Yard Work, Shades, Life

Milo 

The dog and I have colds. Interesting that the two of us were the most passive members of our family this weekend. The husband and the 7th grader performed “Once on This Island” three times. He played music, she sang, danced, and acted. The 11th grader danced in two dance recitals in a row on Sunday. I watched most of these things. Milo the dog stayed home, where I presume he lay on his side, probably mostly in the powder room. And now we are the ones with sniffles. 

Speaking of complaining, I realize that this is the time of year I complain about the yard work. Currently, the grass is as high as an elephant’s eye and I’m just fine about it. The husband has had no time to mow, and I refuse to do it. My excuse is that I’m allergic to grass. This is actually true. Also, I don’t want to mow. Furthermore, as I may have mentioned, I’m allergic to bees, which provides a further excuse for avoiding weeding. All of this renders me more comfortable putting in forty-five minutes here and there, pulling things out of the ground while listening to Fresh Air with Terry Gross or Lexicon Valley on my iPhone. Whenever I sense the rising level of overwhelm - I really hate that word, but it does fit here - I remind myself of the above-mentioned life-raft of excuses. Plus, I just don’t care that much anymore. 

I’m guessing this attitude adjustment is overall positive. Viewed one way, perhaps it’s indicating a slide into total slovenliness. Viewed another way, it’s a sign that I’m becoming more comfortable in my home and I’m not so worried about the Joneses anymore. That’s the way I choose to see it, Readers. 

Although our bedroom shades might tip those scales in the slovenly direction. Have I mentioned our bedroom shades? Our ugly bedroom shades? The shades that, when we first moved into the house, filled me with core-shaking rage every time I had to open them? I must have mentioned the shades. This, by the way, is a fine example of displacement. Yes, the shades were ugly, and yes, I wanted to replace them. But the real problem was how angry I was about our move and that we couldn’t afford to replace them because we had more pressing expenses. I displaced my anger at my situation onto the shades. Also onto the husband, from time to time, but that's another story.

Well, the other day, as I opened our ugly slatted shades in our bedroom, I noticed that I had become more relaxed about those, too. Last year I almost replaced them. I went so far as to take advantage of the consultation service at Calico Corners. We had almost made our final decision on a nice fabric roman shade. Then the consultant quit and we were left to ourselves. Without the push of a salesperson, I sunk back into nothingness. And now the shades are still there, still ugly, still insufficient. But they don’t fill me with rage anymore. 

But the garden. Well, we hired someone to help us do a little landscaping that will eventually result in more ground cover and fewer mulched beds that need weeding. This awesome landscaper who feels like a friend moved a bunch of stuff from the back yard to front yard, and a bunch of stuff from the front yard to the back. We also have a plan that will unfold over a few years. So overall, we are working on the yard, even when we are not actually, uh, working on the yard.

Landscaper added Pieris japonica by the front door. 

So what is the lesson here? A little money is a rage emollient? Oh, dear, that’s not a lesson I want to teach. How about acceptance? Yes, that’s a better lesson. I’ve accepted that I’m not going to race to have the best looking yard unless I really love gardening. Also, patience. I can wait for things. That’s good, right? 

Why am I asking you if it’s good to be able to wait? I know it’s good! Didn’t I just finish reading a whole book about how learning to wait is good? In case you weren’t paying attention, I’m referring to Walter Mischel’s The Marshmallow Test. I talk about it here and here.

The shades. I’m not that concerned about the shades, although eventually I would like different ones. In the meantime, I wear a sleep mask. Yes, really. And I feel just like Auntie Mame. 

I love this thing. 

Self-Control Strategies: Distraction

Well, I am very proud of myself. I have made my first video blog post. Vlog, for those in the know - now including you, Readers. It contains some actual information, based on my previous post about The Marshmallow Test. 

It also contains some silliness, since we're talking about me. The husband says I make some weird faces that I don't make in everyday conversation. For that, I am grateful. I mean, that I don't look like this usually. 

I have to confess that if I were better at this video-making, I would cut a few seconds here and there. However, I'm working on the saying, "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good." I figured I might as well get it out there and move forward. Act confident, become confident. Plus, a lot of us need to develop self-control, and I have info on how to do that. 

Cool the Hot, Heat the Cool: Successful Self-Control

So, with thoughts of riots in Baltimore and conflicting reports of how they started and who was doing what violent and out of control thing, let me return to good old white guy Walter Mischel and his book The Marshmallow Test.

The test, as I have mentioned before, became misconstrued in the popular news as a definitive test. That is, people assumed that if a four-year-old could delay gratification long enough to win two marshmallows instead of one, that determined something fundamental about their self-control. The assumption was that self-control was of a fixed nature, probably genetically determined. Reams of anxiety built up around this question of delaying long enough to get into Harvard versus turning out to be a total wastrel – or perhaps, “thug,” a word that is getting much attention these days.

But it was not so. Mischel devoted his life to studying this marshmallow effect in various permutations, and he realized early on that self-control is something that can develop. It is not fixed. (Shades of good old Carol Dweck, one of his colleagues) And therefore, it can be taught. Self-control depends on executive function, and executive function can be developed. In short, Mischel learned that it is never too late to build up self-control.

So. While some four year olds might have an advantage with a marshmallow, that advantage might be more about being raised in an environment that is safe, consistent, and leads the child to trust the adult who says, this thing looks pretty good, but if you wait a while, you can have something even better. Children raised in middle class or higher homes, for the most part. Children raised in much more stressful and unsteady environments have a much harder time, not because there is something intrinsically less developed about their brains, but because their brains are overtrained to react quickly. Why is this?  

Psychologists talk about the brain having two systems. System 1 is impulsive (hot) and System 2 is more rational (cool). System 1 is related to that good old lizard brain, the part of the brain keyed to survival. The fight or flight system of arousal is part of System 1. System 1 is very attuned to stress, and stress, what Mischel calls “toxic stress”, is rampant amongst, for example, poor black children from violent neighborhoods….Remind you of anything in the news lately? These kids might just have a bit more trouble understanding that the adult who promises two marshmallows later is actually going to deliver. For these kids, it makes much more sense to just go for that one marshmallow that exists right now.

The fundamental principal of self-control is “cool the now, heat the later.” So cool the now, heat the later means to cool down System 1 long enough that System 2 can activate. This is difficult, because the hot system is all about now. Gimme now. Me want cookie. We tend to discount rewards that are delayed, even if we know, rationally, that they are good for us. Like going to the gym. We know without doubt that the future rewards of going to the gym are great – better health. But overcoming the immediate reward of relaxing, or not putting all the sweat and effort into your day, make the future reward seem much smaller than it actually is. Self-control is about reversing our natural tendency to make the later reward seem more appealing. It’s about using our Executive Function to help us make choices, rather than acting on impulse.

So how do you cool the now and heat the later? You have to exercise that Prefrontal Cortex and develop Executive Function. In general, relieving stress helps. So, you know, providing for the basic needs of every human would go a long way toward setting up people for success. For those already provided basic needs, reducing stress through exercise, solid supportive relationships, and – wait for it, even 84-year-old white guy Walter Mischel advocates this – meditation and mindfulness. Also therapy helps.

There are also specific strategies that build self-control.

• Distraction. (If I don’t look at the cookies, they won’t tempt me.)

• If-Then Implementation Plans. (If I am polite to others, then they will be polite to me.) (Usually.)

• Precommitment strategy. This is related to If-Then plans. (To help you quit smoking, you promise someone that if you smoke a cigarette, they will automatically send a check to a cause you despise – say, the NRA).

• Cognitive Reappraisal (That drink may seem like a treat, but imagine what it’s doing to your liver – picture yourself with end-stage cirrhosis, and it won’t seem like such good idea.)

If all these strategies seem draconian, and you’d just like to eat a damn marshmallow, I leave you with this:

 …. A life lived with too much delay of gratification can be as sad as one without enough of it. The biggest challenge for all of us – not just for the child – may be to figure out when to wait for more marshmallows and when to ring the bell and enjoy them. But unless we learn to develop the ability to wait, we don’t have that choice.
                                                - Walter Mischel, The Marshmallow Test.

Mastering Self-Control. Or Not.

Scene: kitchen table. Remains of dinner present. Children absent. Just the husband and I and the dog, despairing of collecting any treats at all. The husband reaches into the snack cabinet and takes two cookies. He offers one to me.

Me: (After a pause.) No, thanks. IF I don’t have one now, THEN I can have a bigger one later.

Husband: Ah! The Marshmallow Test in action. I get it.

Me: That’s right. Self-control in action.

             *                                    *                                    *

The husband was referring to my latest bedtime reading, Walter Mischel’s, The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self Control. I wrote about the Marshmallow Test in a previous post. For those not as interested in psychology as I am, I’ll summarize. It’s a test, devised by Mischel in the 1960s, that involves bringing a young child into a room, and offering her the option of one fabulous, limbic-system triggering treat right now, or two fabulous, limbic-system triggering treats if she waits. The tester then tells the child she will be leaving and will return later. There is a hotel bell on the table in the room, and the tester tells the child she may ring it at any point and the tester will return. If she doesn’t ring it at all, and she doesn’t eat the treat (a marshmallow left on the table by the bell) then she can have the double fancy treat when the tester returns. Then the tester leaves the room and watches through a one-way glass window while the child either gives in, or applies amusing and creative methods of distracting herself (nose-picking; turning her back on the marshmallow; talking to the bell; even falling asleep) until the tester returns.  IF the child waits, THEN she will have a greater reward. The If-Then implementation strategy in action.

Mischel went on to study these participants many years later, and discovered that the ones who were able to delay gratification at four and five were doing, on the whole, much better in school, and were less obese, and generally more successful than those who went for that one marshmallow.  His results have been somewhat misunderstood by the general public in ways that do a disservice to people who come from poor neighborhoods, broken homes, abusive situations, or any other kind of high-stress environment. People have assumed that his results were definitive, reflecting some kind of innate amount of self-control. There have been runs on marshmallows as anxious parents rush to test their preschoolers, under the misapprehension that unless the children can delay their urge to eat the treats, they are doomed to failure. 

I’m joking about the runs on marshmallows, Readers. I am not joking about the misunderstanding of Mischel’s test.

Mischel learned, early on, that the ability to delay gratification depends on many variables. The ability is not innate; it’s circumstantial. According to Mischel, the temptation triggers the “hot” neural system – the limbic system, which is our more primitive system of arousal. The “cool” system – the prefrontal cortex – takes time to kick in. A child who lives under stress of poverty, disorder, or some other miserable situation will have a sensitive limbic system trigger. It makes sense, in that situation, to take what you can get when you can see it in front of you because you might not get anything if you wait for something you can’t see. A child who has had positive, trusting relationships with adults will be able to wait longer than a child who has been let down by adults. A child who knows how long he will have to wait for the adult to return does better than a child who doesn't know when the tester will return. A child who is primed with strategies for resisting temptation will do better than a child who hasn’t been. The upshot is that self-control is teachable. So if you prime the cool system ahead of time, it will override the hot and stop you from eating that single marshmallow. If you help the highly stressed child to change his reaction to those circumstances, he can have as much ability as the child from the stable environment to delay gratification.

Which brings us back to me and my If-Then implementation plans, which have helped me wrench myself away from the hot triggers of Pinterest, etc., with the promise of a reward after I do some work.

It also brings us back to me and the husband at dinner the other night. Remember that pause, before I refused a cookie at that moment, with a plan to have a bigger, better cookie later? Well, right after that admirable marshalling of my prefrontal cortex, I admitted to the husband that my first thought, during the pause, was that since no children were there, I could have a cookie now AND have a bigger one later, without them knowing I violated the dessert rule. Such as it is. The rule I mean. If I had to summarize it, I would say the rule is, have dessert, but never quite as much of it as you would like, and only have it once per night.

But, Readers, you see how it works, the self-control, IF-Then, small reward now or hold out for a bigger, better reward later.

Then I went upstairs and took a piece of chocolate from my secret stash.

As ever, I am a work in progress.

Self-Control Can Be Contagious

Frog knows about self-control

Here's a  topic about which I know almost nothing from personal experience: self-control.

A short story, readers, if I may. Once upon a 1970s school fair, there was a young girl in a potato sack race. This young girl hopped her way towards the finish line in her burlap sack. She was feeling pretty good. She was feeling all right. She was doing fine. Until other hoppers started passing her. Until all the other hoppers had hopped on by. The little girl was near the finish line, but everyone else had crossed it. What did she do? Did she double-down and hop her way over the line to show her grit? Did she think to herself, "I am of the growth mindset and even though I won't win this race, I will do my very best anyway, so that I can improve my time?" Or did she quit?

Readers, she quat.

Look, I already admitted I know almost nothing about self-control. Also known as Willpower. Or Strength of Character.

Which is why I'm turning you over to the experts. Frog and Toad, for one. Or two. As Frog tells Toad in "Cookies," a chapter in Frog and Toad Together (Newberry Honor, by Arnold Lobel, published 1971,) regarding a batch of same, "Will power is trying hard not to do something you really want to do." Like trying not to eat the cookies.

Personally, I think the flip side of Frog's definition is also true. Willpower is also trying hard to do something you really don't want, or are afraid, to do-- but don't take it from me. I am too busy eating chocolate-covered almonds to think it through thoroughly.

Luckily, others have. Around about the time Frog was speaking, maybe a few years earlier, a psychologist at Stanford named Walter Mischel did an experiment with kids and marshmallows. You've probably heard about this. He took 4-year-olds one at a time into a small room, and sat them at a table. Then he gave them a marshmallow. He told them they could eat that marshmallow, BUT that if they waited until he came back, they could have TWO marshmallows to eat. Then he left the room and watched them behind a two way mirror.  This is a clip of the experiment, but it's a little hard to tell if it's the original participants, or participants in a repeat experiment. When did color film make it to psych labs? Anyone?

So do you want the good news or the bad news?

The bad news is, if you were one of those kids who ate the marshmallow before Mischel returned, you were doomed. That's right. Mischel followed up on these subjects later in life and discovered that the ones who had enough willpower or self-control to wait for that second marshmallow tended to reap the metaphorical second marshmallows throughout life. They were more successful, in other words, than the poor cuties who gave in to temptation. Those kids, I am sorry to say, were much more likely to use drugs and do poorly in school, and basically lump along, than the ones who delayed their gratification.

Mischel's studies of the marshmallow effect have yielded a whole field of research on self-control. Also known as willpower. Or Strength of Character. What they've proven, over and over and over again is, according to Heidi Grant Halvorson, PhD, is that self-control is a better predictor of success than academic achievement or IQ tests.

So was that the bad news or the good news? Depends on how you feel about marshmallows. Or, in my case, about chocolate covered almonds. (Not good news.)

Here's some definite good news. Self-control is like a muscle. Like a muscle, it gets weak from underuse, it can fatigue from overuse, but you can work it and build it and bulk it up with practice.

So, how can you build your self-control? There are, thank goodness, many ways to build it up. Today I'm focusing on one. Or one-ish.

Remember goal contagion? Triggers? Things to get you motivated? Goal contagion works to develop willpower, too. Apparently, just watching someone do something you'd like to do can get you going. That's why motivational posters and photos of people or things that remind you of your goals can truly help motivate you. People picking up habits you want to pick up can also inspire you.

Another short story.  A few weeks ago, a full-grown woman with a penchant for chocolate-covered almonds and an expanding waist that I know, visited her friend at her friend's bucolic vacation spot in the mountains. Her friend, a woman with outstanding self-control, who doesn't even eat chocolate, had begun a running regime. This woman, I mean, talk about willpower. I mean, not only did she hold out for that second marshmallow at four, she held out for quadruple-or nothing when the psychologist came back into the room. Life has been upward ever since.

The almond-eater had been sporadically adding a bit of jogging to her workout for months with no real progress. Are you surprised? I am not. Lack of willpower. Also known as Strength of Character. However, the almond-eater did have the goal of running, no matter how pitiful her attempts might have been, to date. So when she got to the bucolic mountain retreat, her friend, let's call her Jane, urged her to run with her. The almond-eater--alright, it's me, for God's sake--I-- resisted at first. Fear. Jane had been running for a while now, and I had not. There were mountains. It was hot. I declined, and so my first day, Jane set off for her run without me. She persisted, however. The next day, when Jane urged me to join, I agreed. Feeling dubious, I set out on the mountainous route Jane chose. And do you know what? While it is true that Jane had to maintain a continuous conversational patter to distract me, and to literally take me by the wrist and urge me on at a couple of key hills, I, the almond-eater, did indeed succeed in running more than fifty yards at a time. The next day we went out again, and I ran further. And the next day.

Since then, I, the almond-eater, have continued to run, much longer than I've run since I developed shin splints in college. So that the other day, when I went out to run, I set myself the goal of running all the way to a particular fence, and instead of stopping short of the fence, as I have been wont to do since the burlap potato sack race days, I did. (Yes, that was me, the quitter in the burlap sack.) Now, running has become a habit (maybe), and when I hit a rough spot, I picture my running friend Jane just a couple of steps ahead of me, taking my wrist, and urging me on.

Goal contagion in action. And the reason why I say I know *almost* nothing about willpower, also known as self-control. Inch by inch, etc.

The End.