Confirmations: A Trap

The confirmation game

The boundary between confirming your action and performing actions for confirmation is quite thin. Unknowingly we often cross that boundary and end up in a trap where a majority of our actions are originated just to confirm. The primary goal or objective of any activity then becomes confirmation. It goes beyond the activities and extends to the mind space even during non-activity times. Slowly confirmation becomes the basis by which we often start to make a judgement about ourselves and our self-worth. As long as it is going well it gives us a boost to our morale and we start doing more activities. The moment there is a negative confirmation of the activity, the mind starts its own games of self-blame and guilt.

The game starts with generously giving compliments, rewards, praises, etc. by the confirmer. This positive reinforcement acts as the trigger for your brain to release dopamine, which is key to feeling pleasure or satisfaction. So far so good. We have read that this type of reinforcement is good for driving productivity and positive behavior. Human minds, however, are super susceptible to the dark effects of this game which can lead to stress and anxiety. The mind gets engaged in building its repository of the ideas and tasks that can be used to earn more validation points for itself.

Onset of Anxiety

Engagement of mind doesn’t usually stop with the execution of an activity, it goes far beyond that in planning too much on how to score more on confirmation. Here we are not talking about productive planning of execution, which is a good thing and helps in many ways for concretizing the results of efforts. The planning and analysis go far beyond this in trying to control so many uncertainties and preparing oneself for an activity in a hypothetical situation that would lead to more hypothetical confirmation points. This often sets the mind on a journey to stress out itself even without any actual substance in reality.

There would be moments when the activity is not confirmed and the reactions of the confirmer are negative. These moments in the mind would result in degradation of morale and tremendous loss of self-worth. It often leads to stressful situations where the mind is engaged continuously to analyze the activity, playing the situation over and again, entering into a loop of guilt, and ending up in an anxious situation about future non-conformities. The restless mind enters a phase of fear where it hesitates to perform an activity with confidence. Even after the activity is over, the mind still hooks at the upcoming result. It gets anxious and always stays on alert to receive feedback on the activity.

The unaware mind

The mind doesn’t enjoy or participate fully in the current act rather it is mostly occupied with the outcomes of the performed activity for the sake of confirmation. The body is involved in eating/cooking/walking/showering etc. but there is no mindfulness. There is no awareness of what is happening internally or externally. There is no complete awareness of what our senses are currently experiencing. Our taste senses may be experiencing a wonderful infusion of flavors but the mind may not recognize this. Internally we might be sad because of missing our partner but our mind is not completely aware of this feeling. Lack of awareness of our internal and external world, which for us are the current realities are not experienced to their full extent rather the mind leads itself to live in an illusionary hypothetical world.

The present internal and external world could be wonderful or misery but still isn’t it better to experience these real wonderfulness and miseries rather than the hypothetical ones?

The self-destructing algorithm

Let’s try to understand our minds as to why these situations are resulting. Consider our mind as a robot that is programmed to identify a task as rewarding or punishing. Post identification it has to maximize the rewarding tasks and minimize the tasks that are punishing. This is its ultimate program and we can call it the nature of the mind. The task that it has to perform needs input and these inputs are provided through the senses in the form of sight, sound, voice, touch, or smell. Inputs could be numerous but the mind starts to accept only those inputs which are important/necessary for its program to maximize the rewards or minimize the punishments.

Slowly the program gets powerful and it tries to run all the time where it anticipates the necessary inputs. In the absence of these necessary inputs, the mind itself starts to generate hypothetical inputs in the form of thoughts and then runs the program. These hypothetical inputs are a projection of the recent memory. If the recent output has been rewarding then the hypothetical inputs would be more likely to be the ones that could produce more rewards and vice versa. Based on these hypothetical inputs the program starts to crunch it and produces hypothetical outputs which are again the projection of the recent real outputs.

The Way Out

Gaining an understanding of the workings of the mind would reveal that we have a super powerful entity that is running without any training to control itself. Just like we are having discussions on artificial intelligence about a situation where it could be out of control and destroy its creators, We need to start discussing more about our minds. To our avail, the answers have already been laid out in the form of ancient practices of mindfulness and meditation. We need not invent the methods but only have to discover them. It would take time and effort to train our minds but it is the only way of keeping it from destroying itself. The journey will progressively grant more truths about the nature of the mind and access to more control over it.