Just as a computer must use a bootloader, a program that runs before anything else and loads the rest of the system, we too must use a similar process if we want to increase our well-being. A bootloader is small and unglamorous, performing a core job: loading your operating system into memory. Without this, nothing on your computer could run; it is quite literally a prerequisite for use. I’d like to make the argument that non-reactivity plays a similar role when trying to increase our well-being: meditation, therapy, relationships, learning, and creativity cannot be run without it.
(Here, non-reactivity is the ability to feel something fully without automatically turning attention or awareness away from it, and without tensing muscles)
Almost all practices dealing with trying to increase our well-being and valence, such as meditation or therapy, beg for us to sit with something uncomfortable. Building muscle quite literally does this: without enough strain, the muscle has no signal to adapt. This has to do with how suffering mechanistically works, but for now I will bypass that technical explanation.
Essentially, non-reactivity is what needs to run, just like a bootloader in a computer, in the first moments sensations of uncomfortableness show up in order for us to do anything related to increasing well-being. Just as a system with a broken bootloader never gets past startup, we too will never get past moments or patterns of suffering without the skill of non-reactivity. If we decide to contract and tense when pain hits right before the practical move would have loaded, just as the operating system and apps would load, we have failed to load the necessary substrate. Because of this, we load the same pattern over and over again, just as an operating system might continually load with a failed bootloader, until we decide to muster up the needed courage to enact the skill of non-reactivity. This is why people try so many wellness habits and none of them stick: they are trying to run away from sensations, and in doing so, they are failing to load what is needed in the first place. The practices themselves were fine, but the boot kept failing. Exercise is still a harmful habit if its purpose is to mechanistically supply a behavior that allows us to turn away from sensations, making the bootloader fail to run.
Just as a bootloader lives below the OS in firmware, so too does non-reactivity live in the body and mind as both a physical and phenomenological move. You cannot simply install the skill by reading or changing your mind; the bootloader becomes more efficient through actual practice. Downloading a better app does not fix the problem if the bootloader is the thing failing.
There exists a bootstrapping problem here: if one does not possess the skill of non-reactivity, how can we increase well-being, which in turn helps increase non-reactivity? We can start by booting in “safe mode”: a minimal, controlled environment where it is safe if it fails. Imagine trying to correct a bootloader in an environment where apps could be potentially corrupted over and over again; that is typically how we try to develop non-reactivity, which does more harm than good. There are many “safe modes” one can practice in, but my favorite is cold showers. The cold is predictable and safe, and the contraction/physical tension is obvious. Just doing one thirty-second run of expanding muscles and awareness while in the cold is enough to get started. Once your capacity here develops in safe mode, you can move on to transferring the “fixes” to more hostile environments, like when dealing with difficult people. This, of course, takes practice and lots of repetition (see any deliberate practice study), so do not expect your bootloader to be incredibly efficient at first.
As we develop our non-reactivity skills, the bootloader can start running across more situations, allowing for more software to come online reliably. Calm makes more careful attention possible, thereby allowing our sensory clarity skills to increase, for example. You build your way up through iterative practice, just as you do with any other skill.