Radio NZ National, Nine to Noon – Parenting slot on 9 August

I’ll be doing the parenting slot that day. If you have a topic you think might be interesting to discuss, please leave a comment and we can chat about it here too. Or feel free to re-post my request on Twitter or Facebook.

Thanks

On chocolate, Billy Ray Cyrus, and the futility of thought suppression

Imagine a tasty bit of chocolate. Imagine unwrapping it, and looking at it, anticipating what it is going to taste like. Now imagine placing it in your mouth and swirling it around, feeling it start to dissolve and become warm as you taste the sweetness spreading across your tongue. Allow yourself to linger on that thought, that taste, that flavor, for a few seconds before you read on.

Now – stop thinking about chocolate. I am instructing you not to think about chocolate again until you get to the end of this article. If you think about chocolate. I want you to stop. Note that you have thought about chocolate but stop. You are not to think about chocolate.

The point of this little exercise is to understand how difficult it is for us to not think about something. I bet you’ve already thought about chocolate. If that’s true, you are not alone. That’s just how the mind works – the more we try not to think about something – or thought suppression – the more we end up thinking about it – this is called the ironic rebound effect. Think of an annoyingly catchy 80s pop song. Maybe, “Achy Breaky Heart” by Billy Ray Cyrus. Go through the chorus a couple of times. Really imagine that mullet swinging in the breeze. Here, let me help – click below for the full experience

Now, stop thinking about it. Yeah, right.

Sometimes, especially when we are trying to dismiss thoughts from our minds, it can feel like we aren’t on the same team. Still have Billy Ray Cyrus running amok in your head? See what I mean – the more you try not to think about it, the more it is there. Even if you get practice suppressing the unwanted thought, that doesn’t seem to work in the long-term either. Trying to push it to the back of your mind just – does – not – work. Thought suppression has behavioural impacts too. In one experiment, people asked not to think about chocolate ended up eating more chocolate when given the opportunity than those who weren’t given the instruction to suppress the thought.

One theory to explain this is that we try to distract ourselves by intentionally thinking about something else. Secondly – and here comes the ironic bit –  out minds start an unconscious monitoring process to check if we are still thinking about the thing we are not supposed to be thinking about – you know, to check if our conscious process is working or not.  The problem comes when we consciously stop trying to distract ourselves and the unconscious process carries on looking out for the thing we are trying to suppress. Anything it sees that looks remotely like the target triggers the thought again and round we go in yet another loop of thinking the same thought we were desperately trying to forget about.

So, the irony of thought suppression, then, is that actively trying to manage our own minds can sometimes do more harm than good. 

What can we do?

• The key is abandoning attempts to exert thought control and practicing acceptance instead. In a nutshell, acceptance is about allowing our thoughts and feelings to be as they are – regardless of it they are pleasant or painful, or just plain irritating.
• Open up, make room for them, and drop the struggle with them. Let them come and go as they naturally do.
• Distraction may work as a short-term solution, but in the long-term, practicing acceptance takes a lot less effort than constantly being on guard and fending off unwanted thoughts. As well as being a driving task, both mentally and physically. It just doesn’t work.

Coaching conversations can help you practice acceptance – get in touch if I can help

A twist on the to-do list – use the 80/20 rule

You’ve got a to-do list, right? Haven’t we all. Chances are you don’t get anywhere near through your to-do list. Even worse, every time you cross something off, another two items spring up to take its place. Your to-do list has just turned into a Hydra, and frankly, you don’t feel like Hercules today. What to do, what to do?

It turns out that there is a mathematical law that might help you – the Pareto Principle (or Juran’s Assumption). This says that, for the most part, about 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. Anything that isn’t just routine work can fall right into this equation. Most people achieve 80% of their results from 20% of their actual effort.

Think about that for a minute. 80% of what you get done comes from 20% of the stuff you actually do.

Back to that to-do list. Unfortunately, most time management techniques tend to give equal priority to the 20% of what you need to do that really matters and the 80% of things that don’t. Even if you try to rank in order of priority yourself, are you really taking the potential payoff into account?

How can you use this Pareto Principle to transform your to-do list into something far more useful? It might take a few more minutes, but I find it a really powerful way to meaningfully prioritize what you start out to do each day.

• When you make a to-do list, prioritize each item by the amount of effort required (rank from 1 to 10, with 1 being the least amount of effort required)
• Do the same with each item, but now rank by potential positive results (1 to 10, with 10 being the highest impact)
• Now divide the potential positive results by the amount of effort required to get your ‘Priority Ranking‘.
• The items with the lowest new ‘priority ranking’ go to the top of your new to-do list.

Here’s some examples:

• Task 1 – Write comprehensive report for funding body on conference meeting and presentation (Effort = 9, Result = 3 : Priority ranking is 9/3 = 3
• Task 2 – Prepare presentation for seminar (Effort = 4, Result = 4 : Priority ranking is 4/4 = 1
• Task 3 – Call client about making appointment for initial coaching session (Effort = 1, Result = 10 : Priority ranking is 1/10 = 0.1

So, my new priority order is Task 3 first, then Task 2, then Task 1.

This method of priority ranking means that the 20% of your effort that makes the biggest difference gets done first. Do this as new items appear on your to-do list, and you’ll soon find their place on your new priority ranked list. Of course, the 80% of stuff you do that falls to the bottom of the list may not really matter – but the impact of doing it (or not doing it) may change. So, it is worth reviewing those tasks that stay on the list every now and again, just to check if anything has changed.

Makes sense? Then go! Let me know how you get on.

Having trouble disconnecting? Access denial might help

A while ago, I posted about the benefit of disconnecting, and a few people have said they liked the idea. However, I know a few people have also talked about how hard they find it to do. In particular, although they may be able to turn their email popups and audio alerts off (or down to a more manageable interval), the pull of Facebook, Twitter and other social media is hard to resist, or may even be an integral part of their job roles. Nevertheless, others have told me that it is sometimes too compelling to step away, despite their best efforts. Productivity can suffer too, as I outlined in my original post.

Now, I’m not sure about how to help with the ubiquitous internet connection that is available through the our mobile devices, but there are ways to help set up your desktop computing environment to thwart your social / newshound impulses and keep you on task. Antisocial runs on Macs and turns off the social parts of the Internet, like Facebook and Twitter for the period of time that you want. You can choose the sites you want to deny access to. The catch is that once you set it up, if you want to break into the social internet that you just blocked off, you have to reboot your computer. As the promotional blurb says, “As you will feel a deep sense of shame for rebooting just to waste time on Twitter, you’re unlikely to cheat.” I’m not so sure about shame, but it’ll be a pain to wait to boot up again, and that would be deterrent enough for me and many others, I’d bet. US$15 to buy the software, but you can try it out for free.

If you have a PC, not to worry, there is a solution for you (and Mac users too) too though somewhat more drastic. Freedom does one thing. It turns off access to the Internet. Completely. You tell it how long for and that’s it, no more internet for the time period you specified. Once again, you can get around it of you reboot, but are you really going to do that? US$10 and a free trial is available.

Of course, you could go to your mobile device to get your fix, but the fact that you do this might cause you to notice that you really are off task. What a great opportunity to practice some mindful compassion and to bring yourself gently but firmly back on task.

And thanks to Kate for putting me on to these tools – in a nice twist, she found the tip on Facebook.