Are You Sabotaging Your Best Intentions?

“Self-Control is not a problem in the future, it is only a problem now.”

- Shlomo Benartzi

According to eminent psychologist Daniel Kahneman, we each have two selves. There's the Experiencing Self, which lives life continuously and is aware of what is happening about 3 seconds at a time. And then there's the Remembering Self, which thinks it remembers most of what happens, but which actually remembers very little.

Kahneman believes the Remembering Self can (and often does) sabotage our best intentions. Kahneman's insights carry a lot of weight. He's a former Nobel Memorial Prize winner, one of Foreign Policy magazine's "top global thinkers", and the author of the best-seller Thinking, Fast and Slow.

Let's see how his theory works in practice. What do you remember about July and August? You experienced a lot in those two months: more than 1.6 million three-second intervals. But, if asked what you remember about the summer, what would you say? How long could you talk about your summer? Twenty or thirty minutes perhaps? That is not much compared with the 80,000 minutes you actually lived during July and August.

Although your mind only remembers a fraction of what you think about moment by moment, your Remembering Self makes almost all of your decisions. Here's where the sabotage comes in. When we make decisions, we don’t choose between experiences - we choose between our memories (or our stories) of those experiences.

How many times has your Remembering Self promised you that you will:

• Save more for your retirement
• Exercise more regularly
• Pay down your credit cards
• Eat healthier foods
• Stop procrastinating

And yet, when you actually experience the moments when you could put those promises into practice (your Experiencing Self), your Remembering Self sabotages the opportunity by remembering  a good reason why you can’t do it this minute.

But there's help at hand. Authors Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein suggest we can overcome the 'can't do it now' message if we give ourselves a gentle nudge, rather than a giant task.

Nudge Yourself and Improve Your Life

According to their new book, Nudge, Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, you can achieve your goals more easily, and live more happily, if you get into the habit of giving yourself... a nudge. For example, if you would like to increase your retirement fund, arrange with your bank to transfer $25, $50,or $100 per week into an RRSP fund. Once the arrangement is made, you will hardly notice the deduction, but you will enjoy seeing your fund steadily increase.

Want to eat more healthily? Here's how the nudge strategy works. Instead of declaring you are going to lose 10 pounds (a giant task), give yourself a nudge: remove all sugary, fatty, and salty snacks from your environment and replace them with your favorite fruits and veggies. You can also explore stickk.com to choose other nudges which will help you achieve your goals.

So, when that self-sabotaging Remembering Self tells you can't pay your debts, or improve your diet, or get fitter - give yourself a nudge.

Scarcity: Why Having so Much Means so Little

How is it that we can be so smart in many ways, and yet some of us can't manage our time? How come others are smart in different ways, but still find themselves maxed out on their credit cards? A new book helps us understand why the poor stay poor, and the busy stay busy.

In their book, Scarcity, Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan and Princeton psychologist Eldar Shafir paint an alarming picture of how completely scarcity - whether money or time or some other asset - colonizes our minds and destabilizes our decision-making.

Mullainathan and Shafir show that scarcity creates a similar psychology for everyone struggling to manage with less than they need. Busy people fail to manage their time efficiently for the same reasons the poor and those maxed out on credit cards fail to manage their money. The dynamics of scarcity reveal why dieters find it hard to resist temptation, and why students and busy executives mismanage their time.

Once we start thinking in terms of scarcity and the strategies it imposes, the problems of modern life come into sharper focus. Chronically busy people, suffering from a scarcity of time, demonstrate impaired abilities and make self-defeating choices, such as unproductive multi-tasking or neglecting family for work. Lonely people, suffering from a scarcity of social contact, become hyper-focused on their loneliness, prompting behaviours that render it worse.

Mullainathan and Shafir have written a book that provides a new way of understanding why the poor stay poor and the busy stay busy. And it reveals not only how scarcity leads us astray but also how individuals and organizations can better manage scarcity for greater satisfaction and success.

Richard Thaler and UCLA Economist Shlomo Benartzi have worked together for years on finding the crucial steps to help people save for the future. You might enjoy Benartze’s TED talk “Saving for Tomorrow, Tomorrow.”

Wired for Easy Answers

Good decisions take time.

Daniel Kahneman demonstrates that we have two systems of thinking:

System 1 is what he calls 'thinking fast'. It represents intuition, and engages us three seconds at a time. It tirelessly provides us with quick impressions, intentions, and feelings. It is also called the Experiencing Self.

System 2 is 'thinking slow'. It represents reason, self-control, and intelligence. It is also called the Remembering Self. But the Remembering Self only remembers a tiny fraction of what happened, although it thinks it remembers almost everything.

The Remembering Self is also reluctant to put much effort into thinking and will only do so when it has to. For example, if I ask you to tell me the answer to 2+2 you would give me the answer easily. But if I asked you to tell me the answer to 271 x 37 you would resist - unless you could reach for your calculator.

Of course, we are working with both 'selves' simultaneously. But both compete for our attention and the Experiencing Self often wins, even though the Remembering Self is more rational and cautious. The big problem for the Remembering Self is that it has to work harder to stay on task and quickly forgets most of what the Experiencing Self has been experiencing.

Watch Daniel Kahneman for more of an explanation.

When System 2 thinking gets tired, the brain goes with System 1. So when you have an important decision to make, you will get a better result if you allow time for careful, step-by-step thinking, and don’t let yourself be swayed by your fears and hopes of the moment. Ask critical friends or colleagues for their honest input and sleep on the decision for at least one night.

If you are a manager or a technical expert, you tend to be convinced very easily that you know best, that you have very good intuition about your particular field. But this depends on whether the domain you work in is inherently predictable and whether you have had sufficient experience to learn the regularities.

In today’s fast changing world, those conditions are very difficult to maintain. To keep your expertise up-to-date, you need to be able to listen without pre-judgment to many different resources, especially front line employees and customers.

This information about our Experiencing Self and Remembering Self ties in directly with the insights from my April newsletter on Willpower. The fact that our willpower can be easily depleted and then we are more subject to immediate temptations, sounds a lot like the collaboration/struggle between thinking fast and thinking slow.

It also explains why it is so difficult sometimes to concentrate, as discussed in my December 2012 newsletter.

Focusing our pre-frontal cortex on important tasks takes effort. When we do concentrate our attention, extra blood rich in oxygen and glucose flows to the relevant neurons, helping us concentrate even more.

However, our cave-dweller past can upset our plans. We are hard-wired to switch our attention to bright lights or colours, loud noise or movement, or even a moment of fear. It's one of our many survival mechanisms. In an office, it could be the ping of an email or a flashing light on your phone or a worrying thought. Once your attention has been distracted, it takes real effort to re-focus.

To teach our brains to focus more predictably, we need to set up conditions which reduce distractions.

originally published June 2013 Newsletter