Being busy is fine, but the inability to be with
oneself is not. Below is not so much
about tai chi, but it does promote mental down time. Hey, Google, of all places, offers its
employees mindfulness meditation.
Slowing down, as tai chi reinforces, is invaluable. Tom
No Time to Think
By
KATE MURPHY
JULY
25, 2014
New
York Times
ONE
of the biggest complaints in modern society is being overscheduled,
overcommitted and overextended. Ask people at a social gathering how they are
and the stock answer is “super busy,” “crazy busy” or “insanely busy.” Nobody
is just “fine” anymore.
When
people aren’t super busy at work, they are crazy busy exercising, entertaining
or taking their kids to Chinese lessons. Or maybe they are insanely busy
playing fantasy football, tracing their genealogy or churning their own butter.
And
if there is ever a still moment for reflective thought — say, while waiting in
line at the grocery store or sitting in traffic — out comes the mobile device.
So it’s worth noting a study published last month in the journal Science, which
shows how far people will go to avoid introspection.
“We
had noted how wedded to our devices we all seem to be and that people seem to
find any excuse they can to keep busy,” said Timothy Wilson, a psychology
professor at the University of Virginia and lead author of the study. “No one
had done a simple study letting people go off on their own and think.”
The
results surprised him and have created a stir in the psychology and
neuroscience communities. In 11 experiments involving more than 700 people, the
majority of participants reported that they found it unpleasant to be alone in
a room with their thoughts for just 6 to 15 minutes.
Moreover,
in one experiment, 64 percent of men and 15 percent of women began
self-administering electric shocks when left alone to think. These same people,
by the way, had previously said they would pay money to avoid receiving the
painful jolt.
It
didn’t matter if the subjects engaged in the contemplative exercise at home or
in the laboratory, or if they were given suggestions of what to think about,
like a coming vacation; they just didn’t like being in their own heads.
It
could be because human beings, when left alone, tend to dwell on what’s wrong
in their lives. We have evolved to become problem solvers and meaning makers.
What preys on our minds, when we aren’t updating our Facebook page or in
spinning class, are the things we haven’t figured out — difficult
relationships, personal and professional failures, money trouble, health
concerns and so on. And until there is resolution, or at least some kind of
understanding or acceptance, these thoughts reverberate in our heads. Hello
rumination. Hello insomnia.
“One
explanation why people keep themselves so busy and would rather shock
themselves is that they are trying to avoid that kind of negative stuff,” said
Ethan Kross, director of the Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory at the
University of Michigan. “It doesn’t feel good if you’re not intrinsically good
at reflecting.”
The
comedian Louis C.K. has a riff that’s been
watched nearly eight million times on YouTube in which he describes that not-good
feeling. “Sometimes when things clear away and you’re not watching anything and
you’re in your car and you start going, oh no, here it comes, that I’m alone,
and it starts to visit on you, just this sadness,” he said. “And that’s why we
text and drive. People are willing to risk taking a life and ruining their own
because they don’t want to be alone for a second because it’s so hard.”
But
you can’t solve or let go of problems if you don’t allow yourself time to think
about them. It’s an imperative ignored by our culture, which values doing more
than thinking and believes answers are in the palm of your hand rather than in
your own head.
“It’s
like we’re all in this addicted family where all this busyness seems normal
when it’s really harmful,” said Stephanie Brown, a psychologist in Silicon
Valley and the author of “Speed: Facing Our Addiction to Fast and Faster — and
Overcoming Our Fear of Slowing Down.” “There’s this widespread belief that
thinking and feeling will only slow you down and get in your way, but it’s the
opposite.”
Suppressing
negative feelings only gives them more power, she said, leading to intrusive
thoughts, which makes people get even busier to keep them at bay. The constant
cognitive strain of evading emotions underlies a range of psychological
troubles such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety, depression and panic
attacks, not to mention a range of addictions. It is also associated with
various somatic problems like eczema, irritable bowel syndrome, asthma,
inflammation, impaired immunity and headaches.
Studies
further suggest that not giving yourself time to reflect impairs your ability to empathize with others.
“The more in touch with my own feelings and experiences, the richer and more
accurate are my guesses of what passes through another person’s mind,” said
Giancarlo Dimaggio, a psychiatrist with the Center for Metacognitive
Interpersonal Therapy in Rome, who studies the interplay of self-reflection and
empathy. “Feeling what you feel is an ability that atrophies if you don’t use
it.”
Researchers
have also found that an idle mind is a crucible of creativity. A number of
studies have shown that people tend to come up with more novel uses for objects
if they are first given an easy task that allows their minds to wander, rather than a
more demanding one.
“Idle
mental processing encourages creativity and solutions because imagining your
problem when you aren’t in it is not the same as reality,” said Jonathan
Smallwood, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of York, in England.
“Using your imagination means you are in fact rethinking the problem in a novel
way.”
Perhaps
that’s why Google offers its employees courses called “Search Inside Yourself”
and “Neural Self-Hacking,” which include instruction on mindfulness meditation,
where the goal is to recognize and accept inner thoughts and feelings rather
than ignore or repress them. It’s in the company’s interest because it frees up
employees’ otherwise embattled brain space to intuit end users’ desires and
create products to satisfy them.
“I
have a lot of people who come in and want to learn meditation to shut out
thoughts that come up in those quiet moments,” said Sarah Griesemer, a
psychologist in Austin, Tex., who incorporates mindfulness meditation into her
practice. “But allowing and tolerating the drifting in of thoughts is part of
the process.” Her patients, mostly hard-charging professionals, report being
more productive at work and more energetic and engaged parents.
To
get rid of the emotional static, experts advise not using first-person pronouns when thinking
about troubling events in your life. Instead, use third-person pronouns or your
own name when thinking about yourself. “If a friend comes to you with a problem
it’s easy to coach them through it, but if the problem is happening to us we
have real difficulty, in part because we have all these egocentric biases
making it hard to reason rationally,” said Dr. Kross of Michigan. “The data
clearly shows that you can use language to almost trick yourself into thinking
your problems are happening to someone else.”
Hard
as they sometimes are, negative feelings are a part of everyone’s life,
arguably more so if you are crazy busy. But it’s those same deep and troubling
feelings, and how you deal with them, that make you the person you are. While
busyness may stanch welling sadness, it may also limit your ability to be
overcome with joy.
Kate
Murphy is a journalist in Houston who writes frequently for The New York Times.
No comments:
Post a Comment