Habits and Strategies

Worry is a troublesome activity. And we can find ourselves practicing this ancient ritual at the least opportune times: getting ready for an important presentation, anticipating the response of other people to something we want or need, hoping for a positive outcome in a complex situation… and all too often at two or three in the morning.

We tend to worry about the things we can’t control. Money is often at the top of the list. We can’t control how our investments will do. We also can’t control politics, the weather, or future events.

We can’t control the response to our presentation, the receptiveness of others to what we want or need, or the outcomes of many situations… and we certainly can’t control much of anything in the middle of the night, when we should be sleeping soundly.

When we’re dealing with things we can control, we don’t usually worry about them, we just do them. We prepare diligently for our presentation, we ask for what we want as clearly and respectfully as possible, and we bring our very best to what we do, giving us the best chance at a positive outcome – but the outcome itself is often not in our hands.

Ideally, like the stoics recommended thousands of years ago, we would spend all our time focusing on only those things that we can control, and none of our time worrying about the things we can’t control. But anyone with ambitions, dreams for the future, or children knows that’s just not possible.

So let’s look instead at how we can worry more effectively:

First of all, we do tend to have what we can and can’t control mixed together in our minds. It can help to separate them out.

A simple but effective way to do this is to write them down. Take a big pad of paper, draw a vertical line down the middle of the page, making two columns. Choose an issue or a facet of your life that is troubling you.

In one column, write down all the things regarding that issue that you can’t control. In the other column write down the things regarding that issue that you can control.

Then, take a good look at the column of things you can’t control, and acknowledge that, by definition, there’s really nothing you can do here. Accept the truth of that as deeply as you can, and bring most, if not all, of your attention to the other column.

From the column of things you can control, glean from that list tangible actions you can take that will help your situation. Be as specific as possible, identifying as many actions as you can. Make sure that each of them is doable – preferably in small enough chunks that you can imagine yourself doing and finishing each one in a sitting.

Next, each day, take from that list one or a few things you can do the following day.

Now you have the beginning of positive momentum toward genuinely tackling whatever it is that’s been troubling you.

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To live effectively is to aim for behaviors and habits that work for us in the real world. There are lots of tricks and techniques for making changes in our lives: goal setting strategies, arranging priorities, structuring support for new and better habits, to name just a few.

These are important skills, and part of an effective menu of personal growth. But there’s an essential ground to all of these; a quality that can make the difference between fighting against sometimes overwhelming forces, versus leaning into life with the wind at our back. This quality has less to do with what we do, than how we do it.

Here’s the big idea:

If you want to change things for the better within yourself, be compassionate with yourself; if you want to change things for the better in the world, be compassionate with others.

Think of the people who have had the greatest positive influence on you. Did they spend a lot of time nagging, berating, insulting, or shaming you? I suspect not.

Shame has its place. When we do something that violates our values, one of the natural emotions we feel is shame. Shame provides the painful feedback that motivates us to never do that shameful act again. If we continue to do the same behavior, we’ll continue to feel the same shame… until we eventually get the message.

But once that feedback is received, and we have taken the steps to correct what we feel ashamed of, that emotion has done its job. When we continue to berate ourselves for what we did after we’ve taken the steps to make it right, we actually weaken our willpower, and undermine our ability to establish better habits.

For example, researchers have found that among alcoholics who have become sober, those who continue to actively feel ashamed of themselves, to criticize and castigate themselves for their previous behavior, are the ones who go back to drinking. On the other hand, those who have compassion for their previous behavior after changing it for the better are the ones who stay sober.

This is very different from pretending that everything was fine, or some other pretense. It’s possible to know and acknowledge that we’ve done harmful things, to feel the pain of facing our shameful behavior; and then, having changed that behavior, and done what we can to make amends, to feel compassion and kindness toward ourselves.

It’s important, of course, that we change that behavior. Just having compassion for our human failings without feeling the shame and working to change what we’ve done will keep us on a steady course of destruction. We need to have compassion for ourselves while working to improve ourselves – and the attitude that will most help us to make and maintain those positive changes is compassion.

Compassion also helps us to weather failure, and even to counter low self-esteem. Among teenagers who were studied, those with low self-esteem who were compassionate with themselves were more resilient, and were better able to cope with life’s ups and downs. They had fewer mental health issues as time went on – whereas those with low self-esteem and low self-compassion had much more trouble with mental health.

So the leverage point is the compassion, not the self-esteem.

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When we’re traumatized by something, there are things that we can do to be able to bounce back as best as we can. One of those things is writing. I’ll get to the specific action in a minute, but first let me clarify a few things.

When I say “bounce back,” I don’t mean “just pretend that everything’s okay.” There are experiences that are so horrible that we really never completely bounce back from them. But we can do things that will make our situation worse, and things we can do that can make them better.

Something that can make a trauma – or even just a troubling conflict or major life change – worse is to keep it a secret. We tend to keep secrets of things that we’re ashamed of, and trauma can often be accompanied by a sense of shame. What I’ll be showing you can help you through a part of that.

It’s important to distinguish “keeping a secret” from having appropriate boundaries. There’s a time and a place to share our experience with others; and it matters who those others are. Telling anybody and everybody about our traumatic or troubling experience can be intrusive and presumptuous, and can set us up for an awful experience as well.

That said, one of the most harmful things we can do if we’ve experienced trauma is to hold it completely inside, trying to make believe that it didn’t happen, and keeping it a secret.

Now here’s what we can do instead.

…well, let’s start with what not to do: we should not go into the details of a trauma when it first occurs.

There are interventions, such as Critical Incident Stress Debriefing (CISD) that ask a traumatized person to talk about their feelings and experience right away after a trauma. These actually do more harm than good for most people. They can cement the events into a story that makes it harder to find any sense in what happened; and that can lead to a feeling of greater fragility and vulnerability.

There is a natural process of psychological healing that people have gone through throughout human history, but it takes time. We integrate, we protect ourselves, we cry, we wrestle with feelings and fears, we talk with people we trust.

This might take a few months, but for most of us, the symptoms of trauma dissipate over time. Humankind has had an incredibly violent history; we as a species are well versed in dealing with trauma. That said, trauma can also linger and interfere with our lives in subtle or not so subtle ways. We understand how trauma works, and how to heal from it, much better than ever before, so it’s worth seeking help if this is the case with you.

But there is something that you can do that, while it may not completely heal a trauma, has been shown to make a difference, courtesy of Dr. James Pennebaker, author of Writing To Heal:

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There is one quality, more than any other, that leads predictably to greater success and effectiveness in the world: the ability to choose between short term pleasure/avoidance of pain on the one hand, and longer-term goals and values on the other.

People who have a strong capacity for delaying gratification like this are more successful academically and professionally, earn higher incomes, have better relationships, and are less likely to engage in criminal behavior or destructive personal habits.

We can deliberately grow this quality in ourselves.

For most of us, most of the time, this comes down to a question of consistency around more subtle day to day choices: Do I spend this next hour focused on my work project, or scrolling social media? Do I go to a somewhat challenging social event or stay home? Do I get up and do a workout, or sleep in? Do I make the effort to spend time connecting with my spouse or allow myself to get distracted with other things?

I’ve been working with people as a teacher, Marriage and Family therapist, and coach for over 40 years now. I have worked – and continue to work – with people all over the world via phone and video. In all that time, across many different cultures, there’s one question that I’ve found more effective than any other in clarifying these choices, so that the better decision stands in stark relief.

Here is that question:

“What will I be proud of tomorrow?”

(When I use the word pride, I mean a healthy pride, not boastful arrogance. I mean that good feeling we get when we’ve earned something, when we’ve done something challenging, and come through it well. But pride can have a negative connotation for some people, so if you prefer, you can say it as: “What will I feel better about having done – or not done – tomorrow?”)

• If you’re wondering whether to save and invest that extra money, or spend it on a short-term impulse… what will you be proud of tomorrow?
• If you’re not sure whether you should let your spouse know how much he or she means to you… what will you be proud of tomorrow?
• If you’re trying to decide whether to cut corners on your work project, or spend the extra time and energy to do it right… what will you be proud of tomorrow?
• If you’re more on the introverted end of the spectrum, and you feel like staying home instead of getting together with friends… what will you be proud of tomorrow?
• If you don’t know if you should accept a challenging new opportunity, or stay within your comfort range… what will you be proud of tomorrow?

Too often we put our short-term impulses up against an abstract goal far off in the future:

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There are (at least) two major qualities from our ancient past that cause us considerable trouble. Taking conscious control of them and training and updating ourselves for our present environment can make a big difference in our quality of life.

One of these is our attraction to high calorie foods. Starvation and famine were dire threats for our hunter gatherer forebears. Finding enough food was always the mission – and discovering a trove of high calorie foods was generally a cause for celebration and feasting.

When our ancestors came across the wilderness equivalent of a bakery, the best option for their survival was to eat as much as they possibly could.

So today, when high-calorie/low-nutrition snacks are everywhere and inexpensive, our inner hunter gatherer leads us to want to eat as much as we can.

That our rate of obesity and corresponding health hazards such as heart disease and diabetes are through the roof is one consequence of our incredible prosperity. This is not some moral failing or lack of character; we’re doing what our successful forebears selected for us. What worked well for our ancestors is killing us today.

Our challenge is to adapt to our abundance by consciously and purposefully resetting our habits from hunter-gatherer auto-pilot eating, and toward deliberate habits that include knowledge of how our current meals will affect our future health and well-being.

The other leftover from our ancient past is our strong bias toward negativity.

For our hunter-gatherer forebears, their natural inclination when assessing their environment was to be pessimistic and vigilant. They scanned for danger in a way that kept every one of our ancestors from being eaten, poisoned, murdered, drowned, crushed… or otherwise mortally damaged.

Those that didn’t do this… are not our ancestors.

Those cheery optimists of the distant past who weren’t sufficiently on guard, continuously looking for whatever could go wrong… they may have had a very nice time for a short while, but they weren’t likely to survive for long.

This negative bias served us well for millennia, but in our much more peaceful, complex, and abundant world today, we’re better served by understanding this bias, and adapting to the new environment in which most of us, most of the time, now live.

The concrete consequence of this negative bias is that, as Roy Baumeister and John Tierney point out in their book, The Power of Bad, Negative experiences are about four times as strong for us as positive ones.

An easy way to experience this is with two simple questions posed by Amos Tversky to Steven Pinker:

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We are all familiar with the basic guidelines for good health: exercise, eat right – more fruits and veggies, less red meat, more fish, fewer calories, more fiber, less sugar- don’t smoke, don’t abuse alcohol or drugs.  If we follow these guidelines and maintain an optimal weight, many health problems would be greatly diminished.

But there is another dimension to our health. How we think and feel, how we interact with others, and the kind of activities we spend our time doing can have a huge impact on our physical health.

We can assess these different habits and behaviors by how they affect our happiness, our relationships, and our resilience. Which helps us to function better? Which helps us to enjoy the company of family and friends? Which helps us to be more effective and to live a better life?

Fortunately, over the years there has been a great deal of very good research that is beginning to show some clear and consistent guidelines for how to practice psychological health, and live a happier and more fulfilling life.

It’s also shown some practices that can lead to a physically healthier life.

There’s a clear difference, for example, between people who are more optimistic or more pessimistic. Optimists have greater longevity – living an average of about eight years longer than pessimists. They have healthier hearts, more resilient immune systems, and even have fewer bad events happen to them – because they take active steps to anticipate and avoid them.

Optimists tend to practice healthier behaviors – for example, they tend to give up smoking, while pessimists tend not to. The skills of optimism are also a powerful inoculation against depression.

Optimists tend to be more effective in general, because they tend to look for solutions to problems, while pessimists tend to look for problems in the solutions.

Optimists tend to have better social support, because people tend to stay in contact with optimists longer. As the late Chris Peterson of The University of Michigan told a group of us, “Misery loves company, but company does not love misery.”

From the ongoing Harvard Longitudinal Study that has followed men since 1938, there was no difference in health up to age 40, but from ages 40-50, optimistic men stayed healthy, while pessimistic men began to get sick and die – usually from heart problems. If they had a 2^nd heart attack, it was correlated with pessimism, not the traditional health indicators such as cholesterol or high blood pressure.

The former director of the study, Harvard professor George Vaillant, MD, shows how to apply it to your own life in his marvelous book, Aging Well: Surprising Guideposts to a Happier Life from the Landmark Harvard Study of Adult Development.

Optimism is only one element of a happy life, but it is the easiest one to improve. While some people are naturally more optimistic than others, it is possible, by practicing some fairly simple skills over time, to become more optimistic.

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Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics called it akrasia – a weakness of will, acting in a way contrary to our consciously held moral values. It’s the quality that most distinguishes criminals from the rest of us; and the quality that most distinguishes less successful people from those who are more successful.

The ability to resist our short-term impulses and desires, and to focus instead on our long-term values and goals is the most important capacity for living well.

In the late 1960’s, Walter Mischel, a professor at Stanford University, conducted one of the most important experiments in psychology. It’s now called The Marshmallow Test, but marshmallows were only one of a variety of treats used to tempt youngsters to indulge in their immediate desires.

Children from age three on up were left alone in a room with treats – luscious marshmallows, yummy cookies… the children got to decide which treats they’d be tantalized by. They were given two options: ring a bell to call the experimenter back in the room, at which point they could eat one of the indulgences; or wait until the experimenter came back some twenty minutes later, and get to eat two of the treats.

This was a test of the ability to delay gratification. Following up in the decades since, Mischel and his colleagues have found that those children who were able to wait longer also were more successful in many crucial ways as time went on.

As teenagers, they scored an average of 210 points higher on their SAT scores. As adults, they were better able to pursue and reach long term goals, including reaching higher educational levels; they were less likely to use drugs, had a significantly lower body mass index, were better able to deal well with challenges in work and maintain close relationships.

Later, when brain imagery technology was used to study these now grown children, those who had maintained a high level of self-control over the course of their lives showed more activity in their prefrontal cortex – the area that integrates the higher functions of motivation and control.

Those who were less able to delay showed more activity in the more primitive ventral striatum – which involves desire, pleasure, and addiction.

The children who were able to resist the siren song of immediate treats went on to lead more disciplined and successful lives than those who were not. This could lead us to think there’s something inborn, a fixed trait of self-control present from early childhood, that would allow some people to flourish and succeed, while others were doomed to a life of self-indulgence and failure.

That’s the message a lot of people have taken from a superficial look at these experiments, but they’ve missed the point entirely…

The most important finding from Mischel’s experiments, and indeed from a whole wealth of studies now on self-regulation and willpower, is that we are not at the mercy of some fixed trait of temperance – there are things that any of us can do to strengthen our capacity for self-control.

In fact, it’s so easy, a child could do it… and indeed they did.

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A marriage, a friendship, a close family relationship… all of our important relationships are built on countless moments, innumerable interactions that either build qualities of trust, joy, and respect – or undermine those qualities.

Today I want to show you what is arguably the most important moment for building a trusting, satisfying, loving relationship.

We can often think that what makes a difference in a romantic relationship, or our relationship with our kids, or other friends and relatives, are the big things; the romantic getaway for the weekend, or the great gift that we buy.

…but there is a moment that packs more leverage, more meaning, and more potential for doing good – or harm – than almost any other: the moment when someone we care about asks for our attention.

Changing how we respond in that moment can enliven the entire atmosphere of our relationships. To understand why, we must first look at what happens to us when we’re ignored.

One of the most severe punishments for a prisoner is solitary confinement; one of the most hurtful things kids do on a playground is to ditch another kid; one of the most frustrating and hurtful things that friends can do to each other is “the silent treatment.” These are all experiences of social isolation; and social isolation is the strongest psychological risk factor for disease. More than stress, more than anything else.

Of course the moments I’m talking about are not as severe as total social isolation, but they are threads of the same cloth. Research shows how even mild experiences can have a huge effect:

Pedestrians who walked past a stranger without getting any acknowledgment from that stranger reported a substantially lower sense of connection to other people – just from that one moment.

People riding an elevator who were completely ignored by the stranger next to them moved from feelings of happiness toward feelings of hurt.

In a computer simulation of a game of catch, when people were not thrown the ball for just 5 minutes, they felt more sadness, despair and hostility, and less self-esteem, sense of belonging, sense of control, and meaning in life… in 5 minutes. With a stranger. Even with a stranger they were told they would not like.

Imagine how much more intense it is for us to be ignored by somebody we know and care about.

And yet most of us are unaware of how often we do this.

It is so easy to get caught up in whatever it is that we’re doing, and miss these moments of contact – the moments when the people we care about ask for our attention. We usually think that it will be just fine to respond a little later when we’re done with our task. We do this not because we’re rotten people, or because we don’t care about our partner or children or friends, but because these moments can be easy to miss, and we don’t realize the power that’s contained in them.

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Believe it or not, you have a powerful resource inside your head, one that can provide a reservoir of joy, strength and perseverance.   Once you recognize it – and practice tapping into it – you can use it not just to boost your day but to improve the quality of your entire life.  Best of all, it’s as straightforward as hanging a picture on the wall …

Think about the photographs you have displayed in your home.  Are they pictures of the miserable times, the disappointments, the conflicts, the traumas? Did you set things up so you are constantly reminded of the events and people who hurt you most?

Of course not. We’ve all had those times, of course. It’s part of life. But when we put pictures on the wall of our home, we choose pictures of the people we love, the peak moments. We want to be reminded of how adorable our kids were at that age, or the great trip we took that summer, or a favorite quality of someone we love.

We do this because it affects the entire atmosphere of our home. It’s part of what makes our house feel like a home. We may have boxes of pictures stored away that cover a wider range of experience, but what we want to see every day are the images that warm us, comfort us, inspire us.

In a similar way, we have images we reflect on in our mind’s eye; memories of times past, of people and events. We don’t regularly reflect on that many images; probably about as many as the pictures we have hanging on our wall.

And just as the pictures on our wall create a mood in our home, the pictures we reflect on in our minds create an atmosphere within ourselves. What many of us don’t realize is that we have the same ability to choose those internal images as we do to choose the pictures on the wall.

What images do you think of often? Do they warm you? Comfort you? Inspire you? Or do they remind you of regrets, disappointments, or painful events?

We can choose our internal mental images, but it’s not as simple as replacing pictures on the wall. We can tell ourselves to stop thinking of a certain memory, or we can distract ourselves from thinking about it, and that can have some effect. But there’s a better way that’s a little less direct.

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We have a wonderful deli/bakery nearby that has great, healthy food, and very yummy, not-so-healthy treats – cookies, éclairs, pastries… very tempting stuff. Every once in awhile I’m seduced by these delicacies, and when I am, I almost always notice something afterwards: I don’t feel as good as I did before.

It’s not a severely bad feeling, and I can easily ignore it if I want to. But if I pay attention to the sensations in my body, there’s a clearly different feeling from my insides; it’s not as pleasant as it was before I had eaten the sugar and fat filled morsel.

This is the key to making our fight against bad habits a fair fight.

About 80 percent of the nerves connected to our viscera are afferent – meaning they send signals to our brain from our organs. These are sensory nerves, designed to give feedback about what’s happening within our bodies.

Until recently medical texts claimed that there was little or no sensory information coming from our organs. We now know that’s not true; there are well understood pathways from a part of our vagus nerve that send these sensory signals. Interestingly, Charles Darwin wrote about this over 100 years ago, but it never became widely appreciated until now.

But it’s also extremely common for us as we grow and deal with our challenges and goals – and peer pressure, and impatience of our fellow humans – to learn to ignore much of what these signals are telling us.

By ignoring the sensations of our bodies, we effectively deprive ourselves of one of our great strengths to overcome short term temptation… including the cravings for sugar and refined carbohydrates that have been fueling the alarming rise in obesity in recent decades.

In Walter Mischel’s “Marshmallow Experiment,” Young children were presented with a marshmallow (or cookie or other treat – they were given some options from which to choose), then given the opportunity to earn a second treat if they could wait for the experimenter to return – about 15-20 minutes later.

A lot of kids had a very hard time doing this, until they were told a very simple secret: they could imagine the treat as though it were only a picture of a treat. This turned the sensory stimulation of that immediately seductive treat into an abstract thought; and this very simple shift in attitude allowed children – who had zero resistance before – to now almost miraculously resist temptation.

By turning the immediate temptation into an abstraction, it lost its seductive power.

What does this have to do with body sensations, afferent nerves, and obesity?

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