What is your default state?
Finding free will within the confines of neurochemical puppetry
In mindfulness practice, there’s a lot of focus on the mindful state — the optimal state of immersion in the present experience. There’s a lot of structure and theory around this state: methods to invoke it, deeper deconstructions of it. Yet, on the other side of this mindful state is a much less explored state of mind: one’s default state — the “going through the motions” mental state that we revert to for almost all of our waking lives. This is the you that mutters at bad drivers, scrolls absentmindedly through social media, eats without tasting. And seldom does one’s default state undergo a similar level of pedagogical scrutiny. This is not to say that meditation does not involve awareness of the default state — it does. But we have few tools to more systematically scrutinize what our default state is.
The state of the art is to simply try to catch oneself before exiting mindful state and falling into default state. And this, of course, is already quite helpful. My greatest advances in personal practice have been recognizing different default states when they happen, slowly pulling back the curtain on what brought me there, and learning to preemptively catch that signature before it manifests. But I’ve started trying to characterize this state as of late, and I suspect there’s some great value here for, not only is everyone’s default state different, but we also all have different default states depending on context. And failing to recognize that variability can make progress more difficult for some than others.
In particular, I’ve found that a useful framework for me is to identify three aspects of default state: context, mood, compulsion. I.e. what context am I in, what is my mood and the physiological signatures of it, and what is my desired default behavior? The following, for instance, summarizes my difficulty in staying present with my daughter.
Another example: in the evenings, I feel particularly prone to scrolling endlessly on my phone. And in this situation, I don’t [usually] get a proper, building, all-consuming, endocrine-dipped craving. Rather, the pull just seems to manifest as deep mental patterning — vices just flit across my consciousness as options. I can watch Netflix. I can scroll Youtube. I can open a dumb mobile game. And sometimes it doesn’t even manifest as an idea, but there’s a short circuit that directly goes to muscle memory. I’m on my phone, and — while my mind wanders — I’ve somehow already opened Instagram.
I’ve found this to be a useful instrument for reflection — a diagnostic when simply pulling myself back to mindfulness isn’t enough. In preparation for a particular context, this allows me to predict what my mood is going to be, why, and what I will be driven to do, which has helped me establish a level of proprioception against the standard sequence of events that I otherwise have historically not been able to observe. I think the reason this works is as follows:
Context is important. Some situations are simply harder to be mindful within. Recognizing this variability makes it easier to steel yourself against it when it comes. By analogy, trying to be mindful without recognition of this variance is like climbing a hill in the dark — you can’t anticipate where you’re going, so each step risks a fall.
Mood is a critically important undercurrent to recognize. It may sound obvious from a practical perspective, as common knowledge carries this wisdom: it’s harder to resist binge-eating when stressed. But from a mindfulness perspective, disentangling this from the hunger itself is clarifying, particularly when trying to execute some self-control.
All in all, I hope there’s some utility here for you. A final comment: breaking your default state down in this way must be quite an important part of the human experience, no? To learn to recognize what it is that our default state is pulling us toward, then to try to execute some agency against that? If free will exists, it must only be possible within this nexus of reasoning. Our consciousnesses have taken host in these arbitrary bodies with highly variable design. You can live a life where you are carried by the arbitrary patterns that it creates, or you can recognize what those are, and design around the constraints.
“To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.” - Socrates