Generally Thinking

Category: Self-Help

  • How to improve social anxiety by training your attention

    In 2009 Brad Schmidt and colleagues published a clever treatment for social anxiety disorder. Before I describe it, a short “spoiler” alert…

    If, as i suspect, you are reading this looking for a self-help treatment for social anxiety, I recommend that you do not read this article, as knowing the nature of the experiment might negate its effects (or it may not; I don’t know, but it surely can’t help you so let’s stay on the safe side).

    Instead, try to get hold of the computer program used in the study. The best lead I have is Richard McNally’s lab who tested an iPhone, iPad and android app of the program. There might be an ongoing study you can take part in, or you could try requesting a copy of the app for your own use.

    End of spoiler alert

    Hypersensitivity to threats is a feature of social anxiety disorder. Where one person sees a disgusted facial expression and ignores it to continue chit-chatting, the person with SAD will focus on this facial expression and take it as evidence that they are being poorly judged.

    They are negative evaluation detectives, scanning and interpreting social situations in a way that paints them negatively. For whatever reason, an adaptive behaviour — making sure we’re not pissing off our allies — has become maladaptive, leading to anxiety.

    Threat? Photo: massdistraction

    A potential treatment, then, would be to re-train the attention not to focus on negative facial expressions so much. This is what the program aims to do. Here’s how it works.

    Participants are presented with two pictures of people, one displaying a threatening facial expression, the other a neutral one. The pictures stay for a while and then disappear, and one picture leaves a letter in its place. Participants press a key to indicate which face left the letter behind. They are told to do this as fast as they can.

    The trick is that 80% of the time the letter appears behind the non-threatening face so that over time, participants are being trained to move their attention away from threatening faces. With less attention paid to them, there’s less opportunity to infer negative judgements. The fact that participants have to press the keys quickly is important here, like a “gamification” effect to increase engagement and attention.

    Participants completed eight 15-minute sessions on the program, two per week for 4 weeks. Could such a short, simple game really make real-world differences in social anxiety disorders? Well this is only one test and it needs to be repeated, but the results were impressive. After 4 weeks, 72% of participants no longer met the criteria to be diagnosed with social anxiety disorder, compared with 11% in the control group. The results remained in a follow-up four months later.

    So, yes, so far it seems it can.

  • Why are some people more driven than others???

    Some people just have that “Get up and go” don’t they??? This goes by many names – self-control, grit, motivation, drive, persistence, work-ethic. When it comes to succeeding in a particular pursuit, this thing is a pretty important factor, too. One study found that self-reported grit was more important than IQ in predicting a number of outcomes in eighth-grade students:

    Self-discipline measured in the fall accounted for more than twice as much variance as IQ in final grades, high school selection, school attendance, hours spent doing homework, hours spent watching television (inversely), and the time of day students began their homework.

    It’s a pretty common trait among successful people, too. Will Smith is a pretty successful guy by most standards. Why is that? Here’s what he has to say about success:

    Why are some people driven like this, while others are happy to tread water? Will Smith is clearly a very competitive guy with a huge work ethic. Where other people would be happy to take a day off, he keeps on working. Where other people slow down, he speeds up. Sounds exhausting! What is behind such a huge amount of effort?

    Genetics

    I don’t believe that this is a fixed trait, because different people in different cultures and environments will react differently. But I do think genetics play a role. Many traits studied by psychologists have a strong genetic component, according to studies of twins. So maybe the traits that lead to being driven also develop more easily in people with a certain set of genes. I’ve never believed the idea that “All people are created equal.” Clearly, some people are born with better aptitudes in different areas than others. We’re not all born with the same mental blank slate, onto which we can develop in different directions.

    Intrinsic Motivation

    I’ve talked before about the difference between intrinsic motivation (something you do for its own sake) versus extrinsic motivation (something you do for a reward). Could it be that lack of drive is simply a symptom of doing something for a reward, as opposed to doing it for the pure pleasure of doing it?

    Michael Jordan talks in his autobiography about how the massive amount of effort he put into training was fun. For him, getting up early every day to practice free throws was scarcely an effort. Not that it’s right to say he has no work ethic — of course not — only that what seems on the outside to be a strong work ethic and “forcing” of behaviours is sometimes less so from the inside.

    The key thing to keep in mind here is difficulty. In the video above, Will Smith mentions the idea of talent versus skill, of honing your craft for thousands of hours until you’re a master. This gels with Ericsson‘s work on deliberate practice, and the well-known (thanks to Malcolm Gladwell) idea that it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to reach mastery, regardless of the starting skill level. Deliberate practice is different to just doing the activity. It is doing it at the outer limit of your ability. It’s working on those hard, frustrating aspects that actually take effort. If you find a pentatonic scale difficult but could jam along to “She Loves You” all day long, then working on the former contributes to your 10,000 hours but the latter does not.

    If your craft is something that naturally appeals to you, and you enjoy, so much the better, but you’ll still have times you don’t want to practice, or you’d rather relax, or where you’ve reached a plateau that is hard for you to progress past. Therefore, to the extent that skill level plays a role in success, it stands to reason that grit, persistence, and work ethic is going to play a role in success regardless of intrinsic motivation. As beneficial as it may be, don’t make the mistake of thinking that intrinsic motivation is necessarily synonymous with “high” motivation. I read books for intrinsic reasons, but I don’t always want to read.

    You could say therefore, that success can stem from something that you’re intrinsically motivated to do, but either doesn’t require high levels of skill, or you already have high levels of skill in. As long as it’s not something mundane like eating. If you can find something like that, you’re home free, so it’s worth considering if any activities like this exist for you.

    However, there is a trap here. If you’re looking for external success via something you’re intrinsically motivated to do, it could very easily switch to something you’re extrinsically motivated to do when you start seeing it as a path to external rewards. This is particularly dangerous, because as Dan Pink explains in his book “Drive”, motivation for activities only tends to be increased by external rewards when these are rote, boring, repetitive tasks. Ability on tasks that require creative thought or effort tends to be stunted by the promise of rewards. Maybe that’s why a musician’s second album is usually worse than the first?

    Purpose / Meaning

    Maybe some people have a greater sense of purpose behind them, and this provides the motivation for them to keep going even through difficult times. Survival is one such purpose. It’s hard to imaging Chinese factory workers doing 18 hour days in terrible conditions for any reason other than to survive. If they had a few million in the bank, that would seem like an absurd course of action.

    Being anchored to a purpose might keep people going. When they feel like they want to take a break, they remind themselves of what they are trying to do, and they suddenly feel the urge to continue. This makes sense to me. I think our bodies keep energy in reserve, even when we feel very tired, just in case something of high importance becomes salient. Many a times I’ve been walking down the street, tired and hunched, when I see a pretty girl walking the opposite way. Isn’t it funny? I suddenly find the energy to walk upright and stick my chest out a bit!

    I imagine this as a kind of evolutionary reserve power store, just in case something comes up that might influence our ability to survive our reproduce. But because our brains are adaptable, and self-programmable, we can “install” a number of rules so our brain learns other occasions it should access our reserve power. The ability to build a sense of purpose might be one such thing. Of the top of my head, I can think of one study that backs this up, where people who reviewed their core values did better in a self-control task than people who didn’t.

    The need for success itself might serve this role for some. Why would Will Smith rather die than get off a treadmill before you? You could imagine some negative motivations behind this, like not wanting to feel like a failure, or status consciousness taken to such an extreme level that people would rather try to beat everyone that simply deal with that issue. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way. Competition can be a tool, something that you use to motivate yourself but deep down understand is essentially meaningless. Beyond competition, the desire to contribute and to serve might provide that purpose. There are many examples of people being willing to put themselves through hell, even to die, for a purpose. This is something we’ve been reminded of in recent years but the mechanism has always existed.

    If this is correct, the action step here is to install a purpose into yourself, to find the meaning behind what you want to do. There are two ways. One is to determine your values, beliefs and convictions, and pick your direction based on them. This makes sense but is very difficult. If you ask yourself “What do I value?”, “What do I believe?”, it would be hard to know if the answer is “real,” and not something that has been pushed into your head from one of the 10 zillion sources we’re bombarded from in daily life. How “deep” do you have to go to find your true purpose, if there is such a thing, and where does it even come from?

    The other way is to take your direction, and integrate your values into it. This strikes me as a temporary solution at best since the two probably won’t fit together very well. It’s unlikely you be pursuing a path that’s in line with your core values and not know it on some level. The reverse is probably true as well, if you’re going in a “wrong” direction there’s probably a little niggling feeling that pops up occasionally (but you bash it back down with the perks of the job).

    Have I missed anything?

    What do you think about this? Why are some people more driven than others? This isn’t an extensive list, just a few ideas – what have I missed?

    Also, what do you think about the “how” side of things. How does one install a sense of purpose for instance?

    Here’s another question – can the lack of purpose, motivation and genetic propensity be overcome through “techniques?” If you set goals, go over your values, plan your time, etc., is that enough?

  • What to do with your Strengths

    Short Version

    1) Find ways to use strengths more in your life
    2) Look for supplementary knowledge on using these strengths in the domains you have chosen
    3) Practice the activities that use the strengths and/or get training in them

    Long Version

    lego strong man hammer

    Alright.  So you understand that a strength is a part of your brain that’s more efficient than other parts, like broadband is to dial-up.  And you agree with me that life is easier when you stick to your strengths.  Potentially, you can do anything you set your mind to, but it’s going to be a better experience if you set your mind to something that employs your strengths.  Also, you’ve figured out what your strengths are through either self-reflection or questionnaires.

    Now what?

    The next step is to blend your strengths into your life, and get over the obstacles that come up as you do so.  As I imply above, I’m assuming you’re sold on the idea of doing this; if not, re-read the links above to review the benefits, do some further reading through the books I mention or on the web, and ponder the issue further.  If you’re still not convinced, then move along: there’s nothing more to see here.

    If you’re still with me, let’s start with…

    Strengths and Career

    You probably spend between 30 and 50 hours per week working.  Most visitors to Generally Thinking are from the UK and US, so you’re probably near the top end of that scale too; congratulations if you’re not.  In any case, career seems like a good place to start.

    You’ve got two possibilities:

    1) Rearrange your present work so that it involves your strengths
    2) Switch to work that does involve your strengths

    Which of these you do, is up to you.  I suppose it depends on how much you like what you’re doing now balanced against how much you want to fit your strengths into your career.  If your current career doesn’t appear to make use of your identified strengths, don’t immediately conclude you’re miscast, because using option 1 you might later find yourself a good fit.

    Rearrange

    Here you have to discover what strengths you are currently using, then see if you can add the other ones into your role.  Your position might employ one or two of your strengths really well, then it’s a matter of finding ways to add the others in.  If you can’t find ways to add any of your strengths in, you’re currently going against the grain.  You should consider what’s keeping you doing this, and consider Option 2.  If your current role is temporary or a stepping-stone job, you’ll still enjoy it more if you can rearrange the way you do it around your strengths.

    “You might have to get a bit creative, to blend your strengths into your career.”

    The various books on strengths offer basic examples on how to rearrange, such as a cashier with the strength of social intelligence, who started engaging customers more in conversation at the checkout.  If I described how to use every strength in every possible role, I’d be about 80 when I finished this article, so you’ll have to get a bit creative.  But since Gallup discovered that successful people find ways to do this, it’s potentially worth the effort.

    The other day I was reading interviews with two rock-band front-men, Rivers Cuomo of Weezer, and Tim Wheeler of Ash.  Here’s an example of two people in the same role, unconsciously fitting their strengths into it.  Rivers is shy, introspective, and did an English Literature course at Harvard.  He’d probably show up strengths like intellection, analyse or learner.  Tim seems more charismatic and confident, he parties a lot and might have the strengths of Woo and Positivity.  Both are the primary songwriters for their respective bands, so their biggest strength will surely be Arranger, or the VIA strength Creativity.

    But they seem to lever their other apparent strengths into the mix too: Rivers analysed songs by the Beatles, Nirvana and other bands, and created a file called “The Encyclopaedia of Pop”.  He then extrapolated a songwriting framework from this analysis, which he uses to write his songs.  Tim writes upbeat and positive songs, drawing inspiration from things like sunshine and having a good time.  Both of them are very successful, with multiple platinum selling albums.

    Switch

    Option 2 is easier from the point of view of fitting your strengths in, but harder in that you’re making a big change, which most people don’t find easy.  If it’s time to make a change, then looking at your strengths, it should be fairly easy to draft up ideas for roles which involve them.

    “Switching careers makes it easier to use your strengths, but most people don’t find change easy.”

    For example, looking at my own readout in the last article, my strengths were based around learning, curiosity, critical thinking, and forward thinking.  So I’m suited perhaps for something like research, where all of these come into play, and also something like writing or blogging, so I can make extra pocket money by writing about what I learn, and of course learn more about it in the process.  Hmm, what a coincidence, this happens to be the direction I’m heading in.  Don’t say I don’t practice what I preach!

    What strengths can’t tell you is the field you could go into – Gallup’s research did not indicate a relationship between fields and strengths.  For example, you could play the role ‘journalist’ in any number of fields: science, politics, celebrity gossip, and so on.  Strengths offer guidance on the role – not the field.

    Managing Expectations

    Remember, your aim is to look for ways to make more use of your natural and spontaneous ways of responding to the world.  You’re not searching for something that you’re already a master at!   Excellence will come later.  Faster, but still later.

    This is an important point to remember, which Marcus Buckingham makes clear in Now, Discover Your Strengths.  What if you arrange your whole life around your strengths, and then still don’t find the good life?   You’ve already given it your best shot, and with your strengths, no less!  Buckingham says “When the cause of failure seems to have nothing to do with who we really are, we can accept it.”  I’ve already drilled into you that your strengths are an enduring part of you, so what kind of torment would partner this kind of failure?  Buckingham suggests the fear of this could put you off trying.

    “It seems more sensible to deal with a wounded ego than to not bother trying anything.”

    If you never give it your best shot, you’ve always got an excuse, haven’t you?  Like the would-be suitor in a nightclub who acts like a little strange when talking to the attractive girl; a little bit too cocky, a little bit exaggerated.  If the girl turns him down, it’s not him she’s rejecting, it’s the act.  His ego and pride are protected, safe and sound.  But of course what he gains in ego-protection he loses in effectiveness.

    I think the parallels here are similar.  To me, it seems more sensible to find ways of dealing with a wounded ego than to not bother at all.  There’s all kinds of ways out there that offer to do that; meditation, cognitive behavioural therapy, progressive exposure, and so on.

    To bring up a final question for this section: is feeling a certain way really a good reason not to do something?  I had this idea when thinking about Steve Olson’s article on procrastination.  I’m not talking about safety and survival instincts; if you feel a dark alley is unsafe, that definitely is a good reason not to walk down it.  I mean more benign decisions.  There’s a lot going on in this culture – more people around than our brains are really designed to cope with, then there’s media, bills, careers; a whole cacophony of expectations placed on us.  How would you know whether a certain feeling you have should be trusted, like you would with the dark alley, or when it comes from something that you’ve arbitrarily integrated from the outside, with no particular relevance to you personally?  I don’t know the answer to this, so please let me know if you do.

    Add skills and knowledge

    Using the strengths more in your life is a road to happiness, more engagement, and all sorts of other benefits.  It’s also a road to greater performance – a better chance of reaching excellence in your chosen field.  But as we’ve just seen, you still need to hone your strengths further, by deliberately practising them, and also by adding in skills and knowledge.

    “To get ‘consistent, near-perfect performance’, you need skills and knowledge, as well as talent.”

    The reason for this is summed up in Gallup’s definition of a strength – to achieve “consistent, near perfect performance”.  In fact, Gallup define a strength as a strength only after the skills and knowledge have been appropriated.  They call them ‘talents’ prior to this; I’ve just used the term strength for convenience, and to compare models.  To get this level of performance, you may need to focus your efforts on one or more strengths, like the rockstars I mentioned above, who apparently focus on creativity, and use the other strengths to support this effort.  This was an easy choice for me too, as three of my top five strengths are mental/reflective, so it was obvious that this is the place to focus.

    The skills and knowledge you pick up will be experiential as well as deliberately researched or taught.  Some things you simply can’t get except through hands on practice, other things you can get from a book or trainer.  Our rockstars above may have had knowledge training in the form of music theory, skills training through tuition and practising scales, but their unique style of guitar playing and song-writing, that can only come through hands on practice – allowing their brains and nervous systems to end up with pathways and connections, causing them to respond to a guitar and to music the way they do.  There’s really no way of getting around this.

    This just about wraps up this series on strengths, barring a couple of loose-ends to tie up (managing weaknesses, for one).  Thanks for reading, hope it’s been useful!

    Recommended Reading:


    [Lego Strength image by Coldpants]

  • Four ways to boost your creativity when writing

    Whether you’re writing a novel, a blog, or an essay, the biggest problem has to be writer’s block. It’s so annoying when you’ve actually gotten past the initial procrastination hurdle (not an easy task in itself), you’re sat at your desk and you WANT to write – but it’s just not coming out. Or, what is coming out isn’t to your liking.

    Trust me, I know how that feels; I started this blog post in 2005.

    Here are a few tips you can try to give your creativity a little boost.

    1) Get the right emotions for the job

    3342877736_374c327e7a_m
    Photo credit: Joe Shlabotnik

    Our emotions serve evolutionarily adapted purposes. We have different emotions because they each solve different evolutionary problems. Anger helps to stop people transgressing against us, love helps us keep a mate, fear keeps us out of danger, and so on. Because they are specialised, emotions have different effects on our perceptual system, and the ways we think. ‘Negative’ emotions tend to narrow our though-action repertoire, while ‘positive’ emotions tend to broaden them (Fredrickson, 2001 – PDF).

    In other words, when you’re in a lower mood, you’re more likely to look at the little details, when your mood is high, you’re see the bigger picture and be more creative.

    So whenever you’re brainstorming or coming up with new ideas, boost your mood with something uplifting, heart warming, or side-splitting.

    Whenever you’re editing or proof-reading, put some downbeat music on, and get to work.

    (We might also suppose that continuing a long argument with your spouse is a bad idea – you’re both focusing too much on the things that put you into that negative state. Sleep on it and discuss in the morning.)

    2) Take breaks

    Whenever you’re doing work that requires focused, mental effort, you’re draining your mental willpower reserves. Once these are depleted, performance suffers and you suddenly can’t be bothered to work. Take regular breaks and do something that requires no effort to attend to – spending time in nature has proven to be a useful exercise to this end (See the extensive work of the Kaplans). Also, make sure you don’t go hungry while working – the fuel that willpower runs on is glucose (Gailliot and Baumeister, 2007) – empty stomach equals poorer mental performance.

    3) Use novelty to your advantage

    Short answer: If you want a novel idea, expose your brain to novelty.

    Long answer: The area of the brain associated with novelty is thought to be the substantia nigra/ventral tegmental area (SN/VTA). The VTA is part of the dopamine system, in other words, the reward system. When we perceive novelty, our brain signals us to explore, because it is always looking for rewards. The brain likes novelty.

    What’s more, these brain areas are connected to the hippocampus, which is involved in learning. You can see where I’m going with this; enhanced learning might occur in the context of novelty. On top of that, a novel environment exposes you to a different set of priming, which themselves trigger different areas in your brain.

    There’s the science, here’s the simple advice – go somewhere new to write. Try a park, a library, a coffee shop you’ve never been to. Try a car park, a zoo, a big wheel, try wearing different clothes, talking to different people. Use novelty to your advantage and see if your brain doesn’t come up with some new ideas.

    4) Try the SCAMPER method

    Luciano Passuello of LiteMind discusses the SCAMPER method of creative problem solving. This is going to be more effective when you have a specific writing problem you are ‘stuck’ on. It is essentially a list of questions which help you to look at the problem from 7 different angles, each represented by the SCAMPER acronym. Not all of these angles will be appropriate to your specific writing problem, but I’ve found it really useful at various times. I’m interested to hear how you get on with this method, so let me know if you use it – leave a comment with your experiences!

    Get to it

    I’m certain that by using one or more or these techniques (all four if necessary) you’ll be able to make at least SOME headway on your writing. Let me know how you get on!

  • The incredible reason why you should be exercising regularly

    I think everyone is sold on the idea that exercise is good for the body, assuming no contraindications. Everyone who can, should do it – it makes you physically healthier, stronger, etc.

    Fewer people are aware of it’s effect on mood though, which I have discussed before. Physical exercise makes you happier, and more likely to overcome stressful setbacks that you encounter through your life. I believe it was Tal Ben-Shahar who said “Not exercising is like taking depressants.”

    Fewer people still are aware of another benefit to exercise. It’s even good for the brain. Is there nothing it can’t do?

    Take dementia for instance. Laurin et al (2001) looked at a huge sample of randomly selected Canadian men and women. 6,434 of these were ‘cognitively normal’ at baseline; that is, no dementia. Five years later, 4,615 people completed a follow up test which asked them about their exercise habits, as well as other tests, such as for cognitive impairment.

    High levels of activity were associated with reduced risks of cognitive impairment, dementia (of any type), and Alzheimer disease. The odds of someone having Alzheimer’s in the group who exercise were half as low as those who did no exercise at all!

    So it seems that regular physical activity might be a preventative factor in age related cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s. This is pretty big.

    But the benefits of exercise do not seem to stop at prevention – they may actually have an augmenting effect on cognitive function in healthy adults; and the evidence for this is getting stronger.

    Take Winters et al (2007) for instance. They took a group of people, got them to run around a bit, and then tested their learning performance, both immediately afterwards and long term. They found that vocabulary learning was 20% faster after intense exercise, as well as increases in a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, and sustained BDNF was linked to greater learning success. BDNF is sort of the holy grail of cognitive enhancement, helping to support the survival of existing neurons as well encourage the growth of new neurons and synapses. This protein may explain both the preventative and enhancement effects of exercise on cognitive function.

    So when you’re wondering whether to get off your ass and get to the gym today, keep this in mind – you’re not only keeping your body healthy, you’re improving your mental function and preventing cognitive decline.

    This might also play a role in the timing of your exercise sessions. Try working out immediately prior to any time you need to learn. It should improve your performance.

  • Obesity, junk food, and the brain – tugging the human instinct in an unhealthy direction

    Ever wonder about the effect modern life has on us? Unbridled freedom, choice and… fat? Yep. According to the BBC back in ’06, we were on course for 20% child obesity in 2010. I haven’t checked that fact, nor the actual 2010 figure, but I doubt anything has been done to solve this problem. It doesn’t appear that way on a walk down an average street, anyway.

    Circumstances do kind of conspire against us though. Massive corporations spend millions learning how to alter the behaviour of consumers. Marketing departments and salesmen, in their own field, know as much about human psychology as scientists do. It’s almost empirical, you advertise here, and in this way, at this time, and watch the results. Companies know exactly what buttons to press to have us spending money on junk food.

    Not only that, but junk food may be a bit of a ‘hack’ in itself. As the theory goes, changes in our diet have occurred at a much faster rate than our genome is able to adapt to. Our bodies don’t ‘know’ food is abundant; as far as they are concerned, we’re hunger-gatherers in the pleistocene and food is scarce indeed. Our most successful ancestors were the ones with the strongest taste for nutrient- and calorie-dense food (fat, sugar), they were more motivated to seek and eat food, and hence more likely to pass their sugar-loving genes into subsequent generations.

    At the same time as food has been systematically refined into that which we can resist the least, our environment has been undergoing a similar shift. We can’t resist conserving our energy, resting. Wasting energy could be fatal 40,000 years ago, so if we have food and shelter nearby, we tend not to move (except perhaps for sex). Combine MacDonalds with La-z-boy, throw in a TV for entertainment, and you can see the results.

    fitness_escalator
    You just want to slap some people, don’t you?

    I’m not saying there isn’t a degree of personal responsibility here; there is. My point is that the health and fitness deck is not exactly stacked in our favour. Our natural inclinations are being pulled in an unhealthy direction.

    Do I see a similar thing going on with the brain?

    If I can’t remember the name of that song, Google is at my fingertips to relieve me of the burden of recall. If I had an iWhatever, I could do this wherever I was. Is this another example of circumstances moving us away from optimal functioning?

    It makes intuitive sense, and strong arguments have been put forward both for and against, but I’m not sure the evidence either way is deep enough to form a solid opinion yet. Some studies have been showing cognitive gains related to media usage.

    On the other hand, there’s the multi-tasking study that many bloggers have picked up – where people who were classed as heavy multi-taskers were not so good on a test of task switching ability. But how this relates to general internet usage (for instance) isn’t all that clear.

    But even assuming there is a detrimental effect going on (which as I say, I think is a big assumption at the moment), there might be a common solution, which I’ll talk about next time…

  • Who needs self-esteem anyway?

    I discovered an interesting paper by Ryan and Brown (1), which got me thinking. This paper proposes a view of self-esteem that I hadn’t come across before.

    First, they explain their view of the self. Most researchers use the ‘self-as-object’ definition – we have a self-concept, which can be complex, simple, positive or negative based on our own appraisal and evaluation of it. These evaluative ‘schema’ make up self-esteem.

    A second perspective is the ‘self-as-process’ idea, in which the self is not the object of evaluation, but is the process of assimilating and integrating experience. From this perspective, it is not important whether self-esteem is low or high; what is important is what is going on when these evaluations are made.

    Staying with the self-determination theory (SDT) tradition, they argue from the self-as-process position that concern with the worth of the self is a byproduct of psychological need deprivation. In other words, most people don’t sit around thinking “How worthy am I?”; yet many other people obsess over this, and compare themselves continuously. The fact that they do this, Ryan and Brown propose, means there is a psychological need unfulfilled (the three psychological needs being relatedness to others, autonomy, and competence).

    For example, an individual lacking in relatedness with others may try to conform to the standards of other people in order to gain their acceptance. They might get it, but the quest for self-esteem hinders their authenticity and personal growth. Likewise, a person may seek self-esteem in achievement, if they are insecure about their competence.

    So if one has self-esteem, it is because their basic psychological needs are fulfilled. Therefore self-esteem can be beneficial to an individual – but only if they don’t need it! Seeking self-esteem it for its own sake may lead to conflicts in the basic needs, and therefore only temporary satisfaction.

    Ryan and Brown suggest, based on this, that a life lived without concern for self-esteem might be optimal. When something bad happens, we are disappointed, but we do not integrate this into our self-concept and disparage ourselves (“I’m a loser!”). Likewise, when things go well, we are pleased, but again the self is not conceptualised as an object to be praised (“I’m awesome!”).

    This phenomenon of not integrating positive or negative events with the self may be related to another interesting construct – locus of evaluation. This is the degree that an individual has integrated a set of standards or values by which to judge their actions, versus the extent that they rely on an external frame of reference. For example, if I had an internal locus of evaluation for blog writing, it would not matter how much traffic or tweets I got from this post – I do not judge my performance on that, so it would not affect me. Conversely, if I had an external locus of evaluation, I would be highly affected by the traffic I got, for I would need that external reference to know how well I did.

    An external locus of evaluation is correlated with low self-esteem (2), just as the theories of SDT and self-esteem would predict: the need for another person to set the standard for our self-evaluations is a hallmark of the introjected style of motivation – this indicates the deprivation of a psychological need, and hence low self-esteem.

    You can envision a dark side to an internal locus of evaluation too; if your own judgement is just plain wrong, for instance. But, in any case, this just seems to deflect the issue; if an internal locus of evaluation is a buffer protecting self-esteem, it would preserve both the positive and negative forms of self-esteem alike. The problem seems to be with the concept of the self itself.

    To take this further, Ryan and Brown bring in ideas from Buddhist philosophy, which go something like this: when we form a self-concept (self-as-object) we often forget that this ‘me’ is merely a creation of thought, and is only one of an infinite number of possible ways that we can construe the self.

    We know there is some truth to this idea from CBT and Seligman’s explanatory style of optimism – our self-concept, our self-esteem, the emotions we experience – even mental disorder in some cases – can be traced back to particular thoughts, beliefs and judgements we hold of ourselves.

    Here’s the point: if the self can be constructed in any number of ways – which appears to be the case – is this really the self that we want ourselves and others to esteem? Perhaps the fickleness of the self-as-object construction is the reason that self-esteem is not a reliable route to well-being or growth.

    But if not these constructions, then what? Is there a deeper ‘self’, beneath these constructions? Mindfulness is proposed as an answer – as long as we hold to a construction of the self-as-object to esteem, there will always be situations where we do not live up to the values on which the self is based. The idea is to disidentify with the self-as-object, and simply to have awareness of the processes that the self is made up of, without ever saying “That is me.”

    And coming full circle, this is in accordance with the idea of healthy self-regulation – someone who has their basic psychological needs met, does not strive for self-esteem.

    References:

    (1) Ryan, R., & Brown, K. (2003). Why We Don’t Need Self-Esteem: On Fundamental Needs, Contingent Love, and Mindfulness: Comment. Psychological Inquiry, 14(1), 71-76

    (2) Bucus, D. (2008). Defining the self: Locus of evaluation, self-esteem, and personality. Dissertation Abstracts International Section A, 69, 122.

  • Can we develop psychological resilience through physical activity?

    Psychological ‘resilience’ refers to the differences between people in how they respond to and cope with difficult or stressful experiences. People who are highly resilient would be less affected, recover more quickly, and/or might actually find such events to be growth experiences. For people low in resilience, the opposite would be true.

    Now here’s something to think about: many popular books and articles have mentioned the increases in mental disorder such as stress and depression over the last century, at least in the modern world. And if you think about it, there does seem to be a trend in which, as time has gone by, we’ve increased our use of technology to the effect that we physically move around much less.

    Could it be that there is a causal relationship here, that our lack of movement has reduced our psychological resilience to stress? And by becoming more active, could we increase our resilience?

    Stress

    In a sense, everything that we do involves stress. Even just reading this sentence is placing a particular demand on your brain, so what is important here is how we respond a particular stressor. Stress is also important for growth – our bodies are adaptive and generally respond to stress by becoming more able to deal with it; provided that stress is not too high. For example, doing bicep curls with 100kg would probably be too much stress and lead to injury, but 10kg might be enough stress to increase strength.

    So you could argue that placing the body under moderate amounts of stress could, over time, lead to lowered stress responses to future events, but the important point is whether resilience to the stress of exercise carries over to stress caused by other events (eg, in the workplace, traffic jams, etc).

    Exercise

    resilience_and_exercise
    Two great ways to get some exercise: Walk the invisible dog, and handshake the invisible man. (Credit: mikebaird)

    In one study, researchers put one group of participants on a 10-week walking and jogging program, and left another to continue their normal sedentary lifestyle. At the end of the program, the exercise group scored lower on state and trait anxiety, as well as less tension and fatigue. These factors could contribute to lowered stress responses to future events, however this was not tested directly, and additionally only 16 participants per group took part, and you’d typically want a minimum of 30, preferably more, to get a solid finding. (1)

    In another study, the effects of aerobic, weight, and no training on responses to a fiendishly stressful situation were compared. Participants had to answer mental arithmetic puzzles, which flashed up on a screen too fast to complete, while listening to distracting conversations involving numbers.

    Those who had undergone the aerobic training had reduced heart-rate and systolic blood-pressure responses relative to the control group (the weight training group only had improvements in systolic blood-pressure). So it seems apparent that exercise builds physical and psychological resilience to other events. (2)

    Mechanisms

    The mechanism of this effect is not yet fully understood, but Spalding et al (2) suggest it may by primarily due to improvements in general cardiac performance – the cardiovascular system becomes more efficient and doesn’t need to do as much work to mobilise resources in reaction to a stressor. In this way, exercise effectively raises the body’s natural ‘trigger point’ for the stress response.

    Additionally, exercise triggers the release of atrial natriuretic peptide (ANP), which has a direct effect on the body’s stress response by reducing the activation of the HPA axis. This is a route through which exercise can reduce immediate levels of stress, but there may be longer-term effects too; exercise may benefit chronic levels of stress by relaxing the resting tension level of the muscles, which can reduce chronic stress by breaking the stress-feedback loop (3).

    The body was ‘designed’ with the presumption that it would experience a certain amount of movement, and when this movement doesn’t take place, the body doesn’t perform up to spec. This is one example of many where we see that as humans are taken further from their ‘natural environment’, so to speak, various problems start to arise.

    Recommended Reading:

    References:

    (1) Blumenthal, J.A., Williams., R.S., Needels, T.L., & Wallace, A.G. (1982). Psychological changes accompany aerobic exercise in healthy middle-aged adults. Psychosomatic Medicine, 44(6), 529-536.

    (2) Spalding, T.W., Lyon, L.A., Steel, D.H., & Hatfield, B.D. (2004). Aerobic exercise training and cardiovascular reactivity to psychological stress in sedentary young normotensive men and women. Psychophysiology, 41, 552-562.

    (3) Ratey, J., & Hagerman, E. (2008). Spark. London: Quercus.

  • Positive affirmations don’t work!

    …all of the time. Forgive the title, I’m experimenting with controversial post titles. More on that another day.

    Today the topic is self-help again, and if you’ve read this blog regularly, you’ll know that I take a skeptical attitude towards the self-help industry. A quick inspection of the self-help section of a bookstore will explain why – some of these books are just plain ridiculous.

    As I mentioned in the self-help industry and the self-help book reader’s guide, my main problem with this industry is the fact that the authors feel they have the right to make outrageous claims that they can’t back up with solid evidence. Sometimes they’ll give a few anecdotes of times their advice worked – as if that’s supposed to mean something – but often, all you get is pure unsubstantiated opinion, in-between layers of hyperbole.

    So take positive affirmations, for example. You might think “Do you really need evidence? Isn’t it just so obviously true?” The answers are yes you do really need evidence and, no, it’s not obviously true. Just because something is highly ingrained into our modern parlance doesn’t make it true. How a woman carries her baby during pregnancy does not predict the sex of the child. Walking under a ladder isn’t unlucky. No one ever went blind from, well, you know.

    But sometimes these ideas make such pure, unadulterated, intuitive sense, that you can’t help getting swept along. This theory goes like this: If you want to feel happy with yourself and where you’re going, you have to program your mind to think that way. The way to do this, is through affirmation – you repeat, sometimes in your head, sometimes out loud, a positive statement, over and over again. Eventually, your subconscious mind takes this as truth, and you start to feel the way you’ve been affirming.

    The classic affirmation is “every day in every way I’m getting better and better,” but you could try “I am extremely happy,” “I am loved by everyone,” “I am always confident”, or whatever.

    It makes sense doesn’t it? Say positive things to yourself, feel positive. Keep saying them, keep feeling positive. Sort of a priming effect. So simple. So neat and tidy. And everyone else believes it. Don’t tell me it’s not true!

    Some research in this area says that it isn’t…at least not always. A study last year had two groups of people complete a different task each. One did a free-writing exercise for a few minutes, the other said a positive affirmation (“I am a loveable person”) several times each minute for the same time period. Then, measures of mood and self-esteem were taken.

    positive_affirmation
    They certainly do their affirmations… (Credit)

    What happened? For people with high self-esteem, it worked – the high self-esteem people in the affirmation group did end up in a better mood than the free-writing group. But the people with low self-esteem actually ended up in a *worse* mood than the free-writing control group!

    The suggestion is that saying the positive statements only served to highlight, by contrast, just how poor an opinion the low self-esteem people had of themselves.

    This research is not conclusive, of course. There’s more work to be done to discover the individual differences that make a certain technique work for some and not for others – there may be more things interacting with affirmations than just self-esteem.

    So should you do positive affirmations? This one study says that if you’re already high in self-esteem, this might be a useful mood booster. If you’re not, don’t bother.

    However, as always in science the results only support the findings under the exact conditions under which the study was conducted, and there were a few limitations to this one, for example:

    • Only one affirmation was tested: different affirmations may work for low self-esteem people
    • We are not sure what would happen to low self-esteem people after a longer intervention than 4 minutes (could be better, could be even worse)

    But for me, the key point of all this is that the affirmation tested was lifted directly from a self-help book. The author promoted a one-size fits all solution, which was not found to be the case in this study.

    I’m not trying to promote a negative attitude towards the self-help industry – as fun as that would be. If this study says anything, it just says that it’s unwise to accept something because it seems to ‘make sense.’ Sometimes the truth is a little more complicated.

    Reference:

    Wood, J., Elaine Perunovic, W., & Lee, J. (2009). Positive Self-Statements: Power for Some, Peril for Others. Psychological Science

  • 3 Keys to fantastic memory

    Fantastic memory. I really need this. I’m quite fond of such classic moments as walking into a room without any idea what I’m doing there, forgetting peoples’ names only seconds after I meet them, and once, completely forgetting how old I was (a liberating, if mildly frustrating experience).

    Maybe I need the help of one of the big names in the study of expertise, Dr K. Anders Ericsson. He’s done work on what separates good performers from master performers in a number of different fields, and he consistently found that the main factor in expertise is practice. When he turned his attention to the study of people with a fantastic memory abilities, he reports that not only is practice necessary, it is also sufficient.


    60s pinup memory
    “You’re so forgetful darling! That’s the third time you’ve covered me with suntan lotion!”(credit)

    He goes on to cover what he believes are the three essential requirements for fantastic memory:

    1) Meaningful Encoding

    We looked into what encoding is here. To encode something meaningfully means relating it to existing knowledge – making connections between material.

    2) Retrieval Structure

    Along with the information being stored, cues should be memorised too. This allows for much greater ease of recall later on – the more ‘paths’ to the memory, the more ways it can be accessed and the recalled. This is the principle behind the link system and the peg system of memory.

    3) Speed-up

    This is where practice comes in. People with fantastic memory have extensively practised encoding and recalling information – in a way, this trains the processes involved, so that they function more quickly over time. Eventually, as with many learned skills, the process becomes automatic. For example, if you’ve ever learned to drive, you’ll remember that at first you have to put your full attention on the job; but later, you could switch off while driving and think about whatever comes to mind. According to Ericsson, it’s the same thing with memory.


    fantastic memory

    Bill forgets to pick up his phone once again.

    I find Ericsson’s work quite encouraging. It’s kind of nice to know that given huge amounts of dedicated practice, natural talent doesn’t seem to play much of a role in performance. But does this mean we can do “Anything we set our minds to?” Or should we “Stick to our strengths?” The answer to that is here, and it’s probably not what you’re thinking.

    Either way though, I have to wonder just how much practice it will take for me to stop walking into rooms without knowing why I’m there…

    References:

    Ericsson, K.A. (1988). Analysis of memory performance in terms of memory skill. In R.J. Sternberg (Ed.), Advances in the psychology of human intelligence, Vol 4. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc.

    Ericsson, K.A. & Kintsch, W. (1995). Long-term working memory. Psychological Review, 102, 211-245