12 Months of Introspection
Rocket ship, roller coaster, romance movie
For the last 12 months I’ve adopted an intensive experiment in reprogramming my mind, emotions and perception. It’s worked so well that I figured I should write about it.
The gist: After years of experimenting with many practices, direct work with the imagination has, for me, proven to be the most potent method of self-development by a long shot. I’m much saner, happier and more effective than I was a year ago. It also took a lot of scary staring into the void to get there. This is a work in progress and definitively not magic, though it sometimes feels that way.
Obligatory background info
About a year ago I met a young dude named Mark Estefanos in a commune in San Francisco who claimed to have developed an engineering approach to working with the mind that dramatically improved the results one could get, and that those effects could extend far beyond emotional regulation to enhance perception and intelligence.
Put simply, his approach is a self-coaching system that involves (among other things) something like a combination of IFS (internal family systems) and software engineering. He calls it “Introspection”. As a transcendence nerd, I was intrigued. I grilled him for a few hours on the method and approach, and promptly went off and started doing it on my own. Later, when I broke my brain in various interesting ways, I also got help with regular coaching from Mark himself.
Backing up, it's worth noting as background that I’ve had about 10 years of semi-serious meditation experience, as well as basically 10+ years of on-and-off therapy (various methods) and many other contemplative practices. I’ve done an SF-bay-area average amount of psychedelics, and before this Introspection stuff, my strongest therapeutic experience was by far an ayahuasca ceremony in a bougie mansion in the hills of Berkeley.
All that is to say, I wasn’t coming into this cold. Still, the power of the method sort of blew my mind. I’ll talk a tiny bit here about how this self-coaching stuff works, but I mostly want to highlight the practical value I’ve gotten from it in 1 year of practice.
Self-knowledge Catapult
The beginning of working with the Introspection tools was basically like being put on a rocket into my own unconscious.
On its face the method is pretty simple: you investigate a feeling, thought or recurring perception (a ‘trailhead’) and use it as a starting point to internally talk/interact with a fragment of your mind. This is a bit like chatting with chatGPT, but with feelings and memories and images etc as typical responses.
A fragment can be talked about as a “Part”. If you ask the good questions, and vibe out with the Part in the right way, one will often experience a flood of intense emotions, lost memories, body sensations, and troubling realizations.
After this storm of sensations, typically a large pool of new and detailed self-knowledge emerges. Your perception of the internal and external world shifts noticeably, and aspects of the world you couldn’t or wouldn’t see before come more clearly into view.
Turns out, agency is a skill
In this process, you gain agency over aspects of mind/self that previously felt like they were just you.
Things that felt unchangeable become malleable and you can now respond in more creative and intelligent ways.
Think about a simple example: automatically avoiding getting close to people. As you work on this, you start to notice when you pull back and instead decide to open up. This change from doing things without thinking to choosing your actions is an important part of gaining agency. By looking inward, you might also remember why you started acting this way, and this gives further insight into other patterns. Rinse, repeat. The results compound over time.
Usually in this process there’s a 10-50% reduction in reactivity (ie “ getting triggered”) in some relevant area and a slow trickle of new knowledge and mental capability comes online for something like 2-4 weeks afterwards (although this can last for months or years).
This might sound easy, but the process is kind of like staring into the void and being eaten and spat out by it over and over. You sort of get used to it, but the first few dozen times can be pretty rough.
Still, it’s worth it.
Everyone loves a list, right?
Let’s talk about results.
This kind of public self-analysis is a bit awkward, but it’s valuable for me and maybe others will feel that way too, especially if you’ve found yourself stuck on some areas of self-development despite lots of therapy, meditation, psychedelics and whatnot. I was, and this collection of methods broke through those barriers far more effectively.
Most of this comes from my own experiences (>100 pages of notes), or from interviews done with my wife, friends and Mark himself about how I’ve changed in the last 12 months.
Comparing 1-year-ago me to present me, here’s the most interesting differences:
1. Understanding the story of my life and how it led to how I think and feel
In the last year, it's become increasingly clear how the specifics in the story of my life (and the life of my family, caretakers, friends, etc.) have directly led to how I think and feel and behave.
A really simplified example here would be something like:
Distracted parents in childhood ->
Develop seeking attention behaviors ->
Associating attention with external validation, like from school ->
Believing knowledge and skills ensure safety ->
Feeling betrayed when not praised for knowledge and skills ->
Thinking I must act radically to be acknowledged ->
Receiving negative attention from such actions ->
Growing feelings of alienation and self-anger ->
Developing harmful thought patterns behaviors
Now that I’ve identified dozens of these kinds of internal patterns, many aspects of my lifelong struggles and behaviors make way more sense, and it’s possible to create new patterns in predictable and durable ways that last. This point is the foundation of the points below.
2. Significant reduction in anxiety, anger, frustration, fear, and subtle distress
I discovered and resolved dozens of ways that I was subtly freaking myself out all the time. Having meditated for years, I know these recurring thought patterns well - worrying about the future, hosting fake conversations, cringing about mistakes, etc. etc. etc.
However, my experience with meditation is that it soothes these patterns temporarily and slowly diminishes their occurrence over long periods of time. With this method, I was able to get “clean” resolutions to many sources of stressful internal chatter. I now almost never have some forms of distracted or stressful thoughts that used to take up 15-30% of my mental cycles.
This is an unreasonably large improvement in general mental centeredness and health.
3. Having a detailed map of my mind, feelings, perceptions makes everything easier
Now, when I do have distressing mental, emotional, or body sensations - about 60% of the time I now know why they are there, what my unconscious is trying to communicate, and what to do to soothe or resolve the sensation. This all happens semi-automatically, and can be done in as little as 10 seconds (or of course much longer for bigger things).
This doesn’t mean I can magically feel any way I want at any time, but the sense of “why do I feel this way?” is increasingly rare. When it does come up, I usually know exactly how to approach and resolve it, as well as what part of my life and conditioning led to the distressing sensation. Sometimes these things are too big to deal with at the moment, but I keep a running list of these trailheads and work at them systematically in daily and weekly practice.
4. Unblocking deep rest and reduction in insomnia
I have been a long-time insomniac. For most of my adult life, I’ve taken supplements or medications to help me sleep every single night.
It turns out that because of some specific teenage life conditioning, I was basically never letting myself fully relax. I was totally acclimated to being slightly sleep deprived all the time, totally reliant on sleep aids, and somewhat high strung by default. Now, I sleep most nights with minimal chemical intervention, and totally off over the counter sleep aids, and other strong downers. This is a small change, but hugely impactful on my quality of life.
5. Unlearning self-domination / rewiring my sources of motivation
I’ve discovered through this work that I have historically used negative emotions as fuel for my motivation. Fear, anxiety, stress, frustration, anger and desire for acknowledgement have apparently been major sources of motivation for most of my life’s work. This was all hidden from my direct perception before.
I’ve come to think of these as the internal energy equivalent of fossil fuels. They can get you very very far in life, but eventually they start to choke and pollute your internal ecology.
I’m now midway through what I think of as an internal clean energy transition- step by step rewiring my deep felt sense of motivation to be caused by more wholesome impulses. This is not easy. Practically, this means my motivation has decreased a lot in large step downs, and then is slowly being replaced with more consistent energy sources. This has been very tricky, since running a company means pushing things forward at a high pace all the time. Sometimes I’ve failed on one or both of these goals when they conflict.
Overall this has been one of the most difficult but most worthwhile personal development projects of the last year. It is far from finished, but real progress is being made.
6. Dramatic increase in understanding others’ mindsets and behaviors
Looking back, I’m sort of shocked at how bad I was a year ago at understanding other people’s psyche and motivations. This was a particularly acute area of weakness for me. Turns out that in order to gain a sense of safety and predictability, I was subtly modeling everyone else as very similar to me. With the benefit of hindsight, I can see this led to all kinds of very odd behaviors.
For example, a year ago, I was still under the illusion that conceptual discussion and dialog should naturally lead to shared understanding. If that failed, I basically had no tools other than frustration. Why didn’t this person understand this obvious thing when I explained the reasons clearly?!
This is embarrassing to admit, but it took some deep reworking of my sense of safety in order for me to accept and engage with the reality that people communicate and are motivated by a wide ranging set of conditionings, emotional signals, social signals, trauma responses, and many other unpredictable learned responses. I can see now that “reasons” tend to be low on the list of factors people use to determine what they do and believe. Of course I “knew” this conceptually, but it’s taken a while to really accept it, and internalize that it doesn’t make me unsafe by default.
7. Moderate reduction in some ADHD symptoms
I now suspect I have some kind of undiagnosed ADHD. Based on what I see other’s self-reporting on this, it’s likely less intense for me than for most ADHD-ers. Still, some of the core symptoms describe me well.
One, in particular, is so called “time blindness” - where a subject experiences the future and past as being much less salient than stimulus that is immediately in front of them, and further struggles to conceptualize time as “really real”.
This described 1-year-ago-me pretty much perfectly. It’s been a piece of feedback I’ve gotten personally and professionally for most of my life. Through working on conditioning related to my early schooling, I’ve been able to increase the salience of time in a reliable way that has made me a (slightly) better collaborator, manager and partner.
That said, this has not been a focus and this is not at all a well-developed skill for me. At this point I can really feel time about 2 weeks ahead and behind me. Further out it gets murky. In comparison to my wife, who has almost eidetic memory for experiences and timelines, I still feel like an absolute beginner on this.
8. Adaptive shifts in goals and world models
At some point, I started to discover that my sense of self was deeply embedded in a particular model of how other people and the world works. It included things like:
People (including me) are “reasonable” and “sensible” deep down (for certain idiosyncratic definitions of those terms),
Everyone very much wants to know the capital-t-truth if it could only be discovered and articulated correctly,
Social signaling is only a small portion of what people use to make decisions,
It’s relatively feasible to change systems of power without engaging in power-seeking behavior
Etc. etc.
This model turned out to be super wrong, but was a useful tool to protect myself in many circumstances. I’ve now started to build more subtlety into this model- starting by not ignoring a bunch of aspects of social reality that previously were a bit too distressing to engage with adaptively.
Rocket ship, Roller coaster, Romance movie
There’s no magic pill here. The last 12 months have been very powerful, but also dizzying and terrifying.
Especially in the beginning, the method was very destabilizing. It does get easier though, sort of.
I’ve now uprooted so many aspects of what I thought made me who I am that now digging up a new closet skeleton is sort of entertaining in a “your heart is breaking but you know it’s going to be fine because it’s a romance movie” kind of way.
It’s never exactly “fun” to discover a deep part of yourself that embodies the things you most fear or despise, but having the tools to evolve those parts deliberately makes it much less threatening.
What a relief!
It’s trippy to mentally time-travel to the version of me that was running the show a year ago.
I have a lot of compassion for that person. There was so much more suffering in their day to day experience. I’m grateful to people like Mark, and my wife and my friends for putting up with and loving that person despite all their obvious flaws. I’m sure I’ll feel that way looking backwards next year too.
Even so, it’s a huge relief to know that this kind of progress is possible in such a short amount of time.
Introspection is definitely not magic, but it sure feels like it sometimes.
Big thanks to: Mark Estafanos for doing the hard work of developing these tools, Sasha Chapin for writing and editing coaching, and to Tony for reading and feedback.