2005

“PLEASURE” VS “ENJOYMENT”

or Why TV Is Bad For You

In the wonderful book "Flow: The Psychology of Happiness" the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi looks at how people become happy and enhance their quality of life.

One of the key distinctions he makes is between pleasure and enjoyment. We tend to talk about these two concepts interchangeably, but it’s useful to look at the differences in their nature and effects.

Pleasure is the feeling of contentment that we achieve whenever we feel that "expectations set by biological programs or by social conditioning have been met." 

We seek pleasure from alcohol, drugs, watching TV, having sex, and material possessions. Sleep, food, and rest help us to restore order to our consciousness when we are overstimulated or "run ragged" by the demands of work or modern life – they are what Csikszentmihalyi calls "homeostatic experiences".

Enjoyment is quite different. When people think more deeply about what makes life rewarding, says Csikszentmihalyi, they tend to come up with experiences which go beyond meeting some expectation or satisfying some need to achieve something more. Enjoyment is about a sense of forward movement and accomplishment, where the person’s abilities are stretched beyond what they thought they could achieve.

Some examples would be: having a stimulating conversation in which you surprise yourself by your wit or wisdom, mastering a difficult piece of music that you thought you’d never be able to play, reading a book that causes you to think about things in a new way, or playing a tennis opponent who causes you to lift your game.

These experiences may not necessarily be pleasurable at the time (though sometimes enjoyment and simple pleasure do overlap), but after the event we look back and we’re pleased we did it. Afterwards we know we have "grown" as
individuals and that our self has become more complex and more able to cope with change.

Merely pleasurable experiences, by contrast, leave us no more complex than before. In fact, when the experiences stop we may feel worse. Recent research by Csikszentmihalyi and Robert Kuber found that heavy TV viewers (more than 4 hours per day) reported feeling much more anxious and unhappy when they have nothing to occupy their attention – e.g. when waiting in queues. They are more easily bored and distracted than lighter TV users. (For full details of this study subscribe to my "Practical EQ" emotional intelligence newsletter at practicaleq-subscribe@topica.com)

How do you recognise an activity which is truly enjoyable as opposed to merely pleasurable? Csikszentmihalyi lists eight characteristics of enjoyable or "flow" experiences:

1. The experience is challenging and requires skills but we have a chance of completing it. 2. We must be able to concentrate on what we are doing. 3. The task has clear goals. 4. It provides immediate feedback on whether we are reaching those goals. 5. We become absorbed in the activity and forget about the worries of everyday life. 6. We have a sense of control over our actions. 7. Concern for the self disappears (though the sense of self emerges stronger after the experience is over). 8. Time disappears – hours can pass like minutes, yet minutes can stretch out to seem like hours.

This gives us a useful checklist. How many of these criteria do your favourite leisure activities meet? If you don’t feel as happy as you’d like, how about building more "flow" activities into your life?

BONUS TIP: if it’s hard to think of flow activities that you would enjoy, this is a real sign that you need to free up some mental energy! A good place to start is by "not doing" some of the things which may be pleasurable but don’t give you enjoyment. Let’s say you are in the habit of watching the two most popular soaps in the UK. Simply by switching off "EastEnders" and "Coronation Street" you would have four and a half extra hours to spend on your life and the (real) people in it – and can you honestly say you would have missed anything?

Now – what did you use to do that gave you enjoyment? What did you like about it? And what could you do now that would give you the same feeling? You might find a way of "updating" childhood activities, or it might be some totally new activity that you used to dream about but have never tried.

Let me know how you get on by emailing andy@practicaleq.com.

Click on these links to order "Flow: The Psychology of Happiness" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
from amazon.co.uk or amazon.com.

How diet affects mood and behaviour

An interesting website I’ve just discovered is Food and Behaviour Research (http://www.fabresearch.org) – a UK-based charity which promotes and collects scientific research into the effects of nutrition on:

  • Everyday difficulties in behaviour, learning or mood that can
    affect children and adults – at home, at school or in the workplace.
  • Developmental conditions – such as ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, and autistic spectrum disorders.
  • Mental health conditions – such as anxiety, depression, bipolar (manic-depressive) disorder and schizophrenia.

They have some useful factsheets and lots of links to research, as well as popular treatments of the issues (e.g. the recent school dinners series with Jamie Oliver)

West and East have different worldviews – literally

An study at the University of Michigan by psychologist Richard Nisbett tracked how American and Chinese students look at pictures. The Americans paid more attention to the foreground object, while the Chinese looked more at the background. From the report in New Scientist: “There is plenty of anecdotal evidence suggesting that Western and East Asian

Spiritual meditation works better than secular

A study at Bowling Green State University in Ohio compared the effectiveness of spiritual meditation, secular meditation and a relaxation technique. The spiritual meditation group had greater decreases in anxiety and
more positive mood, spiritual health, and spiritual experiences than
the other two groups. They also tolerated pain almost twice as long as
the other two groups.

Seth Godin on changing minds

In a posting on his ever-excellent weblog (I changed my mind yesterday)
Seth Godin talks about how hard it is to change people’s minds if they
are in a situation or a mindset in which there are barriers against
change.

If you’re aiming to get someone to change their mind, you could save yourself a lot of effort by asking yourself: Is this person in a situation (emotional, professional, even architecturally) where they are pre-disposed to flip?

And

How can I get them to make a tiny flip? And then another one?

A very valuable article IMHO for anyone involved in sales, culture change, or just running meetings.

You’ve got to find what you love

Steve Jobs (CEO of Apple and Pixar) gave this commencement address at Stanford on June 12 – it’s pretty inspiring. He uses 3 incidents from his life to talk about ‘joining the dots’ (how your life only makes sense as a narrative in retrospect), about love and loss, and about the importance of death as an adviser – a concept familiar to anyone who has read Carlos Castaneda’s books. The overall message is "You’ve got to find what you love."

The full text is here.

This is one of the most inspiring things I’ve read in a while.

The delivery (video here) – not quite so inspiring! I’ve seen Steve a lot more animated than this – at Apple conferences, for example.

Self-esteem, self-confidence, self-doubt

Self-esteem, self-confidence, self-doubt. What are they? Everyone will have their own slightly different definition.

Steve Andreas’ brilliant book "Transform Your Self: Becoming Who You Want To Be" makes these issues a lot clearer. In his model, somebody’s "self-concept" is made up of the qualities and
abilities they think of themselves as having.

For any given quality, they will have a collection of reference experiences, like a ‘database’ – probably with one iconic ‘image’ which comes up immediately when they think of the quality (though the ‘image’ is not necessarily a visual one), and a collection of reference experiences which come up when they think about it a bit more deeply.

So, if someone has a ‘database’ which supports them in feeling they have the quality or ability strongly, then they will feel confident in that context. How strongly they feel they have it will depend on things like number of examples and (for NLP buffs) the ‘submodalities’ of the representations. How the person responds to these will vary from individual to individual.

‘Self-esteem’ comes from how the person evaluates their ‘self-concept’ (or rather ‘self-concepts’ as there is one for each quality or ability the person is thinking about) – if they
value kindness highly and they have a strong self-concept for kindness, they will feel good about themselves whenever they think about themselves in this context.

Conversely, if they only have a weak self-concept for a quality they value, or they have a strong self-concept for something they value negatively, they won’t feel good about themselves when they
think about themselves in that context.

Getting the book will give you a lot more information, obviously, but some things to watch out for in coaching would be:

– if their self-concept tends to be about ‘not having’ certain qualities – e.g. "I’m not cruel" rather than "I’m kind", then all their representations will be of the opposite of what they want – a recipe for unhappiness which will leave them feeling ’empty’ and also probably comparing themselves with other people.

– a ‘robust’ self-concept for a given quality (Andreas found) rather surprisingly includes a few ‘counter-examples’ (of times when they didn’t display the quality or ability), which enables the person to recognise more easily when they are not displaying it in real life, and also to accept and learn from feedback more readily.

I can’t recommend this highly enough. It’s an NLP book, but the NLP content is fairly basic submodalities with very little in the way of jargon. It’s a book for coaches and therapists rather than a self-help book.

As I said, self-esteem and self-confidence are vague terms which are going to mean different things to different people, though I suspect the differences are largely going to be about content – the structure of what it means to each person is going to be pretty much as described in the book.

I’ve used the ideas a lot – they work!

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Buy it from Amazon.co.uk

Buy it from Amazon.com

Get Everything In Writing

Psychologists at Washington University report that
  the memory function of people in their mid-60s and up is easily swayed by the
  power of suggestion, making them more vulnerable to memory-related scams. A
  full report appears in the May issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology
  (JEP): General, which is published by the American Psychological Association.

For example, an unscrupulous contractor can tell an older customer, “I
  told you it would cost [a much higher price than was originally quoted] and
  you agreed to pay!‚Äù Without a written estimate, the customer is likely
  to ‚Äúremember‚Äù it that way, too, and be overcharged. Another scam,
  ‚Äúyou forgot to pay me,‚Äù also underscores the need for written receipts.
  Some con artists even run their own rudimentary memory tests on the elderly,
  checking to see if their memory is bad enough to make them good victims.

Get the full story here.

My own experience (of being on the receiving rather than the perpetrating end) suggests that you don’t have to be that old to not always remember clearly what was said – just being preoccupied with something else and not giving something your full attention will do it.

Consciousness in a nutshell

What is consciousness? The best summary I’ve found of where we are up to in understanding this is an article by Susan Blackmore. Susan brings an extra dimension to her understanding – as well as being a psychologist, she is also practises Zen meditation (though she says "I am not a Buddhist", and has experimented with psychedelic drugs.

After discovering her fascinating site, I will definitely be reading her book The Meme Machine (click here for the US version) – review to follow soon!

One perspective she doesn’t mention is Ken Wilber’s Four Quadrants model, in which subjective experience is a different, yet linked, realm to the objective world studied by science. In this model, the sense of self is not reducible to the physical functions of the brain (as most researchers into consciousness in the neuroscience field believe) but they are linked. Makes sense to me.

Most of the information about Wilber’s ideas on the web get very complicated and jargonised very quickly – why I’m not sure. The most accessible description of the basic model is here.

Emotional Intelligence In A Nutshell

Someone asked these questions on a coaching forum recently:

> Can emotions be intelligent? How can emotions be intelligent? How can the
> lymbic emotional brain learn from the intelligence of the cortex and vice
> versa?

I had time for a brief answer, as technically I was on my day off. I’ll reproduce it here in case it helps anyone:

Emotions provide information which is not available in other ways – including information about how other people are feeling (and hence how they are likely to act), and about the state of our health and energy levels, and what we really want.

It’s impossible to make decisions on rational criteria alone – in Descartes’ Error Antonio Damasio quotes the case of a successful corporate lawyer who, after brain surgery which left his cognitive faculties intact but severed the connection with the part of the brain which processes emotion, lost his job, wife and home in very short order. Without access to his feelings, he had no sense of priority, and hence could not make decisions or use his time sensibly.

How the limbic system can learn from the cortex: by mutual communication. If emotions are too strong, they shut down the ability of the cortex to think, reframe and make sense of things; but without emotion, nothing matters.

The ‘them against us’ thinking that <contributor> mentions is probably more to do with the brainstem, an even more primitive part of the brain concerned with fight or flight and territoriality.

We all have the capacity to think about things, we all have the capacity to love, *and* we all have the ability to revert to ‘them against us’ thinking under pressure.

If anyone wants a more academic answer about how emotions can be intelligent, they can have a look at some of the  links from my site at www.practicaleq.com/eqlinks.html.

How To Deal With An Incongruent Coaching Client

One of the students on my NLP practitioner training called me today with a problem that every coach will recognise. She is doing some ‘practice’ coaching for a friend, by telephone. Each week the client very positively identifies and commits to their actions for the coming week – and by the following week, there is

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