Category Archives: Psychology

Increase Your Productivity: 5 Easy Ways to Get Things Done Even When You are Stuck

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Productivity is such a mystery for most of us. In a previous article, I wrote at length and I admit, rather philosophically, about getting things done. In this article, I am going to do something a little different. Clients often ask me for specific tips to help them get moving and increase their productivity. We’ve all had the experience of being completely blocked, seemingly unable to get anything done, and struggling to get moving. Some of this is mood and energy based. When we are tired, sleep deprived, or blue, it’s hard to motivate to do anything, especially tasks that are not fun or interesting. But life demands that we function even under these circumstances, so here are 5 tips for how to get moving when you are blocked.

productivity

1. Priming the Getting Things Done Pump

The first secret of increasing your productivity is to prime your “getting things done” pump by getting something done, anything. Pick a small task that you’ve avoided or failed to do for a long time. It can be anything. It should take no more than 5 or 10 minutes to complete. The key here is that you are going to complete something, and it’s something you’ve been avoiding for a long time.

I picked a Microsoft Class Action legal settlement form that entitled me to $125 in rebates on computer products. I had sent it in a long time ago, but it had been rejected and returned on a technicality. I pulled it out, found an appropriate receipt to attach it to, and put it in an envelope, and mailed it. Time? About 8 minutes. Not only did I get something done, but I made $125 in 8 minutes, that’s $937 per hour!

The principle is to get something a small task done, which flexes your “getting things done” muscles. By picking something you’ve avoided for a while, you get an even bigger kick.

2. The Smallest Piece Technique

You can use a related technique even for huge and complicated tasks that we all tend to avoid starting, and thus never finish. If you have a huge task, break it down into component pieces. Then pick a very small piece, a piece that will take 5 to 10 minutes, and do it.

This breaks the ice and gets you moving on the big task. Often once you’ve done the first small piece you can then do more pieces. Often it is best to use a pump-priming strategy here. Pick the smallest piece there is, and get it done. For instance, if you want to do your taxes, you might simply set the task of pulling out your tax folders and putting them on your desk. That’s it, you are done. (But now you want to do more, don’t you!)

This also works well for getting started with exercise. Rather than saying to yourself, “I’m going to take a 1-hour walk”, and then doing nothing, decide to take a 5-minute walk. Once you are outside and walking, you probably will find yourself walking for more than 5 minutes. The key is to set the task of walking 5 minutes every day, and then you break down your resistance.

3. The Dice Man (or Woman) Technique

The next technique is a good one if you find yourself frozen with indecision. You have many important tasks to do, and you can’t decide which one to do first. You are like an octopus that is pulled in many different directions by each of its tentacles and hence is frozen in place completely. This can really harm your productivity. 

In this case, use the Diceman strategy. The The Dice Man is the title of a comedic novel published in 1971 by George Cockcroft under the pen name Luke Rhinehart, in which a psychiatrist begins to make all his life decisions using a set of dice. (It’s a wild novel, and pretty interesting.)

To use this strategy, make a short list of the some of your main tasks. Number them 1-6 or 1-12. Then throw one or two dice, and do the one that the dice indicates. Or you can throw darts at the list, or even just toss a penny onto the list, and do the task the penny falls upon.

What this does it to short-circuit the part of your brain that is trying to prioritize many equally important tasks, and gets you moving and finishing a task. Often, once you do this, it is much easier to continue picking tasks and doing them. Sometimes the secret to productivity is just to do anything. 

4. The Entertainment Strategy

What about those tasks that are just plain boring? For instance, like filing, or unloading or loading the dishwasher. The best way to do these tasks is to pair them with some other activity that is fun.

For loading or unloading the dishwasher, you could use a phone with a hands-free headset, and talk to someone you like while you take care of the dishes. The same technique is useful for straightening up the house. For filing, this is also a good technique. Another approach is to do the boring task while watching or listening to some entertainment. I find baseball and football games on television perfect for tasks like filing. Both have many slow points, which allows me to get a lot done without missing key points. Listening to a good show on the radio also works. I have a whole bunch of multitasking media consumption methods that help increase my productivity.  Even the famous writer, Tim Ferris, uses this technique, putting the movies Casino Royale and Shawn of the Dead on repeat, muted, late at night, to provide an illusion of social contact while writing late at night. 

5. When All Else Fails, Bribe Yourself!

Another way of increasing your productivity, and getting unpleasant boring tasks done is to pair them with specific rewards. For instance, let’s say you have a big task to do like doing your taxes. This is a task that takes a couple of days. Before you start, set yourself a specific reward once you have finished. It could be that you get to buy something for yourself. Or go do an activity that you like. The key is to make sure that the reward is big enough to motivate the task. Telling yourself you get to eat a piece of pie after spending two days doing taxes won’t work. It probably will take something bigger, and not pie! I call this strategy “paying yourself to get things done.”

So there you have it. Five quick ways to increase your productivity, explode your resistance and get something done! Good luck!

I have to go now and pay one bill.

Copyright 2008 The Psychology Lounge/TPL Productions

All Rights reserved (Any web links must credit this site, and must include a link back to this site.)

Scientists Try to Discover the Earliest Signs of Alzheimer’s disease (Is Alzheimer’s a Lifetime Genetic Disease?)

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Today’s New York Times has a fascinating article about current research in Alzheimer’s called Finding Alzheimer’s Before a Mind Fails. It is simultaneously encouraging and deeply disturbing.

The encouraging part is that researchers are discovering ways to examine patients that can find evidence of Alzheimer’s many years before the disease manifests itself in symptoms. A radioactive dye call Pittsburgh Compound B (PIB) is injected into the patient. This dye attaches itself to amyloid plaques in the brain, and then these can be seen by using a Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scan.  Studies using PIB have found the astonishing fact that amyloid plaques are found in 20-25 percent of people over 65 who appear normal! If the amyloid hypothesis is accurate, then many of these people will go on to develop Alzheimer’s disease.  Using PIB testing we could predict more accurately who will develop the disease, and perhaps develop prevention methods much like we give statins to heart patients who have plaques in their arteries. This is encouraging.

Someday in the future hopefully we will be tested for early signs of Alzheimer’s disease in our 40’s, and those who at risk given medications that will prevent it, just like we do for heart disease now. This would make aging much less scary.

Current Facts About Alzheimer’s disease

But the current facts about Alzheimer’s are less encouraging. It is the sixth more common cause of death by disease in the U.S. Five million people over 65 have Alzheimer’s disease. Estimates suggest that perhaps as many as 16 millions will have the disease by 2050, which is a staggering number that would bankrupt the health care system. (Of course, this assumes that in 43 years we have made no progress in the treatment and prevention of Alzheimer’s disease, which is absurd.)

Costs are already staggering–$148 billion dollars per year, and are increasing every year. Why? Here’s the dark truth. Alzheimer’s disease is a disease of the elderly. Almost 40 percent of those who live past 85 will eventually develop Alzheimer’s disease. The problem is that medical improvements are curing the diseases that used to kill us well before 85. One of the reasons Social Security starts at age 65 is that until recently, most people didn’t live much past the age of 65. Now as we defeat cancer and heart disease, and people stop killing themselves with diet and smoking, we are living into our 80’s and 90’s.  And getting Alzheimer’s disease.

What is Alzheimer’s disease?

Let’s talk a little more about what Alzheimer’s disease really is. Everyone worries about Alzheimer’s disease as they age. But some forgetfulness is completely normal. (We hope.) There is a old joke about Alzheimer’s disease which actually is a useful rule of thumb, it’s not a big deal if you forget where you put the car keys, as long as you can remember what keys are for. It is significant changes in memory and problem solving that are more worrisome.

When does Alzheimer’s disease begin?

This is a mystery currently. Conventional wisdom says that Alzheimer’s disease may begin a few years before symptoms appear, but some scientists question this. Because the brain has a lot of spare capacity, it may take years of deterioration before we lose enough brain function to notice. This may explain one of the common findings that the more highly educated (and probably more intelligent) develop Alzheimer’s disease as  a lower rate. They may have more spare capacity. If you start off with an IQ of 150, and lose a third of your brain functioning, you end up with an IQ of 100, and can still function. Start at IQ 100, lose 1/3, and you now are functionally retarded with an IQ of 66, and you won’t be able to live independently.

One scientist, Dr. Richard Mayeux, who is a professor at Columbia University, says, “I think there’s a very long phase where people aren’t themselves.”

“If Dr. Mayeux asks family members when a patient’s memory problem began, they almost always say it started a year and a half before. If he then asks when was the last time they thought the patient’s memory was perfectly normal, many reply that the patient never really had a great memory.” (New York Times)

This is interesting and disturbing stuff. Other research finds that people who later develop Alzheimer’s disease showed lower intelligence scores even early in life, suggesting that perhaps Alzheimer’s disease is a genetic disorder that affects the brain in subtle way even early in life. If this is true, then the data on highly educated people may have been interpreted in a backwards way—instead of higher education preventing Alzheimer’s disease, it may be that Alzheimer’s disease prevents higher education!

 

Treatment of Alzheimer’s disease

Currently there are drugs that address the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, but no drugs that address or slow the underlying disease progress. The good news is that there are numerous studies attempting to find drugs that will actually address the underlying disease process in Alzheimer’s disease. The bad news is that no one really knows exactly what that underlying disease process is.

There are two finding from examining the brains of those with Alzheimer’s disease. The first is that they show plaques of beta amyloid between the nerve cells of the brain. The second is that the brains show tangles inside nerve cells made of a protein called tau. This damaged tau kills the nerve cells because they no longer get nutrients.  Both these are well-established facts, but no one knows what is the relationship between beta amyloid and tau, and how much each contributes to Alzheimer’s disease.

 

What Society Should Do About Alzheimer’s disease?

So what can we as a society do about Alzheimer’s disease? My grandfather used to say, “Everyone dies, so it’s just a matter of how you die.” By choosing to treat or prevent heart disease and cancer, are we choosing to die from Alzheimer’s disease?   This is a scary thought.  It’s clearly worse to outlive your mind than to outlive your body. And Alzheimer’s disease puts huge burdens on society and caretakers. Maybe we should start a campaign to encourage cigarette smoking in the elderly! (Or motorcycle riding, but this might make the roads a bit dicey.) 

More seriously, we are in the unfortunate window of time where we have successfully improved longevity without really addressing this core disease of longer life, Alzheimer’s disease.  Society desperately needs to find an Alzheimer’s disease cure or preventative treatment. Without this we will as a society incur great costs and individual suffering. I believe that this should become a top priority of private and government research spending. First we need better basic research to find out what the disease process of Alzheimer’s disease looks like. Then we can develop effective drugs to block or reverse that disease process.

In the meantime, all we can do is not worry too much, since stress may damage the brain. Eat healthy, exercise, maybe take some anti-oxidant vitamins, and hope that science can solve this puzzle so we can get old without losing our brain function.   

As for me, I aspire to these not-so famous words of the comedian Will Shriner, “I want to die in my sleep like my grandfather… Not screaming and yelling like the passengers in his car.”

 

Copyright 2007 The Psychology Lounge/ TPL Productions, All Rights Reserved

How to Stop Anger in its Tracks: Applying the SAP™ Model in Three Easy Steps (Part 2)

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In my previous article, How Anger Works: The SAP™ Model (Part 1), I wrote about the SAP™ model, which stands for Shoulds, Awfulizing, and Personalizing. In this article I want to teach you basic anger management skills that will help you to neutralize anger.

Background Concepts About Anger

I should point out a couple of important concepts about anger first. A simple way of conceptualizing anger is that it is related to the amount of difference between our expectations and reality. The larger the difference, the more anger and frustration we experience. Thus if I expect a 10 percent raise, and I only get a 5 percent raise, I will be more angry (and disappointed) than if I got a 9 percent raise.

This leads to an obvious point. To decrease anger and frustration, we need to lessen the difference between our expectations and reality. There are two ways of doing this. One is to change reality so it better conforms with our expectations. The other way is to change our expectations so they better conform with reality.

Here is where it gets tricky. Which should you try to change, reality or your expectations? It depends. When it’s possible and easy to change reality, it makes sense to do so. If you don’t like rush hour traffic you can leave earlier or later to work. Or if you have been dating someone for a few weeks and they consistently annoy you, break up with them. It’s easy, and solves the problem. Or if you have an abusive boss, and you can relatively easily transfer or find another job, do it!

But what if you are angry at your wife or husband of many years? Or at your children? Or you feel angry at the fact that Republicans have run the country for 8 years. These are much harder to change, and more costly. So in cases where you either can’t easily change reality or you don’t really want to change reality, then you need to adjust your expectations. Instead of happiness meaning getting what you want, it can mean wanting what you’ve got.

The famous Serenity Prayer summarizes these concepts elegantly: In Latin, “Deus, dona mihi serenitatem accipere res quae non possum mutare, fortitudinem mutare res quae possum, atque sapientiam differentiam cognoscere.” Or in English, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.”

I like to use the “80 Percent Rule” in determining whether my expectations are reasonable ones or not. If 80 percent of the time, my expectation matches reality, then it is okay to hold onto that expectation. Therefore, if my friend Hugh is on time for our dinners 80 percent of the time, it is okay for me to expect that. But if he is only on time for dinner 20% of the time, then I need to change my expectation, or change friends.

Step One: Defusing Anger by Changing your Shoulds

The first step in reducing anger is to change your “shoulds”. What is a should? We tend to assume that it is a universal law, but in reality, it is simply our personal demand on the universe. If I have a should that says, “People should always treat me fairly,” this is really just a different way of thinking “I want everyone to treat me fairly all the time.”

The first step to defusing anger is to change your shoulds into preferences. Instead of thinking “My wife should not spend so much money on clothes” you would think “I would prefer she not spend so much money on clothes.” Simply doing this reduces the intensity of anger significantly. You are owning your beliefs, instead of putting them into some imaginary universal law. If they are your beliefs, then you can choose to alter them.

Try a mental experiment. Think of something that makes you mad. Identify one of your shoulds that has been violated. Say the should to yourself a number of times, and notice how angry you feel. Now transform it to a preference statement. Instead of “They should _____”, it becomes “I would prefer that they ________”. Notice what happens to the intensity of the anger.

What you will notice is that the intensity of the anger diminishes. It doesn’t disappear, but it does transform in intensity. Why doesn’t it go away entirely?

This is because even our preferences may be distorted. Let me give you an example. I live in the Bay Area, where traffic tends to be quite heavy and slow at rush hour. Let’s imagine that I have the should statement, “I should be able to drive at 65 mph on the freeway, even at 5:30pm.” This should is likely to frustrate me when I am stuck in 25mph traffic. So I turn it into a preference, “I’d prefer to be able to drive 65 mph at 5:30pm.” This doesn’t really help very much. I’m still going to be frustrated because there is a large gap between my preference and reality.

Here is where applying the “80% Rule” is helpful. I ask myself if my preference is true 80% of the time. The answer of course is no. Perhaps only 10% of the time does traffic flow well at rush hour. Thus even my preference violates the 80% rule.

So I need to change my preference. A more reasonable preference would be “I prefer that traffic moves at 25 mph during rush hour.” Now there is a better match between my preference and reality, and I will not get as frustrated.

So, to summarize Step One, first you turn your Should Statements into Preference Statements. Next, evaluate the preferences using the 80 percent rule; does reality match this preference at least 80 percent of the time? If not, change the preference. This should at least lower your anger level, if not eliminate it.

Step Two: Defusing Anger by Putting Things Into Perspective and Emphasizing Coping

The next step of the SAP™ model is Awfulizing. Here we tell ourselves, “It’s awful and terrible, and I can’t stand it.” This creates a lot of internal psychological stress, and intensifies our feelings of anger and helplessness.

How can we change these patterns of thought? We can do so by putting the problem into perspective. On a 100 point scale, how awful is it really? Imagine that a 100 represents having a leg cut off without anesthesia, or a root canal without Novocain. Then rate how terrible is it to not have your should or expectation met. So if I am stuck in a traffic jam, and no one is shooting at me, and there is no blizzard outside, how awful is it really? Maybe a 10 on the 100 point scale.

Most frustrating events are actually relatively minor in the grand scheme of things. But we lose perspective, and this creates anger and stress. Another trick is to ask yourself if you will remember this event in one month, one year, or five years. If the answer is no, then it’s really not very awful.

The other aspect of this is the second part of the awfulizing statement, which is “I can’t stand it.” How often do we say this to ourselves? I define “not standing it” as meaning that you are going insane, hallucinating, curling up in a catatonic ball, or standing on the roof of a building getting ready to jump. Anything less than that means that you are actually standing it!

So what you want to do is replace “It’s terrible and awful, and I can’t stand it,” with “It’s inconvenient, or a hassle, and I don’t like it, but I can stand it.” This will greatly alter your emotional response.

So to summarize the second step in anger management:

  1. Ask yourself “How awful is this really?” Rate the awfulness on a 100 point scale, where 100 is something truly awful, like a serious injury or death of a loved one. Put the event into perspective.
  2. Remind yourself that most events will be quickly forgotten, and that most things in life are really hassles or inconveniences, rather than genuine disasters. Substitute the phrase “It’s a hassle, and I don’t like it but I can stand it,” for the Awful-izing statement of “It’s awful and terrible and I can’t stand it!”

 

Step Three: Defusing Anger by Reducing Personalizing

The final step in defusing anger is to de-personalize events. Remember from the previous article, that personalizing an event greatly intensifies the anger. If I believe that someone is purposely doing something to hurt me, I will get much angrier than if I believe it is an impersonal event.

This is easy to say, not so easy to do. The trick here is to realize that most of the time, when people don’t meet your shoulds or expectations; they are not doing it to harm you. When the clerk ignores you in the store, it’s more likely that they are tired or stressed than they saw you and thought, “Gee, I think I will piss off Dr. Lounge Wizard by ignoring him as long as possible.”

But what about people we love. Don’t they purposely hurt us?

Probably not. Most of the time, when loved ones do things that we are frustrated by, it is because that’s their nature. For instance, a messy person is messy because it is their nature, and it’s not because they are trying to anger their neat spouse. (Believe me, I know.) Everyone is trying to do the best they can, and pretty much doesn’t worry about you, or plan to hurt you.

So the secret is to simply assume that most things aren’t personal, and even when they appear to be, to reframe it as the person’s nature. A critical boss is critical of everyone, in most cases. A bad driver in front of you is probably always a bad driver, even when you are not behind them!

To summarize Step Three, remember than most of the time, no one is out to get you. They are just doing their natural thing. Use compassion, and think gentle compassionate thoughts that other people are flawed, but this isn’t personal.

So there you have it; the Three Steps to Anger Management. Try it out. I suggest you keep an anger/frustration log, and write down the S.A.P’s and then write down the counter thoughts for each step.

Copyright 2007 The Psychology Lounge™/TPL Productions All rights reserved

How Anger Works: The SAP Model ™ (Part 1)

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In this article I will give you a simple cognitive behavioral explanation of how we get angry, and how you can use this knowledge to short-circuit and defuse your own anger. Anger is probably the most cognitive of all of the emotions. We can’t get angry without thinking. And most anger directly stems from our distorted thoughts.

There are three cognitive steps to getting angry. The first two are absolutely necessary for anger, and the third is like gasoline on fire, it intensifies anger. The acronym for remembering these three steps is SAP(tm), which is what anger will make you if you think these thoughts.

To help illustrate this lets consider a common situation where a person might get angry. You are driving on the freeway and a car cuts you off. You instantly react with anger. You steam all the way to work.

STEP ONE: VIOLATION OF SHOULDS or “SHOULDY THINKING”

The first step to getting angry is that you must have a set of shoulds or expectations that have been violated. Without this there is no anger. In the driving example what are your expectations? You tell yourself that the other driver shouldn’t have cut you off. He or she should have looked first and seen you. Obviously this should has been violated. This is what some cognitive therapists call “shouldy” thinking!

STEP TWO: AWFULIZING

But just having a set of shoulds or expectations is not enough to generate anger. The second step is necessary. In this step you exaggerate the negative consequences of the violation of the shoulds. You tell yourself it is awful and terrible that this event has happened. In our driving example your self talk is “Wow, the idiot could have killed me. It’s awful and terrible that they allow people like that to drive. Grrrrrr!” This step is called Awfulizing. Or Terribilizing, if you prefer. The key distortion is that you blow the event out of proportion. After all, if you are able to have these thoughts, then obviously no serious accident has ensued.

STEP THREE: PERSONALIZING

The first two steps will get you mad, but the third step of Personalizing or Blaming will make you crazy angry. If you tell yourself that the person didn’t see you, and it was an accident that they cut you off, you may still get angry. But if you tell yourself they did see you and purposely chose to cut you off anyway, then your anger spirals out of control. Blaming thoughts are like pouring gasoline on the fire of anger. They are responsible for such things as road rage.

So this how anger works. Let’s consider another example. This time we will use one closer to home. It’s early Saturday morning, and you are sleeping in after a long hard work week. Suddenly you are awoken by the loud noise of a lawn mower. It’s your neighbor George, who for some unknown reason, has decided that Saturday at 7:30am is a good time to mow his lawn. You are furious.

Let’s analyze this. What are the shoulds? Basically that your neighbor shouldn’t do noisy activities until 10 or 11 am on a weekend day. This should has been violated by George. What is the awfulizing? You are thinking that now you will be tired all day, and you’ll be cranky and irritable, and won’t have any fun. Is there a personalizing statement? Yes, you think, “George knows I work late, and knows I like to sleep in, so mowing his lawn so early is a direct insult to me!” And so you explode with anger.

So there you have it, a simple cognitive model of anger, the SAP model: Shoulds, Awfulizing, and Personalizing. Try an experiment. For a week, write down each anger incident you have by identifying the three Anger Thought Steps. This will help you to increase your awareness of how anger works, and prepare you for the next step, learning to defuse and eliminate your anger, which I will discuss in Part 2 of this article,  How to Stop Anger in its Tracks.

Copyright 2007 The Psychology Lounge/ TPL Productions All Rights Reserved

 

Sadder but Not Necessarily Wiser (and not quite as sad as expected)

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Here is some more evidence that we poorly predict happiness and unhappiness.

A recent article in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology again shows how poor we are at predicting our future states of happiness or unhappiness. As I wrote about in previous posts on happiness, we seem to be quite poor at predicting how we will feel in the future.

Eli Finkel and Paul Eastwick at Northwestern University studied young lovers to see if their predictions of unhappiness after a breakup matched their actual suffering when the breakup occurred.

They looked at college students who had been dating for at least two months and had them fill out multiple questionnaires. Twenty six of the students broke up during the first six months of the study and these students predictions of distress were examined. The students at rated how painful a breakup would be on average two weeks before the breakup.

On average people overestimated the pain of a breakup. There was some correlation between how much people were in love and how much pain they suffered after the breakup, but everyone recovered more quickly than they had predicted. Looking at the actual study it appears that people were able to predict somewhat accurately their suffering in the first two weeks after the breakup. The correlation between their prediction and the actual distress was about 0.60 which means that they were able to predict about 36% of their suffering. But between weeks six and 10, the correlations dropped to about 0.30, which means that they were only able to predict about 10% of the variation in their suffering.

This is interesting in terms of the habituation process that I wrote about earlier. We habituate to both good and bad events. And we underestimate our ability to adapt to both types of events.

Now we shouldn’t make too much of this study. Remember this is a study of college students who had been dating for at least two months. This isn’t exactly a study of deep connection and commitment. It would be interesting, but much more difficult, to look at the same data for married couples who later break up.

Copyright 2007 The Psychology Lounge ™ /TPL Productions , All Rights Reserved