Much of what passes for thinking amounts to little more than jumping to conclusions based on limited information or evidence. Here’s an example of how that can keep you from achieving your goals.
One of my clients was working on lowering her blood glucose level. Her aim was to lower her A1c to a specific number, so she created a goal action plan to help her do it. She was following her plan just fine until she purchased a kit from a drugstore to do a home test and got a result that was better than the one she was aiming for.
Her brain jumped to the conclusion that she had achieved her goal. As a result, she pretty much stopped following her plan. But when she got her official A1c test results a few weeks later, the number was not as low as the one she’d gotten from her home test.
Her brain then jumped to the conclusion that she had failed—not just in following her specific A1c goal action plan, but also in doing the Goals, Habits & Intentions coursework in general.
So I was surprised to learn that the official A1c result that had disappointed her was lower than the previous test result. And the previous test number was lower than the number at the beginning of the year. From the first test to the third test, she had lowered her A1c by 1.6 points! By any objective measure, that’s a significant success. Instead of acknowledging it as such and celebrating it, however, she didn’t even recognize it!
Engage System 2
I suggested she engage System 2 by making a visual chart to track her A1c numbers over the course of the year and put it in a prominent location so the irrefutable evidence of her success would be harder to ignore.
Jumping to conclusions on the basis of the limited information provided to us by our brain or by external sources is a problem we face daily. Remember that System 1 thinking is focused entirely on the short term. It doesn’t matter whether the conclusion it jumps to is “good” or “bad.” Our reaction tends to be the same: we stop doing whatever we were doing without objectively evaluating our progress or methods.
If the conclusion is “good,” we stop because we think we’ve achieved our goal and don’t need to continue working toward it, which is appropriate when you actually do achieve a goal. But in many cases, a goal is a means to the end of developing a desirable habit. We need to keep up the behavior if we want to get the full benefit. In the area of health and wellness, for example, it’s counterproductive to stop doing the things that make you feel good as soon as you begin feeling good.
If the conclusion is “bad,” we tend to use it as evidence either that something’s wrong with us (we’re lazy or lack self-control, etc.) or that our attempts are pointless. Instead of evaluating what might have gone wrong and engaging System 2 to make adjustments, we find it easier to just chuck the whole thing.
Can you relate to some aspect of my client’s experience? I sure can! But while jumping to conclusions can lead to making mistakes or questionable decisions, it can also provide us with valuable insight and enhance our creativity and problem solving. Be sure to check out the next newsletter for more on jumping to conclusions, and if you’re in the area and able to attend, please join us for the MONTHLY MEETING OF THE MIND (& BRAIN).