This reference point phenomenon is, to me, the kind of thing that seems obvious after you’ve already done it, but isn’t actually helpful if you’re trying to change a behavior.
If you’re trying to get into the habit of going to the gym or whatever, you already know that it’s going to be to your benefit in “far” mode but “near” mode you just doesn’t want to go. Near mode you has better stuff to do right now, healthfulness is far mode’s problem. You can’t re-program yourself to associate “working out” with “feeling good” until you’ve already been doing it for a while. This has been my experience, anyway. I run every day, and it’s just part of what I do, but the catalyst to getting into this habit wasn’t that I was suddenly able to convince myself that this was something that was good for me and that later on I’d enjoy it, even if I didn’t enjoy it now—no, the reason I started running was because at the time I had an immediate desire to do it (stress, pent-up frustration with life situations). I have absolutely no ability to trick my near mode to do things to the benefit of far mode; it has to have utility to me, right now.
Of course, now that I’ve been doing this for a while, when I’m about to go run I don’t even have a mental dialog where I have to convince myself that it’s something that I want to do—I just do it. If I haven’t run today, then obviously I am going to run, there’s modus ponens. If for some reason I have a voice saying I don’t want to do it, my brain immediately overrides that with, “But that just doesn’t make sense!”. If I were trying to convey this mental process to someone else, I might say something like, “well, I just envision myself running and having a good experience, and then not running and not having that good experience, so I’ve changed my reference point”. This after-the-fact explanation sort of explains what’s happening in my mind, but doesn’t actually give somebody else tools that allow them to actually copy it. The only advice I’d give is to find an actual compelling reason to do it whatever it is right now, rather than trying to fake yourself into thinking you want to do something that you really don’t.
Basically, you’re right about the changing reference points but I think you’ve got the order mixed up. That happens after you’ve changed the behavior.
There’s a bunch of distinct clusters of mutually reinforcing mental states in my head, some of which increase my likelihood of doing X (e.g., run) and others of which decrease it. It seems reasonable, and is consistent with my own experience, that deliberately and vividly imagining the pleasant experiences associated with doing X activates the former and inhibits the latter.
That said, I think different techniques work well for different people in this area, just like people have different learning styles and visualize to different degrees and etc. If deliberate/vivid imagination isn’t something I’m good at, for example, this technique won’t work well for me, and I’ll do better with some other approach. So I’m sure you’re right for some people.
Tangentially: one of the most effective things I ever did to lose weight was experience PTSD-related hypervigilance around food and exercise. I’ve mostly gotten over it, and am far more likely to snack and slack off on exercise now. I wouldn’t trade back if I could, but I have to admit it worked.
FWIW, according to these guys, there isn’t actually any good evidence for that:
We conclude therefore, that at present, there is no adequate evidence base to justify incorporating learning-styles assessments into general educational practice.
I agree with your point—that your technique has the potential to work better for some people than others—but I thought you might like to know this.
You know, the beauty of this is that as I wrote that line, I thought to myself “Huh, I wonder if that’s even true. On this site, I should probably look it up before I use it as an analogy. Naaah, never mind… I know enough educators who swear by it that it’s probably true enough.”
Clearly, I should be listening to my niggling doubts more.
Hahaha. Well, to be clear, we’re not sure it’s NOT true—and if assuming it has had good results for many educators, it seems more likely than not that there’s at least some grain of truth to it—it’s just that it hasn’t been tested properly yet. :)
My expectation is that any theory that encourages educators to pay attention to individual nonhierarchical differences among their students will have good results relative to any theory that encourages educators to treat all students either as identical or as stratified, simply because teaching is a social relationship among humans and social relationships tend to benefit from mutual respectful attention.
So I’m reluctant to choose one theory over another solely on that basis.
Hear, hear. The difficulty of that is not to be underestimated, though. I had a teacher once that I liked a lot—I found his explanations really clear and interesting, and he was a funny and nice and interesting person himself. Chatting with some of his other students outside the classroom, I found that everyone I talked to said something along the lines of, “I feel like he teaches in just the right way for me to understand.” So either he’d found the magic teaching style that works for everybody, or he was simply giving us the same information in several different ways throughout the class, and each of us only remembered the one that worked. It was pretty cool, and I have tons of respect for that guy.
(For what it’s worth, what I remember best about his classes was how visual and hands-on they were, despite being about relatively abstract topics. For example, when we were learning about ext2 filesystems, he put pieces of paper with file, directory, or inode contents on the various desks, and had us scurry around tracking down specific information in files—basically, learning how to be a shell! Or, similarly, when discussing standard i/o filehandles, he held up a physical box with one wire going in and two wires going out. It didn’t matter that the box itself wasn’t actually doing anything; seeing it made the metaphor crystal clear.)
In my experience it does seem to be true. In Aikido class, some people did seem to pick up things easier from seeing, others from hearing, etc. One thing I noticed was that my brain doesn’t really get ‘left’ and ‘right’ - ‘same side’ and ‘other side’ make much more sense. Don’t people who learn things in ‘left and right’ have to learn every technique twice, once for each side? (Strangely enough, it appears they don’t!)
But learning things better one way doesn’t mean other ways are useless. All ways reinforce each other, and now that I’m learning Alexander technique I notice that sometimes I get a ‘click’ from spoken directions, other times from touch, etc. If you’re a teacher, you should probably use as many modes as possible.
One thing I noticed was that my brain doesn’t really get ‘left’ and ‘right’ - ‘same side’ and ‘other side’ make much more sense.
This reminds me of a story from a friend who works in a bike shop. A customer came in to buy some pedals, and asked of the two employees (my friend and her coworker) who were standing nearby, “Do I need to screw one of them in differently when I install them?”
Speaking at the same time, one employee said, “Yes, both of them screw in forwards” and the other said “Yes, the thread on the left pedal is reversed.” The customer’s eyes glazed over and one of them quickly picked a single way to explain in more detail. The point was that, given three accurate mnemonics for the same thing, you gotta just pick the one that makes sense to you.
I hadn’t heard of the Alexander technique before and just looked it up. That seems really interesting. How are you finding it?
Speaking at the same time, one employee said, “Yes, both of them screw in forwards” and the other said “Yes, the thread on the left pedal is reversed.” The customer’s eyes glazed over and one of them quickly picked a single way to explain in more detail.
Bonus points if they described the concept of chirality. Who knows, maybe the customer will need to learn organic chem some day!
Sorry for the late reply, but I only just noticed the little red envelope. :( I’m coming up on my last Alexander lesson in a few days, and I really like it. It’s not (yet) been as life-changing as I’d hoped (I still have bad knees (sigh), and people don’t suddenly react very differently to me), but it has improved my posture a lot, and I’m very happy with that. At the very least, it’ll help me not get RSI or back problems.
It seems reasonable, and is consistent with my own experience, that deliberately and vividly imagining the pleasant experiences associated with doing X activates the former and inhibits the latter.
But since I can’t actually copy this technique and have it work every time, I suspect that other people find it equally unenlightening, which is why I think it’s a poor model for actually bringing someone out of procrastination. That is, I think there’s something else going on in your head in addition to just imagining the pleasant experience that you’re not recognizing and therefore can’t communicate. Not just you, of course, this is exactly what I’m struggling with: identifying why my brain works differently some days than others. I’m in the middle of tracking what the conditions are when I have an “on” day versus an “off” one. I’ve already noticed that if I write down the patterns of thoughts that I have when “on”, thinking them back to myself when I’m “off” doesn’t actually change my mental state. I really want to identify what factor(s) will turn me from “off” to “on” every single time. An impossible goal, alas.
Do you think that on certain days, you’ve had to draw on your resources a lot in order to manage interactions with other people (say, pushy salespeople or whiny coworkers)? After a tiring day, or under conditions of stress (hunger or lack of sleep, for example), your brain would definitely be working differently, and not necessarily to your best advantage in the self-control department.
For me, the challenge is sometimes recognizing that I need to actually stop pushing myself.
This matches my own experience with exercise pretty closely. To be honest, I’ve never really learned to enjoy working out, but this hasn’t posed a particular barrier to getting in shape. It’s simply become something I do, and would feel uncomfortable not doing, like brushing my teeth. Once you cultivate habit, a new outlook may follow, but a change in outlook is not strictly necessary to conserve willpower.
This reference point phenomenon is, to me, the kind of thing that seems obvious after you’ve already done it, but isn’t actually helpful if you’re trying to change a behavior.
If you’re trying to get into the habit of going to the gym or whatever, you already know that it’s going to be to your benefit in “far” mode but “near” mode you just doesn’t want to go. Near mode you has better stuff to do right now, healthfulness is far mode’s problem. You can’t re-program yourself to associate “working out” with “feeling good” until you’ve already been doing it for a while. This has been my experience, anyway. I run every day, and it’s just part of what I do, but the catalyst to getting into this habit wasn’t that I was suddenly able to convince myself that this was something that was good for me and that later on I’d enjoy it, even if I didn’t enjoy it now—no, the reason I started running was because at the time I had an immediate desire to do it (stress, pent-up frustration with life situations). I have absolutely no ability to trick my near mode to do things to the benefit of far mode; it has to have utility to me, right now.
Of course, now that I’ve been doing this for a while, when I’m about to go run I don’t even have a mental dialog where I have to convince myself that it’s something that I want to do—I just do it. If I haven’t run today, then obviously I am going to run, there’s modus ponens. If for some reason I have a voice saying I don’t want to do it, my brain immediately overrides that with, “But that just doesn’t make sense!”. If I were trying to convey this mental process to someone else, I might say something like, “well, I just envision myself running and having a good experience, and then not running and not having that good experience, so I’ve changed my reference point”. This after-the-fact explanation sort of explains what’s happening in my mind, but doesn’t actually give somebody else tools that allow them to actually copy it. The only advice I’d give is to find an actual compelling reason to do it whatever it is right now, rather than trying to fake yourself into thinking you want to do something that you really don’t.
Basically, you’re right about the changing reference points but I think you’ve got the order mixed up. That happens after you’ve changed the behavior.
Mm… I think I disagree, at least somewhat.
There’s a bunch of distinct clusters of mutually reinforcing mental states in my head, some of which increase my likelihood of doing X (e.g., run) and others of which decrease it. It seems reasonable, and is consistent with my own experience, that deliberately and vividly imagining the pleasant experiences associated with doing X activates the former and inhibits the latter.
That said, I think different techniques work well for different people in this area, just like people have different learning styles and visualize to different degrees and etc. If deliberate/vivid imagination isn’t something I’m good at, for example, this technique won’t work well for me, and I’ll do better with some other approach. So I’m sure you’re right for some people.
Tangentially: one of the most effective things I ever did to lose weight was experience PTSD-related hypervigilance around food and exercise. I’ve mostly gotten over it, and am far more likely to snack and slack off on exercise now. I wouldn’t trade back if I could, but I have to admit it worked.
FWIW, according to these guys, there isn’t actually any good evidence for that:
I agree with your point—that your technique has the potential to work better for some people than others—but I thought you might like to know this.
You know, the beauty of this is that as I wrote that line, I thought to myself “Huh, I wonder if that’s even true. On this site, I should probably look it up before I use it as an analogy. Naaah, never mind… I know enough educators who swear by it that it’s probably true enough.”
Clearly, I should be listening to my niggling doubts more.
Thanks for the correction, and the pointer.
Hahaha. Well, to be clear, we’re not sure it’s NOT true—and if assuming it has had good results for many educators, it seems more likely than not that there’s at least some grain of truth to it—it’s just that it hasn’t been tested properly yet. :)
My expectation is that any theory that encourages educators to pay attention to individual nonhierarchical differences among their students will have good results relative to any theory that encourages educators to treat all students either as identical or as stratified, simply because teaching is a social relationship among humans and social relationships tend to benefit from mutual respectful attention.
So I’m reluctant to choose one theory over another solely on that basis.
Hear, hear. The difficulty of that is not to be underestimated, though. I had a teacher once that I liked a lot—I found his explanations really clear and interesting, and he was a funny and nice and interesting person himself. Chatting with some of his other students outside the classroom, I found that everyone I talked to said something along the lines of, “I feel like he teaches in just the right way for me to understand.” So either he’d found the magic teaching style that works for everybody, or he was simply giving us the same information in several different ways throughout the class, and each of us only remembered the one that worked. It was pretty cool, and I have tons of respect for that guy.
(For what it’s worth, what I remember best about his classes was how visual and hands-on they were, despite being about relatively abstract topics. For example, when we were learning about ext2 filesystems, he put pieces of paper with file, directory, or inode contents on the various desks, and had us scurry around tracking down specific information in files—basically, learning how to be a shell! Or, similarly, when discussing standard i/o filehandles, he held up a physical box with one wire going in and two wires going out. It didn’t matter that the box itself wasn’t actually doing anything; seeing it made the metaphor crystal clear.)
In my experience it does seem to be true. In Aikido class, some people did seem to pick up things easier from seeing, others from hearing, etc. One thing I noticed was that my brain doesn’t really get ‘left’ and ‘right’ - ‘same side’ and ‘other side’ make much more sense. Don’t people who learn things in ‘left and right’ have to learn every technique twice, once for each side? (Strangely enough, it appears they don’t!)
But learning things better one way doesn’t mean other ways are useless. All ways reinforce each other, and now that I’m learning Alexander technique I notice that sometimes I get a ‘click’ from spoken directions, other times from touch, etc. If you’re a teacher, you should probably use as many modes as possible.
This reminds me of a story from a friend who works in a bike shop. A customer came in to buy some pedals, and asked of the two employees (my friend and her coworker) who were standing nearby, “Do I need to screw one of them in differently when I install them?”
Speaking at the same time, one employee said, “Yes, both of them screw in forwards” and the other said “Yes, the thread on the left pedal is reversed.” The customer’s eyes glazed over and one of them quickly picked a single way to explain in more detail. The point was that, given three accurate mnemonics for the same thing, you gotta just pick the one that makes sense to you.
I hadn’t heard of the Alexander technique before and just looked it up. That seems really interesting. How are you finding it?
Bonus points if they described the concept of chirality. Who knows, maybe the customer will need to learn organic chem some day!
Sorry for the late reply, but I only just noticed the little red envelope. :( I’m coming up on my last Alexander lesson in a few days, and I really like it. It’s not (yet) been as life-changing as I’d hoped (I still have bad knees (sigh), and people don’t suddenly react very differently to me), but it has improved my posture a lot, and I’m very happy with that. At the very least, it’ll help me not get RSI or back problems.
I only just noticed this reply, so we’re even. ;) Thanks.
But since I can’t actually copy this technique and have it work every time, I suspect that other people find it equally unenlightening, which is why I think it’s a poor model for actually bringing someone out of procrastination. That is, I think there’s something else going on in your head in addition to just imagining the pleasant experience that you’re not recognizing and therefore can’t communicate. Not just you, of course, this is exactly what I’m struggling with: identifying why my brain works differently some days than others. I’m in the middle of tracking what the conditions are when I have an “on” day versus an “off” one. I’ve already noticed that if I write down the patterns of thoughts that I have when “on”, thinking them back to myself when I’m “off” doesn’t actually change my mental state. I really want to identify what factor(s) will turn me from “off” to “on” every single time. An impossible goal, alas.
Do you think that on certain days, you’ve had to draw on your resources a lot in order to manage interactions with other people (say, pushy salespeople or whiny coworkers)? After a tiring day, or under conditions of stress (hunger or lack of sleep, for example), your brain would definitely be working differently, and not necessarily to your best advantage in the self-control department.
For me, the challenge is sometimes recognizing that I need to actually stop pushing myself.
This matches my own experience with exercise pretty closely. To be honest, I’ve never really learned to enjoy working out, but this hasn’t posed a particular barrier to getting in shape. It’s simply become something I do, and would feel uncomfortable not doing, like brushing my teeth. Once you cultivate habit, a new outlook may follow, but a change in outlook is not strictly necessary to conserve willpower.