Sometimes you want to add pepper or cinnamon to food, because your senses tell you that pepper will go really well with it. But usually when you get this hunch, it is because the chef already added just the perfect amount of pepper or cinnamon, but just enough to fly below your cognitive perception.
Once you reach for the pepper or cinnamon, you might be told: "But I already added that". Usually it's enough, but sometimes adding more makes it better - not because it actually needed more, but because you did something and you want to believe that you made it better.
Sometimes someone has a breakdown about something, right the moment when the thing that triggered it, was resolved.
When looking for psychological terms to describe this notion of "wanting to do something" or "reacting to something" post factum, and fell short, the above term popped into my head.
Mimetic Lagovershoot: the urge to act that arises after the need to act has passed.
There is a concept of "postdiction" - perception after the fact, where what you perceive is shaped by information that only arrived later which you then integrate with what you felt - "late integration", but it doesn't pin down the notion of agency that usually accompanies this.
What I'm trying to isolate is the action impulse: the feeling that I need to do something, even when the situation might no longer require it.
We could probably further discriminate between the above two instances: call the first "sensory mimetic lagovershoot" and the second "emotional mimetic lagovershoot". The latter term I feel pins it down better than a "delayed stress response", because it also has that urge of "needing to do something" when it is technically not necessary.
Yet, sometimes we need to do this, to feel validated - as if we need to act before our feelings can catch up with our thoughts. According to psychology research, there are also cases where you hold things together until the problem is resolved, and then your system crashes when safety returns. But I would move that emotional mimetic lagovershoot is more subtle, or perhaps shorter lived.
Sure, there's an interpersonal timing aspect to both - tastes differ,
and can be synchronised, and emotional timings may differ, but could
also be synchronised, so maybe this is just a very short feedback loop
that spans seconds, or maybe a minute or two at most.
The counterpart to this might be self sabotage, which is like a mirror image of it:
When you get to the top of something
Do you get that feeling?
Do you get that high?
When you get to the top of something
Do you get there, you want to jump right off?
- Heather Nova - Frontier
These lyrics reminded me of how I would often go 99% of the way, only to shoot my self in the foot or spite myself and cancel the whole project at the last minute, even though I'd already done the (sometimes only conceptually) hardest part. Mimetic lagovershoot is tangentially related, but definitely not self sabotage.
Self sabotage might be driven by a bunch of factors, eg. fear of success, fear of failure, wanting to prove only to yourself that you could if you wanted to - but it's also closely related is "approach avoidance conflict" which is where you might want some part of the process or outcome, but you also
want to avoid the result. eg. commitment, visibility,
responsibility.
So, what do you do with "mimetic lagovershoot" once you recognize it?
Perhaps you can tune in better to reality - enjoy higher appreciation for what is, greater presence, less need to respond or react or intervene.
