Dr. Heidi Grant

Stop Being So Defensive!

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A simple way to learn to take criticism gracefully

I rarely admit this (and frankly, I wonder why I’m doing it now), but I am a very defensive person.  I can be quick to feel challenged or threatened by perceived criticism.  When that happens, my typical responses range from somewhat testy to downright hostile.  It’s not an attractive quality.  I’m not proud.

I have wanted to do something about it for a long time, but I figured that in order to stop being so defensive, I’d have to do something drastic, like stop caring about what other people think.  That sounds great, but it’s an awfully tall order for most of us, and not a realistic option for me.

Thanks to a recent set of studies of defensiveness, I now have a far more practical strategy for dealing with my defensive tendencies.   When I suspect criticism may be coming my way (for instance, when I send my editor a new chapter for feedback, or when my husband comes home from work to find that I’ve redecorated the bedroom), I take a moment to reflect on something I really like about myself.

I remind myself that I am exceptionally well-organized, that I am a sympathetic listener, that I make a killer baguette, or that I’m fun to have around at parties.  This is called self-affirmation, and it can take many forms. Usually, we self-affirm through thinking, talking, or writing about our most important values, skills or characteristics.  We do it when we reflect on our past successes, and the lessons we have learned.  And when we do, we provide a boost to our sense of self-esteem, and a buffer against any incoming threats.

It turns out that these simple reminders of our own self-worth and integrity significantly reduce our tendency to respond to negative feedback with defensiveness.   Instead, we are able to see what may be valuable in the criticism we receive, without feeling the need to prove ourselves right at all costs.

One important drawback to using this strategy, though, is that it is effective only when you self-affirm before you start responding to the criticism – in other words, before you start feeling and acting defensive.   If someone criticizes you and you start feeling hot under your collar, stopping to think about your own good qualities is unlikely to help calm you down.  The trick is to self-affirm before the feedback, and that isn’t always possible, especially when criticism comes as a surprise.

On the other hand, if you know someone who tends to get defensive, this is a great technique to use to make sure your criticism is well received.  Before you criticize, start out with an affirmation, as in “You really have an eye for color, and I like what you did with the furniture.  Though I’m not really crazy about the new bedspread.”  By starting with an acknowledgment of what you do like, you are far more likely to avoid getting anyone’s defenses up, and increase your chances of having a reasonable, hostility-free discussion.  Either way, though, you are probably stuck with the bedspread.

How You Are Sabotaging Your Self-Control

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Why thought suppression is a bad way to deal with temptation.

Have you ever tried to lose weight by just not thinking about food?  How about trying to play it cool and stop yourself from calling (or emailing, or texting) your love interest by blocking out all thoughts about that person?  Ever try to quit smoking by trying not to think about smoking?  Did it work?  I’ll bet it didn’t.  And it’s really not your fault that it didn’t.

Thought suppression is a double-edged sword.  On the one hand, it is a very commonly used strategy – people often try to block out or put the lid on unwanted thoughts and feelings, in order to control their influence.  Dieters try to suppress thoughts of tempting snacks, alcoholics suppress their desire to drink, stressed-out workers suppress their feelings of anxiety, and smokers suppress the thought of cigarettes when trying to quit.

On the other hand, thought suppression is not only very, very difficult, but it works only very briefly, and has some very nasty unintended consequences.  Suppression has often been shown to increase the frequency of the unwanted thoughts you were trying to rid yourself of, once the period of active suppression is over.  Suppress thoughts of smoking, and the thoughts come rushing back with even greater force once you let your guard down.  But does this unintended consequence actually lead to more smoking?  Are you actually worse off in terms of quitting than when you started?

Yes, you are.  In a new study, undergrads who smoked at least a half-pack a day on average were asked to keep track of their smoking for several weeks.  For all of Week 2, some of the students were asked to try to suppress any and all thoughts about smoking.  Not surprisingly, they smoked significantly fewer cigarettes during Week 2 than non-suppressers.  But during Week 3, when these students were no longer required to suppress thoughts of smoking, they smoked significantly more cigarettes than non-suppressors!

While they were at it, the researchers who conducted this study looked at students’ stress levels across all three weeks.  Not surprisingly, suppressors reported a dramatic rise in stress during the week they were suppressing (while non-suppressors stress levels remained unchanged).  So not only does the thought-suppression strategy backfire, it feels terrible while you are doing it.

So how can we deal with unwanted thoughts more successfully, in ways that don’t end up actually diminishing our willpower?  I’ve written about this in previous posts, but here are two suggestions:

  1. Don’t suppress, replace.   Decide in advance what you will think about when a thought about smoking, snacking, or hitting “redial” pops into your mind.  When you find yourself thinking about how yummy a candy bar would be right now, try replacing that thought with one that focuses on your health and weight-loss goals (e.g., “It feels better to fit into my skinny jeans than it does to wolf down chocolate-covered nougat.”)

  2. Don’t suppress, plan.   Creating an if-then plan is an easy and effective way to deal with temptations.  You don’t need to block out the thoughts – what you really need is to learn how not to act on them.  By planning on exactly what you will do, in advance, when the tempting thought occurs, it becomes far easier to stick to your goals.  For instance, when thoughts about smoking occur, plan to chew gum, or step outside for several long deep breaths of fresh air.  Whatever you plan to do, it will disrupt the connection between the thought and giving in to the temptation, and over time, the thoughts will fade all on their own.

It’s almost never a good idea to put a lid on your thoughts and feelings.  It may feel like it’s working in the short term, but soon you’ll find yourself right back where you started – surrounded by candy wrappers, and wondering why he hasn’t returned your three dozen phone calls.

Get Busy and Get Happy

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In defense of busywork

Busywork has a bad rep.   Keeping yourself (or someone else) busy doing meaningless or unnecessary tasks, simply for the sake of avoiding idleness, seems like a pointless waste of energy.  Only it turns out there is a point to it – recent research shows that keeping busy doing anything makes you a whole lot happier than you would have been doing nothing.   Just sitting around, bored and inert, is a recipe for misery.

But if that’s true, why then do we so often choose idleness?  Why do we do nothing, when we could almost always be doing something?  The study of human behavior is full of such paradoxes:  People are happier when they do X.  If you ask them, they’ll even tell you they prefer to do X.  Unfortunately, people often don’t actually do X – they do The Opposite of X.  And they have no idea why.

In this case, the answer seems to lie in our ability (or inability) to justify our actions.   We really do prefer to be busy than to just sit around doing nothing, and being busy does in fact make us much happier, but we just can’t bring ourselves to choose busyness over idleness without some sort of reason for the busyness.

Take for example a recent study, in which students were given the option of turning in a survey to get their candy reward in one of two places.  They could turn it in right next door, though they would have to wait outside the door for 15 minutes before turning it in, or they could turn it in at another location that involved a 15 minute round-trip walk.   The majority of students chose to sit and wait next door, rather than take an unnecessary walk.  They chose idleness over busywork (i.e., walking), despite the fact that the few who chose busywork reported being much happier when the 15 minutes were up.

But when the researchers introduced a justification for taking the long walk – that a different (though not actually better) candy would be offered as a reward for the walkers – the majority of students chose the busy option.  “I really prefer the candy you get after the walk,” they told themselves.  But really, what they preferred was doing something over doing nothing, and all they needed was a reason.   Any reason.

Two forces are usually at work whenever we do choose idleness.  First, we have an aversion to needlessly expending energy.   This aversion is probably built in to each of us as a part of our evolutionary inheritance.  Animals who waste the energy they need to find food and ward off predators are less likely to survive, so animals who spend their energy wisely have the survival advantage.

Second, human beings vastly prefer their actions to be meaningful.  We like the things we do to have reasons – so much so that often when we don’t really have a good reason for what we’ve done, we try to make one up.  We are loathe to undertake any action when we know there is no justification for it.

The good news is, now that you know that busyness is better for you and will make you happier than just sitting around, you will always have a reason to choose busyness. Get up and do something.  Anything.  Even if there really is no point to what you are doing, you will feel better for it.

Incidentally, thinking deeply or engaging in self-reflection counts as keeping busy, too.  You don’t need to be running around, – you just need to be engaged, either physically or mentally.    As Victor Hugo once wrote, “A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought.  There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.”  Keep those mental wheels turning if you don’t want to keep your feet moving.

How to Put An End to Our Emotional Eating

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When I’m feeling bad – whether it’s anxious, depressed, or simply frustrated – I often find myself wanting to seek comfort in the arms of a pint of chocolate ice cream or a bag of Doritos.  I know I’m not alone.  Psychologists call this emotional eating, and it is thought to be one of the major contributors to obesity in our country.

Americans are stressed out, and seeking treatment for anxiety and depression in record numbers.  Experiencing all of those bad feelings each day leads us to consume more and more high-calorie junk food, to try to make ourselves feel just a little bit better (ignoring the fact that binging almost inevitably leaves you feeling even worse).

At least, that’s how most of us, including the psychologists, think emotional eating works.  Only we are wrong.

Feeling bad does NOT make you more likely to reach for comfort food.  It’s turns out that it’s how you deal with your bad feelings that determines whether or not you’ll be brushing the potato chip crumbs off your pants.

Recent research shows that experiencing anxiety, depression, or anger is only associated with emotional eating when we try to suppress our feelings – to control them by not expressing them, by keeping them to ourselves and trying to push them out of our minds.

Aside from being a really lousy strategy for dealing with emotions for a whole host of other reasons, suppression is really hard to do.  It relies heavily on, and often fully exhausts, your capacity for self-control.  This leaves you unprotected –  completely vulnerable to temptation.  And that is why we reach for “comfort” foods – they are the sweet and salty snacks that we normally have the self-control to resist.  But if you’re using up all of your willpower trying to suppress your fear or sadness, then when the junk food appears you are practically a sitting duck.

So, how can we deal with our feelings in ways that don’t leave us vulnerable to temptation?  You can engage in what psychologists call cognitive reappraisal, which is really just a fancy way of saying “thinking differently.”  Try following these steps:

  1. Don’t hide from your feelings – take a moment to examine them.  In particular, focus on what’s causing them.  Why are you feeling so anxious, so frustrated, so down?

  2. Next, try to think about the cause of your trouble in ways that diminish its impact:

    1. Be objective (Would other people react this way?  Am I over-reacting? Am I blaming myself when I shouldn’t?  Am I being too pessimistic?)

    2. Put it in perspective (In the scheme of things, is this really a big deal?  If things don’t work out this time, is it really the end of the world?)

    3. See the silver lining (What have you learned?  How will you take this knowledge with you and use it to grow and improve?)

Tackling your feelings head on, and thinking about them in ways that will actually help you to cope with the circumstances that caused them, may sound hard, but it actually uses less self-control than suppression.

New studies show that when people use this strategy to cope with their feelings, they don’t succumb to the call of the cookie.  And of course, they tend to feel better much more quickly.  So it’s not just a good way to stick to your diet – it’s a good way to become a happier person, too.

Just Don’t Do It!

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In my first year of graduate school, I got the opportunity to give my very first psychology lecture.  The professor who taught the course suggested that I videotape my performance, so I could see what I did well and what needed improvement.  When I finally sat down to watch the video, it was more than a little horrifying.  My “um”s and “uh”s outnumbered the actual words 2-to-1.  Even worse, I saw that I touched my nose over and over again while speaking, as though I were constantly monitoring my own sobriety.  Somewhere along the way I had unknowingly developed some very bad habits, and unless I wanted to be ruthlessly mocked for the rest of my teaching career, I was going to have to break them.

Habits are learned associations.  If you repeat the same behavior in the same situation over and over again, your mind makes a connection and a habit is born.  Light up a cigarette enough times in your favorite bar, and eventually just walking through the door will make you reach for your cigarette pack.  “Situations” can be emotional states as well.  Start using profane words to express your frustration, and pretty soon you’ll be cursing like a sailor every time you lose your temper.  My um-ing and nose-touching were nervous habits – responses to the stress I felt whenever I spoke to a large audience, that probably become habits somewhere in my adolescence (Why didn’t anybody back then tell me?)

Once a habit is formed, all you need is the situation or the cue, and the behavior that goes with it follows automatically.  In other words, you act without conscious intent (or even awareness – I certainly had no idea I had become a nose-toucher).  Most people have at least one bad habit of some sort that they’d like to rid themselves of, whether it’s smoking, nail-biting, over-sleeping, cursing, slouching, or eating too much when we’re nervous, depressed, or bored.

But what is the best strategy to use to break a bad habit?  Should you try to distract yourself, to take your mind off of the habit-triggering situation? Should you remove yourself from the situation entirely, or avoid it like the plague in the first place?  These strategies actually work very well when it comes to resisting temptations (like a plate of doughnuts, or a flirtatious co-worker), but not for breaking bad habits.

Distraction isn’t useful because the habit-behavior happens automatically – you don’t even need to be focused on what you’re doing.  Avoiding the situation altogether is pretty much impossible for most bad habits – how exactly do I avoid public speaking if I’m a professor?  How can we avoid ever being nervous, depressed, or bored?

So to really break a habit, what you need to do is focus on stopping the response before it starts (or, as psychologists tend to put it, you need to “inhibit” your bad behavior).  A recent study by Jeffrey Quinn, Anthony Pascoe, Wendy Wood, and David Neal shows that the most effective strategy for breaking a bad habit is vigilant monitoring – focusing your attention on the unwanted behavior to make sure you don’t engage in it.  In other words, thinking to yourself “Don’t do it!” and watching out for slipups.

In their study, participants kept a daily diary for a week or longer, to record their attempts at not engaging in a bad habit (e.g., overeating, sleeping during an early morning class, smoking, getting nervous before a test). With each attempt, they indicated which strategies they had used:  vigilant monitoring (thinking “Don’t do it!”, watching carefully for mistakes, or monitoring their behavior) distracting myself, or removing myself from the situation.

The results showed that only vigilant monitoring was effective in stopping bad habits. (A second study conducted in the laboratory, in which the experimenters manipulated which strategy participants used, produced the same results).  When people think to themselves “Don’t do it!” they are actually able to take their brain off autopilot and break the situation-behavior connection.  Over time, use of this strategy will destroy the connection completely, and the habit will be no more.

Incidentally, this is exactly how I stopped my nose-touching and excessive use of “um” and “uh” while lecturing.  I consciously monitored what I did with my hands and kept them away from my face at all times.  I wrote “NO UMS” at the top of each page of my lecture notes, to remind me not to fill my pauses with nonsense words.  I would videotape myself every so often to check on my progress.  Over time, (and it definitely took a while), I broke my nose-touching habit completely, and my ums and uhs are now no more frequent than everyone else’s.   I’m sure that I still give my students plenty to laugh about, but that’s ok with me.  I wouldn’t want to ruin all their fun.

J. Quinn, A. Pascoe, W. Wood, & D. Neal (2010) Cant’ control yourself? Monitor those bad habits.   Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36, 499-511.

https://psp.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/36/4/499?rss=1

The Motivational One-Two Punch for Overcoming Bad Habits

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If you want to maintain a healthy weight, there is no great mystery – eat less, exercise more, and you will eventually reach your goal.   So why, then, do most of us struggle to lose weight and keep it off?  One answer is that we’ve developed a lot of bad habits that sabotage our chances for success.  We snack too much between meals.  We eat when we are bored, anxious, or depressed.  We reach for the bag of chips or the candy bar, rather than the apple or the carrot sticks.  We finish everything on our plates too quickly, rather than stopping when we’ve had enough to satisfy our hunger.  We supersize it, when the “regular” size is already way too big to be good for us.

The thing about habits that makes them so difficult to overcome is that they are relatively automatic.  In other words, we engage in these behaviors without the conscious intention to do so.   It turns out to be particularly hard to stop yourself from eating too much when you aren’t even really aware that you’re doing it in the first place.

Fortunately, there are strategies you can use to put an end to these self-sabotaging habits.  Recent research by Gabriele Oettingen, Peter Gollwitzer, and their colleagues shows that two strategies, when used together, create a particularly potent combination for habit-fighting: mental contrasting and if-then planning.

Mental contrasting, in a nutshell, involves thinking positively about how it will be when you achieve your goal, while thinking realistically about what it will take to get there. First, you imagine how you will feel attaining your goal, and then you reflect on the obstacles that stand in your way.  For instance, if you wanted to get a high paying job after college, you would start by imagining the sense of pride and excitement you would feel accepting a lucrative offer at a top firm.  Then, you would think about what stands between you and that offer – namely, all the other really outstanding candidates that will be applying for jobs.  Kind of makes you want to send out a lot of applications, doesn’t it?  That’s called experiencing the necessity to act – it’s a psychological state that is crucial for achieving a goal. Daydreaming about how great it will be to land that job can be a lot of fun, but it won’t get you anywhere. Mental contrasting turns wishes and daydreams into reality, by bringing into focus what you will need to do to make it happen.

Once you’ve set a goal, perhaps the most common problem we run into when actually trying to achieve it is missing opportunities to take action.   We get preoccupied by other goals, or simply so distracted that we forget about our goal entirely, and don’t notice an opportunity when it arises.  Sometimes we “miss” opportunities because we are reluctant to take the necessary steps to reach our goal, especially when it is difficult or just no fun at all (As for myself, I am very loathe to give up all those delicious snacks).   Whatever the reason, we are constantly letting opportunities to achieve our goals slip through our fingers.  If we want to succeed, we literally need to learn how to seize the moment.  This is precisely what if-then plans are designed to do.

Forming an if-then plan (or what Gollwitzer calls an implementation intention) starts with taking a goal you want to achieve, and then spelling out exactly when, where, and how you will achieve it:  If I am in this situation, then I will take this action.  For example, if your goal is to work out more, you might form the plan: “I will work out for an hour at the gym on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays before work.”  So if you’ve made an if-then plan, then you know that when it’s Monday morning, it’s time to hit the gym before work.  You’re less likely to let the opportunity to act on your goal pass you by.

In a study that will appear soon in the European Journal of Social Psychology, Oettingen and Gollwitzer, along with Marieke Adriaanse, Erin Hennes, Denise De Ridder, and John De Wit, tried putting these two powerful strategies together to help people overcome the often irresistible temptation of cookies and chips (they refer to this strategy combo as “MCII”:  mental contrasting + implementation intentions).

Female participants who wanted to reduce their unhealthy snacking kept a food diary detailing their daily indulgences.  Half of the participants in the study were instructed to also complete a “mental exercise” to help them reach their goal (MCII).  First, they engaged in mental contrasting by writing briefly about both the positive aspects of successfully reducing their snacking (e.g., losing weight, feeling healthier), as well as the primary obstacle standing in their way (e.g., the tendency to eat when bored or stressed).  Next, they formed an if-then plan for how they would cope with that obstacle, replacing the unhealthy snack with a piece of fruit (e.g., “If I am bored and I feel like having a snack, then I will eat an apple.”)

Even though both the MCII group and the control group were equally committed to reaching their goal of snacking less, over the course of the following week the women in the MCII group consumed a whopping 1125 fewer snack calories on average than those in the control group!

In a second study, the researchers showed the using either mental contrasting or if-then planning alone is far less effective than the MCII combo.  Their data suggests that engaging in mental contrasting helps people to have greater clarity about what their obstacles to success really are, and as a result they form better, more effective plans.  And it doesn’t just work for snacking!  Similar results have recently been obtained in studies of exercise, test preparation, and even time management.

So the next time you find yourself struggling to rid yourself of a bad habit, no matter what it is, try the MCII exercise:  think about how great it will be if you succeed, identify what stands in your way, and make an if-then plan to deal with it.   These simple steps are a tried-and-true recipe for success.