Brain Archives - Page 43 of 45

2014: Time to Start Shoveling?

December 22, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell 6 Comments

clutter

Wherever we are and whatever we’re doing, we all have the ability to Step It Up. The quality, impact, effectiveness—and maybe even the length—of our lives depend on it.

So why don’t we do it? Why do we keep playing small when we know we’re capable of so much more?

We may think our reasons are personal and unique, but I suspect that in most cases the real reason for not Stepping It Up is the same for everyone. And it’s so basic and mundane it’s almost always overlooked.

The culprit is clutter, plain and simple. Or rather, it’s the mountain of clutter we’ve spent our lives constructing: physical clutter, mental clutter, emotional clutter, the clutter of things left undone or not being attended to. It doesn’t matter how few or how many categories we have for it or how different one type of clutter seems from another. Clutter is clutter is clutter.

We can’t reach for the stars by climbing that mountain of clutter.

We may manage a few steps, but inevitably we’re sucked back down into all that…stuff. We won’t get anywhere by trying to manage or rearrange our clutter, either. Let’s face it; we have developed the habit of creating clutter. We have become clutter junkies. We’re convinced we can’t live without it.

So we rationalize, justify, and explain it away.
Or we deny we have a problem.
Or we admit we have a problem but insist we’re working on it.

The result is always more clutter. Yes, our attempts to deal with our clutter add to the mountain of clutter. So do our failed attempts to Step It Up. In my experience, this is the real “law of attraction”: clutter attracts more clutter. It’s as if the mountain of clutter has magnetic properties. The more undone, unfinished, messy stuff there is in our lives (the bigger our mountain of clutter), the more likely it is that we’ll just keep adding to it.

Clutter is not innocuous; we pay a huge toll for keeping it in our lives. Clutter not only takes up physical space, it also uses precious mental resources. Clutter that preoccupies us taxes our brain’s bandwidth and can literally make us dumber, at least temporarily, by as many as 10 to 14 I.Q. points. The effect is like being sleep deprived all the time. This kind of preoccupation also negatively impacts the brain’s executive function, which results in diminished ability to focus our attention and a decrease in self-control.

The absurd thing is that whatever we’re not doing or not dealing with is likely taking up more of our attention than it would if we were actually doing it or dealing with it. But habits are hard to break. For clutter junkies, there’s only one way out: we have to get rid of the mountain of clutter. Pick a corner, start shoveling, and keep going until it’s all gone. No excuses, no rationalizations, no explanations. Just do it:

Clean it out
Fix it
Address it
Replace it
Finish it
Toss it out

Then declare yourself a clutter-free zone!

If you’re in the market for a New Year’s resolution, this trumps the usual suspects. Not only is it simple, straightforward, and all-inclusive, but the results are guaranteed to surprise you and may even provide you with a brand new view of the world.

What Do You Want? redux

November 11, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell 8 Comments

Right now. Right this moment. What do you really want?

It sounds like a simple question, but it’s often a difficult one to answer. So instead of answering the question what do I want? we answer a different question, an easier one, such as

What do I need?
What do I want that I think I’m capable of getting?
What do I want that’s practical?

Some of those might seem like reasonable approaches, but they sidestep the actual question.

Identifying what you want isn’t an excursion into narcissism. The fact that so many of us are unable to answer this question with any degree of conviction doesn’t indicate we’re selfless beings who aren’t concerned with our own wants and desires. To the contrary, the less clarity we have about what we really want in life, the likelier we are to settle for—even grab at—whatever gratifies our immediate, short-term desires.

But it’s impossible to be truly satisfied if you don’t know what you really want.

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman talks about this phenomenon of answering an easier question than the one that was asked.

If a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, System 1 [the unconscious] will find a related question that is easier and will answer it. I call the operation of answering one question in place of another “substitution.”

Substituting an easier question for the question, what do I want? has consequences that can be deadly—or at least deadening. If you can’t allow yourself to identify what you want in life, you diminish your possibilities dramatically. You lose touch with yourself. Your view of the world becomes narrower. You settle for less. And maybe every once in a while you’re kind of unpleasant to be around.

Could you want something that’s impossible (or seems impossible) to have? Of course! Wanting isn’t synonymous with having. The act of wanting something won’t somehow magically bring it into being, no matter how hard you wish for it. On the other hand, if you don’t even know what you want, then you’ve pretty much guaranteed you won’t go after it. It’s unlikely that everything you want will be impossible for you to have. So why not be honest with yourself and acknowledge what you want, whether or not you think you can have it?

When you ask yourself this question, throw reasonableness out the window and try answering the hard question instead of an easier one. If you keep doing that, the hard question actually becomes easier because you don’t have to keep censoring yourself. If it turns out that you want impossible, improbable, barely imaginable, or highly unlikely things, congratulations! You’re already a winner.

30 Days

Here’s a simple exercise to help you uncover what you want:

For 30 days, preferably consecutive, write “What I really want” at the top of a blank page and then list 15-20 things that you want right then and there. They can be small, medium, or large; material or ephemeral; practical or pie-in-the sky. Don’t put an inordinate amount of thought into creating your list. Write down whatever occurs to you. Repetition is the key. Date your list. At the end of 30 days, you’re likely to have a pretty good idea of what’s important to you and what you want. If not, do the exercise for 30 more days.

Intentional Optimism: Be Bold

October 7, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell 5 Comments

At the end of this video, Jason Silva asks a great question: Why shouldn’t we turn our lives into a work of art?

As he says:

I can decide that I’m going to see the world through rose-colored lenses. I’m going to be optimistic. I’m going to look for the beautiful in every possible experience.

That INTENTION, that agency, coupled with action…with editorial discernment…it creates a self-amplifying feedback loop. In other words, the INTENTION to be optimistic makes me stumble upon all these things that make me feel more optimistic and so on and so forth.

But that requires a boldness of character.

Yes, we all view the world through our own particular lens–and the lens through which we view the world has an enormous effect on what we see. Once we recognize that what we’re seeing is not “reality,” but a limited facsimile thereof, we can alter our perception. But wishing it or wanting it to happen won’t make it so.

The magic starts with creating an INTENTION.

It’s a Mystery

September 13, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell 3 Comments

EPIC FU Conspiracies: 12/9 — (Photo credit: Steve Woolf)

hidden agenda
n
a secret or ulterior motive for something

Imagine what it would be like if everyone, everywhere on the planet, had a hidden agenda. Imagine these agendas are so well hidden, even the people who have them don’t know what they are.

Imagine further that everyone has multiple hidden agendas they don’t know about: your family members, the store clerks you encounter, your friends and neighbors, the people you work with, the other drivers on the road, your representatives in congress, all the way up to heads of state.

To make things even stranger, imagine that there’s no way to find out directly what those hidden agendas are.

What would that sci-fi world look like?

Actually, it would look exactly like the world we live in. Odd though it may sound, this isn’t fiction; it’s reality. And it isn’t the result of any kind of conspiracy. It’s just the way our brains work. The truth is that we have no idea what we’re up to most of the time. And neither do the people “at the top,” who are in significant positions of power.

As a species, we’ve managed to get this far without being aware of or acknowledging our hidden agendas. I can’t help but wonder how much better we could be—and how much farther we could go—if we did become aware of and acknowledge them.

A Mind Really IS a Terrible Thing to Waste

August 25, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell 5 Comments

A snag amongst other living trees. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Science is telling us something we already knew—even if we hadn’t put it into words. We have a limited amount of conscious attention, and when we’ve exhausted it on a task, there’s nothing we can do to immediately replenish it.

But we don’t just exhaust conscious attention on important matters or complex tasks. We squander it bit-by-bit on dozens of things throughout the day. As if that weren’t bad enough, we often squander it on the same darn things day after day after day.

I’ve had an annoying problem with my car for what I thought was the past year and a half but then found out was the past two and a half years. It isn’t as though I hadn’t tried to get it taken care of because I made multiple unsuccessful attempts to do so. In the meantime, I learned to put up with the problem. I didn’t have to think about it unless I wanted or needed to drive my car. But every time I started my car and attempted to drive it, I was forced to put my conscious attention on a routine my basal ganglia normally handles.

Recently, I had to take my car into the shop for an unrelated issue. This time I told the mechanic I didn’t care what it took to resolve the other longstanding problem, I just wanted it fixed once and for all. And lo and behold, it has been fixed! It took about a week before starting the car and driving it stopped snagging my conscious attention each and every time.

The experience led me to notice other things I’ve been putting up with in various areas of my life—things that snag my conscious attention repeatedly. I made a list of various minor but highly visible things that need to be taken care of in my apartment and gave it to the maintenance manager of the complex the other day. These issues all resulted from a series of upgrades that were done about two years ago. At least I thought it was two years ago. Turns out I was wrong about that, too. It was actually three years ago.

I began to notice that every time one of these things-I’m-not-taking-care-of rears its head, I have to give it conscious attention if only to disregard it. That’s true whether it’s something visible in my apartment, something I’ve been wanting to do, something I haven’t finished, or something I’ve been needing to take care of in another area of my life. It’s as if “not now” has become the mantra for these things. Compared to some, my list of things-I’m-not-taking-care-of may be relatively small, but that doesn’t matter. Everything on it still takes up headspace, still snags my conscious attention. There are things in life we do have to tolerate (put up with, if you will), but we don’t have to tolerate these kinds of things. And we do ourselves no favor by tolerating or putting up with them.

So my intention for the rest of 2013 is to clear up every item in my backlog of things-I’m-not-taking-care-of, no matter how large or small. I have only a dim idea of what it might be like to face a new year without these things taking up headspace and without regularly giving my conscious attention away to them. But I can’t wait to find out.

30 Days

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