External Barriers to Change – Stress Part 1

Since 2007, the American Psychological Association has commissioned the annual nationwide Stress in America™ survey to examine the state of stress across the country and draw attention to its potentially serious physical and emotional consequences.  This handy little survey measures attitudes and perceptions of stress and identifies prominent sources of stress, behaviors commonly used to manage stress, and the impact that stress has on our lives.

Year after year, participants’ responses have revealed high stress levels, reliance on unhealthy behaviors to manage stress and alarming physical health consequences of stress.  Key findings indicate that nearly three-quarters of Americans say they experience stress at levels that exceed what they define as healthy. Money, work, the economy, and personal and family health are the most frequently cited causes of stress.  Although, overall, people seem to recognize that stress can have an impact on health and well-being, citing irritability or anger, fatigue, lack of interest, motivation or energy, headaches, upset stomachs, and changes in appetite and sex drive as commonly experienced psychological and physiological responses to stress, they do not necessarily take action to prevent stress or manage it well.  Sizeable proportions of adults of all ages report using maladaptive coping behaviors such as, overeating or eating unhealthy foods, skipping meals, smoking, drinking and sedentary activities such as watching television or listening to music, to alleviate stress in the short-term rather than taking the necessary steps to decrease stress and improve health in the long run. Lack of willpower and time constraints are the most commonly cited impediments to healthy and sustainable lifestyle or behavior change.  Since research shows that stress and the unhealthy behaviors people use to manage it are key drivers and proven precursors of many chronic illnesses and conditions, including high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, certain types of cancer, arthritis, depression, anxiety, and substance abuse, people who cope with stress in unhealthy ways are likely to end up creating significant personal health problems and more stress in the long run.  Overall, Americans appear to be caught in a vicious cycle where they experience high levels of stress and because they are unable to take the steps necessary to alleviate stress and improve health long-term, engage in maladaptive coping behaviors to alleviate it in the moment, thereby creating serious health problems and even more stress.

Are you dizzy yet?

I’m beginning to wonder if stress is just a part of the American identity.  We, as a society, do not appear to value stress reduction.  We seem to value the opposite, admiring and rewarding the person who not only multitasks doing two or three things at once, but five. Exceedingly stressed and excessively busy lifestyles, it seems, have become a necessary component to achieving the American dream and until we learn to value a more balanced and serene life, stress could easily become our next public health crisis.

Google “stress management” and you will get a million and one hits identifying a multitude of strategies for managing stress.  Exercise.  Get more sleep.  Breathe.  Meditate.  Take a vacation.  Relax.  Sound familiar?  None of these strategies that people try when they are already feeling stressed out are new to us, and if you are able to integrate any of them into your life, I highly recommend it.  But what about strategies for reducing the amount of stress we allow in and take on in the first place?  Surely there is a way to stop some of it before it ever happens, right?  I think so.

The next post will begin discussing some things we might do to take on some of our own stressors. In the meantime, can you identify what are some of the recurring stressors in your life?  Can you then identify any unhealthy behaviors that you use to help you alleviate your stress?

 

How Your People and Places Impact Your Change

Your environment includes the places, climates, energies and moods that make up your cultural and social settings.  I live in a safe little suburban town with relatively stable home prices, good schools, and easy access to groceries, libraries, recreational activities, cultural events, etc.  That is all part of my environment.  I live in Colorado, a state high in altitude, with an arid climate that can impact water resources and lead to wildfires, whose economy seems to be rebounding from the downturn.  That is also part of my environment.  I am a citizen of the United States, a country still recovering from recession, with a relatively stable political climate and consumer driven economy.  Again, that’s part of my environment.  You get the picture.

Your community includes the friends, family, colleagues, and acquaintances with whom you live, worship, socialize, recreate and/or work.  I live with my wife and three kids, socialize and recreate with several of my neighbors, have family in neighboring communities, and colleagues all across the Front Range.  That is all part of my community.

Environment and community can have a significant impact on our stability, safety, security, and opportunity.  Because they heavily influence what we think, feel, perceive, believe, and ultimately how we act and react, they also heavily influence our ability to make changes in our lives. I like to think of this environment and community as the soil that each of us, the seeds, are planted in.  Nutrient rich, robust soil typically yields hearty, prolific plants while nutrient poor, depleted soil yields feeble, barren ones.

A former client of mine, Sally, for example, lived in the same city as a lot of her friends from college.  As single women, they had all had similarly paying jobs and liked to hang out together during their free time doing things they all enjoyed and could all afford.  One by one, Sally and the rest of her posse settled down and got married.  Unfortunately for Sally, most of her friends married “up” financially.  Sally married right where she was.  Over time Sally’s friends began socializing more and more frequently at sophisticated, pricier venues in lieu of the old swingin’ singles day’s standbys.  As her community changed around her, Sally, who didn’t want to lose her friends, tried desperately to keep up even though she couldn’t afford to and eventually found herself with massive amounts of debt and in financial distress.  Sally’s environment and community had become a huge disadvantage in terms of financial growth.

For our purposes, I will define three significant community tendencies that can get in the way of our attempts at change.

First, as we noted above in our justifications, we often use “social proof,” which is “well, everyone else is doing it.”  In this case, we give ourselves a little latitude in our efforts and perhaps don’t stick totally to our new change.

The second tendency that can impact our behaviors is “social contagion”.  As you can probably imagine from the term, like a contagious disease that spreads, our behaviors – whether they be positive behaviors or negative behaviors – can spread to other people or can be caught from other people.  Excessive eating, increased drinking or even just being in a bad mood can spread through social networks causing the people in proximity to behave similarly to those around them.

And the third tendency is similar to our own internal justifications, but it happens when your friends or family help you to justify your behaviors.  I call this “group justification” and it happens quite frequently.  For example, let’s say you go to Starbucks with a friend and on the way there you explain that you’re on a diet and have been trying to eat healthier lately but that this week you’ve been feeling especially stressed out, there is a strong likelihood that your friend will actually encourage you to get a “special treat” at Starbucks and then help you to justify the behavior as stress relief, an outlet, or something that will make you feel better.  And it doesn’t have to be your best friend either.  People who don’t even know you very well will chime in and tell you that it is okay to “let off a little steam” by eating something decadent after a particularly stressful week, even though you’re on a diet and have been trying to eat healthier lately.

Obviously, there’s a flip side to these potential barriers that we want to recognize.  If the community and environment that you are in is supportive, that can be a tremendously beneficial asset.

So, take a moment and see if you can identify in your life some places where your people and places hinder your change efforts. Or, perhaps you can identify how they are helpful!

Justifications

As mentioned in the last post, Internal consistency is restored and maintained through denial when we refuse to recognize or acknowledge that an inconsistency exists.  It is restored through justifications when we defend, excuse or uphold an inconsistent choice or behavior with a reason or explanation.

Justification, the more common of the two responses, comes in several different forms.  Here are some of the most common forms of justification:

1. Rationalization whereby our friends, our acquaintances, or we ourselves offer logical explanations to defend contradictory actions and beliefs in an attempt to restore internal consistency. An example would be, “I’m stressed, I need to blow off some steam so I’m going out tonight!”
2. Moral Licensing happens when we reward ourselves with something that is not in alignment with our values.  For example, “I worked out super hard at the gym today, so I’ll have two deserts.”  Or the other way around, “I’ll eat this cake now because I can work it off at the gym later.”
3. Social Proof is when you justify your behavior by telling yourself or others that it is okay because everyone else is doing it.  Basically, all holidays are evidence of social proof.  It’s also a favorite of teenagers.
4. Arbitrary Resource Devaluation.“It was only…”  If you’ve ever uttered these words to describe a purchasing decision, you have participated in what I call Arbitrary Resource Devaluation . In this situation, an individual intentionally devalues the their resource, time, money or energy in order to make a behavior feel okay.  For example, with money, this can be used for small amounts, like, “yeah, it was only 50 cents.” Or we can do it with larger purchases through comparison, like, “Well it was only $200, but at the other store is was $250.”  If you are compulsively drawn to clearance events, you may be participating in ARD frequently.
5. Future Self –  Often we like to rely on our “future selves” to get us off the hook for today.  For instance, we might allow ourselves to make a purchase today, but tell ourselves that tomorrow or next week we will be more steadfast in our choices and besides, we get paid in a couple of weeks anyway – and I’ll probably get a bonus at work. Our future selves are almost always superhumans that do not have the same weaknesses that we are having today.
6. Mental bookkeeping–We frequently keep track of how we spend our money, time and energy in our head, which is a very dangerous way to manage our resources, but it is quite common.  So here’s what happens, again, using money as an example.  First, we attempt to manage our finances on the fly.  To do so, we often will move funds around in our heads, figuring out when out the next paycheck will arrive and how we can massage our finances to make everything work out.  While nothing has really changed outside of our heads, we feel better about our finances in our heads.  Now if this is just a way to manage finances, it will end there.  However, sometimes there is a second step where we will create all of this mental work in order to figure out how to squeeze and additional expense into the mix.  By figuring it all out in our head, it gives us the courage to move forward with our spending decisions.

These different types of justifications are things that everybody in our culture does.  I still do it all the time. The point of discussing them is not to say that you should try to get rid of them, or to say that they are bad.  But at the least, you can be aware of the fact that you are making a justification for the behavior.  The awareness alone can be very powerful.

So, what are some of your favorite justifications?

 

More Barriers – Internal Inconsistency

Internal Inconsistency is the uncomfortable feeling caused by holding conflicting ideas simultaneously.

What does that mean?  As we noted earlier, all of us, whether we have written it out or not, has a perception of ourselves and what we believe is most important to us.  We like to think of ourselves as good people with good values like, we value our  “immediate family” or “health” or “our children” or “faith.”  Again, these are things that we believe are very important to us.  But sometimes we find ourselves acting out of alignment with these things that we believe are so important to us. That seems a little weird, doesn’t it? Okay, I know it can be hard to admit to ourselves that we make choices and engage in behaviors that contradict our perceptions of our ideal self because it means that our inner beliefs and outer actions don’t align with one another and this creates an uncomfortable feeling – that is what we call “internal inconsistency.”

To be sure, I have never met anyone who has said that they don’t notice this little issue, this little nagging discomfort that pops up in their life.  And to be honest, nobody really likes this feeling, especially your brain.  And because we don’t like this feeling and the brain doesn’t like the feeling, something needs to be done about it.  So, when we feel this kind of discomfort, we typically respond in ways that attempt to restore and maintain consistency with our perception of ourselves.  And, most often we achieve this either through, are you ready, denial or justifications.

Internal consistency is restored and maintained through denial when we refuse to recognize or acknowledge that an inconsistency exists.  It is restored through justifications when we defend, excuse or uphold an inconsistent choice or behavior with a reason or explanation.

Justification, the more common of the two responses, comes in several different forms.  In the next post, I will go over some of the most common forms of justification.

Looking at Barriers

The identification of barriers and assets is a significant component to making change that is almost always left out.  I am going to highlight some of our internal and external barriers in order to raise your awareness about how this can significantly impact you ability to change.  Then I’ll look at how identifying your assets are an essential component to your ability to make and stick to your change.

Internal Barriers:

Alright, the next portion is a little dense in content, so bear with me because this section will help us answer the question “why, why is it so hard to change?”

Psychologists have identified two main ways that our minds process the world:  System 1 and System 2.  Daniel Kahneman describes these two systems this way: System 1 is the part of the brain that “operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.”  System 2  “allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computation.  The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.”  Although both systems are in operation when we are awake, most of the time what we think and do originates in System 1 while System 2 stands by in a comfortable low-effort mode engaging only a fraction of its capacity.  A state referred to as cognitive ease.  It isn’t until our environment changes to such a degree that we begin to experience cognitive strain that System 2 becomes fully and actively engaged.  When this happens the brain exerts more effort and energy than it prefers and so in order to lessen its long-term workload, it looks for ways to shift back from System 2 to System 1 as quickly as possible.  It does this by developing routines and habits.

We typically imagine that our brains process, store and then later recall as memories every single elaborate detail of our experiences and interactions.  To conserve effort and energy however, the brain actually compresses data for storage by reducing our experiences and interactions to a few critical threads like a summary phrase or a small set of key features.  A process called chunking.  When we recall an experience or interaction, our brains quickly and effortlessly reweave the compressed or chunked data and fill in the rest of the details with fabricated data, giving the illusion that the bulk of the information was in our heads the entire time when in fact only a few critical threads were stored. The more familiar our brain becomes with a particular experience or interaction, the more efficiently it is chunks, reweaves, and fabricates data and the less energy it expends.  Scientists believe that routines and habits emerge because the brain continuously seeks ways to conserve effort and energy.  Making new and unfamiliar experiences and interactions into more familiar routines and eventually into ingrained habits conserves maximum effort and energy (remember those Unintentional Changes?). Habits are so efficient at allowing our brains to hum along in System 1 while System 2 stands by at a comfortable low-effort mode, if fact, that our brains cling to them at the exclusion of all else, including common sense.

Think back to the first time you drove a car.  Do you remember how overwhelming it felt initially?  If your experience was anything like mine, it felt like there were a hundred things to remember to do simultaneously and like everything was coming toward you at about six hundred miles per hour.  I had to close the door, adjust the seat, put on and adjust my seatbelt, and adjust the rearview and side mirrors.  I had to remember the keys, which I inevitably left in my pocket, take my seatbelt back off to reach into my pocket and pull out the keys, pick through and shake off a couple of pieces of pocket lint I had gathered along with them, and figure out where exactly to put the key.   Where was the keyhole?  And where the hell was this mysterious place my dad was referring to as the ignition?  Was it next to the keyhole?  Are the two related?  After figuring out that they are in fact one and the same thing, I had to put the key in the keyho… I mean the ignition (OH! I GET IT! It ignites the engine! Very clever) turn it, and start the car.  I had to figure out which pedal was the gas and which was the break, how to maneuver both pedals with one foot (One foot?  Really? Two pedals, two feet.  Oh, don’t use them at the same time?  Got it.  Not good for the car), and oh yeah, remember to re-buckle my seatbelt.  Seatbelt buckled, key in the ignition, turn the key and… Holy crap, what was that!?  I had to learn not to turn the key in the ignition when the car is already running and how to tolerate my dad yelling at me for things that were so obviously the carmaker’s fault (I mean why would anyone make a car that would allow you to continue to turn the key once the car has already been started anyway?).  I had to learn the difference between the windshield wiper lever, the lights, and the gear shifter.  I had to learn how to drive forward, how to drive in reverse, and how to turn.  And I had to learn all of this WHILE learning to share the road with other drivers, way more experienced and capable than I.  I don’t know about you but by the time my first few driving lessons were over, I felt physically depleted and emotionally abused!   That’s because learning to drive is an entirely new experience and so nothing about it is automatic or effortless.  It involves the effortful mental activities of concentration, operation, and action, which all create cognitive strain and demand full and active engagement of brain System 2.

Now, with several years of experience under my belt, driving has become largely involuntary and automatic, routine and habitual.  I drive past that sixteen year old, smile calmly and empathetically, change lanes, maintain a conversation with my wife about when she first learned to drive, change the radio station, adjust the temperature, and make a sharp left turn, all with little or not effort and no sense of voluntary control.

Routines and habits can emerge consciously and deliberately or unconsciously and without our permission.  Sometimes we are aware of a habit and its associated routines and sometimes we are not.  Since we can’t change what we aren’t aware of, the first step in any successful modification of behavior is awareness.

Over time, acquired behavior patterns that are regularly followed not only become almost involuntary but also become permanently hardwired in our brain’s neural pathways.  In fact most research indicates that once these pathways are created, no amount of willpower can make them go away.  Habits are never eliminated entirely but rather shaped and modified through changes in routines. Since our brains establish routines in an effort to conserve energy, changing them is extremely difficult because it demands full and active engagement of brain System 2, a state that our brains try to avoid at all costs.  Overcoming the brain’s natural inclination to resist change therefore takes a significant amount of sustained effort and energy, which is precisely why why why it is so hard to change!

Problems with Resolutions – Do You Believe?

Believing that you can really do it is essential when it comes to making an Intentional Change. You might really believe that you are capable of making a change, but you don’t really wanna.  Or, you might really want to do something but don’t believe that you can. If either of these thoughts apply to the changes you intend to make, your efforts will be significantly hampered.

Okay, so you probably already know that how you view yourself can have an impact on your ability to stick with change. I hear a lot of people say things like, “it’s just genetic,” or “I just don’t have what it takes.” Or a number of other expressions along these lines.  But let me just say that if you are beginning from a place where you are constantly doubting yourself (or even your self worth), sticking with your changes will be hard.

Also, your belief can be tied up in your perceptions of your previous endeavors to make a change.  I hear things like, “I’ve tried a million times and it just doesn’t work.”  And no doubt, if you’ve tried to do something before and felt like you were not able to stick with it, that can impact your perception of yourself and your abilities.  However, I will say that it is not uncommon for people, myself included, to want our change to be big and fast.  If you watch television for about 5 minutes, all of the products and services that are offered there make it seem like it should be that fast and that easy to make any change that we want!  And so, we often make our goals, well, unbelievable, which is followed by not sticking to our plan, which then sabotages our belief about our ability to make changes that last. And that, in turn, impacts our ability to stick with future efforts. It’s kind of a vicious circle…

Now, I don’t think it is terribly uncommon for us to look more closely at where we have fallen short in our efforts.  But perhaps, for just a moment or two, you could take a look at the changes that you have made in your life and recognize that you are capable of making change.  You’ve been doing it your whole life – if often just doesn’t look the way you thought it was going to look. Take a moment and reflect on some of the changes you have made, no matter how small the change may have been, no matter how easy or difficult it was for you to achieve.

“Believing you can do it” as a component of change can easily be overlooked because it feels so obvious.  But let’s not overlook it or de-value it.  Before you go any further, ask yourself if you truly believe that what you would like to change is something you are capable of doing?  Are you willing to commit to doing it? And do you want to do and believe you can do?

Problems with New Year’s Resolutions – Two Kinds of Change

Two Kinds of change

In the last post, we looked at resolutions being a kind of change, so in this post we are going to examine “change” in a little bit more detail.

Change – the process of becoming different.  Or, I don’t know…Define it any way you want. You can change your clothes, your shoes, your name, your answer.  The weather can change, the seasons can change, lots of things around us can change.  Your body metabolizes and ages, technology is rapidly evolving and the universe is expanding. The word change can mean a lot of different things in different contexts, but what we are really concerned about in this context is change in behavior. Specifically your behavior.

It is important to note that change is always occurring and that not only is it always occurring but that it is also a process, meaning that it is something that is in constant motion.  It is not something that is static.  You will probably see those words a million times throughout my writings on this topic.  Pro-cess.  Prahhhh-ceeessssss.

Ok, I want to briefly discuss two processes through which our behaviors can change – Unintentional Change and Intentional Change.

Unintentional Change is a process that occurs whereby we make a change in our behaviors or routines but we don’t undertake the process with any real intention or purpose.   This can happen pretty frequently and can happen with almost no awareness on the part of the individual.  It could look something like this:  In your evening routine, after dinner, let’s say that it is customary for you to finish dinner, do the dishes, watch an hour of television while enjoying your favorite beverage, take a look at emails, facebook etc, for an hour before retiring to bed to read for 30 minutes followed by turning out the lights and going to sleep.  However, one night you notice on the television there is an ad for another show that you are interested in watching and it comes on immediately after your current program, so you find yourself engaged in an extra hour of television, but in order to make it to sleep on time, you find yourself cutting back on some of the computer time and only about 5 minutes of reading.

In this example, you changed your routine without too much thought or effort.  You didn’t think beforehand, “hmmm…., boy, I really need to make a change to my behaviors tonight.“ You just did something different. There was not really a point where you thought to yourself, “I’m going to change my behaviors and really start a new television viewing schedule and rearrange my other activities to accommodate that new allotment of time for viewing television.”  It just kind of happens.  It’s not that you were completely unaware, it’s just that you didn’t set out to do anything differently –that is, you didn’t have any intention behind it.  Now, sometimes this kind of change might just be a one-time experience, but sometimes it can be the emergence of a new routine.  In either case, there was no real intention behind the behaviors.

Intentional Change is, obviously, a process whereby we set out to make a change with the full intention of making that change.  Intentional change usually begins with awareness that there is something that needs to be changed.  For instance, referring to the example above, you begin to notice that your television watching has increased to two hours every night and you’ve allowed yourself to have two glasses of wine as you watch, and you are noticing that your connection to your family has diminished slightly and you also miss being able to read before bed.  You think to yourself, “Hey, I really like reading at bedtime for 30 minutes.”  So now, you take a look at your evening schedule and you decide that you want to make a change.  You try to figure it out…”ok, wait a minute, I like both of my shows, but I also like connecting with my family online and I like my bedtime reading…I could just stay up later?  Or I could do my reading in the morning, but do I have enough time then?  Or I could TIVO one show and use some of my weekend time to catch up on that program?  Or, or, or…”  There are lots of ways to approach making this change, but in all of the examples, you are consciously thinking about how to make the changes and there is an intention on your part to make that change.

Hmmm…Does this sound familiar?  This is the basis of almost all New Year’s resolutions – there is the awareness of an issue that you would like to change and you make a decision to change, but then…well, for some reason it just doesn’t stick. Bugger!

The next few posts will provide some insights as to why or how your efforts to change are undermined and then I’ll provide some strategies to help you with your  Resolutions or “Intentional Changes.”