When You Feel Like Giving Up

Everyone has their moments when the effort required for success seems overwhelming.  Making a healthful lifestyle change is no different.  Your perseverance will be tested from time to time, so your response to the challenges will determine success or failure.  As always, you are most likely to succeed if you know yourself and your personal defenses.

We all have characteristic responses to the threat of failure—some conscious, some unconscious, some adaptive and some maladaptive.   George E. Vaillant (2000) described the processes well and his work is the basis for this blog post.  He suggested that when we are threatened, we usually respond in one of three ways.  We find someone to help us, execute some deliberate coping strategy, or employ a non-conscious mechanism by default.  Let’s use as an example a cognitive-emotional healthful lifestyle change wherein we want to progress from a personal sense of intellectual stagnation to a sense of intellectual stimulation.    

Responses in the first category require us to find someone capable and willing to help.  The helper might be a partner who inspires us to learn a new skill or to explore a new subject.  Second category responses might include our deciding to find a setting, rather than a person per se, whose expressed purpose is to teach the new desired skill.

Whereas responses in the first two categories are consciously employed, ones in the third, default, category  just seem to happen.  These unconsciously determined responses more often than not are maladaptive, and result in our failing to achieve the desired goal.  For instance, even if you strongly would prefer to learn a specific new skill or subject for yourself, you could overcome intellectual boredom adaptively by unwittingly deciding to teach someone else a less desirable skill or subject that you already have mastered thoroughly.  Alternatively, you could handle your intellectual boredom maladaptively by randomly and mindlessly surfing the internet instead of pursuing a disciplined approach to mastering something specific.

When you have a goal in mind then, whether cognitive-emotional or otherwise, be aware of your characteristic tendency when overwhelmed by the effort.  Try your best to use the more reliable, deliberate, and adaptive strategies that enlist the support of capable others or that enable you independently to execute a deliberate coping strategy that is rational, organized, comprehensive, and long-lived.     

Reference:  Vaillant, George E.  Adaptive mental mechanisms: Their role in a positive psychology. American Psychologist, Vol 55(1), Jan 2000, 89-98.  doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.89

What Do You Meme By That?

Forget about objective reality for the moment.  Psychologically speaking, we most often are affected by subjective reality far more than by what is objectively true.  It is a case of style over substance that results from the ways that we ascribe meaning to our experience.

Where does the meaning come from anyway?

In my previous book, Conversation: Striving, Surviving, and Thriving (McCusker, 2004), I discussed memes, a concept coined by Oxford University ethologist and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins (1976).   In brief, a meme is the fundamental unit of cultural transmission, analogous to the gene, the fundamental unit of biological transmission.  Memes can take many forms; for instance, they can be verbal, as in the Happy Birthday song, enactive, as in the handshake or “high five,” or purely ideational, as in the commonly held belief that Lincoln was the USA’s greatest president.  To qualify as a meme, the item must be faithfully reproduced, widespread, and long-lasting.  Thus, a fad—such as the Macarena—would not be considered a meme.

So, in theory, memes are the proffered cultural meanings that we tend to “inherit” merely by living in our native society.  I say “tend" to inherit because the meme offered is not necessarily the one accepted by you—the individual.  Harkening back to Lincoln, not everyone accepts that he was America’s greatest president, and in a more contemporary vein, some do not accept that Barack Obama is America’s first black president, since, in truth, he is our first biracial president. 

Just because the culture offers a meme, then, does not mean that you accept the meme as valid, or that you think and act upon it in the exact way that many others do.  What you accept and incorporate actually is filtered through your ego strength—through you history, temperament, personality, and environments.  After you do, the filtered meme becomes an indiveme.

So where is the health-oriented connection?  The point is that every day you are besieged with media-generated advice about how to live your life.  Some of the meme-like advice is correct and some, incorrect.  You need to be able to think about your ego strength as it encourages you to embrace some information and to reject other information.  By doing so you accurately determine what is worth pursuing for you specifically and how to pursue it.  That way you will not prematurely dismiss good ideas or uncritically accept bad ones.

Think indiveme, not meme.

Dawkins, R. (1976).  The Selfish Gene.  Oxford University Press.

McCusker, P. (2004).  Conversation: Striving, Surviving, and Thriving.  Iuniverse.   

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.  

What Motivates You

We all have preferences—whether for a given food or fad—that are rooted in our personalities and prior experiences.  Motivation is no different.  We are motivated to do some specific things and not to do others.

Since motivation is a very complicated concept that cannot be addressed comprehensively here, I want to introduce only one single idea to help you understand your motivational style.   That way, you will be much better able to make self-selected health-enhancing changes.

Consider interpersonal relationships.  Presume that you want to meet someone new.  Why might you?  What specifically is it that would make that effort worthwhile?  Please be as concrete as possible about plausible advantages of meeting a new person.  It would be particularly helpful for you to write your thoughts on an electronic device or on paper so that you can refer to them later.  After you are done, continue reading this blog.

Okay.  Let’s resume.

Psychologists divide reasons for change motivation into two categories: promotion versus prevention.  Promotion-oriented motivation emphasizes advantages that you would expect from meeting someone new.  You, for instance, might have written that the new person would be an interesting conversation partner or would provide someone attractive to visit.   A prevention orientation emphasizes disadvantages that you would avoid by meeting a new person.  For instance, you might want to establish a new relationship to overcome loneliness or to have an alternative to the undesirable person with whom you presently interact.

Since perceived advantages mostly are subjective, how one frames an event is determinative.  The advantage that you perceive reveals your personality.  If you chose a promotion reason, you are “eager’ about the outcome that you expect will derive from your healthful change.  And if you chose a prevention reason, you are “vigilant’ about the outcome that you fear from not making your healthful change.  Eager anticipation suggests that you have a more hopeful orientation and vigilant anticipation, that you have a more fearful orientation.

Whenever you consider a healthful lifestyle change, evaluate it in terms of prevention-promotion and apply the insight that you achieve from making that promotion-prevention discrimination.  If your motivation for a change is more promotion oriented, think about all the advantages of making your new healthful lifestyle change.  Conversely, if your motivation is more prevention oriented, think about all the disadvantages that you will avoid by making your new healthful lifestyle change. Knowing and applying your motivation style can make the difference between change success and change failure. 

Time and Effort for Establishing Healthful Habits

You want to make a healthful lifestyle change, but question whether you can invest the time and effort necessary to make it happen.

In his book Outliers (2008), Malcom Gladwell—a journalist—glibly advised that masterful performance in certain fields of endeavor, such as chess playing, requires about 10,000 hours of practice.  Many professional and lay people readily accepted his suggestion as gospel until a research review by Princeton psychologist Brooke N. Mac Namara and her colleagues (2014) debunked it.  They showed, for instance, that even 10,000 hours did not guarantee mastery in such diverse areas as game performance, musical instrument expertise, educational achievement, and professional success.  They asserted instead that intra-individual factors were critical, such as when you begin to work on your skill, how well you employ your cognitive capabilities, and how your personality aligns with your goal and goal implementation efforts.

However, the Mac Namara review group did not in any way deny the importance of time on task, only that ten thousand hours, equivalent to three and one-half years of 8 hours days, is not determinative.  Rather, their advice implied that calculating time cannot be divorced from a person’s idiosyncratic characteristics and from the amount of effort that he/she devotes to planning and implementing their change program. 

I too firmly believe that your idiosyncratic characteristics and the amount of effort that you devote to planning and implementation are central.  If you choose your goals wisely and increase them at a reasonable rate, you can achieve incremental mastery that aggregates toward your best possible outcome.  This approach is predicated on an activity orientation.  Recall that an activity is rational, organized, comprehensive, and long-lived.

Suppose you want to get stronger.  A rational plan presumes that you have gathered the necessary information to determine how strength is acquired.  You then study the process and make an informed decision about where you need greater strength and what you need to do to attain it.  Next, you organize your plan, deciding particulars such as the location(s) where you will perform the strengthening.  Third, you ensure that your plan includes all the most critical features of strengthening.  And finally, you establish a schedule to execute your plan.

Once you have accounted for all components of your healthful activity, you will be able to accurately determine the amount of time and the amount of effort required to reach your goal.  It will not be 10,000 hours, that’s for sure.  If you structure your activity properly, you gradually will master your healthful lifestyle change week by week by week—not 10,000 hours at a time.  You will have apportioned your goal so that it is manageable.  You will have proven to yourself that health is not mastered in the same way that bread-making is.  You will accept that health always is a work in progress and find solace in the fact that you continually are putting forth sufficient personal time and effort for you to achieve and maintain as much health as is reasonably possible.

By the way, although there is no substitute for a personalized plan in order accurately to estimate the time and effort needed to develop a salutary exercise habit, you may be comforted to know that faithfully adhering to a five week program has been shown to work very well for most people (Iso-Ahola, 2013).         

Gladwell, M. (2008).  Outliers: The story of success.  New York: Little, Brown.

Mac Namara, B., Hambrick, D., & Oswald, F. (2014).   Deliberate practice and performance in music, games, sports, education, and professions: A meta-analysis.  Psychological Science, 25, 8, 1608-1618.

 

Iso-Ahola, S. (2013).  Exercise: Why it is a challenge for both the nonconscious and conscious mind.  Review of General Psychology, 17, 1, 93-110. 

Healthful Environments: Where Are You and Who Are You With?

Taking a very broad macro-view, I underscore the significance of environments for our health and function by remembering how our species and all species came to be.  The body that we inhabit evolved to take advantage of the extant available environmental resources.  Our organs and physiological systems developed as they did because we needed to access and exploit what the physical environment offered.  We created tools and dwellings from what we found locally or from materials made from what we found locally.  And we organized our interpersonal relationships to capitalize on the adaptive skills and assistance of people around us.    

A more practical, personal, micro-view reveals that, like our prehistoric and historic forbearers, we always are somewhere and most often we are with someone; those facts profoundly influence what we think, feel, and do health-wise.   The three environments—natural, fabricated, and interpersonal—can be facilitating or debilitating.  We must think about them and structure them in order to effect salutary health-oriented changes.

If you want to become more physically fit, for instance, the natural environment can be an ally or an enemy.  Warm and moderate climates provide a comfortable setting for leaving your shelter and being active outdoors.  If your climate is sub-optimal or interfering and you want to be outside, you of course can dress accordingly.  An indoor activity is an obvious alternative venue.

The fabricated environment, spaces created by women and men, includes houses, offices, malls and similar places that we inhabit when going about our activities.  Those environments inhibit or facilitate our action-oriented physical and mental health goals.  It undoubtedly is easier, for instance, to study or relax in a quiet than in a noisy space.

Finally, the world of people—the interpersonal environment—contributes to healthful change promotion or aversion.   That influence sometimes is obvious and sometimes covert.  If you want to become a vegetarian and your family and friends start calling you “rabbit,” even jokingly, you might be dissuaded from changing.  Conversely, if they all encourage your initiative, your change-oriented efforts are buoyed.  Moreover, “social comparison theory” (Festinger L., 1954) suggests that, consciously or unconsciously, you continually compare yourself to those around you.  When surrounded by health-minded others, your explicit or implicit natural social instincts nudge you toward healthful activities, and vice versa.

So, in contemplating healthful lifestyle change, do not plan or initiate a program without considering your environments and without making a vigorous effort to structure them to be as change friendly as possible.  Choose goals that are consistent with your environments or choose environments that are consistent with your goals.  If neither option is possible, change your environments to be goal-consistent.

Festinger L (1954).  A theory of social comparison processes."  Human relations 7, 2, 117–140. doi:10.1177/001872675400700202.

Behavior That Facilitates Healthful Change

To speak of behavior that facilitates healthful change at first seems rather redundant and obvious, since healthful change usually presumes behavior change.  However, focusing on the behavioral aspect of change is worth your consideration.

The rationale for a primary behavior focus, implicit in Nike’s “Just Do It” slogan, is that behavior sometimes steers thought and emotion long enough to make a healthful change happen.  The psychoanalytic notion of “change of function” (Hartmann, 1950) is one of many possible mechanisms.  In change of function, one forces herself to behave in a manner counter to her typical emotions and thoughts.  Imagine, for instance, that you hate (emotion) vegetables, consider them boring “rabbit food” (thought), and consume virtually nothing that has been incapable of independent ambulation.  Then, one day, your relatively young mother suffers a debilitating stroke that shakes you to your core.  Totally out of character, you schedule yourself for a long-delayed complete physical examination that discloses extremely elevated cholesterol and lipid levels.  In her post-labs meeting with you, the physician advises more vegetables and less meat to reduce your stroke risk.

You are not happy.  You try to dismiss the doctor’s recommendations, but the more you study stroke, the more you conclude that the doctor has an important point.  So, you force yourself to eat a few more vegetables and a little less meat.  You read more, converse with more people, and experiment with ways to make vegetables more palatable.  Although you REALLY miss burgers and steaks, you continue to force yourself along a path of reduced meat consumption.  To your surprise, you incrementally acquire a taste for vegetables prepared your way.  In time, you not only lose you excessive meat cravings, but come to prefer some vegetables.  You have undergone a change of function: by behaving in a manner contradictory to your norm, you have changed how you feel and how you think about eating in general and vegetables in particular.  Because your behavior no longer is at odds with your emotions and thoughts, you have developed a powerful pro-health habit that can endure.

Our last three blogs have emphasized how emotion, thought, or behavior can lead us toward physical and mental health.   Because our actions are determined by multiple interacting factors, when it comes to healthful lifestyle change, one cannot merely focus on emotion, or thought, or behavior.  You must consider all three, and integrate them synergistically in ways that facilitate your best intentions.  Sometimes emotion leads, sometimes thought, and sometimes behavior, but eventually all three need to be aligned to produce the healthiest you.  For instance, in our current example in which a vegetable-eating conversion (behavior) led, the individual who eats less meat should find as many ways as possible to enjoy vegetables (emotion) and to reflect, read, and talk about vegetable’s benefits (thought).

Hartmann , H. (1950).  Comments on the psychoanalytic theory of the ego. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 5, 74–96.