Health psychologist Kelly McGonigal blogged today about a study that looked at how optimism and pessimism affect weight loss. The short version: the pessimists came out ahead, but McGonigal makes a good case for this being mainly a matter of understanding the real benefits of the goals we’re pursuing.

Here’s the post: The Virtue of Pessimism. It’s based on this study.

I’ve been particularly looking forward to the sleep chapter in John Medina’s book Brain Rules (one of my current reading books) because I was interested to know once and for all how much sleep I needed. Was 8 hours really the magic number? What were the consequences of averaging, say, 7 hours, or 6? What about naps? I was interested in knowing how sleep affects our brains so that I could begin to see how it might affect self-motivation.

The answers were very helpful in some ways and completely unhelpful in others. What are the findings about how much sleep we need? Research so far seems to say that there is no definite number, and sleep needed varies widely from person to person. Some people (who have a condition called “healthy insomnia”) only need 4 or 5 hours a night and don’t seem to suffer any ill effects. Kids going through puberty definitely need more, preferably in the morning. There also seem to be genes that determine whether someone is a morning person (a “lark”), a night owl, or (like most of us) a “hummingbird,” which is to say someone with a “normal” sleep schedule. Sleep needs and daily schedules change as a person ages, too.

Too little sleep has serious costs
But one very clear finding across the board is that not getting enough sleep actively sabotages the brain’s abilities. As Medina puts it, “Sleep loss hurts attention, executive function, immediate memory, working memory, mood, quantitative skills, logical reasoning ability, general math knowledge … manual dexterity … and even gross motor movements.” Also, interrupted sleep or inadequate sleep severely limits our ability to remember things we learned that day, increases stress, and causes effects that mimic accelerated aging. Not getting enough sleep even forces the body to crave sugar while reducing our ability to make good use of sugar when we get it, playing havoc with healthy eating.

Figuring out your own sleep needs
Most of us already knew that shorting ourselves on sleep was bad (though maybe we didn’t realize it was that bad). But how do we figure out how much sleep do we actually need to not condemn ourselves to tired, inattentive, grumpy days? The best answer I can give is that we probably already know. If you wake up feeling overtired, it’s probably no secret to you that you could use more sleep. Some of us treat sleep as expendable if something else important is going on, but since even small sleep shortages can have a major impact on performance, we may be more effective if we get the right amount of sleep even though that takes away from the waking hours in which we can actually get things done. If you find yourself adding in extra “down time” during the day because you’re tired, or making mistakes, being distracted, or having trouble getting things done because of a sleep debt, then the “bonus time” you’re getting by cutting out sleep–and possibly more time besides–may be getting used up by the problems caused by not getting enough sleep. In other words, shorting ourselves on sleep is both unpleasant and unproductive.

The need for naps is built into our genetic code
Pretty much everyone, it turns out, is programmed to need about a half-hour nap in the early afternoon, although some of us need it more than others. This isn’t just an artifact of not getting enough sleep at night: it’s a normal part of the sleep-wake cycle in human beings. Many of us won’t have the option of getting this extra sleep on a regular basis, but it may be worth experimenting with it when you do have the freedom to try and seeing if it doesn’t give you a lot more energy and attention. In one study, pilots who took a 26-minute afternoon step performed 34% better than pilots who didn’t. That’s a big improvement!

At the very least, it’s best not to schedule things that require a lot of attention in the early afternoon if you can help it.

Sleep and self-motivation
How does this affect self-motivation? Pretty profoundly, it turns out. Self-motivation requires knowing what you need to do, paying attention to your priorities, devoting a little time and focus to moving forward, being self-aware, and solving problems that come up with your process. All of those things are compromised when we short ourselves even an hour or two of sleep a night. So with enough sleep, self-motivation will tend to get noticeably easier.

I know you will have gotten the advice to “get plenty of sleep” time and time again, and if you aren’t currently getting enough, it might be because you are trying to get enough time in the day to accomplish everything that’s important to you. Only you can judge whether or not a little sleep-deprivation is worth being less intelligent and less capable while the sleep debt lasts. In the past, at least, I’ve often gone with a little sleep deprivation in the service of what sometimes seems like a good cause. Put in this light, though, I’m not sure I want to continue to make that kind of a bargain. I’m beginning to think of it this way: if I can accomplish everything I already accomplish without always getting enough sleep, how much better could I do if I were actually operating at full capacity? It’ll be worth finding out.

By the way, if noise interferes with your sleep, or if you just want a little more silence in your life, you might want to try any brand of soft, foam earplugs with rounded ends (above). I’ve found these very helpful, especially for sleeping when someone else has to get up early, during travel, working while someone’s watching a TV or listening to music nearby, concentrating while my neighbor is mowing the lawn, etc. I haven’t been as happy with plastic earplugs or with the kind that are made of harder foam and don’t have a rounded end. Fortunately, the earplugs don’t block out sound completely, so it’s still possible to hear (faintly) a phone ringing or an alarm going off even while wearing them.

Photo by tempophage

It can be truly humiliating. Maybe it’s never happened to you, but it certainly happens to a lot of us: you’ve been grappling with something for years–your weight, organization, starting a novel, getting the house in order, changing how you act with other people–and a day comes when you’re inspired to do something about it. So you do it! You change your eating habits or start running or create a strict rule for dealing with all incoming e-mails. Then a week or two pass, and you find you’re gone off the rails: your eating habits are worse than ever, or a busy day put you behind on your organization and you never caught up, or the trick you were going to use to remember people’s names has been forgotten itself. What happened?

There’s a simple answer to this and a more detailed answer. The simple answer is that we start things in different circumstances than we continue them in. A New Year’s resolution made at a party with friends on a full stomach (for example) turns into a thankless, lonely grind week after week, and it loses a lot of its sparkle that way.

Don’t worry: the detailed answer is much less depressing than the simple answer. But the simple answer reminds us of something essential: inspiration may drive us to start new things, but it’s our own efforts to rise above obstacles that get us through in the end.

Certainly there is such a thing as a badly-chosen goal, or a good idea for a goal that’s not practical at the moment. But for goals that are worthwhile, there are at least seven ways something that started well could run into trouble. Here’s what those seven kinds of problems are, and how to get past them.

1) The novelty wears off
Annoyingly, somewhere in our evolution we acquired a built-in trait that only allows us to enjoy something for a little while unless it changes. A dish that tastes “amazing” on the first bite and “really good” when we have it again in a few days continues to wane in amazingness as long as we keep eating it regularly. This is known as “hedonic adaptation,” and it means that anything that was delightful and new and exciting eventually becomes old hat unless there’s something renewing that excitement. When we first take on new goals, it helps a lot to understand that we need to not only take the steps to reach our goal, but to keep actively renewing our enthusiasm.

2) Our mood changes
Everyone has better and worse days, days when we feel we can do more and days when we’re mainly just trying to keep things from going wrong. What may seem easy to do on a good day can be the last thing we care about on a bad day. Fortunately, we can stop having bad days if we try, but it also helps to use tactics like rule-making and decision logging to keep ourselves happy with our goals.

3) Things get harder; complications arise
Sometimes we’ll start pursuing a goal when things are going well, but then things get harder: there are new demands on our time or finances or attention, for instance. It may become harder to find time to follow our goals. When the going gets tough, the tough organize and prioritize so they won’t lose track of what’s most important. Goals that aren’t nurtured through busy times tend to get lost in the shuffle.

4) We begin to forget
Goals and new habits need to be nourished and maintained by a process of regular feedback. If we don’t regularly remind ourselves of what we were doing and review our progress, our goals become vague, distant, and easy to forget. Once we’re no longer actively thinking about what we want to achieve, we’re sunk: those habits aren’t going to change themselves. Focusing on our priorities consistently can save them from being forgotten.

5) Just when we start flying, someone shoots us down
There will always be naysayers, whether they’re people who feel threatened by another person’s success or people who genuinely want what they think is best for you but aren’t ready to support your choices. If any of them get to you, figure out what it is they’ve told you that has sunk in and use idea repair to pull it up by the roots. Recruit them to your cause or harden yourself to their criticism: we’re each responsible for our own lives, so while it makes sense to consider good advice, if we’ve considered it and decided to go a different way, we don’t need to consider that same advice again: we’ll need our energy for other things.

6) A new interest takes over
Since things we’re getting used to become less exciting through hedonic adaptation, we human beings are seekers after novelty. This can be fine in a lot of circumstances, but not when it repeatedly derails us on old projects by tantalizing us into taking on new ones. We generally have the resources to undertake only one new thing at a time. After we’ve been in the groove on one goal for a long time, we might consider adding something else, but add something else too early and like it or not, the old goal will very likely go by the wayside. When you’re tempted by a new direction, think carefully about what you’ve invested in the goal you’re already working on and about why it’s important to you in the first place. Of course we have to keep some flexibility, but guard your progress jealously against all but the most important replacement goals.

7) Just announcing it was enough
One interesting psychological study with law students found that students who announced a study goal tended to do worse at achieving that goal than students who kept their goals private. One of the reasons this may be happening is that sometimes, a person can get enough positive feedback for just committing to something that they don’t feel the need to actually follow through–and very often the people who are there to encourage us when we start something aren’t going to be looking over our shoulders to make sure it gets done. Not following through under these circumstances isn’t so much a character flaw as it is a logistical error. Who knew that we would feel so much more satsified and resolved with our current situation just by announcing the intention to change? The enthusiasm for the actual change leaks away, and we may not even realize it’s happening.

If you might be in danger of falling prey to the announcement trap, the safest course is to only announce your goals to people who will be holding you accountable to them. Note that this is hard to do over the Internet; it’s too easy to avoid the subject, or the place where you announced it, or to say vaguely that you’re working on it. Someone who’s going to greet you in person every morning and say “Hey, how’s the novel coming?” is going to be much more help than an online friend who asks the same question, and someone who doesn’t listen to the answer isn’t going to be helpful to you regardless of where they are.

Starting new things and failing at them is so common in human experience that we tend to mark it down as a character flaw, to think that we “just don’t have the willpower.” Fortunately, willpower isn’t so much something you have as something you do. By anticipating the efforts we’ll need to make to move forward with our goals and by proactively handling the kinds of problems we’ve just talked about, we can keep ourselves on track and find ourselves just as committed on day 100 or day 1,000 as we were on day 1.

Photo by greekadman

I’ve been getting fitter over the past few years: these days I’m 42 pounds lighter and much stronger than I was at the beginning of 2006. I still have about 10-15 pounds to go, though, before I’m at the weight I think is ideal, so my weight loss is still in progress. After reading (and posting about) how useful rules can be recently, I decided to experimentally adopt a rule of only eating at designated times of the day. It has been working well, but–no big surprise–sometimes I’m hungry when it’s not time to eat. To distract myself from the hunger, from time to time I’ll try some quick exercise, usually push-ups or crunches. To my surprise, I noticed that I usually don’t feel hungry after just a few minutes of that kind of effort. It was an unexpected side benefit–but was it real? And if so, what was happening?

So I did a little research, and began coming across articles like “Influence of resistance and aerobic exercise on hunger, circulating levels of acylated ghrelin, and peptide YY in healthy males”  and “Exercise-induced suppression of acylated ghrelin in humans”  . Gleaning a little information from these without being a physiologist or an endocrinologist took some doing, but these and other sources suggest that physical exercise can actually reduce hunger, at least in the short term.

This sounds as though it’s in conflict with some of the research mentioned in the Time magazine article I recently complained about, where the author claimed that exercise isn’t particularly useful for weight loss–actually, though, this idea is compatible with that research. The research in the Time article talks mainly about people concluding that they can eat more food because they exercise or rewarding themselves after exercise with food, so that often the extra food adds more calories than the exercise takes away. These have to do with our thinking. The exercise and hunger research I’ve seen deals with the release of hormones like ghrelin and peptide YY, which are physiological triggers that regulate hunger.

RealAge has a tip here where they say that exercise can make you feel less hungry if you do a combination of aerobic and strength exercises, but they don’t cite their sources, so I don’t know where their information comes from, and in any case this seems to be a bit different from the research I’ve come across. That’s not to say I think it’s untrue: I just can’t back their claims up.

Just reflecting on my own experience, I wonder if this isn’t why I tend to feel hungry more often when I’m sitting down to do something than when I’m active. In any case, my experience so far is that exercise seems to be at least a temporarily effective way to ward off hunger some of the time as long as it’s not used to promote unhealthy eating practices.

I haven’t read all of the research on this subject, and it would be long hours of work to understand what I’d read if I had, so don’t take this as gospel. On the other hand, there seems to be meaningful scientific support for the idea that eating a few push-ups for a snack can be surprisingly … satisfying.

Photo by Teecycle Tim

This week’s issue of Time Magazine includes an article called “Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin,” which manages to be interesting, informative, and painfully misguided.

Stripping the article down to its main points, essentially author John Cloud says:

1. Exercise often makes you hungrier
2. If you eat more calories because you’re hungry from working out, you won’t lose weight
3. Most people who exercise regularly to lose weight seem to be eating those extra calories, so
4. Exercise doesn’t help you lose weight. <– Here’s where the error lies

The only problem described with exercise is that it makes a person hungry. Hunger in these cases is a sign that the body is going to burn some fat if you don’t eat some calories soon, so Cloud implies you should give up on the exercise. Wouldn’t it make more sense to just let the fat burn? Yes, this is hard, but if it weren’t, it wouldn’t require willpower, which is what this site is here to help you build.

Cloud also falls into the same two traps as a lot of people who have read about the research that suggests strongly that we have a limited ability to exert self-control. First, he fails to take into account the other research that draws a clear connection between using willpower and strengthening it. That is, he knows about the short-term exhaustion but not about the long-term strengthening.

The other point he misses is that it’s possible to make good choices (that is, use willpower) without using up any of our self-control reserves. Our limitations on self-control appear to have to do with struggling with ourselves, not with simply making good choices. Many of the strategies on this site point to ways we can use willpower without having to fight ourselves over it.

So sure, if you go work out and spend 300 calories, then go eat 500 calories as a “reward” (actually a penalty, if you think about the food’s impact on happiness overall), you won’t lose weight, and may in fact gain it. But it’s still true that weight loss is mainly a question of using more calories than you take in, which means that it’s essential to develop good eating habits and that exercise can help a lot as long as it doesn’t disrupt those habits.

The thing that bothers me most about this article is that I imagine people will read it and then give up, figuring there’s no way for them to win–but I hope I’m wrong. I hope people will read the article, ignore the confused claims about willpower giving out, and understand that to lose weight we just need to make sure we don’t binge on food after workouts. It’s not rocket science, surely. And it’s no surprise the key is self-motivation. Self-motivation turns out to be the key to a lot of things.

There’s a short but intriguing article on More magazine’s Web site called The One Exercise Motivation That Really Works. In it, psychologist Michelle Segar is briefly interviewed about reasons for exercising; her conclusion is that most of the people she’s studied exercise for the least motivating reasons.

While the article is aimed specifically at women in their 40’s and up, the points in it are potentially useful for pretty much anyone. Here’s the money quote: “Only 26 percent of the women in my study said they exercised for mental health benefits, but those women exercised 30 percent more often than those who stated their top reason as physical health benefits or weight loss.” By “mental health benefits,” she’s referring to exercising because it relieves stress and increases happiness.

What’s your biggest goal right now, the one you most want to tackle? If you don’t know that off the top of your head, that may be a big obstacle to getting much done. If you do know, great–and on to the next question, which is this: what is the very next thing you’re going to be doing to further that goal?

Do you know that one off the top of your head? If so, go to the head of the class! If not, you can still go to the head of the class, but first you have to get in the habit of queuing things up for yourself. It sounds simple and inconsequential, but it’s actually simple and crucial.

The logic is pretty straightforward: if I know what my next step is, then I’ll recognize as soon as there’s a good opportunity for me to take it and am prepared to take that opportunity. Once I’ve tackled that step, I take a moment to think about the next step so that I know what that is. Working this way, I’m never that far from thinking about or being able to act on my goals, and sometimes my subconscious may even be able to make extra progress on my project without me expending any real effort.

Looking at it from another perspective, knowing your next step is an effective way to minimize anxiety about a big project. If there twenty things you could do next and you haven’t picked one as being the first, then you’re in a position where you have to worry about all twenty. If you’ve carefully chosen one of those things to do next, you only have to worry about that one until you complete it; then you choose the next one and still only have to worry about one, even though you’re moving right on down the list.

By the way, “the next step” means something that you actively have to focus on to do. If the next thing you need to do to achieve your goal is something that you don’t even have to think about, something that’s already set up for you or already an ingrained habit, ignore it for the purpose of knowing what’s next. But those are specifically the kind of areas where no motivation work is needed. What we’re talking about here is the next step that’s going to take some kind of effort or attention from you.

This approach separates choosing something to do from actually having to do it, which also combats anxiety. Since considering all the things you might have to do can be a source of stress, and since getting yourself to do something difficult can also be a source of stress, taking the two separately can make each piece easier to deal with.

Some examples of choosing the next step: If you’re writing, it might be starting the next chapter, or planning out the next piece of the outline, or editing a particular section; if you’re working on fitness, it might be exercising in the evening, or planning your next meal; if you’re organizing your home, it might be the next area you plan to clean up, or the next habit you need to practice; if you’re quitting smoking, it might be simply restocking your supply of gum or reading up on emphysema. Regardless, always knowing your next step keeps you literally one step ahead.

Photo by Tojosan

Brian Harward, a diet and exercise writer at the Cleveland Examiner, posted a piece yesterday in which he argues that “A finish line mindset might work for you if you have lots of willpower and only need to be thin and healthy for a limited period of time.  But if your goal is permanent change, this approach is no good.”

His article makes a great point; I’ll get to that in a moment. But he’s overstating his case in a couple of important ways. First, he describes goals as counter-productive, yet tacitly recognizes their importance when he says “if your goal is permanent change.” Second, he claims that “Eventually everyone runs out of willpower, yes EVERYONE.” And I think he’s right, but only if you define willpower as “forcing yourself to do things you don’t want to do.” If you think of it instead as “getting in the habit of making good choices,” then we’re talking about changing attitudes, not struggling against an unbeatable system.

And that’s where Harward’s article really shines, in my opinion. He points out that in areas of life change, like diet and fitness, if you’re looking to simply get to some magical moment in the future rather than changing your life, then you’re shooting yourself in the foot by telling yourself that everything between you and that goal is undesirable and hard, and by not looking to enjoy it. For that reason, despite my quibbles, I certainly recommend the article.

You may not be someone who’s trying to lose weight, eat a better diet, get more exercise, or in some other way make changes to become more fit or healthy–but if you aren’t, you’re probably in the minority (and I tip my hat to you).

For the rest of us, I’ll skip the prolonged introduction and go straight to the useful information. And while you may have already heard this a thousand times, just in case, I’ll mention that the real goal here has to be becoming comfortable with leading a healthy lifestyle. Anything short of that will quickly turn on you and bite you in the butt.

1. Know what you should be eating and keep careful track
Most of us have no idea how much we’re actually eating in a day, and many of us have no idea how much we should be eating if we want to lose weight. Do a little research to figure out what your daily food intake would need to be for you to lose weight, then faithfully keep track in terms of calories or some other good measure, like exchanges. To find out calorie counts for a particular food, a Google search for the name of the food plus the word “calories” usually does the trick. It can be helpful to keep a list of foods you eat often and what their counts are for reference.

Not keeping track of this information means that we remain ignorant of the impact of the things we’re eating, so that the reasons behind not being able to lose weight remain a mystery. If we know the impact of each thing we eat, we then have the information we need to make good choices.

2. Pay attention to how you feel and what you’re thinking
Many of us eat badly in response to stress or other negative emotions, or for very unconstructive reasons, like wanting to be polite or because an unusual food happens to become available. The more mindful we become of what is going through our heads when we’re faced with decisions, the better equipped we are to deal with our own thoughts and emotions instead of to automatically revert to bad eating habits. To really notice our own thoughts, we have to take a step back right at the moment of choice–for instance, just as we’re deciding what to have for lunch or whether or not to go exercises.

A technique that can really help here, once a thought is recognized, is idea repair. Another is something I call “decision logging,” which means jotting down thoughts, feelings, and any other conditions throughout the day that might influence decisions. Doing this for a couple of weeks can provide a truckload of insight into where our feelings and inclinations are coming from, and it can show where the opportunities are to cut off negative emotions before they really kick in. This process can be useful for much more than weight loss, of course.

3. Visualize your goals
Spend some time on a daily basis–even just a few minutes–imagining yourself having achieved your goal, and allow yourself to enjoy the feelings of having done it. It’s much easier to be motivated by positive emotions (even if they come from imagining things) than it is to be motivated by vague inclinations. Negative emotions–guilt, shame, frustration–are lousy motivators, and are unlikely to be able to keep you consistently working on a tricky task for long. Use encouraging visions of the future as a continuing source of pleasure to associate with your process. The more you enjoy what you’re doing, the better you’ll do at it. And speaking of which …

4. Enjoy the steps
It’s easy to tell ourselves that exercise is painful and inconvenient, or that eating something healthy is boring. And certainly any process of changing major habits has its hard parts. If we focus on those, though, then again we’re associating negative emotions with our process instead of positive ones, and that won’t get us very far. Instead, it helps to focus, again and again, on the positive or pleasurable parts of the things we need to do. If I’m out running, I can put my attention more on the beauty of the park I’m running through or on the fact that I’m getting a quarter of a mile further than I was getting a week ago rather than on the physical effort or concerns about how I look, for instance.

There is something to enjoy in virtually any good step we take. Even hunger can be enjoyed when we have to experience a small amount of it while changing our eating habits, for instance because of the feeling of success and virtue, or because it’s an indication that we’re doing something that’s working.

5. Set up a feedback loop
Unless we reflect on our successes and mistakes, we tend to repeat the mistakes and only stumble on the successes now and again. At least once a week, and preferably more often, it can be a huge help to reflect on what you did, how it went, and what you want to do in the future. This will help keep you on track.

There are a variety of ways to set up feedback loops. Some commercial weight loss programs offer weekly group meetings and weigh-ins, which can work very well. Buddies can also work well, as can blogs, online forums, and journaling. More public ways of getting feedbacks (like groups and blogs) also can up the stakes for doing well, which can be very motivating to some people (but too much pressure for others). Choose the method that works best for you and make it a priority to do it regularly. If you miss a round of feedback, be sure to include that in the things you consider the next time. In other words, even your feedback loop can benefit from feedback.

6. Cut short arguments with yourself
Many of us are used to looking at choices we really want to steer clear of–often about a food that we don’t need and that would throw off our calorie count for the day–and then debating with ourselves, trying to convince ourselves to follow the virtuous path. But between a piece of chocolate cake and some vague idea of virtue, chocolate cake very often wins, so an alternative strategy is to turn around and walk away, immediately–even if the debate is still going on in your head. You don’t have to convince yourself to avoid something that would be bad for you or to do something that would be good for you if you simply go ahead and take the best available action. Concentrate on the simple physical acts: turning and putting one foot in front of the other, or putting on your workout clothes. These kinds of behaviors can shortcut the endangered decision-making process and help support automatic positive behaviors.

As always, there’s a lot more we could say on this subject, but this is a good start for now. And just so you know: I’m neither a professional nutritionist nor a psychologist. I’m also not qualified in any way to give you personal medical advice.

However, I’ve been studying the factors that go into self-motivation intensively for some time now and have myself lost upwards of 40 pounds while becoming much healthier. Don’t make me post before and after pictures, because I will if I have to. Regardless, I hope you’ll find these ideas useful and comment with questions or about your experiences.

Bike picture by Erica_Marshall
Shoe picture by Fey the Ferocious Feyrannosaur

Terms like “resignation,” “surrender,” and “submission” are practically cuss words in Western culture–certainly in America, anyway. Americans are brought up to believe that we should never give in to anybody, never submit to anything, and always be in control. We’re led to believe that strength always requires this kind of control, and so we tend to think of things like drug trafficking, terrorism, and our own habits as things we need to wage war on rather than things we simply need to find solutions to. Drug trafficking and terrorism are way, way outside the scope of this site, but there’s a crucial lesson about habits here. That lesson is resignation: to truly conquer bad habits, we need to surrender to our own best choices.

The kind of surrender we’re talking about here isn’t the kind where you give up your will to another person, or another force, or someone else’s ideas: instead, it’s letting go of things that may feel comfortable or at least familiar but that are holding you back, like broken ideas, and being willing to make new choices. It’s giving up the things we think we want, when necessary, to achieve the goals that are actually most important to us.

One example that many of us struggle with on a daily basis is priorities. If a person honestly has more things to get done than they’re able to handle, as many of us do, really taking control of the situation requires, strangely enough, letting go of some control. To put it plainly, if I have more to do than I can accomplish, then I’ll be able to handle things best if I resign myself to the fact that certain of those things aren’t going to done–and use that new point of view to make sure the most important items will get done.

Failing to resign ourselves in situations like that means that the things left undone are determined by whim and chance instead of by choice. If I “need” to practice some music, buy some new shoes for my son, exercise, answer some e-mails, and look up a new book I heard about, yet don’t have time for all of those things, then I run the danger of running out of time and (for instance) not getting the shoes and not exercising. As a matter of fact, I may naturally gravitate toward the least important and most immediately appealing of those things, like playing the music and surfing the Web reading reviews of the book. When I explain why I didn’t exercise or buy the shoes later, I may say “I just ran out of time.” Yet in actuality, not resigning myself to the time limitations in the first place meant that I really would have been choosing to do the less important things over the shoes and the exercise. If I resign myself to not having time to learn new music and buy new books, I might get done everything I actually need to get done, and while this may seem less appealing in the moment, over the long term I’m likely to experience more pleasure and more happiness because of having made these seemingly less appealing choices.

Which leads us to another important place for resignation: easy pleasure now versus happiness in future. For instance, I regularly do push-ups, building up my strength both for general health and as part of my Taekwondo training. In the moments I’m doing them, push-ups are hard to enjoy: they make me breathe hard and cause my muscles to strain in a way that feels suspiciously like mild pain. Yet if I don’t resign myself to experiencing this mild pain, then I’ll tend to avoid push-ups most of the time and won’t experience the pleasure of having that strength and being able to do the things push-ups allow me to do (even if that’s mainly just more push-ups).

Another kind of resignation that can make a world of difference in self-motivation is resigning ourselves to take responsibility rather than putting the blame outside ourselves. For instance, if a person has major financial problems but fails to take action because they feel those problems are mainly other people’s faults, they’ll most likely continue to have financial problems. It’s giving up that excuse of blaming outside conditions and resigning ourselves to take responsibility for our own lives that enables us to have some power over our situation.

There’s a surprising and wonderful side effect to resignation, too: it makes unenjoyable things more enjoyable. When I resign myself to doing push-ups, I’m no longer telling myself “These are hard. These are painful. I don’t want to do these.” Instead I’m saying “Time to do some push-ups. I can manage this.” This doesn’t make the exercise any more physically comfortable, but it frees up my attention to focus on things like the power I’m feeling in my muscles and the joy I can take in increasing my personal record, doing a few more push-ups than I’ve ever done in one go before. There are elements to enjoy in virtually any seemingly unenjoyable step to a worthwhile goal. Even hunger can bring a smile to your face if you resign yourself to a little of it (in a healthy context) and begin to experience it as the sensation that often goes with your body burning stored calories–and I say this from experience. But more on enjoying the unenjoyable in another post, because that’s a big subject.

So how do we know when to use resignation in our lives? Resignation is needed whenever we know what we need to do but are having trouble bringing ourselves to do it.

Resigning ourselves, as much as it sounds like knuckling under, is really much more like bravery than cowardice. We can go out and face the dangers that worry us and surrender ourselves to the possibility that we might be hurt, might have to go through something difficult, or might fail; or we can hide and hope that things will just somehow work out, often ensuring hurt and difficulty and failure. Surrender here means not giving up what’s important, but giving up what isn’t: more often than not we need to give up things we think we want in order to get the things we really want.

Chess photo by Some nutter called Mark Grimwood
Letting go picture by niko si
Diving picture by mcescobar1