Recording yourself works
10 mins solves my problems
Nearly every time I’ve recorded myself speaking — video or audio — I get to the crux of most of my problems. I’m somehow surprised not just that this happens, but that it only takes around 10 minutes to get there. I might do this for a couple of days and then will stop for 6 months to a year. Things will then get bad enough again that I’ll grasp at straws and finally decide to record myself talking to myself intensely, and I will just get better again. This loop has been happening for more than 14 years.
It’s mind-boggling.
Back in the day, my mum would see me do this and tell me to stop immediately, saying that I looked insane. Never mind that I’d occasionally see some of my friends do it, sometimes even my teachers. Her telling me this somehow stuck around, and once I moved back to the UK I think it felt weirder somehow to do this.
In hindsight, this probably cost me so many potential good outcomes. I’m writing this post to serve as a public reminder to myself.
The effect feels similar to therapy. With therapy, you have the benefit of an impartial third party asking good probing questions to get to the bottom of whatever issues you have, but at the cost of it sometimes not being obvious to the third party what direction you actually want to take the conversation in. With yourself, direction setting becomes natural. It feels like a better form of meditation, this gentle reflective environment I’m giving myself to ponder the questions or issues that have been bothering me. To pull out threads from my own brain to give more CoT time and approach the topic anew.
For so many good but tough decisions I’ve made in my life regarding relationships, work, stress, research, anything, it has always helped. I can’t emphasize enough how useful this has been. So why do I always stop using it? It’s literally just an enhanced Feynman method.
I recommend video if at all possible, but audio is also good. There’s something about seeing myself on the screen — a true mirror both while recording and afterwards — that just lends it this authenticity, a literal reflection. My hand movements and — hell, sometimes even a whiteboard — help with elaboration both for myself in the moment and for my future self, even if that future self is somewhat unlikely to open the video again, as it does feel sometimes cringey. I do want to also stop feeling that way, and sometimes at various points in my life it does work.
From there, I upload to YouTube on private (Google Photos tends to get extremely crowded since it doesn’t really draw distinctions between folders on device) and I can watch from there. You can also of course create your own S3 bucket etc. but I recommend not overengineering.
You can just record yourself and solve your problems. You can just do things.
[I’ll bring in sources at some point, please bear with :3]