In the face of adversity: Strengthening Self-Control

We live in a society where we are expected to eat, drink and buy things, many of which we don’t need. I'm sure we can all remember George W. Bush encouraging us to go shopping in the middle of a recession. It is our patriotic duty to be good consumers. Right? Unfortunately, being a good consumer may devastate our health and result in financial disaster. So what are we to do to look out for ourselves in a society that is clearly not looking out for us? The first strategy is a relatively simple one to describe, but a difficult one to implement in this society. It involves avoiding temptation. We know from research, both with children and adults, that this is one of the best ways of maintaining self-control. For example, children who stare directly at a treat that they would like, such as a marshmallow, are less likely to resist it than kids who close their eyes, turn away, or otherwise distract themselves. Likewise, adults who keep candy in a desk drawer indulge less than those who keep candy in plain sight. AA understands this principle well when they encourage people in recovery to avoid people, places and things associated with alcohol and substance abuse. Another helpful technique that psychologists have used for years is called “implementation intention.” This psychobabble phrase refers to helping people plan for situations that may occur that will deplete their willpower. For example, if you are in recovery making a plan for Friday afternoon when your friends will want to go to happy hour, may help you to stay sober without drawing on your willpower. But what are we to do as human beings if we possess only a limited reserve of self-control and willpower? There are so many temptations in our society. Will we always fail? The good news is that many researchers believe that willpower is never completely exhausted, that people may, indeed, hold some willpower in reserve for future temptations. Motivation appears to be the answer. Being motivated to persevere, even when our self-control has been run down. Many of those who do research on self-control describe self-control as being like a muscle that gets fatigued with heavy use. But like a muscle, it can be made stronger with regular exercise. Australian scientists studying willpower found that research participants who were able to stick with an exercise program over a 2-month period allowed participants to show more self-control in other areas, such as smoking and drinking, eating healthier food, monitoring their spending more carefully and improving their study habits. The conclusion was that regularly exercising willpower with physical exercise led to stronger willpower in other areas of their lives. The findings that we have discussed regarding willpower depletion and its tie to glucose levels also suggests that eating regularly to maintain blood sugar levels in the brain may help refuel rundown willpower stores. This suggests, as many experts on dieting recommend, that dieters who aim to maintain willpower and cut calories should eat frequent small meals, rather than skipping meals. And last of all, the research on willpower depletion studies suggests that making a long list of New Year’s resolutions is not a good approach. Focusing on one goal at a time may be best. Once a good habit is in place, you no longer need to draw on your willpower to maintain the behavior. This gives you the opportunity to move on to the second goal on your list. Healthy habits can thus be established, become routine and will not require as much difficult decision-making. For more information on willpower, go to the American Psychological Association's website and look for the publication by Kirsten Weir, “What You Need to Know about Willpower, the Psychological Science of Self-control.” www.apahelpcenter.org Ron Breazeale, Ph.D. Author, Duct Tape Isn’t Enough www.reachinghome.com

In the face of Adversity: Poverty, Financial Decision-Making and Willpower

This is America. We’re all supposed to be able to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, right? Even if they don’t have any boots. Many in this country believe that the poor are poor because they lack the will to change their situation. So what role does willpower play in poverty and financial decision-making in general? Recent research on willpower depletion and impulse buying has suggested that poor financial decision-making may have much to do with willpower depletion. In one study, those who had previously exerted self-control in a lab exercise reported experiencing more temptation to buy and did purchase a larger number of items and spent a greater amount of money than participants who hadn’t performed the willpower draining task. Another study done by Princeton University doctoral candidate Dean Spears offered participants an opportunity to purchase a popular brand of body soap at a significantly discounted price. The soap was a good deal, but it represented a very difficult financial choice for individuals living in poverty. Before and after the soap was offered, the participants were asked to squeeze an exercise hand grip as a test of self-control strength. In his study, richer participants squeezed the hand grip for about the same length of time before and after the soap purchasing opportunity. The poor participants squeezed for a significantly shorter duration the second time around. He concluded that their willpower had been run down by their difficult decision-making. Spears in another study with a cross-section of American shoppers supported these findings. These findings suggest that it is not that poor people have less willpower than the rich, but that for people living in poverty every decision, even ones that most of us would assume are not difficult ones, such as buying a personal care product such as soap, requires the use of self-control and dips into what many researchers believe is a limited willpower pool, not just for the poor, but for everyone. More about this in the next blog. For more information on willpower and the studies that were discussed in this blog, go to the American Psychological Association. “What You Need to Know about Willpower, the Psychological Science of Self-control,” written by Kirsten Weir, www.apahelpcenter.org. Ron Breazeale, Ph.D. Author, Duct Tape Isn’t Enough www.reachinghome.com

Willpower

The lack of willpower is frequently cited as the number one reason why people do not follow through with making major changes in their live such as quitting smoking, losing weight, and giving up other addictions. The results from the recent American Psychological Association's annual Stress in America Survey reflect clearly this attitude among respondents. Twenty-seven percent of those surveyed reported that lack of willpower was the most significant barrier for them for making changes in their life. But the majority of respondents indicated that they believed that willpower was something that they could learn. So what is this elusive thing called willpower?
In recent years, scientists -- many of them psychologists -- have gotten closer to answering this question. Some of the results of their work were recently summarized in the publication by the American Psychological Association entitled, "What You Need To Know About Willpower, The Psychological Science Of Self-Control."
Willpower appears to be an ability that allows an individual to "resist short-term temptations in order to meet long-term goals." This ability to exercise self- discipline has been found to be more important than intelligence in predicting academic success. A recent study conducted in New Zealand found that self-control in childhood was predictive of physical and mental health and financial security in
adulthood. The researchers found that these patterns held even when the researchers control for the children's socioeconomic status, home life and general intelligence.
Willpower undoubtedly has much to do with being able to prevent adverse events in your life, e.g., a heart attack, as well as being able to face and deal with them when they do occur. For that reason, we will be exploring what has been learned about willpower from this and other research.

America's Second Half

The Chrysler Super Bowl commercial featuring Clint Eastwood has certainly generated considerable discussion. Unfortunately, most of it has been about whether Eastwood and the commercial were a promo for Obama and his administration. Eastwood, who according to his own report has always voted for Republican candidates for president, agreed to do the commercial, I would assume, not because he was concerned that Obama wouldn't be reelected, but because of the polarization in this country and the failure of the American people to work together as a team. As I see it, the commercial was about resilience, the ability to manage adversity, to bounce back, about the American people being able to work together in a cooperative way, as a team, in creating solutions to our economic and social problems.

The commercial was a realistic portrayal of the challenges that we are facing and a comparison of the challenges to the challenges that one city, Detroit, faced a few years ago. The key is attitude. The problems that we are confronting can be solved. They have been solved in the past. They are not permanent and do not have to be pervasive. They do not have to destroy us. Wasting our time pointing the finger of blame at each other is not going to help us move ahead. Working together as a team and focusing on what our strengths are and what we have accomplished in the past will move us forward. We are all in this together. Our fates are intertwined. It is time we started behaving in ways that reflect this reality.

Holiday Money and Time

Americans often report money as a significant source of stress in their lives, as well as a lack of personal time. The holiday season can increase both financial stress and time pressure. But there are some steps that you can take to help manage these stressors. Happy holidays involve developing a set of realistic goals for the season that includes time for relaxation and for low-key celebration with good friends and family.
The American Psychological Association suggests a number of simple strategies:
Set realistic expectations. Start by creating a realistic budget and remind your children that the holidays aren't about expensive gifts. No celebration will be perfect. Be flexible.
Take time for yourself. If you take care of yourself, you will be better able to care for others in your life. Try to get exercise during the holidays. Take a long walk. Enjoy the holiday music. Enjoy your favorite foods, but in moderation.
Volunteer. With the recession, many charitable organizations face new challenges. Find a local charity, such as a soup kitchen or a shelter, and organize your family to volunteer together. Helping others can be a source of resilience for you and for them.
Prioritize and remember what is really important. Material things can be a part of the holidays, but commercialism can overshadow the true sentiment of the holiday season. Remind yourself that your relationships with your family and friends are what really matters.
Seek support. Talk about the stress and the disappointments you may be feeling. If you're feeling extremely blue and talking with others isn't helping that much, consider talking with a professional such as a psychologist to help you develop coping strategies and better manage your stress.


For additional information on stress and lifestyle and behavior, visit the American Psychological Association website: www.apahelpcenter.org and read the blog www.yourmindyourbody.org

Being an Effective Communicator

In the last blog, we began to talk about communication skills. Communication is one of the basic elements in resilience. Effective communication is one of the keys to building resilience and maintaining balance in your life. If we do not communicate clearly and directly with others, we will not understand and we will not be understood. If people are to talk with you and share information, especially if they are to say things that may be difficult to say or for you to hear, they need to know that they are connecting with you. They need encouragement. If you meet their attempts to communicate with silence, or if you assume the attitude of interrogator, you will not put other people at ease and you will not encourage them to tell you what you need to know.
To be effective in understanding another's perspective and helping them through a difficult time, you need to do things which show interest and genuine concern. In the last blog, we discussed four of these: Using neutral expressions, such as "I see," "Go on," "I understand," etc., nodding your head or smiling, echoing back or simply rephrasing what the person has said and asking good questions of people, questions that are open-ended and that encourage people to talk.
Here are two more ways of encouraging people to talk and improving your effectiveness as a communicator:
Get down to details. If, for example, on a medical crisis you are trying to find out what is happening, be specific. One of the major blocks to communicating in a crisis is the inability of people to describe exactly what was said or done by another person. Being able to accurately describe what happened is often essential to being able to understand a very tense and complex situation.
Being specific requires that you focus on observable actions of others without making value judgments or interpretations of what they meant. As a society, we love to talk in generalities. We often accuse people of behaving in a certain way because of a motive or a value that we believe is hidden behind their behavior. It can be important to look at people's motives, but at this point in the process, that is not your goal. Your goal is to try to understand what is happening and what people did and said.
Reflect back to others what they are saying. This is a technique frequently used by counselors. It is a very effective way of helping people hear themselves and understand what they are saying. Very often, people need to say things out loud, and they need to hear other people's reactions.
When you reflect back what a person is saying, you are not simply trying to say the same thing with different words. It is not a slick use of language that you are trying to achieve. You say back to the person what his or her statement meant to you. This gives the person you are talking with an opportunity to hear themselves, to hear your impressions of what they are saying and to correct you if the impression that they are giving is not accurate. It is also another way of letting people know that you care about what they are saying and that they matter to you.
Here is an example. Your friend may make a general statement that you respond to with a specific statement. For example, she may say, "I can't eat anything I like since I was diagnosed with diabetes." And you may respond by saying, "You like certain vegetables? You mean you can't even eat those now?" Sometimes your specific statement may be humorous and may encourage your friend to look more realistically at the situation that she is confronting and to not exaggerate or generalize.
The reverse may also be true. Your friend may list the things that she hates about her new diet, and you may respond by making a general statement, like, "It sounds like there's not much on your diet that you really like."
What your friend is saying may also bring to mind an example that you believe reflects what she is trying to say. For example, your friend is saying that she has been hesitant to go out to restaurants since she was diagnosed with diabetes. You recall that she turned down an invitation from you and your family to try a new restaurant that had just opened. You may want to mention this as an example.

Can We Change Our Thinking?

In my work as a clinical psychologist, I frequently see people who are convinced that they cannot change their thinking. Indeed, such change involves hard work. We have all developed patterns of thinking that have reached the level of habit. It is almost automatic. Unfortunately, many of these ways of thinking are traps.
They are traps in the sense that they often do not lead us to a solution to the problem that we are confronting. Instead, they encourage us to avoid situations, to give up before we need to and to apply simplistic solutions to complicated problems. From a pragmatic point of view, they do not work.
The first step in changing thinking patterns is to recognize the ones that we have, and especially to focus on the ones that we have that don't work. We have discussed in some detail in a previous blog "Catastrophic Thinking," the tendency to assume the worst and spend much of our time thinking and planning about how we are going to deal with the terrible events that we are quite sure are going to befall us before any of them even occur. Catastrophic thinking is defined simply as ruminating about irrational worst-case outcomes. Needless to say, it can increase anxiety and prevent people from taking action in a situation where action is required. This can be especially true in a crisis situation.
Catastrophic thinking, like other thinking traps, needs to be disputed. In order to do this, you must first identify the thinking for what it is.
Here are three other patterns of faulty thinking:
Confirmation bias. This involves accepting only information and data that support your current beliefs and values. This is the classic "don't bother me with the facts." You don't have to look very far to find this type of thinking rampant in our society. Just look at some of the debates that have occurred over the last few years regarding global warming and evolution.
A second faulty pattern of thinking that can be a thinking trap is "all or none" thinking in which events are seen as either black or white. There is no gray. No flexibility. Indeed, these patterns of thinking encourage rigidity and not resilience.
A third pattern is over-generalization. This is a tendency to see a single temporary event as a general permanent state of affairs. Eric Byrne years ago talked about this as one of the classic dirty-fighting tactics that couples use in an argument. They often accuse each other of "never" or "always" when that simply is not an accurate description of what has occurred. We all know that no one can be that consistent. Like other thinking traps, they do not work very well. In an argument with someone, they simply are a way of putting yourself one-up and the other person one-down. What is the outcome? The other person simply gets angry or hurt and tries to rebalance the contest, which is what it has turned into by now, by saying something equally outrageous.
A faulty thinking pattern, like any old habit, does not die easily. A first step in changing it is to recognize it for what it is and to commit ourselves to try very hard not to make use of it. This may be especially difficult when we are feeling angry or upset. It is at these times that our strong feelings may lead us back to these old patterns.