Choice Archives - Page 4 of 13

I Is for Intention

December 28, 2016 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

An intention is something (an act, speech, or effect) you plan or decide to do. An intentional act isn’t accidental or unconscious. That’s pretty straightforward, but intention has become a buzz word, so some clarification is in order.

In the world of magical thinking, intention is touted as a highly potent element. Or is it? One high priest of magical thinking describes intention as a directed impulse of consciousness that contains the seed form of that which you aim to create. (A simpler way to say it would be you have a thought or an idea.) You must then release your intentions into the fertile depths of your consciousness (aka the ground of pure potentiality) so they can grow and flourish. How or why you would need to release an impulse of consciousness into consciousness is unclear. But it’s the escape clause that really gets me. After releasing your intention, you are advised to relinquish your rigid attachment to a specific result because the outcome that you try so hard to force may not be as good for you as the one that comes naturally.

Hold on! The one that comes naturally sounds suspiciously like the very status quo your intention would serve to change. So what was the point of that directed impulse of consciousness? And who or what directed—or, more accurately, misdirected—it?

In a nutshell, you have a thought, you release it, and then things do or do not proceed as you intended. It appears that a directed impulse of consciousness is neither relevant nor powerful after all.

Intention Really IS Powerful

If you want to do something deliberately, as opposed to habitually, you defiinitely do need to start with an intention. Without one, you’re likely to succumb to the siren song of the path of least resistance: that thing that comes naturally. This is just the way we’re all wired.

An intention is more than wishful thinking, a good idea, or a thought released into fertile ground. Creating and acting on an intention requires your conscious thought and attention. If you want to break away from the path of least resistance—no easy task, given your brain’s desire to maintain the status quo—you need to be both committed to following through on your intention and willing to do whatever that takes, including feeling uncomfortable.

You also need to get very, very specific. Many ideas begin as vague or general aims, but if you want to give yourself a fighting chance at changing the status quo, you need to spell out the what, when, where, and how of what you intend to do. this may take some practice.

Creating an Intention

Although creating an intention is not complicated or difficult, there are a few pitfalls to watch out for.

“Shoulds”

You probably have some concepts about the way things should be, as well as how you should be and what you should be able to do. When you’re creating an intention, banish the word should—and even the concept. It isn’t helpful, and it sets you up to have unrealistic expectations. Why start out by pitting your actual self against an idealized self who can easily do whatever it is you’re currently struggling with?

If you have created an intention to do something because you think you should do it or you should be able to do it, let it go. You’re less likely to fully commit yourself to something you should do, and you’re probably not willing to do whatever it might take to accomplish it since you think you should already be doing it. If you prejudge yourself as somehow lacking, you’ve lost before you’ve even begun.

Giant Steps

Maybe there’s an entire area of your life you want to revamp, so you create an intention to do just that. No baby steps for you; you’re going for the gold! But trying to tackle too much all at once is another recipe for failure because the chance of succeeding is minuscule at best.

When you try to do many things at the same time, you give yourself many opportunities to fail. So if, for example, you want to develop a habit that involves doing something multiple times during the day, start out by creating an intention to do it once or twice a day—or even every other day. Once you’ve succeeded with that, you can expand on it.

Aiming to do too much and missing the mark only reinforces any existing feelings of ineffectiveness or inadequacy. When you take baby steps, you have a much better chance of accomplishing what you set out to do. You can then build on your success.

Wiggle Room

As indicated above, a common mistake to make when creating an intention is to be vague rather than specific. Maybe you aren’t consciously trying to give yourself wiggle room, but that’s what vagueness does to intentions: it paves the way for you to wiggle right out of them. Maybe you believe just creating the intention is sufficient. Or your schedule is too variable for you to be specific. Or you want to maintain your flexibility.

It’s important to be specific when creating an intention because vagueness simply doesn’t work, so creating a vague intention is a waste of time. If you want to do something twice a week, decide on the days of the week and the time of day you will do it. If your schedule varies, make appointments with yourself and write them on your calendar or in your planner. Treat your appointments with yourself the same way you would treat an appointment with someone else. Give yourself a little respect. If you know the result (desired outcome) you want, think through the steps you’ll need to take to achieve it. Make the steps your intention and the result is more likely to follow.

For more on intentions and the IAP (Intention/Attention/Perseverance) process, see Make It So!

Part of the series A-Z: An Alphabet of Change.

H Is for Habits

December 21, 2016 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Habits are recurring, generally unconscious patterns of behavior you acquire through frequent repetition or that are learned over time. Since they operate outside conscious awareness (and control), you may suddenly discover, as I have, some habits you didn’t know you had.

Your brain creates habits, with or without your conscious participation, in order to operate more efficiently. It chunks repetitive behaviors and turns the chunks over to the basal ganglia so you don’t have to waste your precious and limited System 2 attention on them. So the habit habit is actually a labor-saving device for your brain, which means your brain is primed for habits.

Since we tend to identify with our conscious brain rather than our unconscious, we’re under the illusion that most of what we do is the result of conscious choice (behaviors are preceded by conscious intentions). So you may not be aware of how pervasive habits are in your life.

When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. It stops working so hard, or diverts focus to other tasks. —Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit

Habits vs. Goals

Habits differ from goals in two significant ways:

Goals are temporary; whether it’s three weeks or three years, there’s always an end point. Habits, on the other hand, are ongoing.
Goals require conscious attention from beginning to completion. Habits, once in place, use System 1 attention. That’s why you may be unaware of some of your habits.

Creating a habit you want (or changing an existing habit) does require conscious attention initially, but only until System 1 takes it over, at which point it is initiated automatically as a result of something in the environment—a cue or a trigger.

Continual repetition of behaviors and thoughts results in highly reinforced neural connections, which are experienced as habits. …By adulthood, most emotional responses and behavioral impulses are conditioned: we think, feel, and behave more or less the same in the same states and social contexts over and over. Habits and the conditioned responses that compose them are processed in the brain in milliseconds, thousands of times faster than conscious decisions. —Steven Stosny, Ph.D.

According to Charles Duhigg, there are three parts to what he refers to as the habit loop: the cue, the routine, and the reward. The cue is what triggers the routine—the beginning of the habit loop—and the reward lets your brain know the loop is complete.

Habits: Good or Bad?

The word “habit” often conjures up the word “bad.” If you think of habits as bad—or as just something inconsequential that you do—you’ll have a harder time creating the habits you want to have.

Whether your habits are “good” or “bad,” they’re all the same to your brain. It doesn’t care what you think of your habits. All it cares about it is being efficient. Do anything often enough and it will become a habit. And habits, by their nature, are hard to change. Trying to exert willpower, using positive thinking, engaging in deep soul searching, or looking for the underlying cause of a habit are all fruitless endeavors. Unfortunately, you can’t have a heart-to-heart with your basal ganglia.

The main reason that conscious control of habits is limited is that it requires the most easily exhaustible and metabolically expensive of mental resources: focused attention. …When resources are limited, people are unable to deliberately choose or inhibit responses, and they become locked into repeating habits. …The autopilot, being virtually inexhaustible, wins the struggle more often. —Steven Stosny

The Value of Habits

It’s easy to see the positive, productive role of habits in the development of a skill or craft—that of a musician, an artist, a writer, a quilter, or a cook, for example. We generally expect that the more a musician practices her instrument, the more dishes a cook prepares, the better they will become at doing those things. A musician is unlikely to attain excellence if she only practices when she’s in the mood for it. Skillful musicians develop the habit of practicing regularly whether they’re in the mood for it or not. And they don’t have to be in the mood for it precisely because they’ve developed the habit. They don’t have to waste conscious attention or drain self-control resources by thinking about or deciding each time whether or not to practice.

Because habits don’t drain self-control resources to the same extent as non-habits, once a behavior becomes a habit, it frees up your conscious attention and makes achieving goals considerably easier. Habits and routines are actually essential to people who need to be creative on a regular basis.

Changing the status quo isn’t easy. The unconscious part of your brain, which might be said to be allergic to change, is way ahead of the conscious part, especially in familiar situations. It’s built to predict what’s likely to happen next, construct multiple response scenarios, and initiate the response it considers the most effective—not the response you consider most effective.

That’s why habits seem to have so much power. They are very familiar to your unconscious, which bases its predictions and responses on previous experience. You may want to go for a walk after dinner, but if you’ve been plopping down on the sofa every evening, your brain is going to “choose” the sofa over the walk. You may want to cut back on the donuts, but if you’re in the habit of grabbing one with your coffee at the office, that’s what your brain is programmed to “choose” to do.

You can make use of the power of habit by learning how to change the ones you don’t want and by creating habits you do want. In order to change an existing habit, you need to identify the cue and the reward and substitute a different behavior (routine) that gives you the same reward. To start a new habit, first decide what the behavior will be, and then choose a reward and a cue. It’s easier to start a new habit if you make the cue something you already do on a regular basis. Charles Duhigg explains the process in his Guide to Changing Habits.

One major caveat: There is no magic number of days that it takes to change or create a habit. But there is a highly effective type of magic you can apply; it’s called perseverance.

Part of the series A-Z: An Alphabet of Change.

Habits: Eating the Entire Bag of Potato Chips

August 24, 2016 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

A couple of years ago, I noticed that instead of following the same route (taking the same streets) to and from a particular grocery store, my habitual route was somewhat circular. After paying attention a few times, I realized that the route I’d ended up with involved more right turns than left turns, which meant it was ever so slightly faster. (If you know me, you know even the illusion of faster matters.)

A habit is a recurring, often unconscious pattern of behavior that is acquired through frequent repetition. Habits are acquired or learned over time. You can suddenly discover, as I did, that you have a habit you weren’t even aware of.

I may have consciously thought about making that initial right turn a few times at first, but I never think about it now. I’m satisfied with this habit, so I have no need to think about it unless I encounter an obstacle along the path. Goals, which I wrote about the value of last week, require ongoing System 2 intention from beginning to end. You’d be hard-pressed to complete a goal while your mind is otherwise occupied.

But habits only require System 2 attention until System 1 takes them over. That means that once a behavior or routine becomes a habit, it is initiated by your unconscious (System 1), usually as a result of something in the environment—a cue or a trigger. Your response is automatic rather than intentional or volitional.

Some other examples of habits are:

playing an instrument, if you’re trained
raiding the refrigerator in the evening
brushing your teeth before going to bed
biting your nails
eating the entire bag of potato chips every time
checking your email first thing in the morning

The word “habit” often elicits another word: “bad.” If you think of habits as bad—or as just something inconsequential that you do—you’ll have a harder time creating the habits you want to have.

Habits Are Immune to Your Opinion

Good habits, bad habits, they’re all the same to your brain. It doesn’t care what you think of your habits. All it cares about it is being efficient. Do anything often enough and it will become a habit. And habits, by their nature, are hard to change. Trying to exert willpower, using positive thinking, engaging in deep soul searching, or looking for the underlying cause of a habit are all fruitless endeavors. Unfortunately, you can’t have a heart-to-heart with your basal ganglia.

Your brain creates behavioral habits, with or without your conscious participation, in order to operate more efficiently. It chunks repetitive behaviors and turns the chunks over to the basal ganglia so you don’t have to waste your precious and limited System 2 attention on them. Habits are an energy-saving device.

The unconscious part of your brain (System 1) has one imperative, which is survival. However, it is only concerned with the short term: get out of the way of that bus right now! The fact that eating an entire bag of potato chips every time may have long-term negative consequences for your survival is of no concern to System 1. Up till now, eating the entire bag of potato chips has worked out fine. You’re still here. The status quo is status quo.

Maybe your cholesterol is becoming a growing concern. Well that’s conceptual; there’s no immediate crisis. Acknowledging and evaluating information about your cholesterol and deciding whether or not to change your diet requires System 2 attention. And then actually changing your diet requires more System 2 attention. In the meantime, System 1 continues running it’s program—in this case your habit of eating the entire bag of potato chips each time.

You think, What’s wrong with me? I know better. Or worse, and even less productive: I must be trying to sabotage myself. But the fact that you have information or that you know better has no direct or immediate bearing on your habit, which runs automatically whenever it is cued or triggered.

We experience this confounding situation over and over again because we tend to assume that behaviors are preceded by conscious intentions. You decide what you’re going to do and then do it. But only some behaviors are preceded by conscious intentions, far fewer than we’d like to believe. Estimates are that from 50% to 80% of what we do every day we do on autopilot, which means without conscious intention or volition.

You may be operating a 4,000 pound vehicle on a busy highway at a speed of 65 miles an hour or more while your mind is somewhere far, far away. This is especially likely to happen if you’re familiar with the route. You don’t need to pay conscious attention to your driving if nothing out of the ordinary occurs. You can zone out and your unconscious will generally get you to your destination just fine.

Your unconscious is doing exactly the same thing once you open the bag of potato chips. It’s getting you to your destination of eating everything in the bag. You don’t need to tell it to do that. But if you want it to not do that, you’re going to have to tell it over and over again until it rewrites the chip-eating program. You’re going to have to practice.

Repetition and Perseverance:
Practice, Practice, Practice

You would expect that the more a musician practices her instrument or the more dishes a chef prepares, the better they will become at doing those things. A musician is unlikely to attain excellence if she only practices when she’s in the mood for it. Skillful musicians develop the habit of practicing regularly whether they’re in the mood for it or not. And they don’t have to be in the mood for it precisely because they’ve developed the habit. They don’t have to waste conscious attention or drain self-control resources by thinking about or deciding each time whether or not to practice.

When a musician shows up onstage to perform a violin solo, her habit of practicing ensures that her fingers know what to do with the violin. Without her habit of practicing, she might still be thinking about becoming a violinist or wishing it were so.

Changing or starting a new habit is no different. A musician or a chef wouldn’t expect to execute with complete skill the very first time. And the best musicians and chefs continue to hone their skills by practicing. So if you want to master not eating the entire bag of potato chips every time instead of just wishing it were so, all you have to do is keep practicing until it becomes automatic.

The Other Problem with
Affective Forecasting

July 27, 2016 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

The year it was published, I purchased a copy of the Best American Non-Required Reading 2004, which included an article written by Jon Gertner for the New York Times titled The Futile Pursuit of Happiness. The article reviewed the work of several psychologists whose work I eventually became familiar with—including Daniel Gilbert, Timothy Wilson, and Daniel Kahneman—in the relatively new field of affective forecasting. I was intrigued enough to copy the article, reread it, and highlight a good portion. From the vantage point of now, I see it was one of the small handful of bread crumbs along the trail to creating Farther to Go!

But I filed the article away, and in the interim between then and 2012, seem to have forgotten about it. Daniel Gilbert’s book Stumbling on Happiness was already a best seller before I came across a copy of it, and I don’t recall connecting the dots between it and the article I’d been so interested in. I’ve recommended the book to numerous people and refer to it in some of my courses in spite of it’s focus on happiness, not because of it.

Don’t Worry; Be Happy

That’s the other problem with affective forecasting (read my previous post, Miswanting). The emphasis is on happiness rather than on satisfaction and meaning. Happiness is an ephemeral emotional state. We’re simply not always going to be happy—and trying to be isn’t even a worthwhile goal.

We are living in an era in which the Happiness Industry invades and permeates society and every unpleasant aspect of life is frowned upon, and dismissed as an unnecessary social ill. Rather than learning to cope with or contemplate certain aspects of life—fear, sadness, loneliness and boredom—we avoid them, gradually removing our ability to tolerate even the most mundane of the difficult aspects of life. —Siobhan Lyons, Philosophy Now

The things that make us happy are not necessarily the things we find satisfying or meaningful. That’s partly because happiness is a function of the unconscious part of the brain (System 1), which is focused on immediate gratification, while satisfaction and meaning are functions of the conscious part (System 2), which is focused on long-term goals and plans. The pursuit of happiness keeps us fixated on ourselves and on gratifying our immediate wants and needs.

Furthermore, because happiness is an ephemeral and transient emotional state, what makes us happy at one point in time isn’t necessarily going to make us happy at another. But because of the way we’re wired, it’s very difficult to recognize and account for that in the moment.

We’re more different from ourselves in different states than we are from another person. —George Loewenstein, Educator and Economist

And maybe a certain amount of something makes us happy, but too much of it makes us sick—literally or figuratively. Too much craft beer, sex, alone time, hanging out with a best friend, tiramisu, dancing, cooking, listening to music, laughing—whatever it is that makes us happy has at least the potential to also make us very unhappy.

To be fair to Daniel Gilbert, he isn’t advocating the relentless pursuit of happiness, either:

If someone offers you a pill that makes you happy 100 percent of the time, you should run fast in the other direction. It’s not good to feel happy in a dark alley at night. Happiness is a noun, so we think its something we can own. But happiness is a place to visit, not a place to live. It’s like the child’s idea that if you drive far and fast enough you can get to the horizon. No, the horizon’s not a place you get to. —Daniel Gilbert, quoted in The Science of Happiness, Harvard Magazine

However, there is a considerable amount of discussion and debate about how we should approach the subject of happiness. This may be the most useful perspective:

The moments of happiness we enjoy take us by surprise. It is not that we seize them, but that they seize us. —Ashley Montagu, Anthropoligist

Satisfying and Meaningful vs. Happy

One way to bypass the errors we make in affective forecasting is to focus on creating satisfying and meaningful lives rather than happy ones by identifying what we really want. Higher order wants or, as I call them, Big Picture Wants, are abstract but they are neither transient nor ephemeral.

Research indicates that if you aim for satisfying and meaningful, you may get happiness as a byproduct. But if you aim for happiness, you will not get satisfaction and meaning as byproducts. And the people who pursue satisfaction and meaning, even when the going gets tough, report higher overall levels of satisfaction with their lives. Because what is meaningful is less transitory, we have a 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 ourselves and to others.

Our obsession with happiness may reflect a sense that our lives lack meaning, but pursuing happiness is not the solution. George Loewenstein recommends we invest our resources in the things that will make us happy. I think we’ll be much better off if instead we invest our resources in what makes our lives satisfying and meaningful. That path may be risky and not always easy or pleasurable, but…

If you want a guarantee, buy a toaster. –Clint Eastwood

Miswanting: The Problems with Affective Forecasting

July 20, 2016 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Affective forecasting refers to our attempt to imagine a future event and predict how we’re going to feel about it when it occurs. The term and the research on it may be relatively new, but we engage in the process whenever we attempt to determine a course of action. The results of numerous studies on affective forecasting reveal that (1) we’re not very good at it, (2) we don’t know we’re not very good at it, and so (3) we keep making the same mistakes when pursuing what we think will make us happy. The term for this coined by Daniel T. Gilbert and Timothy D. Wilson is miswanting.

The reason we’re not very good at predicting our future feelings is that we routinely make all kinds of errors, some of which are described below. First the good news: we’re generally good at predicting whether a future experience will be positive or negative. And when we make short-term (tomorrow) versus long-term (a year from now) predictions, we’re pretty good at accurately identifying the emotions we’re likely to feel when we experience an event.

Impact

What we’re not very good at is predicting how intense our feelings will be and how long they will last. This prediction error is known as the impact bias.

Whether people overestimate how good or bad they will feel, overestimate how quickly those feelings will arise, or underestimate how quickly they will dissipate, the important point is that they overestimate how powerfully the event will impact their emotional lives—Timothy D. Wilson, Daniel T. Gilbert (2003)

So we tend to believe that both positive and negative events will affect us more intensely and that the duration of those effects will be longer than they’re likely to be. We think that getting the new job, the guy/girl, the new house/car, or winning the lottery will cause us to feel fantastic for the foreseeable future. We think not getting the job, failing a test, losing a friend, or experiencing a financial setback will cause us to feel devastated for the foreseeable future.

Big vs. Small

We believe that a bigger problem will have a bigger negative effect on us than a smaller, chronic problem or minor annoyance will. But that doesn’t turn out to be the case for a couple of reasons. One is that we tend to respond to and take care of the bigger problems but often let the smaller ones drag on and annoy us indefinitely. The other is that we have a so-called psychological immune system that’s triggered by big problems to help us cope with them.

Misconstrual

In order to predict how we’re likely to feel about something, we need to be able to imagine the event. That’s easier to do if we’ve experienced it or something similar in the past. If we’ve been to a lot of parties, we can imagine—in general—how we’ll feel about attending a party on Saturday. If we’ve cleaned out the garage before, we can imagine how we’ll feel about doing that on Saturday, too. But if we haven’t experienced an event, what we imagine or expect may not bear much resemblance to the way the actual event unfolds. Thinking we can predict the future leads us to believe in the veracity of what we imagine.

Memory

Even if we’re able to imagine an event because we’ve experienced it before, our memory of it—and how we felt at the time—may be faulty simply because it’s the nature of memory to be faulty. And the feelings we experience when remembering a past event are not necessarily the same feelings we had when the event took place. Additionally, when we don’t recall actual details of an event, we may come to rely instead on our beliefs or theories about how such an event will make us feel.

Variability

When trying to decide where to vacation, which movie to see, or which house to buy, we tend to focus on, compare, and overestimate the differences between various options and underestimate their similarities. Furthermore, the order in which people are asked to think about differences vs. similarities has been found to influence the accuracy of their affective forecasting. Those who thought last about the similarities tended to be happier about their choices.

Hot vs. Cold States

When we’re in a “hot” emotional state (anxious, fearful, hungry, courageous, or sexually excited, for example), we have a hard time predicting what we will want when we’re in a “cold” (more rational) state—and vice versa. That means when we’re in a cold state—satiated, for example—we’re likely to predict we’ll have enough willpower to avoid binging on the bag of potato chips we’re picking up at the supermarket. But later that evening, when we’re hungry—in a hot state—we do, in fact, binge eat.

These mistakes—which arise because of the way we’re wired, not because there’s something wrong with us—aren’t the only mistakes we make when trying to predict what will make us happy or sad in the future. But hopefully they help clarify why it’s so hard to make accurate predictions and why we’re often disappointed by the choices we make.

Next time: The Other Problem with Affective Forecasting