Blog on mind and brain research and advice

The Fruits of a Lesser Discontent

April 17, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 1 Comment

I don’t mean to imply that all great ideas or outcomes—or at least all of my ideas or outcomes—arise from states of discontent. Some have been the result of a logical progression of thought or activity. Others have come from Aha! moments when my unconscious connected some previously unconnected or unrecognized dots.

But just as a moment of deep existential discontent started me on the path of creating Farther to Go!, a moment of lesser discontent led to the creation of the What Do You Want? course. And weather played a role that time, too.

One overcast and unusually cool early fall day, I rebelled against immersing myself in the tasks I needed to complete. Imagine me mentally stamping my foot and scowling. This isn’t a particularly common occurrence, but it’s definitely more likely to happen on gray days than on sunny ones. In this instance, I decided to make myself a cup of coffee to generate some motivation or at least a small burst of energy.

While I was waiting for the water to boil, I asked myself, out of the blue, what I wanted to do instead of all the boring and tedious stuff. What did I really want to do? If I could do anything. And then it happened! I found myself answering a different question instead, an easier one: What do I want to do that’s practical?

By then I was familiar with the brain’s tendency to substitute an easier question for a hard one and to answer the easier question. But I had never before been aware of it as it happened, and I was kind of stunned. Why couldn’t I answer the original question? What made it too hard to answer? I should know what I want, right?

Well, maybe. Later that day, I decided to try to find out. I set myself the task of asking and answering the question “What do I really want?” every day for 30 days. Not just once, but multiple times, using 5×8 index cards. I ended up with nearly 500 answers, including several surprises. Obviously I hadn’t known everything I wanted.

Afterward, I put the individual items into general categories. That was even more illuminating. But the final step was what made the process priceless. I realized that all the items on my list fit under the umbrella of one or more of what I came to call Big Picture Wants. As I wrote out the words and phrases—in my case 12—of my own Big Picture Wants I knew I was on to something huge. I had been able to identify everything I wanted to have in my life.

Now that I’ve done this, I can’t imagine not being clear about what those things are. How can I set goals, make decisions or choices, or work on habits and intentions without knowing how they fit into the bigger picture? How can anyone?

When discontent strikes, we can try to make it go away quickly, or we can use it as motivation to dig deeper and examine our assumptions. If I were given a choice between being discontent and being complacent, I’d choose being discontent every time.

The Gift of Existential Discontent

April 14, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 7 Comments

Spring in New Mexico brings longer, brighter days, but those days seem to be carried in on incessant, howling, nasty winds. Two years ago, I was out for a walk on one of those very windy spring days. It was so windy that each step I took was an effort, and effort seemed to accurately describe my entire existence at that point. Abruptly, I thought, If this is how it’s going to be, I’m not interested.

Unhappiness and dissatisfaction are associated with a release of cortisol by the brain. Cortisol makes us want to do something to change how we’re feeling. A low level of cortisol—indicating a low level of discontent—triggers us to do something we know will make us feel better. Immediately! Whether that response is eating something sweet, going for a run, or surfing the internet, it’s automatic. No conscious thought is involved.

Cortisol also makes us pay attention. But more than a little cortisol has to be released before we actually sit up and pay conscious attention to our discontent. Otherwise the stimulus-response of cortisol and self-soothing behavior just runs in the background—at least until we start to notice all the weight we’ve gained or the time we’ve lost.

The amount of existential discontent I experienced that day did not feel good at all. I definitely wanted to do something about it! But I knew there was no easy response or quick fix. I couldn’t just go home and lose myself in a good book or have a glass of wine or play with my cat and expect to forget about it.

If this is how it’s going to be, I’m not interested was the impulse—the inciting incident, you could say—that eventually launched Farther to Go! I didn’t just want to feel better; I wanted to be better. I had a variety of tools to work with, processes and techniques I’d used before, but I quickly recognized none would do the trick this time. So I began carving out a path, hacking through my own wilderness, to find a way to be better.

I was kind of excited about my discoveries (if you know me, feel free to laugh here) and shared them with anyone who would listen. After a few months I began getting together twice a month with several other women. The members of the group changed, and as a result of my ongoing explorations, so did our focus. It was a few months before I found my way to learning about how the brain works and the revelation that underlies Farther to Go!

Trying to understand and change behavior without taking the brain into account is like trying to bake a cake without understanding that baking involves chemical reactions.

Two years ago, I had a general idea of what cortisol was, and since I had been a substance abuse counselor, I knew a little about serotonin and dopamine. But I had no idea how fortunate I was on that windy spring day to experience enough existential discontent that the amount of cortisol my brain released made it impossible to ignore.

Roll the Dice

April 12, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 4 Comments

English: A pair of dice Español: Dados cúbicos. — (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’ve been thinking lately about randomness and probabilities. And then there’s this poem by Charles Bukowski.

On the face of it, it seems to have more to do with commitment than with rolling the dice. But maybe he’s talking about taking a chance–or taking the chance. The big one.

if you’re going to try, go all the way.
otherwise, don’t even start.

if you’re going to try, go all the way.
this could mean losing girlfriends,
wives, relatives, jobs and
maybe your mind.

go all the way.
it could mean not eating for 3 or 4 days.
it could mean freezing on a
park bench.
it could mean jail,
it could mean derision,
mockery,
isolation.
isolation is the gift,
all the others are a test of your
endurance, of
how much you really want to do it.
and you’ll do it
despite rejection and the worst odds
and it will be better than
anything else
you can imagine.

if you’re going to try, go all the way.
there is no other feeling like that.
you will be alone with the gods
and the nights will flame with fire.

do it, do it, do it.
do it.

all the way
all the way.

you will ride life straight to
perfect laughter, it’s
the only good fight
there is.

The Danger of a Single Story

April 10, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

This TED talk is very important and very moving. It made me think about and ask myself who are the people and what are the places I have a single story about?

So that is how to create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.

The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar.

The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.

Stories matter. MANY stories matter.

Novelist Chimamanda Adichie

Challenging Conventional Wisdom

April 7, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 2 Comments

Remember that we treat ideas like possessions, and it will be hard for us to part with them. —Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan

Many of our ideas are based on what could be called common sense or conventional wisdom. They just seem so obvious we never consider questioning them. Because they make sense to us, we operate as if they are factual. We don’t need to know if there’s any evidence to support them. But those kinds of ideas are actually beliefs: things we accept or trust to be true. And when it comes to beliefs, trust generally trumps the need for evidence.

Here are two recent examples where evidence doesn’t support the conventional wisdom. Both involve children and child-rearing attitudes.

The conventional wisdom is that parents’ involvement with their children’s schooling is advantageous to their children’s education. That just seems like common sense. But this belief had never actually been tested or measured until recently. And it turns out that the conventional wisdom is not all that wise.

Don’t Help Your Kids with their Homework and other insights from a ground-breaking study of how parents impact children’s academic achievement: Parents can impact their kids academic success, but not by helping them with their homework, especially when the kids get to middle school.

Other conventional wisdom in regard to kids is that the world is a more dangerous place than it used to be, and the primary job of adults is to keep kids safe. This also seems obvious. But it’s also a belief that isn’t often examined. It turns out that the world may not be that much more dangerous than it used to be, and the zealous overprotection of kids may be doing them more harm than good.

The Overprotected Kid: A preoccupation with safety has stripped childhood of independence, risk taking, and discovery—without making it safer: Kids need to have time away from the watchful eyes of their parents or other adults, and they need to experience a feeling of being in danger in order to develop into competent adults.

There are many more examples of evidence not supporting the conventional wisdom in other areas, especially aging and behavior. In the two instances cited above, I think it’s interesting to consider how these beliefs may have been formed and how they became so widely accepted. It’s generally harder to find a middle ground when beliefs are involved because beliefs have such a strong emotional component.

And that’s another area in which common sense or conventional wisdom fails us. We think the level of confidence we have in a belief has some positive correlation with the accuracy of the belief. But it doesn’t. In fact, there’s probably little evidence to support many of our beliefs.

Declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true. —Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

The bottom line is that our brain craves certainty, and beliefs provide us with a feeling of certainty. If we want to use our brain, however, we need to challenge some of our own deeply-held beliefs instead of doing everything we can to shore them up. That’s easier said than done, of course.

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