Tag: understanding

066b – more on being HSP

I mentioned a few posts ago that I’ve been learning more about the highly sensitive person trait lately. Today has been a bit of a gloomy day because of some of the things I read. Although in many ways this feels like a puzzle piece that had been missing for a long time from my landscape of self-understanding, it does come with its fair share of sad-ish realisations. 

  1. I will not be able to express all my ideas. 

    I think this hit harder because yesterday had been a very prolific day (from my standards) in terms of creative expression and I’d been feeling overjoyed and extremely enthusiastic about a lot of it. I did feel a little overstimulated already today morning, since I hadn’t caught enough sleep, but then I ended up reading the book I’ve been reading on HSPs which coincidentally also hit this point. That someone like me can feel overstimulated or over-aroused not just because of “intrusive thoughts” but also thoughts (and ideas) in general. And we need to be aware that we won’t be able to do justice to them all. 

  2. The balance between finding peace/calm and “satisfaction” might be a constant struggle. 

    If I’m someone who wants to work on, express and share a lot of my ideas, but can only operate on a lower productivity than the “majority” of the people around me, I’m probably going to find myself either a. a bit dissatisfied or b. regularly overstimulated. So, yeah— I suppose this is going to be a constant struggle. I might have to REALLY ask myself what’s important.

    In other words, sustained peace might also be a bit elusive. I imagine it’ll be a regular dance of arousal and calm as opposed to just staying calm for a whole day, for example. 

  3. I need to not use social media as a way to calm myself down. 

    This one isn’t sad, it makes sense actually, and I need to work on this anyway. I was checking Instagram a lot throughout the morning and even after waking up but by the afternoon, I felt completely depleted even though I didn’t really do anything exhausting or tiring, really. I’ve noticed that I end up feeling not very great if something important to me doesn’t get the response I expected. I’ve talked about this before, but this is my reminder. Definitely need to be cautious about this. 

  4. Paying attention to and not compromising on sleep will be of utmost importance. 

    I am susceptible to letting sleep suffer if I’m really enjoying certain activities (whether it’s hanging out with friends or really getting in the zone with something creative etc). However, I need to remember that that short-term gratification is NOT worth fucking up your entire next day. We’re pretty good at accepting that that’s true for things like work and partying (for example) but I need to remember it applies to almost everything. Except like really urgent situations. (Health-related, etc). 

Okay, this is all for now, I imagine I’ll be talking more about this regularly. Like I said earlier, bear with me! And if you’re HSP too, let me know! 

016 – the mere-exposure effect

I love writing. Or at this point I can simply call this filling up a page with words. It genuinely makes me feel alive. I was going through a phase of loneliness and I kept going back to this idea of “a person is a person through other persons”. And that still may be true, but since I’m not feeling lonely anymore, I don’t have to think about it all the time.

So once (or while) my basic needs are fulfilled, writing genuinely makes me feel alive. Sometimes I want eyes on the stuff that I write, but often I don’t care as much. It’s almost addictive, letting the words flow out of my head, through my body and out on the screen. I think I genuinely achieve flow when I write. Not always, but often enough to enjoy it. And sometimes I’ll aid myself with good music and a nice beverage. 

Nothing new, but conflict and being misunderstood is still on my mind, a lot. I don’t currently want to dive deep into it since I feel like it’ll bother me. But I suppose I could dip a toe in and see whether it does. 

I had another argument with my mother today and she expressed annoyance about how we’ve been disagreeing over pretty much everything. Now, I do believe I am someone who is very vocal about things I don’t like, specially within relationships that matter to me.. but I think it gets a little complicated with parents or “unequal” relationships. I think something that might be hard for parents is to look at their children, truly, as adults? I mean we often disagree and argue and face conflicts in friendships too, but they’re rarely so intertwined with emotions and history, I suppose.

Anyway, I genuinely think most conflict or dislike is rooted in a lack of complete understanding. And I don’t just mean this in relationships and people, though it’ll obviously be easier to make a case for that. Even “ideas” should be easy enough. Though I think we can “disagree” after a full understanding. What I’m curious about is “dislike”.

The one I’m more interested in is with things like art and “creative” things. I wonder whether the hypothesis “if I don’t like something, it must mean I don’t fully understand it” can be true. I once told someone that I don’t really like EDM, and I always support that with the reason of “I haven’t really heard it enough”.

There’s beliefs in psychological theories of love and attraction that proximity and familiarity can increase both. The reasons might seems obvious but I’m not sure if they are. I also wonder if we can apply the same to art too? It would make sense right? We’re all quite used to the phrase “it’s grown on me”.

What happens when this occurs, let’s say in case of a… song? Do we simply get more “familiar” with it, or do we actually somehow understand it better?

So looks like the mere-exposure effect does apply to all sorts of things, including things like words and paintings. So how does this work? Do we know anything about the reasons or causes behind this effect?

Did a quick search, seems like the two main reasons behind this effect are 

  • reduced uncertainty, and 
  • increased understanding and perception 

There was a time when I used to think that art is more valuable for the aesthetic value it provides rather than being something one could understand and/or resonate with. I used to often click pictures only for their form and not care much about why people were liking them. People would often say “I don’t get it” to some of my posts and I would just say things like “that’s fine, you can judge it purely based on form”.

But it makes sense now that form could also simply be the first layer or signal to a potential understanding? It’s one of the biggest reasons we conform to societal beauty standards as well, right? To signal an understanding of society.

It makes sense then how repeated exposure could work for reducing the dislike for something as well. First, the danger and uncertainty and fear is eliminated. Once that’s done, we could become curious and more open-minded about really perceiving and understanding the thing or the person. 

Does that mean that given enough time, intent and courage we can “grow” to like anything? Probably does. Feels like good news to me, lol. (Now I remember how this is one of the biggest arguments used by the proponents of arranged marriage setups as well.)

This is great. If we start here, we then don’t have to pick things simply because “we already like them” or “we’re already good at them”, we can have the freedom to pick things (or people) based on other factors. Though this sounds great in theory, I already feel an anxiety about time coming up. It tells me how I’m conditioned to want quick returns. 

—

Since I’m veering towards thinking about this from a romantic relationships perspective again, it might be a good time for me to think about my values and the things I care about — 

  • Being self-aware and living without least regrets
    • If I like doing something I want to be able to do it but I also want to be somewhat aware of why I like doing it
    • If I want to do something but I’m not doing it I want to be aware of my constraints and know whether I plan to change them or not (if they’re changeable)
      • If they’re unchangeable that’s fine, but I want to be aware of them as well
      • Note to self (call grandparents tonight) 
  • Health (physical and mental)
  • Connection (with humans as well as living beings as well as… nature?) 
    • Being “there” for people 

I can’t (at this moment) explain how this came up from whatever I wrote above, but until two years ago, I used to be quite sure of the fact that I want to have kids. I’ve been questioning this for the last year or so. I think the more people I meet who “don’t plan to have kids”, the easier it becomes to question it as well. And sure, it might depend on whether I’ll meet someone I want to spend the rest of my life with, and what their preferences are, etc. But so far it’s nice to be able to even question it.