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  • How to Stop Procrastinating

    How to Stop Procrastinating

    By Lila MacLellan  January 15, 2018

    To be human is to procrastinate.

    Exceptions exist, but most of us can identify at least one area of our imperfect lives (whether it’s our health, home, work, or relationships), where, for no justifiable reason, we routinely delay doing that thing(or series of small thingies) that would improve the present moment or future.

    Procrastination also appears to be as old as we are—academics have traced a history of philosophers grappling with the problem—so relying on a few hacks to deal with it seems naïve. People love hacks, but they’re really only handy for treating procrastination as a symptom, the way small nudges—like hiding the cookie jar—can help people stick to a diet, without, arguably, changing their fundamental relationship with food.

    Our guide, therefore, combines hacks with suggested tactics for designing your own more holistic approach to beating procrastination, one that examines all the deeper dynamics at work—the fear, the automatic coping strategies, the self-deception—when you put things off. All we ask is you…

    Take the first (micro) step

    Boom. You’ve done it. Not only did you click into this story, but you’ve also begun reading the first “tip,” rather than pinging the link to your Pocket or Evernote list to read later. Making that oh-so-tiny first move is an evidence-backed strategy for beating procrastination; the trick is setting the threshold for completion low—so low that the hedonist in you, who would rather feel good now and deal with real stuff later, won’t put up a fight.

    Tim Pychyl, a psychologist and director of the Procrastination Research Group at Carleton University, in Ottawa, Canada, says that his group tested this approach in a small study and “found that once students got started, they appraised a task as less difficult and less stressful, even more enjoyable than they had thought,” he explains in an email to Quartz. “They said things like ‘I don’t know why I put it off, because it’s not so bad,’ and ‘I could have done a better job if I got started earlier.’”

    Planning to get in shape by taking the stairs to work? Promise yourself you’re going to do just one flight. You’ll continue. Have a letter of recommendation to write? Tell yourself that all you have to do is open your laptop and reread the email requesting that letter, says Pychyl. As a bonus, completing that baby step will give a person a sense of accomplishment, which is fuel to continue.

    Manage your emotions, not only your time

    One common harbinger of oncoming procrastination is the belief that you should wait until you’re in the right mood to get something done. It’s a trap.

    Joseph Ferrari, a professor of psychology at DePaul University in Chicago, has found that the “I’m not in the mood to do X” argument, which we’re all familiar with, can lead to a vicious cycle. The Atlantic once called it the “procrastination doom loop,” and described the stages: “I’ll do it later!” becomes “Ugh, I’m being so unproductive,” which turns into “Maybe I should think about starting this task…,” leading directly to “but I’m in the wrong mood to do it well,” so “I’ll do it later!” And so on.

    The truth is, tossing aside a task because you’re “not in the mood” is actually a way of externally regulating your emotions—perhaps a fear of failure, of disappointing others, of losing some self-esteem, of not being perfect, says Fuschia Sirois, a psychologist and lecturer at the University of Sheffield in the UK. You may believe that procrastination is a time management issue, but really, “it’s just a way of coping with emotions that you’re ill-equipped to cope with,” she says. The dark feelings can be off-putting enough to be paralyzing, to send you looking for anything else you can do besides the task at hand, a reaction that’s often knee-jerk and unexamined.

    Sirois suggests reflecting on the real reason that you’re procrastinating, and turning to emotional regulation tactics—which could include reframing the way you see a situation (psychologists call it cognitive reappraisal), or naming the emotion you’re experiencing (labeling)—to deal with the underlying feelings that are triggering procrastination. Research has suggested that people with more developed abilities at regulating their emotions, and in particular those who can tolerate the unpleasant ones, are less likely to procrastinate. In other words, you may need a therapist, or you may need to figure out how to be your own therapist.

    Name your delay: Is it really procrastination?

    One easy solution to cutting down on all the procrastination in your life is to reclassify any delays that aren’t actually procrastination, thus clarifying your perspective on the problem. It could lift some unnecessary weight.

    Delays come in all forms, and some are what Pychyl calls “sagacious delays.” They might give a person room to gather more information or get the sleep needed to refresh an overworked mind. Other delays are inevitable and may stem from other more pressing roles you play in your life, says Pychyl.

    Consider the taxonomy of delays that Mohsen Haghbin, one of Pychyl’s former students, identified:

    • Inevitable delays, arising when one’s schedule is overloaded or a crisis related to an obligation (as a parent, for example) knocks a person off track
    • Arousal delays, when a person delays a task because they enjoy the pressure of doing something at the last minute
    • Hedonistic delays, when a person chooses doing something instantly gratifying and pleasurable over the task at hand
    • Delays due to psychological problems, such as grieving or another mood or mental health condition, whether chronic or acute
    • Purposeful delays, when a person needs to, say, think about something before writing about it
    • Irrational delays, which are inexplicable to the procrastinator and often fueled by fear and anxiety

    In practice, these categories are not mutually exclusive.

    Correctly labeling a delay matters, because you can’t defeat an enemy if your image of it is in vague or muddied. Sometimes you may be intentionally pushing something into the future—let’s say postponing your delivery of a creative project— and calling it procrastination, when what you’re actually doing is allowing yourself time to think. But calling it “productive procrastination” could easily lead to real procrastination, Pychel theorizes, because, by its definition, procrastination impedes productivity.

    Many people say they have made procrastination work for them, such as Tim Urban, author of the “Wait But Why” blog and a master procrastinator. Arguably, Leonardo Da Vinci did the same. According to the taxonomy above, however, what such people may actually have figured out for themselves is the value of arousal or purposeful delay. All the power to them, but intentional delays can worsen anxiety in those prone to it. Importantly, at least according to Pychyl, they’re not necessarily procrastinators in the truest sense and they likely don’t have to deal with the fallout from real procrastination. At work, for instance, chronic procrastination has been associated with lower salaries and lower rates of employment.

    Practice “structured” procrastination

    In 1996, John Perry, a Stanford University professor of philosophy, gave the procrastinators of the world a gift: a concept called “structured procrastination.”  (He has since written a book on the topic.) To procrastinate with structure involves putting the task that’s most daunting and somewhat urgent near the top of your list, but keeping your list filled with other equally valuable tasks that are less daunting to you.

    Since procrastinators avoid whatever is near the top of the their list, that’s where he suggests putting your most important task, and taking advantage of your urge to avoid it to tackle all the less important but still-valuable must-dos on your agenda. So, instead of getting next-to-nothing done as you put off writing that first draft of your looming presentation, you attack your messy office desk with cheerful fervor. As a bonus, your inner maverick—the one who wants you not to be such a mindless slave to your obligations— will feel acknowledged.

    Perry also suggested padding your list of to-dos with the minor accomplishments you probably would have pulled off anyway, like “make coffee” or “shut off alarm,” just to give yourself those dopamine hits from tiny wins.

    He wrote in his original essay on the topic:

    Procrastinators often follow exactly the wrong tack. They try to minimize their commitments, assuming that if they have only a few things to do, they will quit procrastinating and get them done. But this approach ignores the basic nature of the procrastinator and destroys his most important source of motivation.

    The few tasks on his list will be, by definition, the most important. And the only way to avoid doing them will be to do nothing. This is the way to become a couch potato, not an effective human being.

    It’s all a mind game you play with yourself, but proponents say it works.

    Time travel to your future self

    When a New Year’s resolution fails, we rarely hold a back-of-the-brain, post-mortem meeting to examine why. If we did, we’d often discover that we’d made a mistake when we imagined the future: we saw it as different from today, free of the burdens that make exercise or organizing our files feel so totally impossible to achieve this week. But we don’t ask why Monday would be any different.

    “We believe this future me of tomorrow or next week will have more energy, more willpower to follow through on this task that feels threatening to me,” says Sirois, “but we don’t really change that much in that time frame.” It’s a ruse that only leads to more stress, she adds.

    Eve-Marie Blouin-Hudon, a psychology researcher at Carleton University, has developed a guided visualization exercise—to be practiced daily for 10 minutes—to help people feel more connected to their future self, to see that they are largely one and the same, and to thus be kinder to that person. To begin, you would choose the area in which you most need to stop procrastinating. Then begin to imagine yourself at a certain “deadline” time in the future, and get specific about the details: Where are you? What are you wearing? How do you feel? What words do you see in an email to you about this task? Although Blouin-Hudon’s script was written for students, it can serve at a blueprint for a personalized exercise.

    We have a wonderful ability to “see” the past, present, and future, so why not use it, says Blouin-Hudon. Her work and that of others have suggested that shoring up one’s sense of “future-self continuity” can lead to less procrastination.

    Make plans to work around the “The hell with it” effect

    Once you’re committed to not procrastinating, you may still encounter moments when, facing an unexpected turn of events, you’ll be tempted to return to your old friend, your trusted escape, procrastination.

    For instance, you’re planning to cycle to work, but when you open the garage door, you find that it’s raining, writes Thomas Webb, another psychologist at University of Sheffield, in his Psychology Today blog, “The Road To Hell.” Suddenly your will power is stretched, and your good intention is vulnerable to collapsing under what Webb calls  “‘the hell with it’ effect.” As in “The hell with it. I can ride to work tomorrow.”

    But, he explains, your intentions will have a fighting chance if you have enacted an “if-then” plan, a specific type of behavior change technique, developed by psychologist Peter Gollwitzer.  The “if-then” method ensures that you’ve spent some time thinking about what headwinds you might encounter and how you’ll react to them. Rather than give up when a challenge arises, writes Webb, “the person would quickly and relatively automatically think about how good they will feel about themselves if they cycle and find themselves rolling down the road looking forward to these feelings.”

    Behavior change, as a category of study, is loaded with techniques like this, Webb points out. Among the dozens of options, the if-then plan has the most evidence to suggest that it’s durable enough to protect a commitment during a stress test.

    It can pay to attend to your physical and mental environment, too, to minimize the number of critical moments that might possibly be encountered. If your mind perceives a silently vibrating phone as a cue to start scrolling through Instagram, turn the appliance off. (Seems obvious, but how often do we do it?) If your colleague’s mood feels contagious and counterproductive, create some distance.

    Avoid berating oneself

    Negative emotions can be motivating, until they’re not. When you’re so immersed in a crappy feeling, like shame or fear, you can’t take an objective view of the situation, says Sirois. “When procrastinators feel bad, they’re feeling bad not just about the things they’re currently procrastinating on, but they’re remembering all the times they procrastinated before,” Sirois explains, “so it feeds back into feeling negative, which feeds back into wanting to avoid whatever the task is all together.”

    A range of exercises exist to help a person recognize and become less controlled by self-defeating emotions, she says, whether through forgiveness, or more subtly, self-compassion, her focus of academic research. For instance, you might first recall a past incident when you procrastinated, and life was not okay in the end. Then write a note to yourself, as if you were writing to a friend, reassuring that person that what they did was not immoral or inexcusable. “We’re a lot kinder to other people who are struggling than we are to ourselves,” she adds. “We all default to self-critical.”

    Sirois’s experiments suggest that normalizing your past mistakes this way seems to “brings down the threshold of those emotions, so that you can get on with things, rather than having to deal with the way you’re feeling.”

    Simply tell yourself, “Look, you were not the first person to procrastinate,” she says, “and you won’t be the last.”

  • A Swedish Tradition that Brings You Back to Center – FIKA

    A Swedish Tradition that Brings You Back to Center – FIKA

    fika1By Lila MacLellan June 13, 2018
    Excerpts from article written for GRIT Issue #17

    According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Canadians work fewer hours per week than Americans. The Canadian government also mandates 10 paid days of vacation per year (about half of what’s guaranteed in most of Europe and in Australia), while the US doesn’t guarantee any time off. Nor does US law guarantee maternity or paternity leave, whereas parents in Canada have the right to up to 18 paid months away…

    I’ve adapted to New York expectations, which means I’ve also come to understand that breaks are rare here, not only because of the relentless drive to achieve and compete, but because that ethos pushes the rest of your life to the margins. If you feel like you can wrestle 10 minutes from your laptop’s claim on your time, you probably have a doctor’s appointment to schedule, or a friend or loved one needing to hear from you—there isn’t idle time to sit and be, well, idle…

    …I jumped at the opportunity to impose forced breaks on my Quartz At Work colleagues, as a kind of quasi-socialist experiment. Anne Quito, design writer at Quartz, had written before on the Swedish tradition of Fika, when employees at companies large and small take a break from work and gather to have some coffee with pastries, cookies, or cake. And they do this twice daily. Anne called it “the four-letter word that was the key to happiness at work.”

    “In the UK, there’s afternoon tea, and merienda in Spain, South America, and the Philippines, but few cultures practice the midday psychic recharge as intentionally and regularly as the Swedish,” she wrote.

    So how would a team of American workers react to a full week of fika?

    A resistance to change (and sugar)

    …When I proposed we test it out, the reaction from my peers was mixed. In our team of six, a few people had no response at all, which I took as a “meh.” The one main concern of the group was the idea of eating cake every day for the duration of the experiment, since we’re all fairly health conscious here. And indeed, there are good reasons to eschew cake at the office. After all, many of us eat enough sugary and processed foods as it is, inviting health consequences like memory loss and tooth erosion; we don’t need to turn coworkers’ birthdays into occasions to indulge in even more of it…

    I consulted Anna Brones, the co-author of Fika: The Art of The Swedish Coffee Break (Penguin Random House; 2015), on this point, and learned that there are no fika police, that substitutions are fine, and that not only do you not have to eat a sweet treat to fika, food doesn’t need to be involved in it at all. (“Fika” is “back slang” for the older Swedish word for coffee, kaffi, which is now kaffe—but even coffee is optional when you fika.)

     

    The self-consciousness vanishes

    By now, we were feeling less self-conscious about “performing fika.” We just were fika-ing. Conversation flowed and we acquired real facts about each other. Normally we communicate via Slack, the group-messaging app, where we tend to stick to work ideas and housekeeping information…

    …Perhaps to deal with the itch to check our phones, we talked about tech addiction. Fika-ing was forcing us into mini-tech detoxes of the sort you often promise yourself but never initiate.

    …The awkwardness wore off when we allowed ourselves to briefly talk about work, which somehow segued to an incredible episode of the This American Life podcast. Indeed, people are more creative when their thoughts are roaming…

    …We talked about books, and about a documentary Heather had seen (and loved) about an alternative music radio station that was the height of cool in the 1980s. Continuing the music theme, Khe described his system for maximizing the Spotify user experience, and his attempts at discouraging his young daughter from channel hopping.

    “A true source of happiness”

    We did manage to reflect on our fika experiment before it was exhausted, and we had to admit, as cliche as it sounds, the breaks were a good thing. It’s the kind of tip that we give to readers all the time, and now I’m assuming everyone ignores, because ungluing yourself from your desk is almost a brave thing, requiring real courage, when the work-comes-first mindset is so culturally ingrained…

    …But the deep-seated cultural forces that keep you pinned to your seat really ought to be confronted, for the sake of your mental health. Taking even just a few minutes to let your mind wander, or to let your peers open your mind to the world of coaching 10- to 12-year-old soccer players, is restorative…

    More short periods of rest help us consolidate more learned information. They also lead to better productivity, because you’re more likely to reassess your goals and the way you’re working on them. According to one study from Lund University, regular fikas  lower the risk of burnout  and reduce the need for long-term sick leave, which makes it a pretty attractive antidote to the forces at work that are literally making us sick…

    …We gained some personal insights and a new admiration for our colleagues. One person said they “cherished” the conversations we had during our fleeting Fika sessions, observing, “I have always considered us a friendly, chatty-enough team, but we’ve never covered the breadth of topics that came up during our Fika breaks”…

    …“Forcing myself to take a break, getting off clock time, and having non-digital sources of interactions with my colleagues is a true source of happiness, a ‘small achievable win, each day,’” said [a] co-worker…

    A most countercultural habit

    For me, the in-person conversation removed a layer of anxiety I have about setting and interpreting tone, which can be a minefield in a messaging app, even with emoji to help convey feelings. Still, I noticed that as much as I enjoyed ditching screen-based communication, my conversation skills felt rusty…

    …We read a lot about the slowly dying art of holding meaningful, or even civil, conversations, and we tend to pity young people who have so few opportunities to develop their ability to be present, listen, and perhaps respectfully disagree with someone. But I’m nearly 10 years older than the oldest millennials; the fika experiment forced me to consider whether my conversation skills were atrophying, too…

    …No matter how topsy-turvy your schedule is, you take the time out to connect with your coworkers. In Sweden, “there’s a greater understanding that to be a functional person, you need to take care of the human,” [ Khoury  argues], “and Sweden is better at taking that mentality into the work situation”…

    “In the US, it’s rewarded if you eat your lunch by your desk,” Khoury says. People seem to value quantity over quality, “putting in the most hours, sitting the longest at your desk,” she adds. But in Sweden, you’re either focused and working, or you’re taking a break and eating. “And when you’re eating, you should be actively enjoying what you’re consuming,” Khoury underlines. She sees fika as part of a mindfulness practice, but a communal one…

  • Why I Unfollowed People in Real Life

    Why I Unfollowed People in Real Life

    There was no easy way to do it—it was one of the toughest things I had to do—but as I unfollowed one person at a time, I literally felt my heart growing more and more at peace…

    I always assumed I was someone who stood up for herself and never tolerated less than she deserved; until I turned 28 and realised how extremely passive I had been for most of my adult life. Little did I know that the reason for my unhappiness, low self-esteem and little self-worth, was because of what I tolerated and accepted as “okay” from the people in my life at the time.

    For years I justified people’s actions toward me—their criticism, body shaming, dream killing, gossiping, back stabbing, empty promises and disappointments—all to the expense of my peace and happiness. It brought me to a point where, whether I liked it or not, I had to weed out the energy sucking people from my life. Sadly, these people were close friends and relatives.

    What did I do? Without any notice or explanation, I unfollowed every one of those persons in real life. How? I changed my number and deleted them from every single contact and friend list possible. Sounds harsh don’t it? But guess what? No one came looking for me after, so I guess I did the right thing. 

    If you knew how much of a pushover I was two years ago, you’d know that doing something so cold and drastic took a lot of courage and willpower out of me. It was kind of like getting waxed for the first time—it hurt like hell, but afterwards it felt A-M-A-Z-I-N-G!!!

    To this day I have no regrets. My life has blossomed and I have complete inner peace. I have honest, supportive people around me who encourage me to be my best.

    I cannot stress enough how instrumental the people in our lives are to the way we feel about ourselves and the way our lives turn out. I urge you to choose wisely those whom you allow into your life. If you have negative, cynical people surrounding you, you’re only going to end up feeling discouraged, depleted and down all the time. Sometimes these negative people are close family members who we can’t cut off; learn to love and respect them from a distance and understand that you cannot be around them on a daily basis.

    Surround yourself with people who are uplifting, encouraging, supportive and honest; people with big goals and dreams; people who have plans to do something significant with their life—they are the ones who will inspire and motivate you to live the life you deserve.

    What are your thoughts? Comment below and share.

    Smile! Life is better when you’re laughing!

  • What Is the Difference Between Pride and Arrogance?

    What Is the Difference Between Pride and Arrogance?

    Posted Arash Emamzadeh Jun 18, 2018

    Pride and arrogance, though similar, are different in important ways.

    I am watching the World Cup. More specifically, the match between England and Tunisia. It is tied 1-1.

    You can really feel the sense of national pride in the fans on both sides; they are dancing, singing, and cheering on their respective teams.

    But are these fans proud or…arrogant? It is good to be proud, of course, but is it good to be arrogant?

    Monet wrote, “I tell myself that anyone who says he has finished a canvas is terribly arrogant. Finished means complete, perfect, and I toil away without making any progress, searching, fumbling around, without achieving anything much.”1

    Qur’an calls Satan “arrogant” for refusing to bow before Adam. George Carlin once referred to golf as an arrogant game. Frank Lloyd Wright is reported to have said that early in life, having been given the choice between hypocritical humility and honest arrogance, he chose the latter.

    Pride

    Before I discuss the meaning of arrogance, allow me to discuss the meaning of pride. Pride refers to those feelings that are “generated by appraisals that one is responsible for a socially valued outcome or for being a socially valued person.”2

    According to this definition, then, pride requires being responsible for an outcome that is valued socially. If you scored a nice goal for your team, for instance, you might feel proud of your accomplishment.

    Pride can be considered a positive emotion. Pride in “one’s successes might promote positive behaviors in the achievement domain…and contribute to the development of a genuine and deep-rooted sense of self-esteem.”3

    Arrogance

    What is arrogance? Arrogance refers to excessive and overbearing pride. If you are arrogant, then you may believe that scoring that nice goal in the dying minutes of a match means that you have been carrying the team, that your teammates are useless without you, that if it were not for you, your team would have had no chance whatsoever at succeeding.

    If you are arrogant, you are also more likely to compare everyone’s accomplishment against your (incomparable) accomplishment, constantly reaffirming your own superiority. Your hubris has no bounds.

    (Note that I use arrogance, hubris, and egotistical pride interchangeably, just as most research articles I will be referring to, do).

    What is the difference between pride and arrogance?

    Pride arises out of taking responsibility for a specific action that is considered positive and socially valued, but arrogance arises from pride not in one’s actions but in one’s “global self.”

    That is, pride results from “attributions to internal, unstable, controllable causes (I won because I practiced),” and is associated with high self-esteem.3 So we gain a sense of pride from doing things that are in our power to do, but require effort and determination. The result is increased self-esteem.

    Egotistical pride, however, results from “attributions to internal, stable, uncontrollable causes (I won because I’m always great),” and is associated with narcissism.3 The assumption is that great actions do not result from effort, but are a natural consequences of our greatness. In other words, everything we touch turns gold.

    It has also been shown that feelings of pride correspond with increased empathy and positive reactions toward out-group members, whereas arrogance is linked with lower empathy, and as a result, increased hostility toward others, including out-group members.4

    The more power people have, “the more pride they feel,” but “to the extent that this pride is hubristic,” then those powerful people may also be more prejudiced. The implications can be worrisome. Why?

    Because business and political leaders (and other people of high-status) “who are likely motivated by pride on an almost daily basis are precisely the individuals whose prejudice could do the most harm, leading them to hire and fire others in a discriminatory manner.”4

     

    References

    1. House, J. (1986). Monet: Nature into art. New Haven: Yale University Press

    2. Mascolo, M. F., & Fischer, K. W. (1995). Developmental transformations in appraisals for pride, shame, and guilt. In J. Tangney, & K. Fischer (Eds.), Self-conscious emotions: The psychology of shame, guilt, embarrassment, and pride (pp. 64–113). New York, NY: Guilford Press.

    3. Tracy, J. L., & Robins, R. W. (2007). The psychological structure of pride: A tale of two facets. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92, 506–525.

    4. Ashton-James, C. E., & Tracy, J. L. (2012). Pride and prejudice: How feelings about the self influence judgments of others. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38, 466 – 476.

  • Lessons You Won’t Learn In School

    Lessons You Won’t Learn In School

    Wisdom lies in acting on the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. Here are 10 skills that will clarify your vision and bring you closer to your life goals.

    By Jena E Pincott, published May 1, 2018 -Photo by Tim Petersen

    1: Understanding that not everything that happens to you is about you.

    We are all stars of our own movies, and everything in the world is but a backdrop. Your partner’s mood dips. Your company’s market value lifts. You’re mired in a traffic jam. It’s human nature to experience it all through the lens of how it affects you personally. This slanted sense of reality has a name: the egocentric bias.

    Social psychologists say our tilt to egocentricity is deeply ingrained because it helps us maintain a coherent narrative of the events in our lives. The more we personalize experiences, the more relevant they are to us—and only relevant memories stick around over the long term. These memories are all we have and all we are; they’re the foundation of identity.

    Even so, it is essential to recognize the egocentric bias for what it is: an adaptive illusion.

    There will definitely come a morning when your boss will barely acknowledge you. Or you won’t get the job you thought was in the bag. You’ll take it personally and feel baffled, offended, maybe irate. You will be sucked into your own emotional state to nurse perceived wounds, perhaps even act on them.

    At the very least, the egocentric bias causes us to misread others; it undermines empathy and tolerance. It also traps us in a bubble; we waste vast amounts of psychic energy recovering from insults that were never targeted at us in the first place.

    To live a life that is less reactive, more directed, it is necessary to put the ego in its place. We can cognitively prompt ourselves to recognize that our own point of view isn’t the only one, or necessarily the best one. We can then see situations with clarity and approach them effectively. We may even see the wisdom in others’ points of view, and learn from them.

    There are some situations in which such ego-shifts occur naturally, with little effort—sublime experiences that pique awe or defy comprehension: Brahms’s concertos, childbirth, mathematical formulas, contemplation of the universe. What they all do is subdue the ego and widen perspective, scholars say. Some studies also find that memento mori, reminders of the impermanence of life, also displace the self from center stage (and increase happiness).

    2: Focusing on other people without dwelling on how they view you.

    The corollary to the egocentric bias is the spotlight effect: If you live life as the star of your own movie, you’ll almost automatically assume that everyone is observing you closely. As the center of your own universe, you naturally believe that you’re also the center of everyone else’s. The consequence is that in your interactions with others, you might find yourself thinking less about them and more about how you appear to them and what they must think of you. Are you displaying confidence, competence, awkwardness, or agitation?

    It likely doesn’t matter. The evidence shows that the spotlight is not quite so bright. People do not notice us nearly as much as we think they do.

    Consider one study in which participants who wore an embarrassing shirt—emblazoned with the image of Barry Manilow—were asked to guess how many peers would notice. Fewer than half of the estimated number were aware of it. Similarly, an experiment on group dynamics found that people assumed that their contributions—as well as their little verbal flubs and gaffes—registered more with others than they actually did.

    The spotlight effect extends beyond external events. People routinely believe that their internal state is known to others. When subjects were asked to practice a deception, they radically overestimated how much of their deceptive intentions they “leaked.”

    When we care a little less about our curated self-image, we open the door to interacting more genuinely. We can let down our guard. Others may respond in kind, focusing less on their own self-image and opening up. In this way, moderate self-disclosure can inspire emotional reciprocity. The spotlight becomes more like a floodlight, expansive and shared.

    3: Realizing that you don’t have to act the way you feel.

    No one feels good all the time. We suffer disappointments or outright opposition. Some days require more effort and energy than are available to us. We disappoint ourselves on something that matters to us. Or events happen that absorb us in sadness or consume us with anxiety.

    But we are not transparent. The knowledge that we inherently misperceive the degree to which people notice us and misjudge the extent to which our states of mind are somehow visible to others, confers on us the opportunity to preserve our dignity, our privacy, and our self-respect when we’re not at our best.

    We don’t have to contaminate social interactions with our own state of mind. But how can we be gracious when feeling moody and snappish? How, after an ego blow, do we hold back defensiveness, aggression, or anger?

    In recent years, the psychological technique of self-distancing has gained traction as an effective means of self-regulation. The idea, explains Ethan Kross, the director of the Emotion & Self Control Lab at the University of Michigan, “is to process one’s feelings from an outsider’s point of view.”

    First, imagine that your mind contains more than one self. If the self that reasons through the negative experience—on paper, out loud, or silently in your head—has a different voice from the one that experienced it, the bad feeling doesn’t feel so immediate.

    The distanced self can give the suffering self the mental space to react to a bad experience less emotionally. We think more clearly and have more control over the way we act.

    Kross identifies several ways to use this “linguistic jujitsu” to shift mood (and behavior) at will. A pep talk works well when couched in the same language you’d use to counsel other people, using your first name or the second-person pronoun you, rather than the usual I or me. (Look, Jane, getting fired is an opportunity to examine your strengths and what you’d like to do next.) 

    Use of you or one in the universal sense is also helpful, Kross notes, and we sometimes even use it unconsciously as a way to normalize and make meaning of experience. (If you work for a misogynist tyrant, you’ve got to expect problems.) The more emotionally intense the feeling in the moment, Kross says, the better self-distancing works.

    4: Being able to reframe (and manage) disappointment and adversity.

    To give a job interview your all and fall short is a disappointment, not a crisis. To throw a party that bombs is a letdown, not occasion for depression. To be reprimanded for arriving late to work is an indignity, not grounds to quit.

    The most resilient people give themselves mental latitude, space to see their setbacks as opportunities to learn and grow. They believe failure is an event, not an identity. Social psychologists recognize that, although people may differ in their inborn ability to tolerate stress, mental fortitude can be cultivated.

    Every Buddhist knows—and mindfulness techniques actualize the knowledge—that emotions are not an accurate reflection of reality (in fact, there’s no such thing). Feelings are no more than passing ephemera—and so are flops and fiascos. Resilient people do not define themselves by their adversity. They understand that bad times are temporary affairs.

    The same self-distancing tools that work to improve mood and self-regulation can also be used to bolster resilience. Kross recommends calling upon your distanced “second person” self to ask and answer questions about the failure or disappointment that bothers you. What was under your control, Alice, and what could you have done better? If the same thing happened to a friend, what would your advice be? How is this incident going to affect you in a month, a year? 

    In the telling, you recast the setback as a strengthening experience—a form of cognitive reappraisal, or reframing. We may even come to recognize how we tend to knock ourselves down with the usual cognitive culprits: catastrophizing, overgeneralizing, personalizing, engaging in polarized black-or-white thinking, and jumping to conclusions. As Hamlet said, “There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

    Using imaging techniques, researchers have observed subjects’ brains as they practice reappraisal. The reasoning medial prefrontal cortex becomes particularly activated, and the overactive, emotional amygdala calms down. That’s mental fortitude in action.

    5: Knowing how to solicit honest feedback.

    There are two types of people in the world, observes organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich, author of Insight. “There are ones who think they’re self-aware and the few who actually are.” To complicate matters, there are two types of self-awareness: internal (how we see ourselves and our own values and passions) and external (how others view us). Only the latter can tell us that the tale we’re telling is boring or that no one trusts us because we kiss up to the boss.

    External self-awareness allows us to be more in sync with others. It makes us more effective leaders because we have more empathy, which comes from understanding other people’s perspectives.

    If we knew how others perceived us, we wouldn’t be blindsided by criticism or interactions that go awry for no apparent reason. “Other people, including those who don’t know us well, are often better predictors of our future behavior,” Eurich says. It may come as a surprise, she adds, but people high in introspection don’t necessarily have high external self-awareness. In fact, there’s often an inverse correlation because, in asking “why” our interactions go wrong, we make up answers that aren’t true.

    The life skill to work on here is having the temerity and humility to ask others specific questions about how they perceive you. Life isn’t all about you, but you still need accurate knowledge of how you’re perceived. Eurich recommends selecting as many as five “loving critics” who’ll give you a good read, including friends as well as coworkers or employees. Ask them questions like, What am I doing that I should keep doing? What should I stop doing? What about me annoys you? The knowledge can shake up your sense of reality, Eurich warns. “Afterward, take a break. Then process the information.”

    6: Staying true to your own values despite what others expect of you.

    Your own needs and values matter. If you don’t reasonably accommodate them in all that you do, you will be setting yourself up for a life of regret or resentment. A life of meaning requires the thoughtful exercise of your passions and skills. That, of course, obliges you to discover what they are and equip yourself to deploy them.

    Knowing how others see you, or what they expect you to be, doesn’t mean you have to change anything, adds Eurich. “You’re in control.” The challenge, she admits, is that what we want for ourselves (again, internal self-awareness) and what others expect of us (external self-awareness) aren’t always well defined. “It’s a balance, a tug-of-war,” Eurich says, “and you need enough internal self-awareness to pull back.” When everyone expects you to take over the family business, can you be confident that what you really want is to join the Peace Corps in rural Malaysia? Or that you don’t want to have children—ever?

    The skill here involves reconciling two concepts of selfhood: the part of us that knows its own desires and passions and remains essentially stable over time and the part that derives meaning and identity from a social context which by definition is in flux.

    They are, of course, not entirely separate. Unconsciously, we tend to try to live up to the expectations of others, including parents, teachers, and romantic prospects. The weaker our internal self-awareness is, the more we may care only about how we appear to others and struggle to discern what we want for ourselves from what they want of us. We become pleasers.

    People high in both internal and external self-awareness are best at navigating the dueling expectations, Eurich says. They value authenticity and integrity, know what they want to do, and illuminate it with other perspectives. When soliciting feedback, they’re “very, very picky,” she says, singling out just those they trust. When it comes to their desires and aspirations, they may confide in only a select few who want them to succeed.

    Eurich points out that self-knowledge is acquired by taking in overall trends and patterns, not the input of any one person. What do you really want for yourself? When introspecting, she recommends sidestepping emotionally charged Why? questions to instead ask productive What? questions: What don’t I know that I’d like to know? What am I not doing that I should be doing? As the philosopher Lao Tzu said, “At the center of your being you have the answer.”

    7: Being open to new information or revised thinking.

    The world doesn’t stand still. Situations change. Available information changes. However much we get emotionally attached to our own decisions, however much our opinions and perspectives may have once served us, there comes a point at which constancy can curdle into rigidity. 

    Whatever you find at the center of your being, you don’t want rigidity. But that happens to many of us over time, reports University of California Berkeley psychologist Alison Gopnik. She conducted an experiment in which preschool-age kids and grown-ups encountered a toy they’d never seen before. Both age groups were taught how to turn the toy on and make music, either by using a single block or a combination of blocks. Later, everyone got a chance to try to make the toy work with a new set of blocks—but only the little kids were able to disregard their existing knowledge and tinker with new combinations to make the toy turn on. The grown-ups tended to doggedly adhere to their original instructions, even if they no longer worked. They didn’t revise their thinking.

    As we get older and accumulate knowledge, we tend to become procrustean. We learn a principle and then become constrained by it. New information that conflicts with existing knowledge is harder to take in. Unless we can find a way to make it conform to our preconceptions, we may reject it (known in the psych biz as “confirmation bias“). That’s how our political views become so fixed. We fail to readily adapt to strange environments and new technologies. With age, neural flexibility cedes ground to efficiency.

    Yet cognitive flexibility can be trained, and even regained, with exercise. For starters, there’s physical activity; it increases blood-oxygen levels, which may lead to synaptic plasticity. Then there’s the mental training that Gopnik recommends—working on how to face new problems like a novice. “It’s not only about trying new things,” she points out, but making forays into areas that are far from your base of expertise. (Psychologists, try coding. Coders, try fiction writing. Everyone, study or work abroad for a bit, if you are able to do so.) Curiosity should prevail over mastery. “Ironically,” Gopnik notes, “not caring about the outcome can actually make you more exploratory and ultimately more effective.” For a proper demonstration of cognitive flexibility in action, she recommends hanging out with 4-year-olds.

    Mental flexibility also has a very situational side. Studies show that people are more apt to change their minds when they feel good about themselves. At the same time, the more people feel threatened in any way, the more likely they are to cling to their beliefs, especially if those views align with those of groups with which they identify.

    8: Mastering a fail-safe way to motivate yourself, one that works when interest flags.

    Remember how Tom Sawyer got his friends to paint his aunt’s white fence? He made the chore seem like so much fun that they bribed him to let them do it. The internal drive that little kids have, the one that makes them want to do what they do—not out of necessity but from pure interest—is called “intrinsic motivation.” It’s the gold standard of prods.

    But when our interest or our efforts at motivational whitewashing fall short, we struggle to get ourselves to do what we need to do. Money is scarcely a universal motivator; ask anyone suffering from burnout. The link between compensation and motivation is complicated, but studies show that money often robs people of satisfaction, turning once enjoyable activities into downright chores. Money does not buy engagement.

    The act of writing down how the drudgery will end with a success (say, a raise and a promotion) or of visualizing the triumph in all its detail, have been shown to activate areas of the brain linked to reward. Some people can incentivize themselves just with thoughts of competition: They gamify a task, have peers hold them accountable, or imagine an opponent succeeding. Second-person self-talk, the “coach in the head,” has its value, too. You can crush this, Ted! Some studies find the phrasing is even more potent as a question: Can you crush it, Ted? The idea is to recast the task as an interesting challenge, which, if all goes well, taps into intrinsic motivation.

    But for many of us, the most useful skill is to get the proverbial ball rolling, and for that you need to rely on habit. You wake up at 6:00 A.M. to work out, not out of passion but habit. You dive into a document not always because it’s riveting but because it’s routine. Just 20 minutes, you tell yourself, and you’ll move on to something else. Then, more often than not, a magical momentum takes over. This is not about carrot-and-stick. It’s about the mulish determination to take a step, then another, and another, until you hit your stride.

    Sometimes the pleasure is in the process. People who know how to make their inspiration—rather than waiting for it to come to them—connect even the most onerous tasks to a greater purpose. For the least inspiring items on their checklist, they set microgoals: Put in 20 minutes for a sense of progress and momentum. They learn to value the succession of nitty-gritty steps, not just the triumphant outcome.

    9: Zoning in on your purpose in a zoned-out world.

    As Mark Twain said, “The two most important days in life are the day you are born and the day you discover the reason why.”

    Purpose, however, hinges on self-regulation, the ability to resist impulses in the service of long-term goals. Unfortunately, an entire generation is coming of age absorbed in Facebook and other media that undermine self-regulation, says Larry Rosen, a professor emeritus at California State University and a coauthor of The Distracted Brain. Fully grown adults are no less immune to the dings and pings of feedback that make smartphones so compelling. “You may want big ideas, but if your attention is jerked away constantly, they won’t come. There’s no time to process anything on a deeper level,” Rosen says. Nor, he adds, is there time for creative daydreaming, because the brain is often overstimulated.

    Rosen has found that young adult students can maintain focus on important work only for two to four minutes on average before checking emails, texts, and social media (older adults are not much better)—and it can take up to 20 minutes to get back on task. The more hours students spend media-multitasking, the lower their grade point average. Even a single check-in on Facebook during focus sessions predicted a lower grade.

    Beyond the Likes and the sounds aimed at activating the reward circuitry of the brain lies an even stronger motive for constant check-ins, Rosen finds: They reduce the nagging anxiety about missing out (FOMO). Traditional ways to free the brain from an obsessive rut—10-minute nature walks, exercise, meditation, showers—still work, but deliberate tech breaks are now almost necessary. Rosen recommends breaks of 30 minutes each, especially at focus times.

    Practice, Rosen says, can foster the development of executive control. Turning away from the small screen can reorient us to the big picture.

    10: Tolerating ambiguity.

    You’ll never know exactly what you’re missing out on. You can’t know for sure what the other side is thinking during a negotiation or what your date or partner really thinks of you. You’ll never know whether the decisions you make today are the best ones, or what you may have sacrificed in making them—or, for that matter, where they will lead.

    What’s more, the speed of events today increasingly demands that we make decisions in the absence of definitive information. Nor will you ever know everything about your partner. Despite being a sure-fire fuel of anxiety, uncertainty is a condition of life.

    Tolerance for ambiguity comes at the expense of clarity. But the rewards are rich. We’re more able to shift gears, experiment, be more flexible, take in new information that we’d otherwise reject, and let a situation develop before pulling the proverbial trigger. We’re better able to handle risk and to make decisions without deluding ourselves into thinking we know everything there is to know. In the end, we’re less anxious. Total certainty is, at best, an illusion.

    The most effective strategies for increasing comfort with uncertainty (especially when a decision must be made) would have us look beyond the here and now. Ask a person who made a hasty decision to explain or write about the consequences and her desire for clear-cut closure diminishes.

    Clarity, we come to realize, develops best over time. Perhaps this explains the finding that a tolerance for ambiguity increases after reading fiction. Stories pull us out of the present moment—as well as out of our own minds and mindsets. It was a novelist, Margaret Drabble, who memorably observed, “When nothing is sure, everything is possible.”

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