Farther to Go!

Brain-Based Transformational Solutions

Depression’s Interesting Effect on Decision-Making

by Leave a Comment

confusionHow does depression affect decision-making? In a word: negatively. That’s not a big surprise. But why do depressed people have a harder time making decisions? According to the results of a recent study reported in the British Journal of Clinical Psychology, one reason is that people who are depressed have more difficulty accessing their intuition. In my last post, Intuition: Knowing without Knowing How We Know, I said that intuition as the result of the associative thinking of System 1 (our unconscious), which constantly sees patterns and connects dots our conscious brain (System 2) is unaware of.

Intuitive—or associative—thinking is good for making short-term predictions and for everyday decision-making. And it’s everyday decision-making that depressed people report having difficulty with. Instead of accessing or relying on their intuition, they use the rational, logical, and linear thinking of System 2, which is considerably slower.

Over-relying on System 2 thinking often results in “analysis paralysis,” which I’ll be covering in my next post. System 2 attention is limited and easily depleted, so if we have to rely on it for every little decision we make, we will quickly run out of steam. We won’t be able to make any decision, large or small.

Another thing the study revealed is that depressed people are more likely to ruminate. Maybe it’s this tendency to ruminate that disrupts a person’s access to intuition.

In a post on rumination last month, I wrote:

Rumination feels like problem-solving, but it actually prevents us from solving problems because it keeps us focused on negative events and emotions. We continue to dwell on our problems instead of attempting to resolve them. Rumination disrupts our self-regulation. Because we want to feel better, we try to distract ourselves or turn to immediate gratification. Rumination also increases stress levels and has a negative effect on our general health.

Rumination is a low level of thinking in which one thought leads to another but never to a solution or a conclusion. Rumination occupies mental space and System 2 (conscious) attention, which is already in short supply.

So depression may at least partially be a matter of using, or getting stuck in, the wrong kind of thinking. Intuition—otherwise known as jumping to conclusions—isn’t infallible by any means, but in terms of ordinary, everyday decisions, it is generally reliable. And when it’s wrong in those situations, the stakes tend not to be high enough to lead to major negative consequences.

System 2 thinking is slow, effortful, and deliberate. It’s great for solving complex problems and for long-range or strategic planning. It isn’t the best choice for the hundreds of quick decisions we normally need to make every day. It’s easy to understand how someone could become mired in the quicksand of System 2 thinking and feel mentally paralyzed.

Some suggestions on curtailing ruminative thinking can be found here. Hopefully, the link between a tendency to ruminate and the loss of access to intuitive thinking will lead to greater insight into depression and more treatment options for those experiencing it.

Intuition: Knowing without Knowing How We Know

by 4 Comments

associative thinkingIntuition goes by many names: hunch, gut feeling, instinct, inkling, inner voice. Malcolm Gladwell refers to it as “rapid cognition.” Cognitive psychologist John Bargh calls it “automatic processing.”

No matter how we label it, what intuition is is the ability to “know” something without knowing how we know it.

One thing intuition is not is magical or mysterious or superior in some way to rational, logical thinking. It’s just different. The world is not divided into people who are intuitive and people who are not. We all rely on intuition every day.

Intuition is the result of the associative thinking that takes place in the unconscious (System 1). The unconscious sees patterns and connects dots our conscious brain (System 2) isn’t even aware of. It operates quickly and it’s always on. That’s because, by the way, it’s what keeps us alive. And keeping us alive is what our brain is designed to do. System 1 makes rapid-fire assessments and communicates them to System 2. When we become consciously aware of one of those assessments, we call it intuition. We could also call it jumping to conclusions.

Jumping to conclusions on the basis of limited evidence is important to an understanding of intuitive thinking. System 1 is radically insensitive to both the quality and quantity of the information that gives rise to impressions and intuitions. —Daniel Kahneman

System 1 reacts exactly the same way (jumps to conclusions) whether we have a clue or not. So sometimes its assessments are accurate and sometimes they’re not. Intuition is good for making short-term predictions when it’s based on training, experience, and practice. But even when the training, experience, and practice are in place, intuition is not good for making long-term predictions or forecasts. There are just too many unknown variables for it to account for.

There are a number of potential problems related to relying on intuition. One is that System 1 processing is highly context-dependent. That means that whatever is going on at the time—the weather, our state of mind, the time of day, the last thing we ate—can influence our thoughts. So an intuitive assessment reached under one set of temporary circumstances could be entirely different from the one reached under a different set of circumstances.

Another problem is that good intuition in one area of our lives where we have expertise doesn’t carry over to other areas where we don’t have comparable expertise.

A third and bigger problem with intuition is the strong feeling of confidence it often engenders, whether or not that confidence is warranted, because that sense of confidence is all too easy to confuse with clarity.

What You Can Do:

Don’t automatically assume your intuitive guesses are accurate across the board. Just because you feel confident about something doesn’t mean you’re right. If you are skilled or knowledgeable in an area, your intuition is more likely to be accurate—at least when it comes to short-term predictions. But if  you have no particular skill or knowledge, your intuition isn’t any better than a wild guess.

As Kahneman says, “Do not simply trust intuitive judgment—your own or that of others—but do not dismiss it, either.”

Additional Reading: How Important Is Your Need to Be Right? and Do You Confuse Clarity with Certainty?

How Important Is Your Need to Be Right?

by 2 Comments

being rightA heavy investment in being right can lead to all kinds of problems, large and small, personally and interpersonally, even nationally and globally. The underlying source of our drive to be right is survival. Being right enhances our chances of staying alive. In the distant past, if we were wrong too often or about something really important—such as which food was poisonous or which animal was dangerous—we could have ended up dead.

Being and proving we’re right are knee-jerk reactions to perceived threats. Most of us no longer face the same daily threats to life our long-ago ancestors faced. But our brain doesn’t quite get that because it hasn’t changed all that much. It still operates the same way. To our unconscious (System 1), a threat is a threat is a threat—and that includes threats to our beliefs, our opinions, and our good feelings about ourselves and the people we care about. Furthermore, we not only want to see ourselves as being right, we want others to see us that way, too.

Our need to be right gets in the way of clarity in a couple of different ways.

First, refusing to acknowledge we could be wrong about something automatically clouds our judgment. It restricts what we are able to see and understand because we screen out anything that conflicts with the scenario in which we are right.

Second, an investment in being right creates a singular agenda. Rather than focusing on doing the right, or appropriate, thing in the situation, we’re more concerned about being right—or being seen as right—about what we’re doing.

When you argue and win, your brain floods with different hormones: adrenaline and dopamine, which makes you feel good, dominant, even invincible. We get addicted to being right. …Luckily, there’s another hormone that can feel just as good as adrenaline: oxytocin. It’s activated by human connection and it opens up the networks in our executive brain, or prefrontal cortex, further increasing our ability to trust and open ourselves to sharing. —Judith E. Glaser, Organizational Anthropologist

No one enjoys admitting they’re wrong, even to themselves. But we’re all wrong much more often than we’re right. And nobody’s perfect.

What you can do:
  • Recognize that you’re not alone: everyone has the same hardwired need to be right and to be seen as right.
  • If you’re feeling stuck about something, ask yourself if wanting to be right is getting in the way of your judgment or your ability to think clearly.
  • Remind yourself that you’re not still trying to survive on the savannah. Being wrong may be unpleasant or uncomfortable, but it’s highly unlikely to be fatal.

Additional reading: Anger, Adrenaline, and Arrogance: Addiction to Certainty and Do You Confuse Clarity with Certainty?

Do You Confuse Clarity with Certainty

by 1 Comment

road ahead

Although we frequently use the terms interchangeably, certainty is not a synonym for clarity.

Certainty itself is an emotional state, not an intellectual one. To create a feeling of certainty, the brain must filter out far more information than it processes. In other words, the more certain you feel, the more likely you are wrong. –Steven Stosny, Ph.D.

There’s a big difference between being unclear—not knowing which step to take—and being uncertain—not knowing what the outcome of taking that step will be. It’s important to distinguish between the two and to be able to recognize whether it’s a lack of clarity or the fear of uncertainty that’s getting in the way.

There’s another big problem with trying to be certain, which is that we can’t be. There’s no way to predict the future—and randomness plays a much bigger role in our lives than we want to believe—so we can’t be certain about the outcome of anything we do. We end up tying ourselves in knots and wasting precious mental resources chasing an illusion.

So if we wait until we can be certain of the outcome of our actions, we’ll never act because the outcome can never be certain. There are no guarantees in life.

The best laid schemes of mice and men often go awry. —Robert Burns

Unlike certainty, clarity is not an emotional state. It’s a state of mind: unclouded, unobstructed, unambiguous. Unlike certainty, clarity isn’t arrived at via a tortuous route. Unfortunately, the unconscious part of our brain (System 1) is biased against uncertainty, and so we are biased against it, as well. This is another example of our brain using us instead of the other way around.

What you can do:
  • Practice tolerating uncertainty and not being attached to the outcome.
  • Learn to distinguish between being unclear (not knowing which step to take) and being uncertain (not knowing what the outcome of taking that step will be).

Additional reading: 12 Signs that You Lack Clarity

12 Signs that You Lack Clarity

by 1 Comment

distortionMental clarity means freedom from ambiguity or clearness of perception.

When you have mental clarity, the matter at hand or the situation you’re dealing with is in focus. The path ahead is illuminated. You aren’t weighing pros and cons. Your mind is calm. You know what to do next.

A clear view, a clear sky, a clear mind, and a clear conscience all have the same thing in common: a lack of obstruction (respectively, a building or fence, clouds, an unresolved issue, guilt).

When you have clarity, you know it. But how can you tell when you don’t have it? You probably lack clarity if you:

  1. Come to a major fork in the road and are unsure about what to do or which path to take
  2. Struggle with minor decision-making
  3. Feel confused, overwhelmed, stressed, anxious, or tired
  4. Are in a fog or feel “brain dead”
  5. Rehash the same situations or problems over and over again
  6. Feel stuck
  7. Are chronically disorganized
  8. Feel ineffective or unproductive
  9. Always have too much to do
  10. Are easily distracted
  11. Operate by consensus
  12. Constantly question yourself

There can be other causes for these symptoms, of course, and hopefully you don’t have all of them at the same time. But there’s no question that a lack of clarity can make your life much more difficult and challenging than it needs to be.

The bad news and the good news is that we confuse and obstruct our own minds. We create our own lack of clarity. In general, we do it by letting our brain use us instead of the other way around. If you can identify how you habitually get in your own way, you’ll have a much better chance of stepping aside.

I’ll talk about some of the most common obstructions to clarity in upcoming posts.

In the meantime, here are some questions to ask yourself to help you get in touch with your experience of clarity—and the lack thereof.

What is something you HAVE clarity about?

How does being clear affect your thoughts, feelings, and actions?

What is something you DON’T HAVE clarity about?

How does being unclear affect your thoughts, feelings, and actions?

Please feel free to share your thoughts, feelings, or experiences concerning clarity.

Contact Me

joycelyn@farthertogo.com
505-332-8677