3 Proven Ways to Change a Bad Habit

Each year, we see January 1^st as a time for fresh starts - for tackling our bad habits head on and replacing them with new, healthier ones.  Maybe you want to start exercising regularly, quit smoking, lose a few pounds, or remember to call your mother more often.   Now Spring is here, and many of us are no closer to changing our bad habits than we were three months ago.  But don’t give up yet!  No matter what it is you would like to do differently, these simple, scientifically-tested strategies will help you to finally make the real, lasting changes you’re looking for.

 

1. 1. Get Specific.  Very Specific.

One of the most common mistakes we make when trying to reach a goal is not being specific enough about what we want, and what we we’re going to do to make it happen.  We say things like “I want to lose some weight” – but how much exactly do you want to lose?  Studies show that it is much easier to stay motivated when we have a very specific end point in mind, and can know at any moment exactly how far we still have to go.

Next, make sure you think about the specific actions you’ll need to take to succeed.  Don’t just say “I’ll eat less.”  Less of what?  And how much less?   Don’t just say “I’ll save more money each month.”  Decide exactly what will you spend less on to make that happen.  The more detailed you make your plan, the more likely you are to actually stick to it.

1. 2. Embrace this Fact: It’s Going to Be Hard.

People will tell you that it is important to stay positive and be confident in order to reach any goal, and that’s perfectly true.  But there’s an important difference between believing you will succeed, and believing you will succeed easily. When you are tackling a difficult challenge, like losing weight or stopping smoking, you will be much better off if you accept the fact that it’s not going to be smooth sailing.

Studies show that people who are realistic about what it will take to succeed naturally plan more, put in more effort, and persist longer in pursuit of their goals.  They expect to have to work hard, so that’s exactly what they do.

For example, in one study, women in a weight loss program who believed that it would be hard to resist the temptation of snack foods lost 24 pounds more than women who believed they could easily ignore the allure of doughnuts and potato chips.  Because they accepted that it would be hard, they avoided being anywhere near tempting foods, and were much more successful because of it.

1. 3. Willpower is Like a Muscle.  Plan What You’ll Do When It Gets Tired.

Research shows that your capacity for self-control is very much like the muscles in your body - it can grow stronger with regular exercise.  But just as well-developed biceps sometimes get tired and jelly-like after too much use, coping with the daily stresses of career and family can exhaust your supply of willpower.  When you tax it too much at once, or for too long, the well of self-control strength runs dry.   It is in these moments that the doughnut wins.

If you’ve spent all your self-control handling other challenges, you will not have much left at the end of the day for resisting bad habits.  So it’s important to think about when you are most likely to feel drained and vulnerable, and make a plan to keep yourself out of harm’s way.  Be prepared in advance with an alternate activity or a low-calorie snack, whichever applies.

 

You Won’t Stick To Your Diet - Unless You Know These 3 Facts About Willpower

Most of our New Year’s resolutions have one thing in common: resisting temptation.  Trying to ignore the powerful allure of the forbidden cigarette, doughnut, or latest budget-blowing buying impulse requires willpower.  You might expect very successful people, who presumably have boatloads of willpower, to be particularly good at not giving in.  But if anything, they seem to be even more susceptible to temptation than the rest of us.   Quick – name a famous or powerful person that doesn’t have a well-known weakness for something.   I’ll wait.

Having the willpower to govern a country, yet lacking the willpower to resist cigarettes or french fries may seem like a contradiction, but it actually isn’t, according to research on the nature of self-control.  So if you want this to be the year that you finally stop smoking, slim down, or stick to your budget, it’s a good idea to start by understanding how willpower really works.

Your capacity for self-control is not unlike the muscles in your body.   Like biceps or triceps, willpower can vary in its strength, not only from person to person, but from moment to moment. Just as well-developed biceps sometimes get tired and jelly-like after a strenuous workout, so too does your willpower “muscle.”

Even everyday actions like decision-making or trying to make a good impression can sap this valuable resource, as can coping with the stresses of your career and family.  When you tax it too much at once, or for too long, the well of self-control strength runs dry.   It is in these moments that the doughnut wins.

So the first thing you are going to want to do, if you are serious about resisting temptation, is make peace with the fact that your willpower is limited.  If you’ve spent all your self-control handling stresses at work, you will not have much left at the end of the day for sticking to your resolutions.  Think about when you are most likely to feel drained and vulnerable, and make a plan to keep yourself out of harm’s way.  Be prepared with an alternate activity or a low-calorie snack, whichever applies.

Also, don’t try to pursue two goals at once that each require a lot of self-control if you can help it.  This is really just asking for trouble. For example, studies show that people who try to quit smoking while dieting, in order to avoid the temporary weight gain that often accompanies smoking cessation, are more likely to fail at both enterprises than people who tackle them one at a time.

The good news is, willpower depletion is only temporary.  Give your muscle time to bounce back, and you’ll be back in fighting form and ready to say “no” to any doughnuts that come your way.  When rest is not an option, recent research shows that you can actually speed up your self-control recovery, or give it a boost when reserves are low, simply by thinking about people you know who have lot of self-control.   (Thinking about my impossibly self-possessed mother does wonders for me when I’m about to fall off the no-cheesecake wagon.)

Or, you can try giving yourself a pick-me-up.  I don’t mean a cocktail – I mean something that puts you in a good mood.  (Again, not a cocktail – it may be mood-enhancing, but alcohol is definitely not willpower-enhancing).    Anything that lifts your spirits should also help restore your self-control strength when you’re looking for a quick fix.

The other way in which willpower is like a muscle (and the really great news for those of us trying to lose a few pounds) is that it can be made stronger over time, if you give it regular workouts.  Recent studies show that daily activities such as exercising, keeping track of your finances or what you are eating – or even just remembering to sit up straight every time you think of it – can strengthen your capacity for self-control.  For example, in one study, people who were given free gym memberships and stuck to a daily exercise program for two months not only got physically healthier, but also smoked fewer cigarettes, drank less alcohol, and ate less junk food.  They were better able to control their tempers, and less likely to spend money impulsively.  They didn’t leave their dishes in the sink, didn’t put things off until later, and missed fewer appointments. In fact, every aspect of their lives that required the use of willpower improved dramatically.

So if you want to build more willpower, start by picking an activity (or avoiding one) that fits with your life and your goals – anything that requires you to override an impulse or desire again and again, and add this activity to your daily routine.  It will be hard in the beginning, but it will get easier over time if you hang in there, because your capacity for self-control will grow.

Armed with an understanding of how willpower works, and how you can get your hands on some more of it, there’s no reason why this can’t be the year that you cross those troublesome resolutions off your list for good.

(For more on tips on building willpower and resisting temptation, check out my new book Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals)

Five Ways to Increase Your Productivity

From HRM Today

You just have too much on you plate.  Chances are, your employees do as well.  You suspect that you could all be making better use of your time, completing more projects and achieving more goals.  You want to be more productive, and to help your team be more productive, but you aren’t sure where to start.

You are far from alone in your confusion. Even the most successful, highly accomplished people have difficulty pinpointing why they are so productive.  The intuitive answer – that you are born predisposed to having the intelligence, creativity, and willpower to get the job done – is really just one small piece of the puzzle.  In fact, decades of research on achievement suggests that successful people reach more of their goals not simply because of who they are, but more often because of what they do.   Here are five scientifically-tested strategies that successful people use, proven to help you reach your goals and make the most of your time.

 

#1   Get Specific. When setting a goal, try to be as specific as possible.  “Meet with every member of my team once a week” is a better goal than “meet more often with my team,” because it gives you a clear idea of what success looks like.  Knowing exactly what you want to achieve keeps you motivated until you get there.  Also, think about the specific actions that need to be taken to reach your goal.  Just promising you’ll “communicate more” is too vague – be clear and precise.  “At our meeting, I’ll ask about each project they are currently working on” leaves no room for doubt about what you need to do, and whether or not you’ve actually done it.

 

#2 Seize the Moment to Act on Your Goals. Given how busy most of us are, it’s not surprising that we often miss opportunities to act on a goal because we simply fail to notice those opportunities.  Did you really have no time to work on that assignment today?  No chance at any point to return that phone call?  Achieving your goal means grabbing hold of these opportunities before they slip through your fingers.



To seize the moment, decide when and where you will take each action you want to take, in advance.  Again, be as specific as possible (e.g., “When it’s 3pm today, I’ll stop whatever I’m doing and work on that report.”) Studies show that this kind of planning will help your brain to detect and seize the opportunity when it arises, increasing your productivity by roughly 300%.



 

#3  Know Exactly How Far You Have Left To Go. Achieving any goal also requires honest and regular monitoring of your progress - if no one else is looking over your shoulder, then you’ll need to monitor yourself.  If you don’t know how well you are doing, you can’t adjust your behavior or your strategies accordingly.  Check your progress frequently – weekly, or even daily, depending on the goal.

 

#4  Be a Realistic Optimist. Believing in your ability to succeed is enormously helpful for creating and sustaining your motivation.  But whatever you do, don’t underestimate how difficult it will be to reach your goal or complete your project.  Studies show that thinking things will come to you easily and effortlessly leaves you unprepared for the journey ahead, and significantly increases the odds of failure.   Express confidence in your employees, while always being honest with them about the challenges they’ll face.

 

#5  Focus on Getting Better, Rather than Being Good. Believing you have the ability to reach your goals is important, but so is believing you can get the ability.   Many of us believe that our intelligence, our personality, and our physical aptitudes are fixed – that no matter what we do, we won’t improve.  As a result, we focus on goals that are all about proving ourselves, rather than developing and acquiring new skills.

Fortunately, decades of research suggest that the belief in fixed ability is completely wrong – abilities of all kinds are profoundly malleable. Embracing the fact that you can change will allow you to make better choices, and reach your fullest potential.  People whose goals are about getting better, rather than being good, take difficulty in stride, and appreciate the journey as much as the destination.   And telling your employees that you expect them to make a few mistakes as they learn is, ironically, the surest way to elicit their very best performance.

 

Want to Double or Triple Your Own Productivity? Here's How.

From my Fast Company blog:

Very few of us are as productive as we could be. We want to be focused with laser-like precision on critical tasks and make the best, most efficient use of our time.  Instead, we get distracted by coworkers, lost in our Inboxes, and too absorbed by unimportant aspects of a single project when we’d be better off turning our attention to other things.

Wanting to be more productive isn’t enough to actually make you more productive.  You need to find a way to deal effectively with the distractions, the interruptions, and the fact that there is just way too much on your plate.   Fortunately, there is a very simple strategy that has been proven to do the trick.

If you’ve already read my book Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals, then know that I am a big fan of planning.  If-then planning, in particular, is a really powerful way to help you achieve any goal.  Well over 100 studies, on everything from diet and exercise to negotiation and time management, have shown that deciding in advance when and where you will take specific actions to reach your goal (e.g., “If it is 4pm, then I will return any phone calls I should return today”) can double or triple your chances for success.  Making if-then plans to tackle your current projects, or reach your 2011 goals, is probably the most effective single thing you can do to ensure your success.

If-then plans take the form:

If X happens, then I will do Y.

For example:

If I haven’t written the report before lunch, then I will make it my top priority when I return.

If I am getting too distracted by colleagues, then I will stick to a 5 minute chat limit and head back to work.

If it is 2pm, then I will spend an hour reading and responding to important emails.

How effective are these plans? One study looked at people who had the goal of becoming regular exercisers.  Half the participants were asked to plan where and when they would exercise each week (e.g., “If it is Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, then I will hit the gym for an hour before work.”) The results were dramatic:  months later, 91% of if-then planners were still exercising regularly, compared to only 39% of non-planners!

A recent review of results from 94 studies that used the if-then technique found significantly higher success rates for just about every goal you can think of, including monthly breast self-examination, test preparation, using public transportation instead of driving, buying organic foods, being more helpful to others, not drinking alcohol, not starting smoking, losing weight, recycling, negotiating fairly, avoiding stereotypic and prejudicial thoughts, and better time management.

Why are these plans so effective?  Because they are written in the language of your brain – the language of contingencies. Human beings are particularly good at encoding and remembering information in “If X, then Y” terms, and using these contingencies to guide our behavior, often below our awareness.

Once you’ve formulated your if-then plan, your unconscious brain will start scanning the environment, searching for the situation in the “if” part of your plan.  This enables you to seize the critical moment (“Oh, it’s 4pm!  I’d better return those calls”), even when you are busy doing other things.

Since you’ve already decided exactly what you need to do, you can execute the plan without having to consciously think about it or waste time deliberating what you should do next.  (Sometimes this is conscious, and you actually realize you are following through on your plan.  The point is it doesn’t have to be conscious, which means your plans can get carried out when you are preoccupied with other things, and that is incredibly useful.)

So if you are finding, day after day, that too many important tasks have gone unaccomplished, and you are looking for a way to introduce better habits of time management into your life, look no further:  try making a simple plan.  By starting each morning making if-thens to tackle the day’s challenges, you won’t actually be adding hours to your day, but it will certainly seem like you did.

Nine Things Successful People Do Differently

Cross-posted from the Harvard Business Review

Why have you been so successful in reaching some of your goals, but not others? If you aren't sure, you are far from alone in your confusion. It turns out that even brilliant, highly accomplished people are pretty lousy when it comes to understanding why they succeed or fail. The intuitive answer — that you are born predisposed to certain talents and lacking in others — is really just one small piece of the puzzle. In fact, decades of research on achievement suggests that successful people reach their goals not simply because of who they are, but more often because of what they do.

1. Get specific. When you set yourself a goal, try to be as specific as possible. "Lose 5 pounds" is a better goal than "lose some weight," because it gives you a clear idea of what success looks like. Knowing exactly what you want to achieve keeps you motivated until you get there. Also, think about the specific actions that need to be taken to reach your goal. Just promising you'll "eat less" or "sleep more" is too vague — be clear and precise. "I'll be in bed by 10pm on weeknights" leaves no room for doubt about what you need to do, and whether or not you've actually done it.

2. Seize the moment to act on your goals. Given how busy most of us are, and how many goals we are juggling at once, it's not surprising that we routinely miss opportunities to act on a goal because we simply fail to notice them. Did you really have no time to work out today? No chance at any point to return that phone call? Achieving your goal means grabbing hold of these opportunities before they slip through your fingers.

To seize the moment, decide when and where you will take each action you want to take, in advance. Again, be as specific as possible (e.g., "If it's Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, I'll work out for 30 minutes before work.") Studies show that this kind of planning will help your brain to detect and seize the opportunity when it arises, increasing your chances of success by roughly 300%.

3. Know exactly how far you have left to go. Achieving any goal also requires honest and regular monitoring of your progress — if not by others, then by you yourself. If you don't know how well you are doing, you can't adjust your behavior or your strategies accordingly. Check your progress frequently — weekly, or even daily, depending on the goal.

4. Be a realistic optimist. When you are setting a goal, by all means engage in lots of positive thinking about how likely you are to achieve it. Believing in your ability to succeed is enormously helpful for creating and sustaining your motivation. But whatever you do, don't underestimate how difficult it will be to reach your goal. Most goals worth achieving require time, planning, effort, and persistence. Studies show that thinking things will come to you easily and effortlessly leaves you ill-prepared for the journey ahead, and significantly increases the odds of failure.

5. Focus on getting better, rather than being good. Believing you have the ability to reach your goals is important, but so is believing you can get the ability. Many of us believe that our intelligence, our personality, and our physical aptitudes are fixed — that no matter what we do, we won't improve. As a result, we focus on goals that are all about proving ourselves, rather than developing and acquiring new skills.

Fortunately, decades of research suggest that the belief in fixed ability is completely wrong — abilities of all kinds are profoundly malleable. Embracing the fact that you can change will allow you to make better choices, and reach your fullest potential. People whose goals are about getting better, rather than being good, take difficulty in stride, and appreciate the journey as much as the destination.

6. Have grit. Grit is a willingness to commit to long-term goals, and to persist in the face of difficulty. Studies show that gritty people obtain more education in their lifetime, and earn higher college GPAs. Grit predicts which cadets will stick out their first grueling year at West Point. In fact, grit even predicts which round contestants will make it to at the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

The good news is, if you aren't particularly gritty now, there is something you can do about it. People who lack grit more often than not believe that they just don't have the innate abilities successful people have. If that describes your own thinking .... well, there's no way to put this nicely: you are wrong. As I mentioned earlier, effort, planning, persistence, and good strategies are what it really takes to succeed. Embracing this knowledge will not only help you see yourself and your goals more accurately, but also do wonders for your grit.

7. Build your willpower muscle. Your self-control "muscle" is just like the other muscles in your body — when it doesn't get much exercise, it becomes weaker over time. But when you give it regular workouts by putting it to good use, it will grow stronger and stronger, and better able to help you successfully reach your goals.

To build willpower, take on a challenge that requires you to do something you'd honestly rather not do. Give up high-fat snacks, do 100 sit-ups a day, stand up straight when you catch yourself slouching, try to learn a new skill. When you find yourself wanting to give in, give up, or just not bother — don't. Start with just one activity, and make a plan for how you will deal with troubles when they occur ("If I have a craving for a snack, I will eat one piece of fresh or three pieces of dried fruit.") It will be hard in the beginning, but it will get easier, and that's the whole point. As your strength grows, you can take on more challenges and step-up your self-control workout.

8. Don't tempt fate. No matter how strong your willpower muscle becomes, it's important to always respect the fact that it is limited, and if you overtax it you will temporarily run out of steam. Don't try to take on two challenging tasks at once, if you can help it (like quitting smoking and dieting at the same time). And don't put yourself in harm's way — many people are overly-confident in their ability to resist temptation, and as a result they put themselves in situations where temptations abound. Successful people know not to make reaching a goal harder than it already is.

9. Focus on what you will do, not what you won't do. Do you want to successfully lose weight, quit smoking, or put a lid on your bad temper? Then plan how you will replace bad habits with good ones, rather than focusing only on the bad habits themselves. Research on thought suppression (e.g., "Don't think about white bears!") has shown that trying to avoid a thought makes it even more active in your mind. The same holds true when it comes to behavior — by trying not to engage in a bad habit, our habits get strengthened rather than broken.

If you want change your ways, ask yourself, What will I do instead? For example, if you are trying to gain control of your temper and stop flying off the handle, you might make a plan like "If I am starting to feel angry, then I will take three deep breaths to calm down." By using deep breathing as a replacement for giving in to your anger, your bad habit will get worn away over time until it disappears completely.

It is my hope that, after reading about the nine things successful people do differently, you have gained some insight into all the things you have been doing right all along. Even more important, I hope are able to identify the mistakes that have derailed you, and use that knowledge to your advantage from now on. Remember, you don't need to become a different person to become a more successful one. It's never what you are, but what you do.

A Simple Fix for Miscommunication Part 2: Putting It Into Practice

(From my Fast Company Blog)

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post on miscommunication in the workplace, and how so much of it is caused by the fact that people routinely fail to realize how little they are actually communicating. We think we’ve said a lot more than we actually have.  As a result, our colleagues are left guessing as to what we meant, or what we want from them.  All too often, they guess wrong.

Judging by the popularity of the post, Fast Company readers can relate.  You know how frustrating it is to be on the receiving end of communication that is confusing or vague.  But most of us have no idea that we are guilty of the same crime.  It’s easy to see why – after all, we know what we mean.  Unless we are confronted directly about how poorly we are communicating (something people are generally loathe to do, for a number of reasons), how are we to know if we’ve said enough?

I received a number of emails asking how to put the insight gained from the last post into practice on a daily basis.  Here are three strategies you can use to make sure that you are saying everything that needs to be said.

1)    Take a few moments before communicating to identify the key points you need to get across. Write them down if you think you might forget something when you are actually conversing (this is very common).  If you think any of your key points “go without saying,” you are probably wrong.

2)    Create a process for assessing understanding.  Everyone on your team needs to participate – don’t single anyone out.  When you communicate something to a team member, end the encounter by asking them to summarize in their own words what they heard.

For this to work well without anyone feeling patronized, you need to make it clear that this is not a test – your concern is that you didn’t communicate effectively, not that they weren’t paying attention.  Also, it has to work both ways.  When your team member brings something to your attention, you should summarize what you heard as well.

Without direct feedback, there is no way to figure out if the message was fully received.  But people are reluctant to provide this feedback if there is no explicit process in place.  They worry about looking foolish, or irritating the communicator (particularly when the communicator is the boss.)

3)    Invite questions should they arise.  Sometimes, you don’t realize that you didn’t understand what a colleague asked you to do until you actually try to do it.  At this point, it can be embarrassing to go back and admit “I don’t get it.”  Take the embarrassment out of it by reminding your team members that you are always happy to answer any questions that may come up later.  When you are asked for clarification, provide it with enthusiasm.

I know that all of this seems like a lot of work, and it is.  But the extra time and effort you put in to improving your team’s ability to communicate will be well worth it.  You’ll spend far less time fixing mistakes and putting out fires.  Your team will be more motivated and productive.  And you’ll have confidence that everyone is finally, and permanently, on the same page.

Too Much Miscommunication At Work? A Simple Fix

From my Fast Company Blog:

“I’m sure he understood what I meant.”

“I’m sure it was obvious.”

“It goes without saying…”

The most common source of miscommunication in any workplace is a very simple one:  people routinely fail to realize how little they are actually communicating.  In other words, we think we’ve said a lot more than we actually have.

Psychologists call this the signal amplification bias (because we can’t resist slapping esoteric names on things – calling it the “I’m Sure It Was Obvious” Effect would be much more to the point.)

Studies show that the vast majority of us tend to believe that our behavior is much more expressive than it actually is, and this occurs across a wide variety of situations.

For instance, we often think people know when we’re lying – that our discomfort with deception is obvious - when they rarely have any idea.  We also assume that others understand our goals and what we’re trying to accomplish, when in fact they don’t have the first clue.  Most of what we say and do every day is open to multiple interpretations, and when other people try to figure out what we really mean, they are apt to guess wrong.

We are particularly likely to be “sure it was obvious” with people we know well or who we’ve worked with for a long time – we assume our thoughts and behaviors are transparent, when they are far from it.  So, ironically, the risk of miscommunication is greater with a close colleague than a brand-new coworker.

When we assume that other people know what we’re thinking, and what we are expecting of them, we do them a real disservice.    Assuming that we’ve been clear about what we wanted, we blame them when things don’t go as planned.

The next time you catch yourself thinking “I didn’t expressly say that to Bob, but it should be obvious…” STOP.  Nothing is ever obvious unless you made it obvious by spelling it out.

Remove the phrase “It goes without saying” from your mental lexicon, because it is total rubbish.  If something is important, then it goes WITH saying.  Make a point of saying exactly what you mean, and asking for exactly what you want, and you will be pleasantly surprised by often you get it.

5 Easy Tips for Spending Less

Everyone knows that if you want to get your finances in order and start being smart about your financial future, you need to make a financial plan.  And there is lots of terrific advice out there from personal finance experts on what should go into that plan. But knowing how to stick to your plan, whatever it might be, is the really critical part of the puzzle, and it’s the part we pay the least attention to.  Understanding how to stick to a plan once you’ve made it isn’t a financial issue, it’s a motivational one.  Luckily, there are very effective strategies you can use to make sure you follow through on your good financial intentions.

Tip #1: Be very specific about what you want to achieve.  “Saving money each month” sounds like a good step, but how much money?  “Pay off credit card debt” is a great idea, but how quickly?  How much will you pay, and on which cards?  When the steps in our plans are vague, like “spend less here” or “save more there,” there is way too much wiggle room.  We find ourselves settling for very small changes in the right direction, when actually, people are much more motivated when working toward challenging goals.  Be specific, and set the bar high.

Tip #2: You need to make sure that your plan includes concrete actions you are going to take in order to reach your financial goals.  Turn “spend less money eating out” into  “I’ll bring lunch with me to work each day, and eat out no more than once a week.”  One of the most common reasons we fail to reach our goals and stick to our plans is that we don’t translate what we want to accomplish into real, everyday behavior.  “Cut down on my clothing expenses” needs to become “spend no more than $____ on clothes each month,” or you’ll never succeed in making real change.

Tips #3-5: Most of us are guilty of buying things we don’t really need.  If your finances are in a sorry state, you will definitely need to get a handle on your impulse buying, and fast.    Out-of-control spending is just another example of succumbing to temptation – for some of us it’s doughnuts or chocolates, for others it’s gadgets and designer shoes.   Tips #3-5 are simple strategies you can use to help you resist the temptation to spend.

Tip #3: Never, ever shop as a pick-me-up.  When you are tired, anxious, stressed, or depressed, your self-control will be at its weakest.  This is a perfect recipe for a bad decision.

Tip #4: When you are faced with the temptation to splurge, it can help if you stop and think about someone you know who has lots of self-control – someone who is financially responsible. Self-control is actually contagious, and studies show that just thinking about someone who has it can boost your own.

Tip #5: Finally, reward yourself for good behavior.  Everyone needs incentives.  When you have a fiscally responsible week, or month, treat yourself to something you want that won’t totally blow your budget.   For some of us, there just isn’t enough inherent satisfaction in being frugal to keep you motivated, so reward yourself with something that speaks to you.

The Simple Reason Why Some of Your Plans Work, and Others Backfire

Regular readers of my blog, and of my new book SUCCEED, know that I am a big fan of planning.  If-then planning, in particular, is a really powerful way to help you achieve any goal.  Well over 100 studies, on everything from diet and exercise to negotiation and time management, have shown that deciding in advance when and where you will take specific steps to reach your goal (e.g., “If I am hungry and want a snack, then I will choose a healthy option like fruit or veggies,”) can double or triple your chances for success.  Making an if-then plan to stick to your New Year’s resolutions, or reach your 2011 goals, is probably the most effective single thing you can do to ensure your success.

But once you’ve decided to make an if-then plan, the next thing you need to do is figure out what goes in it.   According to new research, you need to be very careful about what goes in your plan, because one particular type of if-then plan can backfire – leaving you doing more of whatever you were trying to avoid doing in the first place.

Researchers from Utrecht University in the Netherlands looked at three types of if-then plans.  Replacement plans do just what the name suggests – replace a bad habit with a good one.  If you are trying to do a better job controlling your temper and stop yourself from flying off the handle, you might create an if-then replacement plan like “If I am starting to feel angry, then I will take three deep breaths to calm down.”   By using deep breathing as a replacement for giving in to your anger, your bad habit gets worn away over time until it disappears completely.

Ignore if-then plans are focused on blocking out unwanted feelings – like cravings, performance anxiety, or self-doubts.  (“If I have the urge to smoke, then I will ignore it.”)  In this case, you are simply planning to tune out unwanted impulses and thoughts, in order to diminish their effect on you.

Finally, negation if-then plans involve spelling out the actions you won’t be taking in the future. With these plans, if you have a habit you want to break, you simply plan not to engage in that habit.  (“If I am at the mall, then I won’t buy anything.”)  This is, in a sense, the most straightforward and head-on way of addressing a bad habit, and probably the one we most often end up using.

All three types of if-then plans were put to the test, with surprising and consistent results.  The researchers found that negation if-then plans were not only far less effective compared to other plans, but that they sometimes resulted in a rebound effect, leading people to do more of the forbidden behavior than before.

Just as research on thought suppression (e.g., “Don’t think about white bears!”) has shown that constantly monitoring for a thought makes it more active in your mind, negation if-then plans keep the focus on the suppressed behavior.  Ironically, by simply planning not to engage in a bad habit, the habit gets strengthened rather than broken.

Remember that when it comes to reaching your 2011 goals, you need to plan how you will replace bad habits with good ones, rather than focusing only on the bad habits themselves. Ask yourself, What will I do instead?   The answer to this simple question could mean the difference between another year of broken New Year’s resolutions and the real, lasting change you been looking for.

The Top 10 Psychology Studies of 2010

The end of 2010 fast approaches, and I’m thrilled to have been asked by the editors of Psychology Today to write about the Top 10 psychology studies of the year.  I’ve focused on studies that I personally feel stand out, not only as examples of great science, but even more importantly, as examples of how the science of psychology can improve our lives.  Each study has a clear “take home” message, offering the reader an insight or a simple strategy they can use to reach their goals, strengthen their relationships, make better decisions, or become happier.   If you extract the wisdom from these ten studies and apply them in your own life, 2011 just might be a very good year.



1)  How to Break Bad Habits

If you are trying to stop smoking, swearing, or chewing your nails, you have probably tried the strategy of distracting yourself – taking your mind off whatever it is you are trying not to do – to break the habit.  You may also have realized by now that it doesn’t work.  Distraction is a great way to resist a passing temptation, but it turns out to be a terrible way to break a habit that has really taken hold.

That’s because habit-behaviors happen automatically – often, without our awareness.  So thinking about George Clooney isn’t going to stop me from biting my nails if I don’t realize I’m doing it in the first place.

What you need to do instead is focus on stopping the behavior before it starts (or, as psychologists tend to put it, you need to “inhibit” your bad behavior).  According to research by Jeffrey Quinn and his colleagues, the most effective strategy for breaking a bad habit is vigilant monitoring – focusing your attention on the unwanted behavior to make sure you don’t engage in it.  In other words, thinking to yourself “Don’t do it!” and watching out for slipups – the very opposite of distraction.   If you stick with it, the use of this strategy can inhibit the behavior completely over time, and you can be free of your bad habit for good.

J. Quinn, A. Pascoe, W. Wood, & D. Neal (2010) Can’t control yourself? Monitor those bad habits.   Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36, 499-511.

2) How to Make Everything Seem Easier

Most of us have grown accustomed to the idea that our moods, and even our judgments, can be influenced by unrelated experiences of sight and sound – we feel happier on sunny days, more relaxed when listening to certain kinds of music, and more likely to lose our tempers when it’s hot and humid.  But very few of us have even considered the possibility that our tactile experience – the sensations associated with the things we touch, might have this same power.

New research by Joshua Ackerman, Christopher Nocera, and John Bargh shows that the weight, texture, and hardness of the things we touch are, in fact, unconsciously factored into our decisions about things that have nothing to do with what we are touching.

For instance, we associate smoothness and roughness with ease and difficulty, respectively, as in expressions like “smooth sailing,” and “rough road ahead.” In one study, people who completed a puzzle with pieces that had been covered in sandpaper later described an interaction between two other individuals as more difficult and awkward than those whose puzzles had been smooth. (Tip:  Never try to buy a car or negotiate a raise while wearing a wool sweater.  Consider satin underpants instead.  Everything seems easy in satin underpants.)

J. Ackerman, C. Nocera, and J. Bargh (2010)  Incidental haptic sensations influence social judgments and decisions.  Science, 328, 1712- 1715.

3)  How To Manage Your Time Better

Good time management starts with figuring out what tasks you need to accomplish, and how long each will take.  The problem is, human beings are generally pretty lousy when it comes to estimating the time they will need to complete any task.  Psychologists refer to this as the planning fallacy, and it has the very real potential to screw up our plans and keep us from reaching our goals.

New research by Mario Weick and Ana Guinote shows that, somewhat ironically, people in positions of power are particularly poor planners.  That’s because feeling powerful tends to focus us on getting what we want, ignoring the potential obstacles that stand in our way.   The future plans of powerful people often involve “best-case scenarios,” which lead to far shorter time estimates than more realistic plans that take into account what might go wrong.

The good news is, you can learn to more accurately predict how long something will take and become a better planner, if you stop and consider potential obstacles, along with two other factors:  your own past experiences (i.e., how long did it take last time?), and all the steps or subcomponents that make up the task  (i.e., factoring in the time you’ll need for each part.)

M. Weick & A. Guinote (2010) How long will it take? Power biases time predictions. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

4) How to Be Happier

Most of us tend to think that if we just had a bit more money we’d get more satisfaction out of life, but on the whole, this turns out not to be true.   So why doesn’t money make us happier?  New research by Jordi Quoidbach and colleagues suggests that the answer lies, at least in part, in how wealthier people lose touch with their ability to savor life’s pleasures.

Savoring is a way of increasing and prolonging our positive experiences.  Taking time to experience the subtle flavors in a piece of dark chocolate, imaging the fun you’ll have on an upcoming vacation (and leafing through your trip photos afterward), telling all your friends on Facebook about the hilarious movie you saw over the weekend – these are all acts of savoring, and they help us to squeeze every bit of joy out of the good things that happen to us.

Why, then, don’t wealthier people savor, if it feels so good?  It’s obviously not for a lack of things to savor.  The basic idea is that when you have the money to eat at fancy restaurants every night and buy designer clothes from chic boutiques, those experiences diminish the enjoyment you get out of the simpler, more everyday pleasures, like the smell of a steak sizzling on your backyard grill, or the bargain you got on the sweet little sundress from Target.

Create plans for how to inject more savoring into each day, and you will increase your happiness and well-being much more than (or even despite) your growing riches.  And if you’re riches aren’t actually growing, then savoring is still a great way to truly appreciate what you do have.

J. Quoidbach, E. Dunn, K. Petrides, & M. Mikolajczak (2010) Money giveth, money taketh away: The dual effect of wealth on happiness.  Psychological Science, 21, 759-763.



5) How to Have More Willpower

Do you have the willpower to get the job done, or have you found yourself giving in to temptations, distractions, and inaction when trying to reach your own goals?   If it’s the latter, you’re not alone.  But more importantly, you can do something about it.  New research by Mark Muraven shows that our capacity for self-control is surprisingly like a muscle that can be strengthened by regular exercise.

Do you have a sweet tooth?  Try giving up candy, even if weight-loss and cavity-prevention are not your goals.  Hate exerting yourself physically?  Go out and buy one of those handgrips you see the muscle men with at the gym – even if your goal is to pay your bills on time.  In one study, after two weeks of sweets-abstinence and handgripping, Muraven found that participants had significantly improved on a difficult concentration task that required lots of self-control.

Just by working your willpower muscle regularly, engaging in simple actions that require small amounts of self-control - like sitting up straight or making your bed each day – you can develop the self-control strength you’ll need to tackle all of your goals.

M. Muraven (2010) Building self-control strength: Practicing self-control leads to improved self-control performance.  Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46, 465-468.

6) How to Choose a Mate

What role does personality play in creating marital bliss? More specifically, is it your personality, your partner’s personality, or the similarity between the two that really matters when it comes to being happy in your marriage? A study of over 10,000 couples from three countries provides us with some answers.

Your own personality is in fact a powerful predictor of your marital satisfaction.  People who were more agreeable, conscientious, and emotionally stable reported being significantly happier with their spouse.  That spouse’s personality was also a reliable, though slightly less powerful, predictor of relationship satisfaction.  Keep these same traits – the “Big 3” for happiness in a marriage – in mind when you are seeking Mr. or Ms. Right.

Finally, there’s personality similarly - which, as it happens, doesn’t seem to matter at all. The extent to which married couples matched one another on the Big Five traits had no predictive power when it came to understanding why some couples are happy together and others not.   This is not to say that having similar goals or values isn’t important – just that having similar personalities doesn’t seem to be.

So if you are outgoing and your partner is shy, or if you are adventurous and your partner doesn’t really like to try new things, it doesn’t mean you can’t have a satisfying marriage.  Whether you are birds of a feather, or opposites that attracted, you are equally likely to live a long and happy life together.

Just try to be generally pleasant, responsible, and even-tempered, and find someone willing to do the same.

P. Dyrenforth, D. Kashy, M.B. Donnellan,  & R. Lucas  (2010) Predicting relationships and life satisfaction from personality in nationally representative samples from three countries: The relative importance of actor, partner, and similarity effects.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 99, 690-702.

7) How to Feel More Powerful

In the animal kingdom, alphas signal their dominance through body movement and posture.  Human beings are no different.  The most powerful guy in the room is usually the one whose physical movements are most expansive – legs apart, leaning forward, arms spread wide while he gestures.  He’s the CEO who isn’t afraid to swing his feet up onto the conference room table, hands behind his head and elbows jutting outward, confident in his power to spread himself out however he damn well pleases.

The nervous, powerless person holds himself very differently – he makes himself physically as small as possible: shoulders hunched, feet together, hands in his lap or arms wrapped protectively across his chest.  He’s the guy in the corner who is hoping he won’t be called on, and often is barely noticed.

We adopt these poses unconsciously, and they are perceived (also unconsciously) by others as indictors of our status.  But a new set of studies by Dana Carney, Amy Cuddy, and Andy Yap reveals that the relationship between power and posing works in both directions.  In other words, holding powerful poses can actually make you more powerful.

In their studies, posing in “high power” positions not only created psychological and behavioral changes typically associated with powerful people, it created physiological changes characteristic of the powerful as well.   High power posers felt more powerful, were more willing to take risks, and experienced significant increases in testosterone along with decreases in cortisol (the body’s chemical response to stress.)

If you want more power – not just the appearance of power, but the genuine feeling of power – then spread your limbs wide, stand up straight, and lean into the conversation.   Carry yourself like the guy in charge, and in a matter of minutes your body will start to feel it, and you will start to believe it.

D. Carney, A. Cuddy, and A. Yap (2010) Power posing: Brief nonverbal displays affect neuroendocrine levels and risk tolerance.  Psychological Science, 21, 1363-1368.

8) How To Tell If He Loves You

“If he really loved me, then he would…”

Everyone who’s ever been in a relationship has had thoughts like this one.  If he loved me he would bring me flowers, or compliment me more often, or remember my birthday, or remember to take out the damn garbage.    We expect feelings of love to translate directly into loving behaviors, and often judge the quality and intensity of our partner’s feelings through their more tangible expressions.  When it comes to love, actions speak louder than words, right?

Well, not necessarily.  According to new research by psychologists Lara Kammrath and Johanna Peetz, romantic feelings like love, intimacy, and commitment reliably lead to some loving behaviors, but not others. In their studies, love predicted spontaneous, in-the-moment acts of kindness and generosity, like saying “I love you,” offering a back rub, or surprising your partner with a gourmet dinner – the kinds of loving actions that don’t require much in the way of forethought, planning, or memory.

On the other hand, love does a lousy job of predicting the kinds of “loving” behaviors that are harder to perform, often because they have to be maintained over longer periods of time (e.g., remembering to do household chores without being asked, being nice to one’s in-laws) or because there is a delay between the thought and the action (remembering to buy your wife a gift for her birthday next week, keeping a promise call home during your conference in Las Vegas.). When it comes to the harder stuff, it’s how conscientious you are, rather than how much in love you are, that really matters.

So if you’re trying to get a sense of how your partner really feels about you, the smaller, spontaneous acts of love that occur without much forethought are a much  better indicator of the depth of his love than whether or not he remembers your birthday or to take out the trash.

L. Kammrath & J. Peetz (2010) The limits of love: Predicting immediate vs. sustained caring behaviors in close relationships.  Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

9) How to Make It Easier to Cut Your Losses

Sometimes, we don’t know when to throw in the towel.   As a project unfolds, it becomes clear that things aren’t working out as planned, that it will cost too much or take too long, or that someone else will beat you to the punch.  But instead of moving on to new opportunities, we continue to devote our time, energy, and money to doomed projects (or even doomed relationships), digging a deeper hole rather than trying to climb our way out of it.

Why?  The most likely culprit is our overwhelming aversion to sunk costs - the resources that we’ve put into an endeavor that we can’t get back out. We worry far too much about what we’ll lose if we just move on, and not nearly enough about the costs of not moving on  - more wasted time and effort, and more missed opportunities.

But thanks to recent research by Daniel Molden and Chin Ming Hui, there is a simple way to be sure you are making the best decisions when your endeavor goes awry:  focus on what you have to gain, rather than what you have to lose.

Psychologists call this adopting a promotion focus. When Molden and Hui had participants think about their goals in terms of potential gains, they became more comfortable with accepting the losses they had to incur along the way.  When they adopted a prevention focus, on the other hand, and thought about their goals in terms of what they could lose if they didn’t succeed, they were much more sensitive to sunk costs.

If you make a deliberate effort to refocus yourself prior to making your decision, reflecting on what you have to gain by cutting your losses now, you’ll find it much easier to make the right choice.

D. Molden & C. Hui (2010) Promoting de-escalation of commitment: A regulatory focus perspective on sunk costs.  Psychological Science.

10)  How to Fight With Your Spouse

Having a satisfying, healthy relationship with your partner doesn’t mean never fighting – it means learning to fight well. But what is the best way for two people to cope with their anger, frustration, and hurt, without undermining their mutual happiness?

Thankfully, recent research by James McNulty and Michelle Russell provides the answer.  The best way to deal with conflict in a marriage, it turns out, depends on how serious or severe the problem is.  Did your spouse drink too much at the party last night, or is he drinking too much every night?  Did she splurge a little too much on clothes last month, or are her spending habits edging you closer and closer to bankruptcy?  Did he invite his mother to dinner without discussing it with you first, or did he invite his mother to live with you without discussing it first?  Little problems and big problems require very different approaches if you want to have a lasting, happy marriage.

When it comes to minor problems, direct fighting strategies – like placing blame on your spouse for their actions or expressing your anger – results in a loss of marital satisfaction over time.   Flying off the handle when he forgets to pick up the dry cleaning yet again, or when she spends a little too much money on a pricey pair of shoes, is going to take its toll on your happiness in the long run.  You really are better off letting the small stuff go.

In response to major problems, these same direct fighting strategies predict increased marital satisfaction!   Expressing your feelings, blaming your partner and demanding that they change their ways will lead to greater happiness when the conflict in question is something significant – something that if left unresolved could ultimately tear your relationship apart.  Issues involving addiction, financial stability, infidelity, child-rearing, and whether or not you live with your mother-in-law need to be addressed, even if it gets a little ugly.  Couples who battle it out over serious issues do a better job of tackling, and eventually resolving those issues, than those who swept big problems under the carpet.

J. McNulty & V.M. Russell (2010) When "negative" behaviors are positive: A contextual analysis of the long-term effects of problem-solving behaviors on changes in relationship satisfaction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98, 587-604.

3 Tips for Avoiding Weight Gain Over the Holidays

The holidays are a difficult time for those of us who both enjoy eating and worry about our waistlines.  Chances are good that if you overindulged a bit at Thanksgiving, you are now looking ahead to the month of December with a wary eye – only too aware of the minefield of cookie platters, holiday parties, family dinners, and gift baskets that you will have to somehow navigate.

You know from experience that you cannot get through these trying times on willpower alone.  So here are three very simple and proven-effective motivational strategies for ending up in your current pant size on January 1^st.

Tip 1:  Acknowledge That You Probably Can’t Have Just One. According to the laws of physics, bodies in motion tend to stay in motion, unless something acts to stop them.  Well, the same thing can be said about human behavior, too - including eating.

Your actions have a kind of inertia – once you start doing something, it often takes more self-control to stop than it does to just avoid doing it in the first place.  And it gets harder to stop the longer the behavior goes on.  So it’s easier to be abstinent if you stop at the first kiss, rather than letting things get hot and heavy.  And it’s a lot easier to pass on the potato chips entirely, rather than just eat one or two.

Stopping before you start is an excellent strategy to keep your need for willpower to a minimum.  Consider cutting out all between-meal snacking over the holidays.  The fewer times you start eating each day, the less you’ll have to worry about stopping.

Tip 2:  Set VERY Specific Limits. Before you get anywhere near the cookie platter, the fruit cake, or the cheese plate, think about how much you can afford to eat without over-indulging.  Decide, in advance, exactly how much of any particular holiday treat you will allow yourself for dessert, or at the Christmas party.

The problem with most plans, including diet plans, is that they are not nearly specific enough.  We plan to “be good,” or “not eat too much,” but what does that mean, exactly?  When will I know if I’ve had too much?  When you are staring at a table overflowing with delicious snacks, you are not going to be a good judge of what “too much” is.

An effective plan is one that is made before you stare temptation in the face, and that allows no wiggle room.   Studies show that when people plan out exactly what they will do when temptation arises (e.g., I will have no more than 3 cookies and nothing else), are 2-3 times more likely to achieve their dietary goals.

Tip 3:  Savor.   Savoring is a way of increasing and prolonging our positive experiences.  Taking time to experience the subtle flavors in a piece of dark chocolate, the pungency of a full-flavored cheese, the buttery goodness of a Christmas cookie - these are all acts of savoring, and they help us to squeeze every bit of joy out of the good things that happen to us.

Avoid eating anything in one bite – you get all the calories, but only a fraction of the taste. Also, try not to eat while you are socializing.  When you are focused on conversation, odds are good that you will barely even register what you are putting in your mouth.

Eating slowly and mindfully, taking small bites instead of swallowing that bacon-wrapped scallop or stuffed mushroom whole, not only satisfies your hunger, but actually leaves you feeling happier.

And that, ideally, is what holiday feasting is all about.

What Makes You (and Me) Act Like a Jerk

Lessons from Good Boss, Bad Boss

I recently finished fellow PT blogger Robert Sutton’s excellent new book, Good Boss, Bad Boss.  In it, he describes not only what the best (and worst) bosses do, but why they do it, identifying the essential beliefs that form the foundation of effective (and ineffective) management.

It struck me again and again as I was reading that so much of the advice Sutton offers on how to be a good boss can also be applied to the universal challenges of being a good and happy person.   I think one of my favorite chapters, “Squelch Your Inner Bosshole,” is a perfect illustration of what I mean.

In it, Sutton points to the some of the forces that turn otherwise decent human beings into rotten bosses.  We would be wise to remember that these forces are often present in the lives of non-bosses as well – who among us hasn’t been a real jerk on occasion?  The good news is, if you can identify the triggers of your unpleasant behavior, and become aware of their influence on you, you too can effectively squelch your inner a**hole.

Here are some of the triggers of bad boss behavior Sutton highlights:

1.     “Power Poisoning.”

Sure, power sometimes corrupts.  But more often, it just turns us into jerks.  Studies show that when people are given power, they become less tuned in to other people’s feeling and needs, paying less attention to what others say and do.   With power, our language and behavior becomes more insulting and inappropriate, and we become more self-absorbed, focusing more on our own personal gain than what is best for the group.

It’s not just bosses who experience the nasty side effects of power.  Have you ever been in a relationship with someone who was just a bit too needy and insecure?  Were you surprised to find how cold, selfish, or downright cruel you became in response?  When friends or romantic partners give us all the power, when we find ourselves with too much “hand,” it can lead to pretty callous behavior.

2.     “Extreme Performance Pressure.”

Being under time pressure, or knowing that a lot is riding on what we’re doing, makes all of us less sensitive to the needs and feelings of others.   We’re so busy thinking about what could wrong, and worrying about our own performance, that it creates a kind of tunnel vision.    Feeling anxious makes you irritable – this is why you come home from work after a hard day and yell at your spouse, your kids, or your dog.

3.     “Sleep Deprivation, Heat, and Other Bodily Sources of Bad Moods.”

Sutton points out that a lack of sleep, or uncomfortable temperatures, can disrupt our ability to make good, rational decisions, because tiredness and heat make us irritable and impatient.  Poor nutrition and illness can also leave you feeling unusually jerky.

(Interestingly, do you know what doesn’t predict mood?  Day of the week – people aren’t actually reliably happier on Friday and more depressed on Monday.  So if you’re acting like a jerk on a Monday, find something else to blame.)

4.     “Nasty Role-Models” and “A**hole Infected Workplaces”

Throughout Good Boss, Bad Boss, Sutton emphasizes the enormous power of social influence.  We emulate the people around us, often unconsciously.  And as he writes, “emotions are remarkably contagious.”  Anxiety, cynicism, selfishness, and negativity rub off.  So if you are surrounded by cranky jerks, you just might begin to behave that way yourself without realizing it.

Sutton’s solution to the trigger problem is a good one  - make sure you have people in your life you can trust to tell you when you are acting like a jerk.  Give them explicit permission to do so, and make sure you really listen and react without defensiveness.

Then take a good hard look at how you’re acting and ask yourself if that’s really the person you want to be.    If not, start looking around for the trigger.  Is power going to your head?  Are you under too much pressure?  Are you hanging around too many jerks?

If you’re not happy with your own behavior, renew your commitment to noticing and respecting the needs and feelings of the other people in your life.  And if you need one, take a nap.

Stop Being So Defensive!

A simple way to learn to take criticism gracefully

I rarely admit this (and frankly, I wonder why I’m doing it now), but I am a very defensive person.  I can be quick to feel challenged or threatened by perceived criticism.  When that happens, my typical responses range from somewhat testy to downright hostile.  It’s not an attractive quality.  I’m not proud.

I have wanted to do something about it for a long time, but I figured that in order to stop being so defensive, I’d have to do something drastic, like stop caring about what other people think.  That sounds great, but it’s an awfully tall order for most of us, and not a realistic option for me.

Thanks to a recent set of studies of defensiveness, I now have a far more practical strategy for dealing with my defensive tendencies.   When I suspect criticism may be coming my way (for instance, when I send my editor a new chapter for feedback, or when my husband comes home from work to find that I’ve redecorated the bedroom), I take a moment to reflect on something I really like about myself.

I remind myself that I am exceptionally well-organized, that I am a sympathetic listener, that I make a killer baguette, or that I’m fun to have around at parties.  This is called self-affirmation, and it can take many forms. Usually, we self-affirm through thinking, talking, or writing about our most important values, skills or characteristics.  We do it when we reflect on our past successes, and the lessons we have learned.  And when we do, we provide a boost to our sense of self-esteem, and a buffer against any incoming threats.

It turns out that these simple reminders of our own self-worth and integrity significantly reduce our tendency to respond to negative feedback with defensiveness.   Instead, we are able to see what may be valuable in the criticism we receive, without feeling the need to prove ourselves right at all costs.

One important drawback to using this strategy, though, is that it is effective only when you self-affirm before you start responding to the criticism - in other words, before you start feeling and acting defensive.   If someone criticizes you and you start feeling hot under your collar, stopping to think about your own good qualities is unlikely to help calm you down.  The trick is to self-affirm before the feedback, and that isn’t always possible, especially when criticism comes as a surprise.

On the other hand, if you know someone who tends to get defensive, this is a great technique to use to make sure your criticism is well received.  Before you criticize, start out with an affirmation, as in “You really have an eye for color, and I like what you did with the furniture.  Though I’m not really crazy about the new bedspread.”  By starting with an acknowledgment of what you do like, you are far more likely to avoid getting anyone’s defenses up, and increase your chances of having a reasonable, hostility-free discussion.  Either way, though, you are probably stuck with the bedspread.

How You Are Sabotaging Your Self-Control

Why thought suppression is a bad way to deal with temptation.



Have you ever tried to lose weight by just not thinking about food?  How about trying to play it cool and stop yourself from calling (or emailing, or texting) your love interest by blocking out all thoughts about that person?  Ever try to quit smoking by trying not to think about smoking?  Did it work?  I’ll bet it didn’t.  And it’s really not your fault that it didn’t.

Thought suppression is a double-edged sword.  On the one hand, it is a very commonly used strategy – people often try to block out or put the lid on unwanted thoughts and feelings, in order to control their influence.  Dieters try to suppress thoughts of tempting snacks, alcoholics suppress their desire to drink, stressed-out workers suppress their feelings of anxiety, and smokers suppress the thought of cigarettes when trying to quit.

On the other hand, thought suppression is not only very, very difficult, but it works only very briefly, and has some very nasty unintended consequences.  Suppression has often been shown to increase the frequency of the unwanted thoughts you were trying to rid yourself of, once the period of active suppression is over.  Suppress thoughts of smoking, and the thoughts come rushing back with even greater force once you let your guard down.  But does this unintended consequence actually lead to more smoking?  Are you actually worse off in terms of quitting than when you started?

Yes, you are.  In a new study, undergrads who smoked at least a half-pack a day on average were asked to keep track of their smoking for several weeks.  For all of Week 2, some of the students were asked to try to suppress any and all thoughts about smoking.  Not surprisingly, they smoked significantly fewer cigarettes during Week 2 than non-suppressers.  But during Week 3, when these students were no longer required to suppress thoughts of smoking, they smoked significantly more cigarettes than non-suppressors!

While they were at it, the researchers who conducted this study looked at students’ stress levels across all three weeks.  Not surprisingly, suppressors reported a dramatic rise in stress during the week they were suppressing (while non-suppressors stress levels remained unchanged).  So not only does the thought-suppression strategy backfire, it feels terrible while you are doing it.

So how can we deal with unwanted thoughts more successfully, in ways that don’t end up actually diminishing our willpower?  I’ve written about this in previous posts, but here are two suggestions:

1. Don’t suppress, replace.   Decide in advance what you will think about when a thought about smoking, snacking, or hitting “redial” pops into your mind.  When you find yourself thinking about how yummy a candy bar would be right now, try replacing that thought with one that focuses on your health and weight-loss goals (e.g., “It feels better to fit into my skinny jeans than it does to wolf down chocolate-covered nougat.”)


2. Don’t suppress, plan.   Creating an if-then plan is an easy and effective way to deal with temptations.  You don’t need to block out the thoughts – what you really need is to learn how not to act on them.  By planning on exactly what you will do, in advance, when the tempting thought occurs, it becomes far easier to stick to your goals.  For instance, when thoughts about smoking occur, plan to chew gum, or step outside for several long deep breaths of fresh air.  Whatever you plan to do, it will disrupt the connection between the thought and giving in to the temptation, and over time, the thoughts will fade all on their own.

It’s almost never a good idea to put a lid on your thoughts and feelings.  It may feel like it’s working in the short term, but soon you’ll find yourself right back where you started – surrounded by candy wrappers, and wondering why he hasn’t returned your three dozen phone calls.

Get Busy and Get Happy

In defense of busywork

Busywork has a bad rep.   Keeping yourself (or someone else) busy doing meaningless or unnecessary tasks, simply for the sake of avoiding idleness, seems like a pointless waste of energy.  Only it turns out there is a point to it – recent research shows that keeping busy doing anything makes you a whole lot happier than you would have been doing nothing.   Just sitting around, bored and inert, is a recipe for misery.

But if that’s true, why then do we so often choose idleness?  Why do we do nothing, when we could almost always be doing something?  The study of human behavior is full of such paradoxes:  People are happier when they do X.  If you ask them, they’ll even tell you they prefer to do X.  Unfortunately, people often don’t actually do X – they do The Opposite of X.  And they have no idea why.

In this case, the answer seems to lie in our ability (or inability) to justify our actions.   We really do prefer to be busy than to just sit around doing nothing, and being busy does in fact make us much happier, but we just can’t bring ourselves to choose busyness over idleness without some sort of reason for the busyness.

Take for example a recent study, in which students were given the option of turning in a survey to get their candy reward in one of two places.  They could turn it in right next door, though they would have to wait outside the door for 15 minutes before turning it in, or they could turn it in at another location that involved a 15 minute round-trip walk.   The majority of students chose to sit and wait next door, rather than take an unnecessary walk.  They chose idleness over busywork (i.e., walking), despite the fact that the few who chose busywork reported being much happier when the 15 minutes were up.

But when the researchers introduced a justification for taking the long walk – that a different (though not actually better) candy would be offered as a reward for the walkers - the majority of students chose the busy option.  “I really prefer the candy you get after the walk,” they told themselves.  But really, what they preferred was doing something over doing nothing, and all they needed was a reason.   Any reason.

Two forces are usually at work whenever we do choose idleness.  First, we have an aversion to needlessly expending energy.   This aversion is probably built in to each of us as a part of our evolutionary inheritance.  Animals who waste the energy they need to find food and ward off predators are less likely to survive, so animals who spend their energy wisely have the survival advantage.

Second, human beings vastly prefer their actions to be meaningful.  We like the things we do to have reasons – so much so that often when we don’t really have a good reason for what we’ve done, we try to make one up.  We are loathe to undertake any action when we know there is no justification for it.

The good news is, now that you know that busyness is better for you and will make you happier than just sitting around, you will always have a reason to choose busyness. Get up and do something.  Anything.  Even if there really is no point to what you are doing, you will feel better for it.

Incidentally, thinking deeply or engaging in self-reflection counts as keeping busy, too.  You don’t need to be running around, - you just need to be engaged, either physically or mentally.    As Victor Hugo once wrote, “A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought.  There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.”  Keep those mental wheels turning if you don’t want to keep your feet moving.

How to Put An End to Our Emotional Eating

When I’m feeling bad – whether it’s anxious, depressed, or simply frustrated - I often find myself wanting to seek comfort in the arms of a pint of chocolate ice cream or a bag of Doritos.  I know I’m not alone.  Psychologists call this emotional eating, and it is thought to be one of the major contributors to obesity in our country.

Americans are stressed out, and seeking treatment for anxiety and depression in record numbers.  Experiencing all of those bad feelings each day leads us to consume more and more high-calorie junk food, to try to make ourselves feel just a little bit better (ignoring the fact that binging almost inevitably leaves you feeling even worse).

At least, that’s how most of us, including the psychologists, think emotional eating works.  Only we are wrong.

Feeling bad does NOT make you more likely to reach for comfort food.  It’s turns out that it’s how you deal with your bad feelings that determines whether or not you’ll be brushing the potato chip crumbs off your pants.

Recent research shows that experiencing anxiety, depression, or anger is only associated with emotional eating when we try to suppress our feelings – to control them by not expressing them, by keeping them to ourselves and trying to push them out of our minds.

Aside from being a really lousy strategy for dealing with emotions for a whole host of other reasons, suppression is really hard to do.  It relies heavily on, and often fully exhausts, your capacity for self-control.  This leaves you unprotected -  completely vulnerable to temptation.  And that is why we reach for “comfort” foods – they are the sweet and salty snacks that we normally have the self-control to resist.  But if you’re using up all of your willpower trying to suppress your fear or sadness, then when the junk food appears you are practically a sitting duck.

So, how can we deal with our feelings in ways that don’t leave us vulnerable to temptation?  You can engage in what psychologists call cognitive reappraisal, which is really just a fancy way of saying “thinking differently.”  Try following these steps:

1. Don’t hide from your feelings – take a moment to examine them.  In particular, focus on what’s causing them.  Why are you feeling so anxious, so frustrated, so down?


2. Next, try to think about the cause of your trouble in ways that diminish its impact:
   
   
   
   1. Be objective (Would other people react this way?  Am I over-reacting? Am I blaming myself when I shouldn’t?  Am I being too pessimistic?)
   
   
   2. Put it in perspective (In the scheme of things, is this really a big deal?  If things don’t work out this time, is it really the end of the world?)
   
   
   3. See the silver lining (What have you learned?  How will you take this knowledge with you and use it to grow and improve?)
   
   
   
   

Tackling your feelings head on, and thinking about them in ways that will actually help you to cope with the circumstances that caused them, may sound hard, but it actually uses less self-control than suppression.

New studies show that when people use this strategy to cope with their feelings, they don’t succumb to the call of the cookie.  And of course, they tend to feel better much more quickly.  So it’s not just a good way to stick to your diet – it’s a good way to become a happier person, too.

Just Don't Do It!

In my first year of graduate school, I got the opportunity to give my very first psychology lecture.  The professor who taught the course suggested that I videotape my performance, so I could see what I did well and what needed improvement.  When I finally sat down to watch the video, it was more than a little horrifying.  My “um”s and “uh”s outnumbered the actual words 2-to-1.  Even worse, I saw that I touched my nose over and over again while speaking, as though I were constantly monitoring my own sobriety.  Somewhere along the way I had unknowingly developed some very bad habits, and unless I wanted to be ruthlessly mocked for the rest of my teaching career, I was going to have to break them.

Habits are learned associations.  If you repeat the same behavior in the same situation over and over again, your mind makes a connection and a habit is born.  Light up a cigarette enough times in your favorite bar, and eventually just walking through the door will make you reach for your cigarette pack.  “Situations” can be emotional states as well.  Start using profane words to express your frustration, and pretty soon you’ll be cursing like a sailor every time you lose your temper.  My um-ing and nose-touching were nervous habits - responses to the stress I felt whenever I spoke to a large audience, that probably become habits somewhere in my adolescence (Why didn’t anybody back then tell me?)

Once a habit is formed, all you need is the situation or the cue, and the behavior that goes with it follows automatically.  In other words, you act without conscious intent (or even awareness – I certainly had no idea I had become a nose-toucher).  Most people have at least one bad habit of some sort that they’d like to rid themselves of, whether it’s smoking, nail-biting, over-sleeping, cursing, slouching, or eating too much when we’re nervous, depressed, or bored.

But what is the best strategy to use to break a bad habit?  Should you try to distract yourself, to take your mind off of the habit-triggering situation? Should you remove yourself from the situation entirely, or avoid it like the plague in the first place?  These strategies actually work very well when it comes to resisting temptations (like a plate of doughnuts, or a flirtatious co-worker), but not for breaking bad habits.

Distraction isn’t useful because the habit-behavior happens automatically – you don’t even need to be focused on what you’re doing.  Avoiding the situation altogether is pretty much impossible for most bad habits – how exactly do I avoid public speaking if I’m a professor?  How can we avoid ever being nervous, depressed, or bored?

So to really break a habit, what you need to do is focus on stopping the response before it starts (or, as psychologists tend to put it, you need to “inhibit” your bad behavior).  A recent study by Jeffrey Quinn, Anthony Pascoe, Wendy Wood, and David Neal shows that the most effective strategy for breaking a bad habit is vigilant monitoring – focusing your attention on the unwanted behavior to make sure you don’t engage in it.  In other words, thinking to yourself “Don’t do it!” and watching out for slipups.

In their study, participants kept a daily diary for a week or longer, to record their attempts at not engaging in a bad habit (e.g., overeating, sleeping during an early morning class, smoking, getting nervous before a test). With each attempt, they indicated which strategies they had used:  vigilant monitoring (thinking “Don’t do it!”, watching carefully for mistakes, or monitoring their behavior) distracting myself, or removing myself from the situation.

The results showed that only vigilant monitoring was effective in stopping bad habits. (A second study conducted in the laboratory, in which the experimenters manipulated which strategy participants used, produced the same results).  When people think to themselves “Don’t do it!” they are actually able to take their brain off autopilot and break the situation-behavior connection.  Over time, use of this strategy will destroy the connection completely, and the habit will be no more.

Incidentally, this is exactly how I stopped my nose-touching and excessive use of “um” and “uh” while lecturing.  I consciously monitored what I did with my hands and kept them away from my face at all times.  I wrote “NO UMS” at the top of each page of my lecture notes, to remind me not to fill my pauses with nonsense words.  I would videotape myself every so often to check on my progress.  Over time, (and it definitely took a while), I broke my nose-touching habit completely, and my ums and uhs are now no more frequent than everyone else’s.   I’m sure that I still give my students plenty to laugh about, but that’s ok with me.  I wouldn’t want to ruin all their fun.

J. Quinn, A. Pascoe, W. Wood, & D. Neal (2010) Cant’ control yourself? Monitor those bad habits.   Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36, 499-511.

http://psp.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/36/4/499?rss=1

The Motivational One-Two Punch for Overcoming Bad Habits

If you want to maintain a healthy weight, there is no great mystery – eat less, exercise more, and you will eventually reach your goal.   So why, then, do most of us struggle to lose weight and keep it off?  One answer is that we’ve developed a lot of bad habits that sabotage our chances for success.  We snack too much between meals.  We eat when we are bored, anxious, or depressed.  We reach for the bag of chips or the candy bar, rather than the apple or the carrot sticks.  We finish everything on our plates too quickly, rather than stopping when we’ve had enough to satisfy our hunger.  We supersize it, when the “regular” size is already way too big to be good for us.

The thing about habits that makes them so difficult to overcome is that they are relatively automatic.  In other words, we engage in these behaviors without the conscious intention to do so.   It turns out to be particularly hard to stop yourself from eating too much when you aren’t even really aware that you’re doing it in the first place.

Fortunately, there are strategies you can use to put an end to these self-sabotaging habits.  Recent research by Gabriele Oettingen, Peter Gollwitzer, and their colleagues shows that two strategies, when used together, create a particularly potent combination for habit-fighting: mental contrasting and if-then planning.

Mental contrasting, in a nutshell, involves thinking positively about how it will be when you achieve your goal, while thinking realistically about what it will take to get there. First, you imagine how you will feel attaining your goal, and then you reflect on the obstacles that stand in your way.  For instance, if you wanted to get a high paying job after college, you would start by imagining the sense of pride and excitement you would feel accepting a lucrative offer at a top firm.  Then, you would think about what stands between you and that offer – namely, all the other really outstanding candidates that will be applying for jobs.  Kind of makes you want to send out a lot of applications, doesn’t it?  That’s called experiencing the necessity to act – it’s a psychological state that is crucial for achieving a goal. Daydreaming about how great it will be to land that job can be a lot of fun, but it won’t get you anywhere. Mental contrasting turns wishes and daydreams into reality, by bringing into focus what you will need to do to make it happen.

Once you’ve set a goal, perhaps the most common problem we run into when actually trying to achieve it is missing opportunities to take action.   We get preoccupied by other goals, or simply so distracted that we forget about our goal entirely, and don’t notice an opportunity when it arises.  Sometimes we “miss” opportunities because we are reluctant to take the necessary steps to reach our goal, especially when it is difficult or just no fun at all (As for myself, I am very loathe to give up all those delicious snacks).   Whatever the reason, we are constantly letting opportunities to achieve our goals slip through our fingers.  If we want to succeed, we literally need to learn how to seize the moment.  This is precisely what if-then plans are designed to do.

Forming an if-then plan (or what Gollwitzer calls an implementation intention) starts with taking a goal you want to achieve, and then spelling out exactly when, where, and how you will achieve it:  If I am in this situation, then I will take this action.  For example, if your goal is to work out more, you might form the plan: “I will work out for an hour at the gym on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays before work.”  So if you’ve made an if-then plan, then you know that when it’s Monday morning, it’s time to hit the gym before work.  You’re less likely to let the opportunity to act on your goal pass you by.

In a study that will appear soon in the European Journal of Social Psychology, Oettingen and Gollwitzer, along with Marieke Adriaanse, Erin Hennes, Denise De Ridder, and John De Wit, tried putting these two powerful strategies together to help people overcome the often irresistible temptation of cookies and chips (they refer to this strategy combo as “MCII”:  mental contrasting + implementation intentions).

Female participants who wanted to reduce their unhealthy snacking kept a food diary detailing their daily indulgences.  Half of the participants in the study were instructed to also complete a “mental exercise” to help them reach their goal (MCII).  First, they engaged in mental contrasting by writing briefly about both the positive aspects of successfully reducing their snacking (e.g., losing weight, feeling healthier), as well as the primary obstacle standing in their way (e.g., the tendency to eat when bored or stressed).  Next, they formed an if-then plan for how they would cope with that obstacle, replacing the unhealthy snack with a piece of fruit (e.g., “If I am bored and I feel like having a snack, then I will eat an apple.”)

Even though both the MCII group and the control group were equally committed to reaching their goal of snacking less, over the course of the following week the women in the MCII group consumed a whopping 1125 fewer snack calories on average than those in the control group!

In a second study, the researchers showed the using either mental contrasting or if-then planning alone is far less effective than the MCII combo.  Their data suggests that engaging in mental contrasting helps people to have greater clarity about what their obstacles to success really are, and as a result they form better, more effective plans.  And it doesn’t just work for snacking!  Similar results have recently been obtained in studies of exercise, test preparation, and even time management.

So the next time you find yourself struggling to rid yourself of a bad habit, no matter what it is, try the MCII exercise:  think about how great it will be if you succeed, identify what stands in your way, and make an if-then plan to deal with it.   These simple steps are a tried-and-true recipe for success.