Different

mental strategy:Find a way to keep from thinking it

The Willpower Trick

• By Jonah Lehrer January 9, 2012 11:21AM

• 
  January is the month of broken resolutions. The gyms are packed for a week, Jenny Craig is full of new recruits and houses are cleaned for the first time in ages. We pledge to finally become the person we want to be: svelte, neat and punctual.
  Alas, it doesn’t take long before the stairmasters are once again sitting empty and those same dirty T-shirts are piling up at the back of the closet. We start binging on pizza and beer — sorry, Jenny — and forget about that pledge to become a kinder, gentler person. Human habits, in other words, are stubborn things, which helps explain why 88 percent of all resolutions end in failure, according to a 2007 survey of over 3,000 people conducted by the British psychologist Richard Wiseman.
  The reason our resolutions end in such dismal fashion returns us to the single most important fact about human willpower — it’s incredibly feeble. Consider this experiment, led by Baba Shiv, a behavioral economist at Stanford University. He recruited several dozen undergraduates and divided them into two groups. One group was given a two-digit number to remember, while the second group was given a seven-digit number. Then, they were told to walk down the hall, where they were presented with two different snack options: a slice of chocolate cake or a bowl of fruit salad.
  Here’s where the results get weird. The students with seven digits to remember were nearly twice as likely to choose the cake as students given two digits. The reason, according to Shiv, is that all those extra numbers took up valuable space in the brain — they were a “cognitive load” — making it that much harder to resist a decadent dessert. In other words, willpower is so weak, and the conscious mind is so overtaxed, that all it takes is five extra bits of information before it becomes impossible for the brain to resist a piece of cake.
  This helps explain why, after a long day at the office, we’re more likely to indulge in a pint of Häagen-Dazs. (In fact, one study by researchers at the University of Michigan found that just walking down a crowded city street was enough to reduce measures of self-control.) A tired brain, preoccupied with its problems and run down by the world, is going to struggle to resist what it wants, even when what it wants isn’t what we need.
  The problem is only compounded by studies showing that the very act of dieting can make it even harder to resist temptation. In a 2007 experiment, Roy Baumeister — the influential psychologist behind the ego-depletion model of willpower and co-author of the interesting Willpower — gave students an arduous attention task, in which they had to watch a boring video while ignoring words at the bottom of the screen. Then, the students drank a glass of lemonade. Half of the students got lemonade with real sugar, while the other half got a drink made with Splenda. On a series of subsequent tests of self-control, the group given fake sugar performed consistently worse. The literal lack of sugar in their prefrontal cortex, that neural “muscle” behind willpower, made it even harder to not give in.
  Is there a way out of this willpower trap? Are there secret exercises that can make it easier to stick with our new year resolutions? Not really. Baumeister has found that getting people to focus on incremental improvements, such as the posture of the back, can build up levels of self-control, just as doing bicep curls can strength the upper arm. Nevertheless, it’s not clear that most people even have the discipline to focus on their posture for an extended period, or that these willpower gains will last over the long term.
  But there is a neat way to circumvent the intrinsic weakness of the will, which helps explain why some people have a much easier time sticking to their diet and getting to the gym. A fascinating new paper, led by an all-star team of willpower researchers including Wilhelm Hofmann, Baumeister and Kathleen Vohs, gave 205 participants in Würzburg, Germany a specially designed smartphone. For seven days, the subjects were pinged seven times a day and asked to report whether they were experiencing a strong desire. The participants were asked to describe their nature of their desire, how strongly it was felt, and whether it caused an “internal conflict,” suggesting that this was a desire they were attempting to resist. If a conflict existed, the subjects were asked to describe their ensuing success: Did they manage to not eat the ice cream? The researchers suggest that this is the first time experience-sampling methods have been used to “map the course of desire and self-control in everyday life.”
  Christian Jarrett, at the excellent BPS Research Digest, summarizes the results:

  The participants were experiencing a desire on about half the times they were beeped. Most often (28 per cent) this was hunger. Other common urges were related to: sleep (10 per cent), thirst (9 per cent), media use (8 per cent), social contact (7 per cent), sex (5 per cent), and coffee (3 per cent). About half of these desires were described as causing internal conflict, and an attempt was made to actively resist about 40 per cent of them. Desires that caused conflict were more likely to prompt an attempt at active self-constraint. Such resistance was often effective. In the absence of resistance, 70 per cent of desires were consummated; with resistance this fell to 17 per cent.

  But not everyone was equally successful at resisting the psychological conflict triggered by unwanted wants. According to the survey data, people with higher levels of self-control had just as many desires, but they were less likely to feel that their desires were dangerous. Their desires also tended to be less intense, and thus required less inner strength to resist.
  These findings are incredibly revealing, as they document the banal secret of willpower. It’s not that these people have immaculate wills, able to stare down tempting calories. Instead, they are able to intelligently steer clear of situations that trigger problematic desires. They don’t resist temptation — they avoid it entirely. While unsuccessful dieters try to not eat the ice cream in their freezer, thus quickly exhausting their limited willpower resources, those high in self-control refuse to even walk down the ice cream aisle in the supermarket.
  This experience-sampling study neatly confirms the influential work of Walter Mischel, which I wrote about in the New Yorker. In the late 1960s, the Mischel began a simple experiment with four-year-old children. He invited the kids into a tiny room, containing a desk and a chair, and asked them to pick a treat from a tray of marshmallows, cookies, and pretzel sticks. Mischel then made the four-year-olds an offer: They could either eat one treat right away or, if they were willing to wait while he stepped out for a few minutes, they could have two treats when he returned. Not surprisingly, nearly every kid chose to wait.
  At the time, psychologists assumed that the ability to delay gratification — to get that second marshmallow or cookie — depended on willpower. Some people simply had more willpower than others, which allowed them to resist tempting sweets and save money for retirement.
  However, after watching hundreds of kids participate in the marshmallow experiment, Mischel concluded that this standard model was wrong. He came to realize that willpower was inherently weak, and that children that tried to outlast the treat — gritting their teeth in the face of temptation — soon lost the battle, often within 30 seconds.
  Instead, Mischel discovered something interesting when he studied the tiny percentage of kids who could successfully wait for the second treat. Without exception, these “high delayers” all relied on the same mental strategy: they found a way to keep themselves from thinking about the treat, directing their gaze away from the yummy marshmallow. Some covered their eyes or played hide-and-seek underneath the desk. Others sang songs, or repeatedly tied their shoelaces, or pretended to take a nap. Their desire wasn’t defeated — it was merely forgotten.
  Mischel refers to this skill as the “strategic allocation of attention,” and he argues that it’s the skill underlying self-control. Too often, we assume that willpower is about having strong moral fiber or gritting our teeth and staring down the treat. But that’s wrong — willpower is really about properly directing the spotlight of attention, learning how to control that short list of thoughts in working memory. It’s about realizing that if we’re thinking about the marshmallow we’re going to eat it, which is why we need to look away.
  The same lesson applies to adults. Although we might not be able to resist the delicious temptations of the world — they are simply too tempting — we can outsmart them, finding ways to avoid that internal conflict in the first place. The only way to boost willpower is to recognize the inherent weakness of the will

people with moderate to severe depression exhibit an unusual neural response when viewing pictures of their mothers

Can a Picture Of Your Mother Diagnose Depression?

• By Jonah Lehrer December 20, 2011 4:35PM

• 
  Sigmund Freud gets a bad rap from modern science. (The immunologist Peter Medawar summarized the feeling of many with his remark that psychoanalysis is the “most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century.”) Sure, Freud’s theories mangled a lot of details — we no longer worry about penis envy or the Oedipus complex — but he was shockingly prescient on the big themes. In recent years, it’s become clear that, as Freud always insisted, the unconscious is the dominant force in our mental life. (What Freud called the id is now a network of brain areas associated with emotion, such as the amygdala and nucleus accumbens.) He was mostly right about the logic of dreams, which often regurgitate those parts of experience we store in long-term memory. And he was basically correct to imagine the mind as a set of conflicted drives, with reason competing against the urges of the passions. We expend a lot of neurotic energy holding ourselves back.
  But there’s another Freudian theme that deserves a little 21st century appreciation: his obsession with the mother-child relationship and the way it shadowed people throughout life. Freud saw this parental bond as a dominant motive for behavior, influencing both our development as children and our happiness as adults. (The super-ego, for instance, begins to form when the incestuous desires of the child are thwarted by the father.) Although many of Freud’s particular claims feel like cultural relics, modern attachment theory has confirmed the crucial importance of the maternal bond. As Harry Harlow put it, “You’ve got learn how to love before you can learn how to live.” And it’s our mothers who often first teach us how to love. (Thankfully, human parenting is slowly becoming much more gender neutral. But this a recent cultural innovation.)
  A new paper in PLoS ONE expands on this Freudian theme. The study involved a team of scientists at Columbia University, Beth Israel Medical Center and Albert Einstein Medical Center who performed fMRI scans on 28 female subjects between the ages of 18 and 30, half of whom were suffering from unipolar depression. (The patients were evaluated using the Beck Depression Inventory II.) While lying in the scanner, the volunteers looked at pictures of their mothers, a few friends and a selection of strangers. The scientists focused their attention on the left anterior paracingulate gyrus (aPCG), a brain area that plays an important role in the regulation of social emotion. Previous studies have linked the bit of cortex to error and conflict resolution and the understanding of intentionality.
  By looking at the differential brain responses of depressed and control subjects after viewing those various faces, the scientists came up with an impressive diagnostic tool. In fact, the fMRi scans were able to predict the presence of depression in nearly 90 percent of subjects; the correlation between actual BDI scores and the predicted BDI scores based on fMRI results was 0.55, which is quite strong. Out of the 28 subjects, the fMRI diagnosis generated one false positive and two false negatives.
  Here’s where Freud comes in: the neural differences were only significantly different when the young females were viewing photos of their mothers. (When looking at pictures of friends and strangers, every brain looked similar.) In the data below, notice the differential response between the activity generated by maternal faces compared to that generated by friends and strangers, as mothers generated a much larger response from the aPCG in those suffering from depression:
  
  Obviously, there are many statistical tricks one can play on fMRI data to generate mistaken correlations; only time will tell how these results hold up. It’s also unclear what’s driving this fMRI observation. What is the aPCG up to? The scientists throw out a number of possibilities, including the disregulation of social bonding hormones like oxytocin, but these remain mostly speculation:

  Oxytocinergic activity in the hypothalamus has been linked in studies of attachment to reward processing activity in the ventral striatum and is in turn regulated by the aPCG and other areas of the medial PFC. Higher activity in this area for depressed subjects during appraisal of attachment figures and others could reflect compensatory control activity in a dysregulated network, as has been suggested in various studies.

  So we don’t understand why this effect exists. But we do know that it’s a pretty robust phenomenon and that people with moderate to severe depression exhibit an unusual neural response when viewing pictures of their mothers, at least when compared to pictures of friends and strangers. (Future studies should look at other family members.) Although these subjects are adults, the maternal relationship remains a window into the murk of their mental illness, as the Viennese doctor surmised long ago. This doesn’t mean our parents are responsible for our sadness — it’s too early to say if Philip Larkin was right about mum and dad — but Freud was definitely onto something when he insisted that the maternal relationship be considered in the context of therapy. When attempting to diagnose depression using the patterns of activity exhibited by the brain, it turns out that we don’t need to ask people lots of questions or measure stress levels or investigate their mood. Rather, we only need to show them a picture of their moms.

Exercise Improves Brain Function

ABC | Experiment shows brain function improves with exercise

January 5, 2012 

I Know I Can

Be Yourself

Be Who You Are

Break Early April

It feels like I just need to take a break. I have been working hard and yet it feels like I am doing some things wrong.
I'm not kidding myself. Probably part of the reason that I feel like things are going so well is because Divya is wanting to spend time with me and not reaching out to other people. She mentioned wanting to get together with other people from her room and some of the old fears were there. I didn't know that she was talking with people who lived close. She spends a lot of time talking on her site. She has me so closed out from being able to check she could be having an emotional or real affair that I wouldn't be aware of. Trust is a very scary thing. It opens you up to being hurt very deeply.

Anyway, things are going pretty good emotionally. I'm working on the emotional negative thinking that is going to be the key to getting help. I am trying to set up writing/tracking spaces for working through this. I'm trying to set up realistic goals so like exercising and getting work done.

I working to fit exercise into my daily agenda.

I want and need to meet with Dr. Black to document what went on with me and my boss JD.

I have a meeting set up with Dr. L for a potential increase in pay/responsibility.

And I have an obligation to get stuff turned in for the website venture with Divya's daughter.

That is quite a bit on my plate.

Not to mention the daily crap that I need to take care of with B and the house.

So, there was something inside me that snapped...broke...resisted, when I told Dr. M that I was taking some time for myself that to work on myself and this other stuff. Her comment back was yes but an introvert such as yourself has to be careful not to let that go on too long because you'll just be happy doing your own thing and not reach out to other people. Remember two friends is what is healthy.

Friends are a fucking hell of lot of work. You have to talk to them and do things with them and so on. I'm not saying that this shouldn't be a goal but right now the thought of making new friends is so overwhelming.

So realistically looking at what Dr. M said, it makes sense that in order to be completely whole, I will need to have other people in my life other than family. I hear her and I'll do it.

At the same time, I think that it is ok to take time to get to where I need to go and if I keep making new good habits, it will fall into place to meet new people. But for now, I am even taking a break from Dr. M for myself to just get back on track with all of the little details that I have going from moving files to writing in my journals to creating tasks list etc. So I cancelled my appointment with Dr. M on April 16th, but now I have to take B to the darn doctor for her puking and I am having to go prom dress shopping. Sounds like a damn day off right....sigh.

Wednesday April 4, 2012 Daily Thoughts

Got a call from my sister today. She was checking to see if

Update on dates Dr. M, Dr. W and Dr M's Practice Group

Dr. W
January 30 8:30AM talked about cyst and meds
March 20 2:30PM talked about labwork...bloodwork came back really well as if I've never had diabetes. Need to take vitamin D3. Believes that cyst is not from Bartholin gland but a sinus cavity that has been formed from anus. Took culture when it comes back she will prescribe antibiotics. (common staph infection/amoxicillin prescribed on 3/27/12)

Labwork
February 20 8AM

Dr. M:
March 7 5PM 1st meeting/gave test to take
March 12 5PM test showed that I have anxiety and depression/suggested that I read Feeling Good first three chapters
March 26 12PM talked about three chapters/filled out FMLA papers/read more chapters Feeling Good and work on negative thoughts worksheet
April 9 5PM
April 16 11AM (I just want to note that this was orginally scheduled for April 18th at 12PM but had to change the date and time by request of JD because MA was off on April 18 already)

Dr. MJ:
March 20 12:30 PM increased alprazolom from .25 mg twice a day to .5 mg three times a day
May 15 1:15PM

Dentist February 23 10:30 AM

Tuesday April 3, 2012 Daily Thoughts

Gonna try to make more daily notes so that I can try to track my negative thoughts as they happen. I write my daily rants and thoughts about work and have found it to be relevant going back for some documentation. I hope that as I move forward this self reflection can help,

I was sentimental for my mom tonight. I am under no illusions that a lot  of my negative self talk comes from my mom voice or that she'll go crazy again at some point. But I love my mom....I feel her love at times...and I think that I need to allow myself that. 

I put together my mom's birthday box and made her some corner bookmarks that I saw.

I walked for the second time in a row. Yesterday, I did .5 miles in 24.58 minutes. I had thoughts that I was having pain in my arm and neck. Today, I did .5 miles in 22.35 minutes. My hands did get numb and I thought that was from gripping the handle too tight. I also it felt like the toes of my right foot were falling asleep. 

I've been taking my antibiotics for the cysts and I am still having drainage.