Life Lessons from Psychological Research

In 2019 I heard a talk by Ida Momennejad. She was showing an algorithm that learned to navigate a grid world that had a cliff. With a regular setting, the algorithm would figure out where the cliff is, and navigate around it while pursuing a reward nearby. When the researchers cranked up the algorithms pessimism, it started to think that not only the cliff was dangerous, but that increasingly extensive areas around the cliff were also dangerous. At first, the pessimistic algorithm would just take ridiculous detours to avoid the cliff, but increasingly it would go more and more out of its way to prioritize avoiding the cliff over doing anything else. I gasped when Ida showed that ultimately the algorithm could learn to perceive the world as so terrible - an ever looming cliff - that the only way to escape the pain was to throw itself off the cliff.

I had two critical insights that day: 1) I had been operating like that algorithm and made my world smaller and smaller to avoid threats, and 2) I could change the world I inhabited.

These insights allowed me to change my life for the better. Awareness is the first requirement for change. By being mindful and recognizing when I was not doing things that would be good for me or doing things that incurred unnecessary effort to avoid potential, unlikely threats, and then choosing otherwise, I increased my world again. I restarted doing things that were fun, I began enjoying things again because I stopped focussing on the terrible things that could happen and aligning everything with avoiding them. I changed the world I inhabited by changing which aspects I looked at. Suddenly there were opportunities and blessings where before all there was was threats and fear. 

What world do you choose to live in? Do you regularly not go places because something bad might happen? Do you regularly work around people because you don't trust that they will respond well to things you bring up? Do you regularly overprepare and overthink or abandon plans altogether because they seem too daunting? 

You can read the published article here. Maybe it changes your life, too. 

Zorowitz, S., Momennejad, I., & Daw, N. D. (2020). Anxiety, Avoidance, and Sequential Evaluation. Computational Psychiatry. doi:10.1162/CPSY_a_00026