• Auto-config seems to work. I know my instincts and my internal progress bars. This is not them. After the first loop, I was certain of the listening schedule that I should run, and it was neither by way of my usual signposts nor by posted loops/days. I'm going to delay the use of my progress bars once again, but I really want to explore this unfamiliar certainty of scheduling. (Taking full responsibility on deviating from the instructions.)
  
• Calm is appearing as instant-on/instant-off. Can't begin to guess to what others are experiencing, but, for me, stress and tension vanish while I'm listening. When the last loop ends, the weight of the world returns. I'd love to try sleeping while listening, but logistics preclude that.
  
• Dreams have been more involved and complex, but they're still not scary. Still lacking in zombies and action film motifs, but they always are. It's more about solving what would ordinarily be stressful situations, just at a slightly more social level than my daily life involves.
  
• On the first night, I'd had a sensory experience similar to my first night on E2, years ago. On the first night of E2, I'd had a feeling of being held down underwater, as if a current were washing over me. With OF v2's first night, I'd had a strong mental image of my anxiety (played, curiously, by a frenetic fraggle) whooping and bouncing off of the walls, floor, and ceiling of a cage. Both events had occurred at the precipice of sleep. With E2, it'd been while listening, but, with OF v2, I'm not listening during sleep. Multiple plausible interpretations come to mind, but I don't consider any one uniquely correct.
  
• As with v1, fleeting opportunities are still being taken, and the decisions continue, thus far, to be good ones. Interestingly, in the past, I've skipped several choices that, even when backed by trustworthy data, seemed too rushed, and, if I'd observed them in others, I'd have considered acting on that sort of hastiness to be prompted by the fear of missing out. Now, between v1 and v2, I've been appreciating that, for better or worse, some choices simply have a narrow window of opportunity and that seizing such a moment, when visible, isn't necessarily prompted by fear, just limited availability.
  

• Friday was a day of extreme exhaustion. Nothing to do with holiday stresses, since it's not my holiday. It was the closest seen (in the execution of any version of OF) to tiring myself out with execution, but cherry-picking the result that you've been told to expect doesn't automatically guarantee cause and effect. It happened once over five months, and a single exhausted day doesn't suddenly mean that a version of OF is responsible. Nor is Overcoming Wakefulness the actual goal of the sub. I'll concede that cause and effect might be possible, just not irrefutable.
  
• Had a dream that nudged one of the big fears. Not unheard of, but a glimpse of one of the big ones (possibly the biggest) may mean that this one's finally made it close to the menu. Not necessarily onto the menu, but... maybe, I don't know, into the pantry? Can't say that I'm looking forward to that battle, especially given its emotional complexity, but living on the other side of it would be liberating. Alternatively, if that battle doesn't actually take place while on OF, I won't be surprised either, as it's not why I'm running OF, but, in the meantime, it does make for a convenient mile marker.
  
• Dreams got even stranger. One about dismembering superhero and supervillain action figures like they were voodoo dolls (fictional mythology style, no offense intended toward anyone's real-life culture or traditions) because the "real" ones were expected to arrive? Another where I was experiencing already-dead family members dying again, but, this time, they were doing so in my presence, almost contagiously or sequentially? Not my usual.
  
• Unfounded sadness, tears, etc. Like on E1/E2. Did not encounter it on OF v1. How much of it is circumstantial and how much is sub-related is unclear.
  

1. When auto-config seemed to suggest an initial listening pattern, that pattern worked very well for the first 2-3 cycles.
   
2. When auto-config seemed to suggest downshifting so soon after those first few cycles, I mistook it for resistance and stubbornly refused to decelerate.
   
3. When my own instincts started throwing up "over-listening" indicators (I'm one for whom "carpet-bombing" on 5.5G+ either backfires noticeably or has little effect), I mistook it for normalization of the initial positive effects and continued to trust the original auto-config scheduling.
   
4. When various unrelated aspects of my life kept throwing the phrase "Too Much Too Soon" at me, as if it were "Bad Wolf" in a 2005 sci-fi TV series, I still failed to connect the dots, clinging to "It's just a forced march, like E1" while enduring the increasingly miserable/uncomfortable spiral downward.
   
5. When circumstances finally disrupted the original listening pattern, execution quickly improved, and I regained enough clarity to put the ignored puzzle pieces together. To clarify: I'm not underdoing my listening now; I was just overdoing it previously.
   

• Encountering more fearfulness and less emotional self-control than usual. On the surface, that might seem like the opposite of what I'd want, and, for all that I know, it may be exactly what it seems. But, that possibility aside, it's no less plausible that the increased fearfulness could follow directly from the outcomes of decisions that I'd never have risked making before (in other words, fearlessly choosing metaphorical room B might result in new scares that room A was never capable of hosting) and that the reduced self-control might be a side effect of facing my emotions more directly (taking down filters that I originally put up out of fear). Or a handful of other potential explanations, such as regressing and finding a creative way to excuse it.
  
  Either way, I'm not rushing to the superficial conclusion that 6 months on 2 OF versions is making things worse, even if my mid-process results might seem to paint that picture. Two things that look the same from the outside may be very different on the inside.
  
  
• Still not feeling any more freedom than I'd felt before I'd started. As before, I'm not proclaiming loyalty to any one explanation. It could relate to baseline adjustment, incremental progress, or only a short distance covered. Or it could be because OF's suggestions are encouraging me to max out my efforts. Or because my standards, if not my expectations, keep me at arm's length from that freedom, feeling perpetual (if not verifiable) certainty that there's always more ground that could be covered. Or because of the Covid restrictions or my previous health-related limitations. Or, or, or.
  
  Plenty of answers, but, in the end, I have no idea which ones contribute the most. I know that there's a tendency to want a single, simple cause that explains everything about the effect, but effects are often a conglomeration of several contributing factors. So, in absence of wiser options, I'll fall back to persistence and process of elimination over time (if determining a cause is even necessary -- I suspect that it isn't), and I'll keep my mind optimistic that the process will get me closer to where I want to be, even if I never reach an imagined ultimate destination where I've finally run out of road.
  
  
• Continually being hit on the head with the irony in how much of what I have feels taken away by others insisting on what I "must" acquire instead. Or, more simply, I'm even more irritated than usual by the overused "everybody does/is/has/etc" being offered as a reason for me to do/be/have/etc. Throughout my life, I've made numerous decisions not to do/be/have numerous things (certain relationships, property, tools, territory, etc that others consider ubiquitous, mandatory, and desirable), as I find happiness in their absence, not their presence. One man's trash, everybody else's treasure.
  
  While unwanted intrusions into my material "needs" by others' values isn't even slightly new, my tolerance of it has been hitting new lows. To be clear, given recent popular controversies that I'd rather not mention, this lowered tolerance is about others invading my private choices, not about others encouraging public responsibility. My annoyance comes from the relentless expectation that I make choices that don't really benefit my life or anyone else's (with "everybody's doing it" as the only reason), not from health/lifestyle suggestions that have multiple (albeit debated) reasons behind them.
  
  And what's actually nagging at me is that I feel as if I'm being pressured to remove value from the few things in life that do matter to me and reassign that value to whatever cultural fad excites the supposed majority. Especially when there's more than enough value to go around. If I'm not presuming to tell others what they need (when I have no way of knowing what's right for them, specifically), I don't understand why I'm undeserving of reciprocal respect. To the best of my knowledge, what little I value isn't harming me or others. Not sure if this irritation relates directly or indirectly to OF (maybe a DRS-related suggestion?) or if this is just a pressure point that's aching more while under the increased stress of an OF run.
  
  
• Doing less "homework" before making decisions. Don't like this change much, as I'm reflexively reading it as increased carelessness and depleted work ethic, not fearlessness. And I have curiosity, passion, ambition, and several other motivators in my utility belt, not just fear, so reducing fear, unless it had been supporting mistake-aversion, needn't be all that demotivating on its own. Either way, adequate research has historically been how I've made more informed decisions and has, as far as I'm aware, reduced the negative impact of wonky interpretations and conclusion-jumping.
  
  Of course, the easy counter-argument against preparatory information-gathering, one which doesn't necessarily outweigh its benefits, is that so-called "informed" decisions may also be misinformed decisions. There can be a lot of difficulty in establishing the veracity of said information (beyond testing directly or indirectly, followed by success and failure), and the information's source may be incorrect, no matter how reputable or trustworthy I subjectively find them to be.
  
  It's (hopefully) safe to say that humans, even the most trustworthy of us, are fallible and may be likely to be wrong more often than we're right. As far as I can tell, we're frequently learning something new, re-learning what we thought we knew, or stubbornly refusing to learn or change what we think that we've learned already, often bragging about which one it is and "helpfully" trying to impart information to (read: foist our imperfect beliefs on) others that, in a more objective sense, isn't guaranteed to be helpful. To me, it's like saying, "This is what I'll eventually be wrong about in the future, but I'm definitely right about it today." That's why, even in my postings here, I try not to qualify things with more certainty than they've earned.
  
  But, to return to the counter-argument, more information can't easily be relied upon as being wholly true, wholly false, or a clearly-defined mix of the two, so being more informed doesn't necessarily increase accuracy as much as it increases perception of accuracy (or certainty of what isn't necessarily certain?). If the past few years have taught me anything, it's that people, both individually and collectively, appear to have an impressive capacity to blur the lines between facts themselves and their personal interpretations of (and conclusions about) those facts and what they supposedly mean. One blinding example of this seems to be when people cite sources, as they often do, to support conclusions not actually found within those sources, merely extrapolated (sometimes, very poorly) from their contents or, worse, from their title or abstract alone.
  
  Still, having more information ahead of a decision can improve the outcome, assuming that the person possesses more skill at critical thinking than at they do at demonstrating the Dunning-Kruger effect (a concept whose own supporting study has been debated as misinterpretation of the facts). In any case, doing more homework before making a decision can still confer benefit to a skilled critical thinker, even if it can also mislead an unpracticed one, and, whether I'm one or the other, increasingly skimming through the prep work doesn't really feel like a positive step. Even provisionally.
  

• Both v1 and v2 coincided more with clearing out fear-related excuses, beliefs, and other impediments, as well as taking more risks, than with clearing fearful behaviors, reactions, and responses. I make the distinction only because, to my surprise, there's apparently been a distinction there to make. Fears standing in the way of the proactive have become fewer, but fears provoking the reactive are either unchanged or possibly even worse.
  
• More on v2 than on v1, I've felt as if courage is an ever-decreasing option. To clarify, I'm defining "courage" as the willingness to fight fear in the face of fear while still experiencing the fear. Previously, I'd felt as if, on a per-fear basis, I'd had four options across a blurry spectrum: have no fear, remove fear, proceed despite fear, and surrender to fear. On OF, it's seemed as if options 1, 2, and 4 grew and option 3 shrank.
  
• In the past, I've achieved obstructed goals through circumvention of fear, but, more recently, I've noticed myself prioritizing the complete removal of the obstacle above achieving the original goal. I get that any permanent removal of the fear would prevent long-term future obstruction, but, in the near term, insisting on removing (not bypassing) the obstacle results in goals being deferred when they could be completed. Yeah, I could overlook a short-term hit as temporary growing pains, but 1) nothing about OF has been short-term, and 2) my goals' deadlines aren't always at my discretion.
  
• Been thinking about fears that may be supported by a "point of no return" and the mind/body's reliance on homeostasis. Been wondering if FOMO-like fears may partly derive from a need to preserve re-calibration, wanting to be able to right the tipping canoe before the point where gravity's made stabilizing it impossible without external intervention. As adaptive homeostasis, not as immutability, envy, disappointment avoidance, etc. To cherish the unguaranteed choice to pause, slow, readjust, or take a step back while still possible, before the choice's number of options reduces to 1 (or 0).
  
• On a bit of a learning kick lately, while also finding more creative inspiration. Making random technical advancements in my work, although they're so disconnected from each other that they're more distraction than progress. Curiosity (one of my stronger positive motivators) has increased, but, so far, it's been so disorganized and haphazard as to be of limited short-term value, even if the cumulative knowledge will eventually benefit me in the future.
  

(07-18-2021, 06:40 PM)Shannon Wrote: That is absolutely turbulence.

(07-18-2021, 06:40 PM)Shannon Wrote: The latest gen subs do need time to fizzle out.  A week is the absolute minimum, and if that's what you did, I'd say 2-3 is better for long term use of a single program.

But as the MHS dominates the remnants of OF it will smooth out.