In our relationships we often want to share things with others — we want them to know what we’re thinking and feeling, or convince them to think in a certain way. To do this, we have to carry out a miraculous task — to somehow get what’s in our head over to the other person, so that they understand it in much the same way that we do.
In some ways this might seem like a simple task — you can “just tell them”. And sometimes it is as simple as that. But in many cases it isn’t easy — our thoughts and feelings are complex, or they are conflicting, or we have a sense of something but we’re not really sure how to put it into words. And there may be a lot of background information that we know but the other person doesn’t (imagine telling a stranger about something that just happened to your best friend). On top of this, we have to use a language where almost every word has several different meanings.
Perhaps this is obvious, but it seems to me that miscommunication and lack of communication are everywhere. I’ve been in more than my share of business meetings where almost no real communication happens — people talk at length about something that others pretend to understand but don’t, or different people express conflicting points of view while congratulating themselves about reaching agreement. And in personal relationships I’ve had my share of arguments that later turned out to be… just misunderstandings. Continue reading →
Why is it that when we get insulted, it helps us feel better to insult the other person back? On the face of it, our counter-insult does nothing to refute whatever negative thing they just said about us. For example:
James: Thanks for cutting me off! You just failed your driving test, genius!
Pierre: Oh yeah, well I bet you haven’t gotten laid in twenty years!
When we get insulted, it seems like our feelings may be mainly a reaction to two things:
- Feeling like other people may accept the insult as true and view us in a negative light
- Feeling attacked, and that others may now view us as having a lower position in the social hierarchy if we’re unable to defend ourselves
I imagine that giving a counter-insult addresses the second point — we’re defending ourselves, and not letting the other person get away with attacking us.
So attacking the other person back may keep us from looking like we’re lower on the social hierarchy, but it has its own problems. You end up with an antagonistic relationship, where both of you come across as looking bad. A better goal might be not just defending yourself, but defending yourself and having fun and maintaining the possibility of having a good relationship with the person who delivered the insult. But how can you get there? Continue reading →
When it comes down to it, “productivity” seems to be all about how we spend our time. We want to spend our time in a way that best brings about the things we care about. Here are four things that can get in the way of productivity:
Doing an excellent job… on things that aren’t very important
It might seem that the most effective person would be the one who made sure things were done right. After all, a great job is always better than a mediocre job, right? This is true up to a point. However, there is a fatal flaw in this reasoning, which is that it doesn’t consider that there is often a cost to doing a great job, which is often… spending more time on it. Time isn’t free, and spending more time on something doesn’t just mean you’ll do a better job on that thing — it also means you’ll do something else less well, or not be able to do something else at all. Bottom line: spend a lot of time where it counts, and do an adequate job where it doesn’t count so much.
Doing things that improve our lives… a little bit
Doing things to better your life is of course a good thing, everything else being equal. But again, there is a cost associated with doing something to improve you life, which is the time spent doing it. Doing something that gives you a positive but small return may actually stand in the way of doing something that gives a bigger return. Of course, some things we have no choice about — they must be done, even though we don’t get much out of them (unloading the dishwasher, for example). But where we have a choice, not doing things that improve our lives a little may actually make time for doing things that improve our lives a lot. Continue reading →
We all have our own understanding about the way the world works. I like to refer to this individual way of viewing things as our “view of the world”. Our view of the world might include that, say, Obama is the president, grass is green, James and Samantha are our friends from college, and that we love chocolate-covered strawberries.
Depending on our political and religious beliefs, it might also include Obama being an “outstanding” or a “disaster” president, and it might include “we are physical machines described by the laws of physics” or alternatively, “Jesus is my Lord and Savior”. We also have thoughts about what other people’s attitudes and beliefs are (such as “he did that because he only cares about himself”) as well as what we think the best course of action is in a given situation (“we should raise taxes to pay for the fight against global warming”). Even our understanding of what happened in the past is part of our view of the world. By a “view of the world” then, I simply mean everything we believe to be true about the world.
Our views of the world are, ultimately, in our heads. Sometimes we have good reasons for our beliefs, sometimes they are based on incorrect information, and sometimes they are just guesses. Sometimes we’re right, and sometimes we’re wrong.
When we’re interacting with other people, our views of the world often differ.
And we often want other people to accept our view of the world and attempt to “sell” them on our view. For example, we might want others to agree with our political or religious beliefs (“We should present all sides of the story in biology, including intelligent design” vs. “Intelligent design goes against everything we know from science and doesn’t belong in the classroom”). We might want others to agree with our view of the past (“You told me I could return this vacuum cleaner if it was defective!” vs. “I told you you have to contact the manufacturer with any problems!”). And, we might want others to agree with our evaluation of ourselves (“I am an excellent driver” vs. “You are a terrible driver”). Continue reading →
To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Be yourself!” We hear this phrase in many contexts — as advice for children worried about how to act at school, or for a junior high school student just starting to go on dates, or as general advice for having good relationships and friendships, not to mention endorsements from people like the esteemed Mr. Emerson mentioned above. On the flip side, there are probably just as many jeering and booing as applauding this statement, suggesting that perhaps this advice doesn’t take the realities of the world into account, or that it is just too simplistic to be useful. But what does it really mean to “be yourself”? I think it’s not always clear what “being yourself” might mean, and not even clear what you might do to “be yourself” — but I do think that some of the ideas around “being yourself” may be relevant to having great relationships.
Saying what you “feel like saying” vs. Communicating what you feel
What might “being yourself” mean? It could mean that you say whatever you feel like saying. So if you’re at the opera and you feel like standing up and (inappropriately) shouting “Bravo!” in the middle of a quiet scene, you would do so. If you’re physically attracted to someone, you would tell them, even if they’re married to your friend. As you can imagine, saying and doing what you “feel like doing” can get you into a lot of trouble. And sometimes our feelings conflict — we might feel like saying two different things at the same time. So there may be some problems with saying what you feel like saying.
Perhaps even more importantly, what we feel like saying in the moment may not accurately reflect what we actually feel, as paradoxical as this may sound. One great example of this is that when we are angry, we may have a strong urge to verbally hurt or attack the other person. In this state, we may feel like saying things simply because they will hurt the other person, not because they actually reflect our feelings, such as “I never loved you”, etc. And as much as we wish it weren’t the case, it seems to be part of human nature that it sometimes just “feels good” to criticize someone or yell at someone, regardless of whether we really believe the criticisms (take “Judge Judy”, for example, who seems to really enjoy telling people off). In other words, feeling like saying something and feeling that something are two different things. Continue reading →
Do you ever feel like you’re not doing everything you could to make your life the best it could be? Do you get that lousy feeling that you should have read a book on investing your money instead of surfing the web, or called a friend to catch up instead of watching TV, or gotten out of bed an hour earlier? I think I’ve been feeling that way for most of my adult life.
And, I actually think that this feeling is right — I think that very frequently I’m not in fact doing everything I could to make my life great.
So it seems like there are two problems here then:
Problem #1: A bad feeling that seems to say we’re not doing our best
Problem #2: Actually… not doing our best — resulting in lower productivity and behavior that is less than optimal for helping us reach our goals
Before we go on I want to clarify a few things that I don’t mean by “doing your best”:
- I don’t mean doing everything that other people think you should be doing. This includes society, bosses, religion, parents, friends, moral rules, etc.. That is, of course, unless you happen to think that they’re right about something.
- I don’t mean being a workaholic. I think the best life often involves working hard, but also enjoying yourself. And even the best way to be productive sometimes is to take breaks.
- I don’t mean being successful. We only have limited knowledge, we can’t predict the future, there are many things beyond our control, etc., so all we can do (obviously) is the “best” we can do, given our limitations and what we know now. Doing the best that we can may be unsuccessful, and our “best” decisions may turn out badly. But, they’re our best shot at success.
Continue reading →
We’re constantly making decisions — decisions about what to eat, which side of the street to walk on, what relationships to be in, whether to stay at our job or quit. In short, as long as we’re behaving (which is always), we’re making decisions about what behavior to carry out.
Much of the time, we just act “automatically”, without really thinking about our decisions. This is often a good thing, since if we thought about every single decision, we’d soon spend so much time thinking that we’d never get anything done. Imagine, for example, if you had to give serious thought to which shoe to tie first or whether to take a bite of your french fries or your hamburger next. In short, we couldn’t function if we had to give thought to every decision.
Conscious and unconscious
To digress for a moment (to give some background), I think it’s helpful to make a distinction between “conscious” and “unconscious” aspects of the brain. By this I simply mean that there’s a lot going on in your brain, and that much of what happens, happens outside of our awareness, i.e. unconsciously. For example, when you hear a sound, you can “just tell” where it comes from (as in “it’s coming from over there!”). In fact (and horrifyingly for some!), behind the scenes your brain is doing a lot of complex math to compare the sounds from your two ears to figure out where the source of the sound is. The mathematical analysis of the sounds is happening unconsciously, while the sense of “where the sound is coming from”, the result of that analysis, is present in consciousness. Continue reading →
In my view, anxiety has three purposes: 1) to make us pay attention to possible danger, 2) to motivate us to act so as to avoid that danger, and 3) to physically prepare our bodies to act.
Anxiety is very successful at carrying out these three purposes, by 1) drawing our attention to danger, 2) making us feel miserable until the danger is no longer a threat, and 3) pumping adrenaline, increasing our heart rate, and other physiological changes that prepare the body for action.
Since it helps us avoid negative outcomes, anxiety is in many ways a good thing. But in spite of its benefits, anxiety has its downsides as well:
- It can continue to make us miserable even when we’re doing all that can be done
- It can make us miserable about dangers that aren’t very important or which are extremely unlikely
- It can actually make a negative outcome more likely (such as worrying about a presentation the next day making us unable to sleep the night before)
- The physical changes caused by anxiety are often inappropriate for the actual danger faced (for example, a rapid heart rate today doesn’t help you face being laid off next month)
- The physical changes can have negative long-term effects on our health (heart attacks, ulcers).
Continue reading →
It’s all well and good to talk about trying to have a great relationship. But what do we mean by “great relationship”? Everyone probably has their own ideas about this, but since I think everything that matters is ultimately about feelings,
My working definition of a “great relationship” is one in which… you feel great and the other person feels great.
In other words, lots of really good feelings, not so many bad feelings. This might be simple, but I think it gets at what is really important. Relationships, like everything else, can be measured by how much they further our goal of just… being happy. So the next question is of course:
So what kinds of things cause good feelings in relationships?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and based on my own personal experience and what I’ve read, I’ve come up with six ideas — six things that I suspect make a big difference in whether a relationship has a lot of good feelings:
- Lots of High Value, Not Much Low / Negative Value
- Lots of You, Not Much “Not-You”
- Awesomeness
- Awareness
- There’s Something (Good) Going On
- Independence
Continue reading →
Here are two techniques for dealing with anxiety, which I’ve been putting into practice in my own life and have had some success with. Like most (all) anxiety techniques, sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t.
Technique #1: This technique is based on the idea that anxiety is present when there is a possible danger in the environment, in order to make sure you are paying attention to the danger and doing everything in your power to prevent the danger from affecting you. If you can “satisfy” the anxiety by attending to the danger, taking appropriate measures to deal with it, and being convinced that you have done all you can do, the anxiety will no longer need to be there and can be reduced.
- Name the danger. Often we have a feeling of anxiety without explicitly thinking about what we are anxious about. So the first step is to get specific about what we’re worried about — what is the possible danger? Sometimes there will be several dangers at the same time, in which case you should pick one to focus on first, and then repeat these steps with the remaining ones.
- Figure out what you can and should do about the danger. The next step is to form a plan — what should you do about the danger? Sometimes the answer is “nothing”, which is okay. You may not know specifics about all that will have to be done, which is also okay — you just need an overall plan and next steps.
- Decide to implement your plan. This step simply involves deciding that you will carry out your plan.
- Write down any future actions you’ll need to remember. This can be in a “to do” list on paper or in a computer or your cell phone, etc. The important thing is that you no longer need to rely on anxiety to remind you. Continue reading →
In our relationships we often want to share things with others — we want them to know what we’re thinking and feeling, or convince them to think in a certain way. To do this, we have to carry out a miraculous task — to somehow get what’s in our head over to the other person, so that they understand it in much the same way that we do.
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