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by
Susan David
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September 8 - October 15, 2018
After many more studies, with many thousands of participants—children and the elderly, students and professionals, the healthy and the sick—we can say with confidence that showing up and applying words to emotions is a tremendously helpful way to deal with stress, anxiety, and loss.
In the process of writing, they were able to create the distance between the thinker and the thought, the feeler and the feeling, that allowed them to gain a new perspective, unhook, and move forward.
When we’re hooked, we typically have only one perspective, one answer, one way of doing things. We’re entangled with our thoughts, emotions, and stories. They dominate us, direct our actions, and make us inflexible, often leaving us to wonder after the fact, “What was I thinking!?” Only when we step out can we see that there might be more than one way of looking at the situation.
mistake is often a matter of life not going as we’d planned. When we blow it, we blame ourselves for failing to make the right choice or do the right thing. A mistake, however, often supposes a predetermined course—that we have failed to navigate a static world that “is” a certain way.
No matter how certain we are about the best course of action, the world is constantly changing, and circumstances are unpredictable. And since no one knows for certain what will happen, in battle or otherwise, everybody is bound to make a few decisions that turn out to be not so effective.
Emotional agility means having any number of troubling thoughts or emotions and still managing to act in a way that serves how you most want to live. That’s what it means to step out and off the hook.
Research shows that using the third person this way is an effective technique for distancing yourself from stress (or anxiety or frustration or sadness) that can help you regulate your reactions. It also leads people to view future stressful situations more as challenges and less as threats.
1. Think process. See yourself as being in it for the long haul and on a path of continuous growth. Absolutist statements drawn from old stories (“I’m bad at public speaking” or “I suck at sports”) are just those—stories. They are not your destiny. 2. Get contradictory. In Zen Buddhism it’s common practice to contemplate paradoxes such as “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” There are probably paradoxes from your own life that you could chew on in a Zenlike fashion: You may love and loathe your hometown, your family, or your body. You can feel that you’re both the victim and the person
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What you let go of will be different from what another person chooses to let go of. Sometimes it is letting go of a past experience. Sometimes it means releasing an expectation or a relationship. Sometimes letting go means forgiving others. Sometimes it means forgiving yourself.
“Walking your why” is the art of living by your own personal set of values—the beliefs and behaviors that you hold dear and that give you meaning and satisfaction. Identifying and acting on the values that are truly your own—not those imposed on you by others; not what you think you should care about, but what you genuinely do care about—is the crucial next step of fostering emotional agility.
Identifying what you value and acting on it is not always easy. We’re constantly bombarded with messages—from culture, advertisers, our upbringing, our religious training, and our families, friends, and peers—about what is important and what makes us worthy.
If we need guidance, we look around to check out what other people are doing, mindlessly choosing all sorts of things that we’ve been told are universal keys to satisfaction, such as a college education, home ownership, or having children. In fact, these are not for everyone. It’s just a lot faster and easier to follow what we see than to work it out for ourselves.
Other people’s actions and choices affect us more than we realize, on every level, through a fascinating phenomenon called social contagion.
Studies show that certain behaviors really are like colds and flus—you can catch them from other people.
But make too many mindless, autopilot decisions over the long haul, and eventually you’ll find yourself living what feels like somebody else’s life—a life aligned with values you don’t necessarily ascribe to.
If you know your own personal values and generally live by them, you are also likely to be comfortable with who you are. You don’t need to compare yourself with other people because you’re a success—by your own definition.
Here are a few questions to ask yourself in order to start identifying your values: Deep down, what matters to me? What relationships do I want to build? What do I want my life to be about? How do I feel most of the time? What kinds of situations make me feel most vital? If a miracle occurred and all the anxiety and stress in my life were suddenly gone, what would my life look like, and what new things would I pursue?
The thing to ask is not whether something is “right” or “wrong,” but rather how it relates to the way you want to live your life.
When you know what you do care about, you can be free from the things you don’t care about.
asking yourself when you wake up each morning, “If this were my last day on earth, how would I act to make it a great final day?”
It’s not just that values are nice things to have. Rather, research shows that values actually help us access greater levels of willpower and grit and safeguard us from negative social contagion.
We are on this planet for only a limited time, and it makes sense to try to use that time wisely, in a way that will add up to something personally meaningful. And study after study shows that having a strong sense of what matters leads to greater happiness, as well as to better health, a stronger marriage, and greater academic and professional success.
Unfortunately, when we’re hooked by difficult thoughts, feelings, and situations, we often start making moves away from our values.
what if moving toward each of your values leads you in opposite directions? The key is to think about these choices not as better or worse but as equal and different. Then it’s up to you to find the reason for making the choice, not because one thing is better than the other, but simply because a decision has to be made. To come to a decent decision, we’d better know ourselves pretty well.
Often, what we view as a values conflict is really an issue of goal conflict (and, importantly, values are not goals), or of time management, or of the difficulty in committing to a plan or a course of action. Or it may be that as mere mortals, we simply cannot be in two places at once. One of the biggest issues many people face on this front is creating a work-life balance.
Since values relate to quality—rather than quantity—of action, the amount of time you spend enacting your values doesn’t necessarily reflect how much they matter to you, or limit the degree of engagement you bring to the precious moments you have with your loved ones or to the limited time you have at work. If you need to put in a twelve-hour day at the office to complete a project, something as simple as sending a quick email or text to your spouse can keep you connected to your value of being a loving partner.
We all spend time in different value domains depending on our circumstances, and being in one doesn’t mean you value the others any less.
Living your values—walking your why—however, will not bring you a life free of difficulty. We all face dilemmas, no matter how solid our beliefs and regardless of our specific decisions. Moving toward your values isn’t always fun or easy, at least in the moment.
Even if your choice turns out to be wrong, you can at least take comfort in knowing you made the decision for the right reasons. You can show up to yourself with courage, curiosity, and self-compassion.
the research team was most struck by was the way individuals made and responded to “bids for emotional connection” or efforts to reach out,
A simple bid for a partner’s attention: “There’s a pretty boat.” A bid for a partner’s interest: “Didn’t your dad sail a boat like that?” A bid for enthusiastic engagement: “Hey, with a boat like that, we could sail around the world.” A bid for extended conversation: “Have you called your brother lately? Did he ever get his boat fixed?” A bid for play: Rolling up a newspaper and bopping a partner lightly on the head, saying, “There. I’ve been meaning to do that all day.” A bid for humor: “A rabbi, a priest, and a psychiatrist go out sailing . . .” A bid for affection: “I need a hug,” or
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How the couples reacted to these emotional offerings revealed volumes about each couple’s future.
In one follow-up six years later, the couples in which either partner had responded with intimacy to only three out of ten bids were already divorced, while those who had responded with intimacy to nine out of ten bids were still married.
In marriage, these micro-moments of intimacy or neglect create a culture in which the relationship either thrives or withers. The tiny behaviors feed back on themselves and compound with time, as every interaction builds on the previous interaction, no matter how seemingly trivial. Each person’s moments of pettiness and anger, or generosity and lovingness, create a feedback loop that makes the overall relationship either more toxic or happier going forward.
When our approach to problems is too grand (“I need a new career!”), we invite frustration. But when we aim for tiny tweaks (“I’m going to have one discussion a week with someone outside my field.”), the cost of failure is pretty small. When we know we have little to lose, our stress levels drop, and our confidence increases. We get the feeling “I can handle this,” which helps us become even more committed and creative. Equally importantly, we tap into the fundamental human need to make progress toward meaningful goals.
In looking for the right places to make these tiny changes, there are three broad areas of opportunity. You can tweak your beliefs—or what psychologists call your mindset; you can tweak your motivations; and you can tweak your habits. When we learn how to make small changes in each of these areas, we set ourselves up to make profound, lasting change over the course of our lives.
People with a fixed mindset follow an “entity” theory of self and believe important qualities such as intelligence and personality are fixed traits that cannot be changed. People with a growth mindset believe that these basic qualities are “malleable” and can be improved through learning and effort.
Studies show that these beliefs about change can have a profound effect on behavior.
After all, those who are open to change and believe they can do better—and that their efforts matter—have a sense of agency over their performance and rise to the challenge. So setbacks or failures don’t keep them down, and they persevere, even when they’re frustrated.
Change is often seen as a onetime event that happens after, say, setting a New Year’s resolution. But change is a process, not an event. A focus on this process gives individuals the sense that they can make mistakes, learn from them, and still improve their performance over the long run.
In a different analysis, Levy showed that people with fixed negative views on aging die about 7.5 years earlier than those who are more open to a positive future.
Studies show that, on average, seniors have greater life satisfaction and make fewer errors at work relative to their younger counterparts, and that various aspects of thinking and memory actually improve with age. Yet when we have fixed negative assumptions, we tend not to take any of these facts into account.
People who have a growth mindset and who see themselves as agents in their own lives are more open to new experiences, more willing to take risks, more persistent, and more resilient in rebounding from failure. They are less likely to mindlessly conform to others’ wishes and values and more likely to be creative and entrepreneurial.
We all have personal qualities and parts of our identity we wish we could change. But when we try to make changes and run into difficulty, we sometimes focus too much on what we assume is our destiny.
Tweaking your mindset starts with questioning notions about yourself and the world that may seem set in stone—and that might be working against what matters to you—and then making the active choice to turn yourself toward learning, experimentation, growth, and change, one step at a time.
In trying to bring our actions more in line with what really matters to us, we can double down on discipline and willpower, but—as most of us have learned the hard way—this rarely leads to the best results.
our brain is encouraging us to make certain choices well before willpower even enters the picture. This might explain why, in one study, 74 percent of people said they would choose fruit over chocolate “at some future date,” but when fruit and chocolate were put right in front of them, 70 percent grabbed the chocolate.
Want-to goals reflect a person’s genuine interest and values (their “why”). We pursue these kinds of goals because of personal enjoyment (intrinsic interest), because of the inherent importance of the goal (identified interest), or because the goal has been assimilated into our core identity (integrated interest). But most important, these goals are freely chosen by us.
Have-to goals, on the other hand, are imposed, often by a nagging friend or relative (“You’ve gotta lose that gut!”) or by our own sense of obligation to some internal narrative or external goal, typically related to avoiding shame
You can choose to eat a more healthful diet because of feelings of fear, or shame, or anxiety about your looks. Or you can choose to eat well because you view good health as an intrinsically important quality that helps you feel good and enjoy life. A key difference between these two kinds of reasons is that although have-to motivations will allow you to make positive changes for a while, eventually that determination is going to break down.
