Smiling Alone

The poor man's painkiller?
The other day, I was rummaging around on Deric Bownd's MindBlog looking for some fun stuff on pain tolerance and I stumbled on this article that explored the relationship between laughing and pain.

To ruin the punchline, the authors found that laughter significantly elevated pain tolerance in a number of contexts.  What's more, the researchers do a decent job controlling for mood to tease out if the act of laughing, rather than good-feelings that come with laughing, explained the effect. It does.  In other words, the very act of laughing resulted in an increased pain tolerance, not "being happier".

This reminded me of the classic cause and effect conundrum: the act of smiling may boost mood.

Then I had the following thought: when I'm alone, I'm rarely smiling or laughing.  I did a little experiment and observed my own smiling/laughing behavior when I was alone and was even more bummed when I realized that I'm rarely smiling, grinning, chuckling, or tittering when I'm by my lonesome.

Instead, I'm normally "concerned" about something and wearing said concern on my face: a poker face, a scowl, a furrowed brow.

This is bad news, because as the above research suggests, I may be contributing to my own bad moods.  It is intuitive to think that our mood will dictate our external displays of our mood: we smile because we are happy.  That may be true, but some research suggests that the relationship may extend in the other direction.  The act of smiling may make us happier.

So I tried it: whenever I feel a little too serious (and I'm alone), I start grinning like an idiot.  And, it works.  I've found that if I start being goofy, I cannot stay in a bad mood.  This is great news, because often a bad mood is the number one killer of my work ethic.  If you read the above laughing-pain paper, the authors mention that laughter occurs most readily in a group, so the best way to get a mood boost is likely to be around a group of happy people.  However, sometimes we must be alone, so anything I can do to bump up my mood, I'll take it.  Even if it means smiling at nothing at all.  I'm strange.

Embrace the Suck

Shit happens.
Having just been to the funeral of a loved-one, I am reminded of a cruel fact of life: shit happens.  Bad shit happens all the time and, often, there is nothing we can do about it.

Actually, that's not quite right.  We can always do one thing when shit happens: react to it.  When bad shit goes down, the one thing we have control over is how we react to the bad stuff.  In fact, that is the thesis of Viktor Frankl's classic Man's Search for Meaning: how we react to adversity defines us.

But, of course, this fact brings up a philosophical and practical question: how should we react when bad things happen? Is there a "best" cognitive strategy for coping with bad shit?

The answer to that question is important for many reasons.  From a performance perspective, how we react (internally and externally) to hardship will impact our ability to "get the job done", whatever that might be. For example, if we let our suffering bubble up as anger, we might alienate our boss or an important client.  Internally, if our suffering distracts us, our quality of work may suffer too.

From a health perspective, how we react to difficulty will influence our well-being.  For example, an extremely negative emotional reaction may trigger a stress response.  Unchecked, such a response turns chronic, and brings with it all the documented health nastiness that we hear about.

So, what should we do, metacognitively speaking, when the shit hits the fan?  One method, which is somewhat intuitive, might be to try to ignore the bad stuff: put it out of your mind.  However, this approach may be counterproductive.

An alternative strategy is to actually face suffering head-on.  In fact, this strategy has been adopted by three very different schools-of-thought that each know a lot about dealing with hardship, and is the approach I like most for dealing with my own shit.

The first example comes from the military and is the source of this post's title.  The military phrase "Embrace the Suck" is a crude way of saying "Face the Music".  The lives of military personnel rival almost any endeavor in a nefarious combination of physical and mental hardship: physical exertion, discomfort, sleep deprivation, isolation, fear, injury.  In other words, war sucks.

But, how do top war-fighters react to the suckiness?  Try to ignore it?  No, instead this common phrase is a reminder to not sugar coat a bad situation but, rather, to look suffering in the eye and embrace it as a part of life and as a part of getting the job done. In fact, it appears that some soldiers actually come to revel in suffering as part of the challenge. For example, this guy.

The second take on this cognitive strategy is from a very different source: Buddhism.  Interestingly, Buddhism, which is a philosophy that strives to maximize joy, identifies suffering a fact of life: it's unavoidable.  Moreover, Buddhist teachings actually suggest that we "touch our suffering" and mindfully explore both the cause and feeling of suffering.  The Buddhist practitioner is often encouraged to "smile at suffering", acknowledging suffering as part of life and recognizing suffering as a complex experience that makes happy moments better by contrast. For more on the details of the Buddhist philosophy, you can check out Thich Nhat Hanh's The Heart of the Buddha's Teachings (FYI: this is a philosophy book, not a book about science).

Finally, in performance psychology, the "mindfulness, acceptance, commitment" approach, which I've discussed before, and is described in detail by Frank Gardner in The Psychology of Enhancing Human Performance, offers a scientific perspective on the "embrace the suck" philosophy.  Proponents of this school-of-thought suggest that top athletes recognize pain and suffering (mindful), accept it as part of athletics (embrace it/accept it), and finally move on and get the job done (commitment) in the face of adversity.  The mindful awareness and acceptance of suffering, though, are the essential first steps. The best athletes embrace the suck.

Why might this approach work? The opposite strategy - ignoring bad things - may be counterproductive because it nearly guarantees that bad shit is going to catch us off guard. Then, all the negative emotion can rush forward uncontrolled, like some homunculus back-hand to our amygdala.

Alternatively, embracing pain and bringing it into awareness may act as a pressure release, while also giving us time to craft strategies for coping. In addition, consciously evaluating emotionally charged thoughts and feelings seems to make emotions and sensations less visceral and more intellectual, further reducing their power over us.

The examples I've provided may seem extreme: soldiers, athletes, monks.  However, we all have our own shit to deal with and it never hurts to be a tougher person or to become better at coping with bad shit. Anecdotal and observational evidence suggests that an "embrace the suck" mentally is a decent metacognitive strategy for enhancing our toughness.

Moore's Law for the mind

The smartest apes think about
thinking... And wear armor.
If you've read even a handful of posts here at the Happy Homunculus, you'll know that a major buzzword is "metacognition".  I love saying it, thinking about it (meta-metacognition?) and writing about it.  After all this metacognition geekiness, I feel I am overdue in explaining my obsession with this whole thinking-about-thinking business.

To get right to the point, I think metacognitive skills are the most important cognitive skills we possess. Furthermore, if we want to provide ourselves, our children, our grandchildren, and society with the best tools to survive in a complex, changing world, I am of the opinion that metacognitive training should serve as a foundation on which all instruction is built.

Why? In order to explain, I propose the following thought experiment:  

Let's say I want to become a better runner.  Right now, I am a terrible runner.  I sort of bounce up and down like a large, flightless bird.  It's a sad thing to see and is a horribly uncomfortable experience for me.

However, I also don't run very often.  The skill of running is not one that I've invested a lot of time and energy into mastering.  So, just like anything, if I start running more frequently, I'll improve.  I'll get fitter, my form will probably improve, my pain tolerance will increase etc.

The sigmoid: Awesomeness as a function of time
In fact, once I start running more regularly, I should see my running ability improve dramatically.  I'm so shitty at running that, during this beginner phase, even thinking about running will probably make me a better runner.  

Unfortunately, and as most of us are aware, that honeymoon phase doesn't last forever.  Soon, the improvement gains stop coming so easily.  Soon, I will begin to experience the dreaded "sigmoid" phase of the learning curve. In other words, I'll keep getting more awesome, but the gains in awesomeness will come less and less frequently. 

Now, this is assuming that my training plan doesn't change.  All I'm doing is running more often than not-at-all, say every day for 20 minutes. That's it.  Well, what if I start mixing it up and begin to experiment with my weak points.  Do I need to get faster?  I may run some sprints to see how fast I am.  How's my endurance?  I may go for some longer runs to see if I have the ability to sustain a pace for longer.  By experimenting, through trial and error, I may realize that I've plateaued because I am not focusing on speed.  Switching focus to that weak point may result in faster improvement than if I had continued doing the same thing I had been doing.

This the deliberate practice approach to improving running: I can start thinking about the process and I'll get better, faster.

Metacognition is the same concept applied to how we think and learn.  So, the first cognitive level might be: study.  But  if, after studying again and again I realize I am not at a level I'd like to be, then I must move to the second cognitive level: meta-study.  In other words, I must start thinking about how I think during the process of studying.  How often do I study? Where do I study?  What does studying consist of: reading, looking at pictures, highlighting endless passages?  How might I become more efficient at studying?

Moore's Law is the oft-cited phenomenon that the power per unit size and/or cost of our computers has grown and continues to grow exponentially.  Now, I purposefully mentioned Moore's Law in the title to be provocative and I don't actually believe that one could actually experience exponential growth in intelligence simply by thinking more about thinking.  

However, I do believe that a little deliberate analysis of how we think is a strategy that will undoubtedly lead to better thinking, and performance, than simply rote repetition ever will.  In this way, metacognition is pretty much the only strategy that will allow for constant improvement  in performance.  Moore's Law for the mind is something I made up so you would read this, but metacognition can still make us smarter, faster.

The beauty of a metacognitive approach is that it can apply to any type of thinking or behavior.  Where should I focus to raise my performance to the next level?  Perhaps I give up too soon because I have a pessimistic attitude towards change. I should probably focus on reducing negative self-talk. Or maybe I know what I need to do to get better but don't invest the time to improve.  I might want to think about combating procrastination.  The possibilities really are endless, but improvement will happen after some focused metacognition.

Unfortunately, I get the impression that most people don't think of thinking as a skill that can even be improved.  Instead, many people focus on the externally-motivated skills that are essential for day-to-day existence.  That is a totally reasonable approach in the short-term, but by going meta we can bust through any plateaus that may be dogging us and maximize our effectiveness in the long-term.  

For that reason, the most essential metacognitive skill is to first think that improving how we think is even possible.