them feel like they’re being contacted against their will. If the victim is not consulted, they may never learn about it, and the symbolic means may not be something they find emotionally satisfying. Without an independent mediator, victims may demand an unreasonable amount, perhaps for revenge reasons. Nevertheless, as an offender, if you think a symbolic attempt to repair the harm is appropriate, it may be.

Personal transformation is another aspect of restorative justice. In essence, personal transformation means becoming the sort of person who would not do that particular sort of wrongdoing again. Reflect as honestly as possible about what caused you to hurt other people, and then think about how you could change it. For example, if you did wrong because of an addiction, you might think about how to get clean or sober. If you had a mismanaged mental illness, you might take medication or change your medications, go to therapy, or practice self-help techniques. If particular friends influenced you to hurt others, you might stop talking to them and seek out friends that will help you make better choices. If a particular circumstance tempted you, you might avoid it in the future. If your job involves committing atrocities, quit.

There are two circumstances that commonly come up with regards to personal transformation. First, personal transformation is sometimes really really hard. Some of the concrete steps I listed– quitting drinking, recovering from a mental illness, finding new friends, leaving a job or often a career– are extremely fucking hard. You need support from friends, loved ones, or your community. You need to expect to fail sometimes: addicts, alcoholics, and mentally ill people relapse.

Second, sometimes you discover that you are already transformed. The self-awareness to admit that you did something very very wrong without an outside prompt is often the product of a long process of personal growth, and sometimes the other product of that process of personal growth is that you’re no longer the sort of person who did that thing. That can lead to a sense of emptiness and of useless energy; what are you supposed to do now? There’s an urge to make up for what you’ve done when you’ve done wrong, and it can be frustrating when there’s nothing to channel it into.

The final step is reintegration into society. I discussed that step in greater detail above. Once you’ve made amends, repaired what you could of the harm, and stopped being the sort of person who would do that wrong, then you’re done. You have, as the phrase goes, paid your debt to society, and you don’t have to worry about it anymore.

You can have a life that is not about making up for the worst thing you have ever done.

Scrupulosity Sequence #3: Load-Bearing Things

Tags

neurodivergence, ozy blog post, rationality, scrupulosity sequence

Nobody really worries much about what is going to happen millions of years hence. Even if they think they are worrying much about that, they are really deceiving themselves. They are worried about something much more mundane, or it may merely be a bad digestion.

—Bertrand Russell

Kelsey Piper recently invented the concept of things being load-bearing, a concept so profoundly useful that I occasionally forget she only came up with it this May. She writes:

I think one thing that’s going on here is that there are a bunch of small parts of our daily routine which are doing really important work for our wellbeing. Our commute involves a ten-minute walk along the waterfront and the walking and fresh air are great for our wellbeing (or, alternately, our commute involves no walking and this makes it way more frictionless because walking sucks for us). Our water heater is really good and so we can take half-hour hot showers, which are a critical part of our decompression/recovery time. We sit with our back to the wall so we don’t have to worry about looking productive at work as long as the work all gets done. The store down the street is open really late so late runs for groceries are possible. Our roommate is a chef and so the kitchen is always clean and well-stocked.

It’s useful to think of these things as load-bearing. They’re not just nice – they’re part of your mental architecture, they’re part of what you’re using to thrive. And when they change, life can abruptly get much harder or sometimes just collapse on you entirely. And this is usually unexpected, because it’s hard to notice which parts of your environment and routine are load bearing. I often only notice in hindsight. “Oh,” I say to myself after months of fatigue, “having my own private space was load-bearing.” “Oh,” after a scary drop in weight, “being able to keep nutrition shakes next to my bed and drink them in bed was load-bearing.” “Oh,” after a sudden struggle to maintain my work productivity, “a quiet corner with my back to the wall was load-bearing.”

Examples of things that Kelsey thinks are commonly load-bearing are include things which affect your access to food you’ll reliably eat, aspects of the environments you spend the most time in (from the length of your commute to the light and ventilation of your bedroom), pets, cleanliness, and personal time when you’re alone and no one is making any demands on you. I’d add a few more. Other common load-bearing things include exercise, particular features of your diet like desserts or protein or vegetables, the ability to do something fun, time with your friends or loved ones, access to painkillers or other medications, and not taking heroic amounts of mind-altering drugs. Sleep is load-bearing for almost everyone. But load-bearing things can be incredibly idiosyncratic. For some people it’s load-bearing to ride on the train with headphones listening to soaring music about spaceflight.

Hyper-analytic people of the sort of people who read my blog fall into a particular sort of error when we think about philosophy. We’re sad for some reason totally unrelated to philosophy– because we don’t have any friends, or because we haven’t slept well for three months, or because we’re in an abusive relationship, or because we haven’t had alone time in weeks. But we think about philosophy, because we’re the sort of people who think about philosophy all the time. And suddenly we will decide that the problem is that there’s no such thing as objective morality. Or the heat death of the universe. Or existential risk. Or the existence of suffering in the universe. Or negative utilitarianism. Or the meaninglessness of life. Or the Drowning Child argument. Or atheism. Or the existence of Hell.

I don’t mean to be invalidating, but the problem is almost never negative utilitarianism. It’s true that negative utilitarians are often depressed, but I’m pretty sure that that’s just because negative utilitarianism is a philosophy that is very attractive to depressed people. Brian Tomasik is cheerful as hell and he spends a bunch of time worrying about the suffering electrons.

(Moderation side note: I disagree with 90% of what he believes but Brian Tomasik is one of my absolute favorite people in the entire world and comments about how much he sucks will be deleted with extreme prejudice.)

I don’t think that coming up with a more accurate and livable philosophical system is never relevant to fixing your mental health problems. This sequence is basically (spoiler alert!) “I Fixed My Mental Health Problems Through Moral Philosophy (And So Can You).” But if your issue is a well-known philosophical problem which many nondepressed people have grappled with over the course of their lives, your real issue is almost certainly not the philosophical problem. If it is, it would make everyone who thought about it depressed, and it doesn’t.

It is stupidly easy to forget to do the boring things that everyone knows you should do. I know so many people who, like, take n-acetylcystine to potentiate the effects of cleansing their chakras while in ketosis and who when asked “when is the last time you slept for eight hours and had a real meal?” will answer “…last week…?”

So the first thing to check, if you’re having scrupulosity issues, is whether all your load-bearing things are in order.

1. Are you sleep-deprived for some reason like “I feel bad making my partner do morning parenting even though I do all the nighttime parenting” or “I procrastinate all day and get my work done at 2am” or “Adderall can TOTALLY replace sleep”? If so, stop reading this post immediately and GO TAKE A NAP.
   1. If you’re thinking longingly about how nice it would be to follow this advice, you’re sleep-deprived, go take a nap.
   2. If you’re sleep-deprived for an actual medical reason or a life reason that is not extremely stupid, you’re probably looking at me and going “I know sleep is important, it’s not my fault I do shift work and have insomnia.” I’m sorry about my lack of helpful advice for this situation. You should tell Scott Alexander to write Things That Sometimes Help When You Have Insomnia so I can link to it.
2. Scott has an excellent post called Things That Sometimes Help If You Have Depression. If you have depression, work through the list.
3. How are you doing on basic needs that most people have? Unfortunately, different people have different needs, and any advice I give is going to be wrong or counterproductive for some people, so take all the advice I give with a grain of salt. Things that are worth considering include:
   1. Are you sick or in pain?
   2. Do you do some sort of exercise on a regular basis? (Walks count.)
   3. Are you eating enough food?
   4. Are you getting enough protein? Vegetables?
   5. I said ‘sleep’ two bullet points ago but are you getting enough sleep?
   6. Are you going outside and getting fresh air and sunshine on a regular basis?
   7. Are you either not taking mind-altering drugs or taking a normal, responsible amount of mind-altering drugs that doesn’t make all your druggie friends go “please take fewer drugs”?
   8. Do you experience physical affection from a person or pet? (There is no shame in getting a stuffed animal or body pillow if the answer is ‘no’.)
   9. Does there exist someone who would notice if you were dead? Someone who will talk to you when you’re sad?
   10. Do you talk to a person face-to-face sometimes? Do you get enough introvert time?
   11. Do you do something you think is straightforwardly fun on a fairly regular basis?
   12. Do you have something to take care of, even if it’s just a plant?
4. Are there any parts of your life a normal person would end up screaming “aaaaaaaa” about? You may wish to recruit a normal person of your acquaintance and explain the situation to them to see if they say “aaaaa”. (The comment section here can be a good choice if you are uncertain whether you know any normal people!) Unfortunately, I cannot list out everything that is “aaaaaaa,” because people are continually inventing new and exciting horrible life decisions.
   1. Are you in relationships with any people who benefit from you being scrupulous? If the answer is “yes, I put enormous amounts of emotion work into this relationship with this person and they throw an enormous shitfit every time I try to set a boundary and they guilt-trip me whenever I don’t do what they want,” that is probably related to your scrupulosity.
   2. Are you part of a sick system?
5. Do you remember a time when you were less scrupulous? Think about what things might have changed since then. You might come up with several hypotheses: maybe your house is messy, maybe you’re overextending yourself, maybe your entire home state is on fire and you haven’t been able to leave the house or see anyone in person for two weeks. Test them systematically and empirically.

I have pretty much solved my scrupulosity, but I do sometimes have flareups, and it inevitably turns out that my flareups are related to losing one or more loadbearing things. Getting your loadbearing things in order– whatever that means to you– is an absolute necessity for recovering from scrupulosity.

Scrupulosity Sequence #2: Self-Experimentation and the Replication Crisis

Tags

ozy blog post, rationality, scrupulosity sequence

In a perfect world, if someone had a psychological problem, I’d be able to tell them all about the rich peer-reviewed psychological literature that has to do with specifically their problem, all of which has effect sizes of a billion and definitely and certainly applies to everyone.

Unfortunately, we live in this world.

For the past decade or so, the social sciences (particularly psychology) and medicine have been going through the replication crisis. Basically, when you repeat social scientific and medical experiments, many of the effects that existed the first time you did the experiment disappear. Some projects suggest that fewer than half of psychological studies show a reproducible effect.

Why is this a problem? Imagine if, when we repeated the experiment of dropping a feather and a bowling ball in a vacuum chamber, sometimes they fell at the same rate, but sometimes the feather fell faster, sometimes the bowling ball fell faster, and sometimes the bowling ball fell up and hit the experimenter in the face. It would be pretty clear that we don’t know anything about how gravity works, and all the physics that built on the idea that feathers and bowling balls fall at the same rate in a vacuum chamber was totally wrong.

It would also bring up the question of how nobody noticed that sometimes bowling balls fall up before. The answer for psychology is that many psychologists use questionable research practices: one survey suggests that more than half of psychologists have. Many psychologists check whether the data shows an effect; if it is, they publish, and if it isn’t, they recruit fifty more participants to see if it will show an effect. Other psychologists will write a paper that includes multiple studies and only report studies that showed an effect, even though they conducted other studies that showed no effect. Still other psychologists will decide whether or not to leave out outliers depending on which way shows an effect as existing. There are lots of other questionable research practices, many of which require more statistics to explain, but I hope that gives a sense of what people are doing.

The other problem is that humans behave much more inconsistently than bowling balls do. You’d expect that if you drop a bowling ball in a vacuum chamber, it’ll be exactly the same as every other bowling ball in every other vacuum chamber around the globe. You only need to drop one bowling ball in a vacuum chamber to find out how bowling balls in vacuum chambers work everywhere. But if you do a study with a hundred and fifty people, you might have happened to find a hundred and fifty really weird people. Even if the effect is real within your sample, it might not apply to any other group of a hundred and fifty people, because people are weird.

It is hard to overstate the implications of the replication crisis. I would go so far as to say that you should not read quantitative psychological research, because it will make you actively stupider and have more inaccurate beliefs. You should view quantitative social scientific research more generally with grave suspicion. (Qualitative social science research wasn’t ever really supposed to replicate in the first place; ethnographies are still likely to provide an accurate insight into what it’s like to be a person very different from you, although you might be well-advised to skip the chapter about the generalizable implications.)

Now, you might think we’re in a complete state of epistemic helplessness, unable to know what facts about people are true and what facts are false. But that’s not true.

People are actually very good at figuring out whether psychological results are true or false. I’d cite the research on this but I just finished explaining why that’s bad, so instead I’ll direct you to 80,000 Hours’s psychology replication quiz. If you don’t get better than half, I will write you a drabble on the subject of your choice.

Consider priming, one of the results that has most completely and utterly failed to replicate. It turns out that doing a bunch of anagrams of words related to old people does not actually make you walk slower, imagining doing something morally wrong does not make you want to buy cleaning products, and reading the word ‘stupid’ does not make you assume people you’re talking to are less intelligent. Ask yourself: have I ever in my life experienced reading a bunch of words related to old people and then walking more slowly? Have you ever been like “sorry I’m so slow walking, I was helping out at the nursing home this morning”? No?

Most people spend much of their time thinking about other people. The human brain is in many ways optimizing for understanding other people. (Compare the abilities of your laptop computer and a five-year-old child with regards to comforting you when you’re sad, then compare their abilities with regards to quantum physics.) We are, ourselves, people. We have natural expertise and tons of information about the subject. We can outperform science.

A lot of people think of knowledge as coming from science, and science as coming from people in white labcoats doing complicated things with numbers and publishing peer-reviewed journal articles. But science is just a particular kind of empiricism. Empiricism means going out into the world, looking at things, coming up with an idea about how they might work, trying it out, and seeing if you’re right. You do empiricism all the time– when you try a new recipe, when you see if a good night’s sleep will make you feel better, when you check whether this movie reviewer has any clue what she’s talking about.

And you can do empiricism about your own psychological problems.

There are a bunch of meta-analyses that suggest that SSRIs, in general, are just barely better than placebo. There are also a lot of people who take an antidepressant, go off their antidepressant, get depressed, get back on their antidepressant, stop being depressed, go off their antidepressant, get depressed, get back on their antidepressant, stop being depressed, go off their antidepressant, etc. If you are in that group of people, what should you expect to happen if you go off your antidepressant?

You should expect to be depressed.

In a certain sense, this is totally ignoring science– you’re looking at that peer-reviewed meta-analysis with a bunch of complicated statistics and a sample size larger than one and going “…nah.” In another sense, this is doing science of the sort that is most closely connected to the question. The thing you care about is what will happen if you go off your antidepressant, you have empirically investigated it, and the answer is that you will be depressed.

At this point I should take a moment to discuss the placebo effect. Unfortunately, many people use the phrase “placebo effect” in a sloppy way. In a broad sense, the placebo effect refers to the ways a disease or condition changes if you take a sugar pill instead of a pill with an active ingredient, or talk to a kind intelligent person with no therapeutic training instead of a therapist, or whatever. In a narrow sense, the placebo effect refers to a particular source of these effects: the mind-body effect where if you do something at all to help the condition then you feel better. (More precisely, the former is called the “placebo response” and the latter is called the “placebo effect.”)

Actually, there are lots of causes of the placebo response. For example, a lot of conditions like depression fluctuate: you feel worse for a time, then you feel better, then you feel worse, then you feel better again. People tend to seek out treatment when they feel really bad and stop treatment when they feel better, so it looks like the treatment works, but it’s actually just the natural course of the disease. Similarly, some diseases are time-limited: whether or not you drink orange juice, your cold is going to take about a week to get better. Another example is that some people feel bad that people have put all this effort into giving them medicine and then they don’t feel better, so they rate themselves as feeling better even though they really don’t.

Ideally, you would do a placebo-controlled study on yourself. The process is fairly simple for medications you expect to work within one day, and I think more people should consider doing it. However, there are lots of situations where placebo-controlled studies don’t work at all: it is very difficult to do, say, placebo self-therapy or placebo exercise, and many medications such as SSRIs have to be taken for weeks to work properly.

A more promising strategy is to think about whether your experiences are consistent with the response being a placebo response. For example, if you’ve been depressed for years, you can rule out “it was just the sort of thing that would get better in a week anyway” as an explanation. If you typically miss your antidepressant because of a snafu with the pharmacy, that suggests your post-antidepressant depression is a real effect; if you typically miss your antidepressant because you’re too sad to take it, that suggests it may be a placebo response. If you’ve tried six antidepressants and only the seventh worked (despite them all being similar-looking little pills with similar side effects), it’s unlikely to be a placebo response, since there’s no reason to believe pill #7 would have a placebo response the others didn’t.

How do you choose things to experiment with? I offer the following guidelines:

• Good safety profile; few to no side effects. SSRIs are widely used and if they caused sudden horrible death we would probably know. It is difficult to imagine pomodoros or Facebook blockers having health effects one way or the other. Exercise actually makes you live longer. Conversely, taking random research chemicals off Longecity has all kinds of possible horrible side effects, and antipsychotics are routinely rated as “the only thing worse than psychosis” or “actually, no, I think I would rather be psychotic”.
• Easy to figure out if it works. If an intervention promises to help you get more work done or be less anxious, it is easy to figure out whether your to-do list has fewer items on it or you’re able to talk to strangers instead of hiding in the corner out of fright. If an intervention promises to help you reach enlightenment, this is harder to determine.
• Easy to do. Installing Facebook-blocking software or using a pomodoro tracker is very easy; anyone can do it in about one minute. Exercise, dietary changes, meditating for an hour a day, and so on are very difficult.
• Quick to test. It takes one afternoon to check whether pomodoros work for you: if you didn’t get more work done that afternoon, it probably didn’t. It can take months or years of work to find out whether meditation works for you. The former is a better thing to experiment with.
• Explanation makes sense. Ask the person why it works. If the explanation is something like “when you do something you’re scared of and it isn’t a disaster you’re likely to be less scared,” then the thing is more likely to really work. If the explanation involves unscrambling anagrams about old people making you walk slower, then maybe don’t try that one.
• Good reviews. If it worked for someone else, maybe it’s worth trying. You can ask your friends, but it’s also worth mining historical figures for ideas (maybe Marcus Aurelius has some good tips) or, sigh, reading the psychological literature.