Three Ways to Increase Your Agency

From cognitive science to psychedelic research

A cup rests on a table. You pick it up. You put it down in a slightly different place. A seemingly pointless action, but one suffused with magic.

Our ability to change the world around us, whether it’s the position of a mug or a whole ecosystem, is fundamental to our humanity.

It’s also fundamental to our cognition. 4E cognitive science theorises that how you think, feel and move through the world is inextricable from your embodiment, and the way you exercise your agency, or your capacity to impact the world around you. Everything you do changes your environment in big or small ways, and in turn your environment changes you.

But agency is also where we get most tangled. Faced with so many choices in life, how should we act? How do we know that the choice we’re making is going to lead us where we want to go? Often, we don’t. Sometimes we make choices that restrict our agency, sometimes we make choices that open up new possibilities.

The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen argues in his book Games: Agency as Art that we face so many demands on our agency that we’ve created a whole art form to manage it. Games, according to Nguyen, are our way of exploring different kinds of agency, usually by restraining them. Instead of all the demands of work, life and love, you get to be a squat Italian plumber for a few hours and focus your attention on killing turtles.

But there is another way to approach the impossible demands the world puts on our agency: increase your capacity to act wisely and decisively. Learn ever-deeper levels of choice and attunement with the world.

When I look back at my own life, I can see that most of the practices and frameworks I’ve been drawn to learning are, at their core, about increasing my agency. Learning how to wield it, and how to respond to it in others.

As I explored in my book The Bigger Picture, DMT experiences are notable in that you enter a profoundly altered state, and possibly another dimension, all while retaining your agency. When we learn how to exercise new types of agency in these altered states, we can then adapt those skills to other domains in our lives.

This, for me, is at the heart of what it means to develop the skills we need to imagine a new world. Altered states can come through anything that takes us out of our comfort zone and breaks the ‘frame’ we’ve been using to look at reality, and they are deeply interwoven with our agency.

I’m kicking off our course New Ways of Knowing tomorrow with a session around agency, so wanted to share three key agency-building skills that you can use whether or not you’re joining.

Focus

The best way to strengthen our agency is to learn how not to lose it. To do that, we need to develop focus. If we can’t choose where to focus our attention, our environment will choose for us. Social media, sirens, the weather. People, places, things. Everything is calling for our attention all the time, and it’s up to us to choose where to place it.

The simplest way I’ve found to train this skill cognitively is through concentration meditation. There are many kinds, but I suggest starting with candle-gazing. It’s what it sounds like. Sit opposite a candle and focus your attention on the flickering flame. As you focus, you will become distracted. Notice this, and focus again. No story. No mindfulness fluff. Just develop the skill of losing focus and regaining it for ten minutes. Then twenty. Then thirty…

It’s important to note that this is a different capacity than mindfulness, where you pay attention to your experience without reacting to it. This is also a fundamental skill in expanding our agency.

What happens when we accept the world as it is with no struggle, and no story? We see it more fully. And when we can see it more fully, we can make better decisions.

Focus is a key facet of mindfulness, but the skills are different and could be the subject of many more pieces. But while we’re here, if you’ve tried mindfulness meditation but struggled with distraction, here’s a trick that works for me every time. When a thought or feeling arises like “I need to stop meditating and write that email,” or “I don’t have time for this” just say yes.

“Yes absolutely, I’m going to stop meditating right now.” Then, don’t move. Override your mind with your body. Your mind is placated, your body is in control and doesn’t move. This kind of somatic override is another way to increase your agency.

Pain-Flipping

Pain is inescapable. Avoiding it often leads to a trade-off in agency, so it’s far better not to bother. You can’t anyway, and trying to isn’t worth the cost.

Pain and suffering are not the same thing. Suffering is a story built around pain, and is not inevitable.

What you resist persists, what you accept transforms. This is, in my view, the main lesson of psychedelic experiences. As psychedelic researcher Max Wolff has theorised, there may be a cognitive behavioural element at the heart of this. In day-to-day life, we can avoid our pain just enough, so that it’s on the whole less painful to ignore it than to face the truth of its existence. We can numb it out, drink it away, work through it.

When we take psychedelics, or have a life crisis, or a deep revelation, the dynamic can flip. Suddenly, it’s more painful to avoid the pain than to face it. Normally, the truth is more painful than the lie. In this new state, the lie becomes more painful than the truth. This is why psychedelics heal. I am convinced, after years of research, personal journeys and guiding dozens of people through their own trips, that when you really boil it down this is what it’s about. Deep, painful acceptance turns into freedom and agency.

If this is true, there is no reason not to face your pain right now. To face it as often as you can. Without hesitation. When we do, we expand our agency, build confidence and save ourselves a lot of time. As the great sage Bruce Banner taught in Avengers, owning what’s inside us can also help us self-regulate and process our shadows

Cognitive Flexibility

One of the ways we lose agency is by getting stuck in narrow thinking, narrow hopes, and narrow dreams. Dead-end jobs, broken relationships, tangled traumas. As I explored in The Truth About Trauma a few years ago, trauma researcher George Bonanno cites cognitive flexibility as the single most important indicator on whether people are able to overcome psychological hardship.

In my experience, it’s also a reliable indicator of our level of agency. That didn’t work? Try something else. Don’t like who you are? Evolve. Don’t like where that mug is sitting? Move it. Cognitive flexibility is also what helps us to bring multiple perspectives into our thinking and relating. To challenge our own projections and cognitive biases and open up to new possibilities.

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Learn these skills and many, many more on our 8 week online course New Ways of Knowing, featuring an incredible faculty and a global cohort exploring the skills we need to build a new reality.

We want to get remaining people signed up today so we can finish building the small inquiry groups (pods) tomorrow, so if you’ve been considering joining us, you can get 15% off with the code Agency (case sensitive) at checkout if you book before midnight tonight (13 Jan) UK time.