Habits and Strategies

A healthy relationship with the truth is essential for a happy, successful life.

But this is not a simple thing; the ability to see, acknowledge, and accept what’s true – about ourselves, our circumstances, our relationships; our own strengths and weaknesses, and the challenges we face – is actually much harder than it may seem.

We have all known people in our lives who are smart, self-aware, and curious, but they keep making the same mistakes over and over in one particular area of their lives. You see it, other people see it, but they don’t seem to see it at all.

It’s even more difficult when other people are seeing things that we don’t see – and seeing that we don’t see them.

I remember as a young psychotherapist in my 20s (I’ve been doing this for a very long time!) discovering a new approach or technique that seemed to do wonders. All I could see was the success, and it was exciting.

What I wasn’t seeing was my own confirmation bias, that would minimize where it didn’t work very well, and maximize where it did.

It took some time and experience to see that every approach has its strengths and weaknesses, and every client I work with is unique – what’s helpful with one person may do nothing for another.

And this sort of confirmation bias is something I still have to stay continually vigilant about – because our biases never disappear.

We are made for learning and growth. Our success in life depends, to a significant extent, on increasing our awareness and understanding of the world. Yet we have a tremendous array of biases that color our interpretation of what we perceive, what we experience, and what we think we know.

These biases are not flaws in our system, they exist because they are functional. Like our habits, in most situations, most of the time, these biases work pretty well for us, and the automatic nature of them allows us to live without being continually overwhelmed with bringing consciousness and willpower into every tiny aspect of our lives.

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To ruminate means literally to chew over and over again. It’s what cows do with grass so they can draw as much of the nutritional value from it as they can.

When we dwell too much on what hurt us in the past, we are doing a different kind of ruminating. We “re-chew” our negative thoughts and memories, drawing as much pain and suffering out of them as we possibly can.

This is one of the worst things we can do for our sense of happiness and well-being.

The compulsion to ruminate can be powerful, especially if we’ve practiced it a lot. We can develop an irresistible urge to replay the events that have made us miserable. Yet some older popular notions from psychology can lead people to believe this is a good thing. We think we are figuring something out. In fact, it’s more like re-striking a bruised injury thinking that will help it to heal.

When we purposefully remember painful memories over and over again, without changing our perspective towards them, we actually reinforce the pain with each visit.

Remember, our narrative memories aren’t facts, they are stories that can contain facts—but they can also contain mistaken ideas or conclusions. So when we ruminate we are not exploring Truth with a capital “T,” we are replaying a painful and helpless story.

I don’t say this to deny anybody’s experience or to minimize anybody’s trauma, but the best thing we can do with painful experiences is to have them take their proper place in history.

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Giving and helping others are wonderful things. We are appreciated when we give to others through charity, volunteer work, or other acts of kindness; and rightly so. When we can help another person in some way, it creates a spirit of goodwill, and it’s one of the single most important acts we can do for our own happiness.

What’s often overlooked though is how much consciousness, caring, time, money, and energy each one of us already puts into significantly helping other people every day – through the work we do.

Every hour we’ve spent in a classroom, in an internship, and at work is an hour we’ve spent honing and perfecting our skills. Every dollar we’ve spent for tuition, books, seminars, travel – and of course those most expensive of seminars, the cost of failure or loss that have added to our wisdom – is a dollar we’ve spent investing in our ability to do our work well.

And every ounce of energy we’ve spent thinking about, worrying over, creating ideas for, and sweating through hard work and difficult times is an ounce of energy that increases our ability to provide some kind of product or service to another human being.

It’s popular these days to dismiss all this because we’re doing it for the money; as though earning money cheapens our efforts, makes our efforts base, selfish, or materialistic.

But earning a living from what we do makes it possible and reasonable for us to do it. When demagogues lecture young college graduates to forego making money, and instead to do something else that helps people, they are telling them that what we do to make money does not help people.

This, of course, is exactly the opposite of the truth.

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Man should not try to avoid stress any more than he would shun food, love or exercise.

• Hans Selye

It is common knowledge that too much stress is bad for us; yet stress is also a necessary and vital part of living well. Anything that you do that involves challenging yourself, confronting situations that require your best efforts, or pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone will involve a degree of stress.

Happiness is not the absence of stress; it is living with a degree of stress that we can manage. And there’s new research that turns what we thought we knew about stress on its head – what’s most important for our health and well-being is not the stress itself, but what we believe about stress.

When we’re feeling too much stress in our lives, there are two things that we can do:

• Do less of what causes us stress
• Learn to manage a higher level of stress

Legendary UCLA Basketball coach John Wooden said, “Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.” That one sentence contains great leverage for decreasing stress. A major cause of stress is worrying and spinning our wheels trying to do things that are outside of our control.

When we focus on what we can’t do, we feel both revved up to want to do something, and simultaneously helpless to actually do anything. It’s like having one foot on the accelerator and the other on the brake at the same time. To that end, focusing most of our efforts on what we can do will make us more effective, and less stressed out.

Another thing we can do to decrease external stress is to take stock of our environment, and find what increases our stress. Do you spend a lot of time commuting? Are you in an environment that overloads your senses, or in which you feel threatened? If you can change such things you can lower your stress levels.

Here are three simple but effective things we can do to increase our capacity for stress:

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Change and growth is, first and foremost, an active, creative process. Charting a new course for ourselves, even if we’re only talking about a specific habit or two, involves envisioning what we would like different, how we would like it to be different, and what steps we need to take to get there.

Then, most importantly, it requires the commitment to take action, which involves creating the structures that will guide us through the steps and keep us on track; the scheduled appointments, the deadlines, the people who will keep us accountable.

Successful people actually use less willpower than less successful people, because they set up effective rituals, appointments, and accountability structures that build into their day what they would otherwise need willpower to achieve.

Twyla Tharp, the great dancer and choreographer, in her book The Creative Habit, talks about “rituals of preparation:” what creative people do that prepares them to work. This is hers:

I begin each day of my life with a ritual: I wake up at 5:30 am, put on my workout clothes, my leg warmers, my sweatshirts, and my hat. I walk outside my Manhattan home, hail a taxi, and tell the driver to take me to the Pumping Iron gym at 91^st Street and First Avenue, where I work out for two hours. The ritual is not the stretching and weight training I put my body through each morning at the gym; the ritual is the cab. The moment I tell the driver where to go I have completed the ritual.

Such rituals let our entire system know that we are ready, that it is time to work; they shepherd all of our psychological, emotional and physical resources and make them available to us, so we can focus and absorb ourselves in our task.

It’s the daily consistency that makes such rituals so powerful. As Tharp says:

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My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She’s ninety-seven now, and we don’t know where the heck she is.

• Ellen DeGeneres

It’s no secret that exercise is good for our physical health. But exercise is vital for our mental health as well; and sitting a lot and not exercising is tremendously harmful for our emotional and psychological life.

There has been an upsurge in depression over the past several decades. One major contributor to this is how little physical activity we get. Exercise is just about the best treatment for depression, yet today 50% of men and 60% of women don’t exercise more than ten minutes per week.

Yes, that’s per week.

The most popular treatment for depression is medication. It’s quick to administer, it’s easy to do, but, statistically, for mild to moderate depression it’s actually no better than placebo. It also has side effects that can be pretty unpleasant over time, and when the medication stops, so do its benefits.

Exercise isn’t as easy as medication; it takes work, self-discipline, and perseverance. It requires us to do what we often don’t feel like doing (I’ve probably jumped into a swimming pool tens of thousands of times by now, and to this day I have never liked that moment of entering the water).

But exercise is as much as two and a half times as effective as medication for overcoming depression.

Once we develop the habit of exercise, we can easily overcome the inertia and the discomfort; then the benefits we gain against the depression continue, and the side effects are all positive.

But overcoming the inertia and discomfort – or even the self-concept – that exercise requires can be tricky.

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One of the most harmful ways of thinking of ourselves is as a victim. It can make it nearly impossible to find success, financially or otherwise, and undermines our capacity for relationships.

Yet this mindset is not uncommon, we’ve probably all experienced it to some degree. But for some it can create a more pervasive atmosphere in their lives.

As researchers Rahav Gabay and his colleagues have shown, this mindset has four specific qualities that lead to three specific biases, and one onerous tendency, that can skew our view of the world.

Today we’ll look at how to move away from this kind of mindset, and re-orient toward taking effective, positive action.

Changing a victim mindset is much more complicated than the kind of “get over it” advice that’s so common – and useless. We have reasons for feeling like a victim – sometimes because we have been seriously harmed in some way; sometimes because for some reason at some point it seemed like a good strategy to deal with challenging circumstances, and eventually became a habit.

Whenever looking at our habits or mindsets, it’s essential to start with compassion, to understand that we often build certain habits of action or thought because it’s the best we can do at the time, even if it ends up harming us later.

But if our habits are harming us, it’s well worth looking at them honestly and with courage.

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