Dr. Heidi Grant

How to Walk Away When It’s Not Working

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Sometimes, you don’t know when to throw in the towel.   As time passes, it becomes clear that things aren’t working out as you planned.  You realize that pursuing whatever it is that you’re pursuing, whether it’s being successful in your current career, mending a troubled relationship, or renovating your house from top to bottom, will cost you too much financially or emotionally, or take too long.  But instead of moving on to new opportunities, all too often you simply stay the course and sacrifice your own wellbeing in the process.

You aren’t alone.  Most of us know what it’s like to stay in a job or a relationship long after it has ceased being satisfying, or to take on a project that’s just too big for us and be reluctant to admit it.  CEOs have been known to allocate manpower and money to projects long after it’s become clear that they are obviously failing, digging a deeper hole rather than trying to climb their way out of it (Remember how long it took to get rid of New Coke?)

The costs to the person who can’t see reason, in terms of time, effort, and lost opportunities for happiness, can be enormous. We recognize this kind of foolishness immediately in others, but that doesn’t stop us from making the same mistake ourselves.  Why?

There are several powerful and largely unconscious psychological forces at work here.   We may throw good money after bad, or waste time in a dead-end relationship, because we haven’t come up with an alternative, or because we don’t want to admit to our friends and family, or to ourselves, that we were wrong.   But the most likely culprit is our overwhelming aversion to sunk costs.

Sunk costs are the resources that you’ve put into an endeavor that you can’t get back out.   They are the years you spent training for a profession you hate or waiting for your commitment-phobic boyfriend to propose.  They are the money you spent on redecorating your living room in the hot new style, only to find that you hate it living in it.

Once you’ve realized that you probably won’t succeed or that you are unhappy with the results, it shouldn’t matter how much time and effort you’ve already put into something.  If your job or your boyfriend have taken up some of the best years of your life, it doesn’t make sense to let them use up the years you’ve got left. And an ugly living room is an ugly living room, no matter how much money you spent making it so.

The problem is that it doesn’t feel that way.  Putting in a lot only to end up with nothing to show for it is just too awful for most of us to seriously consider.  We worry far too much about what we’ll lose if we just move on, and not nearly enough about the costs of not moving on  – more wasted time and effort, more unhappiness, and more missed opportunities.  So how can we make it easier to know when to cut our losses?

Thanks to recent research by Northwestern University psychologists Daniel Molden and Chin Ming Hui, there is a simple and effective way to be sure you are making the best decisions when a things go awry:  focus on what you have to gain, rather than what you have to lose.

As I’ve written about before, psychologists call this adopting a promotion focus. When we think about our goals in terms of potential gains, we automatically (often without realizing it) become more comfortable with making mistakes and accepting the losses we may have to incur along the way.

When we adopt a prevention focus, on the other hand, and think about our goals in terms of what we could lose if we don’t succeed, we become much more sensitive to sunk costs.

For example, in one of their studies, Molden and Hui put participants into either a promotion or prevention mindset by having them spend five minutes writing about their “personal hopes and aspirations” (promotion) or “duties and obligations” (prevention).  They also included a control group with no manipulation of mindset.

Next, each participant was told to imagine that he or she was president of an aviation company that had committed $10 million to developing a plane that can’t be detected by radar.  With the project near completion and $9 million already spent, a rival company announces the availability of their own radar-blank plane, which is both superior in performance and lower in cost.  The question put to participants was simple – do you invest the remaining $1 million and finish your company’s (inferior and more expensive) plane, or cut your losses and move on?

Molden and Hui found that participants who had been put in a prevention mindset  (focused on avoiding loss) stayed the course and invested the remaining $1 million roughly 80% of the time.  The control group, included to provide a sense of how people would respond without any changes to their mindset, was virtually identical to the prevention group.  This suggests that when things go wrong and sunk costs are high, most of us naturally become prevention-minded, and more likely to try to keep waging a losing battle.

The odds of making that mistake were significantly reduced by adopting a promotion mindset (focused on potential gain) – those participants invested the remaining $1 million less than 60% of the time.*

When we see our goals in terms of what we can gain, rather than what we might lose, we are more likely to see a doomed endeavor for what it is, and try to make the most of a bad situation.

It’s not difficult to achieve greater clarity if you make a deliberate effort to refocus yourself when making your decision.  Stop and reflect on what you have to gain by cutting your losses now – the opportunities for happiness and growth.  If you do, you’ll find it much easier to make the right choice.

*Why not a bigger drop? Good question.  Remember that promotion focus was manipulated very indirectly through a totally unrelated writing task.  If you adopt a promotion focus directly with respect to the decision itself, considering what you could gain by moving on from your failure, the effects should be even stronger.

Your Misery Has Company. Not Realizing It is Hurting You Even More.

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The holidays can be really, really hard.    We struggle to find the right gifts, and to find the money in our budgets to pay for them.  All the preparation – decorating, shopping, wrapping, cooking, cleaning – takes time and effort, and it’s not as if you can put the rest of your life on hold to get it all done.

And then there are the guests.  Playing host to family and friends may be the most difficult part of all, particularly when there is so much pressure to make the experience a joyous one.  (And if you are the guest rather than the host, holiday travel is no picnic, either.)

It’s not at all unusual for people to feel more anxious, exhausted, frustrated, or depressed at this time of year than they typically do.  As if that’s not bad enough, many of us routinely add insult to injury by feeling guilty or ashamed that we aren’t bursting with happiness like we “should” be.  After all, isn’t this the season to be jolly?

And what’s more, we feel like we are alone in our unhappiness – as if everyone else is making merry while we are making misery.  This common misperception only adds to our pain.

So why don’t we notice that other people are struggling as we are?  New research suggests that the answer is fairly straightforward: People are, generally speaking, more private when it comes to their negative emotions.

As a society, we are taught (often implicitly) to be embarrassed by feelings like sadness and anxiety, which suggest vulnerability.  Consequently, we are more likely to try to keep them hidden – the net result being that others assume us to be happier than we really are, even when they know us well.

In addition, the researchers found that people routinely underestimate how often their peers are faced with the negative experiences they themselves endure.  In one study, undergraduates underestimated how frequently their fellow students were rejected by a romantic interest, received a low grade, or felt homesick for distant friends and families by 10-30%.

They also overestimated the frequency of others’ enjoyable experiences, like going out with friends or attending parties, by 10-20%!  So not only do we think other people are happier than we are, but we assume their lives are better, too.

Our ignorance has serious consequences.  Research shows that the more you underestimate the emotional pain of others, the more isolated and lonely you feel. You are also more likely to brood and ruminate on your bad experiences, and feel less satisfied with your life.  When our perceptions of other people’s lives are distorted, we may feel sorrier for ourselves than we really should, and ashamed of our anxiety and sadness when we really needn’t be.

They say that misery loves company, and there’s good reason for it.  There is comfort, and wisdom, in knowing that other people share our difficulties and understand our experiences.  If you can’t take all the headache and stress out of your holidays (and I’ve yet to meet the person who could), then you can at least do yourself a favor this year, and embrace the very real truth that you are not alone.

SUCCEED: How We Can Reach Our Goals (Hudson Street Press) is available wherever books are sold!   Follow me on Twitter @hghalvorson

If It Doesn’t Kill You, It Will Make You Stronger… But There Are Limits.

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Does that which does not kill us, really make us stronger?  On the surface, it doesn’t seem like it.  People who have experienced significant adverse events, like having to endure physical abuse, experiencing homelessness, or becoming the victims of a natural disaster, often suffer very painful long-term negative effects, particularly in terms of their mental health and well-being.

There has been little in the research on coping  (until very recently, that is) to suggest that these individuals are likely to end up more resilient after being put through the wringer – not much evidence that they are better able to handle future difficulties with greater strength and adaptability, and to rebound emotionally faster and more effectively.

For the record, being resilient in the face of difficulty is actually the norm, rather than the exception. Most people report that they have had to cope with some significant adversity in their lives, and the majority of them do not permanently suffer for it.  By and large, we recover faster and better from hardship than we expect to.  But there is a big difference between returning to “baseline” after a negative event (to being “your old self” again) and ending up somehow stronger for it.

And yet many of us have a sense that adversity does indeed foster resilience – that people who have been through a lot are actually tougher, and better able to handle the curveballs that life may throw at them.  Are we wrong?

New research suggests that we are right – but only when adversity strikes in moderation.

The researchers who conducted this study looked at data from a broad sample of nearly 2000 Americans.  (The average age was 49, but ranged from 18 to 101 years old.)  The participants filled out a measure of cumulative lifetime adversity, which asked them to indicate how often they had coped with serious difficulties or trauma, including major illness or injury, assault, loss of a loved one, serious financial difficulties, and natural disaster.

(Note: I am not saying, nor are the researchers arguing, that these difficulties are equal in severity, nor that every person who experiences them suffers to the same extent. It’s just not possible to take into account every person’s unique experience in a study of 2000 people.  The researchers’ strategy, instead, was to take a set of  negative experiences that we can all agree are terrible to endure, and look at how people who have had to deal with more of them differ from those who’ve dealt with fewer.  This seems like a reasonable approach, even if it’s not a perfect one.)

Not surprisingly, those who had experienced a lot of adversity had poorer outcomes, on average, than people who reported no history of adversity  – they were more depressed and anxious, were less satisfied with their lives, and were more likely to have physical or emotional problems that interfered with their ability to work and socialize.

The real surprise comes when you look at people with relatively low lifetime adversity (2-4 serious adverse events or traumas).  They reported having better outcomes than people who had zero lifetime adversity!  They were happier, more satisfied, and better able to cope with life’s daily ups and downs.

This actually makes a lot of sense.  When you are exposed to a limited number of significant stressors, you come to see a bad situation as more manageable, and you approach it with greater confidence that you will be able to get through it  (“If I can handle that, I can handle anything.”)

Without adversity, you don’t get a chance to hone your coping skills, and develop the “I can get through this” sense of efficacy that will serve you well when trouble comes along.  Too much adversity, on the other hand, is likely to overwhelm your psychological resources, leaving you feeling less capable of coping when things go wrong.

So, what wisdom can we extract from these findings – how can we benefit from them?  I think there are two points in particular worth remembering:

First, it is unwise to try to shelter someone from adversity completely.  It’s perfectly natural to try to protect our loves ones from bad experiences – particularly our children.  But if you never get to tackle big problems on your own, you’ll never develop the confidence and psychological resources you’ll need to succeed.  Ironically, when we shield a person from the harsh realities of life, we leave them even more vulnerable.

Second, if you’ve dealt with a lot of adversity in your life, don’t beat yourself up for not ending up tougher for it.  It’s not surprising that your experiences have left their mark on you, and that you have a harder time than other people do just getting through your day.  Be kind to yourself, and seek out the assistance that you truly deserve (from friends, counselors, support groups), to help you begin to heal.