Unconscious Archives - Page 4 of 5

U Is for Unconscious

July 31, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 3 Comments

Three things we don’t like, all beginning with u: uncertainty, unsolved problems, and urgency. Combine the three and we’re likely to encounter another u word: uncomfortable. Actually, uncomfortable is putting it mildly. Our discomfort with the triumvirate of uncertainty, unsolved problems, and urgency is so strong we will go to great, sometimes absurd, lengths to avoid experiencing or even acknowledging it.

That’s…unfortunate. For at least two reasons.

First, in our haste to return to the illusory state of certainty, we tend to do things like jump to conclusions, accept the first answer or explanation that comes to mind (consistent with our preexisting beliefs), make a mess by acting prematurely, or immobilize ourselves in endless rounds of rumination. Rumination feels like problem-solving but it’s the opposite.

Second, by refusing to let ourselves experience—and appreciate—the discomfort that accompanies uncertainty, unsolved problems, and urgency, we deny ourselves another experience: the pure joy of the aha! moment when a solution presents itself. It may take a while, but suddenly what was murky and inchoate becomes bright and clear. The path ahead becomes obvious. I say the solution “presents itself” because although we tend to take credit for coming up with the brilliant idea or flash of insight, the part of our brain we identify with had little to do with it. It’s the unconscious that figured it out and then clued us in.

One of the reasons waiting it out while the unconscious does its thing makes us squirm is that we have no control over the process. It isn’t going to occur by the force of our will or on our timetable. When we try to make it happen we usually just end up getting in our own way and muddling the process.

Something that’s helped me develop an appreciation for—if not a wholehearted embrace of—uncertainty and the other u states is recognizing the times when I’m unclear or don’t have enough information. No matter how desperately I might want to act, if I’m not sure which action to take, I wait until the next thing to do becomes apparent.

That still makes me uncomfortable, and certainly no one would describe me as a patient person. But I’ve had enough of these experiences that I’ve come to expect an answer or a solution to show up. A pattern will be seen. Dots will be connected. I’ve learned to trust the unconscious part of my brain in these situations even though I can’t observe what it’s doing.

I’m learning to give credit where credit is due. After all, the hamster with the rudder (the conscious part of my brain) would go nowhere at all without the hamster on the wheel (the unconscious part of my brain).

It isn’t easy, but rather than trying to get back to comfortable and certain as quickly as possible, we can develop a tolerance for the discomfort. We can even learn to appreciate the uncertainty, the knottiness of an unsolved problem, and the urgency of the situation. Whatever is on the other side of our current distress is unimaginable to us now, but it could be amazing—even awesome. Why take the chance of missing out on something awesome just to avoid feeling a little uncomfortable?

You Can’t Get Off the Hamster Wheel

July 8, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 2 Comments

Your brain has a mind of its own.

It operates largely outside your awareness and without your consent.

It has developed an agenda for you that determines how you react, the way you think and feel, and what you do.

Your brain’s agenda may have little in common with what you’re trying to create for yourself, but like it or not, its agenda is your agenda.

In order to retrain your brain to get it on board with YOUR agenda, you need to:

1. Find out how your brain actually works.

2. Identify what you really want in your life.

3. Learn how to use your brain to create MORE of what you want and LESS of what you don’t want.

Patience: Learn to Play the Waiting Game

May 12, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 2 Comments

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.]

Inside Week 1 of What Do You Want?

May 8, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 1 Comment

This is a guest post by Jean S., who is sharing her experience of participating the 6-week What Do You Want? course. More posts by Jean will follow, on consecutive Thursdays, as she gives us her perspective on the rest of the sessions.

Nila's Mama (Left) Preforms with a Barbershop ... — Barbershop Quartet (Photo credit: Lea LSF)

I used to think there was something wrong with me because there are things I really, truly want and need to do before I die, and yet I haven’t gone after them, or even half-satisfied the need. In the first meeting of the What Do You Want? course, I learned that it isn’t a flaw in me. It’s System 1, the unconscious, doing its job, what it knows how to do, which is maintaining the status quo. That’s a biggie. As Joycelyn said, “The unconscious keeps you alive, but isn’t interested in enlivening you.”

There are always worksheets which we complete in class, and if not done in class would be harder to do on my own at home. We learn and expand our own thinking as we take turns sharing our thoughts and writing, which we could not do at home, alone. By writing in class, we are sure to get it done, or at least get the process started.

We are never asked to share things that we are not ready to, although sort of by the nature of this work, we end up sharing a lot and finding we have a strong, mutually supportive group.

The main assignment for this week was to fill out one 5″ x 8″ card per day, dedicated to completing the sentence that starts: “What I really want is…” I have gotten past criticizing my every entry. I hear when it starts to sound like a “what I don’t want is…” list. My entries can range from little things that have been bugging me in my environment, such as “What I really want is a new, hand-held shower head,” to somewhat more elusive goals such as “to be clear as much as possible about how to behave so as to be my best self.”

I don’t pay attention to whether it makes sense to put something on this list. I just keep writing. Day after day, many of the same things come up and this tells me they must really be important enough to me to do something about.

Then there are little surprises, like “What I really want is to sing in a Barbershop Quartet.”

The class is provocative, as Joycelyn has many ways to shift our thinking and our understanding about the way we work. This is a great investigation, and I see how exposing it all to light will help us make a difference in our “status quo,” even if we sometimes drag our feet in the process.

Focus: Keep Your Eyes on the Prize

May 5, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

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.]

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