The Easiest Trick to Breaking Out of Wrong Ideas

The Easiest Trick to Breaking Out of Wrong Ideas

Having correct beliefs is vital to having the best life!     

Source: Randall Munroe, used with permission

Right now you have something within your reach with an almost magical ability to break out of wrong ideas. You can use it to process data and identify patterns and trends. What do you think it is? Take a guess before reading onward.
Did you guess your computer or your phone? Then you’re wrong! What I'm talking about is much, much more powerful than that. It's more powerful than the fastest supercomputer on the planet.
I'm talking about your brain.
Humans didn't spread out to rule the entire planet because of bigger muscles or sharper claws. Intelligence, the kind of intelligence that all humans have, is our superpower. It's what separates us from other animals, and it is your greatest resource.
But most people don't really use their brain to its full potential. Do you?
You certainly weren’t taught to use its real potential in school. Children are taught facts that will pass tests, but the skills that are most important in life usually don’t involve stuff that’s on an exam. How do I make plans (link is external)? How should I decide between places to live? What’s the best way to negotiate for higher pay? All of these questions involve thinking about and modeling the future (link is external). Imagine how many fewer poor decisions you will make and how much better off your life will be if you learn how to unlock your brain’s true potential and gain agency (link is external) over your life!
Want to know a secret? It's actually pretty easy to make big improvements to how you think. A few quick tricks can make a world of difference and boost your future-predicting power. I'll share one of them right now.
Have you ever heard of Confirmation Bias (link is external)? It's one of the known problems that scientists have discovered about how we naturally think. Imagine a friend suggests that people who drive red cars are bad drivers. At first you don't think that's true, but after hearing a few stories of bad drivers in red cars from your friend, you think he might be onto something. The next time you're on the road you notice a red car swerving around like a maniac... proof! You're a believer now. You start seeing reckless drivers in red cars all the time.
If you don’t believe me, I challenge you to try it out. Drive for a month looking for reckless drivers in red cars. You'll see them everywhere. Or you can save yourself the time and trouble. This perception would only be in your head!
If you actually use science you'll find this is false (link is external). What happens is that if you look for something you'll find it, but you'll also end up ignoring things that don't fit the pattern. If a blue car does something dangerous you won't think about it. If a red car drives safely then maybe it's just a fluke or maybe you'll interpret it as reckless anyway.
Confirmation Bias affects all sorts of things, from racial prejudices to conspiracy theories to personal relationships. If you expect someone you know to act sad, you'll notice their sadness and ignore their happiness. And importantly, it can hurt your ability to predict the future.
Imagine a gambler (link is external) who loses five games of poker in a row. She thinks “I’ve been getting bad luck for a long time… surely my next hand will have to be good to balance it out!” Have you ever thought something like that? I have. After two more bad hands she finally gets a good hand and thinks to herself “I knew it!” But she was wrong twice before being right! With that sort of sloppy thinking it would’ve been smarter just to walk away.
There are several tricks to avoiding this bias and being a better thinker. The one I'm going to share today is to visualize alternate universes regularly. An alternate universe is just a world exactly like this one but where one or two things are different.
Let's use the example of drivers of red cars being reckless. There are two alternate universes here. One alternate universe is where drivers of red cars are *safer* than normal. The other is where red car-drivers are just as good at driving as anyone else. Take a moment to visualize these alternatives and imagine what they look like. Can you see how that would help? Just like focusing on red cars being dangerous causes you notice examples that fit the story, focusing on the opposite lets you catch examples you might otherwise miss. It’s all about controlling where you put your attention.
Let me give an example from my personal life. I once met someone who I had heard was “obnoxious.” Indeed, when I first met him I could immediately see why: the man had almost no social skills. With the seed of “obnoxious” sown in my mind I began to get annoyed when around him. I noticed every time he said the wrong thing or didn’t seem to understand what the topic of conversation was. But then I remembered what I had learned from my research into psychology and I flipped my thinking: I imagined the alternate universe where this guy was cool and easy to be around.
Did my visualization of the alternate universe mean my friend suddenly became suave and charming? Not at all. But it did make him not obnoxious! Specifically, I realized that having weak social skills did not mean I had to find spending time with him unpleasant, and I began to enjoy my time with him much more. I also noticed that his social skills weren’t as bad as I had initially thought. There were a few times when, not trapped by “small talk” or the pressure of meeting someone new, I noticed him acting much more like his alternate-universe counterpart than I would have otherwise expected.
I don’t invite this friend to parties very often (I doubt he’d even enjoy the experience), but we still talk fairly regularly and he’s someone I know that I can turn to if I have a difficult problem in his field. Without the technique of visualizing alternate universes I would have worse social interactions, fewer friends, and be generally less wise. This simple trick has brought many, many people success in their relationships, their work, and elsewhere!
This is just one step on the path to being a better thinker about the future (link is external), and as we move forward I think you'll see how the technique of visualizing alternate universes can be used for becoming more intelligent, effective, and happy!
What do you think?

• Have you had success in improving your life through visualizations before?
• Do you know anyone in your personal life that seems just convinced about something that isn't true?
• Can you think of any areas of your life where you might have an incorrect perception of the world?
• What are specific steps you can take to apply the techniques in this article to improve your perception of the world?

Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is an author, speaker, consultant, coach, scholar, and social entrepreneur specializing in science-based strategies for effective decision-making, goal achievement, emotional and social intelligence, meaning and purpose, and altruism - for more information or to hire him, see his website, GlebTsipursky.com. (link is external) He runs a nonprofit that helps people use science-based strategies to make effective decisions and reach their goals, so as to build an altruistic and flourishing world, Intentional Insights (link is external). He also serves as a tenure-track professor (link is external) at Ohio State in the History of Behavioral Science and the Decision Sciences Collaborative, and published over 25 peer-reviewed articles. A best-selling author (link is external), he wrote Find Your Purpose Using Science (link is external) among other books, and regular contributes to prominent venues, such as Time (link is external), The Conversation (link is external), Salon (link is external), The Huffington Post (link is external), and elsewhere. He appears regularly on network TV, such as affiliates of ABC (link is external) and Fox (link is external), radio stations such as NPR (link is external) and Sunny 95 (link is external), as well as internet-only media such as podcasts (link is external) and videocasts (link is external).
Consider signing up to the Intentional Insights newsletter (link is external); volunteering (link is external); donating (link is external); buying merchandise (link is external). Get in touch with him at gleb (at) intentionalinsights (dot) org.

Gleb Tsipursky Ph.D. Intentional Insights

Source: The Easiest Trick to Breaking Out of Wrong Ideas

The Poison Tendrils of Negative Emotions

How negative emotions lead to self-regulation failure

For readers looking to jump into the deep end of understanding procrastination, I highly recommend the recent volume edited by James Gross, Handbook of Emotion Regulation (link is external). This collection of chapters provides the most current and thorough review of the research literature in the area. Because I have put such emphasis in my own writing on the role of emotions in understanding procrastination, I thought I would summarize aspects of just one of the many chapters of this excellent book. The reference to the chapter written by Dylan Wagner and Todd Heatherton is below.

I was amused and delighted by the metaphor and image that these authors used to depict the role of negative emotions (also called negative affect) in the self-regulation process. In a very typical, academic-style diagram of a model of self-regulation, they first depict a high-level theoretical perspective.
The essential components conceptually look something like this:

TEMPTATIONS & DESIRES    GOALS & STANDARDS    Success
(food, drugs, media use, etc.)         Monitoring    Capacity         Failure

At the center of the model are our goals and standards. In other words, central to self-regulation is monitoring our progress towards our goals and our capacity to do this.  What they depict as directly influencing our goals and standards are temptations and desires. You know, other more fun stuff.  Finally, the model makes it clear that depending on how well we can ignore the temptations while maintaining our goal pursuit predicts whether we succeed or fail. In sum, it’s a common, simple model of self-regulation that is typical of a scholarly paper.
The amusing bit is how they chose to depict the effects of negative affect (negative emotions). They have the same diagram but with a giant black hole underneath the model out of which evil tendrils emerge. These tendrils, as tendrils will, grab on to every component of the model. This model now emphasizes a failure outcome, and the final piece of the model is how failure now feeds back down to the hole from which the tendrils emerge and feed the negative affect.
[Note: While I am tempted to add a photo of their diagram here, there are copyright laws that prevent usage in this way, so I hope that this description allowed you to imagine this quite vivid depiction of a psychological model.]
As they note in the caption to this figure, “Negative affect spreads poison tendrils into every aspect of self-regulation, amplifying desires, decreasing monitoring, depleting limited capacity, and encouraging misregulation strategies (e.g., mood repair and escape from aversive self-awareness), which can relieve negative affect in the short term but often lead to further negative affect upon failure to meet one’s goals” (emphasis added).
Well done!  That’s certainly the lived experience of the effects of negative emotions on our self-regulation. The tendrils pull us down.
These negative emotions seem to emerge from a dark place within us, grabbing on to every aspect of our self, and undermine our ability to self-regulate. And, of course, as we fail in our attempts to self-regulate, the self-blame begins, as does the downward spiral of self-esteem and self-efficacy.
In the bulk of the chapter, Wagner and Heatherton summarize numerous studies related to the different ways that negative emotions, emotion regulation and self-regulation interact. It’s important to remember that these are interactive effects, or as I like to say, it’s a sort of dance between these processes that undermine our success. As the authors summarize this interaction, we learn the following:

• Negative affect (emotions) leads to a desire to “feel good now,” escaping the negative state by engaging in pleasurable activities and reducing self-awareness (to lower any potential feelings of guilt; a process I have described previously);
• These choices related to mood repair serve to increase the pull or attractiveness of immediately available rewards and temptations grow;
• With a focus on pleasure and lower self-awareness, the ability to self-monitor is diminished; and at the same time,
• Negative affect, which is related to rumination, puts an increased load on working memory that further weakens the ability to self-monitor and further undermines goal pursuit, or any further attempt at self-regulation (i.e., no monitoring, no self-control).

It’s not a pretty picture, is it?  But it’s certainly one that I think every human being knows. It’s that downward spiral we experience when “we don’t feel like it” and negative emotions begin to “weave their tendrils” (as these authors depict) throughout our self-regulatory process.

Interestingly, Wagner and Heatherton paint this despairing picture even a little darker, writing:
“Throw in the fact that prior self-regulatory effort may leave the individual in a depleted state in which both resources for further self-control are lacking and the strength of impulses and temptations are increased, and it is a small miracle that people are not constantly acting out their fantasies, drinking, smoking, or indulging in every gastronomic desire” (emphasis added).
This is indeed a pretty dire picture, and it’s not helped by the fact that there is very little research documenting how positive emotions might reverse this. Although there is some evidence to suggest that positive emotions might buffer against ego-depletion and enhance self-regulation, positive emotions are not simply the antidote.  In fact, positive emotions might feed further off-task behaviors if this becomes the new focus of attention; a sort of carpe diem or even “what the hell” effect where we give in and decide it’s time to eat, drink and be merry.
The authors end with this sentence:
“Negative affect is thus a particularly potent threat to self-regulation, because it not only reduces the capacity for control (increased working memory load, reduced self-awareness and monitoring) but it may also lead to increases in the strength of experienced desires and emotions, rendering them all the more difficult to resist.”
So, you might ask as you join me in this dark place, “what are we to do?”  How do we manage to self-regulate?  Well, this has been the focus of most of my blog writing over the past years, with all sorts of strategies derived from a variety of different studies.
In my last blog post, I re-emphasized the importance of not paying attention to these emotions when they arise. Not a simple thing, I understand, as I noted above that negative emotions (affect) are related to and even seem to cause rumination. This rumination is the antithesis of “not paying attention.” But you get my point, right? The research summarized in this chapter makes it clear that negative emotions really do undermine self-regulation through processes like rumination that puts too much load on working memory (which derails monitoring our goal pursuit), or by provoking a hedonic response to feel good now.

Gross offers some potential points of intervention in his own process model of emotion. And, although it’s simply not possible to go much further in a single blog post, I will note that one effective strategy that is incorporated into many successful procrastination interventions is learning to modify appraisals of our situation to alter its emotional significance (I’ll come back to this at some other time, as this was part of the work we did in our recent book Procrastination, Health and Well-Being (link is external)). In any case, the focus here is on cognitive change, the kind emphasized in cognitive behavioral therapies, for example.
I hope that you can see that despite the “poison tendrils” of negative emotions depicted so vividly by Wagner and Heatherton, there are routes to self-regulatory success.  For some of us, this is certainly made more difficult by personality traits such as low emotional stability, as we are more chronically attuned to negative emotions. However, we can learn to act out of character as we learn new strategies to cope. Strategies that are much more effective than avoidance, self-blame and behavioral disengagement, each of which has been demonstrated to be risks not only to our success, but to our health.

Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/dont-delay/201607/the-poison-tendrils-negative-emotions?collection=1096682
References
Pychyl, T.A., & Sirois, F.M. (2016). Procrastination, emotion-regulation and well-being. In F.M. Sirois & T.A. Pychyl, (Eds.), Procrastination, health and well-being (pp. 163-188). New York: Elsevier.
Sirois, F.M. (2015). Is procrastination a vulnerability factor for hypertension and cardiovascular disease? Testing an extension of the procrastination-health model. Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 38, 578-589.
Wagner, D.D. & Heatherton, T.F. (2014). Emotion and self-regulation failure. In J. J. Gross (Ed.), Handbook of emotion regulation (pp. 613-628). New York: The Guilford Press.

Timothy A. Pychyl, Ph.D., is an associate professor of psychology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, where he specializes in the study of procrastination