Make it a happiness practice to safely test out and play with negative emotions like anguish, grief, or terror, as human emotional life is complicated and often yields more pleasure than expected from seemingly yucky sensations.
Understand that your A-leaf (automatic, affective, ancient) system responds emotionally to sensory input regardless of your rational beliefs, allowing you to experience powerful emotions from pretend situations without real-world consequences.
Experience negative emotions and events through simulations like movies, books, video games, or imaginative play, allowing you to gain emotional benefits without real-life risk or danger.
Engage in chosen anguish or intense sensations to achieve mindfulness, as these experiences are cognitively all-consuming and can quiet a ‘hamster wheel brain’ by focusing attention on a single, strong sensation.
Seek out brief moments of anguish or fear to create a pleasing contrast effect, making your normal, baseline state feel more enjoyable and like ‘absolute heaven’ by comparison.
Push through fear and pain to experience a ‘mind-over-matter hit of pride,’ which comes from making it through something awful and can contribute to a feeling of being badass.
Engage in ‘benign masochism’ by exposing yourself to harmless stimuli that mimic real physical ordeals, allowing your brain to get psychological benefits without actual bodily harm.
Engage in imaginative play, especially with negative scenarios, as a form of planning, preparation, and practice for future real-world challenges, similar to how flight simulators prepare pilots for trouble.
When engaging in pain on purpose, ensure you can consent to the experience and have the ability to opt into it and opt out, as this is a necessary factor for any sensation to feel good.
When exploring benign masochism or chosen pain, avoid experiences that are too painfully intense or genuinely dangerous to prevent negative outcomes like severe physical discomfort or harm.
Leverage the control offered by fictional experiences; if a negative emotion becomes too intense (e.g., a sad novel or scary film), you can stop immediately, unlike real-life painful experiences.
Use reviews, ratings, and word-of-mouth to understand the intensity and content of fictional negative experiences (e.g., horror movies), allowing you to choose experiences that match your tolerance for gore or fear.
To maximize the emotional impact of a simulated negative experience, remove clues that differentiate between automatic response and reality, creating a more immersive and ‘unbelievably scary’ situation for thrill-seekers.
To enhance the ‘benign masochism’ benefits of fear, create immersive experiences that activate multiple senses, such as watching a shark movie while floating in a dark pool, to fully engage the A-leaf track.
If you are sensitive to imaginative emotions, moderate the intensity of negative experiences (e.g., horror movies) by keeping lights on or making the screen small, allowing you to indulge your A-leaf system while your belief system provides a counter-balance.