Anxiety and Procrastination

My apologies for the formatting. Not sure what's going on.

A great article I picked up from Integral Options Cafe.

Meditation has helped me greatly with this, personally. I have always
been a terrible procrastinator, and have relied on various things to
veg-out. The anxiety that comes up when I want to get something
done is the same across the board, felt when I see something I want
to eat, say, or when I have to deal with someone I don't want to talk
to, or approach someone when I'm afraid to. With observation, it
disappears (though this takes practice, and the observation often
must be fairly constant.) This in itself is a large part of my practice.
When I feel anxious, I watch the sensation, and later try and figure
out what about the situation was making me feel anxious so I can
uproot it.

Don't Delay

Understanding procrastination and how to achieve our goals.

by Timothy A. Pychyl

Giving in to feel good: Why self-regulation fails

Focusing on regulating mood can lead to self-control failure in other areas.

We give in to feel good. Give in to what? Food, shopping, drinking, smoking, gambling, and, you guessed it, procrastination. The problem is that focusing on regulating our moods and feelings can lead to self-control failure in other areas.

"Giving in to feel good" is the first part of the title of an important paper written by Dianne Tice and Ellen Bratslavsky (complete reference below). Anyone interested in knowing more about issues of the self and self-regulation should search out resources, and there are plenty, written by Dianne Tice or Roy Baumeister, or their students. I have quoted Roy's work before, and I will again given his prolific prominence as a psychologist.

Procrastinators will tell you that the task they're facing (avoiding) is difficult, and it creates bad feelings like anxiety or general emotional distress. Putting off the task at hand is an effective way of regulating this mood. Avoid the task, avoid the bad mood. This is what Tice and Bratslavsky refer to as "giving in to feel good." We give in to the impulse to walk away in order to feel good right now. Learning theorists would even add that we have now reinforced this behavior as the decrease in anxiety is rewarding.

Of course, this short-term strategy has long-term costs. The last-minute efforts that become necessary when we put off the task usually mean a sub-standard job overall (although not always, and this is a classic reward to the procrastinator and very memorable). More importantly, as Tice and Bratslavsky explain, "the final and overall level of negative affect is likely to be even greater than if the person has worked on the task all along" (p. 152). We actually feel worse later!

In fact, earlier research conducted by Tice & Baumeister across two academic terms demonstrated that procrastination caught up to students in the second term. Whereas in the first term, the non-procrastinators were more stressed, by second term the costs of procrastination became obvious for the procrastinators in terms of course performance, stress and illness.

The message of their research is clear. Putting off a task to control immediate mood results in problems later. They demonstrate this across a number of domains as I noted earlier, including eating, drinking, smoking, gambling, shopping and procrastination. When we give primacy to addressing our emotional distress, we usually do so at the cost of self-regulatory failure. They summarize this key idea with,

"People will engage in behaviors that may be self-destructive (gambling, excessive shopping, overeating, smoking, procrastinating) if the behaviors make them feel better in the short term. Thus, emotion regulation may have a special place in the field of self-control, because emotion regulation takes precedence over other self-control behaviors and even undermines other self-control efforts" (p. 154).

The message to each of us should be clear as well. If we focus on our feelings in the short term, we'll undermine ourselves in the long run.

I've been teaching my 3-year-old daughter this. A typical "lesson" goes something like this.

Me: "Sweetie, it's time to pick up your toys before we go."
[Mood now visibly changing.]
L: "I don't feel like it. I don't want to."
Me: "Sweetie, according to Dianne Tice and Ellen Bratslavsky it's not the best strategy to focus on your feelings now, it's . . . sweetie?? Where are you?"

Ok, so it is about delay of gratification, and we do (should) learn this early in life. But, the evidence seems to show that we all can (and do) act like 3-year-olds at times.

In fact, we may spend a lifetime acting like a 3-year-old, and rationalizing it to ourselves the whole time. I don't feel like it. I need to feel better in order to act. First, I need to feel better.

No you don't.

In fact, your feelings will follow your behaviors. Progress on that task will improve your mood.

For example, new research where introverts are instructed to act extraverted shows that the introverts who act extraverted also feel happier (an affective advantage of extraverts). We'll talk about this more in the near future.

For now, the message is, don't give in to feeling good, get going instead - don't delay!

Reference

Tice, D.M., & Bratslavsky, E. (2000). Giving in to feel good: The place of emotion regulation in the context of general self-control. Psychological Inquiry, 11, 149-159.

Creativity, a baby's world, and happiness.

Occasionally I get behind in my blog reading, and sometimes this creates fortunate coincidences. Like, now.

First, an article in Scientific American about how babies see the world. (both SciAm and the Shambala Sun articles are off Integral Options Cafe.)

"As adults when we attend to something in the world we are vividly conscious of that particular thing, and we shut out the surrounding world. The classic metaphor is that attention is like a spotlight, illuminating one part of the world and leaving the rest in darkness. In fact, attending carefully to one event may actually make us less conscious of the rest of the world. We even know something about how the brain does this: connections from the prefrontal part of the brain both enhance our perception of the attended event and inhibit our perception of other events. And there is a chemical basis for this, too. When we pay attention to an event certain brain chemicals called cholinergic transmitters make a small part of the brain more flexible and “plastic”, better at learning, and simultaneously other inhibitory transmitters actually make irrelevant parts of the brain less flexible.

If you look at baby’s attention you see a related but very different picture. Babies and young children are much worse at intentionally focusing their attention than adults. Instead, they seem to pay attention to anything that’s unexpected or interesting – anything they can learn from. We say that children are bad at paying attention but we really mean that they’re bad at not paying attention – they easily get distracted by anything interesting. And young brains are much more generally “plastic”, more flexible and better at learning than adult brains. Young brains are bathed in the cholinergic transmitters that enhance attention in adults, but the inhibitory transmitters that damp consciousness down haven’t yet come on line. If you put all that together it suggests that babies consciousness is more like a lantern than a spotlight – that it illumines the entire world around them.

Finally, you can think about what adult experience is like when we put ourselves in the same position as babies. When we travel for instance, we are suddenly surrounded by an unexpected new world and, instead of just focusing on the important things, we take in lots of information at once. That actually makes us more vividly conscious of our surroundings, not less. I think that for babies, every day is like first love in Paris."

Also, on play and pretending:

"...they seem to use their imagination the way that creative scientists do. One of the big new ideas about how babies learn is that they use what computer scientists call “Bayesian inference”. That means that you imagine lots of different possibilities and test how likely each possibility is.

When we have a theory of the world, we can not only say what the world is like now, we can also explore what would happen if the world was different. We can ask what would happen, for instance, if there was a rocket that traveled close to the speed of light. In fact, the ability to imagine these possibilities is one of the biggest advantages of understanding how the world works. Because we imagine, we can have invention and technology. Its actually play, not necessity, that is the mother of invention."

In a second article from Scientific American, researchers look at a way to increase creativity, and find that making something psychologically distant from oneself (anything not happening here, now, and to oneself is psychologically distant) increases creativity around the problem, which makes sense. How playful would you feel if you were trapped in a room slowly filling up with water? You'd probably be freaking out.

It also accords with the candle study, explained in the video below from TED talks:

Basically, people have to figure a simple task out. There are two groups, one given money if they complete it quickly and one not given any money. Classically, you'd expect the group given money as a reward to do better, but they do worse. See, the task they have to do involves some creativity. Giving people money apparently takes away some of their playfulness. (The talk is actually on motivation and the twenty-first century work place. I might talk about it in a later post, it's good.)

One more from TED: something I've put up before:

Finally, an article from the Shambhala Sun on happiness.

Now we can get to the point. It seems to me that the mode of consciousness described in the first article is not unique to babies, we're just educated out of it, at least when we're facing concrete and tangible problems, but we have access to it at anytime, and can certainly train to enhance it (the guys on "Who's Line is it Anyway"come to mind). Of course, the restricted, focused consciousness is just as important, we'd never become adult without it, but we're losing something when we ignore it, something that (as the first video explains) is increasingly needed in our world, and which might be linked to happiness. Or perhaps over-reliance on the focused method of consciousness, the "get-the-loot" consciousness, as the article puts it, causes us to ignore those million little things that are uplifting in the day.

Indeed, though the article in the SS doesn't present it in this light, we need both of these kinds of consciousness to be successful, and in meditation are training both: a simultaneous rigid focus on an open and innocent ("virgin", the article says,) state-of-mind. This could be why both the first and the last article are concerned with paying attention. Children are paying attention to everything, and if you're unhappy, maybe you're just not paying attention.

But children are not enlightened, nor are they all-in-all more conscious than adults (well, healthy adults.) The combination of the two is something attained through growth. As the SS article says, the "get-the-loot" mindset is always looking for something exterior, an experience or thing, while happiness comes from the inside. Babies don't have this, they aren't differentiated from their environment yet.

Remove the pillars of your belief in this world and look around a little bit, at least every once in a while, I guess is the take-home message.

Mythic Religion and Containment of the Power Ego

A great post from Integral Options Cafe:

The Benefits of Religion

from Integral Options Cafe by WH

Yesterday morning I was being a slacker and not doing homework, so I watched Top Gun, which was on some cable station or another. I really dislike Tom Cruise so I had never seen this flick, but I had heard that it offered a great object lesson in memetics.

Maverick (Cruise's character) is a hot-shot young pilot, but he is very cocky and takes too many risks to show off his skills. Eventually, through no real fault of his own, his best friend and co-pilot dies on a training mission.

Iceman (Val Kilmer) is the rival pilot, equally as talented, but he flies within the rules of the Navy pilots training program, one of which is to never leave your wingman. Iceman eventually wins the Top Gun competition among the pilots in training. Maverick eventually submits to the military structure and saves Iceman in a real life firefight.

Maverick represents an ego-centered memetic stage of development, while Iceman represents a more authoritarian memetic stage. The film demonstrates through (melodrama and bad acting) that the power-drive of the ego needs some strong containment within authority structures to allow it to reach its potential.

By now, you may be wondering what this has to do with the benefits of religion.

Over the weekend, a video made the rounds online of a pastor up in Tempe (just outside of Phoenix) saying he hates Barack Obama and wished him dead. This same man and some of his congregation had shown up at Obama's speech a little more than a week ago armed with assault rifles and handguns.

Here is the video:

Popout

This video has resulted in a lot of despair about the role of mythic religion in our culture. You can read some of the discussion the video generated at my friend Stuart's Facebook page.

Many people feel that mythic religion has outlived its usefulness, or that it is no longer an appropriate developmental response to a complex world. This is not wrong, but it is only a partial truth. In fact, the mythic worldview is losing its power, and that is partially why those infected with a more malignant version of this developmental meme are reacting with fear-based violence.

However, not all religion is bad, and not all religion is malignant. As is the case with the military structure portrayed in Top Gun, mythic religion offers a structure to contain the power-drive of the raw ego. But mythic religion is only one form of religion (and here we are talking specifically about Christianity, not Islam, Judaism, or other religions). There are many rational, egalitarian, and even some integral stage Christians. It is not Christianity that is the problem.

The problem, rather, is that some of the people who adhere to a fundamentalist religious dogma also adhere to a very rigid and hateful form of ethnocentrism. The result is a profound fear of the other, and the other is anyone who does not share their specific values and beliefs about the world.

In the example of this clown up in Tempe, the other is Obama - because he is liberal, because he holds some postmodern relativist values (a woman's right to choose what happens to her body), and quite possibly because he is black. The Phoenix metro area is already well-known nationally for its fear/hate of all people who are not them, as Sheriff Joe Arpio demonstrates on a regular basis.

When religion in this country isn't infected with this ethnocentric hatred, it performs valuable roles in society. It has been inner city churches that have done the most to help those involved in the tribal and ego-based power drive of gang culture grow out of that. Even Malcolm X, although his faith was Islam, found containment for his power-drives in the authoritarian structure of religion.

In the same way that sports teams or the military provide that rule-bound structure to contain the raging egos of young men, so does mythic religion. When well-meaning but misguided liberals worked to disempower inner city churches in the sixties and seventies, it was the the neighborhoods that suffered for the lack of religious authority.

And none of this even touches the benefits that religion has for its believers. Churches provide community, comfort, and certainty. While we may not share their values or beliefs, most of these believers are good citizens. The few hateful people should cause us to condemn the whole religion.

It's strange that I find myself, an atheist, defending religion so often against other atheists. This is not the first time, and it likely won't be the last that I make these arguments, so I guess it part of what this blog is about - an integral approach.