New Year's Resolutions: Bah

Tam sent me this great column on New Year's resolutions - read it!

A few comments:

A wiser approach may be to set “process” goals: instead of specifying a target salary, commit to spending two hours a week investigating career opportunities. Rather than deciding to write the novel of the century, commit to 45 minutes of writing every morning. “Nothing discourages the concentration necessary to perform well,” writes the sports psychologist John Eliot, in his book, Overachievement, more than “worrying about the outcome.”

I think that the way my grad program fosters "worrying about the outcome" is really dysfunctional; it screwed not only with my ability to settle down and work well but my desire to do the work in the first place.  Being in a highly self-evaluative state seems unavoidable when you know for a fact that you are being evaluated by faculty all the time and that negative evaluations will get you booted from the program like other myriad other previous students who were stereotyped as "lazy" or "not smart enough" or whatever, even if they were meeting the objective requirements of the program. 

The constant emphasis on how you will only get a job if you can have X number of publications in the top 3 journals by the time you go on the job market is not only kind of ridiculous (given that I am in one of the only fields of academia where the number of candidates and number of jobs is basically equal) but makes you think too much about whether an idea you have is likely to lead to a paper in the Journal of Blah Research in the next couple of years.  [Note: one senior faculty told me that she does not even try to publish in this journal because what they require is so ridiculous.]  And really, the probability of any given idea bearing that fruit that is pretty low.

Over time, I found that it was not only the regular commonplace failures (like an experiment not working out) that were crushing and demoralizing and made me despair for the future when I must have that premiere publication on my c.v.  The (rational) expectation that the next thing I did would also be a failure sapped my interest and energy in proceeding with it.  Add to this the way that grad school leads people to over-identify with their scholar identity and minimizes other identities, thus robbing you of other sources of self-worth (e.g., that you're a kick-ass cook, a running machine, a supportive friend, a loving spouse, a person with a great sense of humor, a handy person who can fix anything, a person who can finish the New York Times crossword without a dictionary--because grad school does not value these things and you don't have time and energy to do them anyway) and it all just feels bad.

It's unfortunate that the professors in my program with PhDs in social psychology who study topics like self-regulation, choking under pressure, persuasion, and the like are not able to foresee the obvious negative consequences of their approach.  I guess true superstars are so extremely motivated that none of these things affect them.

Or try the process-goal method used by Jerry Seinfeld early in his career, when he was determined to spend some time every day writing jokes. On a wall calendar, he marked an X every day that he got some writing done, gradually creating a chain of X’s: “Your only job ... is to not break the chain.” It’s a mechanical, nonintimidating target. If Seinfeld had aimed instead at “becoming a world-famous comedian,” might he have sabotaged his success?

I have been using a similar method myself, with placing stickers on my prominently displayed wall calendar.  It seems silly, but it works pretty well.  In my case, I've even found that beyond not wanting to break the chain, I actually feel an immediate reward from placing the sticker on the calendar. 

In fact, as the Buddhist-influenced Japanese psychologist Shoma Morita liked to point out, it’s perfectly possible to do what you know needs doing—to propel yourself to the gym, to open the laptop to work, to reach for the kale instead of the doughnuts—without “feeling motivated” to do it. People “think that they should always like what they do and that their lives should be trouble-free,” Morita wrote. “Consequently, their mental energy is wasted by their impossible attempts to avoid feelings of displeasure or boredom.” Morita advised his readers and patients to “give up” on themselves—to “begin taking action now, while being neurotic or imperfect or a procrastinator or unhealthy or lazy or any other label by which you inaccurately describe yourself.”

I love this.  One thing that has been helpful to me when facing a difficult or onerous task is realizing, "I don't have to like this.  I only have to do it."  (Those are the exact words that I generally use when talking to myself.)  That sounds terribly negative and all that, but it's truly very liberating.  It's much easier to just do something than to make yourself feel a particular way.  And once I've given myself permission to not enjoy it, it's often not so bad.  (Sometimes it's murder, of course, but that's OK.  I can hate it all I want and not feel like some kind of failure for not liking it.  I mean, hey, I did it even though I hated it, that's pretty good, right?)

My mom and I have often talked about how often people in the exercise business carp on how important it is to find the exercise you enjoy and then you'll realize that exercise is just awesome!  As though there are not many people who just don't like doing any exercise.  Instead of leveling with people -- you know, esp. when you're overweight and out of shape, exercise is really hard and can totally be not very much fun at all, but over time, it will get easier because you'll be stronger and exercising will become habitual, though some days, it will still suck and you'll have to just grit your teeth through it -- they claim that if you could just find your Ideal Form of Exercise, it will be awesome every day from day one.  They seem to have no insight into the fact that the kind of people who become professional exercisers are not representative of the population.  There's a weird kind of empathy/theory of mind failure mixed with the belief that you have to like something to do it underlying this advice.  (Of course, it's not that I think people should pick their least favorite form of exercise -- I, for instance, hate elliptical machines and just won't use them -- but the idea of an "exercise you enjoy" seems to be placing the bar pretty high for a lot of people.  And for many, exercising might be an activity that they have to learn to like.)

Several months ago, when I was reflecting on just how counterproductive the constant evaluation and emphasis on outcomes in my program is, I did a fair amount of reading in the literature on self-relevant thought.  I really like the work by Mark Leary on "hypo-egoic mindsets"* -- i.e., "psychological states that are characterized by little involvement of the self" and "a low degree of abstract self-awareness" (common to phenomena such as flow, meditation, and mindfulness).  A big idea here is that although self-relevant cognitive modes (thinking about yourself in the past and future, introspection, self-evaluation, and thinking about how you are perceived and evaluated by others) have benefits, they can also be liabilities.  They can be distracting; promote unnecessary regret, shame, worry, and a focus on social image; cause choking under pressure; and undermine motivation.

* Leary and Terry (2012).  Hypo-egoic mindsets: Antecedents and implications of quieting the self.  Handbook of Self and Identity (2nd Ed.)

Because I've done work on construal level theory, I am particularly struck by how thinking about yourself abstractly/at a high level of construal can backfire.  For example, thinking abstractly about leaving dinner in the oven too long so it became inedible can lead you down the sinking road of "I am irresponsible, I have a terrible memory, I can't cook, I'm an incompetent person" etc.  Thinking concretely is more likely to come up with, "Man, I really fucked that up.  Time to call for a pizza!"

I'd like to note that hypo-egoism is very different from high self-esteem, a state that society at large views as desirable but which recent research shows is not really all that great a thing (particularly the kind of unearned and therefore brittle high self-esteem that is fostered by meaningless praise, etc. - i.e., the only kind of self-esteem that most people talk about).