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Know When to Get Assistance

June 2, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

If you work by yourself or live by yourself (or both), you already know how much there is to do and to keep track of every single day. When there’s no one else to pick up some of the slack, the sheer volume of it all can be overwhelming. Believing that you can and should be able to do it all will not make it so. But it can wear you down mentally, emotionally, and physically.

It will wear you down mentally because our brain provides us with a limited amount of conscious attention each day, and when we’ve used it up, we can’t just shift into another gear to get more. When you are trying to do it all, you may find yourself squandering your conscious attention on things that need to be done but that don’t further what you’re trying to accomplish in life. Too many days or weeks of this and you could begin to wonder if what you’re trying to accomplish is worth it or if you’ve really got what it takes.

It will wear you down emotionally because you will inevitably fall behind, miss a target or an actual deadline, or lose track of something. And then you’ll feel bad about it. You’ll feel bad about yourself. If you believe you should be able to do it all, you’ll feel guilty and incompetent when you don’t. If you’re the rugged individualist or self-reliant type, you’ll feel like you just need to work harder to keep on top of everything. Even worse, you could lose your sense of humor.

It will wear you down physically because trying to do everything is exhausting—whether or not you actually get everything done. Mental and emotional stress creates physical tension. You may let your self-care routines go—or at least skimp on them. No time to get to the gym, no time to prepare a healthy meal, no time for a vacation or even a break. You may develop a constant low-level state of anxiety you aren’t even aware of. Trying to do it all can stress your body, weaken your immune system, and make you physically ill.

If you’re in this kind of situation, the best thing you can do is get out of it as soon as possible.

Consider making a list of all the things you do or are responsible for that can only be done by you and another list of all the things that could possibly be done by someone else, even if you have to pay for having it done. You may think you’re saving money (or being self-reliant) by trying to do it all, but that approach can break your spirit. By trying to do it all, you put yourself in jeopardy of losing it all.

I fall into the self-reliant category, and my life-long tendency is to try to figure out how to do whatever has to be done and then do it myself. Sometimes that’s paid off. But even when it has, I’ve often ended up spending an inordinate amount of time learning about something plenty of other people already know how to do. When I do that, I eliminate the amount of time I can spend doing what I know how to do that others may not.

Within the past couple of months, however, I’ve loosened the reins and have begun getting some assistance in three areas: office/organizational, website, and recreational (seriously). I’m not yet taking full advantage of the assistance that’s available to me because old habits die hard. It requires my conscious attention to bypass the tendency to just do it myself. Yet I already feel an enormous sense of relief in realizing that I don’t have to hold up my entire world…all day…every day…ad infinitum.

[NOTE: This post is the sixth in a series. See also When the Going Gets Grueling, Fortitude: Don’t Leave Home Without It,  Focus: Keep Your Eyes on the Prize, Patience: Learn to Play the Waiting Game, and Embrace Uncertainty.]Enhanced by Zemanta

Filed Under: Attention, Brain, Consciousness, Habit, Living Tagged With: Attention, Brain, Consciousness, Doing It All, Living, Mind

Patience: Learn to Play the Waiting Game

May 12, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 2 Comments

Patience (New York Public Library)
Patience (New York Public Library)

Whatever it is we want, we want it right now! We are primed for immediate results and instant gratification to a greater extent than we have ever been before. Remember when we had to travel to a theater to see a movie—and we could only see it at certain scheduled times? Wasn’t it great when we could rent or buy VHS tapes or DVDs and watch them in the convenience and comfort of our own homes? Netflix made that even easier by sending DVDs to us in the mail. We only had to travel as far as the mailbox to pick them up. Now streaming a movie is just one of many things we can do instantly. Only a quarter of Netflix customers opt for receiving their movies in the mail. Imagine: by comparison to live streaming, overnight mail delivery of DVDs requires delaying gratification.

The expectation of immediate results comes with a decrease in impulse control and a low tolerance for delays. We don’t want to wait in line—any line. In fact, some of us will pay quite a bit of money to avoid waiting in line. We don’t want to wait to get an appointment. We don’t want to wait for a page on the internet to load. We don’t want to wait for a store or business to open. We don’t want to wait till after dinner to have dessert. We don’t want to wait till we have enough money before we buy something. We don’t want to wait more than two days to have a purchase delivered.

And we are famously unwilling to turn down a smaller reward today in exchange for receiving a bigger reward later.

Getting something we want activates the release of dopamine in the brain. What we really want are those hits of dopamine. After repeated instances of instant gratification, impatience becomes a habitual response. In essence, our brain rewards us for being impatient. But while instant gratification obviously feels good in the moment, it isn’t conducive to the carrying out of long-range plans or the completion of long-term projects. It isn’t conducive to turning down the smaller reward today in order to wait for the bigger one tomorrow—or a year from now.

Impatience does have a place. There are lots of things in life that are not worth waiting for, worth putting up with, or worth spending time and attention on. But the part of our brain that rewards us for instant gratification—the unconscious—doesn’t make distinctions. It’s a stimulus-response machine. Making distinctions requires conscious attention.

Knowing when to delay gratification and being able to control the impulse to go for the immediate reward are crucial to the success of any type of venture—from starting up a business to maintaining an exercise program to cleaning out the garage to completing a course of study. But the strategic application of patience can improve the quality of life for anyone, no matter what their situation.

Giving in to the desire for instant gratification can lead to a short-attention-span theater approach to life, where we’re merely skimming the surface of things, of experiences, and even of other people.

Just because you have looked at something doesn’t mean that you have seen it. Just because something is available to vision does not mean that it is available instantly to consciousness. –Jennifer L. Roberts, Harvard Magazine

Being patient means being willing and able to wait for something instead of hopscotching from one thing to another. Being patient means giving something our full attention, which allows for a deeper and fuller immersion in whatever it is we’re involved in. Patience helps us stay focused on the goal, the prize, the long-term result we’re aiming for. Patience and clarity go hand-in-hand because a busy mind that’s hooked on hits of dopamine is not a peaceful, calm, or clear mind.

So if you find yourself having to wait for something—traffic, a line in a supermarket, equipment at the gym, the food you ordered in a restaurant—use these small opportunities to develop the patience you’ll need in order to accomplish the bigger, more meaningful things in your life.

[NOTE: This post is the fourth in a series. See also When the Going Gets Grueling, Fortitude: Don’t Leave Home Without It, and Focus: Keep Your Eyes on the Prize.]Enhanced by Zemanta

Filed Under: Brain, Choice, Consciousness, Creating, Habit, Living, Mind, Unconscious Tagged With: Conscious, Dopamine, Impatience, Instant Gratification, Patience, Rewards, Unconscious, Waiting

Focus: Keep Your Eyes on the Prize

May 5, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

English: A liver-coloured Border Collie with h...
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A distraction is something that keeps us from giving 100% of our attention to what we’re doing or attempting to do right now. By diverting our attention, it dims our focus. Being distracted isn’t the same as choosing to take a break. Allowing ourselves to be distracted is rarely a conscious choice.

The path to anywhere is booby-trapped with an unrelenting blitzkrieg of tempting distractions so magnificent and horrible—and insistent—they may even invade our dreams.

These distractions tempt us because they include:

  • things we’re naturally interested in
  • things we’re convinced we need to know (every single thing there is to know) about
  • things we have to be on top of or take care of
  • things we suddenly remember we forgot to do
  • things that are simply so compelling we can’t not be distracted by them
  • things that take our minds off whatever we’re doing that we don’t want to be doing
  • things that seem better (more interesting, easier, or maybe just newer) than whatever we’re doing now

The internet is a major—and obvious—source of distraction, but it’s a piker compared to the source of distraction inside our own heads.

Attention is notoriously difficult to keep focused. One reason is that conscious attention requires, well, consciousness, and conscious (System 2) attention is a limited resource that can’t be easily or quickly renewed. It definitely can’t be renewed on command. If we squander it early in the day, we may not have enough left for another task that requires it later on. And squander it we do, on all kinds of things that are not worth actually thinking about.

When it comes to maintaining focus on a long-term goal—keeping our eyes on a distant prize—we often trip ourselves up at the outset by not accounting for the inevitable flagging of conscious attention. All evidence to the contrary, we’re convinced we will maintain the same level of enthusiasm and focus through the entire extent of a project that we had at the beginning of it. We count on our interest and enthusiasm to carry us through. It can’t and it won’t.

The sane thing to do, then, would be to assume that our interest, enthusiasm, and attention are going to flag and to create a plan that doesn’t rely solely on will power, self-discipline, enthusiasm, interest, or anything else that comes and goes.

If you want to use your brain to help maintain your focus, one thing you can do is set up checkpoints along the path to monitor your progress and to reward yourself for your achievements. The hits of dopamine your brain releases when you reward yourself will not only make you feel good, they will also activate emotional and learning circuits to increase the likelihood you will remember what you did and will want to do it again. As you get closer to reaching your goal, your brain will actually increase the amount of dopamine it releases each time you pass another checkpoint.

Achieving a distant goal—which could mean two months, two years, or two decades from now—requires detailed planning in order to get your brain to get with the program. Imagining the outcome—so you know what you’re aiming for—is important. But if you don’t identify all the steps it will take to get to the finish line and claim the prize, your brain will not be on board. Your brain, in fact, will be looking to board any passing train it catches sight of, and it will be taking you right along with it.

[NOTE: This post is the third in a series. See also When the Going Gets Grueling and Fortitude: Don’t Leave Home Without It.]Enhanced by Zemanta

Filed Under: Brain, Choice, Consciousness, Creating, Habit, Living, Mind, Purpose Tagged With: Attention, Brain, Consciousness, Distraction, Dopamine, Goals, Unconscious

Thinking, Fast and Slow (animated)

April 19, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 2 Comments

Filed Under: Brain, Consciousness, Mind, Unconscious Tagged With: Brain, Daniel Kahneman, Mind, System 1, System 2, Thinking Fast and Slow

What Is Cognitive Ease—and Why Should You Be Wary of It?

April 18, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 6 Comments

sense of danger

Everyone wants to be right and to feel certain about things. These are built-in biological drives, not character flaws. When we think we’re right and when we feel certain, we experience a sense of cognitive ease. The world makes sense to us. And that puts us in a good mood.

Cognitive ease feels good, but it gives us a false sense of security because it makes us think we understand far more than we actually do.

Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance. —Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

Comfortably Numb

When it comes to taking in information and deciding what to believe and what not to believe, we are appallingly predictable. We are most likely to believe:

  • What Is Familiar

Information that feels familiar is easier to absorb and believe than information that is unfamiliar. It could be familiar because it’s associated with other beliefs we have or it could come from a trusted source. On the other hand, it could simply be something we’ve come across before—especially if we’ve come across it multiple times. Frequent repetition can be enough to convince people to believe things that are not true because familiarity generates a sense of cognitive ease. Called the mere-exposure effect, advertisers make use of it, but they aren’t the only ones.

  • What Is Easy

Information that is easy to understand also gives us a sense of cognitive ease. Information that is difficult to understand requires more cognitive effort to process, and our brain’s preference is to take it easy. Say you’re faced with choosing between two concepts, ideas, or explanations. Idea A is easy to understand, while Idea B is more difficult. Statistically speaking, you’re much more likely to accept Idea A instead of Idea B simply because Idea A is easier for you to swallow. Does that give you a sense of cognitive dis-ease?

  • What Validates Our Preexisting Beliefs

Information that confirms what we already believe to be true makes us feel right and certain, so we’re likely to accept it uncritically. On the other hand, we’re more likely to reject information that is inconsistent with what we already believe or at least we hold inconsistent information up to greater scrutiny. We have different standards for evaluating information depending on the level of cognitive ease it generates.

And evidence has precious little impact on us if it conflicts with what we believe simply because the cognitive strain of processing it is too great. For example, it is easier to believe that What You See Is All There Is (WYSIATI), even after being confronted with evidence that you have missed something that was right in front of your face, than it is to believe that you are aware of only a tiny fraction of what is going on around you.

Cognitive Biases

We use cognitive biases as shortcuts to help us understand the world. We don’t have to use any critical thinking skills. No cognitive effort is required. We aren’t forced to reevaluate our existing beliefs. Because of our cognitive biases, we make snap judgments, form quick impressions or opinions, and operate on autopilot.

The bad news is that, since cognitive biases are by their nature distortions or errors in thinking, they actually decrease our understanding all the while giving us that feel-good sense of cognitive ease.

That’s just fine with the conscious part of our brain, which is slow and kind of lazy and doesn’t want to work if it doesn’t have to. It’s happy to let the unconscious handle as much of the load as possible. Because cognitive biases operate at the unconscious level, unless we make an effort to recognize them, we aren’t aware of them. We will even deny we have them.

To have a human brain is to be subject to cognitive biases. Some of the most common are:

  • Confirmation Bias

The easy acceptance of information that validates what we already believe (as described in What Validates Our Preexisting Beliefs, above) is a result of confirmation bias. Confirmation bias causes us to selectively notice and pay attention to what confirms our beliefs and to ignore what doesn’t. Confirmation bias underlies the discomfort we feel around people who disagree with us and the ease we feel around people who share our beliefs. Example: People who favor gun control pay more attention to stories about injuries and deaths resulting from gun use; people who are against gun control pay more attention to stories about people using guns to defend themselves.

  • The Halo Effect

The tendency to view other people as all good (or all bad) is the result of a cognitive bias called the halo effect. When we consider someone to be a good person, we find it easier to excuse or ignore behavior that is inconsistent with being a good person. Good people can do no wrong. On the other hand, if we consider someone to be a bad person, we find it hard to accept that he or she has any positive qualities. Bad people can do no good. In either case, we ignore evidence that contradicts our general impression of the person. The halo effect requires black and white thinking. Example: People tend to have a completely positive view of the political party they support and a completely negative view of the political party they don’t support.

  • Negativity Bias

Our brains are wired to notice negative events more than positive events, so we give them more attention. This leads us to believe that more negative events are taking place than positive events. It also leads us to give more credence to negative claims about people with whom we disagree. Negativity bias is responsible for the fears we have about some things that are disproportionate to the actual likelihood of their occurring. Bad stuff seems to have more of an impact on us than good stuff, and we are quicker to react to it. This bias can make us susceptible to fear-mongering. Examples: (1) The news. (2) People tend to pay more attention—and give more weight—to critical comments than to praise.

  • Impact Bias

We think we can predict how we will react to potential events, both good and bad, and reliably estimate the impact they will have on us. But in making such predictions, we routinely overestimate how good we will feel (and for how long) after a positive event and how bad we will feel (and for how long) after a negative event. Although we are extremely poor fortune tellers, that doesn’t stop us from being certain about how we will feel in the future. In reality, our excitement over something good will likely dim faster than we predict, and we are likely to rebound from a loss sooner than we predict. Example: People tend to believe a positive change, such marriage, a new job, a bigger house, winning the lottery, etc. will make them feel better—and for a longer time—than it actually will.

  • Hindsight Bias

In retrospect everything seems inevitable. The hindsight bias (“I knew it all along”) makes us think the world is more predictable than it actually is. After the fact, we selectively reconstruct events to make it appear the outcome was inevitable. In doing so, we also exaggerate how likely we considered the outcome to be before it occurred. If the outcome is a negative one, we think someone should have foreseen it and prevented it. Example: After 9/11, many people thought the attacks by al-Qaeda could have been prevented based on the available information. However, the information was not, at that time, as clear as it appeared to be in hindsight.

  • Outcome Bias

The outcome bias leads us to evaluate a decision based on the eventual results or outcome of the decision rather than on the soundness or quality of the decision at the time it was made. If something works out, we think it was a great decision (genius, even), although the reasoning that led to it may have been flawed. Conversely, if something doesn’t work out, we think it was a bad decision, although the reasoning that led to it may have been entirely sound. When outcomes are good, we think the decisions were good; when outcomes are bad, we think the decisions were bad. Example: People tend to think that if something goes wrong during a low-risk surgical procedure, the decision to do the procedure was a bad one.

  • Hidden (or Implicit) Bias

Hidden Biases are attitudes or stereotypes we have, both favorable and unfavorable, particularly about other people in regard to race, gender, age, etc. We don’t all have the same hidden biases, but everyone has them. However, because they are hidden—primarily from ourselves—we are unaware of them, even though they affect our feelings, our behavior, and our reactions. Hidden biases may be at odds with our conscious attitudes and feelings. But some of our hidden biases may be apparent to others.

We can’t find out about hidden biases through introspection. We may be able to learn something about them through observing ourselves. Also Harvard University has developed an implicit association test that is available online (https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/) so you can test yourself for your own hidden biases.

Hidden biases contribute to a sense of cognitive ease by tending to confirm that whatever groups we belong to (ethnic, racial, age, income, etc.) are the best groups because they have more positive characteristics than those other groups have.

Cognitive Distortions

Cognitive distortions are habitual ways of thinking that alter our perception. Many, although not all, cognitive distortions are negative. But even negative cognitive distortions contribute to a sense of cognitive ease just because they are habitual. If you are used to thinking about yourself in a negative way or seeing the world in a negative way, that will feel more comfortable than trying to see things in a different (more positive) way.

Cognitive distortions are not uncommon, and there are a lot of different ones. However, not everyone is subject to them—or at least not to the same degree. A few common cognitive distortions are:

  • Mindreading: believing you know what other people are thinking or what their motives are
  • Overgeneralizing: drawing too broad a conclusion from a single event or piece of information or from limited information
  • Catastrophizing: imagining worst case scenarios; exaggerating the likelihood of negative or disastrous outcomes
  • All or Nothing Thinking (also called Black and White Thinking): thinking in extremes without allowing for complexity (shades of gray); believing that if something isn’t perfect or the best, it’s worthless
The Cognitive Ease Continuum

According to Daniel Kahneman, cognitive ease is both a cause and a consequence of a pleasant feeling. Cognitive ease makes us feel more favorable toward things that are familiar, easy to understand, and easy to see or read. We feel less favorable toward what is unfamiliar, difficult to understand, or difficult to see or read. We don’t even have to be consciously aware that something is familiar to us in order to feel good about it. The feel-good response comes from the unconscious part of our brain. It’s part of our hardwiring for survival. A good mood tells our brain everything is OK and we can let our guard down.

Being in a good mood is associated with intuition, creativity, gullibility, and increased reliance on the unconscious part of the brain. At the other end of the continuum are sadness, vigilance, suspicion, an analytic approach, and increased effort.

We can’t worry when we’re happy. But because we’re less vigilant when in a good mood, we’re more prone to making logical errors. We’re more susceptible to cognitive biases. We think we understand more than we do. We even think we’re thinking.

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Filed Under: Brain, Cognitive Biases, Consciousness, Mind, Monthly Meetings of the Mind Tagged With: Brain, Cognition, Cognitive bias, Cognitive Ease, Confirmation bias, Critical thinking, Halo effect

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