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How to Be More Focused and Enthusiastic, Part VI: Pairing Pleasure With Goals

States of mind

This is the sixth in a series of articles that strive to answer the question “How can I get myself to work harder toward a goal?” Today’s article offers a simple tactic for becoming more enthusiastic about an immediate task within a few minutes.

We don’t always picture the future the same way, and the way we choose to imagine the future has a profound effect on the steps we take to get to it.

If you work a full-time job, for instance, here’s an easy experiment: think about the most annoying, tedious, or especially frightening things you can bring to mind about your job. Really spend a few moments reminding yourself about the awful stuff. Give yourself enough time for your brain chemistry to catch up with your thoughts.

Now imagine going to work tomorrow. What’s your initial reaction? Enthusiasm? Eagerness? I’m guessing not.

Now think about the best things about your job: people you enjoy, problems you enjoy solving, social opportunities, things you learn there, even the paycheck you bring home. Really imagine yourself in a job-related situation that you love (receiving pats on the back, solving a difficult problem, spending time with someone you like, cashing your paycheck), and again give your brain chemistry a minute or two to catch up with your thoughts. Now, once again, imagine going to work tomorrow. Better?

The effect of feeling better about a future event because of our current state of mind is called “mood congruity,” and I’ve talked about it in a few previous articles (for instance, “Everything Sucks. Reboot? Y/N“). Mood congruity combines with a common sense understanding of what attracts and repels us to provide a powerful tool for self-motivation: pairing pleasurable thoughts with goals.

Just as focusing on the most positive things about a job makes it easier to get up and go to work, focusing on the most positive things about a task makes it easier to do that task. It seems fairly obvious when we reflect on it: if I think about writing and imagine myself at a party celebrating the launch of my new book, I’m likely to be happier and more enthusiastic about the writing than if I picture receiving a raft of rejection letters. If we’re honest with ourselves, we have to admit that bad outcomes are possible, and that even if everything comes out well in the end, we may have to go through some things we don’t enjoy before we get there. However, if we’ve resolved to take on a particular task, it doesn’t really matter whether or not there might be some unpleasantness down the road: it only matters how we feel about the task now, and whether or not we’ll be able to step up and get things done. For those purposes, enjoying our imagined future–or aspects of what we’re just about to do–will be a much more powerful motivational tool than brooding over possible problems. While brooding over possible problems has a purpose–anticipating and preventing difficulties–its purpose is not motivation, so when it’s motivation we need, pleasure is an easy place to find it.

Photo by TangoPango (Kimberly Brown-Azzarello)

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What’s Drawing You Forward?

States of mind

Being motivated generally means being drawn toward something. Even running away from a ravenous smilodon is motivated in a way by a desperate desire to keep on living (though when we get down to the reptile brain like that–eating, sleeping, procreating–the rules are a little different, and a little more fundamental, than when we’re trying to motivate ourselves to complete a term paper or clean out the garage).

The question is, what are you being drawn toward? You don’t necessarily need an end goal, and in fact most kinds of personal improvement have to do with acquiring habits you’ll want to keep for the future, habits you’ll want to keep for a lifetime rather than just use to get to a finish line. The best way to complete one novel is to become the kind of person who writes a lot; the best way to lose weight and stay fit is to become the kind of person who eats well and loves to exercise; and so on.

So we’re not looking for some kind of end state or finish line: instead, we’re looking for a vision of the future, some point along the line when you’ve accomplished some of the things you would most like to accomplish. What does that vision look like?

The reason this vision for the future is important is because we tend to align ourselves with imagined situations, an effect called “mood congruity.” If I vividly imagine a cold, drizzly, depressing day, I’ll tend to feel more depressed. If I vividly imagine a ravenous smilodon, I’ll tend to feel afraid. And if I picture myself in a house that is perfectly organized, I’ll tend to get excited about organizing my house. Our mental imagery affects our current mood and even our desires. That’s why thinking about playing video games instead of studying is a bad way to prevent yourself from playing video games instead of studying: the more we picture something, the more we tend to make choices that are affected by the image.

One last note about drawing ourselves forward: while visions of a good future can help make us enthusiastic about making good choices in the present, the future in question doesn’t have to be a distant one. For instance, if I want to clean the garage, it can be very effective to imagine myself just a couple of hours in the future with a small part of the garage completely taken care of, even if the garage as a whole is going to take me weeks to sort out. Or I might imagine what it will be like to show my spouse that newly-clean corner of the garage, or to think about what I’ll do in a couple of weeks with the money I make selling unneeded things I dig out of the garage on Craigslist. In fact, sometimes the little, short-term payoffs are the most motivating.

So short-term or long, what’s drawing you forward?

Photo by rogiro

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Tools for Feeling Better, Part II

Handling negative emotions

 

In a recent article, I began listing some of the most useful ways I know to get back on track when feeling bad, including idea repair, mindfulness, meditation, understanding schemas, and emotional antidotes. Today’s article forges ahead with 4 more tools for feeling happier and improving mood.

Flow: “Flow” is psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmilhalyi’s term for a state in which a person is concentrating intently, performing at their highest level of ability, and completely swept up in what they’re doing. It’s a very enjoyable and productive mode of being, and successfully bulldozes bad moods. My article “Flow: What It Feels Like to Be Perfectly Motivated” describes flow, and “Some Steps for Getting into a State of Flow” provides techniques for achieving it.

Exercise: Exercise often gets a bad rap as being tedious, unpleasant, and a disappointing necessity for people trying to lose weight or obsessed with fitness. The truth is that exercise is not only a way to improve fitness but also a powerful means of improving mood: read “Nothing to Do With Weight Loss: 17 Ways Exercise Promotes Willpower and Motivation” to find out more.

Just starting: A person in a bad mood with a task in front of them that could improve things often won’t do that task because when they imagine doing it, they don’t imagine feeling happier. A large part of the reason for this is something called “mood congruity,” a tendency our brains have to assume that we will always feel more or less as we do now. When we’re happy it’s hard to imagine really feeling bad, and vice-versa. Just getting started on something that could improve mood by making progress on a goal, getting into a social situation, moving around, creating a change of scene, etc. can push us over into a place where feeling better begins to seem not so distant. If you’ve ever started doing something you didn’t think you would enjoy and began to have a lot of fun, you’ve experienced the power of just starting (despite not feeling inclined to at first).

Writing or Talking it Out: Writing out thoughts, concerns, possible solutions, and possible results can go a long way toward clearing the mind and providing reasons to feel better. An intensive process of logging the details of each choice you make, Decision Logging, can provide a lot of insight into what’s going on in a person’s mind as well as immediate opportunities for rethinking things. Writing down progress, self-evaluation, and plans for the future creates a feedback loop. Free writing or keeping a journal can provide an outlet for pent-up emotions while creating clarity. Or instead of writing about what’s going on with you or how you feel, you could connect with a sympathetic and supportive friend, family member, romantic partner, or therapist and talk things through.

For more tools, see the other articles in this series: Part I and Part III.

Photo by batega

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Everything Sucks. Reboot? Y/N

Handling negative emotions

Every once in a while, I have a day where enough seems to have gone wrong that I’m lodged deep in a lousy mood. Sometimes I’m not clever enough to be aware of this right away, so it persists until mindfulness finally kicks in with something to the effect of “You’re in a bad mood, and there is no reason for it unless it’s somehow helping you. Is it helping?”

It generally isn not helping. So I try to find my way out of that lousy mood using one of the techniques in this post.

The human brain is not very much like a computer. It changes its own structure constantly, stores information in locations scattered throughout the brain, and even runs two different systems (one neural and mostly cognitive, the other chemical and mostly emotional) at the same time. There’s more on this in my article about science fiction and the human brain at Clarkesworld.

But even though the brain doesn’t work the way computers do in many respects, it is capable of reboots: shutting down everything that’s currently running–including bad moods–and starting from scratch. However, reboots are not always easy. There are at least two things that get in the way.

The first is called “mood congruity”: this is the tendency of human beings to have trouble really imagining any emotional situation other than the one they’re already in. If you’re in a bad mood and you picture enjoying a nice walk outside, chances are it will be difficult for you to believe in your gut that the walk will be enjoyable–even if you have every reason to think it will be, and even if it generally has been under similar circumstances in the past. Whatever mood we’re in, we tend to imagine the future fitting the same mood. This is one reason the advice “Cheer up! Things will get better” often sounds so hollow. Mood congruity can be overcome, but it’s helpful to realize that the way our brians work, they’re a little limited at imagining an emotion while experiencing a contrary emotion.

Another barrier is that generally speaking, any mental control we have over our emotions happens by thinking (cognition), but cognition can change much more quickly than emotion, because so much of emotion has to do with chemicals like dopamine, cortisol, oxytocin, adrenaline, and others. The chemical states that influence our brains aren’t capable of changing nearly as quickly as our thoughts. We can go from thinking about a horrible tragedy to thinking about a really funny joke and back all within seconds, but our emotional state would not be able to keep up. This means that any mental effort to change mood needs to be kept up for a minute or two at least to allow emotions to catch up with cognition. It also means that idea repair doesn’t have its full effect right away, a subject I’ll be tackling in another article soon.

Knowing the obstacles, what are the techniques we can use to reboot our brains? Well, computers can go through a “warm boot” (rebooting through software only) or a “cold boot” (physically restarting the computer), and the same is true of our brains. A mental cold boot can be accomplished with techniques that completely clear out what’s going on in our minds. Two excellent approaches for this are meditation (which narrows focus to a very specific subject while letting everything else kind of float away) and exercise (which creates a physiological state that tends to help us cut back to a minimum of thinking).

Techniques for warm boots change attention, immediate experience, and/or thinking. Idea repair is one very useful means to do a warm boot. Other methods include emotional antidotes; visualization; and getting into a flow state (or at least distracted by something interesting for a bit).

Regardless of which method you use, rebooting takes attention, effort, and a little time. However, it often doesn’t take any more than that, and while not every bad mood can be banished in minutes, many of them can.

Photo by rofreg

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