Thoughts on a quote

I want to provide some comments on the following quote:

Remember that stress doesn't come from what's going on in your life. It comes from your thoughts about what's going on in your life.

- Andrew J. Bernstein

I dislike advice that asks people to "think differently" about how they view a situation. I believe this misses the point entirely since then you wonder, Ok then where do the thoughts themselves come from? Why do the negative ones consistently show up and the positive ones are usually nowhere to be seen? Why are people usually able to understand something at an intellectual level but they can rarely take the lesson to heart at an emotional and deeper level?

You can't "force" yourself to think differently about something if the more negative interpretation keeps overpowering the positive. We ultimately have no idea where thoughts even come from or where consciousness comes from or why some people are much more prone to anxiety and negative thinking than others. How can you "control" something when you don't know its source or how it's even created?

I am not saying give up and think it's all hopeless. I am saying that's it's not as simple as trying to control how you view a situation and what your thoughts are. The solution is probably a lot more difficult and must be more thorough. Perhaps it involves going through some kind of powerful experience that gives you a perspective shift or genuinely elicits an emotional response.

For instance, somewhat recently, I was feeling especially down and like absolute shit. Nothing was working. Music wasn't helping. My hobbies weren't helping. Talking to friends wasn't helping. But you know what randomly and unexpectedly raised my mood? An old lady was stuck in an intersection because there was no ramp installed to help her move her heavy cart. When she saw me walking by, she called to me and asked me to help her lift her cart. I ran over and helped her and almost immediately afterwards, I was feeling noticeably better. When nothing had broken through the sadness, this small act broke through. Why? I really have no idea. But notice how trying to "think differently" or "controlling thoughts" was doing absolutely nothing. Something completely unexpected like helping an old lady completely broke through the terrible mood when nothing else was working. 

Perhaps we should consider more "non-orthodox" solutions to people feeling like crap. Maybe we can try to convince a sad person to go out and find someone to help and see if that helps raise their mood. Or we can prescribe some other action-based approach that is more relevant for that particular person such as asking the person to consider quitting Facebook or at least uninstalling social media apps from their phone. The overall point here is that you can't simply "think differently" about something most of the time. Some kind of action or powerful experience is needed.

Please Write

"The act of writing is itself enough; it serves to clarify my thoughts and feelings. The act of writing is an integral part of my mental life; ideas emerge, are shaped, in the act of writing. My journals are not written for others, nor do I usually look at them myself, but they are a special, indispensable form of talking to myself."


-Oliver Sacks


An important part of living responsibly and in a healthy way is knowing how to take proper care of yourself. Most of us know that we must exercise and eat properly to stay in shape and be healthy. But, there is another kind of self care that is not discussed as often: mental and emotional exercise. Just like your body, your mind needs care and attention as well. One of the main ways of accomplishing this is through writing. As Mr. Sacks so eloquently hinted at above, writing has numerous mental, emotional, and even physical benefits.

The list of benefits is extensive and the therapeutic effects of writing have been studied for several decades:

Experiments going back to the 1980s have shown that 'therapeutic' or 'expressive' writing can reduce depression, increase productivity and even cut down on visits to the doctor. The act of writing is more powerful than people think.

In one particular study, writing about stressful life events was even effective at fighting serious illnesses such as asthma and rheumatoid arthritis: 

Patients were assigned to write either about the most stressful event of their lives (n=71; 39 asthma, 32 rheumatoid arthritis) or about emotionally neutral topics

Experimental group participants showed greater rates of improvement and lesser rates of worsening than the control group across both diseases 

Writing about stressful life experiences improves physician ratings of disease severity and objective indices of disease severity in chronically ill patients 

Of evaluable patients 4 months after treatment, asthma patients in the experimental group showed improvements in lung function (the mean percentage of predicted forced expiratory volume in 1 second [FEV1] improved from 63.9% at baseline to 76.3% at the 4-month follow-up; P<.001), whereas control group patients showed no change.

Rheumatoid arthritis patients in the experimental group showed improvements in overall disease activity  

Results confirm the hypothesis that writing about emotionally traumatic experiences reduced symptoms in individuals with chronic illness.

Additionally, a meta-analysis of all the studies on this topic found numerous other benefits associated with expressive writing:

Longer-term benefits of expressive writing

Health outcomes

• Fewer stress-related visits to the doctor
• Improved immune system functioning
• Reduced blood pressure
• Improved lung function
• Improved liver function
• Fewer days in hospital
• Improved mood/affect
• Feeling of greater psychological well-being
• Reduced depressive symptoms before examinations
• Fewer post-traumatic intrusion and avoidance symptoms

 Social and behavioural outcomes 

• Reduced absenteeism from work
• Quicker re-employment after job loss
• Improved working memory
• Improved sporting performance
• Higher students’ grade point average
• Altered social and linguistic behaviour

Medical conditions that might benefit from expressive writing programmes

• Lung functioning in asthma
• Disease severity in rheumatoid arthritis
• Pain and physical health in cancer
• Immune response in HIV infection
• Hospitalisations for cystic fibrosis
• Pain intensity in women with chronic pelvic pain
• Sleep-onset latency in poor sleepers
• Post-operative course

If all of the above wasn't convincing enough evidence, one should also consider that

the effects produced by expressive writing are substantial and similar in magnitude to the effects of other psychological interventions, many of which are more involved, time-consuming and expensive.

In addition to the numerous psychological and health benefits, writing has more practical uses as well. Often times, we have difficulty properly identifying the issues in our lives that are causing the most stress and are consistently present. Without clear feedback, we have a difficult time learning about ourselves and which areas of our lives we need to prioritize addressing. Writing can help with such matters as well because if you find that the same worries and issues are consistently appearing in your writing then that's a strong signal that those particular issues need to be prioritized and resolved first. For instance, if you have an intense pain in your knee, would you ignore it and instead address a minor itch on your wrist? The same concept applies here but it's a bit more difficult to grasp because it doesn't have easily recognizable physical attributes that we are more familiar with.

Writing also provides you with a sense of control because it's a

formalized form of thinking [and it] helps [you] derive information from [your] experiences that helps [you] guide [your] perceptions, actions, thoughts and emotions in the present. Drawing specific, causal conclusions about life’s important events may also help reduce the burden of uncertainty and threat that may remain active.

Essentially, writing is a practical and easy way of understanding what is happening to you and it allows you to feel like you're an active participant in your life instead of a passenger who's not in the driver's seat. Such an increasing sense of control is essential for attaining healthy self esteem and the confidence to take on challenges. It also allows you to more effectively deal with uncertainty. 

Ultimately, our first line of defense against mental and emotional difficulties is ourselves. If there is a low-commitment and practical way of taking care of ourselves, we need to utilize it whenever possible. By no means am I cautioning against relying on mental health professionals. Such experts have a role to play as well, especially for more serious cases. But, we should still take personal initiative in addressing mental problems.

Sources cited:

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifestyle/benefits-writing-why-you-should-write-all-the-time.html

http://selfauthoring.com/WritingBenefits.pdf

http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/07/10/419202925/the-writing-assignment-that-changes-lives

http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=189437

http://apt.rcpsych.org/content/11/5/338.full

Seeing the world with fresh eyes

The Einstellung (set) Effect is the topic of today's entry. This phenomena is described by the researchers Merim Bilalić, Peter McLeod, and Fernand Gobet. Their original article that I will be referencing in this post can be found here:

Why Good Thoughts Block Better Ones: The Mechanism of the Pernicious Einstellung (set) Effect

"The Einstellung (set) effect occurs when the first idea that comes to mind, triggered by familiar features of a problem, prevents a better solution being found. It has been shown to affect both people facing novel problems and experts within their field of expertise. We show that it works by influencing mechanisms that determine what information is attended to."

What this essentially means is that our prior knowledge and expertise in a specific area can actually work against us when facing new problems, especially in regards to new situations that have similarities to ones we have dealt with in the past. Our previous knowledge can essentially blind us to the superior solution because we are stuck thinking about the problem in a very limited way that had worked in the past in a very similar but still different situation.

The researchers experimented with Chess players to show the Einstellung (set) Effect in action. Expert Chess players were presented with the task of achieving a checkmate in the shortest amount of turns possible. The quicker and lesser known solution was 3 turns and the more well-known solution was 5 turns. By and large, even the most experienced players were stuck on the 5-turn solution because that was the one they had the most familiarity with. As a result, all their attention was on the longer solution and it effectively stopped them from considering the superior solution. The researchers took the experiment a step further and asked the players if they were even considering the second superior option while working on the task. The majority claimed that they were. However, by using eye-tracking software during the experiment, they were able to analyze the truth behind these statements. The eye-tracking data showed that the Chess players were not in fact actively attending to the other solution. Their eye movements clearly showed they were primarily paying attention to parts of the Chess board relevant to the longer and more well-known solution. According to the authors:

"We show that the origin of the effect was that players continued to look at the squares related to the first idea they had, even though they reported that they were looking for alternative solutions. The eye movement data suggest a mechanism by which one pattern of thought can prevent others coming to mind."

The players who failed to find the shorter solution were then presented with a Chess problem where the only solution was the 3-turn one and the longer solution was no longer possible. In this scenario, they had no problems finding the new solution, which proved they had the ability to see the shorter solution all along. However, there is an additional detail here. These Chess players who had initially failed the 2-solution problem took longer to solve the new 1-solution problem than players who had never been exposed to the initial 2-solution problem. In essence, their "blindness" from the initial experiment was still negatively affecting them in a new scenario.

The entire study is yet another illustration of how everyone, both experts and novices, are prone to confirmation bias. Once we assess a situation and believe we have found the "correct" path of action to take, alternate solutions are much less likely to be considered. We are fixated on the single solution that we believe is the true one and as a result we fail to account for evidence that can prove us wrong or change our views and align them more with reality. Instead, we primarily welcome evidence that confirms our views and are selective in what information we process.

The authors go on to state that such shortcuts in thinking are not necessarily counterproductive. In fact, such thinking is efficient and  makes sense in most situations because it can allow us to save energy and time when trying to solve a problem:

"Cognitive mechanisms that prevent us spending time looking for an alternative solution to a problem when we already have an adequate one are obviously useful.. in complex real world situations people usually prefer to look for solutions that are good enough rather than spending their energy looking for an elusive best that may be out of reach."

However, such thinking obviously has negative consequences as well because it can lead people to

"repeatedly try to solve the problem with the same method even though it has proved unsuccessful  Constant failure to find a solution is not enough to change the schema they use."

Such discounting of relevant evidence can also lead to scientists in numerous fields to get fixated on the more familiar solution and fail to assess a problem objectively, which is an important goal of scientific research and thought. Perhaps the most troubling aspect is that even experts with years of experience do not realize they can be prone to such biases.

The takeaway lesson from all this is that no matter how experienced or knowledgeable you think you are, always be open to assessing a problem with fresh eyes and have the humility to admit that you can make mistakes and be prone to biases that cause you to discount important evidence that has the potential to prove you wrong. Making mistakes and changing your views as a result of new information should not be viewed as a negative characteristic. It shows that you are constantly willing to learn and are open to new ideas and solutions, no matter how much of a seasoned veteran you are.