Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Emotions

Change Isn’t Just Possible—It’s the Way Life Works

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Remarkable lines from “Change” from the English metaphysical poet John Donne’s Elegy III (Poems of John Donne, Volume 1, 1896):

To live in one land is captivity,
To run all countries, a wild roguery;
Waters stink soon, if in one place they bide,
And in the vast sea are more putrified:
But when they kiss one bank, and leaving this,
Never look back, but the next bank do kiss,
Then are they purest; Change is the nursery
Of music, joy, life and eternity.

Change helps you come back to yourself, over and over again, and ride the waves of richness through whatever life has to offer.

Change is a gift! Flow with it and seek out the beauty in each moment. Show up and be present, for there is something precious for you now—even within the pangs of loss and melancholy.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. The Dance of Time, The Art of Presence
  2. Live as If You Are Already Looking Back on This Moment with Longing
  3. How Can You Contribute?
  4. Temper Your Expectations, Avoid Disappointments in Life
  5. Acting the Part, Change Your Life: Book Summary of Richard Wiseman’s ‘The As If Principle’

How to Prevent Employee Exhaustion

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Feeling exhausted, irritated, unhappy, and lacking in control are all signs of burnout—a temporary decline in an employee’s well-being.

If you notice a drop in energy, motivation, or productivity, try these simple ways to help combat employee exhaustion:

Employee stress and problems at work that are not dealt with effectively can quickly spill out into other parts of an employee’s life. In fact, many marriages go bad when stress at work is at its worst: people use up all their willpower on the job; their home lives suffer because they give much to their work.

Make employee welfare a key area of focus to promote better work environments and keep employees engaged.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Managing the Overwhelmed: How to Coach Stressed Employees
  2. Four Telltale Signs of an Unhappy Employee
  3. Learn to Cope When You’re Stressed
  4. Don’t Push Employees to Change
  5. Everything in Life Has an Opportunity Cost

Summary of Richard Carlson’s ‘Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff’

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Stress follows a peculiar principle: when life hits us with big crises—the death of a loved one or a job loss—we somehow find the inner strength to endure these upheavals in due course. It’s the little things that drive us insane day after day—traffic congestion, awful service at a restaurant, an overbearing coworker taking credit for your work, meddling in-laws, for example.

It’s all too easy to get caught up in the many irritations of life. We overdramatize and overreact to life’s myriad tribulations. Under the direct influence of anguish, our minds are bewildered and we feel disoriented. This creates stress, which makes the problems more difficult to deal with.

'Don't Sweat The Small Stuff' by Richard Carlson (ISBN 0786881852) The central thesis of psychotherapist Richard Carlson’s bestselling Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff… And It’s All Small Stuff (1997) is this: to deal with angst or anger, what we need is not some upbeat self-help prescriptions for changing ourselves, but simply a measure of perspective.

Perspective helps us understand that there’s an art to understand what we should let go and what we should concern ourselves with. As I mentioned in my article on the concept of opportunity cost, it is important to focus our efforts on the important stuff, and not waste time on the insignificant and incidental things.

I’ve previously written about my favorite 5-5-5 technique for gaining perspective and guarding myself against anger erupting: I remove myself from the offending environment and contemplate if whatever I’m getting worked up over is of importance. I ask myself, “Will this matter in 5 days? Will this matter in 5 months? Will this matter in 5 years?”

Carlson stresses that there’s always a vantage point from which even the biggest stressor can be effectively dealt with. The challenge is to keep making that shift in perspective. When we achieve that “wise-person-in-me” perspective, our problems seem more controllable and our lives more peaceful.

Carlson’s prescriptions aren’t uncommon—we can learn to be more patient, compassionate, generous, grateful, and kind, all of which will improve the way we feel about ourselves and the way that other people feel when they are around us.

Some of Carlson’s 100 recommendations are trite and banal—for example, “make peace with imperfection,” “think of your problems as potential teachers,” “remember that when you die, your ‘in-basket’ won’t be empty,” and “do one thing at a time.” Others are more edifying:

  • Let others have the glory
  • Let others be “right” most of the time
  • Become aware of your moods and don’t allow yourself to be fooled by the low ones
  • Look beyond behavior
  • Every day, tell at least one person something you like, admire, or appreciate about them
  • Argue for your limitations, and they’re yours
  • Resist the urge to criticize
  • Read articles and books with entirely different points of view from your own and try to learn something

Carlson’s succinct insights have hit home with legions of the hurried and the harried. He became a bestselling author and a sought-after motivational speaker. Before his tragic death in 2006 at age 45, Carson followed up “Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff…” with some 20 tacky spinoffs intended particularly for spouses, parents, teenagers, new-weds, employees, and lovers.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Learn to Manage Your Negative Emotions and Yourself
  2. The More You Can Manage Your Emotions, the More Effective You’ll Be
  3. Anger is the Hardest of the Negative Emotions to Subdue
  4. Cope with Anxiety and Stop Obsessive Worrying by Creating a Worry Box
  5. This May Be the Most Potent Cure for Melancholy

Writing To-Do Lists Can Help You Sleep

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Sleeplessness Can Both Cause Anxiety and Be Caused by Anxiety

If you have recurrent difficulty with falling asleep or staying asleep, making a to-do list may help.

The authors of a Baylor University study suggest that not only can anxiety about unfinished tasks affect your sleep, but improving your sleep problem can also help symptoms of anxiety.

The authors’ experiment asked 57 students to spend a night in a sleep lab with no gadgets or distractions. Five minutes prior to an enforced sleep time, one half of the volunteers created a list of things they wanted to do over the upcoming days and the other half recorded tasks that they had completed during the previous few days. The researchers examined the participants’ brain activity during the night and established that those who wrote their to-do lists fell asleep nine minutes sooner on average.

How Ruminating about Unfinished Tasks Can Keep You Awake

The beneficial effects of a humble to-do list on your sleeplessness can be explained by the Zeigarnik Effect, the tendency for interrupted tasks and thoughts to be evoked better than completed tasks.

As I’ve written previously, Psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, who studied this phenomenon, theorized that incomplete tasks can incite “psychic tension” and can inundate you with a constant stream of reminders. Just the modest act of capturing how you’re going to deal with the unresolved tasks in a to-do list can achieve a sense of completion and respite.

According to Michael Scullin, the lead researcher of the aforementioned Baylor study, “there’s something about the act of writing, physically writing something on paper, that helps us hit the Pause button.”

When you have a task that’s unfinished, it’s on your mind more than any task you have completed. If you test people’s memory for things that were unfinished versus things that were completed, people remember the things that were unfinished a lot better. It seems that unfinished tasks rest at what we call a heightened level of cognitive activation. We think that’s the key ingredient. With our day-to-day lives and work schedule, unfinished tasks pile on one another and create this cognitive activation that’s difficult to set aside—unless, of course, you write about it.

Idea for Impact: Write a To-Do List Before Hitting the Sack Every Night

Some folks I know create a ‘brain dump’ just before bedtime—they not only jot down any worries or unfinished tasks from the day, but also create a plan for resolving their worries and stressors.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Stressed, Lonely, or Depressed? Could a Pet Help?
  2. Beware the Opportunity Cost of Meditating
  3. The Law of Petty Irritations
  4. Anger is the Hardest of the Negative Emotions to Subdue
  5. How People Defend Themselves in a Crisis

What Airline Disasters Teach About Cognitive Impairment and Decision-Making Under Stress

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Airline disasters often make great case studies on how a series of insignificant errors can build up into catastrophes.

As the following two case studies will illuminate, unanticipated pressures can force your mind to quickly shift to a panic-like state. As it searches frenetically for a way out of a problem, your mind can disrupt your ability to take account of all accessible evidence and attend rationally to the situation in its entirety.

Stress Can Blind You and Limit Your Ability to See the Bigger Picture: A Case Study on Eastern Airlines Flight 401

Eastern Airlines Flight 401 crashed on December 29, 1972, killing 101 people.

As Flight 401 began its approach into the Miami International Airport, first officer Albert Stockstill lowered the landing gear. But the landing gear indicator, a green light to verify that the nose gear was correctly locked in the “down” position, did not switch on. (This was later verified to be caused by a burned-out light bulb. Regardless of the indicator, the landing gear could have been manually lowered and verified.)

The flight deck got thrown into a disarray. The flight’s captain, Bob Loft, sent flight engineer Don Repo to the avionics bay underneath the flight deck to verify through a small porthole if the landing gear was actually down. Loft simultaneously directed Stockstill to put the aircraft on autopilot. Then, when Loft unintentionally leaned against the aircraft’s yoke to speak to Repo, the autopilot mistakably switched to a wrong setting that did not hold the aircraft’s altitude.

The aircraft began to descend so gradually that it could not be perceived by the crew. With the flight engineer down in the avionics bay, the captain and the first officer were so preoccupied with the malfunction of the landing gear indicator that they failed to pay attention to the altitude-warning signal from the engineer’s instrument panel.

Additionally, given that the aircraft was flying over the dark terrain of the Everglades in nighttime, no ground lights or other visual cues signaled that the aircraft was gradually descending. When Stockstill eventually became aware of the aircraft’s altitude, it was too late to recover the aircraft from crashing.

In summary, the cause of the Flight 401’s crash was not the nose landing gear, but the crew’s negligence and inattention to a bigger problem triggered by a false alarm.

Stress Can Blind You into Focusing Just on What You Think is Happening: A Case Study on United Airlines Flight 173

United Airlines Flight 173 crashed on December 28, 1978, in comparable circumstances.

When Flight 173’s pilots lowered the landing gear upon approach to the Portland International Airport, the aircraft experienced an abnormal vibration and yaw motion. In addition, the pilots observed that an indicator light did not show that the landing gear was lowered successfully. In reality, the landing gear was down and locked in position.

With the intention of troubleshooting the landing gear problem, the pilots entered a holding pattern. For the next hour, they tried to diagnose the landing gear glitch and prepare for a probable emergency landing. During this time, however, none of the pilots monitored the fuel levels.

When the landing gear problem was first suspected, the aircraft had abundant reserve fuel—even for a diversion or other contingencies. But, all through the hour-long holding procedure, the landing gear was down and the flaps were set to 15 degrees in anticipation of a landing. This significantly increased the aircraft’s fuel burn rate. With fuel exhaustion to all four engines, the aircraft crashed.

To sum up, Flight 173’s crew got preoccupied with the landing gear’s malfunction and harried preparations for an emergency landing. As a result of their inattention, the pilots failed to keep tabs on the fuel state and crashed the aircraft.

Stress Can Derail Your Train of Thought

Under pressure, your mind will digress from its rational model of thinking.

The emotional excitement from fear, anxiety, time-pressure, and stress can lead to a phenomenon known as “narrowing of the cognitive map.” This tunnel vision can restrict your field of mindful attention and impair your ability for adequate discernment.

Situational close-mindedness can constrict your across-the-board awareness of the situation and force you overlook alternative lines of thought.

Idea for Impact: To combat cognitive impairment under stress, use checklists and standard operating procedures, as well as increased training on situational awareness, crisis communication, and emergency management, as the aviation industry did in response to the aforementioned incidents.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. How Stress Impairs Your Problem-Solving Capabilities: Case Study of TransAsia Flight 235
  2. Lessons from the World’s Worst Aviation Disaster // Book Summary of ‘The Collision on Tenerife’
  3. Lessons from the Princeton Seminary Experiment: People in a Rush are Less Likely to Help Others (and Themselves)
  4. “Fly the Aircraft First”
  5. Under Pressure, The Narrowing Cognitive Map: Lessons from the Tragedy of Singapore Airlines Flight 6

What the Buddha Taught About Restraining and Dealing with Anger

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Buddhist psychology identifies anger as one of the six root kleshas, detrimental emotional states that can cloud the mind, lead us to “unwholesome” actions, and cause our suffering.

Chapter XVII of the Dhammapada (ref. Max Muller’s Wisdom of the Buddha) compiles the teachings of the Buddha and his monastic community on the topic of restraining and dealing with anger:

  • “He who holds back rising anger like a rolling chariot, him I call a real driver; other people are but holding the reins.” (Verse 222)
  • “Beware of bodily anger, and control thy body! Leave the sins of the body, and with thy body practise virtue!” (Verse 231)
  • “Beware of the anger of the tongue, and control thy tongue! Leave the sins of the tongue, and practise virtue with thy tongue!” (Verse 232)
  • “Beware of the anger of the mind, and control thy mind! Leave the sins of the mind, and practise virtue with thy mind!” (Verse 233)
  • “The wise who control their body, who control their tongue, the wise who control their mind, are indeed well controlled.” (Verse 234)

As I’ve mentioned before, you will be at a marked disadvantage in life if you’re unable to perceive, endure, and manage negative emotions. And anger is the hardest of the negative emotions to subdue.

Despite the seemingly abstract nature of the questions philosophers ask, most philosophy books argue that investigating the nature of anger is important. Not only is it such a destructive emotion, but anger often sums up many other self-judgments—sadness, powerlessness, fear, regret—that are entwined into it.

The Zen priest Jules Shuzen Harris advices approaching feelings of anger with awareness and mindfulness in his insightful article on “Uprooting the Seeds of Anger” in the Summer 2012 issue of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review:

We must remember that we create our own anger. No one makes it for us. If we move from a particular event directly to our reaction, we are skipping a crucial awareness, a higher perspective on our own reactivity. What is that middle step, that deeper awareness? It is mindfulness about our own beliefs, our attitude, our understanding or lack of understanding about what has really happened. We notice that a given situation reliably provokes our anger, and yet somebody else can be exposed to the very same situation and not react angrily. Why is that? No one can tell us: we each have to find the answer ourselves, and to do that, we need to give ourselves the space to reflect mindfully.

We’re going to keep getting angry. It’s going to come up. It has come up in our lives before, and it will come up again. This practice is about becoming more mindful, becoming aware of how we are getting stuck. With care and work, we find ways to get unstuck. But we also know that the moment we get unstuck, we’re going to get stuck again. That’s why it is called practice—we never arrive. So when you find yourself upset or angry, use the moment as a part of your practice, as an opportunity to notice and uproot the seeds of anger and move into the heart of genuine compassion.

And as stated by the Chinese Sutra of Forty-two Chapters,

For those with no anger,
how can anger arise?
When you practice deep looking and master yourself,
you dwell in peace, freedom, and safety.
The one who offends another
after being offended by him,
harms himself and harms the other.
When you feel hurt
but do not hurt the other,
you are truly victorious.
Your practice and your victory benefit both of you.
When you understand the roots of anger in yourself and in the other,
your mind will enjoy true peace, joy, and lightness.
You become the doctor who heals himself and heals the other.
If you don’t understand,
you will think not getting angry to be the act of a fool.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Change Your Perspective, Change Your Reactions
  2. Don’t Let Hate Devour You
  3. Learn to Manage Your Negative Emotions and Yourself
  4. The More You Can Manage Your Emotions, the More Effective You’ll Be
  5. Anger is the Hardest of the Negative Emotions to Subdue

Moral Disengagement Leads People to Act Immorally and Justify Their Unprincipled Behavior

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Temptation of Christ on the First Day of Lent

Rationality Drives Human Behavior Only After Emotion and Impulse Lose Their Hegemony

People adapt moral standards that dissuade them from objectionable behavior. But these moral standards do not serve as a steadfast regulator of their moral actions. Occasionally, circumstances can make people to become selectively disengaged from those moral self-sanctions and end up pursuing unprincipled actions.

Particularly when people feel angry, pressured, or depressed, their mental footing tends to ebb away. Any state of emotional threat can let up their determination to act ethically and resist temptations. They lose discipline, get into a defensive mode, and become susceptible to thinking only about short-term benefits. They are more likely to engage in self-absorbed behaviors that they would otherwise spurn, especially if the payoff for such behavior is high and the odds of getting caught and punished are low.

Circumstances Sometimes Sway People to Engage in Behaviors That Conflict with Their Internalized Moral Standards

Moral disengagement is the psychological phenomenon that describes how people rationalize behavior that is at odds with their own moral principles. For example, suppose a teenager who has a principled framework that forbids theft. If he takes a newspaper without paying for it from a Starbucks store, he may rationalize his actions by telling himself that Starbucks warranted some harm because it overcharges its consumers and, until recently, purchased not all its coffee beans from certified fair trade sources.

'Moral Disengagement' by Albert Bandura (ISBN 1464160058) People engaging in wrongdoing often see that the rules are uncalled-for and unjustifiable. In their judgment, even though they may be breaking the rules and flouting conventions, they’re persuaded that they’re really not doing anything wrong because the rules deserve to be violated.

Moral reasoning usually deprives people when they devalue their prey and malign their victims (“her tattletaling deserved it” or “he brandish a knife, hence I pulled out my gun.”)

Stanford Psychologist Albert Bandura, who introduced the concept of moral disengagement, identified eight cognitive mechanisms (book) that disengage a person’s internal moral standards from his/her actions, thereby causing unethical behavior without conspicuous remorse or self-censure.

Idea for Impact: Be Wary of Suspending Your Moral Standards to Reduce Self-Censure

When circumstances or people provoke you to potentially regretful behavior, realize that you are a self-determining agent, and that you have a moral and ethical responsibility to behave with integrity and pursue wholesome actions. Step back and ask yourself, “Normally, would I judge this contemplated action to be wrong? Are my ways of thinking flawed? Am I defending the harm I am causing by blaming others? Am I criticizing the victim to justify my destructive actions?”

When in doubt, use Warren Buffett’s rule of thumb for personal integrity: “I want [people] to ask themselves whether they are willing to have any contemplated act appear the next day on the front page of their local paper—to be read by their spouses, children and friends—with the reporting done by an informed and critical reporter.”

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Learn to Manage Your Negative Emotions and Yourself
  2. The More You Can Manage Your Emotions, the More Effective You’ll Be
  3. Anger is the Hardest of the Negative Emotions to Subdue
  4. Summary of Richard Carlson’s ‘Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff’
  5. How People Defend Themselves in a Crisis

How to Prevent a Communications Breakdown During Crisis

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The ultimate test of a leader’s and an organization’s communication skills is how they deal with a crisis—natural disasters, crisis of confidence, acts of malevolence, strategic errors, acts of deception, management misconduct, and so forth.

It’s not difficult to see why communication is an important element of crisis management: leaders today have to tackle media that is unsympathetic to what it regards as management incompetence, shareholders and customers who are ever more demanding, legislation and regulation that is getting stricter, and competitors eager to pinch customers during times of distress.

Effective crisis communications must be able to have a consistent and clear message and present this message swiftly and regularly following a crisis.

Here are seven elements of effective crisis communication.

  1. Strategic Thinking: Think purposefully about what you want your constituencies (employees, stockholders, customers, suppliers, communities, the media) to know under the given circumstances. Many a routine problem has transformed into a crisis because too many people were told too much and the situation became exaggerated and out of control.
    • What happened
    • Who is responsible
    • Why did it happen
    • Who is affected
    • What should be done
    • Whom can we trust
    • What should we say
    • Who should say it
    • How should we say it
  2. Openness: When a crisis befalls, be prepared to talk about it internally and externally as assertively as you respond to the crisis operationally. Understand the expectations of your constituencies and go beyond what is expected or required. If you are not communicative enough, people may make erroneous assumptions about the crisis. Bad news can travel fast and sell best.
  3. Candor: If your constituencies should know about a crisis that your organization is experiencing, talk about it as quickly and as completely as you can, especially to those most directly affected.
  4. Concern: Keep the people most directly affected by the crisis updated until the crisis is completely resolved. Do not brand a whistle blower a troublemaker.
  5. Sensitivity: At the earliest possible moment, step back and analyze the impact of the crisis. Inform and alert all the constituencies that are affected. Demonstrate concern, compassion, sympathy, remorse, or contrition, whatever the case may require.
  6. Integrity: If you are responsible for the crisis or perceived as such, acknowledge the situation promptly. Be true to your corporate and personal conscience. Share the crisis action plan and seek inputs.
  7. Honesty: Learn from your mistakes and talk openly about what you’ve learned. Demonstrate your commitment to keeping errors and problems from resurfacing.

Idea for Impact: Reputation and goodwill represent a great part of business value. Protect yourself when faced with attacks on your reputation and competence. If you do not communicate effectively and frequently with your constituents, somebody else will. In the absence of information, your constituents can develop their own perceptions of the problem and its implications.

Wondering what to read next?

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  2. The More You Can Manage Your Emotions, the More Effective You’ll Be
  3. How People Defend Themselves in a Crisis
  4. Make Friends Now with the People You’ll Need Later
  5. How Stress Impairs Your Problem-Solving Capabilities: Case Study of TransAsia Flight 235

Expressive Writing Can Help You Heal

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Give sorrow words;
the grief that does not speak;
whispers the o’er-fraught heart
and bids it break.
—William Shakespeare, Macbeth (Act 4, Scene 3)

Confronting Upsetting Experiences: Expressive Writing for Healing

People often block out thoughts that provoke negative emotions as a way of reducing their stress and regulating their moods. However, intentional suppression of deep-seated emotions not only increases susceptibility to illness, but also amplifies the emotionality and associated psychological effects of the suppressed thoughts.

Discussing, venting, clarifying, or expressing a trauma is a natural human response. When this necessity is inhibited, emotional stress and physical illness ensue.

Facing up to deeply personal issues can promote physical health, well-being, and beneficial behaviors.

The scientific research on the benefits of putting negative experiences into words is extensive. Studies have shown that expressive writing about oneself and one’s traumatic or stressful experiences does produce significant health benefits. Expressive writing helps ameliorate mood disorders, reduces symptoms among patients with serious illness, improve a person’s physical condition after a heart attack, and even enhance memory.

Writing about Emotional Topics Brings About Improved Physical and Emotional Wellbeing

'Opening Up' by James Pennebaker (ISBN 1572302380) James Pennebaker, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, first investigated expressive writing as a healing process in the 1980s. Since then, research that spawned from Pennebaker’s pioneering studies, has revealed benefits could accrue to those who were dealing with divorces, lost love, death of loved ones, job rejections, terminal illness, even college students struggling with first-year transitions.

Here are the main points about the expressive writing method:

  • Choose the part of the day when you are most contemplative (that’s the morning for most people.) Sit down at a place where you are not likely to be disturbed.
  • Reflect about a very personal and important event. Consider a significant emotional upheaval that influences your life the most or has in the past. Your topic can be about a distress or failure, lost love, health-, school- or career-related anxiety, relationships, inner conflicts, death of a loved one, or just about any topic that you would like to express.
  • If you’re writing about an experience or an event that involves another person, it can help to organize your writing as a letter to that person, whether alive or dead.
  • Write your deepest thoughts about your chosen event or experience continuously for 20 minutes. If you run out of things to write or reach a mental block, just repeat or recap what you have previously written.
  • In your writing, deeply explore your thoughts about the event and describe its effect on you. In other words, write both about what happened and how you feel about it. Think about how you can handle these events and their consequences now—what you can do specifically.
  • Connect your personal experiences to other parts of your life. How do they relate to your childhood, your parents, people you love, who you are, or who you want to be?
  • Write for yourself as your thoughts arise. Be as direct, intense, and serious as possible. Do not worry about grammar, spelling, comprehensiveness, legibility, or structure. On the opening day of writing, your stories are not very structured, but over the three or four days, you will develop a more structured narrative.
  • After writing for 20 minutes, do not look back over. Simply fold the papers you used, seal them, and put them away (read more about the “worry box technique.”) Unlike psychotherapy, the expressive writing technique does not employ feedback to the participant.
  • 'Writing as a Way of Healing' by Louise Desalvo (ISBN 0807072435) Make a mental note of how you feel. It is not unusual to feel sad or disheartened after writing—these feelings usually fade away in an hour or so. In research experiments, many participants have reported crying or getting upset by the experience of writing about emotional upheavals, but most participants testify that the writing experience was meaningful in helping them organize their experiences.
  • Repeat this exercise for four consecutive days. You can write about the same experience on all four days or about different experiences each day. If you choose to write about the same topic on all the four days, try to wrap everything up by the fourth day.

Note that expressive writing is distinct from keeping a daily journal in that it allows people to step back for a moment and evaluate their lives. Pennebaker once said, “I’m not even convinced that people should write about a horrible event for more than a couple of weeks. You risk getting into a sort of navel gazing or cycle of self-pity. … But standing back every now and then and evaluating where you are in life is really important.”

Translating an Emotional Experience Into Language Makes the Experience Graspable: it Can Help You Find New Meaning in Life’s Ordeals

New research has shown that expressive writing—followed by expressive rewriting—can improve happiness and lead to behavioral changes. Narrative storytelling of an unpleasant and chaotic experience may make the experience and its effects more controllable. For instance, according this New York Times article,

At the Johnson & Johnson Human Performance Institute, life coaches ask clients to identify their goals, then to write about why they haven’t achieved those goals. Once the clients have written their old stories, they are asked to reflect on them and edit the narratives to come up with a new, more honest assessment. While the institute doesn’t have long-term data, the intervention has produced strong anecdotal results.

Idea for Impact: Expressive Writing Can Help Change the Way You Feel About Traumatic Events and About Yourself

Expressive writing is a method of self-help that supplements the value of therapeutic talking to someone accepting and non-judgmental.

By exploring your deepest thoughts and feelings with a reflective, inquiring, honest attitude, you can shift perspective. Standing back and reflecting on your suffering from different points of view can bring about an improved emotional state. You can create your greatest opportunities for change by confronting the realities, reframing your experiences in terms of your values and priorities, and identifying impediments that stand in the way of purpose, joy, and contentment.

For more on the means and methods of expressive writing, as well its many confirmed physiological and behavioral benefits, read James Pennebaker’s Opening Up: the Healing Power of Expressing Emotion (1997) and Louise DeSalvo’s Writing as a Way of Healing (1999)

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Cope with Anxiety and Stop Obsessive Worrying by Creating a Worry Box
  2. The Power of Negative Thinking
  3. Get Everything Out of Your Head
  4. This May Be the Most Potent Cure for Melancholy
  5. The Law of Petty Irritations

How People Defend Themselves in a Crisis

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How People Defend Themselves in a Crisis The desire to protect and enhance one’s self-image is among the strongest motives of human behavior. No wonder scientific literature is laden with discussions on the ways in which people invoke self-deception in the interest of maintaining a favorable sense of their selves.

People have a propensity to avoid conscious awareness of fear-triggering worries, conflicts, and uncertainties. They engage in thought patterns that distort the external realities as a way of coping with distress.

Psychologists use the term “ego defense mechanisms” to describe the pattern of thought and behavior that arises in response to the perception of psychical danger.

Defense Mechanisms Play an Important Role in Self-Preservation

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) wrote in The Ego and the Id (1923,) “We have come upon something in the ego itself which is also unconscious, which behaves exactly like the repressed—that is, which produces powerful effects without itself being conscious and which requires special work before it can be made conscious.” Freud’s daughter, Anna Freud (1895–1982,) and other psychologists identified twelve primary defense mechanisms:

  1. Denial: explicitly refusing to acknowledge the threatening reality even when presented with indisputable data (e.g. someone with a terminal illness rejecting the imminence of his death.) Denial may give the respondent some time to evaluate the meaning and seriousness of the threatening reality before reacting to it.
  2. Disavowal: acknowledging the threatening reality but downplaying its significance
  3. Suppression: intentionally engaging distractions to eliminate from consciousness any thoughts of the threatening reality
  4. Fixation: committing inflexibly to one specific mind-set or course of action
  5. Substitution: replacing an unattainable or unacceptable instinctual object or emotion with one that is more accessible or tolerable
  6. Displacement / Transference: redirecting emotions from their original object to a substitute object that is somehow associated with the original one.
  7. Compensation: making amends for a perceived deficiency that cannot be eliminated (e.g., a physical defect) by excelling in some other way.
  8. Grandiosity: exaggerated feeling of power or influence over the threatening reality
  9. Idealization: ascribing power or influence to an existent or imaginary “savior” (an individual or a organization)
  10. Intellectualization: thoroughly rationalizing a particular thought or action, by means of a misleading, but self-serving justification
  11. Projection: incorrectly attributing to others any objectionable thoughts or actions. According to Sigmund Freud, projection makes a person perceive his objectionable character traits in others as a means of avoiding seeing those very faults in himself. For example, a man who cannot accept his own anger may cope with his feelings by accusing others as angry.
  12. Splitting: fragmenting, isolating, and focusing on only certain elements of the threatening reality, instead of considering the complexity brought about by the crisis as a coherent whole

Idea for Impact: It pays to familiarize yourself with these twelve defense mechanisms and be able to identify them in how you (and others) react to emotionally charged situations, especially in close relationships. Defense mechanisms are natural forms of self-protection. However, used excessively, they can turn out to be pathological.

Reference: Cheryl Travers, “Handling the Stress” in Michael Bland (Ed.) Communicating out of a Crisis (1998)

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