My Stress Portfolio

What's your stress tolerance? (Credit: Mike Richey)

I'm no investor.  Far from it.  I've bought maybe 10 stocks in my lifetime and I recall the best performer losing half it's value.  I'm also no sucker, so I learned from my mistakes and quickly outsourced my meager investment portfolio to the professionals and haven't looked back.

Now, when I talk about "investment professionals", I should clarify.  I really don't trust the stock-picking ability of anyone since the financial markets are complicated and I doubt that anyone can predict how anything that complicated will behave.  Fortunately, I'm not alone in this opinion and a subset of the investment community relies on the principle of diversification of risk as a bedrock strategy for coping with the uncertainty of the markets.  Through diversification, an investor can rely on historical information about the best performing investment types without putting all her eggs in a single proverbial basket.

Now let's shift gears to stress.  Life activities and events are like investments.  We are investing our time and attention in activities that may bring us happiness, pleasure, grief, or stress.  The payouts or losses may be on the timescales of days, to weeks, to years.  As an investor of our time and attention, we must weigh the probabilities of gains with the risks of losses: driving hard at work could bring promotions at the cost of personal relationships, for example.

I propose the concept of a Stress Portfolio as a strategy to balance our activities to allow both personal growth while managing the risks that come with stress, like poor health or burnout.  My Stress Portfolio is a introspective sense of the balance of five components of my reaction to daily life: distress, eustress, flow, relaxation, and boredom.  I think of each of these as representing a decreasing level of stress one might experience.  As events happen in life both within or outside my control, I can reevaluate the distribution of my stress portfolio and "rebalance" my intensity to compensate.

What is the right distribution of stress?  I think the answer to that question will vary by the individual. For example, some people are more resilient than others and may benefit from a greater allocation of activities in the distress or eustress categories.  This is an interesting area for research as proper allocation of stress will determine the degree of success an individual can achieve.  To much stress and a person may crumble and give up.  Too little stress and a person is not challenged and may not rise to their full potential.

As a general rule, I think most of our time should be spent in a state of relaxation or flow with a decent amount of time in a state of eustress (exciting or exhilarating situations). I also don't advocate total avoidance of stressful situations or boredom (the extremes).  These act as high and low intensity activities that can permit personal growth and recovery, respectively.

Until more research is done to determine the right allocation, all we can do is look within and ask ourselves what our portfolio should look like.  Just like an investor must evaluate her risk tolerance, an individual must evaluate her stress tolerance to find the right allocation and maximize performance over time.

Stay happy!

The Axiom of Awesomeness

Everything is a skill.

Is intelligence something we are born with? Or, can we become more intelligent with hard work?  The answer is certainly a bit of both but a critical variable is our personal opinion on the matter: if you don't think you can get smarter, you won't.

In classroom settings, if students think intelligence is malleable, they are more motivated, exert greater effort, and outperform students who think intelligence is fixed trait (I'm not compensated for that link, BTW).

Unfortunately, I think the broad implications of these observations are not always appreciated.  Often, the message is that a growth mindset - an attitude that self-improvement is possible - is critical for performance by kids and in school.  However, a growth mindset is really about performance by anyone doing anything.  The real take-home message from studies like these is that a general growth mindset is a critical first step before we can become better at life.

To counter this poor messaging, I propose the following Axiom of Awesomeness.  The Axiom outlines a philosophy of growth that we must accept before we can improve.  I'll enumerate the axiom first and then will expand on each tenet.

The Axiom of Awesomeness

1. Everything we do is a skill.  
2. Every skill can be improved by deliberate practice.
3. Skill improvement through deliberate practice takes time and effort.
4. Every moment is an opportunity to practice a life skill.

OK, so that's the Axiom. Hopefully I will be able to convince you that the axiom is on-target and that it's an important cognitive framework to support becoming a rockstar.

1. Everything we do is a skill.  

While most research studying a growth mindset were focused on school performance, school performance is only one part of life.  As I've discussed before, being good at life goes way beyond an SAT score.  However, everything else we do can be considered as much a skill as test taking.  For example, staying focused on a task is a skill.  Controlling our emotions during stress is a skill.  Managing relationships is a skill.  Speaking is a skill.  Writing is a skill (one I'm struggling with right now).   Skills aren't only limited to those things we traditionally might consider skills, like playing the guitar, drawing, or taking tests.

2. Every skill can be improved by deliberate practice.

No one is born playing the guitar or knowing math or being a great public speaker or being a leader.  Even the masters in fields like these spent countless hours focused on getting better: they practiced (for an in depth analysis of this, check out Mastery by Robert Greene).  Dedicated, focused practice is essential for improvement and success.  For more on the focused part of this tenet, see this article by Cal Newport.

However, let's keep in mind the first tenet of the Axiom: everything we do is a skill.  For example, let's say I'm bad at following through on projects (something most people struggle with, I'm sure).  Well, following-through-on-projects is a skill.  That's the first tenet of the Axiom.  The second tenet of the axiom is that practice improves skills.  Thus, I need to come up with some way to practice this skill.  In my example of "following through on projects", I might select one, small project as a "fail at no cost" test-case which will allow me to work on my issue without getting discouraged.  Once I succeed at the test-case, I can set my sights on something more challenging.

3. Skill improvement through practice takes time and effort.

Ahh, but here is the tricky part: getting better takes real work!  Sorry, I know we all want someone to tell us the secret to being amazing (like this book claims).  But that's not reality and we all know it.  Improvement takes focused effort over long periods of time.  Until one has practiced something for decades one can't assume it's an impossible task.  My homunculus likes to say to me: "Stop whining like a little baby, put your big boy pants on, and get to work".

4. Every moment is an opportunity to practice a life skill.

The good news is that getting smarter, more intelligent, or better at life can happen at any moment.  We don't need to concoct some arbitrary self-improvement program that goes on our calendar.  Every moment of living is a practice opportunity.  Why?  Because life isn't easy and we aren't perfect which is a guarantee that we will always screw something up.  With the Axiom of Awesomeness in mind, these challenges morph from "this sucks and I suck" to chances to get better at life.

Here is a perfect example: preparing for a presentation.  Making and giving a presentation is an opportunity to resist the urge to procrastinate (a skill), focus on a single task (a skill), manage our anxiety (a skill), communicate to a group (a skill), and bounce back if it doesn't go well (a skill).  Every step of preparing for this presentation is a practice opportunity.  My favorites in the list are: managing our anxiety and bouncing back if it doesn't go well.  These are skills that most often trip us up because they are so hard to define and aren't viewed as skills at all.  Frequently, these skills are chalked up to "that's just the way I am."  Wrong.  We must remember the first tenet: everything is a skill.  Next time can be better but we have to keep practicing.

In Summary

Perhaps this is obvious, but a belief that improvement is possible will determine if we improve.  However, a growth mindset is only part of the equation.  As I argue with the above Axiom, a growth mindset must be supplemented by three additional elements: 1) a broad definition of skill to include anything humans do, 2) a willingness to put focused effort into improvement, and 3) an attitude that life's challenges are opportunities to get better at living.  In combination, these four assumptions will not only permit improvement but will also be motivating during periods of difficulty when our resolve is tested.

Stay happy!

Fruit Ninja and flavors of focus

Slice that bananna!

Recently, my wife and I have been obsessed with the game Fruit Ninja.  And, having been simultaneously obsessed with the idea of focus and obtaining metacognitive control over my intensity of focus, I couldn't help but start to analyze Fruit Ninja as a tool for fine-tuning my already ninja-like ability to focus.  Let me explain. (Also, I'm not getting paid to write this, I just like Fruit Ninja).

For those of you who don't know, Fruit Ninja is a game that originally became popular on the iphone and has since expanded to the Android platform, the iPad and (I think) to an online game.

The game is simple, grasshopper.  But not easy.  The goal is to slice up fruit by swiping your finger across the screen of your touchscreen device.  That's the easy part.  The hard part is that, in addition to fruit, there are bombs that fly into the scene and occlude your target fruit.  Hitting the bombs earns a point penalty in some versions of the game, and in other versions of the game can lead to instant failure. Check out some video footage.

What does this silly game have to do with flavors of focus?  Well, cynical adult, the game offers three "modes" of play: classic, arcade, and zen.  Ooooh, zen!

Just one more game, please?

Each mode places different cognitive demands on the player.  In classic, the number of fruit slowly increases over time and if you miss three fruit in total, your game ends.  In addition, hitting a bomb results in instant failure.  For these reasons, classic mode require intense focus and precision.

New to The Happy Homunculus?

You must be new here.

Welcome to the Happy Homunculus!  You might be wondering what the heck is going on here?  Fair question: we're talking about some funky stuff after all.

Simply, our mission is to improve our thinking via metacognition (thinking about our thinking) - essentially, we want to understand what science can tell us about the most effective thinking strategies and apply those principles to our own thinking.  The goal?  Better performance and improved mood.

To that end, we've been conducting a little experiment in applied metacognition: each day we are attempting a different Daily Mind Game that is designed to improve some aspect of our thinking.  In addition, we've been grouping these challenges into week-long themes in order to maintain some focus and make some lasting changes in how we think.

So far, we've completed a Week of Focus and a Week of Empathy.  Currently, we've been trying to improve our own motivation to change during this Week of Motivation.  So far, we've tried the following challenges:

Day 1: Benefits of Change
Day 2: No to the Status Quo
Day 3: Characteristics for Change
Day 4: Expertise for Change
Day 5: Intention to Change

We have one more challenge to go for the week (then one day off).  Hopefully, you'll follow along as I put my own homunculus through his paces.  Also, please comment on the articles.  My homunculus would love some feedback about how these challenges work for you!

Zone of 100

My homunculus is being naughty today: whining, angry, complaining.  But, I am not going to let him get me down!  Instead, I'm going to apply some of what we learned previously to block out the sounds of my obnoxious homunculus.  In the 100 Breaths challenge, we attempted to focus on our breathing and count 100 consecutive breaths.  This wasn't easy for me, but it did make me feel more focused and calm.  So today, for our daily mind workout we will live the 100 breaths challenge:

100 Breaths

Breath normally.

The other day, I was in the gym pumping iron, doing rep after rep of curls with the hope of trying to make my biceps as large as possible (likely a futile activity for me), when a thought occurred to me...  "Methinks," I thought, "A lot of people exercise day-in and day-out trying to be health-conscious."  My biceps were on fire, but I kept performing curls, 38... 39.... 40... 41... I also kept thinking: "But, I can't help but think about all of the minds out there that aren't getting some daily exercise.  What about our minds? We should be exercising our minds!"  A light-bulb appeared over my head, I dropped the dumbbells, and ran out of the gym.

With that thought, the Daily Mind Game was born.

Normal, physical exercise is great for our bodies and our brains.  However, normal exercise doesn't necessarily train our MIND: the software that runs on our brains.  The Daily Mind Game (DMG) will hope to fill that void by providing a small, daily mental work-out designed to test and improve some aspect of our thinking.  These fun challenges won't be traditional brain-teasers, instead they will be meta-cognitive exercises designed to target some aspect of our higher-order thinking with the goal of improving that type of thought.  Meditation-like challenges will be a frequent component of the DMG, but the sessions will include any task that develops our meta-cognitive-ninja-skillz: self-control, relaxation, empathy, motivation, etc.  The DMG will always be science-inspired and I will provide some "additional reading" if you are interested in learning more about why the DMG of the day is useful.  Should be fun!

Without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, I introduce the first Daily Mind Game...

100 Breaths:

The goal: count 100 breaths.

Info:  Find a quiet spot where you will have some privacy.  Just breath normally and easily.  Don't try to slow down or speed up your breathing (although, I found myself speeding up my breathing out of impatience!).  Instead, just try to observe your breathing, don't change it.  At the conclusion of each breath, increase your count.  Don't lose count, or you must start over!

Estimated time: 5-10minutes

Purpose: Build self-control, patience and control over our attention.

More and more, meditation is being recognized as a form of mental training that can lead to improvement in attention.  In this DMG, we work on focus, patience, and self-control (i.e. not giving in to boredom!).  If you want to learn more about the brain-benefits of meditation, check out these links:

http://www.pnas.org/content/104/43/17152.abstract
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100714121737.htm
http://www.spring.org.uk/2009/05/how-meditation-improves-attention.php
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/08/health/psychology/08medi.html

On a side note, my wife pointed out that in pilates, a session will often open with a count to 100 (called "the hundred" actually) while holding your legs in the air and pumping your arms up and down. SOOO, if someone can do that, we should be able to sit in a chair and count to 100, albeit slowly.

Links: Return to the Week of Empathy - Move to the next Daily Mind Game