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Sustaining Attention to TasksThe skill of sustaining attention to tasks goes by several names, among them “persistence skills” and “concentration skills.” With all of these labels, we’ll talk about the skill of focusing attention on one thing long enough to get the results you want. Examples include paying attention to homework long enough to get it completed, concentrating on a problem long enough to get it solved, concentrating on what someone is saying long enough to understand what she is telling you, concentrating on reading well enough to understand thoroughly. Learning versus pharmacological approaches to attentionConcentration comes much easier for some people than for others. Some people who find concentration very hard and who have certain other symptoms get a diagnosis of attention deficit disorder. A good bit of evidence shows us that difficulties in concentration – like almost all other aspects of our personalities – have a hereditary component. People whose moms and dads had a hard time concentrating tend to have a hard time concentrating themselves. The fact that attention difficulties can be hereditary implies that there is something biological, located in our brains, that makes concentration easier for some people and more difficult for others. Some people take these facts and infer from them that attention problems can only be helped by medication. This inference is a serious error. Learning is a way of changing the biology of our brains, just as medication is. Every time we learn anything, our brains are physically changed by that learning. Sometimes that learning is even visible to the brain imaging methods available today. In one experiment, teaching people with obsessive compulsive disorder to face the situations that tended to bring out compulsions, without giving in to the temptation to do compulsions, produced changes in brain activity that were visible with a method of brain imaging. Training in attention skills is likely to change brain physiology as well. Unfortunately, training in concentration skills for someone who is very low in natural concentration talent (e.g., someone with a fairly high degree of attention deficit) is a very time consuming process. People should probably think not of several hours to learn it, but several hundred hours. The current scientific literature on attention problems is rather negative about the possibility of helping attention problems by skill training. But there has hardly ever been a published study in the treatment outcome literature where the subjects received several hundred hours of focused training in a skill. When I have examined the literature on skill training for attention deficit disorders, the longest trainings are in the neighborhood of forty hours, and often even these hours are not spent in concentration exercises per se. Consequently, most of the published studies haven’t tested the hypothesis that several hundred hours of practice and work could produce big improvements. Is it realistic to expect anyone to work for hundreds of hours on anything? Current psychotherapeutic treatment emphasizes extremely “brief treatment.” But people do work for hundreds of hours on many skills. We see lots of people who are capable of playing musical instruments such as the piano or violin; it’s estimated that these take close to a thousand hours of practice to learn to play fairly well. We see lots of people on sports teams who practice hundreds or even thousands of hours to achieve excellence. We routinely see people who have learned calculus; to get to this stage requires several hundred hours of training in mathematics skills. What if we approached any of these skills with the attitude that if you couldn’t learn them in twenty to forty hours, you should give up on a learning-based approach to them? We’d be giving up on all of them. Similarly, we should not give up on learning based approaches to attention skills. This belief, by the way, does not imply that medicine is not useful. Indeed it should be used when the benefits exceed the risks. But a discussion of the risks and benefits of medicine is not a topic for this book. A sales pitch for concentration skillsIs it really worthwhile to spend hundreds of hours working on concentration skill? The answer is yes, for two reasons. First, concentration skill is so crucial to success in so many areas. Second, it’s possible to work on concentration while at the same time working on other goals, namely schoolwork, reading, or using any other skill requiring concentration. Why is concentration skill so important? One reason is that in today’s culture, most people spend a good portion of the first parts of their lives in school. Much of people’s feeling about success in life comes from how well they do in tasks of reading, remembering things that were read, solving math problems, writing coherently, and so forth. If you’re going to spend much of your life in activities that put a high premium on concentration skills, you’d better get good at concentration. But even after school, a vast majority of the most pleasant and high-paying jobs involve dealing in information. A doctor who listens to symptoms and diagnoses an illness is an information-handler. A lawyer who listens to the circumstances of a case, is familiar with the law that is relevant to it, and presents this information in court, is an information-handler. A writer, computer programmer, composer, or artist delivers an information product. A business executive inputs information relevant to the business, and outputs information in the form of decisions, and earns his salary for dealing in information. An accountant takes in information and rearranges it in a form that is relevant, for example, to taxpaying decisions. A scientist reads the available information on a question, and searches out more information. A minister or priest or rabbi deals in the information present in religious writings, and figures out how to apply such information to current questions of living. An engineer takes information about materials and techniques and applies them to decisions of design and production of things people need. All of these information-handlers must concentrate in order to input and output their information well. Concentration is crucial not only in work and school, but also in human relations. One of the basic skills of forming good relationships is being able to listen to another person. If you can’t keep your mind on what the other person is saying, if you aren’t patient enough to hear them out, it’s much more difficult to create a good relationship. And finally, there are hundreds of tasks of daily living where concentration skills make the difference between frustration and pleasure. It takes concentration, for example, to deal with and organize the papers that come in the mail, to remember where we put things, to remember what to take where, to organize what to do by what times. For all these reasons, I believe that work on concentration skills should be a part of the universal curriculum for all people, not just those with diagnosed attention problems. However, it’s usually the case that neither those with attention deficit disorder nor the general population group receives any systematic training in concentration. The connection between boredom and low concentration skillsA very frequent complaint by people with low skills of sustaining attention is that something or other is boring. Almost everyone has the skill of sustaining attention to interesting, fascinating tasks that are not too hard, not too easy, but just at the right level of challenge. What really challenges this skill is “boring” tasks such as reading very difficult material, working at things that are quite complex, working at things that don’t yield results quickly. If you are good at this skill, you are hard to bore, because you have the patience to find something interesting in nearly every task. Sometimes people feel bored when they feel a task is too easy. But after you already know how to do something, if you want to get really great at it, you have to practice over and over so the performance will come more automatically, and you can focus your attention on doing it with true excellence. So it’s necessary to learn to tolerate the boredom of doing something that’s already easy again and again. Sometimes people feel bored when a task is too hard. For example, suppose there is a very hard problem, and you have to keep thinking about it in lots of different ways, but still the answer doesn’t come. If you don’t have the patience to stick with the task and tolerate the frustration of not being able to get it, you won’t be able to get really hard things done. But when you learn this skill of persisting at hard tasks, you can accomplish far more than you ever thought possible. Someone who can’t stand boredom sometimes does what we call “sensation-seeking behavior.” This means the person tries to create some sort of excitement that will relieve his boredom. Sometimes people get this excitement by starting an argument with someone. For example, the person creates a ruckus by refusing to do something that someone else wants, or unreasonably insists that someone do something. For some people even unpleasant arguments are better than boredom. These people can greatly improve their relationships with people by learning to tolerate low-stimulation situations better. If you’re not skilled at sustaining attention and tolerating low stimulation, it’s less pleasant for you to get information simply through a string of words. You’re reading a string of words right now. You listen to a string of words whenever you go to a class and hear a teacher lecture. The person who can’t tolerate low stimulation is more dependent upon visual images, especially visual images that change much more rapidly, such as in a television program or a movie or video game. What improvement in concentration meansAs we improve in concentration, we improve in at least three different ways. We can keep our minds on: 1. less exciting material, 2. with greater focus, 3. for a longer time. Thus, when I move from being able to focus only on movies and video games, to being able to focus on reading very exciting books such as mystery novels, I’m improving my attention skills. When I go from exciting books to less exciting ones (such as Instructions on Psychological Skills), I’m also improving attention skills. When I can do any of these activities without my mind’s traveling to other thoughts so often, that’s improvement. And when I move from being able to focus from five minutes to fifteen minutes to an hour to two hours, I’m improving by another measure. It’s good to monitor each of these three variables as you work on concentration skills, and to celebrate any time you get better in one way while holding the other two constant. Is our culture becoming less skilled in concentration?Some writers have raised the possibility that, as a culture, we are losing the skill of sustaining attention, as we become more accustomed to rapidly changing stimulation. Perhaps we are getting used to seeing television and hearing music and getting all sorts of other stimuli from electronic inputs, such as video games, so frequently that we are losing the ability to read and listen to words. As Neil Postman has noted, the debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas in 1858 were phrased in language very much as someone would write, and yet the audiences of the day seemed to tolerate listening to these debates for three or four hours, taking a break and then continuing to listen for another three or four hours. Postman argues that it’s almost inconceivable that an audience of today could sustain attention that long. Comparing the lengthy and attention-demanding works of Shakespeare or Verdi with today’s television shows makes us wonder about what is happening to our collective attention spans. Concentration exercises1. The self-observation exercise. The first exercise doesn’t ask you to sustain a focus at all, but just to observe what you are focusing on. You practice the skill of self-observation. To do this exercise you first simply sit and close your eyes. (Or ride on an exercise bike, and leave your eyes open.) Let your mind do whatever it wants to. In other words, let your mind drift. If you want to think about some one thing, do so. If you want to flit from one thing to the next, that’s fine. The only thing that makes this an exercise is for you to reserve a little bit of your mind to observe what the rest of it is doing. Ask yourself the questions, “What am I thinking about now?” “What images are going through my mind now?” “What feelings am I having now?” Start out by doing this for short periods of time, for example, a minute. After the minute is up, recall what you thought about, and then report this to someone. Gradually, you can do this for more and more minutes. What is the point of this? If you are going to gain in the ability to focus, you first have to have awareness of what you are focusing on. Have you ever let your attention drift away from what you wanted to be focusing on, without discovering this until perhaps five or ten minutes or more later? The point of the self-observation exercise is that, if you get off task, you’ll know it more immediately. If you notice yourself getting off task as soon as you do it, you can bring yourself back very quickly. You want to be fully immersed in what you are doing, except for saving a very small portion of your mind to observe yourself. If you save too much, you’ll be so self-conscious that you don’t perform as well. But if you don’t save any, you have no way to monitor yourself and know how well you are doing. You learn how to save just the right amount of neuronal energy for self-observation by seeing what maximizes your performance over repeated efforts. We’ll talk more about that later. 2. Self-observation out loud. Here’s a variant of the self-observation exercise. In this one, you do the same thing; only this time you say aloud what you are thinking about. You describe in words any images that flash on the screen of your consciousness. You say out loud any thoughts you are thinking. You name any feelings you are having. This is a difficult one. Talking your thoughts certainly affects what thoughts you have. But that’s OK. The main thing is to practice conscious awareness of what is going through your mind. The more you do this, the more you are set up to realize when you are concentrating on one thing, and when you are drifting from one thing to another. 3. Shifting focus on purpose. In this concentration exercise, you pick something to focus your attention on, such as your own breathing. During the exercise you will turn your attention to your breathing, then to anything else you want, then back to your breathing, then back to anything else you want. You keep shifting the focus, on purpose, about every thirty seconds or so. The point of this exercise is to get practice at consciously directing the focus of your attention. As you do this exercise, feel what it’s like to direct your attention toward something, and to feel your mind respond. For example: I focus on my breathing for a few seconds. Then I turn my attention to looking at my telephone answering machine, and my mind turns to some of the messages I’ve received. Then I turn the attention back to my breathing, and feel the dryness in my nostrils as the air goes in, and the moisture in my nostrils as the air goes out. Now I look at a clock, and watch the second hand moving around the clock face. I do this, thinking about the passage of time on various scales, and then I direct my attention back to my breathing. The point of this exercise is to practice getting your attention to go where you want it to. So much of the time, our attention “is drawn” by external stimuli rather than directed from within. We walk into a room, and the television attracts our attention. Someone speaks to us, and that draws our attention from the television to the person’s voice. Then the doorbell rings, and that pulls our attention to it. But by practicing the conscious directing of your attention, you strengthen the “executive” part of the brain that tells the rest of it what to focus on. You want this executive to be in charge, and you do not want to have your attention held hostage to whatever external stimuli happen to be going on at the moment. There are several variations on this exercise. You can, if you wish, select two things to pay attention to, and alternate between the two of them; for example, you read a book for a minute and then relax your muscles for a minute. Or you do math problems for a minute and then spend a minute looking at the blackness that happens when you close your eyes. You can pick long periods between the shift of focus, or short periods such as three or four seconds. 4. The concentrate, rate, and concentrate exercise. In this exercise, you do anything that requires concentration: reading, typing, math problems, writing, dancing, solving chess problems, playing the piano. But you stop every few minutes and rate how well you concentrated on the task. If you concentrated well, you try to remember what you did with your brain that let you concentrate so well. If you did not concentrate well, you notice that, and resolve that, on the next trial, you’ll emulate a time when you did concentrate well. Then you go back and concentrate again. If you wish, you can use the following scale to answer the question “how much” concentration:
0 = None 2 = Only a little 4 = Some, but not much 6 = Pretty much 8 = High amount 10 = Very high amount
What’s the idea behind this exercise? In explaining this, let’s think about the skill of shooting foul shots in basketball. Most good basketball players spend a good bit of time practicing these important shots. But let’s imagine that a player went to practice foul shots blindfolded and earplugged so that he couldn’t tell whether the shot went in or not, whether it was to the right or left or too high or low. The practice session wouldn’t be nearly so productive, would it? Because the feedback loop would not be closed, the information on each shot would not get back to the learner. I believe this is the way most people practice concentrating when they do homework or read a book – without closing the feedback loop. That is, they try to concentrate, but they never raise the questions to themselves, “How well did I concentrate then?” “Was that one of my best concentration efforts lately, or was it average, or not so good?” Rather than thinking about these questions, they are thinking about the subject matter at hand, or else they’re off on something else. But seldom do they get a concentration rating. When you do periodically give yourself a concentration rating, you close the feedback loop. You are like the basketball player now practicing with the blindfold off. I’ve written some computer programs that ask you to practice typing letters or typing the answers to math fact problems. You can set the period of practice for whatever time you want – say two minutes. During that time you practice, and the computer keeps track of how well you are doing. At the end of each trial, the program prompts you to rate your concentration during that trial. When you are done, the program computes a correlation coefficient to see how your subjective concentration rating correlates with your objective performance. These programs are meant to help you notice when you are performing well or poorly, and to take that into account when judging your own concentration. But you don’t need a computer program to do the concentrate, rate, and concentrate exercise. In one variation, you can study with another person. You can read something and answer questions on it, or write something, or work problems. The other person notices how much you are accomplishing. Every few minutes you stop and rate your concentration, and you compare it with the other person’s rating of how much you accomplished. In another variation, you work alone. You simply stop every few minutes to rate yourself, remember the moments of highest concentration, and resolve to emulate those during the next trial. 5. The reflections exercise. We will discuss reflections in a chapter on the skill of empathic listening. But here we use reflections in the service of gaining concentration. Let’s first describe the version you do with another person. Your partner’s role is to either read or speak to you. The simplest way to do this is for your partner to read to you from a book. Your partner stops every so often, maybe every sentence, maybe every paragraph. You respond with a “reflection” of what your partner read. How do you do a reflection? You can use one of the following prompts and fill in the blank.
Prompts for Yourself to Do Reflections
So you’re saying _________________? What I hear you saying is _________________. In other words, _______________? So if I understand you right, ______________? It sounds like _________________. Are you saying that ______________? You’re saying that _____________?
What you’re doing is saying back what you heard the other person read or say. Your partner’s response can be simply “Yes,” if you heard correctly, or “No,” if you didn’t. If the answer is “No,” then your partner should read it again, and let you try again. Alternatively, the partner can rate the accuracy of your reflection on a 0 to 10 scale. You can again use the rating scale for “How much,” asking the question “How much accuracy was there in the reflection?”
0 = None 2 = Only a little 4 = Some, but not much 6 = Pretty much 8 = High amount 10 = Very high amount
If you can keep doing this activity over time, shooting for 1. more accurate reflections, 2. of more difficult, complex, and unexciting material, 3. for a longer and longer time, then you are almost sure to improve your concentration skills. This exercise is very hard work, but it’s worth it. It’s really a variant of the concentrate, rate, and concentrate activity. And that activity in all its variants is to concentration-building as pushups and weightlifting are to muscle-building. 6. The reflections exercise with reading rather than listening. In this exercise, rather than listening to someone read or speak, you read a paragraph yourself. After finishing the paragraph, you paraphrase out loud what you recall from it. If you’re lucky, your personal concentration trainer, a very fast typist, can transcribe this for you. If you’ve done a great deal of the concentrate, rate, and concentrate activity with typing, you’re a fast typist yourself and can summarize the main idea of the paragraph in writing. Later you can look back at how your summaries compare with the original paragraph, and see if over time you are getting more and more accurate. 7. Constructing your own test, and taking it. This exercise is another variant of the concentrate, rate, and concentrate exercise. Suppose you are studying a book. Like the other variants of the concentrate, rate, and concentrate activity, you don’t try to passively absorb information. You do something that tests or measures how well you are concentrating. You do a task that’s impossible to do without concentrating on the information. A task I recommend is pretending to be a teacher and actually writing a test on the material that you are studying. With each sentence you read, you think, “Can I make a question out of this?” Having to make that decision tends to keep your mind on the task. If you get to the end of a paragraph and the answer to the question “What question can I make about this” is “I have no idea because I wasn’t tuned in,” then you’ve received valuable feedback. You’ve closed the feedback loop. On the other hand, if you can think of a really good test question about the material, that’s important feedback too. Then, when you finish writing the test, you get more feedback on your concentration effectiveness by taking your own test and writing out the answers. Then you grade it and practice answering any missed questions until you can get them correct. At any point, if you don’t remember or understand the material well enough to complete a step in the process, you go back and study it again, and see if you can do so the second time around. You are constantly giving yourself feedback about your concentration as you complete this whole process. My guess is that people who take the time, energy, and concentration to use this technique will see big increases in their mastery of the material. If you’re a student, I would guess that using this technique would improve your grades. 7. The return to the central question exercise. This is another way of completing the feedback loop, seeing how well you are concentrating. Here the measure of your concentration is how well you can keep churning out answers to a question with many answers. I learned this exercise from a yoga book; this is a technique yogis use to develop their skills of mind-control. The yoga book described starting with a question that can trigger lots of thoughts. If you want, you draw a circle with a question inside it, and lots of arrows going outward from the circle. Now, for each of the arrows, you think of an idea. After you think of that idea, you return to the central question and see whether you can think of another. You keep going until none immediately come to mind. Even when you think you have run out of ideas, you keep pulling for new ones. You resist the urge to give up and go on to something else. You also resist the urge to go off on a tangent from one idea to the next without returning to the concept in the center of the circle. The skill of persisting on one focus until maximal benefit has been obtained before shifting to another focus is a central skill this exercise practices. (It also exercises the skills of divergent thinking and option-generating.) Although the spatial image given in the yoga book is one of a circle with lines going outward from it, an equally good way to do the exercise is to put the central concept at the top of the page and list the offshoots of it on successive lines down the rest of the page. In other words, make a list. In the yoga book, there is an example for concentration on the concept of “cow.” The question was defined as, “What is anything you can say about a cow?” The thinker might start with a list something like this:
Usually gentle People use it to get milk Usually lives on farms Eats grass and clover Makes mooing sound Hides can be brown, black, or reddish Hides sometimes used to make leather
If you do this exercise, you will perceive the difference between the way you think while doing it, and the more tangential course that our thoughts often take. This course may be represented as follows: Cows --> Give milk --> A milk shake would taste good --> I saw Mary Jones last time I got a milk shake --> Mary Jones’s brother plays the guitar --> I saw someone break his guitar on stage --> They’re smashing up that vacant house on the corner --> Letting the thoughts drift from one to another without any “return to the center” has many useful purposes, and is not to be discouraged; the point is that the style of thought with “return to the center” is also useful and should be in the repertoire. Let’s give another example of it. Suppose the question is, “How can violence be reduced?” You can do the same concentration exercise, sitting and thinking about the question, writing down one possible answer after another, but always returning to the main question after every possible answer. The list someone would make might look like this:
How can violence be reduced? Teach problem-solving skills Reduce availability of guns Reduce violent models in the media Form a world court or world government Educate people better, for useful work Teach parenting Improve dispute-resolution systems in community Reduce the demand for illegal drugs Remove children from violently abusive parents more quickly Teach people about heroes of peace and heroes of kindness Provide fictional models of peace and kindness Help teachers promote kindness in classrooms Remove violent criminals from rest of society Put more law enforcement officers into action Promote a universal second language for reducing misunderstandings among nations
Returning to the central question and continuing to search one’s mind for items to add to the list is the essence of the exercise. Suppose you make this exercise a little more complex. After listing ideas, you arrange them some rational order. You can generate a list of ideas that are subtopics of the ideas previously generated, and more subtopics of these, as far as you want to go. This then becomes the structure known to writing teachers as an outline. The exercise can get transformed into writing a book! Teaching people to organize their own thinking through writing is indeed a useful antidote to skill deficiency in concentration. 8. Returning to the central question with options or consequences. Two particular types of central questions that are very worthwhile to think about have the following formats. First: “Here is a situation. To respond to it, what options can you think of? Second: “Here’s an option someone is considering. What possible consequences could come from doing that option?” In some of the materials I have written that are companions to this book, there are many problems, each with several options listed; in another section there are many actions listed, each with several possible consequences. If you wish to, you can test your own option or consequence lists against the ones I generated for these hypothetical situations or actions. Generating options and predicting consequences are very important parts of the decision-making and problem-solving process. By using these sorts of questions for the return to the central question exercise, you’re able to practice concentration while at the same time practicing problem-solving. Listing options and listing possible consequences are not the only parts of the decision-making process that are useful to practice with the return to the central question exercise. When you read the section on decision-making, you’ll see several other processes that are central to making good decisions. These include listing your goals for a certain situation, listing the factors that are important to maximize or minimize, listing the advantages and disadvantages of a certain idea, and others. Any listing can be used for the return to the central question exercise, but these decision-making maneuvers are particularly useful to practice in this way. 9. The good will exercise. Here’s another useful concentration exercise: the exercise of good will. This is similar to the technique of relaxation using a mantra that we will look at more thoroughly in the chapter on relaxation skills. In relaxation using a mantra, you do something repetitively with your mind, such as to say a word or gaze at an object. If you notice that your mind has drifted away from the mantra, you gently direct your attention back to the mantra. In the good will exercise, the mantra is mentally directing good wishes toward yourself and other people, one by one. You close your eyes and relax. Then you think about someone, possibly yourself. You direct good wishes toward yourself:
May I become the best I can become. May I give and receive compassion and kindness. May I live happily and productively.
Now think of someone else, and picture that person clearly. Go through these three wishes for that person. Then will that these wishes come true for that person.
May she become the best she can become. May she give and receive compassion and kindness. May she live happily and productively.
Let your mind range from one person to the next, and spend some time willing these positive outcomes for each of these people. If you find your mind straying from the activity (for example, you find yourself making a grocery list in your mind instead), reinforce yourself for noticing what your mind is doing rather than punishing yourself for getting off track, and swing back to the exercise of good will. What’s the point of this exercise? You’re doing an exercise in concentration whenever you try to keep your mind on something and monitor whether you are succeeding or not. The good will exercise is useful also because of what you’re accomplishing at the same time. To practice willing good for yourself and others improves your skills of kindness, empathy, forgiveness, conflict resolution, purposefulness, and various other skills, as well as concentration. When I do this I try to remind myself of images of wise holy people whose good wishes for people are mental and spiritual and cooperative rather than superficial and material and competitive. Thus, good will for the happiness of my friend may be that, in her tennis game tomorrow, she will experience joy and peak performance and conduct herself in a way that betters the world, rather than wishes along the lines of “I hope she beats the pants off those snooty opponents of hers.” 10. Fantasy rehearsals. I’ve discussed the technique of fantasy rehearsal at several points in this book. When doing fantasy rehearsals, you picture and describe to yourself a certain situation, and you run through your mind an image of yourself doing the thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that you would most like to do in that situation. You are practicing in your imagination the best possible response to a certain situation, once you have decided what that response is. The main purpose of fantasy rehearsal is to practice positive patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior in your imagination, and make yourself more likely to carry out those positive patterns in real life by such practice. But to do this exercise requires concentration, and thus it can be used as a concentration exercise. If you concentrate fully on fantasy rehearsals every day, your concentration skills are likely to increase. The principle of fantasy rehearsal is used very frequently in sports psychology. Some of the earliest research in fantasy rehearsal involved sports performance. In several studies, athletes were divided into two groups, and one group was asked to practice their performance in their imagination, while another group was asked to do something irrelevant to their performance. After some time of this, the group that practiced in imagination did better in a real-life performance test than did the comparison group. In doing fantasy rehearsals, it’s good to go through the following steps, as remembered by the mnemonic STEBC. STEBC stands for situation, thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and celebration. You imagine yourself in a certain concrete situation. If there is someone saying something to you, you imagine a particular person, not just a generic person. You make the image as vivid as possible. You describe the situation and the events up to the choice point where you will respond. Next you talk to yourself about the situation. You tell yourself rational, reasonable thoughts. Some of these thoughts are in sentences you say to yourself. Some are in visual or auditory images. You can practice new patterns of emotion just as you can practice new patterns of thought and behavior. If you want to feel differently in situations from the way you currently feel, and if you are sure that the new emotional reaction is better and more preferable, then you can visualize yourself feeling that new way in the situation, and practice that new emotional response. Do you want to feel brave in a situation in which you formerly felt scared? You simply imagine yourself feeling brave. It might help to recall another situation in which you felt brave, and transfer that pattern of feeling into the situation. Or you might imagine someone else feeling the way you want to feel, as a stepping-stone into imagining yourself feeling that way. Then you imagine yourself behaving the way you want to behave in the situation: saying things to other people, moving in the way you want to. There are two points of view from which to visualize yourself doing these things. In one position, you see things as if from your own eyes. In another position, you see your imaginary self as if from the eyes of an outside observer, or as if you were watching a video of yourself. The C in the mnemonic STEBC stands for celebration. In your imagination you hear yourself congratulating yourself for doing the desirable pattern, just as you would like to congratulate yourself in real life. Then you are done with the fantasy rehearsal, and you can celebrate having done it. So two celebrations are in order. There are two ways of doing fantasy rehearsal: silently and out loud. In silent fantasy rehearsals, you simply sit and relax and do the rehearsal in your imagination. If a trainer wants to get feedback on what the trainee imagined, the trainer can ask the trainee to recall and report on what was imagined after the silent fantasy rehearsal is over. In the fantasy rehearsal out loud, you put into words everything that you are visualizing and saying to yourself, while the fantasy rehearsal is taking place. You speak as if you are experiencing the situation in the present, not the past or the future. This technique is a wonderful one because it lets the trainer hear exactly what is going on in the trainee’s mind. If the trainee is trying to rehearse positive patterns but is actually rehearsing fairly negative patterns, the trainer can hear it. If the trainee’s mind is drifting off onto extraneous ideas, it’s obvious to the trainer. And when you do fantasy rehearsals out loud, you yourself can hear when they start and end. For this reason usually when I refer to fantasy rehearsals, I mean fantasy rehearsals out loud. What does a fantasy rehearsal sound like? Let’s give some examples. Here’s a fantasy rehearsal of a situation calling for frustration tolerance. “I’m at the computer, and I’m writing an assignment. I’ve been working at this for half an hour. Oh no, the power for the whole house has gone off, including the computer! And I hadn’t saved what I’d written since I started! I think I’ve lost everything I wrote! Now the power has come back on now, and I can look. Yes, I’ve lost it all. Well, this is an opportunity for me to practice frustration tolerance, all right. I learned something from this. Next time I’ll save what I’ve written really often. And when I can afford it, I’m going to buy an uninterruptible power supply. But how can I handle this now? Let me relax. It’s just a half hour’s work down the drain; it’s not the end of the world. It’s not as if someone is about to drag me off and kill me. What are my options? I could go and do something else for a while, and give myself a break. Or, while what I wrote is fresh in my mind, I could write it back again, as fast as I can, this time saving it every few minutes. I think I’ll do that. Even though I’m disappointed that this happened to me, I’m not devastated. I’m feeling OK. Now I’m writing as fast as I can, before I forget. I’m saving, and writing some more. Hooray for me. I’m handling this really well. And hooray for me for doing this fantasy rehearsal!” Did you notice in this fantasy rehearsal how the person talked about the situation (at the computer, etc.), the thoughts (this is an opportunity, etc.), the emotions (disappointed, not devastated, feeling OK), the behaviors (writing, saving), and the celebrations? This fantasy rehearser went through the STEBC. Now let’s model a fantasy rehearsal of another frustration, this time at the hands of someone else. This is from the point of view of a schoolchild. “I’m at school, and I’m going to sit down at lunch. A kid in my class looks up at me as I walk by with my tray, and says, ‘Hi, fat pig,’ with a real impudent-looking smile. Here’s an opportunity to practice frustration tolerance, because I didn’t feel like being teased or taunted right now. Well, it isn’t as if I’m in the middle of a civil war and people are burning down my family’s village. I can handle this. This I can take. I want to relax my muscles and think fast about how to react to him. The urge to pour my drink right on his head is occurring to me, but if I did that I’d just get into trouble and maybe start a fight. I could ignore him, and if I can’t think of anything else better to do, that’s what I’ll do. I think I’ll just give him a smart aleck remark back, without being too hostile about it. I want to just have some fun horsing around with him. So I’m saying to him, ‘Bye bye, skinny pig!’ and I walk on past him and sit down with my friends. I’m hearing some other people laughing at what I said, and I feel good about how I handled it. I wasn’t mean to him, and I didn’t make too big a deal out of this. Hooray for me for handling this frustration well, and hooray for me for doing this fantasy rehearsal!” Again, in this fantasy rehearsal we had the situation (at school . . .), the thoughts (I can handle this . . .), the emotions (fun horsing around, without being too hostile), the behaviors (I’m saying to him . . .), and the celebration (Hooray for me . . .). Again, the fantasy rehearser included all the STEBC. Now let’s listen to a third fantasy rehearsal out loud. “I’m playing checkers with my friend, and I really want to beat him, because he’s been acting cocky. He’s making a move where I have to take a jump. And now he can jump two of my men. I’m behind. Now I’m in another bad situation. I’ve lost enough men now that there’s no way I can win the game. OK, this is a chance to practice frustration tolerance, because I really wanted to win. But let’s keep this in perspective. Losing one checkers game is not something that’s too much for me to handle. I can take this just fine. Let me relax, and get this game over with, and maybe try again. What are my options about how to act? I want to be gracious about it, and so I’m congratulating him on some good moves. It won’t do me any good to blame him for my losing. What can I learn from this? Let me remember those good moves that he made, and see if I can find a chance to do them myself sometime soon – maybe even in the next game. I want to relax my muscles and just take it easy. I’m finishing up this game, and I’m saying, ‘Good game. Want to play again?’ and I feel pretty lighthearted about this. It’s just a game, anyway. I’m glad I handled it this well, and I’m glad I did this fantasy rehearsal!” Again, let’s think of the STEBC. Situation: losing at checkers. Thoughts: lots of them, including “I can take this” (not awfulizing), listing options, learning from the experience. Emotions: lighthearted. Behaviors: congratulating on good moves, saying good game, wanting to play again. Celebration: I’m glad I handled this well. Another type of frustration is being treated unfairly. Let’s listen to a fantasy rehearsal of this. “I’m in class at school, and the teacher has his back turned and is writing on the board. The guy next to me makes a loud and long yawning noise. The teacher, without even turning around, calls out my name and says, “Go to the principal’s office. Now.” I’m looking at the guy next to me, but he isn’t about to confess. I say to the teacher, ‘Could I tell you something first?’ The teacher says, ‘Out of here, right now.’ OK, I realize this is totally unfair, and I’m totally innocent. But worse things have happened to people in the world. It’s not as if I’m going to have to go to jail. There will be some other people who heard it and can back me up if it comes down to that. So I want to relax. What are my options now? I could continue to protest, but I think that would just get me in worse trouble. I want my behavior to be totally above reproach. So I think I’ll just get up and go to the principal’s office. I’m walking down the hall now, and I’m reminding myself that this isn’t so bad. What are my options? When I get to the principal’s office, I can sit down and plan how I’m going to explain, and make my case really well. I want to be very polite to the secretaries in there and to the principal. I don’t want to sound like I’m perfect, but just to say that this time, I happened to be innocent, and the teacher made a mistake, but I can forgive him for that. I’m feeling confident that I can keep cool throughout this whole thing. Now I’m explaining things to the principal, and I’m being very respectful. I’m mentioning that other people can probably back me up, and telling her their names. I can see the principal doesn’t know whether to buy my story or not, but if she doesn’t, I can handle that, too. I want to come out of this with a reputation for being able to keep cool no matter what happens. I feel calm. I’m glad I handled this in this way.” Again, we have the situation (in class . . .), the thoughts (What are my options?), the emotions (I feel calm), the behaviors (I’m explaining it to the principal), and the celebration (I’m glad I handled this . . .). If we abstract from lots of useful fantasy rehearsals, we can make some skeleton outlines of how to do them for certain sorts of situations. If we get too upset or angry in a certain type of situation, we should practice frustration tolerance; if we get too scared, we should practice courage. If we do the pleasurable but unwise thing instead of the less pleasurable but wiser thing, we should practice delay of gratification. If we fail to feel good about what is celebration-worthy, we should practice celebrating. Here are four outlines for how to fantasy rehearse these sorts of situations.
Steps in practicing handling frustrations1. Situation: Describe the situation. What are the sights, sounds? 2. Thoughts: Here’s an opportunity. How bad is what happened? When I compare this to the worst that has happened to people, how does this stack up? Not awfulizing. Not getting down on myself. Not blaming someone else. Listing options and choosing. Learning from the experience. Let me remember a time when I handled a situation like this well. I want to see and hear it in my mind. I want to relax. It will be an accomplishment if I can tough this out and handle it well. I want to speak to myself and to others in a calm voice. 3. Emotions: If I feel angry, that doesn’t mean I can’t act reasonable. I imagine myself feeling the way I want to feel: confident, excited, determined, resigned, calculating, proud of the way I’m handling this, or . . . 4. Behavior: I’m doing the option that I chose. I’m doing something that makes sense. 5. Celebration: Hooray, I did a good job!
Steps in practicing courage1. Situation: Describe the situation. What are the sights, sounds? 2. Thoughts: Here’s an opportunity. What bad could happen? How bad is it? How likely is it? How much danger am I in? If I’m in danger, I want to protect myself. If I’m not, I want to tough out this situation. Let me remember a time when I handled a situation like this well. I want to see and hear it in my mind. I want to relax. Not awfulizing. Listing options and choosing. It will be an accomplishment if I can tough it out. 3. Emotions: If I feel scared, that doesn’t mean I’m in danger. I’m feeling brave, confident, happy, relaxed, excited, or having fun. 4. Behavior: I’m doing the option that I chose. I’m doing something that makes sense. 5. Celebration: Hooray, I did a good job! Steps in practicing delay of gratification1. Situation: Describe the situation. What are the sights, sounds? 2. Thoughts: Here’s an opportunity. What are the reasons for doing the less enjoyable vs. the more enjoyable option? (Visualize benefits of delaying gratification, visualize consequences of not delaying gratification) How bad is what I have to endure by delaying gratification now? Let me remember a time when I handled a situation like this well. I want to see and hear it in my mind. It will be an accomplishment if I can tough this out and handle it well. It will toughen me for the future. What gratification can I give myself, to celebrate finishing this? It won’t kill me to do the less enjoyable option. If I really play my cards right, maybe I can figure out a way to enjoy this. I want to reinforce myself for every step along the way. 3. Emotions: I feel determined. I imagine myself feeling the way I want to feel: confident, excited, resigned, calculating, proud of the way I’m handling this, or . . . 4. Behavior: I’m doing the option that I chose. I’m doing something that makes sense. 5. Celebration: Hooray, I did a good job! Steps in responding to desirable situations1. Situation: What is the situation? It’s desirable, relative to what? 2. Thoughts: I don’t want to let this opportunity pass. Did I help bring this about? If so, hooray for me. Did I help bring this about? If so, I want to rehearse what I did. Did someone else help bring this about? If so, I’m glad for what they did. Did it happen just by chance? If so, hooray for my good luck. 3. Emotions: If I helped bring this about, I feel proud. If someone else helped bring this about, I feel grateful. If it was just lucky that this happened, I feel blessed. 4. Behavior: Maybe I can let my tone of voice and my actions reflect those good feelings. 5. Celebration: I’m glad I remembered to respond to this situation in this way. How do you maximally turn fantasy rehearsals into concentration exercises? You can do a variant of the concentrate, rate, and concentrate activity by seeing how clearly and vividly you can imagine the situation and your response to it. You might want to use the following scale:
0 = No image at all 2 = Very vague and dim image 4 = Some vividness, but not much 6 = Moderately clear and vivid 8 = High degree of clarity and vividness 10 = Very high degree of clarity and vividness
It’s not necessary to see the image with very high vividness in order to get a lot out of the fantasy rehearsal. What is necessary is that you simply stay on task with the fantasy rehearsals, for a long enough time to get lots of practice. So another way to rate your performance is to rate the answer to the question, “How well did I keep my focus on what I was doing,” after each fantasy rehearsal, and to keep track of how long you can keep up your focus on fantasy rehearsals in general. If the numbers go up and up over time, you’re seeing yourself get better at concentration. There’s another good way to do fantasy rehearsals – in writing. You list the situations, the choice points to which you would most like to improve your response. Then for each you write out the description of the situation, and then the thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and celebrations with which you’d like to respond. You can revise this fantasy rehearsal, add many others to it, and read them out loud or silently many times. You can even fantasy rehearse yourself concentrating. You imagine yourself tackling difficult material, imagine getting the urge to drift away, thinking, “Hey, I want to get back on task,” feeling confident, starting to use a technique such as writing questions (described above) to pull your mind back on the subject, and celebrating getting back on track. To summarize: concentration skill can be built up through exercise and practice, just as muscles can be built up the same way. The exercises of this chapter are highly recommended. But just as when exercising to build muscles, you have to keep at them for a long time before seeing visible results. Persistence is required, even in building persistence skills!
Overcoming work blockSometimes the problem is not so much persisting at work, as starting the work in the first place. Sometimes procrastination is the greatest enemy of accomplishing anything. Here are some ideas about how to get yourself started working. 1. Avoid all-or-none thinking. One of the biggest barriers to getting started working is the idea that it has to come out perfect on the first try. If I believe it’s terrible if I produce work that is flawed in any way, that’s a major obstacle to doing anything at all. On the other hand, if I think along the lines of “This is only a first draft; I can always revise it later,” or “I’ll do a practice run, and the real thing will only come later,” then I give myself permission to work toward the “good enough” level by successive approximations. Successive approximations, or getting better and better the more you work at something – is the way most good things get produced. 2. Discriminate between “pain as a signal to protect yourself,” “pain that should be desensitized,” and “pain that should be tolerated.” Sometimes it’s really painful to start working on something. But you can desensitize the feeling of work aversion by continuing to expose yourself to the work. By contrast, the pain from having freezing hands outside in winter is pain as a signal to protect yourself. 3. Try not to use avoidance and repression to get rid of the pain from work aversion. Avoidance means staying away from the work situation. Repression means making yourself forget about the work, shoving it out of your mind. One way of facing the task head on is to include it on a written to-do list and look at that list often. 4. Using prolonged exposure to desensitize the pain associated with work. In the chapter on courage skills, I speak about using prolonged exposure to the scary situation to get over phobias. Quick and brief exposures won’t work nearly as well. How long is prolonged enough exposure? You want to keep in the unpleasant situation until the “subjective units of distress” rating drops to a fairly comfortable level. 5. Avoid “emotional reasoning.” Emotional reasoning is drawing a conclusion about the way something is in reality from the way you happen to feel about it. “I don't feel like doing this work, therefore I can't,” is an example of emotional reasoning. You can change that to, “I don't feel like doing this work. But what I feel right now is not so important. What's important is accomplishing my goals.” 6. Use internal reinforcement to increase the pleasure of working: self-statements like, “Hooray, I've gotten started”; “Good. I'm getting something down; that's progress”; “Hey, this revision improved it. Yes! I finished it!” 7. Avoid internal punishment statements while working. Avoid saying to yourself, “What a piece of junk this is. How can you even think of showing this to anybody?” 8. Translate internal “critical parent versus rebellious child” dialogues into more rational adult dialogues. For example, some people have dialogues going on inside their own heads that sound something like this:
Critical Parent: “You lazy bum; you should be working . . .” Rebellious Child: “Shut up and leave me alone!”
Adult self-talk goes more like this: “If I want to produce this result, this is the work that will bring it about . . . Of the various possibilities for allocating time to this task, which one will work out the best for me?” 9. Use self-run contingency programs. For example: I allow myself fifteen minutes of TV watching for each hour of work I do. I allow myself to surf the Internet only when the to-do list for today is written and each item checked off. I allow myself to play chess this week only when I’ve done ten hours of writing during the previous week. I'm feeling the urge to avoid working by getting something to eat; I'll reward myself with eating when I've done thirty minutes of work. I allow myself to read whatever I want for an hour when I've done two hours of goal-directed work. 10. Consider contingency programs in cooperation with someone else. For example: I'll give you $200. I'll get $5 back for every day I do a minimum of two hours of work, between now and December 1. 11. Place a high value on self-discipline. Self-discipline is defined as the ability to get yourself to do what is best to do even when you don't feel like doing it. Wish frequently for increased levels of self-discipline, and celebrate greatly any evidence for improvements in this skill. 12. Visualize positive fantasies of accomplishing the goals in question. Cultivate daydreams of celebration and self-congratulation after the accomplishment. 13. Practice the "internal sales pitch" for doing the work and accomplishing the goals. Review the pros and cons of working toward the goal. Affirm that it’s worth working for – or else decide that it isn't worth it, and drop it! Not all tasks are worth doing, but some are; your goal is to make careful decisions about which you want to spend your energy on. 14. Avoid real-life critical parent-rebellious child dialogues. That is, try to stay out of the situation where someone nags you to work, and you tell him or her to leave you alone. If someone irritates you by nagging you to work, it’s too easy to spite him or her by being lazy. 15. Practice relaxation techniques. (See the chapter on this skill.) Use these methods to reduce negative emotion that gets in the way of working. 16. Allocate adequate play and fun time, so that you don't activate a rebellious part of yourself that needs a break. Ideally, you can let that play and fun reinforce the work. As an example of this idea: this is a beautiful day, and I want to take a long walk with my dog. I allow myself to do this as a reinforcer when I’ve spent two hours working on my thesis. 17. When you have decided not to work, avoid getting down on yourself for not working, but enjoy that time, so as to replenish your store of self-discipline. Telling yourself you should be working and not doing it probably depletes your store of self-discipline. 18. When there are experiences of successful accomplishment, recall those and mentally rehearse them in order to help yourself repeat them. Visualize positive experiences of goal accomplishment frequently to help deepen the groove of this pattern. 19. Keep a log of time spent working on goals, and study this log frequently. Study what makes the imaginary or real graph go up or down. Celebrate increases in this over time. 20. Celebrate each event for which you made a resolution and formed an intention and actually followed through with it. 21. Get into your mind models of courageous use of self-discipline, and meditate upon these; then visualize yourself acting similarly. |
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