Week 6 Crit: How you stopped

The other half of the reveal. The funny, undignified and occasionally brilliant things that actually got you out of a spiral, collected into something the room can steal from.

29 March 2027

Before the session#

The reveal collected the spirals. This one collects the exits.

Come with something that actually stopped one. Not the thing you think should work, and not something you read. The real one. Setting a two-minute timer. Saying it out loud in a stupid voice. Texting the person and finding out. Your housemate saying “just send it” in a tone that ended the conversation. Standing up. Going to sleep. Deciding to be wrong on purpose.

They are usually undignified. That is the whole reason this session exists as a session and not a reading list. The effective ones do not survive being written down seriously, so they mostly go unshared.

In the session#

Round one, quick. Everyone gives theirs in a sentence or two. What happened, what you did, whether it worked. No analysis yet, and no defending it. “I don’t know why that worked” is a complete answer. You can pass without giving a reason.

Round two. We sort them on the board and look for the shapes. Some rough categories to start from, which you should argue with.

• Time-boxing. A limit imposed from outside the thinking
• Making it external. Saying it aloud, writing it, telling a person
• Interrupting the body. Moving, cold water, leaving the room
• Ending the uncertainty. Just asking, just sending, just finding out
• Making it ridiculous. The stupid voice, the deliberately absurd worst-case, naming the spiral out loud

Round three. Pair up, and each of you picks one technique from someone else’s list to actually try before the next crit. Not the one you liked best. The one you would never have thought of.

The bit worth noticing#

Several of these will be versions of the defusion stem from week 1, “I’m having the thought that…”, arrived at independently and phrased much better. That is a good sign about both the technique and the room. Where the group has reinvented something with a name, we will name it afterwards, which is the order this course does things in.

Also worth noticing is how many of these are ways of ending uncertainty rather than ways of thinking better. Whether that is a cheat or the actual answer is the argument to have with the time remaining.

Afterwards#

Report back next crit on the technique you borrowed, in one sentence, including if it did nothing. A technique that failed on you is more useful to the room than a third person confirming that timers work.