Hacking Happiness

I really like this piece from Dr. Jeremy Dean It explains how we fool ourselves more easily  than we think we fool others. The way froward to feeling great about yourself is through personal authenticity.

The Truth About Self-Deception

Can we pull the wool over our own eyes or do we see through our mind games?

In theory the one person we should never, ever, lie to is ourselves. Surely lying to ourselves is counter-productive? Like calmly and deliberately shooting yourself in the foot or taking a hot toasting fork and plunging it into your eye?

But look around and it’s not hard to spot the tell-tale symptoms of self-deception in other people. So perhaps we are also deceiving ourselves in ways we can’t clearly perceive? But is that really possible and would we really believe the lies that we ‘told’ ourselves anyway? That’s what Quattrone & Tversky (1984) explored in a classic social psychology experiment published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Lies, damn lies and psychologists

Any study of self-deception is going to involve a fair amount of bare-faced lying, and Quattrone & Tversky’s (1984) research was no different. They recruited 38 students who were told they were going to take part in a study about the “psychological and medical aspects of athletics”. Not true, in fact the researchers were going to trick participants into thinking that how long they could submerge their arms in cold water was diagnostic of their health status, when really it showed just how ready people are to deceive themselves. This is how they did it.

The participants were first asked to plunge their arms into cold water for as long as they could. The water was pretty cold and people could only manage this for 30 or 40 seconds. Then participants were given some other tasks to do to make them think they really were involved in a study about athletics. They had a go on an exercise bike and were given a short lecture about life expectancy and how it related to the type of heart you have. They were told there were two types of heart:

Type I heart: associated with poorer health, shorter life expectancy and heart disease.
Type II heart: associated with better health, longer life expectancy and low risk of heart disease.
Half were told that people with Type II hearts (apparently the ‘better’ type) have increased tolerance to cold water after exercise while the other half that it decreased tolerance to cold water. Except of course this was all lies only made up to make participants think that how long they could hold their arm under water was a measure of their health, with half thinking cold-tolerance was a good sign and half thinking it was a bad sign.

Now time for the test: participants had another go at putting their arms into the cold water for as long as they could. The graph below shows the average results before and after all the blatant lying (in the name of science of course!):

As you can see the experimental manipulation had a strong effect. People who thought it was a sign of a healthy heart to hold their arms underwater for longer did just that, while those who believed the reverse all of a sudden couldn’t take the cold. That’s all well and good, but were these people really lying to themselves or just the experimenters and did they believe those lies?

Hook, line and sinker

After the arm-dunking each participant was asked whether they had intentionally changed the amount of time they held their arms underwater. Of the 38 participants, 29 denied it and 9 confessed, but not directly. Many of the 9 confessors claimed the water had changed temperature. It hadn’t of course, this was just a way for people to justify their behaviour without directly facing their self-deception.

All the participants were then asked whether they believed they had a healthy heart or not. Of the 29 deniers, 60% believed they had the healthier type of heart. However of the confessors only 20% thought they had the healthier heart. What this suggests is that the deniers were more likely to be truly deceiving themselves and not just trying to cover up their deception. They really did think that the test was telling them they had a healthy heart. Meanwhile the confessors tried to tell a lie back to the experimenter (seems only fair!), but privately the majority acknowledged they were deceiving themselves.

This experiment is neat because it shows the different gradations of self-deception, all the way up to its purest form, in which people manage to trick themselves hook, line and sinker. At this level people think and act as though their incorrect belief is completely true, totally disregarding any incoming hints from reality.

So what this study suggests is that for many people self-deception is as easy as pie. Not only will many people happily lie to themselves if given a reason, but they will only look for evidence that confirms their comforting self-deception, and then totally believe in the lies they are telling themselves.

Explains a lot, don’t you think?

This post by Jeremy Dean originally appeared on PsyBlog — a website (run entirely by Dean) dedicated to exploring the science of psychology by examining new, interesting, and exciting peer-reviewed psychology research.

FEAR The destroyer of achievement 

There are all types of fears, from spiders to fear of public speaking, the commonest fear of all. They all have the same features in the way we respond whatever the trigger.

An American woman known to medical science as SM has a rare condition. The part of her brain where we experience fear, The Amygdala, is now missing. The Amygdala is that part of us that is designed to highjack your slow conscious thoughts and replace them with instant, unconscious reactions. When a tiger appears before you on a path , you don't need to think about what to do next , its either fight or run and you need to do one of these right now.

But SM has a unique reaction to scary things, she can be amused or curious about them but she is never frightened, always remaining calm.

One evening she was attacked in a park, a man held a knife to her throat and threatened her. At that moment a church bell tolled in the distance and with absolute calmness SM told the man, “If he was going to kill me you will have to go through my guardian angels first”.

This spooked the guy so much he ran off. Next evening she walked through the park as usual with out a care in the world.

FEAR you see exists only as a concept in our minds. Although what SM experienced was actual danger, almost all our fears are just 

Fantasied 

Events

Appearing

Real 

(FEAR)

We create sophisticated images, scenarios and fantasies in our conscious minds that stimulate the amygdala and this in turn creates the appropriate physical responses. It stresses us with a raised heart rate, increased breathing and lots of adrenaline to create strength that will enable us to either fight or flight.

Daily worry and stress in our lives does exactly the same, it stimulates the amygdala. We worry about that report we are late with, is our child ok out on their own? Will I be affected by the layoffs? Our response to these non lethal events is the same as any real and present danger, in the mind its all the same.

The mind cannot tell the difference between a fantasy or a reality, its all just mental projection, its is just thoughts. We behave as if the event is actually happening, even if its never happened yet or could happen in a weeks time. Almost all that we fear is never actually going to happen at all, we just have a habit of pretending that it is.

If it does come to pass, it’s usually nowhere near as bad as our fantasy and we deal with it as all our fears come to nothing. Even if it actually happens it somehow doesn't seem as bad as we had thought. Our minds are capable of creating horrific scenarios that a hollywood director would be proud of, they would love to be able to elicit these amazing reactions in people

Fear take place in our sub conscious minds and transfers to our consciousness. One solution is first to be aware that your fears are rising and then to consciously take stock and be in the moment of now, where nothing is actually happening. Count to ten staying in the now and then asses how you feel, if the fear is still rising, remind yourself you are ok right now, nothing is actually happening, count to 10 and reassess

By staying in the now we stay in control and when we are consciously in control our amygdala has no job to do if there is no real danger present.

What the Mind of man can Conceive he can Believe and Achieve

This was said by W Clement Stone nearly 100 years ago and repeated ad infinitum by every self development guru, writer and talker ever since. Yet today the average person still does not believe it to be true.

For most people the Law of Accident applies. Things happen and I respond.

The truth remains though, every study of successful, happy people has shown that when you decide to take control of your thoughts and make them what you want them to be, things in your life start to fall into the pattern you set for them.

Is this the Law of Attraction at work? Do we draw into ourselves things that are consistent with our dominant thoughts? Or is this a combination of becoming focused and directed and then seeking out that which we desire for our futures and in doing so we find people, places and situations that are consistent with that which we are seeking?

My personal experience is that when we focus our thoughts we begin to see much of what was before us that was previously unseen. Our actions and behaviours alter and in doing so we open ourselves to others that are also consistent with our actions and behaviours. In doing so we create the very conditions that we have been desiring.

"Look and ye shall find" a wise sage once said and he may have had a thing there. All things are possible in a universe of endless possibilities, we just need to open ourselves to the possibility that it can be or happen. An angry man can see no beauty so beauty does not exist in his world.

Self mastery is the art of controlling your thoughts and when you master those you master the art of deciding what happens in your life.