Why do we put off unpleasant tasks, especially when we know that we’re going to have to do them anyway? Procrastination is a universal human behavior, and it’s one that makes no logical sense. If you delay an unavoidable action, you’re still going to have to do it anyway; all you gain is a mounting sense of frustration or worry as the undone responsibility haunts you. When you finally get around to completing whatever it is you’ve been dodging, the experience is either worse because you put it off or not as bad as you feared, making you wonder why you procrastinated in the first place.
In the October 11, 2010 issue of The New Yorker, James Surowiecki reviews The Thief of Time, a book of essays about procrastination written by economists, philosophers, and psychologists. He summarizes procrastination as a “complex mixture of weakness, ambition, and inner conflict.”
The weakness lies in the mismatch between our immediate desires and long-term goals. While we may have very laudable plans for the future (be fit, eat right, and live in a clean, uncluttered house, for example), these goals are often overriden by our short-term impulses. As we shift our attention to pleasures today, we mislead ourselves and pretend that we won’t feel just as avoidant tomorrow.
Ambition and perfection also lead us to procrastinate. Surowiecki writes about the Civil War general George McClellan, who delayed engaging in battle, convinced his army wasn’t perfectly positioned. The combination of lacking confidence in what we can do, coupled with high expectations can be paralyzing. Rather than taking action and risking failure, it can feel safer to embrace the fantasy that if we wait, whatever we do will be great. Meanwhile, nothing gets done. A painful portrait of this is the recent movie Greenberg, in which Ben Stiller plays a man in his 40s who turned down a record deal in his 20s because it wasn’t exactly what he wanted, torpedoing his career.
So how to combat procrastination? I think first we have to recognize that we have what Surowiecki describes as “competing selves” with conflicting goals, and which need to be tamed and managed (a familiar notion to anyone who has read a little Freud). We can acknowledge that our short- and long-term goals can conflict, and we can learn strategies for focusing on the long-term goals we’re tempted to avoid. These strategies include things like breaking things down into more manageable tasks, setting deadlines, and rewarding ourselves with pleasurable experiences for completing less-than-pleasurable jobs.
It’s also important to gain some better understanding of one’s feelings about the task being avoided. What makes it procrastination is that you are acting against what you rationally know to be your own self-interest. Understanding your motivations behind self-defeating behavior can help you overcome it.
Thursday, October 14, 2010
Sunday, August 1, 2010
Trauma and Memory
People who are in therapy -- and a lot of people who aren’t -- often question the value of discussing traumatic events in their past. It happened, goes the argument. You can’t change it,so why talk about it? What’s the point? Well, a new book by a woman who spent years blocking out memories of her own trauma, then threw herself into an in-depth investigation of it, makes a convincing case for how helpful it can be to examine troubling events from one’s past.
Denial: a Memoir of Terror, by Jessica Stern, is the author’s account of her and her sister’s rape at gunpoint in 1973 and the aftermath of that crime. For years Stern -- who was 15 when she and her sister were attacked by a stranger -- didn’t talk about the event, nor did members of her family. And, judging from her achievements, she did not appear to suffer lasting psychological harm; she earned a doctorate in public policy from Harvard, wrote noteworthy books on the subject of international terrorism, and became a respected academic in her field.
But in fact, Stern was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition most people associate with wartime experiences and battlefield violence. At times, she was nervous -- frightened by crowds or upset by the sound of a ticking clock. At other times, when as an adult she faced real danger (such as when she was the victim of an armed robbery) her reaction was to go into a trancelike state. She had difficulty maintaining relationships with the loved ones in her life.
At some point in her life, however, Stern decided to address her past head-on. She started by requesting the police file on her rape, for which no one had ever been arrested. She ended up researching the rape and its circumstances as thoroughly and as professionally as any of her books or articles. When a police officer subsequently re-investigated the rape and identified the likely perpetrator -- he was a serial rapist who had since committed suicide -- Stern researched the rapist’s life, speaking to his friends and interviewing another of his victims. She interviewed her father, too, whose emotionless response to the rape colored her experience of it; traveling at the time of his daughters’ assault, he didn’t cut his trip short to come home but waited three days until his previously scheduled return date.
Stern’s dissection of her traumatic experience -- via both this research project and psychotherapy -- ultimately made her life more satisfying, in several ways. She found she had a greater capacity to be in a romantic relationship. She was able to understand her father, a Holocaust survivor, in a way she never had before. And she was more conscious of how her ordeal had shaped her -- how she had developed the skill of functioning coolly under great pressure, such as when, as an adult, she was interviewing terrorists in the field.
In other words, Stern’s self-examination -- this dredging-up of a long-ignored nightmare from her past -- has enabled a richer life in the present. As she writes in her book (in the context of her relationship with her father), “I do not believe in ‘forgive and forget.’ To forgive in the truest sense, we must remember first and then forgive....”
Denial: a Memoir of Terror, by Jessica Stern, is the author’s account of her and her sister’s rape at gunpoint in 1973 and the aftermath of that crime. For years Stern -- who was 15 when she and her sister were attacked by a stranger -- didn’t talk about the event, nor did members of her family. And, judging from her achievements, she did not appear to suffer lasting psychological harm; she earned a doctorate in public policy from Harvard, wrote noteworthy books on the subject of international terrorism, and became a respected academic in her field.
But in fact, Stern was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition most people associate with wartime experiences and battlefield violence. At times, she was nervous -- frightened by crowds or upset by the sound of a ticking clock. At other times, when as an adult she faced real danger (such as when she was the victim of an armed robbery) her reaction was to go into a trancelike state. She had difficulty maintaining relationships with the loved ones in her life.
At some point in her life, however, Stern decided to address her past head-on. She started by requesting the police file on her rape, for which no one had ever been arrested. She ended up researching the rape and its circumstances as thoroughly and as professionally as any of her books or articles. When a police officer subsequently re-investigated the rape and identified the likely perpetrator -- he was a serial rapist who had since committed suicide -- Stern researched the rapist’s life, speaking to his friends and interviewing another of his victims. She interviewed her father, too, whose emotionless response to the rape colored her experience of it; traveling at the time of his daughters’ assault, he didn’t cut his trip short to come home but waited three days until his previously scheduled return date.
Stern’s dissection of her traumatic experience -- via both this research project and psychotherapy -- ultimately made her life more satisfying, in several ways. She found she had a greater capacity to be in a romantic relationship. She was able to understand her father, a Holocaust survivor, in a way she never had before. And she was more conscious of how her ordeal had shaped her -- how she had developed the skill of functioning coolly under great pressure, such as when, as an adult, she was interviewing terrorists in the field.
In other words, Stern’s self-examination -- this dredging-up of a long-ignored nightmare from her past -- has enabled a richer life in the present. As she writes in her book (in the context of her relationship with her father), “I do not believe in ‘forgive and forget.’ To forgive in the truest sense, we must remember first and then forgive....”
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Living up to your Potential--or Not
What do you do when you don’t quite live up to the dreams you have for yourself? That’s the question that writer Abby Ellin tries to answer for herself in the current issue of Psychology Today. Ellin, the author of the book Teenage Waistland, describes her own feeling of inadequacy in comparison to Tina Fey, the creator and star of the TV show 30 Rock. Ellin is smart and funny, she tells herself, and it nags at her that Tina Fey is winning Emmys and she isn’t. This vague feeling that she isn’t living up to her own potential is what Ellin labels the Contender syndrome, a reference to the scene in On the Waterfront in which Marlon Brando says, “I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender.” That envy of what she thinks she could be doing, Ellin recognizes, gets in the way of her taking pride in what she has actually done, from writing her book to climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro.
How can you prevent yourself from feeling bad about your non-accomplishments? Being “self-referential” for one. This means using yourself as your reference point, rather than just looking at how you stack up next to someone else. If you think about how slowly you’re running compared to the other runners you see at the park, you might feel bad. But if you think about how much faster you can run than you did when you first took up the sport, you’re more likely to feel good about your performance.
Seeing the idea of potential as something you can affect helps, too. When kids feel that being “smart” is a static trait that comes naturally--not something they can work at and improve--they are less likely to try new and difficult tasks. Similarly, if you see yourself as having “potential” but don’t connect that potential with a task or goal you can work on, you likely won’t realize that potential yet will be more envious of people who do live up to their dreams.
It also helps to broaden your idea of success. If your only definition of success as an actor, for example, is to win an Academy Award, then your odds of reaching your goal are slim. If you can focus on what you’re doing, your enjoyment of the process, then you’re likely to feel good along the way--and feel less cheated by others’ success.
How can you prevent yourself from feeling bad about your non-accomplishments? Being “self-referential” for one. This means using yourself as your reference point, rather than just looking at how you stack up next to someone else. If you think about how slowly you’re running compared to the other runners you see at the park, you might feel bad. But if you think about how much faster you can run than you did when you first took up the sport, you’re more likely to feel good about your performance.
Seeing the idea of potential as something you can affect helps, too. When kids feel that being “smart” is a static trait that comes naturally--not something they can work at and improve--they are less likely to try new and difficult tasks. Similarly, if you see yourself as having “potential” but don’t connect that potential with a task or goal you can work on, you likely won’t realize that potential yet will be more envious of people who do live up to their dreams.
It also helps to broaden your idea of success. If your only definition of success as an actor, for example, is to win an Academy Award, then your odds of reaching your goal are slim. If you can focus on what you’re doing, your enjoyment of the process, then you’re likely to feel good along the way--and feel less cheated by others’ success.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Don't Blame your Parents
The recent death of Alice Miller, an influential European psychoanalyst, revives a question that has nagged people for decades, whether or not they’ve been in therapy: To what extent are our parents responsible for our own psychological problems?
Dr. Miller, in her book The Drama of the Gifted Child, spotlighted the effects of childhood abuse and trauma on people’s emotional development. The headline version of her work is this: Blame your parents for your psychological problems. It’s a pretty simple, powerful idea, and one that has taken root as a stereotype of what happens in psychotherapy: An adult patient and his or her therapist sit around talking about how the patient’s parents are at fault for the psychological problems the patient is facing.
But this isn’t true. The lesson that I and most other psychotherapists have drawn from Dr. Miller and others is that adults’ psychological problems can indeed be rooted in childhood trauma. If a patient comes in wanting to address self-defeating behaviors, one step of the therapy process is to understand where and how these behavior patterns developed. Some of that may be traced to a patient’s parents or to other circumstances of one’s early life. But exploring how something started isn’t the same as blaming. And what gets explored in psychotherapy isn’t just what other people did, but also how the patient reacted to that, understood it at the time, and interprets it now. In other words, other people’s actions are only one part of the puzzle.
Furthermore, re-examining long-ago events isn’t the point of psychotherapy; it’s just a step. The ultimate goal, if you’re in therapy, is to change your life now. Reflecting on how you understand and interpret your past can help you better see why you’re engaging in counterproductive behavior in the present. Do you find yourself fighting with your coworkers or bosses over and over again? Do you keep having the same unsatisfying and destructive relationships with romantic partners? If so, that’s not your parents’ fault. What it may be instead is your treating people today as if you were the same person you were when you were a child. The responsibility is on you to take your awareness of what drives your behavior and use that to change.
Dr. Miller, in her book The Drama of the Gifted Child, spotlighted the effects of childhood abuse and trauma on people’s emotional development. The headline version of her work is this: Blame your parents for your psychological problems. It’s a pretty simple, powerful idea, and one that has taken root as a stereotype of what happens in psychotherapy: An adult patient and his or her therapist sit around talking about how the patient’s parents are at fault for the psychological problems the patient is facing.
But this isn’t true. The lesson that I and most other psychotherapists have drawn from Dr. Miller and others is that adults’ psychological problems can indeed be rooted in childhood trauma. If a patient comes in wanting to address self-defeating behaviors, one step of the therapy process is to understand where and how these behavior patterns developed. Some of that may be traced to a patient’s parents or to other circumstances of one’s early life. But exploring how something started isn’t the same as blaming. And what gets explored in psychotherapy isn’t just what other people did, but also how the patient reacted to that, understood it at the time, and interprets it now. In other words, other people’s actions are only one part of the puzzle.
Furthermore, re-examining long-ago events isn’t the point of psychotherapy; it’s just a step. The ultimate goal, if you’re in therapy, is to change your life now. Reflecting on how you understand and interpret your past can help you better see why you’re engaging in counterproductive behavior in the present. Do you find yourself fighting with your coworkers or bosses over and over again? Do you keep having the same unsatisfying and destructive relationships with romantic partners? If so, that’s not your parents’ fault. What it may be instead is your treating people today as if you were the same person you were when you were a child. The responsibility is on you to take your awareness of what drives your behavior and use that to change.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Therapy and the Internet
Here’s one more arena in which Google has changed our lives: the process of psychotherapy.
How the internet can complicate the patient-therapist relationship is the subject of an interesting story by Dana Scarton that ran in The Washington Post this week. Scarton writes about the growing amount of information that patients can find about their therapist online -- and that therapists can find about their patients.
Googling your patient or therapist, or checking out the other’s Facebook page, if he/she has one, raises all sorts of issues relevant to the therapeutic relationship. The most significant, I think, is that the internet enables both the patient and therapist to learn all sorts of things about each other’s lives that they haven’t learned directly from the other.
I think it’s a bad idea for therapists to google their clients, and I don’t do it myself. I think it’s essential that my understanding of my clients be based on what they disclose during a therapy session. What patients tell me -- or don’t tell me -- about their lives, when they tell me, and how they tell me are all, in and of themselves, important things for us to talk about while helping them work out their problems. Researching a patient’s life online would put me in some awkward situations: If I don’t tell the patient what I’ve done, I end up with information about him or her that I know but can’t talk about. And if I do tell the patient what I’ve done, the patient may interpret my outside research as a sign that I don’t believe what he or she is telling me in person. Either way, my research would destroy the trust and honesty that are necessary for a productive therapist-client relationship.
I know that many people seeking therapy start by researching therapists online (I have my own website, after all). I also know that searching online for one’s friends and acquaintances is an inevitable part of modern-day life, and it’s a hard habit to break. If you’re a person googling your therapist while in treatment, I would suggest that you bring this up with your therapist. Searching online in this context is usually a reflection of a patient’s curiosity about the therapist and the therapist’s life. These questions and feelings can be extremely helpful when discussed in the course of therapy. What does a patient want to know about the therapist that he isn’t learning in therapy? Why does he want to know this? How does he think this knowledge will help him? Discussing these questions in therapy, and trying to answer them, can often give patients insight into their own problems and their relationships with people in their lives other than the therapist.
As a psychologist with a private practice, I think it’s important that I have a presence online; the challenge for me is to not be too online. But aside from my website and initial emails with potential clients, I try to keep my professional communications with clients on the phone or in person.
How the internet can complicate the patient-therapist relationship is the subject of an interesting story by Dana Scarton that ran in The Washington Post this week. Scarton writes about the growing amount of information that patients can find about their therapist online -- and that therapists can find about their patients.
Googling your patient or therapist, or checking out the other’s Facebook page, if he/she has one, raises all sorts of issues relevant to the therapeutic relationship. The most significant, I think, is that the internet enables both the patient and therapist to learn all sorts of things about each other’s lives that they haven’t learned directly from the other.
I think it’s a bad idea for therapists to google their clients, and I don’t do it myself. I think it’s essential that my understanding of my clients be based on what they disclose during a therapy session. What patients tell me -- or don’t tell me -- about their lives, when they tell me, and how they tell me are all, in and of themselves, important things for us to talk about while helping them work out their problems. Researching a patient’s life online would put me in some awkward situations: If I don’t tell the patient what I’ve done, I end up with information about him or her that I know but can’t talk about. And if I do tell the patient what I’ve done, the patient may interpret my outside research as a sign that I don’t believe what he or she is telling me in person. Either way, my research would destroy the trust and honesty that are necessary for a productive therapist-client relationship.
I know that many people seeking therapy start by researching therapists online (I have my own website, after all). I also know that searching online for one’s friends and acquaintances is an inevitable part of modern-day life, and it’s a hard habit to break. If you’re a person googling your therapist while in treatment, I would suggest that you bring this up with your therapist. Searching online in this context is usually a reflection of a patient’s curiosity about the therapist and the therapist’s life. These questions and feelings can be extremely helpful when discussed in the course of therapy. What does a patient want to know about the therapist that he isn’t learning in therapy? Why does he want to know this? How does he think this knowledge will help him? Discussing these questions in therapy, and trying to answer them, can often give patients insight into their own problems and their relationships with people in their lives other than the therapist.
As a psychologist with a private practice, I think it’s important that I have a presence online; the challenge for me is to not be too online. But aside from my website and initial emails with potential clients, I try to keep my professional communications with clients on the phone or in person.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Attacking the Overweight
Harriet Brown writes so articulately about the stigma and prejudice experienced by people who are overweight, it’s hard to say anything other than link to it. She highlights how well accepted it is to disparage the overweight, despite the increasing evidence that weight loss and regulation is not simply a matter of self-control and discipline. Unfortunately, doctors can be as guilty of this as anyone, routinely attributing health problems to weight without looking further. When people feel that disdain from their doctor, they are less likely to get consistent medical care or comply with their recommendations. For some reason, weight and fat remains one of the few areas where people feel free to disparage others. Surely, there must be ways to address issues of health and weight without also demeaning those who wrestle with it.
Sunday, February 7, 2010
How Not to Talk About your Child's Weight
This week, Michelle Obama, trying to promote efforts to combat obesity, described taking her kids to the pediatrician and being told that they were overweight. She also mentioned that President Obama had referred to one of their daughters as “chubby.” These remarks caused consternation among eating disorders professionals, because of their apparent overemphasis on weight and dieting, rather than on healthy eating and health in general. Too often, when people talk about the obesity epidemic, it sounds like an attack on the overweight.
There are better ways to promote healthful eating than to call a youngster “chubby.” Those who treat eating disorders strive to help their patients move away from dieting and strict rules about good and bad foods. They aim to help their patients be less rigidly focused on a number and a weight and instead aim for healthy behaviors. One of the challenges in treating people with eating disorders is when the culture at large supports exactly the same attitudes that get in the way of fighting an eating disorder. In this link, Laura Collins, the executive director of FEAST (Families Empowered and Supporting Treatment of Eating Disorders), writes about how some of the First Lady’s comments sound in the eating disorders world. In a later post, she also mentions speaking to a member of the First Lady’s staff and explaining these issues. It will be interesting to see if this will have any effect on the way Michelle Obama talks about her daughters’ eating habits in the future.
There are better ways to promote healthful eating than to call a youngster “chubby.” Those who treat eating disorders strive to help their patients move away from dieting and strict rules about good and bad foods. They aim to help their patients be less rigidly focused on a number and a weight and instead aim for healthy behaviors. One of the challenges in treating people with eating disorders is when the culture at large supports exactly the same attitudes that get in the way of fighting an eating disorder. In this link, Laura Collins, the executive director of FEAST (Families Empowered and Supporting Treatment of Eating Disorders), writes about how some of the First Lady’s comments sound in the eating disorders world. In a later post, she also mentions speaking to a member of the First Lady’s staff and explaining these issues. It will be interesting to see if this will have any effect on the way Michelle Obama talks about her daughters’ eating habits in the future.
Sunday, January 3, 2010
Making your New Year’s Resolutions Stick
It’s a new year, which means that people are already making (and possibly breaking) their New Year’s resolutions. A useful article on Time.com takes advice from addiction experts on how to make your resolutions stick. What are the main points?
-Be honest with yourself about what you’re doing. If you’re trying to moderate your drinking and every time you plan to have 2 drinks, you end up having 5, then this should signal to you that your drinking may be more problematic than you’re acknowledging.
-Start out by trying to temporarily go cold turkey. For example, if your ultimate goal is to drink less, it might be easier to stop completely for a designated period of time rather than trying to taper off.
-Think before you act. Expect to get urges or cravings for whatever you’re trying to change. When you feel an urge, try to delay acting on it immediately. Try to reflect on the craving and think about the trigger. This may enable you to resist it better. The more you practice resisting or delaying giving in to cravings, the easier it will become.
-Give yourself a break. Be positive in your approach. Rewarding yourself for making a small change is far more effective than punishing yourself for not being able to do it. In fact, learning to tolerate imperfection in yourself may be the most useful change of all.
-Try to surround yourself with people who are doing what you want to be doing. It’s hard to stop smoking when you are only around smokers or to drink less when you mainly hang out in bars. It can be tough to change friends or to change the way you socialize, but it will make it easier for you to achieve your goals.
A last point (and this part is from me, not Time.com) is that change can be very hard. We all know what is good for us--eating right, exercising regularly, and not smoking, for example. Yet it can be very difficult to give up something that we know is not in our best interests. Be honest with yourself about what payoff you get from this habit you are trying to break. If you can’t acknowledge what you like about it--what it does for you, or the loss you will feel if you do give it up--it will be more challenging to achieve the change you want.
-Be honest with yourself about what you’re doing. If you’re trying to moderate your drinking and every time you plan to have 2 drinks, you end up having 5, then this should signal to you that your drinking may be more problematic than you’re acknowledging.
-Start out by trying to temporarily go cold turkey. For example, if your ultimate goal is to drink less, it might be easier to stop completely for a designated period of time rather than trying to taper off.
-Think before you act. Expect to get urges or cravings for whatever you’re trying to change. When you feel an urge, try to delay acting on it immediately. Try to reflect on the craving and think about the trigger. This may enable you to resist it better. The more you practice resisting or delaying giving in to cravings, the easier it will become.
-Give yourself a break. Be positive in your approach. Rewarding yourself for making a small change is far more effective than punishing yourself for not being able to do it. In fact, learning to tolerate imperfection in yourself may be the most useful change of all.
-Try to surround yourself with people who are doing what you want to be doing. It’s hard to stop smoking when you are only around smokers or to drink less when you mainly hang out in bars. It can be tough to change friends or to change the way you socialize, but it will make it easier for you to achieve your goals.
A last point (and this part is from me, not Time.com) is that change can be very hard. We all know what is good for us--eating right, exercising regularly, and not smoking, for example. Yet it can be very difficult to give up something that we know is not in our best interests. Be honest with yourself about what payoff you get from this habit you are trying to break. If you can’t acknowledge what you like about it--what it does for you, or the loss you will feel if you do give it up--it will be more challenging to achieve the change you want.
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