Is Meditation Self-Help Bullshit?

Are you wasting your time,
meditating monkey?

A recent article by Virginia Heffernan in the New York Time Magazine is excoriating the gradual westernization of mindfulness meditation, demonizing this trend as somehow running counter to the essence of this ancient practice.  I think at the heart of this article is a desire to protect people from self-help snake oil but there is a palpable vibe in the article of an anti-self-help bias that is unfortunate.

As I've discussed before, our attitudes about change influence our ability to change.  So, while I agree with Ms. Heffernan that self-help advice should be evaluated critically, binning the entire self-help movement as bullshit isn't helping anyone either.

In this context, I can't help but reevaluate the purpose of mindfulness meditation (and mindfulness, in general).  Is mindfulness mediation useful? 

As someone who has practiced mindfulness meditation as an attempt to manage stress, I have concluded that meditation is simply a concerted effort to implement a reappraisal of bad thoughts.  Specifically, it has been suggested that rumination, or the endless replay of negative thinking, may contribute to depression.  Cognitive reappraisal is a well-known approach for dealing with a number of negative or disruptive thoughts and meditation is just a practiced form of this.  In the mindfulness meditation style I have tried, namely Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction popularized by Jon Kabat-Zinn, one reappraises negative thoughts as "thoughts", taking a meta-level view of them and partitioning them as something distinct from our experiencing mind.

Personally, this makes sense to me.  Just as I wouldn't accept the self-help advice of some rando, I am not going to trust that my automatic catastrophizing about the world is based on fact.  During mindfulness meditation, I am taking a skeptical stance toward my own worries and recognizing them for what they are: worries, not reality.  Ultimately, the proof is in the pudding when it comes to the value of mindfulness meditation.  If it helps someone cope with the challenges of life, then great.  We should all be active participants in our own mental health, experimenting with approaches until we get results.

In this way, stress management is like exercise.  Is one form of exercise better than another?  Is meditation better than a book club?  The answer is: it depends.  It depends on who is doing it, whether they enjoy it and whether they stick with it.  If the answer to these questions is "yes", then the long term outcome is likely to be positive.

The Mental Reboot Script

Time to reboot.

There's no way around it - the grind has been grinding you down.  You're tired, you're stressed, your motivation is low.  Sometimes life can be really tough and, lately, life has been really tough.

But bad times ebb and flow, come and go.  Sometimes things are tough, other times things are great.  Perhaps the tough times seem to happen more than the good times, but it's hard to know for sure.  When you're stressed it's difficult to keep perspective.

Situations can change though, and situations change faster if you make an effort to move forward, to make progress.  Who cares if you only make a little change today for the better?  At least it's a step in the right direction.  One small change to make life better is all you need to feel some hope.  Who knows?  Maybe this is the beginning of a period of incredible success.  Until you get started, you'll never know.

So get focused.  Don't let all the nagging stressors creep into your mind all at once.  You can only do one thing at a time.  Just pick something to do that would make a difference in your life and start working on it.  Pick something small, manageable and doable and just get it done.  No more worrying about picking the perfect thing to do, just trust your instincts and make progress.  Block out all other intruding worries and attack that one thing that will make you feel the most accomplished.

Oh, and please? Give yourself a break when you're done?  In order to make real, lasting progress you're going to want to stick to your goals.  Most things that need to be done take some time to happen, so let's not burn out.  After a full day of focused effort, you deserve to relax, rest and recover.  Your brain is an organ and a day of hard work is like a mental workout: you need some recovery time to be ready for the next day.

And while we're on the topic, don't lose sight of all the good stuff you have going on.  There are things that bring you joy even if they are little, simple things like McDonald's breakfast sandwiches.  Look around and remind yourself about a few things that make life fun and enjoyable.

Feeling better?  Good.  But, don't beat yourself up about getting down in the dumps from time to time.  It happens to everyone.  The important thing is to keep an eye on those nasty thoughts and be sure to reboot when things get out of hand.

Pessimism now, optimism later

Optimism and pessimism aren't
exclusive: it's all about timing.

My homunculus admitted to me that I've been confusing him.

On the one hand, I've been saying that optimism is critical for performance: if we get all pessimistic, we give up prematurely and don't invest the time to achieve our goals.

On the other hand, it's also critical to acknowledge our failures.  If we don't embrace our weak points and bury our head in the sand, we won't get any better at life.

Vexing isn't it?  The optimism thing was particularly hard for the rational part of my brain to embrace: I didn't like the idea of externalizing too many of the bad things that happened to me.  That felt like I was avoiding responsibility for my actions.  Also, as a total control freak, it didn't sit well to think that I couldn't influence most things in my life for the better.

But, luckily, I had a real a-ha moment.  Accepting our failures and being optimistic are not mutually exclusive.  Instead, it's all about timing.

Specifically, it is a fact that no one is perfect.  Life isn't perfect.  Actually, sometimes life can really suck.  Furthermore, none of us and none of our lives will ever be perfect. Debby-downer.

However, this doesn't mean that we can't get better and that our lives can't get better.  Just because we have aspects of our lives that are imperfect doesn't mean that, with time, we can't improve.

This is the way to reconcile our weak points with the need to remain optimistic.  Right now, in the present, we should be realistic about where we stand and acknowledge what sucks.  At the same time, we can remember that the bad doesn't have to last forever.  In the future, things can get better.  Combining these two attitudes - pessimism for now, optimism for later - is the formula for lasting, long-term progress.

Readin', Writin', and... Self Control?

A wrathful Khan, yes.
But, not the Khan I'm writing about. 

One of the most exciting things that has happened to education in recent memory is the founding of the Khan Academy.

If you don't know the story, Sal Khan is a highly educated, non-educator who was once a hedge fund analyst.  However, his life took an unexpected turn when the video-based math tutorials he made for his nieces became increasingly popular on YouTube.  This unexpected response inspired him to create an online "academy" where anyone can learn any topic for free.

The idea (and execution) of the Khan Academy is awesome.  Check out this TED talk to get a sense of the applications and implications of this type of learning system.  Watching this gave me goose-bumps of the "I've glimpsed the future" variety.  But, I also had one criticism; not of Khan Academy per se, but that most educational strategies fail to acknowledge the essential cognitive skills that kids need to succeed both in the Khan Academy and in the regular academies around the world.

At Khan Academy, kids can progressively watch videos on topics of increasing complexity and can also take quizzes to measure understanding.  However, even with an incredible resource like Khan Academy, kids must possess a few cognitive skills to fully benefit.  For example, without focus or diligence, kids will not return to the site again and again to reap the full benefit. Without resilience, kids may quit after a period of failure before the inevitable breakthrough can be made.

While merging education with technology is a fantastic thing, and is sure to improve education for millions, we must not ignore the fact that essential, metacognitive skills must be in place for our children, and us, to reach full potential.  How technology can be brought to bear on this challenge remains a major hurdle.  Until then, teachers in the trenches and parents at home are the only people who can ensure our kids develop these essential characteristics.

Is working hard a talent?

Working hard, or hardly working?

Being the best: is it hard-work or talent...  The topic seems to make internet-blogger-types get all giddy with excitement.  O!  The back and forth; the opinions and convictions.  So dramatic, who is right?

Of course, after all that, some wise-ass chimes-in and states the obvious: "everyone is right!"  Buzz-kill; but, true.

Aha! But I have a new, totally fantastic way of thinking about the issue that is certain to make the "Hard Work is King" crowd cringe.  I raise this question: what if the ability to work hard is a talent?

The problem is that all the talking heads out there look at working-hard as something independent of our brains; like hard work isn't a behavior that happens because our brains/minds make it happen.  Whoa, are we saying that our souls have to get involved now and whip up a frothy batch of free-will so that we can work hard and become a bad-ass?  We aren't becoming dualists here are we?

The ability to work hard is just that, an ability.  Working hard takes a ton of cognitive awesomeness, much of which is influenced by both genetics and our environment.  Let's enumerate some of the metacognitive ninja-skillz necessary to work hard, shall we?

First, we must exert significant impulse control, because we can't be distracted by extraneous information and influences.  Second, we must have the ability to recognize errors as they happen and generate creative solutions.  Third, we must demonstrate resilience and optimism so we can overcome our failures and keep working.  Fourth, we must know when and how to seek out the advice and feedback of others so that we don't fall into repeated patterns of behavior.  Fifth, we must have some motivation to work hard, otherwise, working hard is just dumb.

I'm worried about my genes.

Wow, when I spell it all out like that, the simple dichotomy of hard-work vs. talent breaks down.  Instead, hard-work becomes an ability all it's own that is not easily dissociated from a number of underlying cognitive capacities.  Isn't this fun?  Now we can start to ask more specific questions: is impulse control learned or innate?  Is optimism learned or innate?  Yes, the answer to questions like these will be "both", but at least then we can start to tease out strategies for working with what we have.

Maybe one day the debate will end.  Mr. Science will send me a nice letter indicating that I don't have "that gene" and I should give up science and become a monkey-trainer because, by way of some Gattica-like sorting process, that's what I'm programmed to do.  Until then, I can't change my genes, so worrying about "talent" is a waste of my time.  Instead, I'm going to work as hard as I can to improve my ability to work hard, because that's all I can do.

Sixty Days of Cognitive Fitness

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Normally, when I hear "mental fitness" I think word-puzzles, sudoku, and sequences of numbers. Basically, I think about the SAT and my homunculus gets a little queasy.

Homunky loves metacognition!

However, life is more complicated than word games. I have to motivate myself, interact with people, process new information, and stay calm enough so my friends and family don't disown me.  Instead, I need skills for dealing with life: mental toughness, optimism, self-awareness, self-control, people-skills and more. I need some metacognition up in here.

Meal Plan

Don't think about food!

This week at The Happy Homunculus, we're smushing, squishing, bending, and folding our homunculi to our will.  No longer will the impulses and urges that pop in and out of our head control us!  Oh, no - we are in control of ourselves....  Until our homunculus gets hungry, that is.

When those thoughts of food creep in, many of us play servant to our mighty inner voice: "EAT."  Of course, hunger is one of the most basic, innate drives we have, so it isn't surprising that controlling our eating habits is tough stuff.  The fact is, reducing food intake is a painful process, so don't feel ashamed if it's hard for you, or if you feel you could do a better job.  That is totally normal.  Changing our eating habits is really, really hard.  But it is possible, if our thinking first we change... says Yoda.

Unfortunately, what goes through most of our heads when we "give in" to temptation is more along the lines of: "What is wrong with me? Why can't I control my impulses?"  This pessimistic thought process is self-defeating, because by assuming that the problem is personal and permanent, our future potential for change drops big time.  The truth is, self-control isn't all or nothing: either you have it or you don't.  Instead, I like to think of self-control as a continuum: some days are easier than others. Today, your challenge is to prove this to yourself by controlling what you eat for a single day.  This "small win" can then act as future proof that we have some degree of self-control, which can provide a big boost of hope any time we fall off the wagon.

Meal Plan

Task: Plan all your meals for the day in advance, and stick to your plan.

Info: This game isn't about self-deprivation per-se, it's about self-control.  For this reason, you fail the challenge either if you eat something not on your plan, or if you don't eat everything on the plan.  That's right: you must eat exactly everything on the plan, nothing more, nothing less.  In making your meal plan, visualize the "perfect" day of eating - breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks - and how you'll get all the food.  Then, execute.  Also, one final note: tomorrow, after your day of self-control, make sure you don't "rebound" and eat differently than you normally would.  Control your eating for one day, then return to your routine.

Goal: Do not deviate from your meal plan.  If you fail, you must try again until you succeed.  Modify your plan, if needed.

Thoughts? Feelings? Agree? Disagree?  Post a comment...

Week of Optimism

That is one optimistic monkey.

Optimism is a hot topic this week on the intrawebs: some pundits like it and others don't.  Personally, I could use all the optimism I can get (my homunculus gets cranky easily), so this week at The Happy Homunculus we've been filling glasses of water half-way and contemplating just how full they are...  That was an optimisim joke. Uggh.

During the week, we listened to our thoughts following bad events and completed six Daily Mind Games to try to shift our brains from a pessimistic state to an optimistic one. Guided by research summarized in Learned Optimism, we tried to avoid thinking about things in a permanent, pervasive, or personal way.

My homunculus is still cranky, but less so.  Why don't you see how your homunculus responds?

Week of Optimism

Day 1: Hear the Homunculus - Listen to your automatic thinking.

Day 2: Ignore the Homunculus - Put a nasty homunculus in time-out.

Day 3: Temporary - Nothing lasts forever, bad stuff included.

Day 4: External - It's not always about you.

Day 5: Specific - Stop catastrophizing.

Day 6: Take Control - Escape the shock.

Whew!  I'm all tuckered out from all this metacognition and self-improvement that I need to unwind.  Don't you?  Next week, we're going shed our go-go-go mentality and try to relax.  But, worry not, partner-in-metacognition, we'll have our usual Daily Mind Games, but each day we're going to try to relax more and more.  After next week, you might be able to cancel your next vacation.  Another joke! 

An old classic that discusses the science of relaxation is The Relaxation Response.  While the "science of relaxation" may not sound relaxing at all (dramatic pause), the book is a great source of information about how to achieve a state of relaxation and the positive effects this state can have on our health and mood.  The book is a bit out-dated, but the main points still ring true. The Daily Mind Games for next week have been inspired by this book.

What's the point you may ask?  Well, our minds don't exist independently of our bodies.  In fact, our mental state can directly impact our physiology (our brains are an organ, after all) and vice versa.  For me, I'm always wound a bit tight - I'm kind of a nervous dude.  This seems to have given me a touch of the high blood pressures.  But, I'm not nervous about being nervous, the strategies in The Relaxation Response have been shown to reduce both blood pressure and other biomarkers of stress.  Joy!

Links: Check out other Weeks of Metacognition

Take Control

Want to make a dog mad?  Shock the dog.  Want to make a dog depressed?  Shock the dog and don't let it get away.

Dogs take control.

Treating animals in this way may seem cruel, but experiments of this sort have provided researchers with a significant amount of information about what leads to depression.  Specifically, animals that are given a mild shock, but have no way to escape, develop many of the physical symptoms of depression.  In addition, when these animals are moved into a condition where they can escape the shock (they can jump over a barrier and get away), many animals don't even attempt to escape.  This is the learned helplessness model of depression: the animals have learned to be helpless - that nothing they do matters - and that is just demoralizing.  

However, don't worry - these animals are easily rehabilitated.  Researchers simply demonstrate to the dog that they can escape the shock, and the dog realizes that it actually has control over it's situation.  After that, the dog is all good.

What's the point?  Well, when life beats down on you for awhile, it's natural to learn a bit of helplessness - despite our best efforts, things didn't go perfectly.  However, for the dogs described above, after they were trained to be helpless, and were moved to a situation where they could escape, they just assumed that they had no control of the situation.  In life, we very rarely have NO control over what happens to us.  So, today we're going to take control and, hopefully, our feelings of empowerment will improve too.

Take Control

Task: Exert control over some aspect your life.

Info: Pick something small for this challenge.  The idea is to prove to yourself that you have control over many aspects of your life.  Leave work 5 minutes early.  Do something different for your afternoon break.  Change your daily routine in some way.  Take control over something in your life and demonstrate that you can influence the world in a new way.  When you feel more in control, life seems a little more hopeful.  

Goal: Successfully take control of one aspect of your life.

This is an open-ended task because what makes you feel in control is a very personal thing.  Decide on something that makes you feel empowered and do it!

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Specific

Stop catastrophizing, monkey!

This week at The Happy Homunculus, we're working on becoming more optimistic.  Research suggests that optimistic people out-perform pessimists in many areas by persevering in the face of adversity.  Plus, it just feels good to be more optimistic!  So, let's change our thinking, shall we?

Today, we're going to work on not making things a big deal.

By discussing strategies for being more optimistic, we've explored the thinking styles that contribute to depression and are doing the opposite.  According to research summarized in Learned Optimism, people at risk for depression tend to think about bad things a lot (ruminate), assume bad events will have permanent consequences, and assume that bad events reflect a personal problem.  A third characteristic of a hardcore pessimist is allowing a bad event to impact all aspects of life: it becomes pervasive.  Today, we're going to try to avoid thinking that results in a pervasive, pessimistic mindset.

Specific

Task: Curtail automatic thinking that allows a bad event to impact all aspects of your life.

Info: For this task, you can either recall a bad event or listen to your automatic thinking after a fresh annoyance.  Argue any thoughts that creep in that make the bad thing become pervasive.  Here's an example, let's say you were passed up for a promotion.  How will you let this road-block affect your home life?  This issue at work has nothing to do with what's going on at home.  What will your thinking be like if your significant other is in a bad mood?  "Everybody in my life is treating me like dirt, I can't escape!"  Or, "She must have had a bad day too - let's comfort each other."  

Goal: Convince yourself that the causes of a bad event are restricted to a single context.

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External

It's not always about you, monkey.

The Week of Optimism rolls on!  So far, we've tuned-in to our automatic thinking, ignored negative self-talk, and re-framed a bad event as being temporary.  These metacognitive skills are essentials in the toolkit of any optimist and, today, we're going to practice another approach to bad events.  Specifically, we're going to try not to take bad things too personally.

A characteristic of people who are at risk for getting depressed is a tendency to view bad events as stemming from a personal issue.  Your boss is in a gruff mood: I must have done something wrong.  No job offer: I must not be qualified.  Good-looking person turns you down: I'm not attractive to them.  In each of these examples, something less-than-ideal happened and the individual blames himself.  In reality, the causes of each event might have nothing to do with the individual.  Your boss might have had a fight with her spouse.  You may be overqualified.  That person at the bar may be in a relationship.

For today's Daily Mind Game, we're going to bring a bad event to mind and try to place blame externally. Of course, if it is clear that you were at fault, then it's important to take responsibility.  But, for this exercise, let's choose an event that has a truly ambiguous cause and look on the bright side.

External

Task: Argue automatic thinking that a bad event was caused by a personal issue.

Info: For this task, you can either recall a bad event or listen to your automatic thinking during a fresh annoyance.  Argue any thoughts that creep in that make the bad thing seem personal.  I think one of the best scenarios to apply this to is after a random fight with a significant other.  One might view the cause of the fight as something personal: I may be less compatible with them than I thought.  Or, we could look to external causes: It was late at night and we were both exhausted.  Think of a bad event and try to find external factors that may have contributed.   

Goal: Convince yourself that the causes of a bad event are external.

People who frequently think of bad events as having personal causes are more likely to be pessimistic and more likely to get depressed.  Want to learn more about the thinking-styles that contribute to depression?  Check out Learned Optimism.

Temporary

When things go badly, the hurt is normally so acute that it's easy to just focus on the badness and let it become your whole world.  However, one way to take a bad situation and make it worse is to start telling yourself that things are going to be bad FOREVER.

Ignore the Homunculus

Ignore your homunculus.
Yes, even if it's a gnome.

This week we're trying to get more optimistic, and I'm optimistic that we'll succeed...  I mean, we have science on our side right?  Learned Optimism has a ton of great information about being more optimistic and I'm eager to translate the science therein into real action.  I want to spend less time listening to a negative, nasty homunculus and more time listening to the supportive words of a homunculus with some mojo.  So what might a metacognitive master do when his homunculus is acting all mean?  Ignore his homunculus.

I've discussed this before, but thinking isn't always a good thing.  This is especially true if your automatic thoughts are tinged with negativity, self-doubt, and doom.  Yesterday, we started listening to our homunculus to learn more about types of things we say to ourselves. Hopefully, most of the stuff going on in your mind was good, but if you're typical, a fraction of your self-talk is likely to be on the negative end of the spectrum.

The floppy hat and beard theme continues. 

The science suggests that an unending stream of negative thinking (a.k.a rumination), is a major risk factor for depression.  More importantly, one step in combating depression (or enhancing optimism, for that matter) is to distract ourselves when bad thinking creeps in.  That is today's Daily Mind Game:

Ignore the Homunculus

Task: Ignore negative thoughts for one day.

Info: Continue to monitor your thoughts like you did yesterday.  However, today, whenever a thought creeps in that you don't like (i.e. a thought that makes you feel bad about yourself or what you're doing), come up with some way to distract yourself.  You could try saying "NO" in your mind (or "VETO", my personal favorite).  Another suggestion proposed in Learned Optimism is to wear a rubber band on your wrist and give it a gentle snap whenever some negative thinking creeps in. Do whatever it takes, but no negative thinking today.

Goal: An entire day without a negative train of thought lasting more than 1min.

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Hear the Homunculus

Your homunculus must be hungry.

How's your homunculus doing lately?  I've talked a lot about my homunculus over the last few weeks but really haven't spent much time explaining what I mean by "my homunculus".  It's pretty important that we get a good understanding of this whole homunculus concept now, because during this Week of Optimism, we're going to be staring down our homunculus and putting the little dude or dudette in his/her place.  The goal?  Get more optimistic, happier, and healthier.

I've adopted the Homunculus as the mascot of this blog in a tongue-in-cheek reference to the homunculus argument in cognitive science/philosophy.  For centuries, smart, bearded, be-toga'd philosophers have speculated about the nature of the "viewer" when our brain sees the world around us.  During vision, light hits surrounding objects and bounces off, eventually hitting the back of our eyeballs.  This "image" of the world gets transmitted to our brain (in some form) where we then have access to the data in the visual scene.  But who then "sees" the image in our brain?  Well, one possibility would be that a little guy, a homunculus, sees the brain version of the environment and then tells us what to do with it.  Of course, this is a problematic view: how then does the homunculus "see"?  In this case, the homunculus would need his own homunculus! Oy vey.

I see you Homunculus!

We're not going to get into the details of why the homunculus argument stinks.  Instead, let's clarify what "homunculus" means for a blog about metacognition.  To us, our Homunculus is that "little voice inside", our subconscious, our primitive, our emotional, or our immature side.  I think we've all experienced something like this at one point or another.  Occasionally, we may think a certain way that one part of us (the "real" part of us) doesn't like.  For example, I will occasionally get all gloomy and grumpy for no apparent reason.  During these times, I sometimes get so exasperated that I want to yell at myself  "Snap out of it!"  Other times, I will have really low motivation to do work or exercise and I will literally have to convince myself that it's a good idea.

That "other" part of you that you don't always have control over? That's your homunculus.  Maybe you're not even that aware of this "inner voice".  If not, that's what today's challenge is all about.  We're going to monitor our own automatic thoughts for a day.  Eventually, we're going to start to control our homunculus.  Oh yeah. 

Hear the Homunculus

Task: Monitor your automatic thoughts for one day.

Angels and Devils? Your inner voice is a monkey. 

Info: What kinds of thoughts do you have during the day?  Are they positive? Are they negative?  The point of this exercise is simply to increase our awareness of our own thoughts.  Don't get worried about "thinking the right way" yet.  Just observe your thoughts with interest.  Perhaps put little, mental tags on each thought.  Try not to control your thoughts, just think in your normal, natural way.  If you don't like the way you're thinking, don't worry.  You can change how you think and we'll be working on some strategies over the next week to do just that.

Goal: Get a sense of the quality and quantity of your thoughts in a normal day.

Whether you like it or not, your homunculus is there, chattering away.  Start listening: this is a critical metacognitive skill that will enable us to modify our thoughts during future challenges.

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Week of Motivation

You can do it!

We're intrinsically motivated here at The Happy Homunculus.  We're so intrinsically motivated, that we were able to make ourselves more motivated.  Dios mio!

During the last week, we started arguing with our own mind with the goal of increasing our intrinsic motivation.  We completed six Daily Mind Games, inspired by the book Motivational Interviewing, that were carefully engineered to re-frame our internal biases and make us more open to changing our behavior.

I know it worked for me.  My homunculus said it worked for him.  So, why wouldn't it work for you?

Week of Motivation

Day 1: Benefits of Change - talk up the good reasons to change.
Day 2: No to the Status Quo - remind yourself why not changing is uncool.
Day 3: Characteristics for Change - note your skillz.
Day 4: Expertise for Change - get more skillz.
Day 5: Intention to Change - make a promise to yourself.
Day 6: Small Change - Make a change, a small change.

Next week, our goal will be to improve our moods (and our performance) by working on being more optimistic. I recently read a great book entitled Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman that reviews the current science about optimism and how we can change our thinking to be more optimistic.  The Daily Mind Games for next week have been inspired by this book.

What's the point you may ask?  Well, an optimistic style of thinking has been linked to improved mood, better health, longer life, and greater success.  Neat-O!  Sounds like something my homunculus could use...

Links: Check out other Weeks of Metacognition