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Finding the Perfect Attitude for Willpower: Part I

States of mind

Since I started this blog more than two and a half years ago–actually, no, since long before that–I’ve been quietly searching for the perfect state of mind, the way of thinking or being that would make willpower simple. It always struck me that people sometimes go through experiences that affect them so much that their actions are completely different from that time forward, even though all that changed was their thoughts.

I was talking to an acquaintance the other day about her father. He’s been a diabetic for decades, but he never really got into the habit of checking his blood sugar regularly. It’s hard to blame him: who wants to draw their own blood twice a day for life? A few days ago, though, he called his daughter on the phone and told her something was wrong. His speech was slurred, he couldn’t stand up, and his daughter feared he was having a stroke. She called an ambulance.

The paramedics were able to rule out a stroke, and it turned out that the problem was just that the amount of insulin her father was taking was off. He should have been testing his blood sugar so that his doctor would know if it was getting too low (in this case it was much too low–a little lower and it would have sent him into a coma) and be able to adjust things accordingly.

You might not be surprised to know that my friend’s father is now checking his insulin religiously. Poking yourself with something sharp every once in a while suddenly stops feeling like so much of a nuisance if it’s going to prevent you from collapsing on the floor and going into a coma.

What does this have to do with willpower? Well, I’ve always wondered. On the one hand, I’ve thought, maybe it’s possible to jar ourselves into that state of complete dedication to making the smart choice, over and over again, in the same way my friend’s father was jarred. On the other, maybe that only applies to really traumatic experiences.

A little more background we’ll need to make sense of this topic: I’ve never had a friendly relationship with food. I’m one of four kids, raised in a household where the food budget was sometimes very tight. The kinds of food we liked weren’t always easy to come by, so if something was served that we considered especially good, we’d scarf down our first portion to get seconds before it was all gone. In this and other ways, we all learned some bad ways of dealing with and thinking about food, and for me this has been an issue into adulthood. I was unhappily overweight for years, gradually gaining mass, until about seven years ago, when I finally understood about exercise. I’d always thought it was something that you tried to put up with: I had never realized that exercise could be something you crave, and yet regular exercise made that transformation for me, and with that change along with some hard work to eat better, I eventually lost more than 60 pounds.

Over the past six months or a year, though, I hadn’t been bothering as much about fitness, having family matters to deal with that were a more important place to put my time and attention, and recently I realized I had started putting weight back on. The idea was very unappealing to me, as you can probably imagine, and I focused on the problem to piece together what I knew about willpower so that I could find a state of mind where I didn’t just eat well, but craved eating well–just like I crave exercise. I may have found it, but it’s not as simple as I once imagined it might be. I wasn’t scared into changing my life. Instead, I began looking at things in a different way. In my next post, I’ll talk about what that change of attitude was and how to get to it.

Photo by Chris Rimmer

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How to Harness Desire for Better Willpower

States of mind

Wanting something isn’t all there is to motivation: motivation requires knowledge of what you need to do, effort, and attention, for instance. Yet desiring something–organization, health, success, an achievement–is the most basic and essential ingredient of motivation.

I haven’t written much about the importance of desire in motivation because the connection seems so basic and obvious, but recently I’ve been realizing that desire isn’t as simple as it has seemed to me.

Desires change constantly
It seems we tend to think of our desires as being very consistent over time, but in truth they can expand to fill our whole attention or dwindle away to nothing in just a few moments. For example, a person might wake up in the morning with a firm resolution to start getting really fit, but by three in the afternoon, after a particularly wearing day, care about nothing so much as chocolate, or someone might be driven to rise to the top of her profession one week and perfectly content in her current position the next.

It shouldn’t be surprising that our desires change so much and so quickly: desire is influenced by both physiology (hunger signals, tiredness, the dopamine rush of a pleasurable experience, and so on) and thinking (for instance, admiring what someone else has achieved or daydreaming about the future). Our attention, physiological state, current thoughts, immediate environment, communication from others, and other factors can change from moment to moment.

The thing to take away from this realization that desires change is that sometimes when willpower falters, the root problem is that for that moment we just don’t care about the goal.

Affecting our own desires
Knowing that our desires change and that losing desire for a goal tends to cause willpower to go down the tubes leads us to the conclusion that sometimes we will want to influence our own desires. This sounds very strange: if we don’t want something, why would we expend effort to make ourselves want it? The key realization here is that what we desire at any given moment isn’t necessarily based on what will make us feel happy and fulfilled.

For instance, I might very much want to stay up all night and watch a Gilligan’s Island marathon, but being exhausted for the next day or several days combined with the negative thoughts and feelings from knowing I was sabotaging myself would not make me happy no matter how much I wanted to stay up.

In fact, it might be fair to say that getting what we tend to desire usually doesn’t lead to lasting happiness (see my article on lottery winners, “The Best 40 Percent of Happiness,” and my article on hedonic adaptation, “Why Long-Term Happiness Levels Tend to Stay the Same.”) The exception is when we desire something that provides long-term benefits, like health or rewarding work situations. Therefore being happy, fulfilled, and empowered often means changing what we desire.

How to change what we want
Changing our own desires may sound like a strange and tricky process, but in fact we do it all the time by focusing our attention. We may choose to read about Dr. Martin Luther King and begin to feel ourselves wanting to make a positive difference in the world. We may choose to walk into an electronics store to see what the new gadgets are and become possessed for the overwhelming desire for a 3D television. We may start reading about rollerblading and find ourselves wanting to get more active.

Other articles on this site talk about changing our environment and making good connections with other people to encourage ourselves toward our goals, and these are good external ways to influence our desires. But what it often comes down to is what we choose to think about. That moment of decision during which I have the choice “Stop in at the electronics store, or pull over at the park and go for a walk?” will change not only my environment but what I have available to focus on. The moment in the restaurant when I choose to look carefully at the “heart healthy options” on the one hand or “deep fried specialties” on the other will influence what I begin to be interested in ordering.

And the wonderful thing about changing our attention is that while it takes a momentary effort, when we do it we’re not yet to the point of strongly desiring something, so it doesn’t take the kind of complete reorientation we face when we already want something but know that it isn’t a good choice.

So while focusing attention and influencing our own desires won’t on its own provide all of the motivation we’ll ever need, it is one of the simplest and yet most powerful ways of altering our minds for our own benefit.

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Willpower: Available Right Now

States of mind

It’s easy to think of ourselves as trapped by emotions or ideas, but it’s interesting–and extremely useful, I would say–for us to remember that willpower comes down to making good choices, and that making good choices comes down to our state of mind, because at least in theory, we can get into an excellent state of mind with only a few moments notice.

Today’s post isn’t about the how of changing our emotional states, which is covered in many other articles on this site, such as “How Preparation Enables Stronger Willpower,” “How to Stop Having a Bad Day,” “Antidotes to bad moods and negative emotions,” and especially “All About Broken Ideas and Idea Repair.” Instead it’s about the what and the why: what does it mean to change our state of mind, and why is that important?

What makes up a state of mind?
State of mind has a number of components, including things like alertness that aren’t entirely under our immediate control. For instance, if I haven’t slept all night, I’m going to have noticeably less power over my ability to focus and think clearly.

But the key elements of our states of mind, attention and mood, are things we can influence. If our attention is set on the most beneficial subject available to us, and if we have brought our emotions into balance, then we’re generally in a calm, open state that allows us to make good choices.

For example, if I have the choice of washing the dishes or watching TV, and if I’ve resolved that it’s important to wash the dishes, then there are a lot of things that could affect my state of mind to make it hard to stick to my resolution. For instance, if I were depressed or angry, I might be having trouble caring about things like whether or not my dishes were done. If I were telling myself what I’d be “missing” if I didn’t watch TV or that I “should be able to have a break after the day I’ve had,” then I would be pointing my attention at things that would tend to prevent me from making good choices.

How we change our state of mind
Emotional states feel very difficult to shake sometimes, but in truth if our attention changes focus, our emotions can follow suit within just a minute or two. Changes of emotion aren’t immediate, though: a lot of our experience of emotions is physiological, and while our brain chemistry changes constantly, it takes a small amount of time for the chemicals to shift, as compared to our near-instantaneous changes of attention or thought, which involve sending electrical impulses through our brains.

So let’s say I walk through the door upset, distracted, preoccupied with wanting to watch TV, and telling myself that doing the dishes is self-punishment. Under those conditions, the dishes probably won’t get done unless I have a strongly-ingrained habit or something changes. But if I have enough time and attention to spare, along with the awareness of what I really want, I can change my state of mind. First I let go of unhelpful thoughts like “I’m going to miss the new episode of my favorite show!” and “I shouldn’t have to do dishes after my long day at work.” Then I will want to bring my attention to any subject that’s helpful, like remembering what it was like getting up the other morning to a gleaming clean kitchen. I’ll also want to use whatever techniques I have available, like breathing exercises, meditation, or music, to help me calm down, focus, and cheer up.

Under these circumstances, it’s possible for a completely different state of mind to surface, one in which I’m happy to be doing the dishes because that’s the exact right thing for me to be doing at the moment. If other kinds of thoughts get in the way of my experiencing that mood, I would need to deal with those individually, for instance by using idea repair.

We’re not always successful (at least, I’m not) at getting into a positive state of mind, but the important takeaway here is realizing that a positive state of mind is nearly always available, however uncomfortable or unhappy or cussed we may feel. The trick is to get better and better at seeking it out.

Photo once again by Stuck in Customs

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Why Long-Term Happiness Levels Tend to Stay the Same

States of mind

In yesterday’s article (“The Best 40 Percent of Happiness”) I talked about the factors that the current research suggests go into determining how happy we are. About 50% seems to be genetic, 40% from attitude, and only 10% from our life situation.

But this flies in the face of what seems like common sense. After all, the things that cause the most worry and excitement in our lives–jobs, money, romance, new experiences, health, etc.–really do change. We might have a job we hate one year and a job we love the next; we fall in love or get married or split up; we get illnesses or lose weight. Why wouldn’t these make major, long-term changes in our level of happiness? In fact, there are several reasons they generally don’t:

Hedonic Adaptation: “I could get used to this”
Hedonic adaptation is the process we go through of getting used to pleasurable things so that they no longer provide as much bliss as when we first encountered them. The first bite of a really delicious meal or the first week of an incredible romance, tends to provide a lot of stimuli we really like, triggering pleasurable mental and physiological reactions. However, our brains are designed to get used to these stimuli so that the reactions gradually lessen. This seems cruel, but on the bright side it’s also true of stimuli we don’t like, which is why we gradually get used to bad smells, for instance.

So eating caviar every single day eventually will begin to feel about the same as eating oatmeal every single day.

So anything we do that’s pleasurable has a short-term effect unless it’s alternated with other different, pleasurable things. For instance, if you love France and move there, then over time France will likely feel less and less like something special and more and more like the same old neighborhood. But if you move to a new country you like every year (due presumably to being an international jewel thief or space shuttle salesperson or something), then you’ll continue to be engaged by the new places, sights, and sounds–though you might get exhausted after a while and start thinking about the attractions of a good old boring home, too.

There’s more to it than just the one thing
Another reason situations tend not to affect our long-term happiness in the ways we expect is that we tend to focus on just the single most obvious result of a big change. For instance, if you think about winning the lottery, probably the thing that keeps your attention is having a ton of money or being able to quitting your job. You probably won’t be thinking about having to spend more time with your annoying sister-in-law, about people asking you for handouts day after day, or about how bored you might get if you don’t have a structured thing to do, like a job. That’s not to say that the pleasure wouldn’t balance out the inconveniences, at least in the short term, but it does mean that any good thing that happens to us is unlikely to be 100% blissful.

And these factors work the same way on troubles: people with physical disabilities get used to them; people who suffer losses become accustomed to making do with whatever’s left over; and things that are very painful at first tend to become less painful in time.

Cultivating long-term happiness
Whatever the reasons, the research seems clear that attitude means a lot more than situation–even if cultivating a better attitude makes our situation worse. That’s not to say that we should give up and not do anything about our troubles, although it’s possible that’s a route to happiness for some people. Most of us will want to work on our situation and on our attitude.

The important thing to know about cultivating an attitude that creates happiness is that just as we tend to get used to new stimuli, we also tend to get used to anything that inspires us temporarily–so that just trying to have a new attitude is unlikely to produce long-term change because after a while we’ll stop being inspired to do it and go back to our old ways. What will produce long-term change is cultivating habits that change attitude. As these habits become part of our daily behavior, they make a durable and lasting impact on how we see and react to the world, digging out the happiness that’s available from the situations we’re already in.

Photo by keeping it real

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The Best 40 Percent of Happiness

States of mind

What do lottery jackpot winners and people who have been paralyzed in an accident have in common? Major life changes. These two groups were the focus of a 1978 study on happiness and how it’s affected by our situation in life, including our ups and downs. In years since then it has contributed to a lot of other studies, including Adaptation and the Set-Point Model of Subjective Well-Being: Does Happiness Change After Major Life Events? by Richard E. Lucas in 2007, which argues that our happiness has a level–different levels for different people–to which we naturally tend to return (even after things like winning the lottery or having a spinal cord injury).

Different researchers conclude slightly different levels for the importance of genetics, conditions, and attitude in happiness, but as a good example, in their book Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks, authors Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler give these percentages:

50% genetic,
40% attitude, and
10% situational

In other words, if your life goes amazingly well and you’re the luckiest person on the planet, you’ll probably be only about 10% happier than someone just like you who has the worst luck on the planet. However, if you cultivate habits of finding happiness in your situation regardless of whether or not things go your way, you can make a major difference in how happy you are.  This is probably why the Dalai Lama is such a happy-looking guy (just take a look at him! And that’s not just for the cameras: our faces begin to show our emotions in wrinkles as we get older–ever notice the difference in appearance between a happy 80-year-old’s face and a grim 80-year-old’s face?–and His Holiness the Dalai Lama has the face of a guy who has been doing a lot of smiling). Buddhist teachings promote letting go of desire, and as Ben Franklin once observed, “Blessed is he that expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.”

In tomorrow’s post, I’ll touch on some of the reasons happiness works the way it does, and what we can take away from that to become happier ourselves.

Lottery photo by jackace

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Guest Post: How to Be a Badass

States of mind

Today’s guest post is an excerpt from Wally X. Dammit’s book-in-progress, How to Be a Badass. Wally has what you might call a very direct style, and his writing usually (maybe always) contains profanity, so I’m putting this post behind a click-through and recommend it only for people who don’t mind a little rough language and plain talk.

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