It turns out that there are some tricks. These are written about in a wonderful new book called 59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot by Richard Wiseman. I’ll be blogging more on the book, which is a concise, science-based set of tips for improving your life, and being happier, healthier, and more productive. I highly recommend the book. It’s a fun, easy read, full of great research and life tips.

(Full Disclosure: If you click on the link, and buy, PsychologyLounge will get a small payment, so you’ll be supporting this blog. If you don’t want to support this blog, just log into your own Amazon account, and search for the book.)

So let’s review conventional wisdom first.  Job interviews are based on academic training and work experiences, right? The candidate who gets the job is the one with the best academic credentials and the most impressive work history, correct?

That’s what most people think and they are wrong!

Chad Higgins and Timothy Judge did research looking at factors that influenced interviewers decisions about job candidates. I won’t bore you with the details of their research, but I will tell you what they found. First, they found that the qualifications and work experience of the candidate didn’t matter.

It turns out that the most important predictor of who will be offered the job was a magical and mysterious quality: the pleasantness and likability of the candidate!

So now you’re thinking: “Great, I need a personality transplant in order to become nicer and more likable. Thanks, Gottlieb, years of therapy for that one no doubt!”

No, you don’t need a personality transplant. You just need to follow a simple set of behavioral guidelines.

What were the behaviors that communicated likability? They were very simple:

1. Small talk. Talk about something that interests both you and the interviewer, even if it’s not about work. You notice a picture of them fishing, and you share fishing tales.

2. Praise. Find something you like about the organization they represent and compliment it. Or praise or compliment the interviewer in a genuine way.

3. Enthusiasm. Show your excitement about the job being offered and the company.

4. Connection. Smile and make eye contact.

5. Involvement. Show interest in the person interviewing you. Ask smart questions about the type of person they are looking for, and how the job fits into the organization.

That’s it. Do this and you will greatly increase your likability, and with it, your chance of getting a job. I suspect this would work pretty well in other interview situations too, like blind dates, but that’s more research…

P.S. Two more quick tips from 59 Seconds. If you have weaknesses that will most likely come up, bring them up early in the interview, that increases your credibility, and gives you time to use likability to your advantage. If you have a particular strength, share it later in the interview, in order to look more humble, and end on a strong note.

Copyright © 2010 Andrew Gottlieb, Ph.D. /The Psychology Lounge/TPL Productions

So what does buy happiness? We have a surprising answer from our friends across the pond, at the University of Warwick in England. A new study published online Nov. 18 in the journal Health Economics, Policy and Law surveyed thousands of people on  their levels of happiness and correlated it with external factors such as a pay raise or winning a lottery prize, and compared this to receiving psychotherapy.  Astonishingly, even to me, a psychologist, the increase in happiness from a $1329 course of therapy was so large that to equal it people had to get a pay raise of more than $41,542! That’s a ratio of 32 times! That means a dollar spent on therapy boosts happiness 32 times more than the same dollar received in a pay raise or lottery prize.

As the study author Chris Boyce, of the University of Warwick, summarized:  “Often the importance of money for improving our well-being and bringing greater happiness is vastly over-valued in our societies. The benefits of having good mental health, on the other hand, are often not fully appreciated and people do not realize the powerful effect that psychological therapy, such as non-directive counseling, can have on improving our well-being.”

Bravo,Chris! Now when patients ask me whether therapy is worth the money, I can confidently say that research suggests it might be one of the best investments you can make in yourself and your own happiness. (And it’s okay to get a raise, as long as you spend it on therapy!)

The only problem I can see with this article being published is that it may lower MY happiness, as I might get busier, perhaps earning more money, but not having time to see my own therapist!

So to answer the original question, does money buy happiness? Money doesn’t buy happiness; it buys psychotherapy, which yields 32 times more happiness than money!

Copyright © 2009-2010 Andrew Gottlieb, Ph.D.  The Psychology Lounge/TPL Productions

Link to study: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/news/fullstory_92421.html

More in a continuing series about one of my favorite topics, something we all do every day, and spend roughly a third of our lives doing…sleep!

Since we are in the middle of the common cold season, this post will be particularly relevant.

It turns out, grandma was right. Getting good sleep really does prevent colds. This supports a favorite belief of mine—that I don’t believe in the germ theory of illness.  Read on and you will see why I liked the referenced article.

Researchers at a variety of universities collaborated and did a clever study looking at sleep and its effects on susceptibility to the common cold. First they had their 153 subjects, healthy men and women between 21 and 55, report their sleep duration and efficiency for 2 weeks. (Efficiency is what percent of the time you are actually sleeping while in bed.) Next, these diabolical researchers sprayed cold virus up the noses of all the subjects (in quarantine), and watched what happened over the next 5 days.

The results were very interesting. Those subjects who slept less than 7 hours were almost 3 times more likely to develop a cold than those who slept 8 hours or more. In addition, those whose sleep was less than 92% efficient were 5.5 times more likely to develop a cold than those with 98% or more sleep efficiency. Interestingly, how rested subjects reported feeling after sleep was not associated with colds.  The lead author of the study concluded, “The longer you sleep, the better off you are, the less susceptible you are to colds.”

Now I promised that I would report evidence that this study bolsters my theory that germs don’t really matter that much. Remember the researchers sprayed virus up everyone’s noses. After five days, the virus had infected 135 of 153 people, or 88% of the people, but only 54 people (35%) got sick. What this suggests is that even among the people who were infected with cold virus, 60% stayed healthy, while 40% got sick. And the ones who got sick were much more likely to have reported less and lower quality sleep in the two weeks before infection. 

This is very relevant for everyday life, since much of the time we can’t really avoid exposure to common germs like colds and flu. If good sleep protects us even when infected with such germs, then it may be the key to staying healthy.

What is truly fascinating about this study is the precise immune regulation showed by those who got infected, but stayed healthy. To understand this let me digress for a moment with a short primer on the common cold. Most people think cold symptoms are caused by cold virus. This is wrong. Actually, cold symptoms are caused by our bodies’ immune reaction to the cold virus. Our bodies produce germ fighting proteins called cytokines, and when our bodies make too much, we get the congestion and runny nose symptoms. If our bodies make just the right amounts of cytokines, we fight the virus without feeling sick.

So getting 8 or more hours of sleep a night may allow your body to fine tune an immune response, and make just the perfect amount of germ fighting proteins.

Another interesting finding is the relationship of sleep efficiency and illness. Sleep efficiency was an even more powerful predictor of getting sick than total sleep. (Of course, this might reflect an overall difference in sleep quality. Those who sleep deeply may tune up their immune systems better, and they are likely to spend most of their time in bed asleep.)

But assuming that increasing sleep efficiency is useful, then those people who take a long time to fall asleep, and who sleep fitfully may benefit from spending less time in bed, and working on sleeping more of the time they are in bed. On the other hand, those who fall asleep as soon as their head hits the pillow, and who are sleep like logs, would probably benefit from spending a little more time in bed, since they are not getting enough sleep.

So there you have it. Sleep 8 hours or more, try to sleep well, and you can lower your odds of getting a cold greatly. Even if you are exposed to the virus, if you have good sleep quality, you probably won’t get sick. So much for the simple germ theory! I suspect that this applies to all infectious diseases. So getting good quality and quantity in sleep may be one of the most important health behaviors for staying well.

It’s late, and I’m off to bed now…..zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Copyright © 2009 The Psychology Lounge/TPL Productions/Andrew Gottlieb

The Wall Street Journal today has an article called Keeping Love Alive, which documents some fascinating research looking at why a small minority of long term couples seem to maintain intense passionate loving connections.

First the grim background to these findings. Keeping love alive is no mean feat, as the research on long term relationships suggests that for most couples love is a fading affair.

From the article:

“Each year, according to surveys, the average couple loses a little spark. One sociological study of marital satisfaction at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Penn State University kept track of more than 2,000 married people over 17 years. Average marital happiness fell sharply in the first 10 years, then entered a slow decline.”

This is not such good news for all of us in long term relationships. What do we have to look forward to? A sharp decline in happiness for the first ten years, and then a slow erosion of whatever remaining happiness is left, until either we run out of love or time, whichever comes first? Ugggh!

But then to the rescue comes Arthur Aron, who is a social psychologist at Stony Brook University. He’s looked at those unusual couples who claim that their love is just an intense years later. It’s a strategy of research which is called examining the outliers, those people who fall outside the averages.

Aron and his students are studying these couples in an interesting way. They are taking pictures of their brain function, using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). They have a person lie inside an MRI machine, and look at pictures of their spouse, while measuring the activity in their brain.

What have they found? It turns out that when these passionate couples look at or think about their spouses, a part of their brain called the ventral tegnmental area lights up. This is a section of the brain that is rich in the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is connected to our ability to feel pleasure and joy. The results have been duplicated in China, suggesting this is not just a western cultural phenomenon.

So what does this all mean? It’s not of much help in the challenges that I face as a marriage therapist, in helping couples repair damaged love. One of the interesting details reported in the article was that these passionate long term “in love” couples show one behavior in common. They are constantly affectionate, kissing, hugging, and holding hands. They display many PDA’s (public displays of affection).

Now that there is a brain measure of this intense love, what is more important is to study how people get there. Are these couples just more intensely in love to begin with? Perhaps it is like cognitive function, where those who start off smarter and more educated deteriorate more slowly in old age. Maybe these passionate couples simply start with more love, and show erosion, but they have such an excess that it doesn’t matter.

We might be able to answer some of these questions with a long term longitudinal study of new couples that followed them over 10 years or longer.

Is it a selection process, where better mate selection leads to better long term outcomes? Or are there behavioral differences, a set of behaviors and attitudes that preserves love? These are the key issues in answering the question of how do we go about Keeping Love Alive.

What I find deeply fascinating is that in spite of the fact that most people value love as one of the most important things in their lives, we actually know very little about what predicts success, and even less about how to help people love better. Brain scans may tell us more about the process of love and attraction, but unless we develop a “love beam” that changes the activity of the key brain regions, it won’t help us fall in love and stay in love.

…Excuse me, I’ve got to go kiss my sweetie!

Copyright © 2008 The Psychology Lounge/TPL Productions

All Rights reserved (Any web links must credit this site, and must include a link back to this site.)

In a previous article I wrote at length and I admit, rather philosophically, about getting things done. In this article I am going to do something a little different. Clients often ask me for specific tips to help them get moving. We’ve all had the experience of being completely blocked, seemingly unable to get anything done, and struggling to get moving. Some of this is mood and energy based. When we are tired, sleep deprived, or blue, it’s hard to motivate to do anything, especially tasks that are not fun or interesting. But life demands that we function even under these circumstances, so here are 5 tips for how to get moving when you are blocked.

1. Priming the Getting Things Done Pump

The first secret is to prime your “getting things done” pump by getting something done, anything. Pick a small task that you’ve avoided or failed to do for a long time. It can be anything. It should take no more than 5 or 10 minutes to complete. The key here is that you are going to complete something, and it’s something you’ve been avoiding for a long time.

I picked a Microsoft Class Action legal settlement form that entitled me to $125 in rebates on computer products. I had sent it in a long time ago, but it had been rejected and returned on a technicality. I pulled it out, found an appropriate receipt to attach it to, and put it in an envelope, and mailed it. Time? About 8 minutes. Not only did I get something done, but I made $125 in 8 minutes, that’s $937 per hour!

The principle is to get something done, which flexes your “getting things done” muscles. By picking something you’ve avoided for a while, you get an even bigger kick.

2. The Smallest Piece Technique

You can use a related technique even for a huge and complicated tasks that we all tend to avoid starting, and thus never finish. If you have a huge task, break it down into component pieces. Then pick a very small piece, a piece that will take 5 to 10 minutes, and do it.

This breaks the ice, and gets you moving on the big task. Often once you’ve done the first small piece you can then do more pieces. Often it is best to use a pump priming strategy here. Pick the smallest piece there is, and get it done. For instance, if you want to do your taxes, you might simply set the task of pulling out your tax folders, and putting them on your desk. That’s it, you are done. (But now you want to do more, don’t you!)

This also works well for getting started with exercise. Rather than saying to yourself, “I’m going to take a 1 hour walk”, and then doing nothing, decide to take a 5 minute walk. Once you are outside and walking, you probably will find yourself walking for more than 5 minutes. The key is to set the task of walking 5 minutes every day, and then you break down your resistance.

3. The Dice Man (or Woman) Technique

The next technique is a good one if you find yourself frozen with indecision. You have a many important tasks to do, and you can’t decide which one to do first. You are like an octopus that is pulled in many different directions by each of its tentacles, and hence is frozen in place completely.

In this case, use the Diceman strategy. The The Dice Man is the title of a comedic novel published in 1971 by George Cockcroft under the pen name Luke Rhinehart, in which a psychiatrist begins to make all his life decisions using a set of dice. (It’s a wild novel, and pretty interesting.)

To use this strategy, make a short list of the some of your main tasks. Number them 1-6 or 1-12. Then throw one or two dice, and do the one that the dice indicates. Or you can throw darts at the list, or even just toss a penny onto the list, and do the task the penny falls upon.

What this does it to short-circuit the part of your brain that is trying to prioritize many equally important tasks, and gets you moving and finishing a task. Often, once you do this, it is much easier to continue picking tasks and doing them.

4. The Entertainment Strategy

What about those tasks that are just plain boring? For instance, like filing, or unloading or loading the dishwasher. The best way to do these tasks is to pair them with some other activity that is fun.

For loading or unloading the dishwasher, you could use a phone with a hands-free headset, and talk to someone you like while you take care of the dishes. The same technique is useful for straightening up the house.

For filing, this is also a good technique. Another approach is to do the boring task while watching or listening to some entertainment. I find baseball and football games on television perfect for tasks like filing. Both have many slow points, which allows me to get a lot done without missing key points. Listening to a good show on the radio also works.

5. When All Else Fails, Bribe Yourself!

Another way of getting unpleasant boring tasks done is to pair them with specific rewards. For instance, let’s say you have a big task to do like doing your taxes. This is a task that takes a couple of days. Before you start, set yourself a specific reward once you have finished. It could be that you get to buy something for yourself. Or go do an activity that you like. The key is to make sure that the reward is big enough to motivate the task. Telling yourself you get to eat a piece of pie after spending two days doing taxes won’t work. It probably will take something bigger, and not pie! I call this strategy “paying yourself to get things done.”

So there you have it. Five quick ways to explode your resistance and get something done! Good luck!

I have to go now, and pay one bill.

Copyright 2008 The Psychology Lounge/TPL Productions

All Rights reserved (Any web links must credit this site, and must include a link back to this site.)

Here is some more evidence that we poorly predict happiness and unhappiness.

A recent article in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology again shows how poor we are at predicting our future states of happiness or unhappiness. As I wrote about in previous posts on happiness, we seem to be quite poor at predicting how we will feel in the future.

Eli Finkel and Paul Eastwick at Northwestern University studied young lovers to see if their predictions of unhappiness after a breakup matched their actual suffering when the breakup occurred.

They looked at college students who had been dating for at least two months and had them fill out multiple questionnaires. Twenty six of the students broke up during the first six months of the study and these students predictions of distress were examined. The students at rated how painful a breakup would be on average two weeks before the breakup.

On average people overestimated the pain of a breakup. There was some correlation between how much people were in love and how much pain they suffered after the breakup, but everyone recovered more quickly than they had predicted. Looking at the actual study it appears that people were able to predict somewhat accurately their suffering in the first two weeks after the breakup. The correlation between their prediction and the actual distress was about 0.60 which means that they were able to predict about 36% of their suffering. But between weeks six and 10, the correlations dropped to about 0.30, which means that they were only able to predict about 10% of the variation in their suffering.

This is interesting in terms of the habituation process that I wrote about earlier. We habituate to both good and bad events. And we underestimate our ability to adapt to both types of events.

Now we shouldn’t make too much of this study. Remember this is a study of college students who had been dating for at least two months. This isn’t exactly a study of deep connection and commitment. It would be interesting, but much more difficult, to look at the same data for married couples who later break up.

Copyright 2007 The Psychology Lounge ™  /TPL Productions , All Rights Reserved

Today I am going to write about a topic that simultaneously seems ridiculously simple and yet is deeply complex. This isn’t based on any article or book, only my own musings, so you have only me to blame if this makes no sense. The question is: “Why can’t we accomplish our goals? Why can’t we get things done that we tell ourselves we want to do? Why is getting things done so hard?”

After all, think about it this way. If you want to raise your right hand and touch your chin, you will have no difficulty in doing so. You think, “Move your right hand to your chin,” and your hand moves completely predictably and reliably. You don’t forget to do it. You don’t struggle to do it. It is easy, almost effortless.

There are so many other examples where we get things done without apparent effort. You go to a restaurant, order food, and eat. No struggle, no difficulty. You don’t have to make a list of what to do. You don’t make a list; “1. Order food, 2. Eat food, 3. Pay bill.” You don’t check off anything. It all happens without drama or hassle.

So why is it so hard to do things like paying bills, cleaning up the kitchen, or doing financial planning? Why is it so hard to exercise? Who exactly is running the show? Which self says, “You should exercise.” Which self refuses to do so? How many selves do we have?

This is a deep mystery of the self. It’s almost like we have multiple warring selves, some of whom want to accomplish tasks and be productive citizens and some of whom want to sleep all day, or go to the beach, or eat crackers in bed.

How can we make sense of this? I’m going to propose a model for understanding this. It will develop as I write, so hang onto your hats.

WHAT DO WE REALLY WANT?

The first Big Question we need to examine is What Do We Really Want? Perhaps the problem is that we tell ourselves to do many tasks that we really don’t have any interest or intention of doing.

Why would we do this? Mainly because of social pressure, which we internalize. We are told you should clean up, pay bills, exercise, call your mother…and so on, and we end up internalizing these demands. But do we really want to do any of these things?

So when I tell myself, “You should pay the bills now,” do I really want to do this? I would argue that the behavior that follows answers the question. If I immediately sit down and pay the bills, then I wanted to pay them. But if I struggle, avoid, and don’t pay them without a lot of internal mental friction, then the answer is I didn’t want to pay them. I can force myself to do things that I don’t really want to do, but it’s hard, and takes extra time and effort. I want the bills to be paid, but I don’t want to pay them. That’s a common dilemma—we want the outcomes of an action, but we don’t want to do the action itself.

I am reminded of two stories that shed light on this dilemma. The first is a famous Zen story. A young monk visits the old Zen Master, telling the old master that he wishes to study with him to gain enlightenment. He goes on and on about how great it would be to study with the old master. The old Zen master says “walk with me.” They walk up a hillside, through a forest, and then come to a lake. The old Zen master walks out into the lake. Figuring that this is what Zen masters do, the young monk follows him out into the water. Soon the water is up to their necks. Calmly, the old master reaches out, forces the young monk under water, and holds him there with remarkable strength. The young monk struggles, and just when his lungs are bursting, he fights to the surface, and takes a huge breath. He looks with horror at the old Zen master, who simply smiles calmly and says, “Come back when you want enlightenment as much as you wanted that breath of air.”

Clearly we have no difficulty getting things done when we want those things done as much as the monk wanted that breath of air.

The second story is something I learned from a friend of mine who is a large animal veterinarian. I was always curious about the psychology of large animals like horses and cows. Carol worked with those, but also with more exotic beasts like buffalo. One time she mentioned a “buffalo bridle.” I was curious about what kind of bridle could be strong enough to control a buffalo, and asked her about it.

She looked at me with a sly smile, as if to say, “What a city slicker you are!” Then she explained that the buffalo bridle was not a thing, but rather something you know. Falling for it, I asked the obvious question: what do you need to know to control buffalo?

She said, “You only need to know two things.”

“What are they?” I asked.

“The first thing is that you can make a buffalo go anywhere you want…

as long as the buffalo wants to go there.”

“And let me guess the second principle,” I said. “You can keep a buffalo out of anywhere you want…. as long as they don’t want to go there.”

“Exactly!” she said.

So that’s another clue. We are a lot like buffalo. We get lots of things done, mainly the things we want to. And we are really good at not doing the things we don’t want to do.

So there you have it, a simple theory of why we get things done or don’t get things done. The things we get done easily are the things we wanted to do, and the rest is just a bunch of internalized “shoulds” that we never really wanted to do in the first place. In this radical notion there is nothing wrong with our “getting things done” mechanism. We simply have to stop fooling ourselves that we want to get all these things done. Accept our limited ambitions, and be done with it!

But there is a problem with this elegant and simple model. If this model is right, then what do we do? How can we get things done? It wouldn’t really work very well if everyone stopped doing the things they don’t want to do, like paying bills, cleaning the dishes, taking out the garbage, going to meetings, and so on. Unfortunately, sometimes we really need to do the things we don’t particularly want to do, like working at job, for an example.

Yet there is a simple allure to this model. And maybe we can use it to sort out the genuine wants from shoulds in our lives. Here’s an exercise. Take out a piece of paper right now. Make four columns vertically. In the first column list all of the tasks you find hard to get done. You can stop after 10 or so.

Next, label the second column “Want Rating.” In this column I want you to rate the degree to which you want to do each thing. This is your genuine desire to do the task, not the degree to which you think you should do it. Use a 0-10 scale where 10 is intense wanting.

In the next column rate the degree of should that you feel about the task. Again use a 0-10 scale.

Now look over the tasks where the rating for want is low, and should is high. In the last column write down what would happen if you never did the task. What would be the consequences?

This exercise can help sort out the wheat from the chaff, and help us eliminate thankless tasks or at least outsource them. For instance, I hate mowing the lawn, and can’t think of anything I’d rather not do instead. So I pay a gardener to do it. And I hate paying bills, so I don’t. Instead, I have most of my bills automatically deducted from my checking account or Visa card. If we analyzed all of our lives this way, perhaps we could spend more time doing our wants, and less time doing shoulds, and thus find happiness.

But let’s continue on our journey into the land of getting things done. Another question we need to ask is how can we want to do certain tasks? How do we increase our wanting? How do we become like that monk who desperately wants that next breath of air?

A Brief Digression into the Language of Wanting

But before I discuss that I want to take a slight detour through the intellectual forest, and talk about how we figure out what we want and perhaps more important, what we don’t want.

People often talk about doing things in terms of “having to.” “I have to go to work today. I have to take out the garbage, I have to pay the bills, I have to exercise, I have to take the kids to school.” Then there are other things that we don’t use this language about. No one really says, “I have to do the crossword puzzle, or I have to watch TV, or I have to kiss you.” But the truth is that the words “have to” don’t mean what they say. I don’t really have to go to work today. I don’t have to pay the bills. I can let the kids stay home and watch television. I can even let the garbage rot in the pail.

But we choose to do these things, mainly because we don’t want the negative consequences of not doing them. I don’t like the smell of rotting garbage, nor do I like bill collectors or truant officers banging on the door. The reason we don’t use the “have to” formulation for doing crossword puzzles, or watching television is because we enjoy them, and there are no negative consequences for not doing them.

Another difference is between process and outcome. Tasks that are easy are usually fun during the process of doing them, and have a good outcome. So watching a good show on television is fun during the watching, and leads to a satisfying outcome, assuming you are not watching the cliffhanger “24.” But paying bills is a mostly thankless process, and the only outcome is that you are poorer.

Another distinction is that easy tasks lead to some reward in the outcome, while hard tasks often the outcome is simply the lack of any negative outcome. When I pay bills, at the end I am a little poorer, and my creditors richer. All I have accomplished is to avert financial disaster.

So what happens if we change the inner and outer language we use? What happens if instead of saying “I have to _____” we instead say, “I choose to do_____” or even “I choose not to do _____?”

What is interesting is that saying “I choose not to do ____” is very powerful. It forces one to confront one’s actions as a conscious choice, rather than pretending that forces beyond your control are determining your actions.

And sometimes, when we say, “I choose not to do ____” we discover that that is just fine. For instance, my garage is a mess, but this weekend I choose not to clean it up. Instead I will take a bike ride.

Capitalism is to some extent based on altering what people choose to do. Forbes recently had a survey of the highest paying jobs in the United States. Almost all of them were medical jobs. Surgeons, anesthesiologists, dentists, and oral surgeons were all on the list. CEO’s were actually a little lower on the list.

Let’s think about this. We tend to think of these as good jobs. But let’s get real. Surgeons stick their hands inside the bloody guts of sick people. Anesthesiologist watch people sleep and try not to fall asleep themselves. Dentist and oral surgeons poke around people’s smelly mouths with small sharp tools. In order to get people to take on high stress, bloody, and often disgusting jobs, we pay them really well. Imagine if these jobs paid $40,000 a year. No one would do them. Most jobs that pay well require either lots of training, high stress, or great talent, and people are willing to work towards these jobs because they pay well. Salary is one way we get people to want to do things more than they would otherwise want to do them.

I often do a mental experiment with clients. When they are struggling to get something done, I ask them if they could do it if, upon completion, I wrote them a one million dollar check (and the check wouldn’t bounce.) Invariably, they say they would have no problem. So this tells us that one of the challenges of getting things done is that hard tasks have inadequate rewards. Or the rewards are too far off in the future to matter much. If I tell them instead of giving them a million dollars on completion, I will pay them 30 years later, then my offer loses most of its appeal.

How to Alter What We Want

So if my simple model is correct and we fail to accomplish things because we don’t want them enough, how do we change our wanting?

It seems that the key is to understand the basic principles that make us want to do things. Those things we do easily either are pleasant and fun during the actual process of doing them, or they have powerful rewards that follow their completion.

So understanding this we can begin to think about modifying tasks so that we can get them done. The first step is to improve the actual process of doing the task. For many boring, repetitive tasks, the easiest way to do this is to add another activity you do simultaneously. For instance, I usually clean the kitchen while on my headset phone talking with my mom or my brother long distance. This makes the experience almost painless, and I also benefit from staying in touch with people I love.

Or I will watch a baseball or football game on TV while sorting and filing papers. I have a rolling filing cabinet which I roll out into the living room, and this makes filing fairly painless.

Or I will listen to a podcast while grocery shopping.

Almost any task can be improved by adding good music, or an audiobook to the background.

The other strategy for lowering the aversiveness of tasks is time. If instead of trying to do an hour or two of boring paperwork, I instead break it down into 5 or 10 minute pieces, I can tolerate that much more easily. Some tasks are just too annoying to tolerate for very long, so breaking them down into smaller pieces makes good sense.

Another strategy is to change the reward structure. Let’s say you have 4 hours of filing to do. Although your papers will be filed at the end of the day, this is too small a reward to really motivate. You could break it down into 10 minute pieces, but this would mean you’d be still filing in 2050! The best strategy here is to create an artificial reward structure. Establish a reward you get when finished. Maybe you get to buy that Ipod Shuffle ™ you didn’t really need. I like to think in terms of an hourly rate of pay, even for nonwork tasks. I’ve set mine at $30 per hour, so after a four hour task I get to spend $120. Yours might be higher or lower, just be sure it’s high enough so that you are motivated. Pay yourself well for scut work!

This is the end of Part 1. In the next Part I will talk about the perils of prediction, the limitations of memory, and I’ll comment on the official Getting Things Done system.

Copyright 2007 The Psychology Lounge/TPL Productions

For those readers curious about the mechanisms by which emotional stress affects brain function, I found an interesting piece of research about the physical mechanisms for how chronic stress can induce brain changes that could lead to cognitive impairment.

Scientists at Salk Institute for Biological Studies subjected mice to mild chronic stress for two weeks. What they found was fascinating. First some background on the physiology of Alzheimer’s disease. As the article explains:

“Alzheimer’s disease is defined by the accumulation of amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles. While plaques accumulate outside of brain cells, tangles litter the inside of neurons. They consist of a modified form of the tau protein, which–in its unmodified form–helps to stabilize the intracellular network of microtubules. In Alzheimer’s disease, as well as various other neurodegenerative conditions, phosphate groups are attached to tau. As a result, tau looses its grip on the microtubules, and starts to collapse into insoluble protein fibers, which ultimately cause cell death.”

So basically, when phosphate attaches the the tau molecules, it causes them to change from helpful molecules to damaging the neurons.

The mice research found that the brain-damaging effects of negative emotions are relayed through the two known corticotropin-releasing factor receptors, CRFR1 and CRFR2, which are part of the body’s central stress mediation system.

So what does this all mean? It suggests that we have to protect our brains from stress, particularly chronic stress. Occasional stress doesn’t cause problems, but daily chronic stress does. The mice only showed permanent brain changes after 2 weeks of daily stress.

So stress management through cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) or other means is not just a nice comfort option, but may be essential if you want your brain to last. Emotional pain doesn’t just cause emotional damage, it also damages the brain.

Perhaps scientists will be able to develop drugs that change CRF1 and CRF2 levels, but in the meantime, better take up that yoga, meditation, relaxation exercise, or CBT stress management program!

Copyright 2007 The Psychology Lounge/TPL Productions

So you’ve been putting off getting therapy, even though most of the time you feel anxious and upset? Well, a new study suggests that you may be putting your brain in danger.

Researchers at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, Illinois, followed more than 1200 men and women who were 65 and older, average age of about 76. At the beginning of the study they made sure that none of them had mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and measured their emotional distress using a simple 6 item scale of neuroticism. Items such as 1) “Are you the type of person whose feelings are easily hurt?”; 2) “Are you the type of person who is rather nervous?”; and 3) “Are you the type of person who is a worrier?” make up this scale.

At the beginning of the study the average score was about 15 on this emotional distress scale. Patients were followed up for up to 12 years. About 38% developed MCI during the study. Those in the top 10% of emotional distress at the beginning of the study were about 40% more likely to develop MCI.

What is interesting is this relationship held even after researchers statistically removed the effects of depressive symptoms at the beginning of the study. So the results were from emotional distress, not from depression. The risk for MCI increased by 2% for every 1 point increase on the distress scale. This is a pretty strong correlation.

So what does this mean? I think what it means is that chronic emotional upset is hard on the brain. It makes sense, since emotional stress raises stress hormones such as cortisol, which we know can damage the brain, especially the hippocampus, which controls memory. What we don’t know is whether this study was picking up some early brain changes in the elderly, changes which correlate with both emotional distress AND a tendency to develop MCI. A better study would look at younger people, and see if emotional distress in those aged 40 or 50 leads to the development of MCI in later life.

Since about a third of those with MCI will develop Alzheimer’s Disease, any reductions in the prevalence of MCI would be tremendously beneficial to society. Perhaps psychotherapy should be mandatory for all those over 65!

What can you do to lower your brain risk? First of all, honestly evaluate whether you suffer chronic emotional stress. Ask yourself if most of the time you feel calm and happy, or upset and worried and stressed. Also ask your close friends and/or family what they think. If you are someone who suffers chronic stress, then get help. A cognitive behavioral psychologist can teach you good stress management skills, and may help break lifelong patterns of emotional stress. Another good option is to learn mindfulness meditation and yoga and practice them daily. These are known to reduce psychological distress.

Whatever you do, don’t take it lightly if you are in long term distress. Your brain wants you to be mellow!

Copyright 2007 The Psychology Lounge/TPL Productions