Sweatpants Dance Party

So here's what's up.  I don't know what I want this tumblr to be about.  It seems like you have to have a "thing" and be on topic with that "thing" to tumble properly.  My problem is that I like a lot of things.  I like to contemplate the meaning of life, the meaning of my life, and I also like to swear about meaningless crap.  I like pictures of cats and poop jokes, and I like learning about behavioral economics and how we make choices.  I am obviously a very complex person. 

The internet is interesting.  In the beginning, it didn't seem to me like anyone would care much about what other people wrote on the internet, and now people make livings off of it.  It matters how you present yourself on the internet now, and that is a lot of pressure.  It's also interesting because whoever people are on the internet is who they have chosen to present.  It's their public face, which may or may not represent them in any way. 

What is particularly difficult about that is that people grow.  You put something up on the internet, and really that only represents you at one moment in time. You put something up, and ten years later you don't know who you'll be exactly, what may have happened, or what you will care about in that future moment.  We are now made to account for who we are at every moment.  To anticipate our own growth so we will not be embarrassing or horrible to our future selves, and by that I mean our future public faces.  Understand that I am not saying people shouldn't be held accountable, but that people grow and change, and there has to be room for that.  

I don't think we like complexity, or at least I don't think we like it in others. We like to see ourselves as complex and evolving, and everyone else as static.  

All that having been said, I treat you to a post I wrote exactly 10 years ago today:

1000 island poop

I talked to my mom recently as she was clearing out the clutter around her house and she mentioned she found a diet plan we had made together years ago.  She starts telling me what was on the plan, and all I could think was that it must have been from around the time I was in middle school or early high school, meaning that it has been at least 20 years that I have been unhappy with my weight.  Twenty.  Years.  My entire adult life and then some, because I knew I was a chubby kid before I even started making diet plans. 

Before I go further, I want to say this will not be a post where I rehash my lifelong relationship with my weight.  I will not go into my feelings on societal pressures on women or standards of beauty.  I will not promise you “8 ways to get amazing abs in 10 minutes a week,” and I do not have a silver bullet.  All I can do is tell you how I feel now, how it affects my personal happiness, and the steps I've been taking to make changes.

How I wish I could eat you without feeling bad about it...

What do you mean when you say “I want to improve my health”?

Let me start off by saying that yesterday I got delicious cookies in the mail.  How, you ask?

A few weeks back I began to tackle the de-cluttering of my house, something I will post more about later, and was going through my boxes of various nostalgia.  Littered throughout, were postcards and letters I had received over the years from friends and family.  I thought how awesome it was to get real mail, especially that since now mail mostly just means bills and catalogues I swear I never signed up to receive.

Except for recently when I got these awesome mittens as a surprise in the mail from a friend.

At the time, I wasn't looking for ways to increase my happiness, but seeing the letters it occurred to me I would like to strengthen my relationships with friends and family.  It also struck me how happy I was to have those letters, how awesome it felt to receive some unexpected Valentine's cards from friends this past year, and how happy I thought it would make my friends to get some unexpected mail.  

In mid-December of 2013, I went to a conference that is the equivalent of disneyland for those in the psychology field held, as luck would have it, right next to Disneyland.  I went to an informal session held by Martin Seligman (aka Marty to his friends and pioneer of the learned helplessness theory), wherein he discussed the shift in primary focus in the latter part of his career to that of well-being.  

Seligman is a prominent figure in the world of positive psychology, and has developed what he believes are the five essential elements in well-being.  He calls this PERMA (positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, achievement).

I recognize these articles have been long, so I'm going to change it up and spitball out these last ideas.  

Making a decision by the flip of a coin?

The guys over at Freakonomics wanted to learn more about decision making and so they created an experiment.  People can go to a website, ask a question, and their question will be answered by the flip of a coin.  You also fill out some information so they can track how well your decision turned out, how happy you are, etc.  

I'm hoping to see an update soon of how this experiment has turned out, and if they've been able to discover anything systematic about people's decision making.  I'm also interested to know if they will have any results on the aspect of this experiment I find the most interesting, which is the feeling you get while the coin is in the air.  

In most cases where I have flipped a coin to make a decision, which I think we have all done at some point because sometimes we really do like the idea of a decision not being in our hands, as soon as the coin is in the air I have a feeling about how I want it to land.  I'd be interested to see if in their experiment flipping the coin crystallized a decision for anyone, or if they didn't follow the instruction of the coin because by flipping it they were able to see the way it landed was actually not what they wanted.   

But I digress, so in the meantime, I can tell you what I have read thus far about decision making.  

Think broadly and ask around

The research I've seen shows pretty consistently two clear ways to help improve decision making and/or improve your affective forecasting.  First, is to think broadly.  When we think about a decision, we tend to focus on a very narrow part of our lives.  We don't think about the day-to-day, and all the other events that will happen to us.  As you think about the decision in perspective to all the other things that happen in your life, you are better able to predict how you'll feel in the future.

Second, ask around!  Research also shows that when you find people who have traveled the path you are considering traveling, and ask them what they think and what their experience was, you become more accurate in your predictions of how you will feel about your decision.  This can be from speaking to someone you know, or even from researching reviews, blogs, etc.  

The good news

Have you ever made a pretty major decision and then after the fact thought you made the best decision?  Life is good?  Yeah, well you have a little something called subjective optimization on your side.  This is the tendency to rationalize a decision so that whatever you decide, in retrospect, seems like it was a good decision.  After all, you can never know what would have happened if you made a different decision, so our brains do us the favor of making us feel we chose correctly.  Thanks brain!

I wanted to take a break from the decision making series to cover an important aspect in my decision.  For me currently, this is the matter of why I do and do not want to become a therapist.  It is the two sides of the same coin.

Today I was doing some cleaning up, and found some items my adolescent clients had made for me - little bracelets, fortune tellers, papers - and I felt a moment of fondness wash over me, followed by a moment of glumness.  The fondness comes from genuinely having connected with these kids.  From having sat with them through good moments and bad, exploring with them, laughing with them, and from listening and getting to know them.  

This fondness comes because as a therapist, you make real connections with clients.  I think if you have a therapist who does not generally seem to care about your well-being, you should find another therapist. It is hard to sit in a room with someone and not genuinely want that person to be successful in his or her goals.  

The glumness comes in many forms.  Being a therapist is stressful and draining work.  It is about dealing with life and death situations at times.  These are not things unique to this profession.  However, what I think is unique is that you form deep, and yet temporary, connections with people, sometimes during the emotional low points in their lives.  

You sit with them over many weeks, months, or years, and they come to be a part of your life in some way. You are privy to the most intimate things about them. You may think about them, or worry about them.  You can try not to take any of that emotion on, but some of it will seep in.  It has to, you're human!  

And at some point, it will be time for them to move on, you will say goodbye, and you will likely never see or hear from them again.  

In Part 1, I methodically approached making a decision.  I brainstormed my options and the values important to me.  I ranked things.  I assigned points to determine just how important each thing was.  I went through each option to see how well it matched each value, and I ended up with a number estimating the "best" decision.  So we have this decision-making thing locked down now, right?

Perhaps not.

When making a decision, you can gather a lot of information.  Using the example from last time, I can check what jobs are out there, and use the Bureau of Labor Statistics to see the expected growth in various fields. I can explore expected salaries, or the degree requirements for jobs I'd be interested in.  I can research degree programs to see if I'd be a good fit.  I can use travel sites to check for cheap fares.  The question, however, is are these the things I really want to know?  Yes, and no. 

While these are great bits of information to have, what I'm really trying to do when making a decision is predict how my future self will feel after having made the decision.  Will I be better off in the future?  Will I be happier?  This is called affective forecasting, and research indicates that we are not very good at it.  At all.

Not only are we not very good at it, we all seem to make the same kind of error. On the whole, people tend to overestimate the impact of a future event on their happiness.  This is what is called impact bias.  For example, when people try to predict how they will feel after a breakup, they imagine themselves upset and for a while.  Similarly, when people are asked to predict how they will feel after a positive event, like a graduation, they predict they will be quite happy and for a while.  However, in both cases, people return to about the level of happiness they had before the event, and do so much more quickly than they had predicted (for a breakup, usually about two to three months).

When making a decision, we also tend to think about what, if anything, we have already expended.  For instance, if we spend three years in a relationship, in school, or at a job, we don't want to think our time is wasted. In our decision-making process, we take into account the value of whatever time, money, and effort we have already put in, and weigh that when moving forward.  However, not only do we weigh it, it seems we tend to weigh a potential loss more heavily than a potential gain (aka "the sunk cost fallacy").  We are loss averse. We are creatures who have survived because we take calculated risks, and a potential loss can feel much more risky than a potential gain.  

Then, of course, we have this pesky thing called confirmation bias.  Let's say you believe that psychology is all a bunch of nonsense and quackery. The likelihood is that you will remember and retain information that supports this belief while ignoring information that does not.   

So if we cannot accurately predict how we'll feel in the future, we are more averse to losses than to gains, and we seem to seek out or retain information that confirms what we already believe, how can we make a good decision?

Stay tuned for Part 3!

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As a recent graduate with a Master's degree in Counseling facing life outside of school, I have a number of potentially big decisions ahead of me.  The last year I was in school I said repeatedly that my plan was to graduate, quit my part-time job, and travel for at least a month.  Now that the possibility of doing that is staring me in the face, other questions have crept in as well.  What will I do when I get back from this trip? What kind of job would I want to get?  Do I want to get a job in counseling or stay at my current job?  Or both?  Do I want to go on for my PhD?  

As these questions swirled through my head, ebbing and flowing, the best option changing from day to day, I knew it was time to sit down and try to sift through the clutter.  There clearly must be a way to find the right decision, right?  The "best" decision is out there.  I just have to find it.  

Or rather, I need to find out how to find it.

The first step was to revisit an exercise I had learned in my first year of school.  The exercise is aimed at "values clarification" and "finding personalized meaning."  Basically, it's an exercise to get a person talking about what is important to him or her and why, and thereby help the person come to a decision.  Really, it's just a very mathy version of a pros and cons list.  

Given that this is not the easiest exercise to explain, I'll provide myself as an example.  

First, you have to brainstorm the options that you have, as well as the relevant values. As seen below:

So you can see the options I have come up with so far include traveling, applying for PhD, applying for internships, staying at my current job, and maintaining the status quo.  The things I want to consider for each of these options are the values of importance to me.  These include things like my current and future financial stability, current and future job prospects, happiness, and wanderlust.

Next, you would rank the values, like so:

The rankings can be difficult to decide.  You may find that it is pretty clear some things are more important to you than others, or you may find that many things seem equally important.  In other words, the rankings might not tell you much at all.  This is where assigning weight comes in.  

You can choose a weighting system that makes sense to you.  For my purposes, I will assign up to 500 points per value.  Meaning that if something is very, very important to me I will assign it a value of 500 points, but if it is not so important, maybe it gets 100 points. The chart will look something like this:

Next you look at each value to see how it will be fulfilled under each option.  You would assign it a + or a -.  If one of your values would be really well fulfilled under a certain option, you can assign it a ++.  If it would be really unfulfilled, a --.  If it seems neutral, you can give it a 0. Like so:

I know, this seems to be going overboard fast, but hang in there, it's almost over.  Now it is time to add it all up.  Each +, ++, -- or - would now be replaced with the corresponding weight.  For example, Wanderlust is assigned a weight of 350.  In the "Travel in Fall" option, it has two plus signs, so for that box I would put 700 points (350x2).  In the "Stay at current job" option, Wanderlust shows a -, so that would now be -350 for that box.  Like this:

Then to find out what the "best" decision is, you add up each column of options.  So with all this diligent work, I've found the best decision(s) for me in clear landslide victories, and here they are!:

So... why don't I feel ... victorious?

So I'm reading this book about thinking, and he's talking about how there are many cases where you have an immediate reaction to something that doesn't necessarily involve thinking.  He says to look at the following words and notice your reaction.  The words are "banana vomit."

So, I am on public transportation and immediately laughing like a bonkers person.

Then he goes on to say about how normally people will feel disgusted and have an immediate gross out reaction to these words, make various associations, etc.  So I look at it again.

And again I laugh like a fool.