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January 24 - February 3, 2020
We may think that guilt motivates us to correct our mistakes, but it’s just one more way that feeling bad leads to giving in.
Study after study shows that self-criticism is consistently associated with less motivation and worse self-control. It is also one of the single biggest predictors of depression,
Surprisingly, it’s forgiveness, not guilt, that increases accountability.
Without the guilt and self-criticism, there’s nothing to escape. This means it’s easier to reflect on how the failure happened, and less tempting to repeat it.
Polivy and Herman call this cycle the “false hope syndrome”. As a strategy for change, it fails. But that’s because it was never meant to be a strategy for change. It’s a strategy for feeling better,
That is why so many people are happier giving up and starting again, over and over, rather than finding a way to make a change for good. The high we get from imagining our own extreme makeovers is a difficult drug to quit.
When it comes to increasing self-control, self-compassion is a far better strategy than beating ourselves up.
Although both chimps and humans preferred six treats to two if they didn’t have to wait, the species made very different decisions when they had to wait. Chimpanzees chose to wait for the larger reward an impressive 72 per cent of the time. The Harvard and Max Planck Institute students? Only 19 per cent of the time.
many of our problems with temptation and procrastination come back to one uniquely human problem: how we think about the future.
Economists call this delay discounting – the longer you have to wait for a reward, the less it is worth to you.
One reason we’re so susceptible to immediate gratification is that our brain’s reward system did not evolve to respond to future rewards.
The good news is, temptation has a narrow window of opportunity. To really overwhelm our prefrontal cortex, the reward must be available now, and – for maximum effect – you need to see it. As soon as there is any distance between you and the temptation, the balance of power shifts back to the brain’s system of self-control.
When “never again” seems too overwhelming a willpower challenge to tackle, use the ten-minute delay rule to start strengthening your self-control.
One reason this intervention works is that the participants are held accountable by someone who supports their goals. Is there someone you can share your goals with and call on for support when you’re feeling tempted?
we think of our future selves, rarely do we see them as fully us. Princeton University psychologist Emily Pronin has shown that this failure of imagination leads us to treat our future selves like strangers.
Brain-imaging studies show that we even use different regions of the brain to think about our present selves and our future selves.
Strengthening your future-self continuity can do more than fatten your savings – it can help you with any willpower challenge.
High future-self continuity seems to propel people to be the best version of themselves now.
both bad habits and positive change can spread from person to person like germs, and nobody is completely immune.
the human mind is not one unified self, but multiple selves who compete for control.
happiness and loneliness spread from friend to friend and through families.
goal contagion is limited to goals you already, at some level, share.
willpower challenge always involves a conflict between two competing goals.
When we observe evidence of other people ignoring rules and following their impulses, we are more likely to give in to any of our own impulses.
When you need a little extra willpower, bring your role model to mind.
we could say that our immune system only rejects the goals and behaviour of other people if it recognizes those other people as “not us”.
When it comes to social proof, what we think other people do matters even more than what they actually do.
As a preventive measure, shame may work. But once the deed is done, shame is more likely to inspire self-sabotage than self-control.
Pride, on the other hand, pulls through even in the face of temptation. Forty per cent of participants who imagined how proud they’d be for resisting the chocolate cake didn’t take a single bite.
“If shame worked, there’d be no fat people.”
Rather than shame people for their willpower failures, we would do far better by offering social support for willpower successes.
The latest research on anxiety, depression, dieting, and addiction all confirm that: “I won’t” power fails miserably when it’s applied to the inner world of thoughts and feelings.
A tired operator and an energized monitor create a problematic imbalance in the mind.
This cognitive bias seems to be hardwired in the human brain. We estimate how likely or true something is by the ease with which we can bring it to mind.
an antidote to ironic rebound that is, itself, ironic: give up. When you stop trying to control unwanted thoughts and emotions, they stop controlling you.
Another experiment found that when people try to push away self-critical thoughts (“I’m such a loser”, “People think I’m stupid”), their self-esteem and mood plummet faster than when people openly contemplate such thoughts. This is true even when people think they have succeeded at pushing the negative thoughts away.
The social anxiety sufferers were paying more attention to the self-critical statements than they had before the training. Now, to most people, this would sound like a complete failure. Except for one thing: there was also a major decrease in the stress centre’s activity.
FEEL WHAT YOU FEEL, BUT DON’T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU THINK
Let yourself notice whether the upsetting thought is an old, familiar tune – that’s your first clue that it is not critically important information you need to believe.
The opposite of thought suppression is accepting the presence of the thought – not believing it.
thought suppression doesn’t just make it more likely that we’ll think something – it makes us compelled to do the very thing we’re trying not to think of.
A 2007 review of all research on food-restriction or calorie-restriction diets declared that there is little to no evidence for weight loss or health benefits of dieting, and growing evidence that dieting does harm.
In fact, dieting is a better way to gain weight than to lose it.
Instead, they should notice when they were craving chocolate, accept whatever thoughts or feelings they had about the chocolate, but also remember that they didn’t have to act on those thoughts and feelings. While not controlling their thoughts, they still had to control their behaviour.
ACCEPT THOSE CRAVINGS – JUST DON’T ACT ON THEM
Students often tell me that bringing a specific study to mind – even imagining the participants in the study – gives them greater self-control. If a study stands out for you, bring it to mind in tempting situations.
Instead of waging war against their appetites, they make it their mission to pursue health.
Studies of this approach show that turning “I won’t” into “I will” works. Two-thirds of the participants who have been followed lost weight and maintained that loss at a sixteen-month follow-up.
If you focus on what you want to do, instead of what you don’t want to do, you sidestep the dangers of ironic rebound.
Before the torture test, half of the smokers had received a brief training in a technique called “surfing the urge”.
interesting experiment for deaddiction
