``` **Instructions for making decisions that minimize regret** I think regret is preventable. Regret is caused by not processing gut feelings (hesitations, inclinations, hunches, and curiosities). Intuition heuristics: * "It's a good opportunity but I'm hesitant" -> Regret * "I can't explain it but it feels right for me" -> Glad * "I should do it but I don't want to" -> Regret * "It seems silly but I like it" -> Glad <div style="position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0;"><iframe src="https://www.loom.com/embed/a0cb054f953949f6b04a319c4803047f" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen style="position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%;"></iframe></div> My theory of regret = regret is basically the future form of unprocessed emotions. If you make a decision and are conflicted and have lots of unprocessed emotions, you'll feel regret afterwards at some points in the future. The regrets are basically those emotions saying "hey we wish you'd processed us before you made the decision". **Explanation of how to do it:** Before a decision or action where you feel internal conflict, you'll pause, use resonance to feel/digest all of those emotions (either by yourself or with help from someone), and then once you feel mostly emotionally neutral (you may wanna wait a bit - a few minutes, a week, depending on the scale of the decision, to see if anything else comes up), use a trick for "talking" with your subconscious to see which choice feels most peaceful, and then if you want to feel peace/glad, do that one. **Instructions for the basic version:** 1. Notice you're in a decision with inner conflict: e.g. whenever you say to yourself or someone else "I should" or whenever you notice a strong craving or sense of urgency 2. Say out loud: "I should do {X}, my impulse is to do {Y}." 3. Talk back to yourself, also out loud: "You should {x}, because {guess at why this matters to you.}" Repeat this for all of the shoulds and all of the impulses. Don't argue with yourself, instead, just reflect back your shoulds and impulses. 4. Repeat until you feel emotionally neutral. 5. Say out loud something like: "I should do {x}, my impulse is to do {z} or {y}, and my peaceful preference is to do {a}." While saying it wave your head side to side in a relaxed wave pattern. Notice if it feels true to say. If it does, great, that's your peaceful pref. If you're unsure, it's probably not, but you can also invert the sentence and say that to check. **Instructions for if you know resonance:** 1. Notice you're in a decision with inner conflict: e.g. whenever you say to yourself or someone else "I should" or whenever you notice a strong craving or sense of urgency 2. Do self-resonance on all of the different things you feel about the decision/action. 3. Repeat until you feel emotionally neutral, mostly. 4. Take some space (if it's a big decision, you might revisit in a week and check if it's still peaceful, if it's a small one, it might be 60 seconds). 5. Say out loud something like: "I should do {x}, my impulse is to do {z} or {y}, and my peaceful preference is to do {a}." While saying it wave your head side to side in a relaxed wave pattern. Notice if it feels true to say. If it does, great, that's your peaceful pref. If you're unsure, it's probably not, but you can also invert the sentence and say that to check. **Quotes from my friends:** Ben Pan said: "I think that's one of the most life changing things I've learned, how to reach peaceful preference between your subconscious and conscious mind" Maile Minardi said: "Peaceful Preferences are now my roadmap for all parts of my day here are a few small examples that FELT SO GOOD to choose" Your gut is very very very good at regret minimization. It's a supercomputer and has seen all of your decisions. It works best when you integrate all of the information from different parts of you, and that's what this is. (Also it feels really good when you're in the habit of making the different parts/emotions of you feel seen and it becomes an automatic thing that happens in the background) **"But on some decisions you just gotta use logic ya?"** IMO no, this is a way of allowing your gut to synthesize and digest all the information tha texists in the brain and emotions - just integrate/emotionally process/feel all of the logic/shoulds. That way you get all the info from your brain and all the info from your gut and elsewhere **"Peaceful intuition vs fear/impulse vs wishful thinking?"** Peaceful preference feels clear, grounded, relaxed, non-urgent. Fear/impulse often feels constricted and urgent. Wishful thinking might feel exciting but non-grounded/non-relaxed. If it feels urgent and your conscious mind has major logical hesitations, it's impulsive, if it's relaxed and your conscious mind has no major objections, it's likely a peaceful pref. **Quick heuristics:** "I'm not so sure about this, but I should do it" -> regret "I don't know how to explain it, but this feels really right" -> glad **Examples** <div style="position: relative; padding-bottom: 62.5%; height: 0;"><iframe src="https://www.loom.com/embed/f4d066c58f9941f1bb4efdc664c48bb6" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen style="position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%;"></iframe></div> and <div style="position: relative; padding-bottom: 62.5%; height: 0;"><iframe src="https://www.loom.com/embed/d7a73569da5b4d3fb26995c0972fc435" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen style="position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%;"></iframe></div> **Next steps** It'll take about maybe 10-15 decisions of using this before you hit the magic moment where it clicks. Practice with small fast-feedback-loop low-stakes decisions: food, clothing, tweets, emails, exercise, shopping, texts, social event decisions. [[Peaceful Prefs Prompt]] === 00:01 So this is kind of like a guide of what if regret was preventable. This is very much early adopted thing. 00:09 If you would like something more polished, I would say wait and come back for a future version. I have to with a couple of friends, um, but again, like, it's, you'll run to challenge when you use it, and the instructions aren't very good, and, um, so on. 00:28 It's, I call it peaceful preferences, you're going to try and basically find a peaceful preference in decisions and I'll talk about how to do that. 00:36 And yeah, try it out and tell me what challenges you run into. This is kind of, it's a, almost like a self-dialogue method going to that. 00:45 So same way that like a plant has a life cycle, my intuition is that basically regret is the future tense kind of evolved form of feelings that aren't felt when they would like to be felt. 01:05 And conversely, peace is kind of the result of processing all the feelings before a decision over for an action. And another way to think of this is that a very simplified model of kind of parts work of the self is you kind of have subconscious mind, you know, more impulse driven and so on, and then 01:26 you have conscious mind, kind of more logical, rational, obvious simplified, but still useful for me. The, when there's an alignment, what people often experience is like, either they're just driven by what they should do, just driven by the logical stuff, or they're just driven by the impulsive stuff 01:44 , or they kind of go back and forth between the two, you know, normally doing the logical stuff and then when they consume alcohol and they're just doing the impulsive stuff and they kind of have that cycle back and forth and maybe it's uncomfortable. 01:57 And instead, if you can get some alignment between your subconscious mind, it's almost like you get it, experience more free will because the parts of you are kind of rolling in the same direction. 02:10 And another thing I feel is that like, pieces kind of reward your body gives you once process of the emotions that are wanting to be processed at a given moment. 02:20 It's like an emotion. It's like a signal of like, hey, there's some information here or a thing to do or something. 02:25 Please process this once it's digested and there's nothing left to process. Emotions are directive. They have a direction. So how do you actually do it? 02:38 All right, so imagine that you are deciding about where to go out to brunch. And maybe you feel like I kind of should stay or maybe feel like, oh, I kind of should go. 02:49 So should is a good flag of, okay, there may be something in the conflict there. Should often imply, okay, there's a party that feels like you should do X, which often means that there's an impulse part that wants to do the opposite. 03:06 If you notice any strong sense of urgency, like, oh, I have to do this, or like, you know, I've got to do this right now. 03:11 Um, often there'll be some inner conflict, it's like, you know, over resource prioritization. So what you'll do is, and you can do this with your eyes, your eyes open, so like, okay, I really, I should go to the branch, and my impulse is to stay, what you might do, the Uh, I should stay home and do work 03:39 , I'll do this other thing, but my impulse is really go. And then you're going to do some active listening. If you know resonance which is an emotional processing method that I've talked about, which you can see in other links I have, use that. 03:57 It's basically a piece of performance where it's extremely well with resonance. It's like you're kind of finding all the parts that have emotions and using resonance to process all them and then once you've resonated them all and they're all kind of emotional and neutral, then find the piece of prep 04:11 is very easy. If you don't know a resonance, I'll just kind of say like you're basically going to active listen when you're self-out loud and think of it as a more intensive, more reflective, more exaggerated form of active listening. 04:23 So I'd be like, ah, you really want to stay home because you feel like unless you finish this work, like it's not going to work well. 04:32 Is that kind of And it's like, well, yeah, sort of, but maybe it's more about that I'm not sure how the timing is going to work for the afternoon. 04:47 Okay, you're not sure how the time is going to work for the afternoon because you're worried you want to enough time for some things later in the day. 04:55 Yeah, I feel like it might be a little bit tight. And so you're just going to kind of keep going back and forth and your goal is basically to take all those parts of you that have feelings, have emotions, and reflect back to them, what they have, what they want to say, until it feels like, yes, like 05:13 you really get it. So it's like, okay, you feel like you would like to go, and you also want to make sure you have enough time to stuff later in the day. 05:22 So maybe you want to do a check of your schedule or a check of your kind of the things you want to do and See how you feel after that. 05:33 Yeah, maybe I want to do that You know, it'd be whatever it is for you And the things to notice there is like I'm going back and forth between it. 05:43 I and you it's like I'm hesitant your hesitant. I I have an impulse to go, you have an impulse to go. 05:51 I feel like I should stay. You feel like you should stay. You, you know, I feel like I shouldn't do it because I'm this other thing. 06:01 Oh, you feel like you shouldn't do it because you have this other thing. And it's like you're conversing with someone else, but you're just gonna converse with that kind of part of yourself to help it to adjust. 06:11 And then you're gonna repeat until you feel more emotionally neutral, you've processed the charges and you can kind of tell that by doing this check so you might say like okay and what I call the way of our check is kind of like I find it's easier just doing some kind of body movement that feels easy 06:31 to do when you're feeling very peaceful and flowing allows you to kind of check is this a decision that feels peaceful and flying so it's like okay it's peaceful for me to go to the brunch Yes. 06:47 It's peaceful for me to stay for the brunch. No. It's like, do you want to go to the brunch? Yes. 06:57 Is it peaceful to go to the brunch? Yes. There's something else, it's like you're still having a relatively tight schedule for the day? 07:04 Yes, a tight schedule for the day. And you still feel peaceful when I go to the brunch. Yes. You don't want it to drag onto? 07:10 Yes. And that's kind of how it looks, and then if you notice yourself like, if you notice kind of your face is getting any kind of tension, or your body doesn't really like want to do the flying of like, I want to stay home, I don't want to go to it, it's like for me that feels kind of tight, and it's 07:28 like I don't want to do that flying motion, which I mean, that's not a piece of breath, it wouldn't be a piece of breath to stay in this up in this hypothetical example. 07:38 So that is the way you're checking it and then the simple version of that is like, okay, I should stay home. 07:43 My impulse is to go and my peaceful preference is to go. Does that feel true to me when I say it? 07:51 Yes. Yeah, so that's how you can kind of check, it's how you can check, it's a piece of breath. And in terms of what to do next, the things to do next would be practice this in very quick feedback, load, lower sex things. 08:13 So what to eat, when to eat, where to go to eat, where to eat at home, eat out, etc. What clothing to wear? 08:21 I feel peaceful to wear this. It's a piece of pride. And then for bigger decisions, you know, this process might take like a couple minutes. 08:32 If it's a really huge decision, there may be something that you do, and then you do it again in like a week. 08:37 And it's like it may be 20 minutes or something. It's like a, you know, where should you go to college? 08:41 Or should you take a job or something like that? You can use it for, what do I want to, do I, does this message feel peaceful for me to send? 08:52 Or am I sending it out of a should or kind of an impulse? And then the other thing that I'll note is that my intuition is that decisions made out of a place of should, where it's not the subconscious doesn't like it, tend to lead to regret, and decisions made out of impulse where the conscious mind isn't 09:15 like it also tends to lead to regret because it's kind of like your prioritizing you know one of these parts of the other and the other doesn't like that so you're looking for the ways to like okay yeah or you feel scared about this so yeah please try it out sending messages with you know either publicly 09:36 or email or DM or or, um, at me or whatever, with challenges, with successes, um, with, you know, did you get to the magic moment? 09:50 I think that my guess is that it'll take people maybe 20 uses of this to get to the magic moment. 09:56 Practice only small things and then eventually you'll start to feel like, okay, cool, now I can actually access this because you kind of already have this gut feeling that will come up in some things, like sometimes you will have experienced things where you just have like a moment of clarity of like 10:10 , okay, yeah, this, I can't explain it, but like, I actually really want to do this thing. And, you know, it's heuristics is like, I can't explain this, but it just feels really right. 10:19 Like, that's kind of instances where you've had this kind of piece of preference in the past already. And this is just a, my experiences, if you practice this and you basically, you're basically asking your body like, hey, I want to be able to apply this to other things. 10:36 The AI analogy is like you already have this kind of very powerful subconscious computer and you're just kind of doing a fine tune on it. 10:43 You're giving like a few shot prompt example where you just like practice it you know 20 times on these other things and then all of a sudden you'll find like okay cool and now I can just access my gut stability to predict regret and digest emotions of anything. 11:00 So yeah send me messages with to do the magic moment and if so are when and what was the experience, challenges, questions, etc. === 0:00 If you have hesitations and inclinations, got feelings, um, hunches, and you don't process them, those are the things that after a decision is made, will come back to you in your mind. 0:14 Those are the things that will feel like regrets they were like, ah, I knew this or like, why didn't I check it back to it? 0:20 Um, but you can avoid them So imagine that you are deciding about going to an event or not. The before might look like trying to just process that decision logically. 0:33 So it's like, okay, well, if I go, I'll be able to talk to this person and I'll be going because I've been wanting to talk to him about this. 0:38 If I don't go, then I could do this other thing and I don't really want to go because of this reason because the track is going to be annoying or whatever. 0:48 And it's not going to get you very far. You might come to a decision, but they'll probably, what often happens in that kind of case is that there's still like some, you know, conflict that is unresolved. 1:02 And so we'll just kind of still be sitting there with you. It's like you still have the unprocessed emotions that, and the more unprocessed emotions you have sitting with you, the harder it is to kind of just be flowing and, you know, vibrant and radiance and kind of all that good stuff and feel like 1:16 peaceful and so on. The more resonance approach might look something like, now this is easier if you can go to a fireplace, show your eyes and talk out loud. 1:28 So I'll give you an example. If you've practiced a bunch, you can also do the eyes open in your head, but it's easier with eyes shut and out loud. 1:37 So it might look like you don't want to go to the event. Yeah, I don't want to go to the event. 1:45 I don't want to go to the event because I just feel like it's going to be super annoying. You feel like it's going be super annoying. 1:52 Yeah, I feel like it's going be super annoying and hesitant because the last time I went it took longer. Okay, the last time you went it took longer. 1:59 And you don't want it to take longer again? Yeah, I really don't want it to take longer again. And you kind of feel like it might take longer again. 2:05 Yeah, I feel like it might take longer again You feel like it might take longer again. You really consume it would take longer again That would be that wouldn't kind of mess up all the stuff. 2:13 Yeah, that would mess up all the stuff for the Evening and et cetera So what you hopefully noticed there is basically that what you're doing is It's kind of the same as the really the residents with someone else, but you're basically just resonating with yourself. 2:27 You are saying the eye sentence, I think this, I feel this, I'm wondering about this, whatever, and you're also doing the reflection segment, which is a non-judgmental neutral, oh, you kind of feel this, or you're thinking this, and then sometimes it's questions. 2:42 Are you more concerned about this or this? More concerned about this. What I expect you'll see is if you do this, you can imagine that the, if you have the emotion and you're kind of how the feeling or the thought that went away or whatever, they have something that's sticky around the decision, the 3:02 more accurately and strongly, you can reflect it, the more quickly it will process and digest away. And I'll also mean that you don't know the more neutral you can get to before you make the decision, the less like you ought to feel in your red afterwards, because you've made it with full information 3:24 . You've processed all the thoughts, the logical information, you've processed all the body feelings, intuitions, hunches as well. And so yeah it's basically you're doing the non-judgment or reflection back to yourself. 3:39 I this, you this, I this, you this and you're basically playing both parts. Instead of what a lot of people do is just kind of thinking in one direction, you're thinking in one direction, you're also adding the echo statements and it's a common failure mode with this is like I'm not sure about going 3:54 to the event because I feel like this I'm not sure about going to the event because you feel like this but you know you know that it'll probably work out fine. 4:00 Well I didn't say that and I'm now kind of reassuring myself so the fix there would be like I'm not sure about going to the event I'm not sure about going to the event and also another part of me like feels like it's gonna work out fine and what's going to go and the another part of you feels like it's 4:13 gonna work out fine and wants you to go so you kind of break each thing into its own component and each component gets a reflection rather than a thing that gets kind of reassured or what not. 4:27 Another example is for fear and avoidance. The way you can think of the self-stuff is this is kind of where it relates to emotions as a way to, as kind of like ways for people to update their own neural networks. 4:41 It's like the emotion is the direction of the neural network once they update. And so by doing the self-processing you're helping that process happen === 0:00 I didn't think there's a project that is really exciting to you, but it's also like kind of scary kind of intimidating And so the before I might look like it might just look like avoiding it and coming up with a bunch of excuses for why you're not gonna do it Well actually doesn't make sense for this 0:14 reason and like it probably wouldn't work out anyway and probably like, you know, it's gonna be hard for this and like, uh, you know, this other thing actually makes more sense. 0:24 It's a lot of rationalization. Rationalization is a good sign of unprisoning The other before might look like if you're trying to talk with yourself about it, it's like oh come on like I just got to like I just got to do it. 0:41 I just got to buck down and do it. I, or like maybe it's kind of telling yourself about all the reasons that it's really scary or something, or just again trying to force yourself into it. 0:54 Now the more resonance approach might look like just trying to digest all of those feelings. So it's like, oh you are, so let's see, I am feeling excited about this project, but I'm also nervous because there's a lot of work involved. 1:07 You're feeling really excited but you're also nervous because there's a lot of work involved. Yes, there's a lot of work and it's like a darn one I have to do, a bunch of that kind of work. 1:17 They don't want to have to do a bunch of that kind of work. And is it more because you just feel like it's just going to be a lot of effort or more because because it's new stuff that I've done before. 1:26 Well, it's borrowed, but I guess mostly it's like, it's gonna be new stuff that I haven't done before. Okay, so it's gonna be new stuff that I've done before and it's that more scary because it's kind of unfamiliar or more because you're not sure if you're gonna do well at it. 1:38 I think it's more like I feel more just because it's unfamiliar, so I'm not sure how it's gonna go. Yeah, okay, so it's more unfamiliar, not sure how it's gonna go. 1:46 And so that's how that might look like. You just kind of play that out and you kind of get to the core, kind of, you're just basically processing and reflecting all these emotions. 1:57 And you don't actually need to do anything other than just the reflection. If you want to do any logical stuff afterwards, like that's great, you don't need to. 2:08 To me, the end point is like once you get to the emotionally neutral place where it feels like you don't have any under-justed emotions left, and you can kind of feel like you've a strong hesitation or strong impulse or a strong inclination or a strong like I should do this or a strong like avoidance 2:25 or a strong impulse or whatever that's strong fear. Those generally can be treated like unprocessed emotions so you do the reflection with yourself or your partner or your friend can do this with you until you get to that more neutral place. 2:40 If it's a small thing this might take 20 seconds, 10 seconds. If it's a medium thing it might take a minute or two minutes. 2:45 If it's a really really big thing maybe it'll take like five minutes a day for like a week or something ```