Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life
Page 5
_______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ If nothing comes to mind yet, remember that the toothbrush is plastic (watch carefully what your mind does now, and write down your thoughts, even if fragmentary):
_______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ If nothing comes to mind yet, remember that plastic is made from oil. Now write down any thoughts, even if fragmentary:
_______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ If nothing comes to mind that would work yet, remember that plastic can melt (watch carefully what your mind does now):
_______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ If nothing comes to mind yet, remember that when melted, plastic is pliable. Now write down any thoughts this fact evokes:
_______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ If nothing comes to mind yet, remember that pliable plastic can form a shape (watch carefully what your mind does now):
_______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ If nothing comes to mind yet, remember that melted plastic hardens when cooled. Write down your ideas for removing the screw using only a toothbrush and lighter:
_______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ How Helpful Skills Cause You to Suffer
Hopefully, by now, you should be able to remove the screw, if it’s not screwed in too tightly and the melted plastic holds. (Presumably the plastic was melted by heating the end of the toothbrush with the lighter and inserting it into the screw while it was still pliable. Then waiting for the plastic to cool.) Now look at what you thought and wrote down.
Notice whether your thoughts had these qualities: you named objects and noted their properties; you described temporal (time-oriented) and contingent relations (if I did this, then…); and you evaluated or compared anticipated outcomes. See if it’s true that sometimes you literally “pictured” your ideas. That is, you saw the toothbrush, or pictured melting its handle at the end.
By doing this exercise, you’ve just demonstrated the main reason why humans, for good or for ill, have become the dominant species on the planet. These following relations are necessary for any verbal problem solving:
events and their attributes;
time and/or contingency;
and evaluation.
With these three sets of simple verbal relations we can think about the future, make plans, and evaluate and compare outcomes.
Unfortunately, with just these three sets (and not the scores of additional relations that language contains) you also have the capability to cause mental distress. Simply by having names for events and their attributes you can do a better job of remembering and thinking about them. You can, for example, remember and describe a past trauma and start sobbing as a result. You can be afraid of knives because you know they can cut and injure you (even if you’ve never seen that happen or had it happen to you).
With an if…then, or a temporal relation, you can predict bad events that may not happen, you can be afraid that pain or depression will return in the future, or you can know that you will die and you can worry about that imagined future. As a result of these symbolic temporal relations, most people tend to live more in the verbally remembered past and the verbally imagined future than in the present moment.
With comparative and evaluative relations we can compare ourselves to an ideal and find ourselves wanting, even though we are actually doing quite well. We can think we are much worse than others, or (perhaps just as bad) that we are much better than others. We can be afraid of negative evaluations from others, even if we haven’t ever experienced them, and we can become socially inhibited as a result.
These processes are quite primitive. Consider what a six-year-old child is like and then read this sad news story:
Dania, Fla. June 16 (AP)—A six-year-old girl was killed today when she stepped in front of a train, [after] telling siblings that she “wanted to be with her mother.” The authorities said that her mother had a terminal illness. (New York Times 1993)
Suicide is unknown among two-year-olds, but just a few years later, when we are able to think about the future and evaluate what we imagine, we have the tools to imagine we would be better off dead. If a six-year-old can step in front of a train to be with her mommy in heaven, a person as complex as you are has all of the cognitive tools needed to be tormented.
This is our point: humans suffer, in part, because they are verbal creatures. If this is so, then here is the problem: the verbal skills that create misery are too useful and central to human functioning to ever stop operating. That means suffering is an unavoidable part of the human condition, at least until we know how to better manage the skills language itself has given us.
WHY LANGUAGE CREATES SUFFERING
In normal problem-solving situations, when there is something we don’t like, we figure out how to get rid of it and we take actions to do that. If we don’t like dirt on the floor, we get out the vacuum cleaner. If we don’t like a leaky roof, we fix it. The human approach to solving problems can be stated as, “If you don’t like something, figure out how get rid of it, and then get rid of it.” That’s exactly why the linguistic and cognitive processes we’ve just described are useful. But when we apply this strategy to our own inner suffering, it often backfires.
Suppressing Your Thoughts
Suppose you have a thought you don’t like. You’ll apply your verbal problem-solving strategies to it. For example, when the thought comes up, you may try to stop thinking it. There is extensive literature on what is likely to happen as a result. Harvard psychologist Dan Wegner (1994) has shown that the frequency of the thought that you try not to think may go down for a short while, but it soon appears more often than ever. The thought becomes even more central to your thinking, and it is even more likely to evoke a response. Thought suppression only makes the situation worse.
EXERCISE: A Yellow Jeep
Let’s try an experiment and see whether suppressing a thought can work.
Get a clear picture in your mind of a bright yellow Jeep. How many times during the last few days have you thought of a bright yellow Jeep? Write down your answer in the space provided: _____________________________
Now get your watch out and spend a few minutes (five would be ideal) trying as hard as you can not to think even one single thought of a bright yellow Jeep. Really try hard. Return to this page when you are finished.
Write down how many times you had a thought about a bright yellow Jeep, however fleetingly, during the last few minutes while you were trying so hard not to think of it. __________________________________
Now get your watch out and spend a few minutes (five would be ideal) allowing yourself to think whatever thoughts come to your mind. Return here when you are finished.
Write down how many times you had a thought about a bright yellow Jeep, however fleetingly, during the last few minutes while you were allowing yourself to think of anything. __________________________________
If you are like most people, the number of times you thought about a bright yellow Jeep went up over time. You might have been able to keep the thought of a yellow Jeep out of your mind while directly suppressing it, but somet
imes even that breaks down, and the number of times such thoughts occur soars. Even if you were able to suppress the thought for a short period of time, at some point, you will no longer be able to do so. When this happens, the occurrence of the thought tends to go up dramatically. That is not simply because you were reminded of a yellow Jeep. In controlled research studies, when participants are told about the Jeep but are not instructed to suppress thinking about it, the number of thoughts does not increase.
When you try not to think of something, you do that by creating this verbal rule: “Don’t think of x.” That rule contains x, so it will tend to evoke x, just as the sounds “gub-gub” can evoke a picture of an imaginary animal. Thus, when we suppress our thoughts, we not only must think of something else, we have to hold ourselves back from thinking about why we are doing that. If we check to see whether our efforts are working, we will remember what we are trying not to think and we will think it. The worrisome thought thus tends to grow.
If you have obsessive thoughts or worries, this pattern is probably familiar to you. Research has shown that the vast majority of people without obsessions have odd intrusive thoughts from time to time, just as people with obsessions do (Purdon and Clark 1993). What is the difference? Part of the answer to that question may be that those with severe obsessive thinking problems spend more effort on trying not to think these thoughts (Marcks and Woods 2005). If normal people are asked to not think certain thoughts, they too will begin to feel more distressed about their negative thoughts (Marcks and Woods 2005).
Now, let’s try this exercise again using one of the thoughts that contributes to your suffering.
EXERCISE: Don’t Think About Your Thoughts
Psychological problems of any kind become entangled with our thoughts, and as a result, if you are struggling psychologically, you probably also have recurring thoughts that cause you pain. For example, if you are depressed, you may have the thought, “I’m worthless and no one loves me” or even just “When will this depression go away?” If you are suffering from generalized anxiety disorder, you may have the thought, “Vigilance is the only way to be safe.” Now, try to isolate a single thought that contributes to your current suffering. You can use the examples above as models. If you can, deconstruct your thought until you have it in the form of a short sentence or simple phrase. When you have this sentence or phrase in mind, complete the exercise.
1. Write down a thought that contributes to your suffering in the space below. _______________________________________________________________
2. How many times have you had this thought in the last week? (If you don’t know exactly how many times, make an approximation.) _______________________________________________________________
3. Now, get out your watch again, and try as hard as you can not to think that thought for the next few minutes (again, five minutes would be ideal). Return here when you are finished.
4. Write down the number of times you had your thought, however fleetingly, while you were trying not to think about it. ____________________________
5. Now, take another five minutes, and again allow yourself to think anything you want. Come back here when you are finished.
6. How many times did you think your thought when you allowed yourself to think about anything at all?
Go ahead and write down your answer here: ______________________
As you began to try to suppress your thought, what was your experience? Did it become less heavy, less central, and less evocative? Or did it become more entangling, more important, and even more frequent? If your experience was more like the second description than the first, this exercise illustrated an important point. That is, it can be useless or even actively unhelpful to try to get rid of those thoughts you don’t like. In controlled research, this doesn’t always work the way it does with arbitrary thoughts like those about bright yellow Jeeps. That may be because personally relevant negative thoughts are often already the target of chronic thought-suppression and those thoughts are already quite high in frequency.
What Is True for Thoughts Is Also True for Emotions
This same process applies to emotions. If you try not to feel a bad feeling, such as pain, not only do you tend to feel it more intensely, but previously neutral events also become irritating (Cioffi and Holloway 1993). Any parent knows this. If the kids are irritating you by making too much noise and you are trying to ignore it, the noise just becomes more and more irritating and, eventually, even little annoyances can cause you to explode.
Emotions link to thoughts in the same way. Research has shown that when you suppress thoughts in the presence of an emotion, eventually the emotion evokes the thought, and the suppression strategies evoke both the thought and the emotion (Wenzlaff and Wegner 2000).
For example, suppose you are feeling sad and you are trying not to think of a recent loss, such as the death of a friend. Perhaps you’ll listen to your favorite music to try to keep your mind off the friend who will no longer be in your life. What would be the result? Eventually, when you feel sad, you’ll be more likely to think of your loss, and your favorite music will tend to sadden you and remind you of your dead friend. In a sense you will have amplified your pain in your attempt to avoid feeling it.
Behavioral Predispositions and the Thought Trap
Finally, the same results apply to behavioral predispositions, behaviors that are programmed to the degree that the mere thought of them sets off a chain of bodily and psychological events that predispose us to behave in the programmed way.
In an almost nightmarish effect known to every weekend golfer trying to make a pressure putt, researchers have asked subjects to hold a plumber’s pendulum (a weight on a string) over a spot on the floor and not to let it move at all, but especially not forward and back. The effect? It tends to move forward and back, not side to side, simply because thinking about not having it move forward and back activates the very muscles that move it that way (Wegner, Ansfield, and Pilloff 1998). The effect is especially strong under pressure situations, precisely when you would most wish it were not there.
If you have a fear of heights, this effect may be quite familiar to you. When you look over a ledge from a great height, you almost feel a pull as if some invisible force were causing you to be unsteady precisely when you wish that would not happen. If we can generalize from the literature on suppression, this effect is probably not just in your mind: your fear activates some of the muscles that move you toward the ledge, as well as those that move you away from it. As a result, you feel unsteady.
WHAT YOU’VE BEEN DOING
It’s likely you’ve been using a verbally guided “fix-it” mentality to find a solution for the causes of your suffering. If you’ve opened this book, it’s also likely that your attempts haven’t been entirely successful. (Otherwise, why did you open it?) The coping techniques you’ve developed to fix or counteract the pain you struggle with belong to the same class of language-based, problem-solving behaviors described in the exercises above.
Let’s look at this a little more carefully. What kinds of actions do you take to suppress or otherwise reduce, diminish, control, or counteract your painful thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations? Consider all the rituals you engage in as a means to keep yourself from feeling pain. These might be as extreme as incessant hand washing if you are suffering with OCD, or as simple as turning on the tube at night to numb yourself from the aftereffects of the irritation you felt on your way home from work. Your coping behaviors might include purely psychological behaviors like thought-suppression or rationalization. Or perhaps you engage in physical activities like obsessive exercise, habitual smoking, or even intentional self-harm, like cutting, to ameliorate your pain. Whatever you do (and we all do some of these things to a greater or lesser degree), you can explore them in the exercise below.
EXERCISE: The Coping Strategies Worksheet
Please glance at the Coping Strategies Worksheet below, and then return here for directions on
how to work with it. In the column on the left, first write down a painful thought or feeling. (This can be taken from the Suffering Inventory you generated in chapter 1 if you wish. It can also be something entirely different if you have a more pressing thought or feeling that you would like to address right now.)
Then, in the second column, write down one strategy you’ve used to cope with this painful thought or feeling. Once you’ve done this, please rank your coping strategy for two sets of outcomes. The first asks you to rate how effective your coping strategy has been in the short-term. That is, how much immediate relief do you get from the behavior? For the second ranking, rate your strategy for how effective it’s been in the long-term.
Think about how much of your total pain is caused by your painful thought or feeling. Has your coping behavior reduced your pain over time? Rate each short- and long-term strategy on a scale from 1 to 5 where 1 is not effective at all and 5 is incredibly effective. For the time being, simply note your rankings. We will look at what they mean in greater detail later in this chapter.
For example, suppose someone writes a thought like this: “I’m not sure life is worth living” in the “Painful thought or feeling” column. The coping technique the person uses may be to have a beer, watch sports, and try not to think about it. While watching TV, the short-term effectiveness of the strategy may be ranked a 4; but later, the thoughts may be stronger than ever and the long-term effectiveness may be ranked a 1.
Coping Strategies Diary
If you find that you aren’t sure what you’ve been doing to cope, it may be best to collect this information first in diary form. You can copy the form below and use it to record what happens in your life when you experience something psychologically painful. Note the situation (what happened that evoked a difficult private experience); what your specific internal reactions were (particular thoughts, feelings, memories, or physical sensations); and the specific coping strategy you used then (e.g., distracting yourself, trying to argue your way out of your reactions, leaving the situation). After making entries like these in diary form for a period of one week, you should have a better understanding of what coping strategies you have been using and how effective they are.