Understand Past Struggles and Successes

You learned to ride a bike and to play basketball, but you never did master swimming.  Now you believe it’s time.  So, where do you begin and how do you proceed?

First, think about your history.  Implicitly or explicitly, you learned biking and basketball by preparing, acting, observing, understanding, and adjusting.  Preparation could have involved rigorous study or superficial assembling of necessary equipment; acting could have consisted of brief, infrequent efforts or extended, intensive ones; observing might have been meticulous or undisciplined; understanding, insightful or superficial, and adjusting, minimal or radical changes to what you had tried previously.  Regardless of the precise details, you did prepare, act, observe, understand, and adjust to some extent; if not, you never would have learned to ride a bike or to play basketball.

To master swimming, apply insights that you acquired from earlier mastery experiences.  That means you need to think about the aspects that were easiest and those that were most difficult.  Next, consider which aspects from skills learned in the past apply most directly to the new skill that you wish to acquire.  With regard to biking, a past concern could have been about possibly breaking your leg or of having onlookers giggle as you wobbled erratically passed them. For basketball, perhaps you were afraid of shooting an “air ball” and being booed.  Swimming is not biking or basketball, but maybe you now have a fear of drowning or are embarrassed at the thought of needing to be rescued by the lifeguard.  

Second, reflect on your temperament.  Many dimensions of temperament could be involved, so let’s just consider one: persistence.  Again look to your past.  You had to maintain adequate persistence in order to acquire bicycling and basketball skills, especially if you have been a person who readily withdraws from challenging situations.  Let the lesson from your previous persistence prepare you for your current endeavor.

Third, review your personality characteristics.  For instance, if you are high in the neuroticism trait—trait anxiety—you need to get that under as much control as possible.  If not, you will be too nervous to concentrate and too pessimistic to persevere through the inevitable frustrations and uncertainties that are a part of learning to swim. You overcame your biking and basketball apprehensions, you can overcome your swimming ones.

Fourth and finally, do your best to structure an environment that maximally supports skill acquisition.  Find the place and the people who will make learning as easy as possible.  That means an environment that not only enables you to learn the mechanics of swimming, but that also enables you to apply insights that you have acquired from reflecting on specific features of your history, temperament, and personality.  For instance, if you are particularly fearful of the water and especially self-conscious about learning to swim, you require a place and people that provide extra support to you in those specific need areas. 

Coping with Stress

Jobs often are exhausting, whether the work involves ditch digging, child care, public school teaching, computer programming, carpentry, or surgery.  Perseverance in the face of those stressful circumstances demands an intensity that psychologists called “regulatory effort” designed to minimize “resource depletion.”  The fancy jargon makes little difference to a person—layperson or psychologist—who is being depleted.  But psychologists have used the jargon-infused concepts to achieve insights that can be applied to help all of us better cope with job strain.  I will review one such insight.

Klaus-Helmut Schmidt  and his colleagues (2016) wondered whether and how physical fitness might fortify us against stress.  To find out, they evaluated 819 German employees who sold financial products and who also provided customer service.  The participants worked an average of 40 hours per week with a range of 10 to 65 hours.  Results showed:  First, the physically fit had healthier blood glucose levels that helped bolster their recovery from stressful events.  Second, the fit were psychologically more resilient as well—less emotionally overwhelmed.  And third, self-control was found to be a personality trait such that those higher in trait self-control demonstrated more efficient and effective ability to plan, coordinate, and monitor their self-control efforts that did those with low trait self-control.

Studies such as Schmidt’s sharply underscore the interrelationship between the components of our physical and mental selves.  Since glucose fuels both body and mind, adequate glucose certainly is necessary for both physical and mental action.  But stress is not purely physical, so adequate glucose is not enough. 

Certain personality constituents enable us to resist stressors and to recuperate from the stressors that do penetrate our defenses.  The constituents are: positive interpersonal relationships, effective problem solving skills, avoiding catastrophizing thoughts, finding reasons to be grateful, and learning to challenge negativistic beliefs (Fletcher & Sarkar, 2013).

Every day we all endure physical and mental stress.  Accordingly, we all must act daily to counter stressors by improving our physical and mental conditioning.  We either improve or deteriorate over time; there truly is no middle ground.  When we speak about health, doing nothing enables deterioration. 

References: 

Fletcher, D. & Sarkar, M. (2013).  Psychological Resilience: A Review and Critique of Definitions, Concepts, and Theory.  European Psychologist, 18, 1, 12-23.

Schmidt, K., Beck, R., Rivkin, W. & Diestel, S. (2016).  Self-Control Demands at Work and Psychological Strain: The Moderating Role of Physical Fitness.  International Journal of Stress Management. No Pagination Specified.  doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/str0000012.

Anticipating Healthful Changes

Carly Simon sang: “Anticipation, anticipation is makin' me late; is keepin' me waitin.'   Being late and waiting, however, are only two of many possible effects of anticipation.  Anticipation can work for or against your desired healthful lifestyle changes.  So understanding your anticipatory style can empower you more successfully to execute changes that otherwise would be elusive.

Anticipation can occur before or during an activity.  Negative anticipation before a healthful lifestyle behavior militates against your initiating effort, and negative anticipation during the behavior causes you to perform hurriedly, half-heartedly, or in a manner that leads to premature withdrawal. 

How about after you have performed a healthful activity?  Are there personality features important during that time frame?  Of course.  Your post-activity reaction—reactive mood— will bias you toward returning to the healthful activity in the future or toward resisting or even totally abandoning it.

Suppose you decide that it would be better for you to cut your own lawn every Saturday rather than to pay someone to do it.  You reason that cutting the lawn would give you some exercise, get you outside in the fresh air, provide a sense of self-sufficiency and accomplishment, and save you a few bucks.  That reasoning, if maintained, presumably would create in you a sense of positive anticipation.

Manuel C. Voelkle and his colleagues (2013) studied the anticipatory and reactive mood responses of younger and older adults, ranging from 20 to 81 years-of-age.  Their research disclosed three main findings.  First, they clearly demonstrated that many people do in fact experience both anticipatory and reactive mood changes regarding their recurrent activities.  Second, either the anticipatory or reactive response can be so intense that one almost totally determines the other.  And, third, in young adulthood we tend more toward adjusting our anticipatory mood and in older adulthood, to maintaining a positive mood.

Applied to our lawn-cutting example, the Voelkle findings suggest some possible scenarios.  Friday night you might look forward to or dread Saturday.  Positive anticipation could cause you to get right to work early Saturday morning.  Negative anticipation could prompt you to wait “a couple more days” before cutting.  If your positive anticipation is intense, it might produce so strong a positive feeling that it carries all through the cutting and into the subsequent reaction to the completed event, setting up a positive anticipation for next Saturday’s mowing.  The opposite also could occur if your negative anticipation is especially strong.  Younger adults might be inclined to adjust their anticipatory mood in order to facilitate lawn-cutting while older adults might decide to begin their lawn-cutting activity only when they are in a “good mood” to begin with.

The take-away:  pay attention to the quality of your anticipation when you think about initiating or maintaining a healthful lifestyle behavior.  Use that insight to time when you start and stop any enactment of the behavior.   

Reference:  Voelkle, Manuel C.; Ebner, Natalie C.; Lindenberger, Ulman; & Riediger, Michaela. (2013).  Here we go again: Anticipatory and reactive mood responses to recurring unpleasant situations throughout adulthood.  Emotion, 13, 3, 424-433.    

Start Talking to Yourself

My book Don’t Rest in Peace emphasizes that activities are the keystones for healthful lifestyle change.  You might recall that to qualify as an activity, relevant behaviors must be rational, organized, comprehensive, and long-lived.   Accordingly, activities need to begin with considerable thought and effortful processing.  In order to move from ill health to good health, you must engage your mind deliberately and consistently.  I say deliberately and consistently because we all have fleeting, semi-conscious intentions to do what is best health-wise, and those kinds of intentions produce no significant, enduring results.

Meaningful changes only occur when you work diligently toward them.  I advise that you begin your healthful lifestyle change project by thinking deeply about who you are and where you are, literally and figuratively.  I have said that you are a composite of your history, temperament, personality, and environments.  Accordingly, you must consider how each singly and combined causes you to behave as you do.

The deliberative process requires you to talk to yourself—aloud, silently, or in writing.  Language facility makes us human and it is language that has enabled us to outperform all other earthly creatures and to create the world that we experience today.  You need to turn the language advantage toward yourself to make salutary self-directed changes happen.

When it comes to self-talk, psychologists differentiate “change talk” from “sustain talk,” the former being what you say to encourage yourself to behave differently and the latter, to maintain your current behavior.   Evaluate how much time you spend and how convincingly you perform the two types.  Are you predisposed to cataloguing all the reasons that a healthful change is unattainable?  

You need to maximize your change self-talk and minimize your sustain self-talk.  That often is easier said than done because most of us have “status quo bias.” 

Georgios Gerasimou (2016) suggests that we be on the alert for two of these biases.  The first occurs when we see alternatives as qualitatively similar and the second when we see alternatives as qualitatively different.  Think, for instance, about whether you reject changing your diet because you conclude that one diet is as good or bad as another (the first status quo bias) or whether you conclude that two diets are not feasible alternatives to each other (the second status quo bias) and should not be compared.  In either case of status quo bias, you have taken the easy route of no change, talking yourself out of expending the effort required to become healthier. 

The status quo biases are merely two of many destructive thought processes that undermine your health.  You can learn about many more in my aforementioned book.

Reference:      Gerasimou, G. (2016).   Asymmetric Dominance, Deferral and Status Quo Bias in a Behavioral Model of Choice.  Theory and Decision, 80, 2, 295-312.