Browsing the archives for the idea repair tag.
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Still Not Getting to That Goal? Four Essential Factors

Habits

obstacle

I started this blog about four and a half years ago and started doing energetic research into willpower and habit change two years before that. My belief when I started was that it would be possible to learn how to change nearly any habit, to summon far greater willpower, because it was clear that around the world, there are people who make these changes every day. So, is it true? Does learning about habits and willpower give you willpower and mastery of your habits? The answer is no … and yes.

The further I got into this subject, the more I kept wondering when I would break through. I lost weight, got much more fit, earned a black belt, finished writing books, eliminated some bad habits, improved my relationships, and otherwise made a lot of improvements in my life … but I would still sometimes waste time I needed for more important things, show up late now and then, make bad decisions, or otherwise demonstrate to myself that whatever willpower was, I hadn’t mastered it.

So I sat down the other day and pondered everything I’ve learned since 2007 or so. If learning all about habits and willpower doesn’t give you mastery over them, what does? As near as I can figure it, it comes down to four things that stand between us and change. I think when I describe them, you’ll see why learning alone doesn’t cover it (other than the facts that habit change takes time and that just knowing about something won’t automatically change our behavior).

1. Tools and Knowledge
Here’s an area where what I’ve learned and written about here has been powerful. Mental and emotional tools can cut through a lot of habit difficulties and get us on the right path. For example, we can learn to generate confidence and enthusiasm in place of depression and hopelessness with idea repair; we can clear our minds and let go of things that bother us through meditation; and understanding mental schemas can let us get to some of the root causes of our worst behaviors.

2. Thinking
How we think, what we tell ourselves, and where we put our focus make a huge difference in how we feel and what our lives are like. We can often change our thinking using tools like the ones I mentioned, but whether it occurs naturally or has help through mental tools, our thinking itself is crucial in determining our actions and decisions.

3. Lifestyle
Nutrition, sleep, exercise, friends, social contacts, activity, surroundings, physical tools, responsibilities, family, and many more external factors can influence our internal state. Here too, I’ve learned about many useful improvements through researching and writing about the psychology of habits on this blog, whether it’s a quiet walk in green space, having just the right tool, or keeping company with people who help us become better.

4. Commitment
Here’s the tough one: we have to care. Knowing how to do something or having a theoretical goal generally doesn’t carry us very far unless we’re strongly and consistently motivated by our own emotions.

I’m not just using “commitment” as a substitute for “willpower” here, creating a circular argument. What I’m talking about isn’t making the right decisions or doing the right things, but rather consistently caring about our decisions and what the right ones are.

Commitment can come from many different places, so fortunately we can influence it. It can come from our own emotional difficulties: for instance, a person who craves attention might use that to drive excellence in music, or a person who hates conflict may learn how to be a consummate peacemaker. It can come from thinking and understanding, when we get to know ourselves better and make important connections. (It’s one thing for me to know that doughnuts aren’t good for me, but it helps me more to realize how foods like that contribute to atherosclerosis, drain my energy, and give me a headache). It can be inspired by a role model or a clear picture of the future, be shocked into us through a tragedy, be nurtured by helpful surroundings, or rest on support from friends and family. Commitment is an emotional state in which we yearn toward a goal or state of being. Without it, it doesn’t matter how we can act, because commitment directs how we do act.

Which matters … why?
The point of bringing up these four aspects of willpower or habit change is to create a simple way to look at our goals and see what’s missing.

For example, why did I lose 60 pounds or so and then stop about 15 pounds heavier than my ideal weight? After all, I have the mental tools to lose weight and know how to direct my thinking, and my lifestyle is compatible with fitness and weight loss. What happened, I believe, is that my commitment dried up. Having reached this point, I’m fairly happy (though not ecstatic) with how fit I am, and my health is very good. Losing more weight would make me look better, which would be a fine thing both in terms of my self-image and my romantic relationship, but there’s nothing about it that would affect my life expectancy or my ability to be in my relationship in the first place, whereas my old weight years ago really could affect those kinds of things. To lose more weight, I’d have to find reasons to really, really care. This might involve hanging around with extremely fit people, finding more reasons to lose the extra pounds, or working on increasing my enjoyment of fitness.

In the same way, any of the four things above can be missing in a person’s quest to change. For example, a person might passionately want to quit smoking, might live in an environment that discourages smoking, and might be beautifully focused on the problem, but if that person doesn’t have a good working approach–that is, doesn’t have the right tools–then quitting may fail time and time again.

So I invite you to do in your life what I’m doing in mine these days: if you have an important goal that you’re having trouble reaching, look at it in terms of these four factors. Do you have all the tools and knowledge you need to succeed? Are you thinking thoughts that move you toward your goal? Is your environment helping or hurting you (or both)? Are you deeply and emotionally commited, and does that commitment stay strong even when trouble comes?

So, will I ever master willpower and habits? Somehow I suspect not, but it continues to be worth trying, and I continue to push hard. Maybe in another six and a half years. Who knows? It could happen. Check back with me then.

Photo by foxypar4

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XKCD: Internal Monologue

States of mind

Today’s XKCD cartoon shows that internal commentary I talk about, and (as usual) manages to be really entertaining to boot (at least, to me, having experienced situations like this):

My favorite line in there is “I hope he doesn’t ask me what his name is.” It’s taken a real effort over the past ten years or so for me to get comfortable with admitting I don’t remember someone’s name. I’m mostly there now, though. Mostly.

Anyone wanting to do something about this kind of experience might be interested in the page on this site about Broken Ideas and Idea Repair.

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How Writing Can Help Cure Depression

Techniques

An excellent article on MedicineNet.com interviews medical professionals and therapists about using writing to cure depression. Creative writing might very well have positive effects on depression, but the kind of writing the article discusses, and the kind I recommend for working on almost any emotional or motivational issue, is journaling.

Before I go much further than this, I’ll add this disclaimer: of course not all emotional concerns can be addressed through writing and self-help. This is one tool for helping address depression, but it’s not meant to be a cure-all, something that does everything for everyone.

What can a journal accomplish for a depressed person? There appear to be a whole range of benefits:

  • Dr. Michael Rank calls journaling the “most effective and cheapest” form of self-help.
  • A journal can be used with an understanding of idea repair to help fix broken ideas. This is one of the most powerful contributions of cognitive psychology: a tool we can use to change our own thoughts and feelings from damaging to constructive.
  • A journal can create a feedback loop, which can help a person break an old habit, start a new one, or make progress with motivation in general.
  • Dr. James Pennebaker, a psychology professor at the University of Austin, reportedly has found that “writing about upsetting personal experiences for just 20 minutes at a time, over three or four days, can result in a significant drop in blood pressure and a healthier immune system.”
  • Therapist Catherine Carlo credits journaling with giving journal writers “a better sense of where they’ve been, where they are, and where they’re going,” according to the article.

In the article, Rank points out that people can feel resistance to starting a journal. This is an understandable feeling, but reversing any habit or emotional condition requires something either internal or external going in a new and not entirely comfortable direction. However, my experience writing about even very disturbing issues in my own life is that it rapidly becomes not only comfortable but actively a relief.

There are several approaches to journaling that can be useful. Carlo recommends journaling in a group. “Just having that unspoken support and encouragement gives [journal writers] courage to write about their feelings” even if the journals aren’t shared, the article quotes her as saying. Carlo also suggests envisioning yourself in a medieval castle while writing, in order to get some distance and perspective.

Recording journal entries with a tape recorder, computer, or smartphone is a viable alternative to written journaling for anyone who doesn’t like to write.

Sharing a journal with someone else can invite help and understanding. On the other hand, some journal writers may prefer to never share what they write in order to create a feeling of complete privacy about the process. When I write about something especially sensitive in my life, I go beyond even that by writing the journal entry and then immediately deleting it. I still reap all the benefits of writing the entry, even though there’s no outward trace left over when I’m done.

People who like to draw, even if only stick figures are involved, can substitute drawings for writing some of the time. While these drawings aren’t usually as clearly-communicated as words, they can sometimes be more expressive and exploratory.

Journaling can also be used to understand how we might not be using time well by logging everything we do (even down to stopping to pick up the phone or take a bathroom break), to provide insight into why we’re acting the way we are (see my article on “How To Improve Willpower Through Writing Things Down: Decision Logging“), or to create a record we can use to go back and understand parts of our lives better, after the fact.

It doesn’t have to be difficult to start journaling. If you can get yourself to sit down at a computer and open a word processor or to pick up a pen and a notebook, you can just write, with no pressure about how much or how often you’ll write, nor what you’ll write about. Journaling gives us each the choice of how to approach difficulties in our lives … and often, even the tools to overcome them.

Photo by paperbackwriter

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Finding Peace in Crazy-Making Situations

Self-motivation examples

I recently moved out of a house I was renting and am currently wrangling with my former landlord over getting my security deposit back. I’m certainly tempted to denounce him here, to list what I see as his misconduct and wrongdoings in an attempt to show you what a terrible person he is and how justified I am in being upset at him for causing me trouble over this issue. This way, however, lies madness (or at the least, unproductive angryness).

All the ingredients for crazy-making
Honestly, the issue of getting back the money I gave him in good faith is the kind of thing that can easily drive me nuts. It’s a combination of money matters plus uncertainty plus a feeling of being wronged, each of which has its own specialized cohort of broken ideas, things like “I need that money” and “He should stop trying to steal from me!” and “What if I can’t get him to play fair? Will we have to go to court? How long will that take? What kind of evidence will I have to prepare? Will the judge see it in the same light I do, or will I get screwed?” And on and on: fortune-telling, mind reading, “should” statements, magnification, and more broken ideas (see “All About Broken Ideas and Idea Repair“). It’s an ideal formula for driving me up the wall, in recent history running a close second to similar problems with the same landlord while we were still living in the house he owned. (It’s bad enough having someone you feel is untrustworthy is holding onto your money; it’s that much worse to have such a person holding onto your money and in charge of the building in which you and your family live.)

However, this issue is not driving me crazy. While I certainly haven’t quashed every last bit of anxiety about it, it isn’t keeping me awake at night and preventing me from focusing during the day or making me unhappy–nor should it bother me, except to the extent that I may need that to do the things I need to do with the situation. What tactics have I learned that are helping keep me sane?

1. Dig out the broken ideas, and keeping digging
Broken ideas are thoughts that force us deeper and deeper into negative emotions.  To clear my mind, I have to witness what I’m thinking, catch the problem thoughts in the act, and then replace them with more useful thoughts.

For instance,

“He’s going to steal my money!”

turns into

“He may or may not take money that I don’t think he should have.” (That’s a twofer: not trying to predict the future and not labeling the situation in a way that makes it sound as bad as possible.)

For me, that rephrasing gives an immediate–though partial–relief. The problem then is that the broken ideas keep cropping up and continue to need to be repaired. The good news is that the more I do this, the sparser and sparser those thoughts become.

2. Stop making my happiness conditional on outside situations
I don’t know if there’s anyone in the world who always gets everything they want, but somehow I suspect even a person like that wouldn’t always be happy. Since sometimes things are going to go my way and sometimes they aren’t, and since making my happiness dependent on something that might or might not happen in the future postpones that happiness indefinitely, it would be smart for me to be happy with whatever I have at the moment–even if discomfort, deprivation, or injustice are involved. It worked for me last night at Taekwondo practice when I was holding a stance and beginning to ache and feel tired from it; it also worked for me this morning when I reminded myself that my happiness doesn’t need to be a hostage to whether or not I get my full security deposit back.

3. Relax, stretch, meditate, move, breathe
Anxiety and stress can accumulate physically in the form of tense muscles, aches, cramped posture, and the like. When I remember to let go physically and mentally, take short walks (see “The Benefits of Quick, Easy, Pleasant Exercise“), breathe deeply, meditate (see “Strengthen Willpower Through Meditation“), and consciously relax my muscles, I begin to feel better both physically and emotionally.

Photo by notsogoodphotography

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The Two Ways to Strengthen Willpower: Focus and Ease

Habits

The idea of willpower is certainly appealing: I imagine how I want to be; compare that to how I am; plot a course between the two; and somehow have the strength to follow it.

Since virtually everyone (I’m tempted to say “everyone,” but since I haven’t been introduced to everyone I’m thinking that would be presumptuous) has problems with willpower sometimes, I suspect that we can all agree that the idea of a reservoir of strength is neither very attractive or very useful. After all, if willpower is just something we have or don’t, then clearly all of us (or at least, everyone I know) doesn’t have enough. If, on the other hand, it has to do with actions we can easily take, then we’re in luck: we can have more of it. As you can guess, I don’t think much of the “reservoir” theory.

As to actions, most willpower seems to come from two kinds of those: focusing attention and making good choices easier.

Focus
There are any number of ways to use focus to make progress: we can envision goals (see “Motivation through visualization: the power of daydreams“), create feedback loops (see “How Feedback Loops Maintain Self-Motivation“), pay attention to the attractive aspects of things we want to do or unattractive aspects of things we want to avoid (see “Tools for Immediate Motivation: Attraction and Distraction“), moderate our moods through tools like meditation (see “Strengthen Willpower Through Meditation“) and idea repair (see “All About Broken Ideas and Idea Repair“), schedule, note on task lists, or mentally picture ourselves doing behaviors that will help us.

The array of tools we have to build willpower, actually, is enormous. All these tools that deal with focus, however, come down to the same kinds of things: raising our own awareness about what we want to do and/or putting ourselves in a mindset to be more inclined to do them.

Ease
The other major category of tools for building willpower has to do with making constructive action easier. For example, scheduling time to go running three days a week after work so that there will be no conflicts, setting out running clothes in the morning, getting good running shoes, and having a treadmill to use in bad weather all contribute to making running easier. If I want to make running a habit, then any barrier I remove to running means less effort I have to put in to run, which in turn means that I’ll be able to successfully run more of the time.

Ease often has to do with preparation and planning. Often we’re a lot less likely to tackle things we want to do if we find we don’t have what we need or if we’re having trouble blocking out the time. Preparation and planning get these complications out of the way and lessen the amount of focus and effort needed to stay the course.

Commitment is another way to encourage ease in building habits. By commitment, I mean reconciling ourselves to the consequences of what we need to do, then thinking, talking, and acting accordingly. Some examples: telling people (firmly) when we won’t be available because our goal requires us to be doing something, reminding ourselves that it’s all right to use time or resources in pursuit of a goal, associating with other people who have the same or similar goals, and not letting ourselves foster broken ideas about what we need to do to make progress.

The short question
The short question, then, that helps us align with our own goals, is this: “What can I do to focus better or make things easier?” Even if a particular approach isn’t working out, this kind of question can often point to other approaches that will. Or, as a last resort, you could always come here and start digging into past posts. Reading things here can be used to procrastinate, but if you find anything that helps you as you go forward, you get to chalk it up to “useful research” instead.

Photo by Anirudh Koul

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Joy and Misery for Writers

Writing

In response to my 2009 post “7 Key Self-Motivation Strategies for Writers,” Ankush commented about his own experiences applying some of the ideas in the article and then asks some thorny questions about where we go from there. One of those questions was this, which applies as well to many other areas of life as it does to writing:

Will I ever 100% enjoy writing or will it always be a cold, suffocating process to start and finish a piece?

Having talked with many dozens (possibly hundreds) of successful and aspiring writers about their process, it seems clear to me that some writers find writing is very hard work and often unpleasant; others find it to be work like any other work; and yet others find it to be loads of fun, even when it’s difficult. I know of successful writers in all three categories: none is an absolute barrier to success (though I know which approach I prefer).

Happiness vs. pleasure
The first thing to know is that happiness comes from fulfillment or satisfaction, not necessarily pleasure per se (see “The Difference Between Pleasure and Happiness“). A lot of activities engage us even when they don’t offer immediate pleasure, everything from performing open heart surgery to watching horror movies, from running a marathon to playing a video game (see “A Surprising Source of Insight into Self-Motivation: Video Games“). We get engaged in these things because of larger goals: healing people, accomplishing something difficult, being healthy, or connecting emotionally with something we see. It’s these meanings that make our actions worthwhile even when they’re not always pleasant to experience.

A sense of rightness
This works the way it does partly because happiness has a lot to do with a sense of rightness. We might call this “pride” in the sense of our images of ourselves matching our visions for what we want to be. For instance, if I find out that someone has been entertained or helped by something I wrote, then my view of myself as an effective writer matches my aspiration to be an effective writer: all feels right with the world.

Note that we’re not talking about pride in terms of arrogance or a sense of superiority: we’re talking about something more akin to what we can sometimes feel through meditation (see “Strengthen Willpower Through Meditation“). If I am meditating and I successfully let go of all of my expectations and preoccupations, even if only for a few moments, then suddenly there is nothing I want or need that I don’t have. Strangely, you can get a very similar feeling by either reaching your goals or by letting go of them. Of course, if we’d like to live a life in which we get things done, then both learning to let go of things that don’t truly matter and pushing hard to get to goals that really do matter need to fit into the equation. Getting wrapped up in too many things drags us down, and getting wrapped up in too little leaves us without an anchor.

So in a larger sense, writing (or anything else difficult that’s worth doing) is going to feel good to us to the extent that we feel like we’re doing a good job at it. This is where we come to some potentially practical ideas, because how we feel about things has a great deal to do with what we tell ourselves about those things, our internal commentary. To really delve into this idea and to understand it well enough to start turning your own moods around at will, check out “All About Broken Ideas and Idea Repair.”

Internal commentary in a nutshell
If you decide not to read that material just now, the brief explanation is this: we act as commentators on our own lives, often without realizing it. Whenever we do something or think something or experience something, we normally make judgments about that and then relay those judgments to ourselves. For instance, someone might cut me off in traffic and come close to causing an accident. I could experience this a lot of different ways, and how I experience it will change how I feel. I might think

  • That moron shouldn’t be driving!
  • Wow, that was close. I’m glad I’m OK.
  • Damn, these people come out of nowhere–there’s no way to be safe on the roads!
  • Yeah, that’s exactly how my day has been going.
  • I’m a much better driver than that guy!

I might feel proud, scared, angry, resentful, worried, relieved, or any number of other things, and how I feel is dictated in large part (though not entirely) by how I think about the situation. So too with my writing. I might write 250 words in a day and be proud that I wrote at all, annoyed that I wrote so little, delighted that I wrote something that is meaningful, despondent that what I wrote wasn’t better, and so on.

Right vision and action to match
Accordingly, it helps to have a vision of writing that you care about and can live up to–and then to pursue that vision. If you want to get more pages turned out, focus on setting daily word count goals. If you want your writing to be better, mix your writing with reading about writing, getting feedback, and critiquing other people’s work. If you want to get published more, send out more of your work. As long as you working hard on a goal that’s important to you and giving yourself credit for that work, you’re likely to feel relatively happy about what you’re doing. And of course it’s much easier to write a lot and to care about your writing if writing is a direct source of happiness for you.

To put it another way, if you’re spending your writing time beating yourself up about how bad your writing is or fretting about how slowly the novel is progressing, it will be hard to enjoy the process. If on the other hand you’re putting time and effort into aspects of writing that are important to you and giving yourself credit for doing so, it will be hard not to enjoy the process.

Don’t forget about flow
One last point about enjoyment and writing: while you can’t always be in flow (see “Flow: What It Feels Like to Be Perfectly Motivated” and “Some Steps for Getting into a State of Flow“), when you can achieve that state, you’ll be doing your best work and absolutely rapt.

Photo by redcargurl

PS – There’s more to say on other points Ankush brought up about knowing what to write and about genre versus literary writing, and I’m hoping to address those points in other posts in the near future.

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Why Do Different People Like Different Things?

Habits

The answer to why different people like different things might seem obvious: people are just different; their brains are just wired differently. And certainly there’s a lot to that, especially with evaluating complicated things like novels or other people’s personalities. But what about our reaction to new experiences that don’t fit into predefined preference categories for us–a completely new food, say, or a style of clothing, or a different kind of music? Do we learn these preferences, are they innate, or do we somehow choose them? And if we choose them, why do we make the choices we do?

Here’s a recent, trivial example from my own life: I’ve never liked black jelly beans, although I would eat them from time to time if they came mixed in with fruit-flavored jelly beans. But the other day my girlfriend, whom I admire a lot and whose tastes are so close to mine that we usually order each other’s first or second choices in restaurants, said that she loved black jelly beans.

The next time I ate a black jelly bean, I had this in mind–and it was delicious. I don’t even mean that I just had happy thoughts while eating it and enjoyed those: I mean that my sensory experience of the jelly bean was more pleasurable.

It’s a small change, something that was close to neutral for me became mildly pleasurable–but it’s interesting that the only thing that altered to effect that change was my attitude toward black jelly beans. Their chemistry and my physiology were unaltered. How much of what we like is based on what we’re thinking as we experience it?

Professor Jane Wardle of Cancer Research UK has studied one aspect of this question through children’s eating preferences, reportedly concluding that while children’s tastes in meat and fish seemed to be mostly inherited, tastes in other kinds of foods had much more to do with environment. Unless our taste buds themselves change in response to environment (which of course might be a possibility), our own thinking seems to determine a lot about our likes and dislikes.

All of which may be a huge yawn to you. If our likes are influenced by our thinking, so what? But there’s a useful lesson here: if our likes are influenced by our thinking, and if we can change our own thinking patterns by conscious choice (which we can–for instance, see articles on this site on the subject of idea repair), then apparently we can alter some of what we like and don’t like by conscious choice.

I don’t know how far this conscious influence of likes and dislikes can go, but consider the applications: enjoying a job more, preferring healthier foods, or having an easier time with unpleasant but necessary tasks. Influencing our own likes–perhaps through approaching an experience with an unusually open mindset and being willing to interpret sensory input as pleasurable whenever possible–can (it would seem) lead to greater happiness, productivity, and health.

In a way this is just another perspective on how thoughts influence emotions, and I don’t know whether for you it will be a particularly useful one or not. For me, though, a whole lot more delicious jellybeans just came into existence, and that’s not a bad thing.

Photo by Grim…

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Cures for Sadness, Part I: Ideas and People

Handling negative emotions

Stuck in sadness
In his classic book Emotional Intelligence, Dr. Daniel Goleman describes one of the most common responses to sadness: rumination. Something happens; we get sad; and then that sadness encourages us to sit and think the situation over, reliving it or elaborating on it or beating ourselves up. These kinds of rumination tend to keep the sadness going.

Being sad can actually be a helpful in some circumstances, as described in “The Benefits of Feeling Bad.” For instance, if I’m sad because I’ve done something unkind to a friend so that the friend is now upset with me, ruminating may help me understand where I went wrong and how I can handle things differently next time. It can also help me formulate an apology and convince my friend that I’m truly sorry.

In many situations, though, being stuck in sadness is simply painful. When this is the case, according to the research Goleman cites and much other research that has come out since he wrote the book, we have several options for finding our way out of sadness.

Thinking our way out
One of the most powerful means of getting out of any kind of negative emotion, a mainstay of cognitive therapies, is using idea repair (officially known as “cognitive restructuring”): see “All About Broken Ideas and Idea Repair.” With this approach we eavesdrop on our own thoughts, find out what it is we’re doing to make ourselves sadder, and change our thinking to relieve that pressure.

Socialization vs. sadness
Another method–one you’ve probably used on yourself or on a friend–is social time. According to research, says Goleman, sad or depressed people who spend time with people they enjoy very often experience a big boost in mood. The barrier here is that a sad or depressed person often avoids the company of others, and activities don’t sound as appealing when a person’s mood is low. This makes friends who are willing to drag you out to have fun when you’re down very valuable.

Without going into great detail, a few of the reasons social time improves mood are:

  • Moods tend to be contagious, so a single sad person in a group of happy people has a good chance of being influenced by the mood of the others.
  • A person who is out in a group is likely to make a greater effort not to act depressed, and acting out a mood is a good way of encouraging that mood. For instance, the act of smiling tends to make people happier even if the smile is completely fake.
  • In a group, broken ideas are more likely to be challenged and functional ideas more likely to be offered as replacements.

In further articles in this series, I’ll talk about other techniques for trumping sadness.

Photo by Beni Ishaque Luthor

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To Make Better Choices, Create a Protocol

Strategies and goals

Willpower as a series of choices
The real challenge of willpower often comes down to making good choices–a lot of them. One of the best ways to make a good choice is to come to a decision before you actually need to act: for instance, making firm plans to start cleaning out the closet at 3:00pm (ideally with an alarm or reminder in place) instead of coming to an opportunity to start and deciding between that and watching TV; or planning and packing meals for the day rather than choosing something to eat after you’re already hungry.

But for the choices that come up without planning, there are many other tools we can use. As opportunities or temptations come up, we can take time to envision accomplishing a current goal (visualization), focus on immediate positive benefits of a good choice, look for broken ideas, use distraction to steer away from a temptation, or focus on the mechanical steps of  acting well (for instance, see my post called “Just Don’t It“)–to name a few techniques.

Seizing the moment
What’s tricky about this is that bringing these tactics to mind takes special focus and a little time, commodities that are often in short supply when there’s an immediate choice to be made. If we wait to figure out what we can do about the situation, often by the time we are recollecting how to detect broken ideas or have come up with a good visualization to use, the opportunity has passed, the doughnut is already being eaten, or the procrastination has already begun.

The solution to this is to develop a protocol, a set of steps to follow every time you possibly can when a choice comes up that requires willpower.

How to create a protocol for choices
A protocol is short list of pithy reminders about willpower tactics: 3 to 4 items is good. It should contain the techniques you think have the best chance of getting you on track on short notice, summarized in a way you can memorize and bring to mind immediately when a situation comes up.

Once you think of your protocol, don’t hesitate: apply the first technique. If that gets you to the good choice you want to make you’re all set, but if it doesn’t seem to be working, switch to the second technique. No single technique is likely to work all the time, which is why having several already thought out is so powerful. Having too many, though, begins to get difficult to remember and hard to apply. Your protocol can swap out elements over time, but try not to overload it.

It can help to include both high-power techniques that require some time and attention and quick-draw techniques that you can apply immediately, since you want to have the big guns available but may not always have the time to deploy them.

Some examples
Protocol elements should be stated in a positive, encouraging, brief way. They should always be directed to plug into your motivation and long-term happiness and never to inspire guilt or to try to force yourself to do something you know you don’t want to do. Rather, these elements should redirect your thinking so that your actual desires in the moment change to make you want to pursue the best choice. There are many such techniques on this site. Here are a few examples. The terms in quotes are the kind of thing you might memorize, while the rest is just explanation. Your protocol elements might be much more specific to your goal than these general examples.

  • “What am I thinking?” – Search for broken ideas and repair them: see “All About Broken Ideas and Idea Repair
  • “Just go ahead” – Focus on the mechanical steps of doing the thing you want to do. If the task at hand is making a telephone call you’ve been avoiding, go through the moment-to-moment tasks of looking up the telephone number and dialing each digit instead of trying to get up enthusiasm. If it’s to stop eating, focus on moving your dishes to the sink, closing food containers, putting things away, washing up, walking into the next room, etc.
  • “Picture finishing it” – Use visualization to get some immediate happiness out of a long-term goal.
  • “Write it out” – Use a feedback loop to reorient yourself.

There are many more techniques you could use in a protocol, and I’ll see if I can’t get together a reference page of them to help. In the mean time, try browsing the complete post listing for this site, where you’ll find articles on a wide variety of willpower tools.

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Anger: Keeping Your Cool with Preparation and Self-Awareness

Handling negative emotions

This is the second article in a series on anger. The first article was Monday’s “Anger: Does Venting Help or Just Make It Worse?

One of the tricky things about dealing with anger is that our immediate mental response system for dealing with threats–run by a primitive part of the brain called the amygdala–doesn’t wait for us to understand what’s going on. This is pretty reasonable: if you’re a primitive human being and you’re being attacked by a Smilodon, you don’t want to be thinking about whether to react or not: you want to be immediately jabbing with your spear or running away (fight or flight). This is why people can be startled even by things that they know intellectually aren’t dangerous, like a loud noise in a carnival haunted house.

But Smilodons are extinct these days, and while the fast-track fight or flight response is still useful sometimes, as when we jump out of the way of a falling object, at other times anger and fear responses are very bad news. For instance, if someone is scared or upset and says something ill-considered to us, we may have a hard time not immediately responding in kind and turning a offhand comment into an argument.

Yet we do have the power to override our amygdala-driven gut reactions, and two of our best weapons in this fight are preparation and self-awareness.

Preparation in this case means putting ourselves in a mood to defuse instead of magnify negative feelings. One of the best ways to do this, notes Daniel Goleman in his book Emotional Intelligence, is to look at people toward whom you may be feeling angry “with a more charitable line of thought,” which “tempers anger with mercy, or at least an open mind, short-circuiting the buildup of rage.” In other words, thinking about what circumstances may be driving people to do things we don’t like rather than focusing on our mental condemnation of those people for doing those things creates an opportunity for compassion and keeping our cool.

As for self-awareness, this is an approach I’ve praised in other articles, such as “Mindfulness and Deer Flies.” Being aware of our own emotions gives us the opportunity to do something about a situation using our thoughts, for instance by noticing and repairing broken ideas. Lack of self-awareness–that is, acting without considering why we’re acting or what we’re feeling–closes off that option to us completely. When we’re not aware of our own emotions, we are mostly slaves to our own emotional habits.

This series will continue in the next week or two with more information about and strategies for dealing with anger.

Photo by euthman

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