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Hoppy Bunny Day!
Mar. 31st, 2024 03:49 pmI’ve been making pizza-sandwiches lately. Basically, take a piece or two of bread, put some tomato paste on it, sprinkle some basil, oregano, black pepper, layer it with pepperoni, mushrooms, (in my case fake — cashew mozz) cheese. Put it in the countertop oven until it’s cooked, eat it with sprinkled red pepper flakes.
I’d had been looking at the dates thinking, hmmmm. Today, I sliced one up and added it as a layer. Holy crap that’s good. That’s going on every pizza ever from now on that I possibly can.
Also!
https://www.feministsurvivalproject.com/episodes/episode-08-the-monitor
The Nagoskis have stuff on frustration! Yay!
Also, definitely hits different knowing that surviving 2020 only gets you to 2021 and we probably all remember more about 2021 than we are exactly comfortable with.
ETA:
OK, did a 3 mile walk with R. and talked about some stuff including this. I’m increasingly focusing on A.’s perseverance / autism rage loop / high-stakes affect when “working” as the problem that may persist when she is in classes again. I’ve talked to A. about frustration and what it feels like, and she says she often has a list of, say, 3 things, to try to do something, and when she has tried all 3, she is already depleted and has no energy to think of more things to try. My immediate reaction was, oh, yeah, no, don’t do a list of three things. Do one thing, and then the next task is to figure out what to do after that, based on whatever you learned from the one thing. If you have a list of three, you might learn something from the results of round one that will make the others irrelevant. This was interesting, but I wasn’t necessarily satisfied with my explanation.
The Nagoskis have this:
“We've got three different targets for solutions, right? So option number one is going to be changing the kind of effort you're investing. Solution number two is going to be just making a decision to change your brain's assessment of how hard it's going to be. And then our third option is going to be changing the goal.”
They are working with a model of approach / avoidance (discrepancy decreasing or increasing), and frustration is the affect that arises when the criterion velocity is too low. I have some very real issues with this model, but we’re going to play along at least for a paragraph or two.
The “kind of effort” turned into a discussion of what I have as the Basic Needs Theory. It’s less developed than my theory but basically same same. Get enough sleep, eat better food, etc.
The “how hard it’s going to be” is basically a redo the schedule to be more realistic.
The “change the goal” is super weird, and I’m not 100% certain I even understood much less agree with that make Andrew experience joy thing.
“ The new goal has to be soon, certain, specific, concrete, positive and personal.”
No explanation on this. In my world, the absolutely crucial element of any goal is that it be attainable. Which is not on this list. Which I find extremely worrisome, because an unattainable goal is going to bring us right back to frustration. It’s easy to think, but how do you _know_ it is attainable? Well, it has to be something that you know to be fully within your control. So, “drive to the mall” is kind of a sucky goal, but “try to drive to the mall” is a great goal. You try, and if it turns out someone else already took the car, well, you tried! You met the goal, even if you didn’t make it to the mall. Let’s say the car is there, and you drive partway there, car breaks down, resolving the car breakdown takes the rest of the day / money. You still tried! You didn’t make it to the mall, but you tried! If you get stuck in traffic, and by the time you get there you would have to turn around and go right back home for some other part of the day’s plan, oh well! You turn around right away, because you tried!
Yoda’s there is no try is absolute bullshit. Try is a great goal, and a great way to reduce frustration.
Another change-the-goal is “do a bad job quickly”. Then you can decide whether the bad job is good enough (now you have extra time!) or you can decide whether it’s worth spending any remaining time allocated to the task to improving the the work.
“Do a bad job quickly” for “go to the mall” might be, well, I wanted to look for a pair of shoes or a sweater, and I can do that online and maybe you find good enough shoes and/or sweater online, place the order and the amount of time spent on the task is a tiny fraction of the time it might take to drive to the mall. Or maybe you go look in your closet and discover a pair of shoes or a sweater you forgot you owned that is kinda cool and because it had been forgotten for a while, it feels like new. Fastest solution ever!
I’m not sure if this is going to help with A.’s frustration, especially when it comes to words or concepts that she does not understand and wants to understand. I use these techniques. Like, why does Germany / German have so many terms in different languages (Alemanni derived, German, Deutsch). We talked about migration, and terms from outside vs. inside a group, and concluded that Deutsch, like so many terms used by a group of people to refer to themselves, just means “of the people” (I predicted that, actually, and was pleased that that turned out to be the case.) Alemanni was a reference to a confederation, so probably it means something close to what it sounds like (all the tribes). We still don’t know what’s up with the German/Germany one, tho. So I tried to answer, told her it would be harder than expected (reset expectations), and punted on a complete answer after getting answers to parts of it (reset success criteria / abandoned part of it). And she’s mostly been okay with me using these techniques. But it’s less clear how successful I will be at teaching techniques like this to her.
I’d had been looking at the dates thinking, hmmmm. Today, I sliced one up and added it as a layer. Holy crap that’s good. That’s going on every pizza ever from now on that I possibly can.
Also!
https://www.feministsurvivalproject.com/episodes/episode-08-the-monitor
The Nagoskis have stuff on frustration! Yay!
Also, definitely hits different knowing that surviving 2020 only gets you to 2021 and we probably all remember more about 2021 than we are exactly comfortable with.
ETA:
OK, did a 3 mile walk with R. and talked about some stuff including this. I’m increasingly focusing on A.’s perseverance / autism rage loop / high-stakes affect when “working” as the problem that may persist when she is in classes again. I’ve talked to A. about frustration and what it feels like, and she says she often has a list of, say, 3 things, to try to do something, and when she has tried all 3, she is already depleted and has no energy to think of more things to try. My immediate reaction was, oh, yeah, no, don’t do a list of three things. Do one thing, and then the next task is to figure out what to do after that, based on whatever you learned from the one thing. If you have a list of three, you might learn something from the results of round one that will make the others irrelevant. This was interesting, but I wasn’t necessarily satisfied with my explanation.
The Nagoskis have this:
“We've got three different targets for solutions, right? So option number one is going to be changing the kind of effort you're investing. Solution number two is going to be just making a decision to change your brain's assessment of how hard it's going to be. And then our third option is going to be changing the goal.”
They are working with a model of approach / avoidance (discrepancy decreasing or increasing), and frustration is the affect that arises when the criterion velocity is too low. I have some very real issues with this model, but we’re going to play along at least for a paragraph or two.
The “kind of effort” turned into a discussion of what I have as the Basic Needs Theory. It’s less developed than my theory but basically same same. Get enough sleep, eat better food, etc.
The “how hard it’s going to be” is basically a redo the schedule to be more realistic.
The “change the goal” is super weird, and I’m not 100% certain I even understood much less agree with that make Andrew experience joy thing.
“ The new goal has to be soon, certain, specific, concrete, positive and personal.”
No explanation on this. In my world, the absolutely crucial element of any goal is that it be attainable. Which is not on this list. Which I find extremely worrisome, because an unattainable goal is going to bring us right back to frustration. It’s easy to think, but how do you _know_ it is attainable? Well, it has to be something that you know to be fully within your control. So, “drive to the mall” is kind of a sucky goal, but “try to drive to the mall” is a great goal. You try, and if it turns out someone else already took the car, well, you tried! You met the goal, even if you didn’t make it to the mall. Let’s say the car is there, and you drive partway there, car breaks down, resolving the car breakdown takes the rest of the day / money. You still tried! You didn’t make it to the mall, but you tried! If you get stuck in traffic, and by the time you get there you would have to turn around and go right back home for some other part of the day’s plan, oh well! You turn around right away, because you tried!
Yoda’s there is no try is absolute bullshit. Try is a great goal, and a great way to reduce frustration.
Another change-the-goal is “do a bad job quickly”. Then you can decide whether the bad job is good enough (now you have extra time!) or you can decide whether it’s worth spending any remaining time allocated to the task to improving the the work.
“Do a bad job quickly” for “go to the mall” might be, well, I wanted to look for a pair of shoes or a sweater, and I can do that online and maybe you find good enough shoes and/or sweater online, place the order and the amount of time spent on the task is a tiny fraction of the time it might take to drive to the mall. Or maybe you go look in your closet and discover a pair of shoes or a sweater you forgot you owned that is kinda cool and because it had been forgotten for a while, it feels like new. Fastest solution ever!
I’m not sure if this is going to help with A.’s frustration, especially when it comes to words or concepts that she does not understand and wants to understand. I use these techniques. Like, why does Germany / German have so many terms in different languages (Alemanni derived, German, Deutsch). We talked about migration, and terms from outside vs. inside a group, and concluded that Deutsch, like so many terms used by a group of people to refer to themselves, just means “of the people” (I predicted that, actually, and was pleased that that turned out to be the case.) Alemanni was a reference to a confederation, so probably it means something close to what it sounds like (all the tribes). We still don’t know what’s up with the German/Germany one, tho. So I tried to answer, told her it would be harder than expected (reset expectations), and punted on a complete answer after getting answers to parts of it (reset success criteria / abandoned part of it). And she’s mostly been okay with me using these techniques. But it’s less clear how successful I will be at teaching techniques like this to her.