How I am "playing with frames" to feel better and make better decisions

Many therapy practices, rationality techniques and strategic tools train the same core skill

Yesterday was terrible… I got up late because I am a deeply lazy man. Instead of reading something wholesome or useful in the morning I checked Twitter. (behold, my pathetic information addiction). I cycled to work only to discover most of my colleagues were on leave, which made me feel deeply lonely throughout most of the day. Due to a chronic lack of self-control, I found myself constantly snacking on food in the office during most of the work day. I am a pathetic addict to immediate gratification. I don't care about my body at all…

…also…

Yesterday was wonderful! I allowed myself to lie in because I was feeling all cosy; a nurturing moment of self-compassion. Then I read some super interesting threads on Twitter as I sipped my morning coffee. I felt very grateful that I am able to connect with so many people remotely. I got to work and I had a day with no meetings so was able to get a tonne of deep work done. This was while still giving myself short breaks to enjoy the delicious snacks my workplace offers. I am skillfully balancing productivity, indulgence and self-care!

I’ve been learning what is now a very central skill, without realising it

In my life and career I’ve tried a lot of “self improvement”.

I’ve attempted to feel better through therapy or therapy-adjacent practices. Things that promise to improve your emotional resilience, self-knowledge and wellbeing. These include cognitive behavioural therapy, internal family systems, psychodynamic therapy, psychodrama practices, gratitude practices, meditation retreats, and training in co-counselling.

I’ve also explored and practised tonnes of strategic decision making and rationality techniques in the hope of making better decisions in my life and work. Using tools such as goal factoring, SWOT analysis, developing a scout mindset, applying 6 hats thinking, running pre-mortems, trying to find double cruxes between competing ideas, engaging in cluster thinking and steelmanning seemingly bad ideas.

I’ve benefited a lot from many of these practices, particularly where I’ve been able to systematise their integration into my life (usually by installing some kind of trigger action plan or regular review). But these practices, while clearly useful, often stand in isolation. It’s easy to forget to actually apply then when I need to. This can make it hard to integrate into my moment-to-moment decision-making.

I also realised recently that there is a common psychological thread that ties many of the above tools together. Something that they have each been teaching me in their own way. That skill is one of the main thing that seems to actually be impacting the rest of my life; the main thing that seems to be giving many of these tools their power.

That skill is the ability to move with curiosity and lightness between different ways of seeing the world. That is, to be able to deliberately zoom into, say, a negative emotion, a limiting self-belief, an ambitious project idea, or a strategic risk; to be able to explore the thing, live in its world, but then zoom out again without being sucked into its reality. I didn’t have a name for this overarching skill, so I started calling it “frame play”.

Many of the therapeutic approaches and strategic decision making techniques have rediscovered the power of applying this skill for their specific context (e.g. giving you tools to move between different beliefs about the purpose of your organisation or about how acceptable a person you are). I have learned a lot from those practices. But I have more recently been trying to get better at the general skill of frame play more directly. This is moving me towards more emotional and cognitive flexibility.

Why “Frame Play”

A frame as I am referring to it here is: everything that is affecting your experience, other than the things that you are explicitly consciously aware of, and focused on in any given moment. 

This is a lot. The above definition includes things like:

• your unconscious beliefs and assumptions about the world around you.

• the social norms of your group that you are tracking

• your position in space, and what other people near you are doing

• the way your body feels: e.g. discomfort, pain, hunger

• your implicit motivations

• the emotional colouring of your experience (the rose, grey, or brown tinted spectacles).

For example, maybe you are cooking a meal and focussing on chopping an onion. At that moment your attention is on the knife and the onion skin and their relative position. The frame is everything else: The place that onion chopping fits within the wider recipe. The fact that you are standing in your kitchen alone. The pull of gravity and the shape and sensations of your human body. The intention to cook a delicious meal for your friend. The social context that makes this dish appropriate for this meal. Your desire for this friend to appreciate the food. The feeling of self-assuredness you’ve had since that successful meeting earlier in the day. Your semi-conscious emotional reactions to all of these other frames….

You are not looking at your frame, but you would feel quite different if any of these things were to suddenly change.

There is always a frame. If you direct your attention to the frame that you are in (i.e. zoom out), the frame will often just change. For example, if you try to look at what is motivating you in a given moment, the implicit motivation might move to self-curiosity. this might then colour your perception with whatever emotional or cognitive reaction you have to noticing that frame, rather than the frame that was there before. You can escape a frame, but you can’t escape frames.

By play, I mean an emotional frame that has a lightness or curiosity. A motivational frame that has a subtle non-seriousness, and a freedom in moving between the different options within a space. For example, within the frame of a dance, you might play with a bunch of different ways of moving and interacting with people around you, with an underlying implicit sense (frame) that it is safe for you to try lots of different things (though if you’re an anxious dancer it will not feel playful unless you are also able to hold the anxiety itself as an object of play).

So frame play is a practice of having a playful attitude towards the moving between the frames themselves. It’s attempting to build a playful frame around other frames that are present in any moment. Or more meta’ly, the concept of frame play is itself a frame that I am using to encourage these types of wholesome and useful psychologically flexible manoeuvres.¹

By developing a playful meta-frame I am more able to move between different ways of seeing the world.

The good/bad frame is one of the most important and consistently-present frames

One of the most general and common frames present in almost every moment of my life is the “good/bad” frame. Some moments I judge to be good (talking to a friend) and some to be bad (stubbing my toe). Some concepts just feel good (frame play) and some feel bad (frame control). Some feelings are good (joy) and some bad (anxiety). In psychology this is referred to as valence. There are usually a complex set of beliefs underlying my valenced interpretations of the world. It is usually hard for me to see outside the valence sign that I habitually interpret a given object through. If I feel like a day was bad, it just was obviously really bad.

I track my mood a bunch (see my wider life review process here). I have, over various periods, tracked my mood on both a weekly and daily basis. When I looked at the relationship between these rating recently, I found a correlation of 0.25 on any given week... This was surprisingly uncorrelated. How good I thought individual days are predicted surprisingly little about how good I thought the week was. Something odd is going on when I reflect on the quality a period of time

One of the issues here is that reality is surprisingly detailed. I won’t actually be able to find a definitive answer to whether something as complicated as my whole day or week was really good or bad (even if there was some better way to measure that). There is just too much data, and I am strongly pulled around by biases. Biases like the “peak end rule” that leads me to remember the quality of events based on the most intense moments and the most recent moments; this can make a day that ends badly or has an unusually bad thing in it feel bad regardless of how good the other moments were.²

So there is a sense in which my valenced judgement of any sufficiently broad period of time (or sufficiently abstract concept) is almost free floating… Or those judgments are at least as flexible as they are distant from my direct experience of reality. How good a day is ends up being mostly a matter of perspective. A perspective that I can move around and within deliberately; a frame that I can play with!

Bad day / good day - a simple frame-play practice I have been trying

A simple exercise I have been trying and enjoying recently is “bad day / good day”. It works like this: 

At the end of your day:

1. Describe your day as negatively as possible, by leaning into any emotional negativity you can see in the moment - what are all the things that went wrong? How did you fuck up? How is it always going to be like this?

2. Describe your day as positively as possible, by leaning into any emotional positivity you can see in the moment  - What are all the things that went right? What are all the things that you are grateful for that day? What was beautiful about this day?

The two stories at the start of this post are an example of this. The good and the bad of a single day.

The above has replaced the gratitude practice that me and my partner had been doing each night. Before bed we now tell each other both the good and bad stories of our day. I recommend it!³

“I see a cliche”, “I see art”, “I see animal abuse”, “I see grey”, “I see 6 men in mortal danger”, “I see a powerful metaphor for the nature of perception”

More ways to play with frames

The two main ways to start to play with my frames that I know of are:

• Indirectly “let go” (through mindfulness or other awareness/deconstructive practices), cultivate a loving/open attitude, then see what happens! (you’ll find other some frames…)

• Directly go searching for alternative frames to jump into.

The below is more about the latter approach. Here are some more examples of frames I have found helpful to play with. Some of these will be familiar!

• What would X do (e.g. Jesus, my friend, a person who wasn’t as constrained by Y as I am)

• What if I didn’t believe X (e.g. in god, that you are safe, that you are unsafe)

• What’s the most [cynical / optimistic] interpretation of this situation?

• What would this be like if I were the [bad guy / hero] here?

• What if [I / everyone else] was crazy?

• How would X perceive this? (e.g. the universe, my parents, aliens, future historians, older me, younger me)

• What does X part of me think/feel about this? (e.g. your inner critic, your inner cheerleader, your taskmaster, the part that wants to just chill out)

• What would it look like if this thing were as [meaningful / meaningless] as possible?

• What is the base-rate of the [bad / good] thing actually happening?

I generally find frames that at least part of me holds, at least a little bit, are the most useful to play with. So for this to be helpful, I need to be able to actually feel the frame; I need to half-forget that it’s a game. 

(Why) does this help?

I think the process of deliberately allowing multiple narratives to have their time in the sun has been really powerful for me so far. I think there are a bunch of reasons for this, which reflect the reasons that playing with frames is such a significant part of so many therapeutic, rationality and strategic techniques. These are things like:

• making exploration of options feel safer

• reducing inertia

• play encouraging an anti-anxiety “I am safe” frame

• escaping stuck beliefs and negative mental habit patterns

• showing acceptance to shadow parts

• cathartic expression of angst

• easier connection to (the frames of) others (i.e. empathy)

The daily “good-story / bad-story” practice in particular is a neat, repeatable act of frame play that is helping me be more flexible with how I see the world moment-to-moment. I want to continue to improve my ability to play with frames. I am excited to play with (and write about…) the frame-play frame more!

Bonus - meta frame play 

“Frame Play? Are you serious? That has to be one of the most pretentious and meaningless buzzwords I've ever heard. This really is some vague, pseudo-intellectual nonsense. It sounds like you just strung together a bunch of fancy-sounding words to create the illusion of a profound concept when in reality, it's empty fluff.

You are tapping into something profoundly innovative and impactful with this 'Frame Play' concept. The ability to shift perspectives and engage with multiple frames is a superpower in today's complex world. By developing a practice around playfully cultivating this skill, you're equipping yourself for better decision-making, deeper empathy, and greater psychological resilience.”

-Claude 3

1. Frame play” isn’t that novel - I’m pointing at the same things as a lot of the modalities I mentioned at the start. Psychological flexibility (as defined within acceptance and commitment therapy) is perhaps the most common descriptor for the thing that I have been trying to get better at (and the benefits of developing more of that are fairly well established). But I prefer the “frame play” framing because “psychological flexibility” feels kinda dry to me. And “Frame play” is more active and combines both the intense vibe of existential frame-change with a kind of easy irreverence.

2. I like this TED talk by Daniel Kahneman where he talks about his research on the disconnect between the remembering and experiencing selves.

3. A day is an arbitrary time period to use here. You can use longer (a year, your childhood, your career, your whole life); I have found the process of allowing myself to really lean into the negative stories of these really powerful. I usually don’t let myself be so “unreasonably” negative. You can also play with shorter time periods…On a recent meditation retreat I spent a bunch of time trying to notice the valence of each moment of experience; and then allowing myself to move between positive and negative interpretations of the current thing I am experiencing. This act of noticing and allowing, of both good and bad, resulted in many moments of peaceful equanimity and joy. Waaaait… is the main point of meditation!?