Blog on mind and brain research and advice

How Quickly Can You Turn Success into Failure?

September 18, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell 4 Comments

We don’t have to make a point of looking for what isn’t working or the places where we haven’t lived up to our expectations. Our brain automatically notices those things and points them out to us. It’s wired to pay more attention to negative events than to positive ones. That’s because while positive events may be extremely pleasurable and possibly even good for us, negative events could kill us or put us in grave danger. At least that’s how the unconscious part of the brain (System 1) perceives them. This automatic tendency is so universal it has a name: the negativity bias.

In and of itself, having a brain that points out what isn’t working or measures how far we missed the mark isn’t a bad thing. That kind of information is potentially very useful. It’s the way we over-value and respond to negative information that gets us into trouble. Because we have a brain that is primed to notice the negative, it’s easy for us to overlook the positive altogether, even when there’s plenty of positive for the eye to behold.

When Good Isn’t Good Enough to Qualify

Several of my clients are addressing health-related issues in my Goals, Habits & Intentions course. They have either set long-term goals to achieve specific results in terms of such things as diet and exercise or they are working on changing or creating habits that support the level of health and well-being they want to achieve.

One person who has diabetes is working on lowering her blood glucose level (which is measured by a test called the A1c). She decided to aim for lowering her A1c to a specific number and created a goal action plan to help her do that. 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.

At that point, she pretty much stopped following her plan. But when she got her official A1c test results back from the lab a few weeks later, they were disappointing. The number was not as low as the one she’d gotten from her home test. Her view of the situation was that she had failed—not just in continuing to follow that specific goal action plan, but in doing the Goals, Habits & Intentions coursework.

So I was surprised to learn that her A1c result was lower than it had been the last time she was tested. And the number last time she was tested was lower than it had been 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 celebrating it, however, she discounted it. Her successful results were a failure in her own eyes because they weren’t quite as amazing as she’d thought they would be.

I suggested she make a visual chart that tracked her A1c numbers over the course of this year and put it up in a prominent location so the irrefutable evidence of her success would be harder to ignore.

The Default Response

This is a pernicious problem we all face: jumping to conclusions about the information provided to us by our brain and by external sources. It can happen at either end of the scale (“good” news or “bad” news), but the interesting thing is that the result of both good news and bad news is often the same: we stop whatever it is we were doing. And the culprit in both cases is System 1 thinking, which is focused entirely on the short term.

If the news is “good,” we stop because we think we achieved our goal so we don’t need to continue working toward it. That makes a certain amount of sense because that’s what you do when you actually achieve a goal. But in a lot of cases we need to set up a goal in order to change or start a habit so we can maintain our success. This is especially important in the area of health and wellness. If we want to maintain long-term changes, we can’t stop doing the things that are making us healthier. Instead, we need to turn them into habits. (As an aside, I read a blog post a couple of years ago by someone who set out to develop a 30-day habit of strength training. After the 30 days he decided he had been successful and didn’t need to do it any longer.)

If the news is “bad,” we use it as evidence of our poor character (lack of self-control, powerlessness, etc.) and of the pointlessness of our attempts. Why bother? Nothing works, anyway. The automatic tendency isn’t to evaluate what might have gone wrong, but to chuck the whole thing, thus guaranteeing failure and maybe even overlooking evidence of success.

Celebrate Success!

I used to be able to count on getting in several workouts at the gym each week. And I loved it. But at the beginning of this year, my daily schedule went bonkers and has stayed that way. After months of attempting to fit the gym into my new schedule, I traded the gym for walking every day because I can break walking into smaller segments of time and fit them into the breaks between classes and appointments. As September approached, I decided it was time to exchange a couple of days of walking each week for using the treadmill at the gym.

I went to the gym at the beginning of the first week, loved it, and thought I could probably get in not just one more visit but two that week. Nevertheless, I managed only the one visit. The same thing happened the next week and then the week after that. I noticed I had failed to follow through on my original intention. I noticed the impulse to interpret my once-a-week gym visits as a failure. But I also acknowledged I really hadn’t had an opportunity to get in more time at the gym, and I’d kept up my walking and even increased it. I reminded myself that baby steps and perseverance are an almost unbeatable combination. At the end of three weeks, I looked at the notations on my calendar and realized I’d gotten in three more workouts on the treadmill than I would have if I hadn’t set an intention.

In order to celebrate success, we have to notice it, which means not having a knee-jerk reaction to every realization we haven’t met or exceeded our expectations. The game is only over when we stop playing—and that is largely up to us.

When have you turned a success into a failure? What do you think you could do to change your perspective in those kinds of situations?

Are You Chasing Squirrels?

September 11, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell 7 Comments

If a dog spots a squirrel, it will automatically chase the squirrel. The dog may have been involved in some other activity, but once a squirrel arrives on the scene, the dog’s attention is redirected to chasing it. Dogs don’t have to be trained to chase squirrels. They have to be trained to not chase them.

In regard to chasing the squirrely things that capture our immediate attention, humans are not very different from dogs. Chasing is the default response to squirrels—be they real or metaphorical. We don’t have to be trained to chase those ideas or objects or trivial pursuits. We have to be trained to not chase them.

One of my clients has created a goal action plan to clear away the accumulated clutter in her home so the house can be cleaned before her best friend comes to visit next month. She’s done a good job of identifying both the desired outcome and all the steps that need to be taken, and she’s been able to check some items off the list.

But last week she reported that instead of proceeding to the next step, she spent several days rearranging the furniture in her living room. Rearranging things, especially furniture, is something she finds highly gratifying. Indeed, engaging in this kind of activity makes her feel good because it provides her with hits of dopamine. Given an opportunity to chase squirrels (rearrange furniture) or proceed with clearing clutter, her automatic response will probably always be to go after the squirrels.

As a result of the diversion, she fell behind on her goal action plan, and now she’s anxious about being able to finish everything in time. Nevertheless, an opportunity to plan a fun new trip just presented itself, and she has begun chasing after that squirrel.

Other members of the class she’s in didn’t understand why there was anything wrong with taking time to rearrange the furniture as long as she felt good as a result of doing it. And although she was aware of how chasing that squirrel had negatively impacted her, her awareness didn’t carry over to the next squirrel that presented itself (planning the new trip).

We’re Wired to Chase Squirrels

She’s hardly unique in her compulsion to chase squirrels. We all do it, and we all rationalize it, too. We have great, sometimes elaborate, explanations and justifications for why chasing some particular squirrel was absolutely, positively essential at the time we went after it. We don’t all chase the same squirrels, but most of the time our explanations for why we’re chasing our particular cute, furry rodents are highly fictionalized. So I give her kudos for paying attention and recognizing the cost.

We’re wired to respond to those things that will gratify us right now, not the things that have long-term payoffs. And we’re wired to do what makes us feel good. In other words, we’re programmed to chase squirrels, but that doesn’t mean we should just go ahead and do it. Chasing squirrels can get in the way of all kinds of things, including relationships, careers, projects, health, and both medium- and long-term goals. If we can’t resist the attraction, we’re at the mercy of whatever squirrel happens to shows up in our neighborhood. Squirrels are hardest to resist when System 2 is depleted. And if we aren’t committed to something that’s both compelling and urgent, the squirrels will get us every time.

But if we are focused on something bigger, farther down the road, that’s more satisfying and meaningful than the quick hit of dopamine we get from immediate gratification, we need to stop the compulsive squirrel chasing. To do that, we can apply the same techniques to train ourselves to follow through on our goal, habit, or project as we would to train a dog to stop behaving badly: repetition, persistence, and treats (rewards) for good behavior.

It can be helpful to identify the squirrels that are most likely to attract our attention so we can set some guidelines or limits as to when and how we want to respond to them. It really does come down to the sometimes painful fact that we can have what really matters to is or we can have the freedom to not have it, but we can’t have both.

What kind of squirrels do you find impossible to resist? And how do you resist them (when you do)?

Brain Dead: Is Your Mind Temporarily Offline?

September 4, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Your brain has two systems for processing the stimuli and experiences of your life and determining how you act upon them.

Conscious: The processing system you’re aware of is called System 2. It is logical and intentional and sometimes referred to as “true reasoning.” (A formal outline is a good example.) It is also slow, limited, and easily depleted. It processes about 40 bits of information at a time.

Unconscious: The processing system you’re not aware of is called System 1. It is associative, which means it sees patterns and connects dots. (A mindmap is a good example.) It is fast, vast, and always on. It processes about 11,000,000 bits of information at a time.

If System 1 were to go offline, you would, too. Game over! But you can still function when System 2 is temporarily offline, even for long periods of time, such as when you’re asleep. So when you think or talk about being temporarily brain dead, you’re talking about exhausting System 2 attention.

If you’re in good health, there’s not much you can do to tax or exhaust the capacity of System 1—and there are things you can do to enhance its functioning. However, your supply of System 2 attention is always limited, and anything that occupies your working memory reduces it. Some examples of things that tax System 2 attention are:

Physical illness (even minor), injury, or lack of sleep
Making numerous trivial decisions throughout the day
Stress, anxiety, and worry
Exercising will power (forcing yourself to do something you don’t want to do or to not do something you do want to do)
Monitoring your behavior
Monitoring your environment if it is new or you consider it unsafe
Learning something new, traveling an unfamiliar route, etc.
Completing a complex computation
Trying to tune out distractions
A long period of concentrated or focused attention
Trying to remember dates, numbers, or unrelated facts
Listening to me talk

Since System 1 is fast, vast, always on, and has an answer for almost everything—and since you don’t need System 2 attention for most of what you do when you’re awake—what’s the big deal if you run out of System 2 attention from time to time?

Three Categories of Errors

Optimally, the two systems work together, and neither type of processing is superior. However, System 1 is more useful in some situations, while System 2 is not only more useful but also required in other situations.

System 1 is pretty good at what it does because its models of familiar situations are accurate so its short-term predictions tend to be accurate. But that’s not always the case. System 1 sacrifices accuracy for speed, meaning it jumps to conclusions. It also has biases and is prone to making logical errors.

One of System 2’s jobs is to detect System 1’s errors and adjust course by overriding System 1’s impulses. As Daniel Kahneman says in Thinking, Fast and Slow:

There are vital tasks that only System 2 can perform because they require effort and acts of self-control in which the intuitions and impulses of System 1 are overcome.

Bear in mind that System 1 is not rational. If System 2 is depleted and can’t veto or modify the non-rational impulses of System 1, those impulses then turn into actions (or speech).

There are three categories of errors you tend to make when System 2 is depleted.

Logical Errors

System 1 thinking uses shortcuts. System 2 thinking takes the long (logical/linear) way home. So when you’re out of System 2 attention, you’re more prone to making mistakes in anything that requires logical, linear thinking. Errors of intuitive thought can be difficult for System 2 to catch on a good day. When System 2 is offline, you automatically assume them to be correct. As a result:

You will have trouble making, following, or checking the validity of a complex logical argument. You’ll be more likely to be led by the cognitive biases and distortions System 1 uses because they don’t require any effort and give you a comforting sense of cognitive ease.

You will have difficulty comparing the features of two items for overall value. If you have to make a choice, you’ll be more likely to go with what intuitively feels right or the item that has some emotionally compelling attribute (it reminds you of the one your mother had, for example, or reminds you of your mother).

You will be more gullible. You’ll be more likely to believe things you wouldn’t otherwise believe or be persuaded by empty messages, such as in commercials. System 2 is the skeptic, so the best time for someone to take advantage of you is when it is offline.

Intention or Response Errors

System 1 continuously picks up on cues and triggers in your environment to determine what situation you’re in and to predict what’s next. Any deviation from the norm requires System 2 attention. If it isn’t available, you’re likely to do not what you intended to do but whatever is normal for you in that situation. And without System 2 attention, you’re much more likely to respond automatically (habitually) to the stimulus (cue or trigger).

System 2 is in charge of self-control, continuously monitoring your behavior, keeping you polite, for example, when you’re angry. In the heat of the moment, when you’re out of System 2 attention, you’re much less likely to be able to suppress your immediate emotional reactions to people and situations.

System 1 has an answer for almost everything. But when it encounters a surprising situation (something it hasn’t previously encountered or that is unusual in that situation), it notifies System 2. You don’t need System 2 attention to drive a familiar route, but if you encounter an obstacle along that route, you need System 2 to figure out what it is and to respond appropriately to it.

System 2 is also in charge of will power. If you are in the process of trying to stop doing something you habitually do (such as raiding the refrigerator in the evening), you need System 2 to belay the impulse from System 1 to see if there’s more pie. Without System 2, you’re more likely to give in, look for the pie…and eat it.

You need System 2 if you want to take a different route from your usual one or make an extra stop you don’t normally make. Without adequate System 2 attention, you’re likely to find yourself taking the usual route and forgetting to make that stop.

Gatekeeping Errors

We all have biases, whether or not we’re aware of them and whether or not we want to admit it. While it’s easy to spot overt biases and prejudices in other people, most of your own biases are hidden even from you. In the case of biases toward specific groups of people, you’ve likely come to a reasoned conclusion they’re wrong and have chosen not to think about and treat other people based on stereotypes. But that doesn’t mean the biases have disappeared. They’re still part of System 1’s associative processing operations. It’s just that when System 1 suggests a biased response to System 2, System 2 normally overrides it. Per Daniel Kahneman:

Conflict between an automatic reaction (System 1) and an intention to control it (System 2) is common in our lives.

When System 2 is depleted, there is no one at the gate to keep the biased or prejudiced responses from getting through. You may simply have a biased thought. You may say something in the presence of others that you wouldn’t normally say. Or you may respond to another person based on a group stereotype. The thought, comment, or behavior may be something you later regret. If you were to claim it doesn’t represent what you believe or the way you really feel or think, you’d most likely be right.

But when you see a blatant expression of bias or prejudice in someone else—especially a celebrity—you might have a different reaction. You might assume their true colors are showing. We think that what we see in other people when their guard is down and they’re pushed or stressed reveals the truth about them. But the actual truth is that to the extent we have any civility at all, it’s because System 2 maintains it. Without System 2 you and I would have no ability to question our biases or prejudices, no ability to come to reasoned conclusions about them, and no ability to monitor and veto System 1’s automatic reactions.

Conclusion

It isn’t always necessary, advisable, or even possible to override System 1. But when you deplete System 2, you can’t override it even when you want or need to. Without System 2, you can’t think straight (logically and linearly). So:

Don’t try to make important decisions of any kind when you feel brain dead.
Don’t assume you’ll feel or think the same way about something the next day as you do when you’re stressed, sick, just completed your annual tax return, or have recently fallen in love.
Don’t stay up late to watch the QVC channel unless you have a lot of money you’re trying to unload.
Don’t keep pie around if you’re trying not to eat it.
Don’t get into debates about complex issues after you’ve had a few beers.
Don’t tax your working memory with details you can keep track of some other way.
Don’t take System 2’s censoring of your biases and prejudices for granted. And don’t assume other people’s mental lapses reveal deep-seated truths about them.

Are You Living the Good Life?

August 28, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Does living “the good life” mean living a happy life? Or does it mean living a meaningful life? Although happiness and meaning correlate positively, as the researchers put it—or at least overlap to some extent—they are not the same thing and in some cases they represent two entirely different paths.

The concept of “the good life” is often credited to Aristotle, although there was considerable debate among the Greeks as to exactly what constituted a good life.

Aristotle thought the good life included virtue and excellence of character, along with health, wealth, and beauty. His view fits somewhere in between the Stoics, who believed virtue was sufficient, and Epicurus, who believed the good life was strictly one of pleasure.

The Greeks had a word for happiness, which they considered to be an important element of the good life. Eudaemonia has several possible translations, including “human flourishing” or “good spirit.” But what does that mean?

For most people today, the concept of the good life has come to represent the life one wants to, or would prefer to, live. For some, that’s a life of pleasure, but not for all. Whatever its components, the good life is something to strive for, wish for, or hope to achieve. Interestingly, however, no matter how we define it, or how well off we are, the good life is persistently difficult to attain.

When people are dissatisfied with their lives, their dissatisfaction seems to be the starting point for identifying what a good life would look like and then going after it. But how you go about pursuing the good life depends on what you think the solution to your dissatisfaction might be: happiness or meaningfulness.

The Pursuit of Happiness vs. the Pursuit of Meaningfulness

Quite a bit of research has been conducted to determine how people who pursue happiness actually feel and how people who pursue meaningfulness actually feel. The results of the research are pretty clear, but there are a few problems with the concept.

One problem is with the way the issue tends to be phrased. The pursuit of happiness vs. the pursuit of meaning doesn’t accurately describe what we’re talking about. Meaningfulness doesn’t reside “out there,” so it isn’t something we can go after. We determine the meaning of things. Things (or people or situations or activities) mean something to us because we have assigned meaning to them. And the meaning we assign to them is very specific and very personal. A thing can mean one thing to one person and something else to another person. In addition, the meaning we assign to things, people, situations, or activities can change. If meaning resided within the thing, the meaning of the thing wouldn’t change.

As David DiSalvo says, we are meaning-makers. We can focus our lives on what we determine is meaningful to us, but we can’t go looking for meaning out there and expect to find anything.

Another problem is that happiness vs. meaningfulness represents an apples and oranges kind of comparison. Happiness is a feeling, and therefore transient. It’s the nature of feelings to come and go. Happiness bubbles up in us, often unexpectedly, and the unexpectedness is part of its charm or desirability. If we were happy all the time—which is impossible, anyway—we would miss out on that aspect of it. And since happiness is a feeling—an experience—it is subjective. It’s not easy to describe our personal experience of happiness to someone else.

“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” —Humpty Dumpty

A third problem results from this ephemeral nature of happiness: how do you define it? Some people have decided that happiness means what they choose it to mean:

In her 2007 book The How of Happiness, positive psychology researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky [describes] happiness as “the experience of joy, contentment, or positive well-being, combined with a sense that one’s life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile.” —Greater Good Science Center website

The Greater Good Science Center is well-meaning, but the notion that you can’t experience happiness unless you also believe your life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile—whatever that means—is absurd. Ask a toddler.

Viktor Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning) said, “Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to ‘be happy.’” So he and Lyubomirsky appear to be on the same page. But it isn’t true that happiness can’t be pursued. It’s pursued all the time by quite a large number of people—not only pursued, but attained—at least temporarily. It’s also not true that money can’t buy happiness. It doesn’t always, but it definitely can. At least for a while.

Attempting to maintain a steady-state of happiness requires the ongoing pursuit of bigger and better things or experiences. We have an unfortunate tendency to become complacent with what we already have. We then require more things and more experiences to feed our happiness addiction—or our pleasure addiction, if we’re on board with Epicurus and consider the good life to be a life of hedonism. Yet another piece of bad news is the overwhelming evidence that most of us don’t really know what will make us happy, which can make the pursuit of happiness extremely frustrating and possibly even futile.

Happy as a Clam*

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with feeling happy or wanting to feel happy. Happiness is great stuff, but there’s a reason why pursuing it or trying to be happy all the time is not a good idea.

A good mood is a signal [to the brain] that things are generally going well, the environment is safe, and it is all right to let one’s guard down. A bad mood indicates that things are not going very well, there may be a threat, and vigilance is required.

Good mood, intuition, creativity, gullibility, and increased reliance on System 1 form a cluster. At the other pole, sadness, vigilance, suspicion, an analytic approach, and increased effort also go together. A happy mood loosens the control of System 2 over performance: when in a good mood, people become more intuitive and more creative but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors. —Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

*The full expression is happy as a clam at high tide. Clams are happy at high tide because they can only be dug up at low tide. At high tide they’re safe and secure, which is what System 1 wants us to be.

The Good Life: Gratified or Satisfied?

So what’s the solution to the problem of dissatisfaction? Pursuing happiness and pursuing what is meaningful use different parts of our brain. The pursuit of happiness keeps us fixated on ourselves and on gratifying our immediate wants and needs. Our unconscious (System 1) is focused on the short-term rewards that make us feel good in the moment (because that indicates we’re safe) but which can actually add up to an increase in dissatisfaction. The pursuit of happiness doesn’t appear to be the solution to our existential dissatisfaction.

We have the ability to determine what is meaningful to us. Because what is meaningful is less transitory, we have a much better chance of achieving and sustaining a meaningful life—and therefore a satisfying one—than we have of achieving and maintaining a happy life. When we’re oriented to something bigger than we are—and bigger than our immediate wants and needs—we’re less susceptible to the pull of immediate gratification. When we give our big brain (consciousness, System 2) something worthwhile to focus on, we can achieve goals or create things that actually make a difference, to us and to others.

Our obsession with happiness may be intimately related to a feeling of emptiness, to a sense that our lives lack meaning. Although we recognize our dissatisfaction, we don’t realize the source of it. As a result, we’re stuck on the hamster wheel of System 1 looking for the solution in all the wrong places, unable to look up long enough to even identify what’s most important to us, let alone figure out how to attain it.

Character or Circumstances: Which Factor Is Stronger?

August 14, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

When it comes to determining how a person is likely to act or react at any given time, which factor plays a bigger role: personal character or the situation the person is in?

Research can be found that supports both sides, but I think we intuitively believe character plays the bigger role. We’re pretty sure we know how we would react even in situations we’ve never experienced because we believe we know who we are. And we behave consistently often enough that this belief isn’t usually tested or threatened. Feeling certain we know what we would do leads to many of the critical judgments we make about other people’s behavior.

On the other hand, classic experiments like Philip Zimbardo’s prison experiment and Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments indicate that in some situations, ordinary people who would not otherwise do so are capable of behaving very badly toward their fellow humans. There has also been quite a bit of research on the effect of our environment on what we think and feel and the way we act. So before passing judgment on others, it has been suggested, we should try to “walk a mile in their shoes.”

This fascinating topic is addressed in one chapter of philosopher Julian Baggini’s book, The Ego Trick, which is one of the best books I’ve read so far this year.

The answer to the question of which plays a bigger role, character or situation is, not surprisingly, it depends.

When someone’s character is variable, the situation plays a bigger role in determining action. But when someone’s character is consistent, the situation plays a lesser role.

It’s more interesting than that, however.

Passive or Active

Some of our character traits are passive: they are “the set of dispositions we just happen to have as a result of our genes, upbringing and experience, without any particular effort on our own part.”

And some of our character traits are active: they are “the set of dispositions that we have because we’ve worked on developing them. To use a philosophical term of art, dispositions are active if they are the result of an individual’s attempts at self-constitution, to build who they are.”

As Baggini states, you can’t tell from the trait whether it’s passive or active. Someone who behaves in an extraverted manner may have had that tendency all along, which would make the trait passive. Or a person with a tendency toward introversion may have decided to try to become more extraverted, in which case their extraversion would be considered an active trait. He also says that “in real life, traits are never purely active or passive. Rather, they tend to greater activeness the more they reflect deliberate efforts to mould our own behaviours.”

Variable or Consistent

He further distinguishes passive traits as either variable or constant across situations, and he does the same with active traits. This leads to four trait categories:

passive and variable
passive and constant
active and variable
active and constant

All of us have traits in each of those categories. All of us are affected to one degree or another by the situations we’re in. However, the more our traits lean toward the passive and the variable, the more likely we are to be affected by situations. And the more our traits lean toward the active and the constant, the less likely we are to be affected by situations.

Results of behavior studies indicate that the majority of people behave differently across different situations and only a minority behaves consistently.

The evidence is that unless you try to cultivate traits, whether you display them will depend more on circumstances than on you. So consistency in character is something to be created; it does not arise organically.

As philosopher Christine Korsgaard says:

Beliefs and desires you have actively arrived at are more truly your own than those which have simply arisen in you.

The Takeaway

If you want to be less at the effect of your circumstances, one way to do that is to make a deliberate effort to cultivate those character traits you value.

Don’t be entirely surprised when your behavior is “out of character.”

And don’t be so sure you would behave differently in a given situation than other people who are in it are behaving.