Tag Archives: motivation

Pessimism About Positive Thinking

Many of us have grown up in a world that teaches and values the power of positive thinking. The mantra of positive thinkers goes something like this: think positively about yourself, your situation, your goals and you will be much more motivated and energized to fulfill your dreams.

By some accounts the self-improvement industry in the US alone weighs in with annual revenues of around $10 billion. So, positive thinking must work, right? Psychologists suggest that it’s really not that simple; singular focus on positivity may help us in the short-term, but over the longer-term it frustrates our motivations and hinders progress towards our goals.

In short, it pays to be in touch with the negatives as well, to embrace and understand obstacles, to learn from and challenge our setbacks. It is to our advantage to be a pragmatic dreamer, grounded in both the beauty and ugliness that surrounds us.

From aeon:

In her book The Secret Daily Teachings (2008), the self-help author Rhonda Byrne suggested that: ‘Whatever big thing you are asking for, consider having the celebration now as though you have received it.’

Yet research in psychology reveals a more complicated picture. Indulging in undirected positive flights of fancy isn’t always in our interest. Positive thinking can make us feel better in the short term, but over the long term it saps our motivation, preventing us from achieving our wishes and goals, and leaving us feeling frustrated, stymied and stuck. If we really want to move ahead in our lives, engage with the world and feel energised, we need to go beyond positive thinking and connect as well with the obstacles that stand in our way. By bringing our dreams into contact with reality, we can unleash our greatest energies and make the most progress in our lives.

Now, you might wonder if positive thinking is really as harmful as I’m suggesting. In fact, it is. In a number of studies over two decades, my colleagues and I have discovered a powerful link between positive thinking and poor performance. In one study, we asked college students who had a crush on someone from afar to tell us how likely they would be to strike up a relationship with that person. Then we asked them to complete some open-ended scenarios related to dating. ‘You are at a party,’ one scenario read. ‘While you are talking to [your crush], you see a girl/boy, whom you believe [your crush] might like, come into the room. As she/he approaches the two of you, you imagine…’

Some of the students completed the scenarios by spinning a tale of romantic success. ‘The two of us leave the party, everyone watches, especially the other girl.’ Others offered negative fantasies about love thwarted: ‘My crush and the other girl begin to converse about things which I know nothing. They seem to be much more comfortable with each other than he and I….’

We checked back with the students after five months to see if they had initiated a relationship with their crush. The more students had engaged in positive fantasies about the future, the less likely they were actually to have started up a romantic relationship.

My colleagues and I performed such studies with participants in a number of demographic groups, in different countries, and with a range of personal wishes, including health goals, academic and professional goals, and relationship goals. Consistently, we found a correlation between positive fantasies and poor performance. The more that people ‘think positive’ and imagine themselves achieving their goals, the less they actually achieve.

Positive thinking impedes performance because it relaxes us and drains the energy we need to take action. After having participants in one study positively fantasise about the future for as little as a few minutes, we observed declines in systolic blood pressure, a standard measure of a person’s energy level. These declines were significant: whereas smoking a cigarette will typically raise a person’s blood pressure by five or 10 points, engaging in positive fantasies lowers it by about half as much.

Read the entire article here.

Time for the Bucket List to Kick the Bucket

For the same reasons that New Year’s resolutions are daft, it’s time to ditch the bucket list. Columnist Steven Thrasher rightly argues that your actions to get something done or try something new should be driven by your gusto for life — passion, curiosity, wonder, joy — rather than dictated by a check box because you’re one step closer to death. Signs that it’s time to ditch the bucket list: when the idea is co-opted by corporations, advertisers and Hollywood; when motivational posters appear in hallways; and when physical bucket list buckets and notepads go on sale at Pottery Barn or Walmart.

From the Guardian:

Before each one of us dies, let’s wipe the “bucket list” from our collective vocabulary.

I hate the term “the bucket list.” The phrase, a list of things one wants to do in life before one dies or “kicks the bucket”, is the kind of hackneyed, cliche, stupid and insipid term only we Americans can come up with.

Even worse, “the bucket list” has become an excuse for people to couch things they actually desire to try doing as only socially acceptable if framed in the face of their death. It’s as if pleasure, curiosity and fun weren’t reasons enough for action.

If you want to try doing something others might find strange or unorthodox – write a novel, learn to tap dance, engage in a rim job, field dress a deer, climb Everest, go out in drag for a night – why do you need any justification at all? And certainly, why would you need an explanation that is only justifiable in terms of kicking the bucket?

According to the Wall Street Journal, the phrase “bucket list” comes to us from the banal mind of screenwriter Justin Zackham, who developed a list of things he wanted to do before he died. Years later, his “bucket list” became the title of his corny 2007 film starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman. It’s about two old men with terminal cancer who want to live it up before they die. That, if anyone at all, is who should be using the term “bucket list”. They want to do something with the finite time they know they have left? Fine.

But bucket list has trickled down to everday use by the perfectly healthy, the exceptionally young, and most of all, to douche bags. I realized this at Burning Man last week. Often, when I asked exceptionally boring people what had drawn them to Black Rock City, they’d say: “It was on my bucket list!”

Really? You wanted to schlep out to the desert and face freezing lows, scorching highs and soul crushing techno simply because you’re going to die someday?

There’s a funny dynamic sometimes when I go on a long trip while I’m out of work. When I backpacked through Asia and Europe in 2013, people (usually friends chained to a spouse, children and a mortgage) would sometimes awkwardly say to me: “Well, it will be the trip of a lifetime!” It was a good trip, but just one of many great journeys I’ve taken in my life so far. My adventures might interrupt someone else’s idea of what’s “normal.” But travel isn’t something I do to fulfil my “bucket list”; travel is a way of life for me. I do not rush into a trip thinking: “Good Christ, I could die tomorrow!” I don’t travel in place of the stable job or partner or kids I may or may not ever have. I do it as often as I can because it brings me joy.

Read the entire column here.

The Business of Making Us Feel Good

Advertisers have long known how to pull at our fickle emotions and inner motivations to sell their products. Further still many corporations fine-tune their products to the nth degree to ensure we learn to crave more of the same. Whether it’s the comforting feel of an armchair, the soft yet lingering texture of yogurt, the fresh scent of hand soap, or the crunchiness of the perfect potato chip, myriad focus groups, industrial designers and food scientists are hard at work engineering our addictions.

[div class=attrib]From the New York Times:[end-div]

Feeling low? According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, when people feel bad, their sense of touch quickens and they instinctively want to hug something or someone. Tykes cling to a teddy bear or blanket. It’s a mammal thing. If young mammals feel gloomy, it’s usually because they’re hurt, sick, cold, scared or lost. So their brain rewards them with a gust of pleasure if they scamper back to mom for a warm nuzzle and a meal. No need to think it over. All they know is that, when a negative mood hits, a cuddle just feels right; and if they’re upbeat and alert, then their eyes hunger for new sights and they’re itching to explore.

It’s part of evolution’s gold standard, the old carrot-and-stick gambit, an impulse that evades reflection because it evolved to help infants thrive by telling them what to do — not in words but in sequins of taste, heartwarming touches, piquant smells, luscious colors.

Back in the days before our kind knew what berries to eat, let alone which merlot to choose or HD-TV to buy, the question naturally arose: How do you teach a reckless animal to live smart? Some brains endorsed correct, lifesaving behavior by doling out sensory rewards. Healthy food just tasted yummy, which is why we now crave the sweet, salty, fatty foods our ancestors did — except that for them such essentials were rare, needing to be painstakingly gathered or hunted. The seasoned hedonists lived to explore and nuzzle another day — long enough to pass along their snuggly, junk-food-bedeviled genes.

[div class=attrib]More from theSource here.[end-div]

And You Thought Being Direct and Precise Was Good

A new psychological study upends our understanding of the benefits of direct and precise information as a motivational tool. Results from the study by Himanshu Mishra and Baba Shiv describe the cognitive benefits of vague and inarticulate feedback over precise information. At first glance this seems to be counter-intuitive. After all, fuzzy math, blurred reasoning and unclear directives would seem to be the banes of current societal norms that value data in as a precise a form as possible. We measure, calibrate, verify and re-measure and report information to the nth degree.

[div class=attrib]Stanford Business:[end-div]

Want to lose weight in 2011? You’ve got a better chance of pulling it off if you tell yourself, “I’d like to slim down and maybe lose somewhere between 5 and 15 pounds this year” instead of, “I’d like to lose 12 pounds by July 4.”

In a paper to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science, business school Professor Baba Shiv concludes that people are more likely to stay motivated and achieve a goal if it’s sketched out in vague terms than if it’s set in stone as a rigid or precise plan.

“For one to be successful, one needs to be motivated,” says Shiv, the Stanford Graduate School of Business Sanwa Bank, Limited, Professor of Marketing. He is coauthor of the paper “In Praise of Vagueness: Malleability of Vague Information as a Performance Booster” with Himanshu Mishra and Arul Mishra, both of the University of Utah. Presenting information in a vague way — for instance using numerical ranges or qualitative descriptions — “allows you to sample from the information that’s in your favor,” says Shiv, whose research includes studying people’s responses to incentives. “You’re sampling and can pick the part you want,” the part that seems achievable or encourages you to keep your expectations upbeat to stay on track, says Shiv.

By comparison, information presented in a more-precise form doesn’t let you view it in a rosy light and so can be discouraging. For instance, Shiv says, a coach could try to motivate a sprinter by reviewing all her past times, recorded down to the thousandths of a second. That would remind her of her good times but also the poor ones, potentially de-motivating her. Or, the coach could give the athlete less-precise but still-accurate qualitative information. “Good coaches get people not to focus on the times but on a dimension that is malleable,” says Shiv. “They’ll say, “You’re mentally tough.’ You can’t measure that.” The runner can then zero in on her mental strength to help her concentrate on her best past performances, boosting her motivation and ultimately improving her times. “She’s cherry-picking her memories, and that’s okay, because that’s allowing her to get motivated,” says Shiv.

Of course, Shiv isn’t saying there’s no place for precise information. A pilot needs exact data to monitor a plane’s location, direction, and fuel levels, for instance. But information meant to motivate is different, and people seeking motivation need the chance to focus on just the positive. When it comes to motivation, Shiv said, “negative information outweighs positive. If I give you five pieces of negative information and five pieces of positive information, the brain weighs the negative far more than the positive … It’s a survival mechanism. The brain weighs the negative to keep us secure.”

[div class=attrib]More from theSource here.[end-div]