The Unassociated Press

When we try to understand the workings of our own willpower we tend to focus on the moments when it “breaks down.” When things are going smoothly and we’re accomplishing what we should without thinking too much about it, it generally doesn’t occur to us that willpower is even involved. If the decision or action doesn’t feel difficult, we don’t claim it required an act of will. However, when we stop viewing the Will as a muscle which we flex for brief stretches of time, and instead perceive it as an ongoing competition between many different internal interests, something entirely new jumps out at us. Rather than feeling the need to explain only those moments when we fail to act as we should, it’s clear that we now have to explain the reverse: given that so much of our life consists of chores and behaviors we aren’t all that excited about doing, how is it that so few activities require serious effort?

I suspect very few people get a thrilling shiver down their spine at the thought of taking out the trash, but neither do they put it off indefinitely or expend huge stores of emotion when the moment finally comes. We don’t throw our hands up in the air and give up on the prospect altogether, shamefully admitting to ourselves that “maybe we’re just not the type of person who takes out the trash.” This observation may seem absurd, but it’s critical to realize that most of our day to day life is taking out the trash. The psychological rules that govern basic chores are the same rules that govern our diets, our exercise routines, and everything else with which we wrestle. Why is one action automatic while another needs a constant struggle?

The short answer is Framing. The way we group and classify events in our life largely determines the amount of emotional capital available to be spent on each discrete behavioral item. Largely, this is because our brain has very limited resources. There is far more information assaulting our brains at any given moment than we are capable of processing consciously. Our mind’s primary job is to filter out as much information as it possibly can so that we are presented only with the most relevant pieces. It tries to, as Einstein said, “make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler.” Evolution doesn’t just favor smart choices, it must balance those smart choices against the energy it took to generate them. We are the decedents of those individuals who made the best choices with the least amount of information, and therefore had the lowest processing costs.

Frames can be internally generated or borrowed from the outside world, but most of the time it’s a mixture of the two. I’m ceaselessly surprised by the power new frames have to instantaneously shift our thoughts and feelings according to the situation, often completely without conscious reflection. For the most part, we accept without hesitation any frame we are presented, and we immediately incorporate it into our behavioral repertoire. When we go to a football game we instantly adopt an entirely different set of behaviors from those we would display in a business meeting. We take our cue from the people around us, and from our own past experience as dictated by our memory, and we create this massive shift in our behavior entirely without effort or active intent. What’s more, the shift changes not only the nature and direction of our thoughts, but also of our feelings and the types of events we react to emotionally. Observing the behavior of the same person walking out of a fine restaurant and into a rock concert, aliens would be incredibly confused.

The key to successfully making hard choices will come from understanding why most actions don’t feel effortful at all. Because we can focus on only a very small number of items (the smaller the better!), the type of thing we focus on will massively determine the nature of our behavior. Finally, most of the time the frames that determine our thoughts and feelings are picked up secondhand (and without any conscious acknowledgement on our part) from our social surroundings and the random happenings of our own life history, forcing us to paddle toward our distant goals amidst the pull and push of currents entirely unperceived by our own conscious selves.

Technorati Tags: willpower, effort, Framing, making hard choices

My assault on the problem of willpower and effective self-direction in life does not begin with a blank slate, either in strategy or in terms of my assumptions about the underlying machinery itself. For the most part, this will be a chance for me to explore some potentially useful applications first outlined by George Ainslie in his books Picoeconomics and Breakdown of Will. We are painting our way toward a useful portrait of human self-control, but this is done over top of Ainslie’s grisaille.

You and Me and We

The basic shape of Ainslie’s theory is this: the Self in psychological terms is very much like the Self in physical terms. Although we feel as though our body is a single entity (we say, “I am sick” or “I’m a great tennis player”), we are forced to realize that on some level this sense of unity – the singleness of Me – is a bit of an illusion. The body is composed of smaller units with their own forms and functions (the liver, the teeth), and these in turn are comprised molecules and atoms and quarks, and at every level of functioning the rules of the game differ. The principles that are useful in describing a good tennis serve are wildly different from those governing the individual muscle movements involved in that serve, and the fact that two completely different sets of explanations can correctly describe the same event does not suggest that one is more right than the other; they are simply different viewpoints on the same phenomena, and their differences grant each a unique set of strengths and weaknesses. Either can be useful or useless, it just depends on what we’re trying to do.

With this in mind, Ainslie describes the Self not as a single unit (a Decider in Chief) but rather as a collection of competing interests, like a massive economy inside your noodle. What we call the Will, then, is not so much a thing, but an activity: the Will is the process through which these different competing interests fight out their battles and determine which Interest will control your actual behavior. You may have a Mowing the Lawn lobby, a Reading lobby, a Football Watching lobby (as I typed this I suddenly realized I hadn’t checked to see when the Blazer game is on today, so I suspect the example is a good one!), and each of these competes against the others for control of your actions. Sometimes the interests directly oppose one another (the Cheesecake lobby vs. the Diet lobby), and then the fighting gets downright vicious. In the future I will go into the details of their battle and establish rules of warfare by which we can direct our own actions, but today I’m focusing on something more simple that will prepare the way for future construction projects.

Identifying Interruptions

Before we start building a new house it is important to make sure we’ve cleared away any major debris on the site itself. At this point we’re not taking a laser level to the plot itself, just carting off any fallen trees or jutting boulders in our brains. Because the modification of behavior begins by changing the types of thoughts we think and the emotions associated with those thoughts, it’s important to make sure there aren’t any loud sirens already screeching which will disrupt us while we work.

What I mean by sirens is this: we must identify and eradicate loops of thought which are destructive or negative to such a degree that they actively interrupt normal mental life. For some people, identifying these types of thoughts will be tragically easy: that recurrent horrible voice telling you you’re a bad person for overeating again, or the paralyzing fear of your business failing and having no means to provide for your family that keeps you awake late into the night. By themselves these thoughts are not dangerous insofar as they keep you mindful, but when they become so emotionally laden that they actively intrude on your mental life they should be viewed as obstructions to happiness.

Flipping the Kill Switch

The best way to kill these compulsive processes is to use a dead simple trick that relies on the most basic hunk of neural knowledge we’ve got: neurons that fire together wire together. In short, the more thoughts are repeated the stronger they become and the more numerous their connections seem to be. Guiltily obsessing about overeating while you’re at the ballpark not only strengthens the connections that already existed, it adds new associations that will in turn become triggers in the future. You watch a great squeeze play while compulsively beating yourself up over a greasy hot dog, and in the future the very sight of a good squeeze play can begin lighting up those same networks that lead back to feelings of guilt. Luckily, the flip side of this is also true: those patterns we don’t continually keep alive will slowly die off. The key then lies in immediately interrupting the thought as soon as it’s recognized and supplanting it with another which forces the brain to shift gears. For this I recommend simple addition and multiplication. The instant one recognizes a compulsive thought has begun, begin mentally adding and multiplying numbers. Not only does this nudge our mind away from emotional processing generally, but it has the added benefit (I suspect) of arbitrarily overflowing the short-term memory slots that are required to pull you back into the compulsive loop. Continue multiplying and adding random numbers until the thoughts cease. If they start to come back right away, begin again. Think of it like spraying bitter apple in a dog’s mouth every time he starts chewing on the sofa leg – he’ll be stubborn at first, but as punishment looks more and more inevitable, the actual need for it will decrease by leaps and bounds.

This simple strategy will very effectively delete the emotional impact of thoughts you suspect (or know) are troublesome, and help clear the way for a new more stylish architecture. Best of all, this strategy does its job whether or not you actually expect it to work - going through the motions is all it takes, nothing more “heartfelt” than that. Just pick an idea and hit the brain’s Backspace!

Technorati Tags: George Ainslie, Self, Will, compulsive processes

This blog is about self control – willpower. With the exception of today’s post, the focus will be on the mechanisms by which people control their own actions and emotions. This type of material has been covered before by people far sharper than myself, but it often has such an abstract and academic tone that it fails to filter down into the general public. More importantly, while the general mechanisms of self control have been examined fairly well and in interesting ways, what I have not seen – and what I think must be the ultimate goal of these types of investigations – is any gritty attempt to apply these ideas in terms of strategies for living a better life: specifically, the life we have chosen for ourselves.

When I say that “strategies for better living” are lacking in the public sphere, I don’t mean to insult or dismiss the gaggle of self-help and motivational web sites that have grown up in recent years like green stalks through the concrete sidewalks of blackberry nation. For the most part these sites and their authors offer pithy reflections and tips, but neither the approach nor the underlying philosophies can be considered genuinely systematic or scientific except in the fluffiest sense of the word. The tricks are good, but general, and those following their advice likely hope to stumble toward their goals like a drunkard down a sidewalk, slowly learning better methods for avoiding mailboxes. These generalities allow us to more clearly see ourselves in relation to our goals, but they do little to help us “go boldly in the direction of our dreams,” beyond perhaps reassuring us that such a journey is indeed possible and worthwhile.

Now let me be clear: I do not have this framework ready-made. This blog is not merely my chance for “show and tell,” in which I dismissively dictate the profound conclusions I’ve carried down from Mount Improbable. To the contrary, the purpose of my work here will be to develop piece by piece a finished framework – a simple and easy to understand laundry list of actions – that can be used by any citizen to become a fundamentally different person in any direction they choose.

Why?

There is a common view of willpower that treats it like a handy skill, as though one’s ability to control themselves is analogous to a good golf swing or an admirable fashion sense. We know someone who goes running even in the icy rain, or a chef who eats carefully and healthily despite an obvious affection for food, and we say, “oh, look at their tremendous willpower.” In other words, self control is seen as a useful and admirable trick, but a mere trick nonetheless. We apply it only to situations like eating too much, studying when we wish to be playing, and other mundane events in daily life. We stuff willpower into a small box. I consider this a tragic undervaluation, and one which misses far grander implications for our lives and for the future of the species.

Mankind is a tool user. The history of our accomplishments derives from our evolving relationship with our tools. This starts in simple things: using a stick to get tasty termites, an old leg bone that becomes a blunt weapon, or a chipped rock that acts like a knife. Each new tool creates options for behavior that have never before been options to mankind. Fire allowed us to cook and eat the previously inedible. Language allowed subtle cooperation and communication between once isolated minds in the lonely wilderness, and allowed the persistent storage and distribution of Ideas that each individual or group previously had to re-learn on their own; while single persons lived and died, language made their insights immortal. Economic and political strategies pooled the efforts of lonely citizens to create sprawling achievements of almost unfathomable scale. This kind of list could go on endlessly, but the general lesson is clear. Our advancement as a species is the direct result of having mastered new tools – but all along, what precisely has been doing the mastering? Our mind. Tremendous and subtle and profound though it is, our brushy and ungardened mind has achieved its work through a series of – to quote Bob Ross – Happy Accidents. The Newtons and Darwins of history have been largely lucky products of their environments. That is to say, lucky for the rest of us. While a small number of hard working (yet well-positioned) people successfully pursue their dreams, this American landscape is largely built on the backs of the broken lives of its citizens. For every shining star on the television or receiving a medal in Stockholm there are countless millions grinding out their lives in gas stations and service counters because they were not the people their dreams required them to be, and not knowing how to change they stopped trying altogether.

It is not the goal of this blog to provide those people with a new tool, but instead to develop a method for changing the Tool User herself in absolutely fundamental ways, and hopefully in directions which are historically unprecedented. By giving her the reins while allowing her to choose her own map, we hope to create a somewhat livelier human expedition.

A Final Disclaimer

Lastly, I’d like to give a brief note on science. While the ideas I am pursuing are the result of a profound belief in the value of philosophy and science, I am not a philosopher, and I am certainly no scientist. These explorations then are best viewed as actionable thought experiments. I firmly believe that all conclusions should agree with the evidence, and to the extent that they contradict existing evidence those conclusions ought to be abandoned in search of something better. So while my meanderings will be largely based on scientific modes of thought, they should by no means be considered Scientific. On a closing note, though, when the goal is changing something as arguably subjective as our own feelings and behaviors it may be wise to keep in mind Ramachandran’s cute observation: if someone steps onto the stage and shows the audience a talking pig, the appropriate response is not, “well… N of 1.”

Technorati Tags: willpower, dreams, tools, science