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The Best Mindset for a Fresh Start

December 27, 2021 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

The so-called Fresh Start Effect is based on the idea that we use temporal landmarks—dates that hold significance for us—as motivators for behavior change.* Such temporal landmarks run the gamut from the beginning of a week, a month, or a school semester to the beginning of a new year or a birthday. The brain does appear to take note of temporal landmarks; it’s easier to recall your last birthday than another random day of the month.

As temporal landmarks go, the beginning of a new year is famous for generating resolutions for self-improvement. The fact that most of these resolutions will probably fall by the wayside doesn’t deter us. Nor should it. We can take advantage of the fact that the brain is more open to change at some times than at others, as long as we approach the process from the right mindset.

Wrong Way: Production Mindset

A majority of New Year’s resolutions tend to consist of habits we want to start or stop: things we believe we ought to do or not do—or do more or less of—because they’re good for us. They’re a reflection of what I call the production mindset, which is focused on:

Being right
Being good
Relieving psychological tension
Interpreting feedback as judgment
Determining objectives
Following rules
Performing

It’s no accident that being resolute is also an aspect of production mindset. This is the mindset of whipping oneself into shape. It’s easy and automatic to operate from this mindset, but it’s a mindset that is not at all conducive to change. Production mindset is a stern taskmistress.

Right Way: Experiment Mindset

Experiment mindset operates from both a more committed and a more detached perspective. The commitment is to a desired outcome—and to mastering the change process—rather than to achieving a specific objective. The detachment allows for curiosity and learning. Characteristics of this mindset include:

Willingness to be wrong
Focusing on getting better
Developing creative tension
Evaluating feedback to adjust course
Identifying desired outcomes
Using guidelines
Discovering

In place of resoluteness, experiment mindset leads to resilience, which is a great asset on the rocky road to behavior change.

Running Experiments

Instead of creating a list of habits to start or change, evidence suggests we’ll get better results by running an experiment or two instead. And less really is more in this case. We’ll get better short- and long-term benefits when we focus on a single habit and successfully start or change it. We can build on that success with another habit. When we give ourselves too many things to work on at the same time—all of which require limited System 2 (conscious) resources—we create multiple opportunities to fail.

Here are some guidelines for running experiments.

Identify your desired outcome (the change you want to create; the experience you want to have).
Determine a minimum of three different objectives that could possibly get you your desired outcome.
Consider how you would structure or conduct an experiment to test each one.
Select one.
Set up the parameters:
> What will you test?
> What data will you track and how will you record or track it?
> How and how often will you evaluate feedback?
> What is the timeframe (beginning and ending dates)?
> How will you measure success or failure?
> How will you reward yourself for following through
Run the experiment.
If you have comparative data available, check it against the results of your experiment.
Decide on your next course of action:
> Continue the experiment.
> Implement the new behavior.
> Run a different experiment.

I find the IAP (Intention/Attention/Perseverance) process useful when conducting experiments. A combination of the eight steps above and the four IAP steps below has led to significantly greater success than I’ve ever had in maintaining a strength training program—and that’s saying a lot considering my numerous attempts and multiple heart conditions.

Intention: Describe in writing exactly what you intend to do, as well as when, where, and how you intend to do it. Be specific.
Attention: Identify how you will keep your attention focused on your intention (post-it notes, phone reminders, calendar notations, etc.).
Perseverance: Decide what you will do when things don’t go according to plan (regardless of the reason). What step(s) will you take to get back on track?
Reward: Identify how you will reward yourself when you follow through. Make it something you know you will enjoy—and then follow through with giving yourself the reward!

A note on rewards: Rewarding yourself when you follow through with an intention activates memory and learning circuits in the brain, which makes it more likely you will follow through the next time. Experiment with rewards, too, to discover what works for you.

Remember that you can use any temporal landmark as a boost to start a new habit or change an existing one. I started my strength training experiment on a random Monday in April 36 weeks ago. I set up a series of 10 three-week experiments, all of which I completed, and I’m still going strong.

*The idea was espoused by Katy Milkman, a behavioral economist, and presented in a 2014 article co-authored by Dai Hengchen and Jason Riis.

Anticipation or Apprehension?

June 5, 2021 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

In his bestselling book Behave, Stanford University’s Robert Sapolsy says that anticipation requires learning. (That appears to be more the case for some personality types than others, but casual observation suggests that quite a few people have some degree of difficulty with anticipation.)

I think the learning needs to begin with making a distinction between anticipation and expectation, two states that are oriented toward a future event and tend to be used interchangeably, thus muddying the waters considerably.

Expectation is the sense that something is about to happen. We can expect positive, negative, or neutral things to occur. The unconscious part of our brain, System 1, is continuously predicting the immediate future so it can determine what actions we should take next, and those predictions sometimes give rise to conscious, System 2, expectations. Of course sometimes the predictions bypass consciousness and go directly to motor neurons that control movement.

For our purposes, it makes sense to view expectation as essentially a functional process.

Anticipation, on the other hand, is a feeling of excitement and pleasure about something we expect will occur, especially in the near future.

The opposite of anticipation would be apprehension, also a feeling, but one of fear, anxiety, unease—even dread—about something we expect will occur in the future.

Anticipation is associated with excitement; apprehension is associated with anxiety. While excitement has positive connotations and anxiety has negative connotations, these two states are not as different from each other as they might appear. In fact, the difference is primarily a matter of interpretation.

Name that Emotion!

Both excitement and anxiety are what are called high-arousal states with similar neurological and physiological symptoms, such as increased heart-rate, restlessness, rapid breathing, difficulty concentrating, and nervousness or tension. Certainly context (the circumstances surrounding a particular high-arousal state) contributes to our interpretation of it. But some of us are more inclined in general to interpret this set of sensations as anxiety and some of us are more inclined to interpret it as excitement.

So the first thing to focus on in learning how to anticipate is your experience of this emotional state and your interpretation of it.

Central to both experience and interpretation is the concept of emotional granularity, which means putting feelings into words with a high degree of complexity. But as psychology professor Lisa Feldman-Barrett, who coined the term, says:

Emotional granularity isn’t just about having a rich vocabulary; it’s about experiencing the world, and yourself, more precisely.

The more precisely we can identify and recognize our emotions, the faster and more accurate our brain will be in assessing circumstances to determine the most appropriate response. The payoff for the brain (System 1) is efficiency. The payoffs for us (System 2) are numerous, including more nuanced interpretations of our feeling states, greater ability to identify our desired outcomes, enhanced experience, and improved critical thinking and decision-making.

Your Mental (Conceptual) Model

How does the brain figure out what any collection of bodily sensations means? Most likely it does the same thing with internal sensations that it does with external sensations: it makes something up, i.e. it constructs. The brain is continually constructing our experience in—and of—the world based on our mental model, which determines what we pay attention to, how we interpret what we pay attention to, and what it all means.

In every waking moment, your brain uses past experience, organized as concepts, to guide your actions and give your sensations meaning. When the concepts involved are emotion concepts, your brain constructs instances of emotion. —Lisa Feldman Barrett

Although we operate under an assumption that emotions have some sort of independent existence and are “triggered” by events and experiences, this does not appear to be the case. The brain, which always goes for the path of least resistance, is merely making the easiest and fastest interpretation it can make so it can determine what action to take. We are not passive experiencers of our emotions even though we may believe ourselves to be. In actuality, the more often we interpret a set of bodily sensations as a particular emotion, the likelier we are to keep interpreting it that way.

Get Granular

I don’t need to reinvent the wheel here. In addition to her book How Emotions Are Made, Lisa Feldman-Barrett has a great article and TED talk on how to increase emotional granularity, which I highly recommend.

But as a quick example of the concept, here’s an excerpt from a 2018 article in lucidwaking that involves moving from the non-granular general feeling bad to the first distinction of angry/mad (as opposed to sad or anxious, for example), and then fine-tuning that feeling to a permutation of angry/mad, such as:

resistant … belligerent … offended … agitated … indignant … resentful … irritated … furious … cranky … annoyed … perturbed … enraged … hostile … huffy … wrathful

You can also check out this feeling vocabulary chart to train yourself to detect more nuanced emotions.

The bottom line is that you aren’t entirely at the effect of your brain’s habitual interpretations of your emotional state. Sometimes apprehension is an apt emotional interpretation of a situation or set of circumstances. But if apprehension is always your interpretation of that set of sensations, you are letting your brain off easy, which may feel comforting but limits your options and your possibilities. (Bad brain!)

OK, one more post on anticipation and delayed gratification.View the previous two posts here and here.

Only Trouble Is Interesting

April 21, 2021 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

If you write fiction, read fiction, or read books about how to write fiction, you know the one thing a story absolutely, positively must include is trouble and plenty of it. If you don’t have trouble—otherwise known as conflict—you don’t have a story. But why is conflict essential for capturing our attention?

This seems like a worthy question to ask given the fact that conflict isn’t something we actively seek out in our daily lives. As Janet Burroway says in Writing Fiction:

In life, conflict often carries a negative connotation, yet in fiction, be it comic or tragic, dramatic conflict is fundamental because in literature only trouble is interesting.

There’s no denying that trouble interests us. We start looking for it at a very young age—specifically at about one year. Much of children’s play is organized around big trouble, including homicide, kidnapping, and getting lost or trapped. And children’s nursery rhymes are riddled with violence. Many child psychology experts believe children’s play helps them develop social and emotional intelligence. In a sense, children are rehearsing for adult life. (Hopefully their actual adult lives will be a bit sunnier than the danger-filled lives they appear to be rehearsing for.)

That doesn’t exactly explain adults’ continued interest in looking for vicarious trouble, but it does jibe with research indicating that people who read fiction have better social skills than people who read mostly nonfiction.

Looking for Trouble

We humans are, to a great extent, operating with the same brain we had back when we were traversing the savannah—a brain which, as John Medina explains in Brain Rules, “appears to be designed to solve problems related to surviving in an unstable outdoor environment while in nearly constant motion.” Doesn’t that sound like the plot of any number of books, movies, TV shows, and even video games?

It should be noted that many of us aren’t fighting for our survival, don’t spend much time in unstable outdoor environments, and are rarely in nearly constant motion. Of course, we still get into trouble, in spite of or because of our best efforts, but our troubles are of a vastly different nature from the troubles of our distant ancestors. Could it be that we’re so intent on “entertaining” ourselves by stirring up all this harrowing pretend trouble because it simulates the kind—or at least degree—of trouble our brain is used to dealing with?

Everything that Happens Happens to Us

Based on neuroscience advances over the past 20-30 years, we now know that our brain doesn’t distinguish very well between actual experience and vicarious experience. It reacts the same whether we read about or watch something awful happen to a fictional character or actually see that same thing happen to a person in real life. Watching a fictional disaster unfold on the screen or the page elicits the same response in our brain that it would if it were happening to us—even though we know it isn’t actually happening. (First, of course, we have to suspend disbelief, but that isn’t difficult for us to do primarily because we’re prepared to find stories compelling.)

We anticipate how certain types of books or movies will make us feel. That’s why we select particular books to read or movies to watch. We know how we’re likely to react to a story described as a “tearjerker,” for example. Some genres, such as suspense, thriller, action, science fiction, and mystery, make us feel anxious, frightened, uneasy, sometimes even terrified. Yet we keep going back for more.

This is pretty fascinating in light of the fact that the prime directive of the brain is our survival. Why would a brain that is intent on our survival create all these fictional worlds filled with trouble, disaster, loss, horror, and even death—clear threats to survival—for us to experience as if they were actually happening to us?

We All Lived Happily Ever After

Stories are notable for how they help us learn and remember. One reason is that stories include emotion, and we’re more likely to remember something that has a strong emotional impact. The greater the conflict or trouble in a story, the more emotion we feel, and the more emotion we feel, the likelier we are to remember.

But remember what exactly? The ending! All stories have beginnings, middles, and endings, but we don’t remember beginnings and middles nearly as much as we remember endings. If a story has a happy—meaning emotionally satisfying—ending, we experience a burst of feel-good neurochemicals the gives us a rush of pleasure and also ensures that we will remember how things worked out: the dragon was slain, the day was won, the quest was completed, the boy got the girl, the challenges were overcome.

In the end, a problem related to some aspect of survival was solved. Something was learned about the way the world works and how the people in it function. And we survived to get into trouble another day, just like (some of) our distant ancestors.

So one possible answer to the question of what’s so interesting about conflict is that it isn’t the conflict per se that interests us—or interests our brain. It’s the resolution of the conflict. When the hero or heroine of a story faces big trouble and not only survives but even triumphs, we feel as if we did, too. And that feeling is definitely worth the roller-coaster ride it takes to get it.

Scout vs. Soldier
(more on mindsets)

April 18, 2019 by Joycelyn Campbell 2 Comments

Do you want to be right or do you want to get it right?

You might manage to do both at the same time, but the question isn’t about your result. It’s about your underlying intention or aim.

It’s an important question because the answer determines how you process information. And how you process information can have a considerable influence on how well you succeed at accomplishing what you set out to do.

Soldier or Scout?

Julia Galef, president of the Center for Applied Rationality in Berkeley, has come up with a great metaphor to describe these two different mindsets: the soldier and the scout.

She says that when you operate from the soldier mindset, your actions stem from reflexes rooted in a need to protect yourself and your side and to defeat the enemy, whoever or whatever it may be.

On the other hand, when you operate from the scout mindset, your actions are based not on attacking or defending but on understanding the terrain and potential obstacles. You want to know what’s really there as accurately as possible.

Confirmation or Feedback?

In the grand scheme of things, both mindsets are valuable. Obviously there are times when you need to defend and protect—and maintain the status quo. But if you’re trying to change your status quo, you need to know how to distinguish relevant information from irrelevant information. You also need to pay attention to what happens when you take steps to achieve your goals. You can interpret what happens as either confirmation or feedback.

If you’re aiming to confirm and defend your pre-existing beliefs (soldier mindset), you won’t be inclined to examine what happens with any degree of objectivity. Instead you’ll be quick to jump to a conclusion and then build a case to support it by what’s referred to as motivated reasoning.

But if you view what happens as feedback (scout mindset), you tend to be curious about it. You want to understand it because the better you understand it the better you’ll be at making accurate course corrections. People with a scout mindset, Galef says, “are more likely to feel intrigued when they encounter something that contradicts their expectations.”

The soldier mindset is easier to access because System 1 is often more concerned with being right than it is with getting it right. Soldier mindset is automatic. You don’t have to do anything to slip into it. It’s easier to jump to conclusions than it is to be deliberate and thoughtful and willing to acknowledge doubt and uncertainty.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd. —Voltaire

You can end up paying a very high price when you aim to be right instead of to get it right. It’s easier to dig your heels in than it is to admit you’ve made a mistake or have changed your mind. But if you can’t change your mind, you won’t be able to change your status quo.

Bias and the soldier mindset come naturally to us. But in order to master the art and science of change, we need to develop critical thinking skills and operate from the scout mindset more than we do from the soldier mindset.

Craving

April 4, 2018 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

If craving were a person, he or she would definitely be from the wrong side of the tracks. Probably tattooed. Maybe a smoker. Definitely a drinker. A little bit slutty. A silver-tongued devil capable of talking you into doing all kinds of things against your better judgment. Someone your parents would have warned you—in the strongest terms—not to hang around with.

You try to stay away—to be good. But craving is just too hard to resist. Eventually you give in, and it feels so good in the moment, but you always end up hating yourself the next morning. You really want to break up with craving, but you can’t.

At least that’s the perspective many people appear to have about craving. Craving is associated with wanting things that are “bad” (unhealthy, illegal, dangerous, or excessive) or with being out of control. The logical result of this view of craving is to attempt to squash it, eliminate it, beat it in to submission: to conquer it.

What Is Craving?

The best definition of craving I’ve come across is a strong wanting of what promises enjoyment or pleasure.

Essentially, craving is wanting or desiring something. Wanting is driven by dopamine in your brain. But the neurons that respond to dopamine are interspersed with neurons that respond to opioid and cannabinoid neurons that provide the experience of pleasure (liking). In a sense, the brain likes to want, which is why, according to psychologist and neuroscientist Kent Berridge, “we are hardwired to be insatiable wanting machines.”

So even if you could do it, it makes no sense to try to break up with craving. Your life would be so much less enjoyable. But you can minimize your cravings for some things by cultivating cravings for other things.

We often think of desire and the objects of our desire as inseparable. We think it is the indulgence itself—the luscious ice cream, the rush of nicotine, or the flood of coins from a slot machine—that motivates us. To a greater extent, however, it is the expectation of these rewards, the luxurious anticipation of them, that fires up our brains and compels us to dig in, take a drag, or place another bet. —Chris Berdik, Mind over Mind

The unconscious part of your brain (System 1) is always looking for—expecting, craving—the next reward. Untrained, it will go for the most immediate, readily available source of pleasure. Craving is persistent and hard to resist. So applying willpower to avoid indulging in that pleasure, whatever it may be, is an ineffective strategy.

Rejigger Your Pleasure Experiences

“Pleasure is a potent driver of behavior,” as Anjan Chaterjee says in The Aesthetic Brain. But:

Our cognitive systems can reach down into our pleasure centers and rejigger our pleasure experiences.

Rejiggering our pleasure experiences is an essential component of long-term behavior change. You can’t stop your brain from craving, but you can redirect its path from one pleasurable or rewarding object to another. You can only train it to respond to a different reward, however, if it actually craves that reward.

Yes, craving sometimes goes too far in the pursuit of pleasure. Makes you want things you don’t want to want and do things you don’t want to do, at least after you’ve done them. But craving also drives you to take action to get what you want. Craving motivates you to learn and create and expand…to modify your behavior…to effect change in the world…to experience beauty. Craving is frequently misunderstood—but definitely worth the effort to get to know.