Hello, and welcome to part two of our discussion of psychology.
In this episode, we’ll be talking about refactoring. Refactoring is the process of redefining aspects of your life based on a specific catalyst, often such as a brush up with death, a break up, or unemployment.
The two things that people are most afraid of are chaos and uncertainty. Well, really one thing, as our fear of uncertainty is caused by the probability of chaos. When chaos and uncertainty persists, we must attempt to establish order by reframing our approach to life to better fit the new chaotic reality. This is what refactoring is.
To give an example, let’s say that you go through a bad breakup. After this catalyst, you realize that your life is much more chaotic than you once thought. Your refactoring approach could be either poor quality or high quality. As part of the example, you could respond to the breakup by avoiding new people as a way of making sure the chaos never happens to you again. This would be poor quality, as you’re ignoring a large chunk of activity in which most parts are completely unrelated to the chaos itself. A better, higher quality refactoring might be to look at the relationship holistically, find what caused the chaos (i.e. the breakup), and better define your life to avoid that specific scenario. This is, of course, a lot harder than just avoiding the problem all together — but it’s better for long-term psychological health.
One way to train high quality refactoring without actually being hurt by chaos is by using negative visualization. Negative visualization involves visualizing highly chaotic events such as a breakup or lost loved one, and acting to understand how you would react in the given scenario. This allows you to prepare for when these things might really happen (they will), and make sure that you adapt much more healthily to the change.
And that’s a quick roundup of refactoring. For part 3 of 5 to our psychology series, will be talking about the theory behind social games. See you next week!
Apalla 