psychology
You are viewing stuff tagged with psychology.
You are viewing stuff tagged with psychology.
Mykala and I have what we call everything’s going to be OK moments. They occur when, unexpectedly, you take a deep, clear breath and, finding the typical tightness and anxiety missing, begin to feel the awareness, just over the fence of obligation and the ditch of depression, of a peaceful field of calm.
Thought I worked yesterday, and it turned out I didn’t. Before I figured this out, I drove out to both of the places I normally work, then drove home after a tour of the Twin Cities in the still-dark cloudy morning, and had the privilege of reading Christmas stories to Essie. Next, the three of us went out to pick up a gift, wrapped presents, made salt dough ornaments, took a nap (the three of us! Essie woke up first…), and watched two Christmas movies: The Santa Clause and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.
I read a poem called “Pushing the Dead Chevy” in this week’s issue of the New Yorker and I realize that, more and more, I believe in an intensely bright, pinpoint core inside of us, unsullied by the difficulties, failures, and harm from the outside world. It’s a nice thought, enchanting even, but I don’t know how much about people it actually explains.
Few articles I read, only about one a year, get saved on my computer. These are articles describing an invaluable overarching idea, a critique of our modern world so potent that I want to reference it so I don’t forget it and can incorporate it into my own life planning. The following is one of those articles.
If your goal is to impress, you’ll never stay motivated.
Jill Bolte Taylor’s stroke of insight: “I knew I was no longer the choreographer of my life…”
And on what it is like to have a left hemisphere stroke: “And in that moment, my brain chatter — my left hemisphere brain chatter — went totally silent. Just like someone took a remote control and pushed the mute button. Total silence. And at first I was shocked to find myself inside of a silent mind. But then I was immediately captivated by the magnificence of the energy around me. And because I could no longer identify the boundaries of my body, I felt enormous and expansive. I felt at one with all the energy that was, and it was beautiful there.”
“The antidote to obsolescence is knowledge of the process by which facts are obtained.”
“Autonomy: the urge to direct our own lives.
Mastery: the desire to get better and better at something that matters.
Purpose: the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.”
That’s Dan Pink talking about “The puzzle of motivation”. He points out that scientific studies have consistently shown, regardless of culture, that the more monetary (external, carrot and stick) motivation you use to promote behavior, the less creativity and problem solving you cultivate. If you want creativity and problem solving, you must allow autonomy, mastery, and purpose to flourish (internal motivation).
With my head in the sand of school, the world turned around me, and I kept my horizons narrow and focus tight. What I failed to realize was, well, mortality. You’re young and learning and the last thing you think of is your body—it does what you ask it to do, and it doesn’t sideline your plans with pain, inflexibility, or hospital stays.
For my whole life, school is what has given me meaning. Now, starting my job, I realize that I have to find that meaning on my own. This has been unexpectedly terrifying; the framework in which I lived has melted away. For those accustomed to such existential freedom (to which most have unconsciously adapted), this is nothing — they just… live life, you know? Their adaptation happened gradually since their high school or college careers ended. So, I guess I’m not alone… but I do feel adrift sometimes. I shouldn’t expect too much since it has only been 4 weeks since graduation. Typing it out in black and white, i realize that, wow, it HAS only been 4 weeks since graduation. Life feels a LOT different in the rhythm of a job than it ever did in the rhythm of school. While I struggle to figure this out, I’m going to be a better husband to my wife, spend time with my family, and be better friends with my friends. I’ve been so goal-oriented, that I can’t decide if I should set more of them, or learn to focus my life without them. Probably, as is almost always the answer, a little bit of both.
Recently, I realized that the problem with Facebook is that you can’t actually discuss the problems with Facebook on Facebook. By “can’t”, I mean the discourse has dropped to the lowest common denominator (Cf. “eternal September”). So, in a place where everyone is showing selected pieces of their lives to give an aura of grandeur, carefree frivolity, success, beauty, ease… there’s no time for subtlety, considered introspection, gentle humor. The problem, set in terms of one of my typically strained metaphors: if you’re staring at neon signs all day and then someone shows you a watercolor, it’s going to be boring.
Mykala’s getting her MA in Human Development and another MA in Counseling and Psychological Services, so she’s reached the point where she’ll do something called a practicum. It’s not unlike an internship, except you earn credits for doing the work and getting the experience. We’ve talked a lot, and Mykala is interested in, well, not pathologizing people. Clinical psychology, the DSM diagnoses, etc. have their place, but she wants to take a well-adjusted person and help them stretch to reach their potential. So, Mykala interviewed for her practicum at the St. Thomas Career Development on Friday. The interview went so well that they called back later that day to offer her the position!
I haven’t learned a lot, but I think I’ve learned this: the things that preoccupy us, worry us, stress us, aren’t the things on which we should be wasting energy.
Alex Williams at The New York Times, ‘New York’s Literary Cubs’:
“My whole life, I had been doing everything everybody told me. I went to the right school. I got really good grades. I got all the internships. Then, I couldn’t do anything.”
Srikumar Rao gave a talk a few TEDs back (2009) called “Plug into your hard-wired happiness”. I’ve transcribed parts of it in a kind of note format, because it was really interesting:
One of the themes in Terrence Malick’s ambitious art film Tree of Life:
The way of nature or the way of grace - you have to choose which one you will follow.
I love this article from Tony Schwartz in Harvard Business Review, “The Only Way to Get Important Things Done”:
The counterintuitive secret to getting things done is to make them more automatic, so they require less energy.
It turns out we each have one reservoir of will and discipline, and it gets progressively depleted by any act of conscious self-regulation. In other words, if you spend energy trying to resist a fragrant chocolate chip cookie, you’ll have less energy left over to solve a difficult problem. Will and discipline decline inexorably as the day wears on.
Is long-term solitary confinement torture?
The simple truth is that public sentiment in America is the reason that solitary confinement has exploded in this country, even as other Western nations have taken steps to reduce it. This is the dark side of American exceptionalism. With little concern or demurral, we have consigned tens of thousands of our own citizens to conditions that horrified our highest court a century ago.
I was listening to This American Life’s most recent show “Family Physics”, about the application of physical laws to relationships. I didn’t hear much of the actual episode, but it caused my mind to wander off on a tangent beginning this way: your emotional range increases as you become older, more mature, more experienced. But, earlier in your life, you can not comprehend the depth of pain and joy you’ll experience in the future. So, at any point in your life, you think that your extremes of happiness or sadness are the limits of your emotional capacity. In fact, you think you are plumbing the depths of despair or scraping the ceiling of joy at a variety of discrete points in your life. What is actually happening is an increase in your emotional distance between happiness and sadness. Instead of representing this with physics, why not use math (specifically, y=0.5(x)*sin(x) )? Indeed, in mathematical terms these emotional points are signified by local minima or maxima of your emotional capacities. This idea can’t be new, but I was so excited about it I made a diagram explaining it.
A bit on George Kelly’s Personal construct theory from Wikipedia:
…each individual’s psychological task is to put in order the facts of his or her own experience.
Mykala, please correct me if I’m off base here, but here’s what I’ve got: as story-makers, we are constantly fabricating a thread to connect our isolated experiences into a life that makes sense. So, on a daily basis, we tell a story of ourselves to ourselves.
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