Busy, p.22
Busy, page 22
Deep Inside
So far I have positioned the fragmented, distracted and shallow attention of busy at one end of the spectrum, and placed deep engagement and focused attention at the other. I have suggested that while busy is a buzz, it is not the route to happiness. To find joy we need to sink deep into our experiences and our moments. However, this is not a full picture. In actual fact, there is another place that is equally important for our happiness, one that is under threat every bit as much in today’s world as deep attention. That place is inside ourselves, alone with our thoughts, with nothing to do.
Alone with Your Thoughts
How much do you like being alone with yourself? If you are like most of us, the answer is “not very much.” In fact, in an amazing series of experiments led by the influential professor of psychology Timothy D. Wilson, it was shown that many people prefer to give themselves electric shocks rather than be left alone and unstimulated!11 These people, earlier in the day, had received this same electric shock and been willing to pay in order to never receive it again. Yet, when faced with a period of between six and fifteen minutes without external stimulation, the electric shock was preferable to their own thoughts.
You may be thinking that the above study is crazy (despite the fact it was published in Science), but Wilson’s findings are in line with other studies. For example, Christopher K. Hsee of the Booth School of Business found that, given the slightest excuse, people would jump at the chance to do meaningless activity rather than spend time inactive.12 He also found, as did Wilson, that people are happier when they are meaninglessly busy than when they are idle.
The Default Network
One of the most significant findings from neuroscience in recent years is the discovery of the default network.13 This is the network of neural activity that fires up when we are not externally stimulated with information or activity. It is what happens when we are in the doctor’s waiting room with no magazines, when we are in the shower or walking to the train station, when we sink into ourselves, when we are alone with our thoughts, dreams and ruminations. We had expected a lot to be going on in the brain when we are busy, or when we are focused. We hadn’t expected a lot to be happening when we were neither of these; we were wrong. When we are not on task, the brain becomes extremely active. The question we have to ask is, “Why?”
What is happening here is that the default network is creating you! If you look inside yourself and ask, “Who am I?” your sense of “I” comes from a collection of experiences, roles, beliefs, ideas, cultural associations and feelings. Somehow, from that tapestry of disconnected thoughts and memories comes a sense of identity. When we are on task, we generate input and stimulation for the brain. This information is raw and external. It is only when we play with this input, associating it with our own experiences, that it begins to have meaning. It is only when we integrate it into our understanding of the world that we learn and develop. It is that process that turns raw, external data into something more personal; into your opinion, your insight and your wisdom.
The Importance of Idleness
This brings us right back to busyness: How much time do you have to quietly process, reflect and integrate? We have talked about the impact of all the demands we experience in the world of too much: our racing, multitasking and cramming drive out focused attention and engagement. However, our world of too much stimulation may be having an equally big impact. We now have stimulation devices with us all the time, ready for any moment when we are not on task. At home, we have multiple additional devices to ensure our brains are never left on their own.
Focused attention and engagement are the foods we need to provide the energy and the nourishment to survive and thrive. Stimulation and consumption of media is like bubble gum; it keeps us occupied, but offers little. The default network is like the digestive system: absolutely essential to allow that food to be integrated, to allow you to grow. I don’t think we’re doing enough digesting these days.
Resolving Our Emptiness
I explained in the busyness triangle that a consequence of too much busyness is an increasing sense of emptiness in our lives; which we fill with activity. I have suggested that focusing on values rather than “More” drives less frenetic busyness. I have also suggested deep engagement and flow generate more happiness than the buzz of busy. Both of these strategies will help to reduce the inner sense of emptiness. Now I want to talk about another strategy for happiness: getting comfortable with your emptiness.
What do I mean by emptiness? The notion of an emptiness in people has been explored by many in recent history, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre and Mark Rothko. In my view, we all contain a space inside us of utter emptiness; and it’s not a happy place. It originates from our unmet needs, unsolved problems and thwarted desires. This emptiness affects all of us in some way: it’s the source of our doubt, fear or yearning and it’s the darkness from which our ruminations emanate.
Back in the 1950s, Martin Heidegger predicted that we might become so dazzled and bewitched by technology that our only way of thinking might be calculative thinking; this would come at a loss of meditative thinking, the essence of our humanity.14 When we meditate, we reflect on our being, our truths, and the meaning of our lives. We make sense of everything about ourselves, good and bad, and develop authenticity. A lack of meditative thinking leaves our emptiness untended, raw and dark. If many of us, as Hsee suggests, have developed an aversion to idleness, our stimulation devices are helping us avoid doing the critical psychological work we need to do to become whole. If we fail to spend time inside ourselves, facing our demons as well as our dreams, we can’t resolve our problems, find meaning from our troubles, and make sense of the future we want. If we fail to spend time with our thoughts and worries, we can’t learn from them and grow stronger. If we fail to spend time inside ourselves, we can’t become ourselves, in all our possibilities and potential.
The Happiness Paradox
My wife sprained her ankle badly. Her foot swelled painfully, making her want to rest it all the time. Her doctor, on the other hand, had different ideas. He told her to walk with a normal step, rotating through the full movement, each stride. It was excruciating. At any given point, she would have been much happier resting that foot. Yet, the only way to improve was to walk through the pain, and so step by painful step, she walked and she healed.
It is true, as Wilson and Hsee found, that we are happier when active (even if the activity is meaningless). However, this misses the point. It is only by walking through our thoughts—and all the worries, problems and emptiness—that we build up our internal resources to face future troubles. If we don’t do this, we cannot stem the creeping cloud of hollowness. In many, that might mean we yearn for more external validation through money, image or popularity, which drives us to more busyness. In others it may simply mean that we try to drown out the wails of our existential angst through mindless, frenetic activity. Either way, unresolved emptiness drives us, unsatisfyingly, into the skeletal arms of busyness.
Earning Happiness
Happiness is something earned. It is only through focused effort and stretching ourselves, for example, that we experience flow. The same applies when we are not active. Happiness in your thoughts—alone and unstimulated—takes time and the willingness to do the work. We have to earn it through periods of idleness and meditation. In my view, both active and passive happiness are critical. We will not lead completely happy lives unless we can be completely engaged in our activity; and quietly content in our idleness.
Getting Practical
Going inside and working through what’s there is a little messy. It takes time, and there is no universal solution. Having said that, in the practical spirit of the book, here are a few pointers.
Dead Time
A recent American Time Use Survey, by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, found that that 83 percent of people in the US spend no time at all “relaxing or thinking.”15 Caught between production and consumption, we manage to keep ourselves almost totally occupied. In doing this, we are the first generation who are living without downtime; no previous generation has had so little time alone with their thoughts. Our fabulous devices are allowing us to hyperstimulate ourselves away from happiness and fulfillment.
What are the best times in your day to create “dead time”? For me it is travel time: I fly a lot. I used to be intent on making that time useful, or at least interesting. Between podcasts of recorded lectures, my Kindle, and the odd book, I would make sure every second of my travel time, including driving to the airport and going through security, were learning filled. What I became aware of, is in learning and learning and learning, I had no time and space to stand back, to integrate and to make the research and ideas I was reading and hearing into my own. I have started creating dead time on these trips: time without input or stimulation, time for intellectual ambling. All the best ideas for this book came from those times.
Notice the Chimp
One of the things I like most about Steve Peters’s concept of the Chimp (mentioned in Chapter 8), is that it somehow externalizes emotions. It helps people see emotions and thought separately, to see irrational worries and fears as belonging to the Chimp, and as being normal. This allows the Human to observe them, reflect and learn. One of the core concepts of mindfulness is the ability to be alert and notice what’s passing through your mind, but to stay detached from it, at a distance, not judging or getting wrapped up in it. It seems to me that noticing the grip of fear or anxiety, it is easier to say to yourself, “There goes the Chimp again,” and in so doing retain a separateness from those emotions. In Latin-based languages for example, people would say, “I have fear,” (tengo miedo in Spanish), which seems a much more helpful description than “I am scared.”
Personal Pronoun Proofing
How do you talk to yourself? Ethan Kross, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, was curious when he ran a red light and caught himself saying, “Ethan, you idiot!” He wondered what effect speaking to himself (in his head) in the third person would have versus using “I.” He asked people to give a presentation with only five minutes to prepare. Some of those people he asked to talk to themselves using “I.” Others he asked to use their own names. He found that those who talked to themselves using “I” had an internal monologue full of emotion: “I can’t do this. I’ll look stupid. I’ll forget my words. I wish I’d worn my other pants!” On the other hand, those that talked to themselves in the third person tended to be more rational and supportive: “Tony, you’ll be okay. You’ve done loads of presentations before.” Using this subtle change in inner language helped people to get more emotional distance.16
When your time alone with your thoughts turns sour, catch yourself using “I” statements. Don’t force yourself to make ridiculously overpositive affirmations, just start talking in the third person. Your voices will naturally step away from the emotion and start supporting you through your challenge.
THE BIG MESSAGES IN “FROM BUZZ TO JOY”
This chapter explains how the path to joy is not in the buzz of activity and stimulation, but in diving deep into experiences and moments, or deeply into ourselves.
Buzz and Happiness
• Busyness is a buzz, getting all the chemicals flowing: adrenaline, dopamine and opiates. It can be fun in small doses, but it can also, too easily, take over our lives.
Going Deep
• Flow moments are states of optimal experience in which we are deeply engaged with what we’re doing, losing all sense of ourselves and of time.
• Flow experiences motivate us to follow the path of engagement; we naturally go deeper into activities that are uniquely aligned to our strengths and values, and we naturally become more differentiated.
• Flow is the antidote to a life of distraction, to the addiction of buzz.
• Create flow by challenging yourself, setting goals, concentrating on experiences and getting feedback.
Deep into Your Three Seconds
• From a psychological perspective, the present moment lasts three seconds. All we ever experience is held in those three-second bubbles. To replace buzz with depth, we need to be more engaged within our three seconds.
• Time management tends to drive us toward slicing time and splitting attention, and away from engagement. Focus on managing attention instead.
• Savor moments more fully by noticing “happy attacks,” sharpening your perceptions and increasing your capability to get absorbed in the moment.
Deep Inside
• We have a dread of idleness, because it forces us to come face-to-face with our emptiness. In fact, many of us would rather electrocute ourselves than be alone with our thoughts!
• When we are idle, the amount of blood to our brain increases, because the default network is doing important work.
• The default network integrates what we’ve experienced; it is essential for learning, growth and resolving the problems and pain of our emptiness.
• The happiness paradox: we are happier when we are active, but we won’t be truly happy and fulfilled unless we are idle.
GO-DO
Increase Your Joy
Identify when you experience flow in your typical week and increase the amount of time you spend doing the most flow-inducing activities.
Trigger Flow
Identify one important activity or piece of work you are currently spending a lot of time on. Increase the intellectual or physical challenge by making the task harder (drying three plates at once) or by setting yourself a tough goal. By doing this you are likely to concentrate harder and experience more flow.
Dead Time
Make sure you waste some time—every day. In that time, be alone; just you and your thoughts.
EXPERIMENT
Do Less
Try, for the next week, to do fewer things, both at work and in your personal life. This doesn’t mean you work or play less hard, it’s just the overall number of things you are doing is lower, so you spend longer on each activity.
Happy Attacks
When you are in a moment of true joy, don’t let it pass unnoticed. Give it your full attention by calling out that you’re having a happy attack.
Personal Pronoun Proofing
Catch the voices in your head using “I.” You’ll find your time alone with your thoughts is more constructive and less emotive if you create distance by changing your inner monologue to “you.”
Chapter 12
Beyond Busy
(Making Good Intentions Stick)
On a bitterly cold morning in 1916, Floyd and Glenn Cunningham arrived at their schoolhouse in rural Kansas. There was no one at school yet so, like most days, the two boys went to the stove, soaked the wood in kerosene (so it caught more easily) and lit the fire. Unfortunately, by mistake, someone had put gasoline in the can rather than kerosene. The resulting explosion and fire killed thirteen-year-old Floyd. His younger brother, Glenn, woke up in the hospital a few days later, screaming in pain; his lower body had been ravaged by flames. At first the doctors believed he would die. He survived, but needed to have his legs amputated: his skin had been burned away, he had lost all his toes on his left foot and his right leg was so deformed by the fire it had become two inches shorter. Glenn, however, had other ideas. He screamed so loud and so persistently, they decided to let him try to cope with his tattered legs.1
Bringing life back into his legs would not be easy. He needed horrific stretching exercises and massages, which, in his words, “hurt like hell.” Most young children would have given up, but he was determined to walk again. When his father grew tired from administering the painful stretches and massages, he asked his mother to take over, then when she tired, he continued himself.
In 1919, his mother wheeled him outside only to return and find him on his knees. She rushed to help, assuming a problem, but was brushed aside as he crawled to the picket fence. Stake by stake he clambered along the wall, willing his legs to move. Over the coming months, he worked so hard along that fence that he wore a path in the grass.
After many months of this self-inflicted ordeal, to the astonishment of everyone, Glenn took his first unaided steps in years. He recalls how painful it was. Bizarrely, he found it hurt less if he did a kind of hopping, running step than if he walked. So that’s what he did. For the next six years pretty much every step he took was running.
Six years after the accident, not only was he running, he was outrunning everyone in the town (even though it was still uncomfortable to walk). True to form though, Glenn didn’t stop there; he continued pushing himself. Over the following years he became one of the greatest middle-distance American runners of all time, setting the world record for the mile, 800-meter, and the indoor mile.
Glenn Cunningham achieved amazing things because he persisted. He knew what he wanted and he kept pushing for it. It was hard; his injuries bothered him for a decade, but he willed his body back onto its feet. He willed himself to become the best. I like this story because teaching himself to walk again wasn’t a one-off challenge he faced. It was a long-term struggle. I can only imagine how many days he woke up not in the mood for the difficulties facing him that day. At so many points in his journey he could have settled for something less than he dreamed of. At many points those around him believed he should accept his lot. Yet he pushed on.
