A 30-second exercise to 3X your follow through by Steven Kotler

In the early 2000s at the University of Bath, a team of researchers led by Sarah Milne conducted a simple experiment with the goal of promoting exercise participation.

Two-hundred-forty-eight adults were randomly assigned to one of three groups:

Group one was instructed to read a few paragraphs from a random novel before working out.

Group two a pamphlet on the heart benefits of exercise.

But the third group received a different set of instructions.

In addition to reading the pamphlet, they were told to use the following sentence to formulate an exact workout plan:

"During the next week, I will partake in at least twenty minutes of vigorous exercise on [DAY] at [TIME] OF DAY in [PLACE]."

The results?

• 38% of participants in the first group exercised at least once per week
• 35% of participants in the second group exercised at least once per week
• 91% of participants in the third group exercised at least once a week

That wasn’t a typo.

Writing a single sentence nearly tripled the likelihood of participants following through on the goals they set.

Although more research is required to establish the true efficacy of implementation intentions––the scientific name for this process––the implications are profound.

By engaging in this 30-60 second exercise, we can increase our capacity to follow through on our big goals––and the daily action steps required to achieve them––by orders of magnitude.

For example:

• If you’re struggling to wake up without hitting snooze, you can use this tool during your end of day planning or bedtime journaling
  
  
• If you want to stay focused on an important project, you can take a few moments to write out your implementation intentions before beginning a deep work block
  
  
• If you want to be more present with your family, you can stack this into your end of day review before you leave the office

The point here is simple.

Tiny hinges swing big doors. 

Causes of Depression

We need to feel we belong.
We need to feel valued.
We need to feel we’re good at something.
We need to feel we have a secure future.

10 ways to have a better conversation

1. Don't multitask. Don't think about anything else. If you want to get out of the conversation, get out of the conversation. Don't be half in it. 
2. Don't pontificate. If you want to talk about without listening, write a blog (lol). Everybody you ever meet, will know something you don't. Everybody is an expert is something. Strive to learn that. Assume that you have something to learn. 
3. Use open ended questions. Who What When Where How.
4. Go with the flow. Ideas and stories are gonna come to you during the listening period, let them go. 
5. If you don't know, say that you don't know. 
6. Don't equate your experience with theirs. It's not the same. It's never the same. Every experience is the same. Secondly, it's not about you. Conversations are not a promotion opportunity. Conversations. Are. Not. A. Promotional. Opportunity!
7. Don't repeat yourself.
8. Stay out of the weeds. Forget the details. People don't care. 
9. Listen! If you're moth is open, you're not learning. No man ever listened his way out of a job. 
10. Be Brief. 

source

Reasons for Fatigue

1. Depression
2. Stress
3. Anxiety
4. Lack of exercise
5. Bad nutritional choices
6. Dehydration
7. Withdrawal symptoms hours from the last coffee

Feel Better? Write

Post published by Jennice Vilhauer Ph.D. on Jan 17, 2015 in Living Forward



I have been treating patients usingcognitive therapies for almost 15 years, and one of the most successful exercises I have ever seen work to help them re-engage their sense of well-being is so simple that each and every time I convince someone to do it, I am still remarkably struck by how effective it is.

Before I share this exercise with you, I want you to know that the difficult part is not doing the activity. It is making yourselfbelieve that the activity will have enough benefit that you will put forth the actual effort to do it, and experience the results.

Often when I give this assignment to patients, they come back for two or three weeks afterward, still not having tried it. That's OK; I'm so certain they will not try it initially, that I generally don’t even assign it until I have been working with them for several weeks and have had sufficient time to coach them into understanding the benefits of shifting their attention and thinking; how it relates to brain functioning; and how it affects their mood, so that they understand the value of what I am asking them to do.

OK, so what is the exercise?

• Keep a pad of paper next to your bed and every night before you go to sleep, write down three things you liked about yourself that day.
• In the morning, read the list before you get out of bed.
• Do this everyday for 30 days.

These don’t have to be big things, like I am a kind person; they can be simple, such as I like that I held the door for my co-worker, or I like that I didn’t lose my temper in traffic today, or I like that I am making the effort to try this exercise even if I’m not sure it will work. . .

For someone who is depressed, this activity feels like a lot of effort. Why? Research shows that people with depression have what is referred to as an attentional bias for negative self-relevant materials. They also have impaired attentional control, which means that once a negative schema is activated, they tend to ruminate on it and have difficulty disengaging and shifting their attention to something else; consequently, there is sustained negative affect.(1) Essentially, people with depression generally spend a good deal of time thinking about what they don’t like about themselves—and they have a hard time stopping.

The more time you spend thinking about something, the more active it becomes in your mental space—and the easier it becomes to access. Also, the more you think of something, the more it primes your brain to keep looking for similar things in yourenvironment, creating a selective filter that not only causes you to sift your environment for things that match up with what you are thinking about, it actually causes you to distort ambiguous information in a way that matches up with your dominant thoughts.

Someone with depression who goes to a party might get 10 compliments, but if one person mentions the shirt he is wearing is “interesting,” that person may likely go home and fixate on the ambiguous comment and turn it into a stream of thinking like this: I wonder what was wrong with my shirt, I probably looked silly in it, I bet they all thought I looked like an idiot. What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I ever get anything right? This is so humiliating. The 10 compliments have long been forgotten.

So how will this exercise help you?

Research also shows that it requires more attentional effort to disengage from a negative thought process than a neutral one.(2) This simple-to-do but nonetheless effortful exercise essentially helps you build the strength to disengage from any negative thought stream; redirects your attention to positive aspects of yourself; and retrains your selective attention bias.

As you do this, you not only start to become aware of more of your positive attributes, they become more available to you as you interpret events around you. Compliments become something you can hear and accept because they are more congruent with your new view of yourself. You start to interpret events occurring around you in a less self-critical way. If you stick with it, over time this has a compounding effect that elevates your overall sense of self-worth—and, subsequently, your well-being.

But remember: There is no benefit to your mental health in just understanding how the exercise works, just as there is no benefit to your physical health in knowing how to use a treadmill. The benefit comes from the doing.

How to keep yourself motivated

This article is was originally found here:
http://www.theeffectiveengineer.com/blog/frame-your-goal-to-increase-motivation


In 2009, Dr. Heidi Grant Halvorson made a surprising discovery in the science of motivation. She conducted a series of studies where she asked participants to solve a set of puzzles and problems. In one group — the “be-good” group — participants were told that their score reflected their “conceptual and analytical abilities.” They should try to solve as many problems as possible and aim for a high score to demonstrate how good they were. In another group — the “get-better” group — participants were told that each problem was a “training tool” and that they ought to “take advantage of this valuable learning opportunity” to improve their problem-solving skills. [1]

For some participants in each group, Halvorson also increased the difficulty level by introducing a few challenges. She interrupted participants to use up some of their allotted time. She threw in extra, unsolvable problems to frustrate them, without telling participants that the problems were unsolvable.

What surprised Halvorson was how the two groups dealt with the challenges. The ones in the “get-better” group remained unfazed and solved as many as problems in the challenging conditions as the easy ones. They stayed motivated and kept trying to learn. The ones in the “be-good” group, however, were so demoralized when they faced the challenges and obstacles that they solved substantially fewer problems than those who didn’t have to face them.

And those differences happened just because of how the initial goal was framed.

Define Mastery Goals, Not Performance Ones, For Difficult Problems

Halvorson’s experiments illustrate the difference between a mastery goal, where you aim to learn and get better at some skill, and a performance goal, where you aim to be good, either to demonstrate you’re talented or to outperform other people.

Your objective for a given problem can often be framed in either way:

Are you studying for tests to learn and to grow or to demonstrate your intelligence?
Are you spending years on a PhD to innovate in your research area or to because you think it’ll be a good stepping stone for your career?
Are you training for a 10K race to improve your own time or to beat the competition?
Are you working on side projects and brushing up your coding skills to become a better software engineer or to simply get a better-paying job?

The actions you perform to accomplish a mastery goal or a performance goal might be the same, but your motivation and your mindset will be quite different. When you’re focused on improving your own skills, rather than on demonstrating them, you’re less likely to get discouraged by obstacles, time pressure, or other unexpected challenges. You’ll believe that you can still improve and do better next time. You’ll have a growth mindset.

That’s not to say performance goals don’t have their place. Professor Dan Ariely conducted a series of experiments at MIT, the University of Chicago, and in rural Madurai, India. Subjects were asked to participate in a number of games and offered either a small, moderate, or large financial incentive for performing well on each particular game — a clear example of performance goals in action. For memory games, creativity games, or motor skill games, those offered a large financial incentive actually performed worse than those offered smaller ones. The only task where participants actually performed better when offered a large financial incentive was when they were performing the mechanical task of alternating keypresses on a keyboard as quickly as possible. [2]

Daniel Pink reinforces this idea in his book Drive, explaining that when there is a clear goal and when the problem can be solved by brute force, performance-based goals — especially those incentivized by a reward — work extremely well. It’s when the problems require some ingenuity or some mental effort, that performance-based goals and rewards start to backfire and reduce performance. [3]

Making This Research Useful

Set the right type of goal for the task at hand to get better results.

You’re better off setting a performance goal when you can brute force through the problem, particularly if there’s a reward at stake. For example, performance goals work well if you’re:

Triaging through a long bug or feature list.
Responding to a long backlog of personal emails or customer support emails.
Finishing a laundry list of chores around the apartment.
Mechanically grinding through any number of mindless tasks.

It can be helpful for each of these short-term tasks, where there isn’t much opportunity to master a new skill, to instead tie a reward to the completion of the task. If you get everything done, then you’ll treat yourself (or your team) to something nice. The performance incentive can help you get things done faster.

But for our long-term goals, we’ll stay much more motivated in the long run if we adopt a mindset where we’re aiming to master our skills rather than to hit a performance goal. For example,

Rather than focusing on getting promoted to a staff engineering position at your company, focus on improving your engineering skills and your ability to create meaningful impact.
Rather than training to win at some sport — whether it’s running, a tennis match, ultimate frisbee, etc. — train to become a better player or athlete.
Rather than joining at a startup to get rich, join because you’re passionate about the problem space and excited to learn from the journey.

You’ll notice that long-term goals framed in terms of performance tend to rely on external factors outside of your control (whether your manager promotes you, whether you’re better than your opponent, or whether your startup succeeds). When you let environmental circumstances play such a large role in your success, it’s much harder to stay motivated when you encounter obstacles, just like the puzzle-solving participants in Halvorson’s experiments. If you instead focus on your own learning and on getting better, you’re much more likely to overcome pain points and actually succeed.

Notes:
Heidi Grant Halvorson, Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals, p64-68.
Dan Ariely, et. al., “Large Stakes and Big Mistakes”, https://www.bostonfed.org/econom....
Daniel Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, p60.

Exercising mindfulness might improve ADHD

Mindfulness exercise:

1. Focus on a target
2. Realize when you've become distracted
3. Bring the mind back to the target
4. Sustain!

source: Exercising the mind to treat attention Deficit

Decision Making and Negotiation

Anchoring - the right way to start
BATNA - Best Alternative to the Negotiated Agreement. What happens if you don't come to an agreement. Let me be clear what are my benefits and costs of negotiations.
Emotions - could be in favor/against you. What emotions do you want there to be?

When fighting, at the end one of the two will one. But the longer the fighting goes on, both parties lose more, in the sense that both are miserable. So the earlier the parties can agree on who's going to win, the less both parties will suffer.

"Yes Dear" is a good thing to say.

If you reward people for behavior that they're intrinsically motivated to do, after a while, the reward takes the place of the intrinsic motivation, and people aren't intrinsically motivated.

So, don't get rewarded in money for stuff you love doing. Just don't do it for the money.

Principle of Loss Aversion

People hate losing more than they love gaining.

So if I want to enforce people to behave a certain way, fining them for undesirable behavior will be more effective than rewarding them for desirable behavior.

So, punishment is more effective than rewards.

But what happens when you take them away? In which case, does the behavior continue?

In case of punishments, the behavior resumes to what it was. In case of rewards, the newly learned behavior goes on.

So, while present, punishment maybe more effective than reward. But if you want the behavior to continue, you should reward.

source: I am taking this Irrational behavior course on coursera.org taught by Dan Ariely from Duke, so all these psych posts in the next few days will be from there.

Dog Poop Problem

Two kinds of signs for a rule: 

1. The sign board that says we shouldn't do it. 

2. The clues that everybody else is doing it. 

Which one would you follow? The second is Most important. 

Okay. So How we do we go from one situation where one thing we're trying to curb is the accepted norm?

First - there's never a good day to enforce (regulate) it. There's no smooth transition. There's has to be a quick transformation. So, announce a day that the change is going to occur. Have people subscribe to it, so they all have agreed to it. Then start using huge fines to start curbing it that day. 

source: https://class.coursera.org/behavioralecon-002/lecture/135

The Planning Fallacy

Whenever you're planning for some activity, try estimating it will take you twice as long, and then it might get done on time.

"...research shows that low-level distractions can make a task feel boring..."

source: http://www.howcast.com/videos/413809-How-to-Study-for-a-Long-Time-without-Getting-Bored?p=7345

Sleep Issues

Some tips I came across regarding sleeping better. Since I am having huge issues with sleep these days, here I am sharing these tips I learned in this video.

Not everyone needs 8.0 hours of sleep.

There's an epidemic of sleep deprivation going on. If you have trouble concentrating and feel sleepy all the time, that's a good sign you might be getting less sleep than you need.

1. Stop all caffeine consumption. Not even first thing in the morning. It has a long half-life, but it stays in your body. And even if you go to bed early, you will have trouble getting back to sleep if you happen to get up at sometime. 
2. You need to workout every day. 
3. No big meals before bed time. If you want a big dinner, have it 2-3 hours before bed time. Your last meal should be small. 
4. Avoid getting stressed before bed time. Stop thinking about things that mess you up. Don't think about things that you needed to do but couldn't. Just don't do the things that raise your blood pressue. 
5. Meditate before bedtime. Control your thoughts. Remember Allah. Most of us don't have control over what your brains do. But we can do murakba. 
6. Get rid of your alarm clock. If an alarm clock is waking you up, you're sleep deprived. If you wanna sleep better, you need to sleep longer. 
7. Avoid screen time before bed time. This is a tough one. 

Guide to Thinking Hard

The Cycle of concentration:

Phase 1: Blood Rush Alert
Phase 2: Find and Execute
Phase 3: Disengagement

8 Things Everybody Ought to Know About Concentrating

1. You can’t start concentrating until you’ve stopped getting distracted
2. Just do one important thing per day
3. Chunk into three’s
4. Questions that kill procrastination
    Question one: Does this really need to be done?
    Question two: Can I delegate this?

5. Be Smart With Your Time

A Sage is one that doesn’t involve themselves in dopamine-driven activities; instead, he or she is very selective about what they do. They have a habit of asking themselves questions that most people are too busy to ask. They pre-occupy themselves with the unspoken, yet meaningful assumptions that others fail to address. Sages ask questions about the meaning behind any activity that they embark on. They view turning down work as a logical decision, not an emotional one.

6. Mind Maps

Whenever you’re feeling overwhelmed, it’s critical to allow the mind to disentangle itself by mapping out your thoughts on paper.

There’re two types of maps:

(i) Problem-Solution Map
Top half of the page, write the problem. Bottom half, the solution.

(ii) Fear Map
On paper, map out the following formula “if x, then y.” Where “x” is the fear, and “y” is your estimate of the fear’s result.
Through mapping out your thoughts, you can calm the racing mind, which will free your mind to focus on the task at hand.

7. Blame something

You can reward your mind for concentrating by saying, “OK, mind, here’s the deal–it’s hard to concentrate on this right now, but I’ll pick up a bonsai tree, which will create a more compelling environment to concentrate.” You’ll find that this object-based motivator actually works.

8. Interest

Researchers found that concentration is not a gift. It’s not about intelligence. It’s not about being a prodigy with a gifted memory. It’s not about possessing the ability to recall an insane amount of facts (That’s what Google’s for). Researchers found that concentration is driven by interest, and interest is driven by attitude. If your attitude towards a specific project swells with interest, intrigue and passion, concentration is astonishingly easy.

source: http://howtogetfocused.com/chapters/8-things-everybody-ought-to-know-about-concentrating/

The Cure for Loneliness

I recently read an article about ways of curing loneliness. Now loneliness is not a disease per se, but people who have it do seem to have some defficiencies. Those deficiences may be biological, but one of them is the distortion of perspective. I read in the article that people who are suffering from loneliness tend to associate negativity to any doubt or ambiguity they encounter. That is to say that in any instace, where there is no or little evidence of explicit positive response, they will assume that there is a negative response for it. 


From the article itself:

 In ambiguous social situations, lonely people immediately think the worst. For instance, if coworker Bob seems more quiet and distant than usual lately, a lonely person is likely to assume that he's done something to offend Bob, or that Bob is intentionally giving him the cold shoulder.

This is the article I am talking about. And I found this article to be very helpful, especially this last part about maladaptive thinking. What I found even more remarkable was that, once I tried to force myself to stop making this thinking mistake, I was feeling a lot better! I started to feel worthy; as earlier my sense of worth, unfortunately, was being lowered by the perception that I am not worth liking, now it began to stop depending on an ungrounded assumption, and started shifting towards other, more real things.