Habits and Strategies

People who are extroverts – people who are more sociable, who like to be out, talk, and interact with other people, and who gladly put themselves out into new situations – tend to be happier than people who are not.

That’s great for those who, by temperament, happen to be extroverts. But what if we’re not naturally extroverted? We can still improve our overall happiness by doing extroverted things.

The delightful truth is that, from simply taking more extroverted actions, our overall happiness grows about the same as if we were naturally extroverted.

If you tend to be an introvert, if your natural comfort is to be more solitary, shy, or quietly inward, I’m not suggesting that you deny your nature, or pretend to be someone that you’re not. There are significant strengths to introversion that I’ll discuss in a moment.

But you can get some of the benefits of an extrovert as well by practicing certain skills; then you can have the best of both worlds.

Try doing something each day that challenges you to be more outgoing. Don’t worry about doing the world’s most socially engaging activity – you don’t have to become some social thrill-seeker. What matters is the direction, not the mileage.

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Having choices is wonderful. Today we have more options in terms of goods and services to choose from than any time in the history of the human race, and the options for spending money are nearly endless. This is part of the Great Enrichment I’ve written about earlier, and when we manage it well, it can contribute to our quality of life.

When we don’t manage it well, it can ruin our quality of life – even in the midst of incredible abundance.

On one end of the spectrum, we can get into trouble with our money when we don’t think enough – we spend too much on things we don’t really like once we have them. On the other end, we can devote too much time and emotional energy on making absolutely sure that we’ve bought the very best thing, at the very best price, with everything we buy.

This is where it’s essential for our happiness that we aim for making choices that are good enough, rather than trying to maximize every single purchase we make.

This is the message of Barry Schwartz’s excellent book, The Paradox of Choice.

When we habitually obsess over our purchases, it can undermine our well-being, drain the pleasure from what we buy, and even drop us into depression.

It’s important to put the time and energy into research and comparisons for some purchases. But if you spend hours deciding between one pair of shoes or another, or days fretting over whether you’re getting the best deal on a coffee maker, you might just be overdoing it.

Doing this with one or two choices won’t cause much trouble, but cumulatively, over time, this kind of painstaking deliberation can seriously erode our sense of joy and satisfaction.

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Lying takes a huge toll on our relationships, our physical health, and our mental health. But sometimes we’re not so clear about what it means to be honest. Does it mean we say everything that we think or feel?

There are very strong benefits to honesty; and also some common sense guidelines as to what’s appropriate to express.

Let’s start with outright lying. Americans lie an average of 11 times per week.

In one study, two groups were asked each week over a ten-week period how many lies they told while they were given a lie detector test. One of these groups was also encouraged to stop telling major and minor lies for the ten weeks.

Both groups ended up lying less, which is not surprising. When we focus our attention on something specific we are much more likely to improve our behavior around it – if we weigh ourselves regularly, we are more likely to lose weight; if we carry a pedometer to measure the number of steps we take, we are likely to exercise more – if you want to change something, measure it.

Not surprisingly, those who were encouraged not to lie, lied less than those who weren’t.

In any given week, when people lied less, they also reported that their physical health and mental health was better. But those in the group who were encouraged not to lie also reported that their relationships were better.

This is not shocking. Honesty is one of the foundations of trust, and trust is essential to good relationships. Lying leads to greater distrust. When we lie, we’re not as sneaky as we may think. People figure it out eventually, and they trust us less. Our relationships suffer dearly for it.

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In 399 BC, Socrates defended himself in the court of Athens against charges that he had corrupted the young and did not believe in the gods of the city. Though his attempt was unsuccessful, and he was shortly put to death, Plato recorded his great teacher’s performance that day as his Apology.

The title of this account uses the original definition of the word apology: the Greek apologia (apo – away from or off; logia from logos, words or speech), that is, “A defense especially of one’s opinions, position, or actions.”

Though the modern definition of the word apology is quite different, “an expression of regret for having done or said something wrong;” in some ways, I think we have culturally reverted to this older definition of apology – at least when it comes to politicians and other public figures.

We rarely hear publicly a genuine acceptance of responsibility for hurtful acts. It’s more common to hear either a defense of one’s actions, a displacement of responsibility onto the listener such as, “I’m sorry you feel badly about this,” or a diffusion of responsibility into the ether through the use of the passive voice such as, “I’m sorry that happened.”

Fortunately, we don’t have to behave like these public dissimulators…

We all make mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes let other people down, or hurt them. The first step in repairing the mistakes we’ve made is to acknowledge that we’ve done something hurtful. Then the question becomes: “What’s the best way to apologize to the people we’ve disappointed or hurt?”

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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:

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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 with how we do it.

Here’s the big idea:

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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.

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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:

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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.

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