Thinking about thinking

You are nervous before a presentation. That is one thing.

Then you notice you are nervous, and you are annoyed with yourself for being nervous. Still? After all this time? That is a second thing, sitting on top of the first.

The second thing is usually the heavier one. Nervousness before speaking to a room is ordinary and passes. Contempt for yourself for being nervous does not pass, because it has no natural end — and it adds a problem the first state did not have.

This layering is the idea L. Michael Hall named the Meta-States model, and whatever you call it, the observation holds: states apply to other states. You can be afraid of your anger, ashamed of your sadness, impatient with your own confusion. The top layer is almost always where the difficulty actually lives, and almost never where people look.

Why the top layer wins

Because it decides what happens next.

Fear of a presentation makes you prepare. Contempt for your own fear makes you hide it, which costs energy, which makes the presentation worse, which confirms the contempt. The first state is information. The second builds a loop.

The same shape appears everywhere once you see it:

• Grief, and impatience with yourself for still grieving.
• A mistake, and shame that makes it hard to look at the mistake.
• Uncertainty, and embarrassment about being uncertain, which makes you act decisively before you have decided anything.

In each case the lower state is workable and the upper one is what keeps it stuck.

Finding the upper layer

The question that gets at it is not "how do you feel?" but a small step sideways:

And what do you feel about feeling that?

It sounds like a trick the first time. It usually is not — most people answer it immediately, because the second reaction was already there and simply unnamed. Common answers: tired of it. Embarrassed. Angry that it still gets to me. Guilty, because other people have it worse.

That last one is worth pausing on, because it is so common it barely registers as a judgement.

What to do once you have found it

Less than you would think, and that is the point.

The upper layer often loses most of its force from being named accurately. Not resolved, not argued with — named. "I am not afraid of the meeting, I am embarrassed about being afraid of it" is a different sentence to live inside than "I am a mess about this meeting".

Where something more is useful, it is usually applying a different state deliberately to the same lower one. Curiosity about your own nervousness is not the same experience as contempt for it, and it costs nothing to try. But this is a working model, not a mechanism with a research base — see what the evidence says. Treat it as a way of looking, and judge it by whether it shows you something.

The limit, again

If the lower state is a response to being treated badly, the upper layer is not the problem and neither is the lower one. Someone anxious before every meeting with a manager who humiliates them in public is not experiencing a layering problem. They are experiencing a manager. Working on the reaction there would be doing the harm's job for it.