Nexus State Theory

Four Principles

Nexus State Theory has four central principles:

  1. You can only control yourself – and you can’t always control yourself, either.
  2. Self-control comes from entering a nexus state, which is a state in which we expect that effort will lead to net positive pleasure. To enter a nexus state, we must teach ourselves that effort leads to pleasure.
  3. Net positive pleasure often comes from Default Human Range (DHR) states, which can be accessed via different approaches. Everyone has slightly different DHR states.  (I will call the approaches Argumentation, Mystery, Awareness of Emotion, Awareness of Body, and others).
  4. Most of your waking hours are spent being yourself, but it’s important to be able to relate to others. Dyads (pairs of people) also have a kind of nexus state.

The first principle suggests that you should have an effort timing strategy: you should focus first on that which you can control.

The second principle is partly about what we’ve called denarrativization and renarrativization: the way you get into a nexus state is by letting go of limiting narratives that suggest effort won’t be rewarded – and to reward ourselves with DHR states in order to illustrate the reality of rewards. Of course, a narrative that a specific reward is unrealistic in a given context may be accurate. If I play a slot machine, it’s reasonable to have a narrative that there will likely be no reward. However, we want to let go of generalized no-reward narratives.

The third principle suggests that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to DHR states. For some people, Reason is helpful. For others, Reason is just another Learned Layer (LL) narrative that gets in the way.

The fourth principle suggests that it’s useful to be good at both being on your own and being with others. Each of these skills is sufficiently hard that whole books have been devoted to them, and it’s easy to think that self control is primarily about autonomy or primarily about leaning on others. But it’s both.

Vocabulary

  • Letting go: A synonym of denarratizing. In a particular moment, letting go of a narrative means giving up unhelpful mental and emotional baggage which often suggests that effort won’t be rewarded.

Next page: States