From Joe: In several posts and a recent column, Gerry nicely illustrates how we fight ourselves when it comes to making serious personal changes. She started her training camp thinking that losing a few pounds would be a surmountable challenge, she says, only to find out that her new regimen was creating many daily problems that were far more complicated than she expected them to be.
So what’s a person to do when a new regimen creates challenges that were never anticipated at its beginning?
Two important practical hints can be extracted from Gerry’s material.
First, give up childish fantasies that there will be a simple solution to genuinely complicated life problems.
If you are like most readers of this blog, you really know this already. You probably have a history of failed attempts to improve your dietary and fitness practices. You’ve made resolutions that you did not keep and weight losses that did not hold. You’ve been victimized by peddlers of books and magazines who got your money by promising a simple solution to a tangled problem that has baffled smart minds ever since obesity and poor physical fitness were first recognized as major threats to health. You made some short term gains, but long term success never materialized.
Trust your own life experience! All the personal evidence available to you indicates that a simple method of changing your fitness and dietary practices will lead to simple results: Temporary gains that you know you will lose because you have a track record of doing so.
Gobs of scientific evidence confirm the validity of your personal experience. Programs that seek to change highly ingrained patterns of behavior have, at best, limited long term effectiveness. Smokers quit smoking for a few days, child predators stop their preying for a few weeks, procrastinators get a few things done and then resume their stalling – the list goes on and on. Do you think that all the bright people who have worked on this problem would have failed to discover a simple, obvious solution if one really existed? They haven’t found it because it does not really exist. It’s a cognitive illusion.
People who persist in seeking a simple fix for serious life problems remind me of clients at the entry phase of psychotherapy.
In a different life, I used to have frequent professional conversations with friends who were were family therapists. They were constantly challenging themselves to develop better ways of helping clients dissipate the illusions that form the core of much unhappiness. Those conversations taught me a lot about the dangers of the simplicity illusion. Clients commonly come to therapy with a secret belief that all their problems will disappear if only one or another simple thing about a person would get fixed by a simple remedy. Particularly if that person was somebody else – someone like a child or a spouse. Rarely did clients enter therapy believing that they needed to make important, complex changes to themselves.
When it comes to fixing themselves, people tend to be 100% in favor of progress and 1000% against change. Ultimately, that’s why so many self-improvement projects achieve no more than transitory results.
Bummer!
So why even bother to continue to try?
When she talks about facing the complicated challenges that erupted as her new routines conflicted with daily realities, Gerry documents the importance of admitting to yourself that you are in at least a little over your head. That’s an important step everyone has to take to set the stage for change to occur.
When things turn out to be more complicated than we expected them to be, we can react by ramping up our determination to find a simplistic, low-cost response to the problem. Unfortunately, this reaction does not qualify as an evidence based technique – its support consists of anecdotes (many of them drunken anecdotes) rather than research results.
The other thing we can do is embrace the complexity. Frame it as a pleasurable challenge. Relax. Enjoy it for what it is. Stimulate your self-confidence by exposing unrecognized coping resources you didn’t know you had. Create conditions for realistic optimism. Research on problem solving, creativity, sports psychology, psychotherapy and other interventions suggests that this kind of strategy is likely to increase your chances of success rather than decrease them.
Fine, I can hear you saying. Embrace! Enjoy! Reframe it! Relax! How are you supposed to do that when your regimen is making you half crazy with depression, tension, despair, irritability, anger and who knows what else?
In passing, I’ll mention that there are things you can do to reduce stress to a point where your mind is able to efficiently cope with complexity: Yoga, hypnosis, music, blah blah blah. Any of these might be helpful to you and I mean them no disrespect by giving them short shrift here. If you reading this blog, you’re the kind of person who either knows about these things already or can use Google to educate yourself about them.
So I am going to close this post by pointing out a self-management technique which is less known and more difficult to learn about.
The technique is simple: When you start to analyze why you feel discouraged or tense or whatever,
Use the Part-of-Me Protocol:
Substitute the phrase “Part of me” for the word “I”
What’s the difference in feeling tone between sentences in the following pairs?
“I am 100% in favor of progress, 1000% against change!”
“Part of me is 100% in favor of progress, part of me is 1000% against change!”
“I am totally discouraged by my inability to avoid snacking!”
“Part of me is totally discouraged by my inability to avoid snacking! Part of me is not discouraged!”
“I must have a quick and simple solution to this problem!”
“Part of me must have a quick and simple solution to this problem! Part of me does not need it!”
“I’ll never be able to stop my drinking!”
“Part of me will never be able to stop my drinking! Part of me will be able!”
“I got into trouble because I want desperately to please others at any cost!”
“I got into trouble because part of me wants desperately to please others at any cost! Part of me does not!”
“Because of the conflicts we’re having, I think it’s OK to have an occasional fling with somebody besides my spouse.”
“Because of the conflicts we’re having, part of me thinks it’s OK to have an occasional fling. Part of me says it’s not OK.”
Leave a comment about how these different kinds of self-talk sound to you. Do you think they have different kinds of psychological impact? Open or close different kinds of doors? (Hint: If you cannot perceive any differences, try reading the sentences aloud.)
Oh yeah. I said Gerry’s material contains two important practical hints. We’ll get to the second one later.
Joe, fantastic article!!