The danger of absolute thinking is absolutely clear

Mohammed Al-Mosaiwi

is a postgraduate student in psychology at the University of Reading in the UK.

Think of the most happy and well-adjusted person you know – what can you say about their thinking style? Are they dogmatic, with an all-or-nothing outlook on the world? Do they place totally rigid demands on themselves and those around them? When confronted with stresses and misfortunes, are they apt to magnify and fixate on them? In short, do they have an absolutist thinking style? 
‘Absolutism’ refers to ideas, phrases and words that denote totality, either in magnitude or probability. Absolutist thoughts are unqualified by nuance and overlook the complexity of a given subject.

There are generally two forms of absolutism; ‘dichotomous thinking’ and ‘categorical imperatives’. Dichotomous thinking – also referred to as ‘black-and-white’ or ‘all-or-nothing’ thinking – describes a binary outlook, where things in life are either ‘this’ or ‘that’, and nothing in between. Categorical imperatives are completely rigid demands that people place on themselves and others. The term is borrowed from Immanuel Kant’s deontological moral philosophy, which is grounded in an obligation- and rules-based ethical code.

In our research – and in clinical psychology more broadly – absolutist thinking is viewed as an unhealthy thinking style that disrupts emotion-regulation and hinders people from achieving their goals. Yet we all, to varying extents, are disposed to it – why is this? Primarily, because it’s much easier than dealing with the true complexities of life. The term cognitive miser, first introduced by the American psychologists Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor in 1984, describes how humans seek the simplest and least effortful ways of thinking. Nuance and complexity is expensive – it takes up precious time and energy – so wherever possible we try to cut corners. This is why we have biases and prejudices, and form habits. It’s why the study of heuristics (intuitive ‘gut-feeling’ judgments) is so useful in behavioural economics and political science.

But there is no such thing as a free lunch; the time and energy saved through absolutist thinking has a cost. In order to successfully navigate through life, we need to appreciate nuance, understand complexity and embrace flexibility. When we succumb to absolutist thinking for the most important matters in our lives – such as our goals, relationships and self-esteem – the consequences are disastrous.

In a recent research article in Clinical Psychological Science, I and my collaborator, the neuroscientist Tom Johnstone at the University of Reading in the UK, examined the prevalence of absolutist thinking in the natural language of more than 6,400 online members in various mental-health chat groups. From the outset, we predicted that those with depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation would have a more absolutist outlook, and that this would manifest in their style of language. Compared with 19 different online control chat groups on topics from cancer to parenting, the prevalence of absolutist words was approximately 50 per cent greater in depression and anxiety groups, and approximately 80 per cent greater in the suicidal-ideation group.

Previously, the best-known linguistic markers for mental-health disorders had been an excessive use of first-person singular pronouns such as ‘me’, ‘myself’ and ‘I’, with a reduced use of second- and third-person pronouns. This pattern of pronoun use reflects the isolation and self-focus common in depression. Negative-emotion words are also a strong linguistic marker for mental-health disorders, however researchers have reported that pronouns are actually more reliable in identifying depression. We find that the prevalence of absolutist words is a better marker than both pronouns and negative-emotion words. They produced bigger differences between mental-health and control groups compared with pronouns, and they tracked the mental-health groups better than negative-emotion words. Paradoxically, negative-emotion words were more prevalent in anxiety and depression groups than in the suicidal-ideation group.

How do we know that a greater use of absolutist words actually reflects absolutist thinking, and is not simply a result of extreme emotions and psychological distress? In a second study, we calculated the prevalence of absolutist words in mental-health conditions known to be linked to absolutist thinking (borderline personality disorder and eating disorder) with mental-health groups not linked to absolutist thinking (post-traumatic stress disorder and schizophrenia). All groups are shown to have the same levels of psychological distress, but only the groups known to be linked to absolutist thinking had elevated levels of absolutist words. This confirms that a greater use of absolutist words is specific to absolutist thinking, and not to psychological distress per se.

Despite the correlations, nothing yet suggests that absolutism causes depression. In a third study, we examined groups whose participants believe that they have recovered from a depressive episode, and write positive, encouraging posts about their recovery. We found that positive-emotion words were elevated by approximately 70 per cent, yet they continued to use a high prevalence of absolutist words, significantly greater than control groups and much closer to anxiety and depression levels. Crucially, those who have previously had depressive symptoms are more likely to have them again. Therefore, their greater tendency for absolutist thinking, even when there are currently no symptoms of depression, is a sign that it might play a role in causing depressive episodes.

These findings support the recent ‘third wave’ therapies that have entered clinical psychology. The most well-known of these is ‘mindfulness’, but they all advocate a flexible outlook, acceptance, and freedom from attachments. An early exponent of mindfulness is the noted psychologist John Teasdale, whose lab has produced a litany of empirical data to support its efficacy. In a landmark 2001 study, Teasdale and his colleagues at the University of Cambridge found that an ‘absolutist, dichotomous thinking style’ predicted future depressive relapse.

Many argue that the world is a harsh place, and that it is the stresses and misfortunes in life that make people depressed, not their thinking style. Wrong! Countless people suffer misfortunes and do not get depressed or anxious, while others seemingly suffer no misfortune at all, and are blighted with depression and anxiety. The Stoic philosopher (and former slave) Epictetus opined that ‘men are disturbed not by things, but by the view which they take of them’. A sentiment that is totally, completely and absolutely correct.

How the fear of death makes people more Right-wing

Bobby Azarian

is a cognitive neuroscientist, a researcher in the Visual Attention and Cognition Lab at George Mason University, and a science writer whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times and Scientific American, among others. His research has been published in journals including Cognition & Emotion and Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. He also runs the blog Science Is Sexy.
Published on Aeon

A string of terror attacks across the globe have shaken the world’s most powerful nations to their core. As a result of these tragic events, and the fear-mongering from politicians hoping to exploit them, many feel that an existential threat is nigh.

To make matters worse, a highly influential and experimentally verified theory from social psychology predicts that, as long as an existential threat looms, the world will grow ever more divided and increasingly hostile. Terror management theory (TMT) explains how and why events that conjure up thoughts about death cause people to cling more strongly to their cultural worldviews – siding with those who share their national, ethnic or political identity, while aggressively opposing those who do not.

Consequently, sharp increases in deadly terror attacks around the world serve to create a sweeping psychological condition that sets the stage for waves of far-Right nationalist movements that encourage prejudice, intolerance and hostility toward dissimilar others.

Europe’s nationalist surge, Brexit in the United Kingdom and the presidency win for Donald Trump in the United States are just the most recent demonstrations of TMT, first proposed by social psychologists in the 1980s and derived from cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work of philosophy and psychology, The Denial of Death (1973).

Becker’s big idea was that much of human action is motivated by a fear of death. Unlike other animals, which lack higher cognition and the ability to reflect, humans recognise the inevitability of their own death. The conflict that results from this realisation and the natural desire to live produces cognitive dissonance that causes profound terror and anxiety. According to Becker, humans invented culture as a buffer for the terror. By adopting cultural worldviews that instil life with meaning and value, one can effectively manage the subconscious dread that is always bubbling below the surface.

While religions offer a path to literal immortality through the belief in an afterlife, non-religious cultural worldviews – such as political ideologies and national identities – provide paths to symbolic immortality. Symbolic immortality refers to being part of something larger that will ultimately outlive the individual, such as a great nation or a movement with a collective identity and pursuit. Much of human effort is dedicated to acts that might help one be remembered by groups or society long after death.

Of course, no matter how logical or intriguing a theory might sound, it is merely speculation if it makes no testable predictions that can be confirmed or disproven by experiment and measurement. What might be most impressive about TMT is how much success it has had in the laboratory. Hundreds of empirical studies have provided support for the theory by confirming something called the mortality salience hypothesis.

According to this hypothesis, if we do in fact adopt cultural worldviews to curb a fear of death – as TMT posits – then reminders of our mortality should produce actions that serve to strengthen faith in our worldviews. Specifically, death reminders should motivate individuals to invest more in groups to which they belong and, conversely, to act more aggressively towards those with different cultural worldviews and national or ethnic identities.

A particularly amusing experiment used hot sauce to measure the phenomenon. Students were broken into two groups and asked to write an essay about their own death or another, more benign topic. They were then presented with someone who did or did not disparage their political views, and asked to decide on the amount of mouth-burning hot sauce that person should have to consume. In line with TMT and the mortality salience hypothesis, participants who’d written about death allocated a large dollop of hot sauce to those who didn’t share their worldview, while those in the control condition did not.

Another mortality salience study on aggression conducted on both Iranian and US college students shows disturbing results. One group of students was asked to ‘jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you physically die,’ and to describe the emotions aroused. Participants in the control condition were given similar questions related to dental pain. The results showed that Iranian students who were made to think about death were more supportive of martyrdom attacks against the US, while those in the control condition opposed them. Similarly, death reminders made US students who identified as politically conservative more supportive of extreme military attacks on foreign nations that could kill thousands of civilians.

From these findings, it is easy to see how nations under attack can quickly grow more divided and increasingly hostile towards those from outside cultures. In fact, studies have shown that mortality salience can amplify nationalism and intensify bias against other groups. Evidence suggests that reminders of death can even influence elections, pushing voters to favour candidates on the Right. Five weeks before the 2004 US presidential election, scientists conducted studies on New Jersey voters to see whether mortality reminders influenced voting directly.

Participants were given the same questions about death as the Iranian students in the previously mentioned study, while those in the control condition received parallel questions about watching television. What they found was pretty astonishing. Those voters prompted to think of death said they intended to vote for George W Bush, the hawkish conservative president, by a three-to-one margin; those prompted to think about TV strongly favoured the Left-wing challenger, John Kerry. Such results could help to explain why, after the terror attacks of 11 September 2001, Bush went from having some of the lowest approval ratings ever to being extremely popular with both Republicans and Democrats.

So what does this all mean for the world today? If massively destructive terror attacks continue, terror management theory predicts that societies will grow exponentially more chaotic and divided. Heightened aggression towards dissimilar others produces a tendency to favour war over peace. Right-wing nationalism will thrive along with prejudice and intolerance. Islamic fundamentalism will flourish while terror attacks grow more frequent. Raised tensions between nations, ethnicities and political groups will lead to further conflict, creating a devastating feedback loop of suspicion and violence.

But it is critical that we not lose optimism in these challenging times. By becoming cognisant of the inflammatory and divisive effect that death reminders and perceived existential threat have on all of us, we can begin to take steps toward defending against it. After each terrorist attack we must actively work to unite groups with different nationalities, ethnicities and cultural worldviews. We must help build bridges between dissimilar communities, and discourage ideas such as immigration bans. And we must be conscious of the way some politicians use fear-mongering and propaganda to manipulate voters. Such efforts, combined with a calm and cool temperament, can help manage the terror of mortality in ways that preserve rationality, compassion and peace.

The hunger mood

by Michael Graziano

Source:Aeon

Hunger isn’t in your stomach or your blood-sugar levels. It’s in your mind – and that’s where we need to shape up

I decided to take a try at the great problem of our time: how to lose weight without any effort. So I did an experiment on myself. I was ripe for it, if truth be told. Here I am eight months later and 50 pounds lighter, so something must have worked. My approach to the problem was different from the usual perspective. I’m a psychologist, not a doctor. From the start I suspected that weight regulation was a matter of psychology, not physiology.

If weight were a matter of calories in and calories out, we’d all be the weight we choose. Everyone’s gotten the memo. We all know the ‘eat less’ principle. Losing weight should be as easy as choosing a shirt colour. And yet, somehow it isn’t, and the United States grows heavier. It’s time to consider the problem through an alternative lens.

Whatever else it is, hunger is a motivated state of mind. Psychologists have been studying such states for at least a century. We all feel hungry before dinner and full after a banquet, but those moments are the tip of the iceberg. Hunger is a process that’s always present, always running in the background, only occasionally rising into consciousness. It’s more like a mood. When it slowly rises or eases back down, even when it’s beneath consciousness, it alters our decisions. It warps our priorities and our emotional investment in long-term goals. It even changes our sensory perceptions – often quite profoundly. 

You sit down to dinner and say: ‘That tiny, little hamburger? Why do they have to make them so small? I’ll have to eat three just to break even.’ That’s the hunger mood making food look smaller. If you’re full, the exact same hamburger looks enormous. It isn’t just the food itself. Your own body image is warped. When the hunger mood rises, you feel a little thinner, the diet feels like it’s working and you can afford a self-indulgence. When satiety kicks in, you feel like a whale. 

Even memory can be warped. Suppose you keep a log of everything you eat. Is that log trustworthy? Not only have you drastically misjudged the size of your meals, but you’ve almost certainly forgotten items. Depending on your hunger state, you might snarf up three pieces of bread and after the meal sincerely remember only one. One recent study found that most of the calories people eat come through snacks between meals. But when you ask people, they deny it. They’re surprised to find out just how much they snack. 

The hunger mood is hard to control, precisely because it operates outside of consciousness. This might be why obesity is such an intractable problem. 

The hunger mood is controlled by the brain stem. The part most responsible for regulating hunger and other basic motivated states is called the hypothalamus, and it sits at the bottom of your brain. It has sensors that literally taste the blood. They detect levels of fat, protein and glucose, as well as blood pressure and temperature. The hypothalamus gathers this data and combines it with sensory signals that percolate in through other systems in the brain – fullness in the gut, the feel and taste and smell of food, the sight of food, even the time of day and other surrounding circumstances.

Given all this data, the neural circuits train up on our dietary habits. That’s why we get hungry at certain times of the day – not because of an empty stomach, but because of a sophisticated neural processor that anticipates the need for more nutrition. If you skip a meal, at first you feel acutely hungry, but then you actually begin to feel less hungry again as that accustomed mealtime passes by. That’s also why we get full at the end of a meal. Again, not because of a full stomach. If that’s your only signal, then you’re drastically overeating. As counterintuitive as it might sound, there’s normally a healthy gap between feeling full and having your stomach actually full. Psychological fullness is a feeling of sufficiency that comes from a much more complex computation. The hypothalamus in effect says: ‘You’ve just eaten a burger. I know from past experience with burgers that in about two hours the protein and fat in your blood will rise. Therefore, in anticipation, I’ll turn off your hunger now.’ The system learns, anticipates, and regulates. It operates in the background. We can consciously interfere with it, but not usually to good effect.

Take in fewer calories and you’ll lose weight. But explicitly try to reduce calories, and you’ll do the exact opposite

Here’s what happens when you interfere with your hypothalamus – when medical advice collides with psychology. Let’s say you decide to cut back on calories. You eat less for a day. The result? It’s like picking up a stick and poking a tiger. Your hunger mood rises and for the next five days you’re eating bigger meals and more snacks, perhaps only vaguely realising it. People tend to judge how much they’ve eaten partly by how full they feel afterward. But since that feeling of fullness is partly psychological, if your hunger mood is up, you might eat more than usual, feel less full than usual, and so mistakenly think that you’ve cut back. You might feel like you’re making progress. After all, you’re constantly vigilant. Sure, now and then you slip up, but you get yourself right back on track again. You feel good about yourself until you get on a scale and notice that your weight isn’t responding. It might go down one day and then blip up the next two days. Dancing under the surface of consciousness, your hunger mood is warping your perceptions and choices.

I’m not denying the physics here. If you take in fewer calories, you’ll lose weight. But if you explicitly try to reduce calories, you’re likely to do the exact opposite. Almost everyone who tries to diet goes through that battle of the bulge. Diets cause the psychological struggle that causes weight gain. 

Let’s say you try another standard piece of advice: exercise. If you burn calories at the gym you’ll definitely lose weight, right? Isn’t that just physics? Except that, after you work out, for the rest of the day you’re so spent that you might actually burn fewer calories on a gym day than on a regular one. Not only that, but after a workout you’ve assuaged your guilt. Your emotional investment in the cause relaxes. You treat yourself to a chocolate chip muffin. You might try to be good and decline the muffin, but the exercise revs up that subtle hunger mood lurking under the surface and then you don’t even know any more how much you’re overeating. Meals grow bigger while seeming to grow smaller. Extra snacks sneak in.

Let’s say you’ve tried all the standard advice – every diet out there. Some of them might even work for a short time, until you fall off the wagon and gain back even more than before. After a while you start to doubt your willpower. If the prevailing medical theory is correct, if weight is a matter of calorie control, then your problem is a weak character. It’s your own fault. That’s the message beamed across our culture from all directions. 

But the concept of willpower is anathema in psychology. Cognitive control is much more subtle, complex and limited in its ability than the lay notion of willpower. That notion is false and harmful to mental health. What is willpower anyway? It’s pitting long-term rewards against short-term rewards, and you’re going to fall off that wagon sooner or later. Every time you fall off, you do more damage than you can undo by climbing back on again. And even when you think you’re firmly on the wagon, most of the psychological complexity runs under the surface of consciousness and therefore you can’t possibly realise how much you’re sabotaging your own efforts.

Where does that leave you? At the end of that seemingly inevitable progression, you’re demoralised and depressed. You can do anything else you put your mind to but somehow you can’t manage the weight loss. And so you enter a disastrous spiral. If you’re going to be miserable anyway, you might as well indulge yourself. The food at least mitigates the misery. You slip into comfort eating, self-medication and addiction, and lose all motivation. You fall into the deepest part of the psychological quagmire and your chance of recovery is small. A recent study showed that if you’re obese, your chance of getting back into the normal range is less than one in 100. 

Most doctors, trainers, and healthcare professionals think about weight from the perspective of chemistry. It’s calories in versus calories out. Eat less, exercise more. Different schools of thought posit that all calories are equivalent, or that fat calories are especially bad, or that carbohydrate calories are particularly to be avoided. All these approaches focus on the way that calories are digested and deployed in the body. They ignore psychology. Most studies treat the psychology of hunger as an inconvenience. A ‘properly’ controlled study forces participants to eat a set amount of calories, thus screening out the annoying influence of autonomous human behaviour. And still, for all that has been learned from this mainstream medical approach, the advice is failing us. More than two-thirds of the US population is overweight. More than one-third is obese.

As I reviewed the discouraging rise of obesity in the US and all over the world, and the discouraging shrinking space between my own belly and my desktop, it seemed to me that the mainstream focus is almost entirely wrong. The obesity epidemic is not an issue of calories or willpower. I began to suspect that our problem with obesity is a problem of poisoning the normal regulatory system. We possess a system that’s intricate and beautifully calibrated. It evolved over millions of years to be good at its job. It should work in the background without any conscious effort, but for more than two-thirds of us it doesn’t. What are we doing to ourselves to screw up the hunger and satiety system?

For about a year, I experimented on myself. I used what’s called an event-related design, which involved some arduous sacrifice (or at least some boredom). Simply put, I ate the same damn thing every day to establish a consistent baseline. I measured weight, waistline, and kept notes on everything I could think of. Then I changed one thing in one meal and monitored its tiny, perturbing effect over the next several days. When the measurements went back to baseline, I’d try a new perturbation. Each tweak by itself gave a small signal, but after a while I could average across many events and watch the pattern emerge. Of course I had no illusions of discovering anything new. This wasn’t formal science. It had a sample size of one. The point was to find out which of all the conflicting advice flying back and forth out there resonated with my own personal data. What should I believe?

As usual, the most instructive part of the experiment turned out to be an incidental observation. Never mind whether some foods grew or shrank my poundage. I noticed instead that some acts grew or shrank my level of hunger. I knew when my hunger mood was up, even if I didn’t consciously feel hungry, because somehow I’d end up at the lunch deli early. And after I finished eating, it didn’t seem like I’d had as much food as usual. Maybe they’d slipped me a smaller sandwich? 

When my hunger mood was down, the roster of priorities would shift and I’d get caught up in my work. Somehow lunch would get delayed by an hour. My moment-by-moment decision-making was warped. Each time it happened it seemed as though there was some other reason for it, but I couldn’t ignore the pattern accumulating in my notes.

Three bad habits appeared to consistently boost my hunger. I call them the super-high death-carb diet, the low-fat craze, and the calorie-counting trap.

The super-high death-carb diet has become normal US fare. We get up in the morning and eat a croissant, or pancakes with syrup, or a muffin. Or cereal and milk. The cereal is all carbs. Then comes lunch. Suppose I’m unhealthy and eat a fast-food, McDonald’s lunch. We think of it as greasy food, but beyond the grease the burger has a bun and the ketchup is sugar paste. The fries are all carbs. The large soda is sugar water. The grease is only a tiny part of the meal. Maybe you feel morally superior and prefer a ‘healthy’ lunch, a deli sandwich that’s mainly French bread. And chips. And a Snapple. All carbs. 

The afternoon snack is some sugary beverage at Starbucks and a cookie. Or a power bar, which is a candy bar with spin. If you’re good, maybe a banana, which is as high carb as you get in the fruit world. Dinner? Piled with potatoes, pasta, rice, bread. We think we’re healthy eating sushi but it’s mostly rice. Maybe you go for a nice healthy soup. It’s thickened with flour and has noodles and potatoes. And every meal comes with soda, or juice, or ice tea, or some other sweetened drink. Then dessert. Then a snack before bed. It’s all carbs. You can’t walk through a supermarket without being assaulted by carbs on all sides. Some people talk about complex carbs versus refined sugar. They have a point, but take out the refined sugar and it’s still a staggering amount of carbohydrates. The super-high death-carb diet has warped our sense of normal.

The low-carb people might be right for the wrong reasons. Starting with Robert Atkins, the American cardiologist who first popularised the diet, an entire physiological theory has sprung up. In that theory, if you cut out enough carb, your body switches from using glucose to using ketones as the main energy-transporting molecule in your blood. By using ketones, the body begins to draw on its fat reserves. Moreover, by reducing blood sugar, you reduce insulin, the main hormone that promotes the deposition of fat in the body. Less carbs, less fat. The theory sounds good and might have some validity, but its impact on obesity remains controversial. One recent paper seems to smack it down entirely. 

The study monitored two groups of people. For six days, one group ate low-carb, the other low-fat. Both were strictly forced to eat the same number of calories. The result? The low-carb group did not lose more weight. Actually, the low-fat group did. The low-carb people might have reduced their insulin, but the theory didn’t really translate into magical weight loss. Given all that contradiction, what can we say about the low-carb approach?

Skip breakfast, cut calories at lunch, eat a small dinner, be constantly mindful of the calorie count, and you poke the hunger tiger

The theory and the experiments might be right as far as they go, but they miss the most important point. They emphasise how calories are deployed in the body instead of emphasising the motivated state of hunger. It would be encouraging to see more studies on how different diets affect hunger regulation. It is now well-established that a high-carbohydrate diet increases your hunger. A low-carb diet removes that stimulant. Taking all this together, the evidence suggests that a low-carb diet doesn’t make you lose weight because of its effect on your energy utilisation. It makes you lose weight because you eat less. Or (perhaps more accurately), the ridiculous, super-high death-carb diet stokes up the hunger mechanism and your eating goes out of control. 

Because that hunger state runs mostly beneath consciousness, it’s easy to misattribute the result. But in the end, if you follow the death-carb diet to its conclusion, you can’t help noticing the effect on your appetite. Extremely obese people reach a point where they’re always hungry, never full. They can eat six dinners’ worth until their stomachs feel stretched and terrible, about to split in the middle, but the brain isn’t satisfied.

The low-fat craze works the same way. I grew up in the era when public service commercials on TV warned us about the dangers of fat. Poor data and a rush to conclusions might have led the medical community to that recommendation. Don’t eat butter. Don’t eat eggs. Don’t drink whole milk. Take the skin off chicken. Eat low-fat yogurt (which is still chock-full of sugar). Dietary fat might have its medical downside; I don’t think the data are perfectly clear yet. But cutting out the fat has led to a disaster. As numerous studies have now established, fat reduces hunger. Take it away and the hunger mood soars. It’s not a simple relationship, and the effect is gradual. Remember, your hypothalamus takes in complex data and learns associations over time. Give it a few months of training with a diet that’s stripped of fat, and it will ratchet up your sense of hunger. 

But the most insidious attack on the hunger mechanism might be the chronic diet. The calorie-counting trap. The more you try to micromanage your automatic hunger control mechanism, the more you mess with its dynamics. Skip breakfast, cut calories at lunch, eat a small dinner, be constantly mindful of the calorie count, and you poke the hunger tiger. All you do is put yourself in the vicious cycle of trying to exert willpower and failing. That’s when you enter the downward spiral.

All three of these effects – high carb, low fat, and calorie counting – are increasingly evident in the scientific literature on diet, and also showed up in my self-observations. Amazingly, even a small tweak to one meal on one day had a noticeable effect on my hunger mood.

At the end of all my self-observations and meditations, the time had come to put the theory to a test. I tried a simple formula. First, moderately low-carb. The Atkins and Paleo diet purists would scoff. I reduced my carbohydrate intake by about 90 per cent and in doing so came nowhere near a low-carb diet. I wanted to avoid the super-high death-carb diet that most of us eat most of the time. Second, a little higher fat. I know some people swear by high fat and snack on entire sticks of butter. I don’t know what the research is on that kind of thing, but all I wanted was to avoid the extremity of a diet stripped of fat. Third, I could eat as much as I like at each meal. That last proposition was the hardest. When you want to lose weight, it’s hard to wrap your mind around the concept of eating more. I simply had to trust a bizarre psychological twist: if I try to eat less, I’ll end up eating more.

I could give a list of foods – salmon, peanut butter, pork chops, apples, tomatoes, chicken with the skin, tofu, eggs, and on and on – but really the concept is more revealing than the details. The diet had nothing to do with standard health advice. It had nothing to do with how those particular foods chemically affect my body. I wasn’t thinking of my arteries or my liver or my insulin. The approach was designed to speak to my unconscious hunger control mechanism, to encourage it to eat less. And it worked at a slow drip of about two pounds a week, trailing off finally to a much more comfortable weight. Twenty years of accumulation, 50 extra pounds (I cringe to admit it) went away in a few months.

There is no effort in an all-I-want diet of moderately fat comfort food. I simply sat back and watched my brainstem do its thing

The beauty of the method was that it required no effort. By effort, I mean that dubious concept of willpower. Pitting long-term goals against short-term rewards. When the hunger mood rises, the personal struggle is heartbreaking. I know all about that struggle and the weird thing is, the struggle is alluring. It might be dreadful, and it might be counterproductive, but it makes you feel like you’re doing something. Our society is impressed by hard work. Think of those people exercising maniacally on that TV show The Biggest Loser. We expect progress to be punishing, and we admire the people who push themselves to super-human limits. Another psychological trap, I guess. None of that self-flagellation turned out to be necessary. I had to reconcile myself to what felt like a lazy method. There is really no effort in an all-I-want diet full of moderately fat comfort food. I simply sat back and watched my brainstem do its thing. 

I don’t think I’m alone in this experience. Others have tried a similar diet, though perhaps for other reasons. Advocating for one particular weight-loss diet isn’t my point. My message is this: your weight is in large measure about your psychology. It’s about the hunger mood. Obesity is a crippling social problem, but to our detriment the research has almost uniformly ignored this aspect of the situation. Consider this to be a call to science to focus a great deal more on the psychology of the hunger mood.

In some ways, the hunger system is like the breathing system. The brain has an unconscious mechanism that regulates breathing. Suppose that system got shut down so that it was up to you to consciously control your own breath, adjusting its rate and depth depending on factors such as blood oxygen, carbon dioxide level, physical exertion, and so on. What would happen? You’d die in about 10 minutes. You’d lose track of the necessities. The intellectual, conscious mind is not really good at these matters of regulating the internal environment. It’s better to leave the job as much as possible to the dedicated systems that evolved to do it. 

What you can do with your conscious mind is to set the general parameters. Put yourself in a place where your automatic systems can operate correctly. Don’t put a plastic bag over your head. 

Likewise, don’t eat the super-high death-carb, low-fat diet. Don’t micromanage your brainstem by counting every calorie. You might be surprised at how well your health self-regulates.

When it’s good to be bad

The relentless pursuit of success is valorised in our culture, but taking the long way around is often the best

by Cody Delistraty 

Source: aeon

On 11 October 1726, Benjamin Franklin stepped off the Berkshire and breathed in ‘the fine weather’ of Philadelphia. After spending two years in London learning the printing trade, he had crossed back over the Atlantic on a 12-week voyage that left him nauseated but craving the comforts of America. 

Within three years he would be publishing The Pennsylvania Gazette, a popular daily newspaper, followed by the indispensable Poor Richard’s Almanack. But on that fine October day, the 20-year-old had another idea – an idea that had him scurrying to his room to find his quill pen and a bottle of red ink.

With these, he sketched a chart – the days of the week on top and 13 ‘virtues’ on the side – which he would use to test his personal growth. ‘I conceiv’d the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection’, Franklin wrote in his Autobiography. ‘I wish’d to live without committing any fault at any time; and to conquer all that either natural inclination, custom, or company might lead me into.’ The virtues he listed were temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity and humility.

Franklin quickly found that he was less than perfect. Black dots began poxing his chart. On the first Sunday of his exercise he twice betrayed his virtue of silence (with ‘a habit I was getting into: prattling, punning, and joking, which only made me acceptable to trifling company’); and once his virtue of order. The following day he violated silence and order yet again, but this time he also failed to be frugal (‘to waste nothing’). Tuesday saw the same breaches of virtue as well as a failing of resolution.

Throughout that week and the next, Franklin would betray all of his virtues, perhaps most dubiously that of chastity. This was not a new problem: while working as a printer in London, he thought his marriage prospects dim, thanks to his getting frequently caught up in ‘intrigues with low women that fell in my way’. Fell in his way, indeed.

What Franklin began to learn was that attempting total perfection was futile. He gave up his chart, thinking it better to allow himself a few faults so as to be near perfect, rather than trying so hard for unattainable heights that any slight failure derailed his entire week. ‘A speckled axe is best’, he concluded. ‘A benevolent man should allow a few faults in himself.’

It is a common belief that to achieve a goal one must work at it constantly – not taking a circuitous path towards it when a straight one is available. Thus the Overeaters Anonymous organisation, the Atkins diet, the South Beach diet, and so on, ban a variety of ‘bad foods’; financial planners would probably advise clients against going to fancy restaurants while saving up to buy a house or car; a pastor would seek to dissuade his congregation from sin, no matter how minor. In order to achieve a goal, the thinking goes, one must not deviate from the straightest course; to allow for mistakes or failures is to torpedo your chances of attaining your goal.

And yet a new school of thinking is challenging these received ways and arguing that straying from the path, even engaging in hedonistic behaviour, might be the surest way to success.

Rita Coelho do Vale is an assistant professor at the Católica Lisbon School of Business and Economics, where she researches the human decision-making process with respect to self-regulation. She says that we not only can but should engage in behaviour antithetical to our ultimate goals.

In experiments conducted with Rik Pieters and Marcel Zeelenberg, and published in January 2016 in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, do Vale surveyed the way people go about achieving their goals. She concluded that it is better to make plans to fail intermittently – to splurge on occasional luxuries when saving for a house; to have a slice of chocolate cake when trying to shed a few pounds – than to end up failing anyway and getting so demoralised you give up your goal altogether.

‘It’s something that’s so obvious, but no one has ever studied these phenomena,’ do Vale told me. ‘We all plan for breaks during the day – coffee, a nap – and we know that we will feel better after these rests. But with goals we simply don’t think like this.’

Do Vale conducted a pair of diet-related experiments. A ‘straight striving group’ was asked to adhere to a strict regimen of 1,500 calories per day with limited food choices, while an ‘intermittent striving’ group was given an even stricter diet of 1,300 calories with limited choices; however, after six days of strict dieting the second group was allowed one day of 2,700 calories with unlimited food choices.

 Do Vale found that the ‘intermittent’ strivers had higher self-regulatory abilities, while generating a greater variety of strategies to overcome food temptations: they were more motivated to see the diet through. Participants in the ‘straight striving’ group, meanwhile, were more likely to quit the diet and report emotional setbacks when they accidentally overate. It follows that, so long as it is planned, it is often good to be bad. ‘The only way to get rid of temptation,’ Oscar Wilde wrote in The Picture of Dorian Gray, ‘is to yield to it.’

In June 2007, Angela Duckworth published a revolutionary study, where she found that the personal quality of ‘grit’ was the single most important factor in success – more important even than socioeconomic background. The world of pop psychology was set ablaze.

Duckworth, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, with a MacArthur Fellowship under her belt (largely due to her grit-related findings), has become an in-demand public speaker and a preacher of meritocratic ascension: she espouses the idea that success is about effort and anyone, no matter where they’re from, can get to the top. It’s a theory tailor-made for the middle and upper classes: 

‘We’re here because we tried; you’re there because you didn’t.’ In Grit: the Power and Passion of Perseverance, to be published this May, Duckworth supports her findings with rousing anecdotes. At the West Point military academy, a cadet’s ‘grit’ score was a better predictor of his success in the Beast Barracks (a gruelling summer training course) than his fitness, leadership ability, or intelligence; at the Scripps National Spelling Bee, contestants with the highest grit score were the most likely to get to the final round, regardless of intelligence or initial spelling ability.

Most people aren’t extremely gritty; they won’t be able to study 15 hours a day for a spelling bee, or complete punishing military training in the summer heat

This ‘grit score’, determined via a test created by Duckworth, is based on answers to questions concerning diligence, seeing tasks through, hard work, and not being discouraged by setbacks. ‘Cheat days’ are unacceptable for the high-grit person; but if she does somehow stumble, she’s able to get back up and continue forward.

Duckworth’s findings are relentless. To a certain extent she’s right: people who are able to persevere despite repeated failure do tend eventually to find success. Yet this approach to goal-completion and this negative view of setbacks (they are to be overcome, not planned or revelled in) puts this version of success out of most people’s reach.

The truth is, most people aren’t extremely gritty; they won’t be able to study for 15 hours a day for a spelling bee, or complete punishing military training courses in the summer heat. And not even the grittiest are guaranteed success. In fact, the mindset needed to maintain persistent forward motion can be its own setback. People who are obsessive and who want the very best for themselves tend to be the grittiest; they also tend, as University of Texas psychiatrist Monica Ramirez Basco writes in her book Never Good Enough (2000), to be ‘more vulnerable to depression when stressful events occur’. 

Plus, much as we may want to achieve our goals – and be willing to work for them – there are limits to our capacity for work and will. That’s because willpower is a finite resource, according to Roy Baumeister, a professor of psychology at Florida State University, who coined the term ‘ego depletion’. Ego depletion (or a dwindling reserve of willpower) is the reason that you may feel less keen to exercise after a hard day at the office; it’s the reason poorer people, after expending energy on finding the best price on basic goods at the grocery store, may then buy bags of Skittles and lowbrow magazines at the checkout counter. You only have so much willpower to use before you need to take a break from decision-making and let it replenish. In Baumeister’s principal study on willpower, people who were told to give a speech advocating beliefs contrary to their own were less able to complete a difficult puzzle afterwards, implying that psychological stress had depleted their reserve of willpower.

But why do some people have significantly more willpower – and thus the potential for higher grit – than others? It might boil down to the types and number of decisions they must make each day, factors that are primarily influenced by one’s socioeconomic class.

‘Slack’, which allows a person to use more of their cognitive and emotional resources, comes from having a cushier social and financial safety net, according to Sendhil Mullainathan, a professor of economics at Harvard University, and Eldar Shafir, a behavioural scientist at Princeton University. 

Slack is often a better indicator of potential success than grit. It’s the reason the impoverished single mother, gritty and hardworking though she might be, is likely to have a tougher time succeeding than a young man from an affluent family. Her relative lack of slack means she has less room for error; even if she is equally good at recovering from setbacks (the quintessence of grit), she will simply face both more arduous and more numerous setbacks, leading to a faster depletion of willpower.

You soon see how privilege can exert influence in goal-driven behaviours. In this light, the notion that hard work and passion are all that is necessary for success begins to seem woefully naïve. In almost every case, but particularly where slack is in short supply, it’s advisable to plan for a setback. ‘It’s important to plan in advance to fail,’ do Vale told me. ‘Perhaps we should call failure something different – a moment of indulgence, a moment of rest, a saving of willpower.’

Epicurus understood that the expectation of future pleasure is a pleasure in itself. Taking up his ideas, the Enlightenment philosopher Jeremy Bentham noted: ‘Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure.’ Yet pleasure, for Epicurus and Bentham, was defined not by sensation or excitement but by both the absence of pain and the expectation of its absence. For Freud, the ‘pleasure principle’ described the active pursuit of pleasure; but in both cases, pain and pleasure are binary feelings: while a person might still have to physically endure pain, by looking forward to a lack of pain in the future – that is, pleasure – she can be sufficiently distracted from her current bodily discomfort.

The history of exaggerated pleasure is generally a response to a perceived deprivation. That is, pleasure is relative. For the late 19th-century French Decadents, for instance, whose works might seem salacious, pornographic, unnecessary (reminiscent of the Marquis de Sade), their exaggerated pleasure came to embody a bolder meaning when juxtaposed with the bourgeois values that brought levels of financial inequality and deprivation that had been unheard of since the Revolution.

To take a more prosaic example, consuming 2,300 calories might not be pleasurable to someone who consumes that on a daily basis; however it quickly becomes pleasurable when one is accustomed to eating just 1,300 calories per day. A fancy restaurant means very little if every night is spent at august tables, and a good deal more when one has been consuming dinners comprised chiefly of ramen. 

Therefore to plan hedonistic setbacks on your way to achieving a goal is to convert an otherwise painful process into a more pleasurable one. ‘The simple act of knowing they would have a moment of pleasure in the future made participants more persistent towards their goals’, said do Vale.

Pleasure, however, is a particularly slippery concept. Surely the pursuit of pleasure – and avoidance of pain – does not exclusively inform our every move? Is that what all of our goals come down to – maximising pleasure, minimising pain? In De Anima, Aristotle claimed animals desire things and with this desire they are given movement – a lion desires food so he runs for a gazelle. But for human beings, Aristotle says, reason also plays into our pursuit of a goal.

Humans use reason to shape how they imagine a useful object of desire. With reason and desire working in tandem we choose and pursue our goals. In Phaedrus, Plato said the soul is guided by a dark horse of passion and a white horse of reason. Socrates agreed, but said the white horse is of greater importance – we must use reason to pursue the right things; to let desire reign over reason is to chase the eventually meaningless and temporal.

Franklin eventually gave up on his virtue chart. The single fault behind all his other faults was pride

There are un-pleasurable, even painful aspects to pursuing most goals, and so we must be clever about what we choose to go after. To go wherever desire and pleasure whisk us is to fall into the trap of chasing things we want in the immediate moment but may care nothing about in the longer term. Zooming out on our lives, it is fascinating to see that both our goals, and the ways in which we set out to achieve them, so often go unexamined. Why do we want what we want? Why do we think a relentless pursuit forward is the surest way to succeed? We so seldom interrogate our desires and the best ways to achieve them – especially when those methods cut against the grain of what we’ve grown accustomed to.

After years of striving for perfection, Franklin eventually gave up on his virtue chart. He noted that the single fault behind all his other faults was pride. ‘In reality, there is, perhaps, no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride’, he wrote. ‘Disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive…even if I could conceive that I had completely overcome it, I should probably be proud of my humility.’

That he ever thought he could achieve perfection, without setbacks, without respites, Franklin admitted, was his gravest error. He had been naïve. And prideful. Only decades later, while writing his autobiography, did he realise that his goals could not be attained just by trying hard, by going at them again and again, without rest or leaving a place for pleasure: ‘the mere speculative conviction that it was our interest to be completely virtuous was not sufficient to prevent our slipping.’ He saw that pursuing his truest goals would take more than pure desire. It would also take reason. It would take a plan.