Tag Archives: meditation

January 24, 2016 · 9:58 pm

Self-Control

This week I started reading Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow about how we think and biases that can arise from our intuitive thoughts and judgment. One thing that really stood out to me was a relationship between self-control, intelligence, and academic performance. Intuitively, it would seem that intelligence would have a greater effect on academic performance than self-control. While self-control is required to complete work, generally the greater one’s intelligence, the better they will do in school and other academic or intellectual tasks.

I was reminded of some similar findings which were presented in The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, where quoting from some research it was explained that:

“Highly self-disciplined adolescents outperformed their more impulsive peers on every academic-performance variable,” the researchers wrote. “Self-discipline also predicted which students would improve their grades over the course of the school year, whereas IQ did not…Self-discipline has a bigger effect on academic performance than does intellectual talent.”

No matter how intelligent someone is, if they don’t have the discipline and self-control to sit down and do the work required of a course, they are not going to do well. While someone with slightly less intelligence, but greater discipline and self-control can complete the work and earn better grades.

Unfortunately, willpower, which we use to exercise our self-control and maintain our focus on a particular task, is a finite resource; having to exert your willpower throughout the day to get work done and maintain your focus on a task will deplete your reserves. This can lead to negative effects later, as Kahneman explains:

It is now a well-established proposition that both self-control and cognitive effort are forms of mental work. Several psychological studies have shown that people who are simultaneously challenged by a demanding cognitive task and by a temptation are more likely to yield to the temptation.

When we are distracted, or at the end of a long day, it can become difficult to find the motivation to do any more work, or resist the temptation of sitting on the couch and relaxing. Having spent the entire day doing the work that you have to do, it can be very difficult to get home, then do the work that you want to do, to improve yourself , or just to get things done, having done so much work already. This problem was also expressed through an analogy in The Power of Habit where Duhigg said:

There’s been more than two hundred studies on this idea since then, and they’ve all found the same thing. Willpower isn’t just a skill. It’s a muscle, like the muscles in your arms or legs, and it gets tired as it works harder, so there’s less power left over for other things.

Like any muscle, our willpower can become tired from continuous use throughout the day, when we have to do the things that others want us to or require us to do, rather than the things we’d like to be working on. The bright side of this comparison of willpower to a muscle, is that like a muscle, our willpower can be strengthened through practice and training. As Kanheman states in Thinking, Fast and Slow:

The testers found that training attention not only improved executive control; scores on nonverbal tests of intelligence also improved and the improvement was maintained for several months. Other research by the same group identified specific genes that are involved in the control of attention, showed that parenting techniques also affected this ability, and demonstrated a close connection between the children’s ability to control their attention and their ability to control their emotions.

By building our attention we can improve our self-control and discipline. This can also have lasting effects on our intelligence. Although the study focuses on academic performance, it seems reasonable to conclude that any intellectual work could benefit from an increased attention span and greater self-control and discipline while working.

While there are many ways to train one’s attention, an easy one that can be done almost anywhere is through the practice of meditation, which can have benefits beyond an improved attention span and ability to concentrate. As Shunryu Suzuki explains in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind:

If you want to obtain perfect calmness in your zazen, you should not be bothered by the various images you find in your mind. Let them come, and let them go. Then they will be under control. But this policy is not so easy. It sounds easy, but it requires some special effort. How to make this kind of effort is the secret of practice. Suppose you are sitting under some extraordinary circumstances. If you try to calm your mind you will be unable to sit, and if you try not to be disturbed, your effort will not be the right effort. The only effort that will help you is to count your breathing, or to concentrate on your inhaling and exhaling. We say concentration, but to concentrate your mind on something is not the true purpose of Zen. The true purpose is to see things as they are, to observe things as they are, and to let everything go as it goes.

By practicing meditation, especially when your willpower is depleted, or you are distracted and do not really feel like sitting, over time one can build up both one’s self-control and willpower, simply by sitting when we don’t want to, as well as our attention span, by maintaining our focus and concentration on our breathing.

By strengthening our willpower we can not only focus better and concentrate more on our work, but summon the motivation to get work done even when we do not feel like doing it as well as resist temptations when they arise in our lives. Stronger willpower can help us to get more done at work or school, then leave us with enough reserves to do our own work when we get home and resist the temptation to relax and put off our work of improving ourselves until we have had an easier day.

Practice

While rereading Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki, I was struck by the book’s suggestions on how to go about practicing, which although it was within the context of meditation, still seemed applicable for anything in life which we must practice at. Just the title alone gives us one of the major points that seems to contradict our normal way of thinking about learning. Generally when learning something new we want to quickly get past our beginning mistakes and into a more proficient practice, failing to recognize the value in our lack of knowledge. As Suzuki says regarding “beginner’s mind”:

In Japan we have the phrase shoshin, which means “beginner’s mind.” The goal of practice is always to keep our beginner’s mind. Suppose you recite the Prajna Paramita Sutra only once. It might be a very good recitation. But what would happen to you if you recited it twice, three times, four times, or more? You might easily lose your original attitude towards it. The same thing will happen in your other Zen practices. For a while you will keep your beginner’s mind, but if you continue to practice one, two, three years or more, although you may improve some, you are liable to lose the limitless meaning of original mind.

When we first start learning something we generally have no clue what we are doing. We have the potential to go in almost any direction. As we being to learn more though, the knowledge we acquire can start to restrict our thinking. What might have initially seemed like an important question or suggestion will seem ridiculous after we have learned better. As we practice then, we will no longer look in that direction, as we know, or think we know, that there is nothing to be found over there. But often it is in these directions, rather than in the well worn paths that that new and interesting ideas can come from. The right, or seemingly right, path has already been explored, and most of the major discoveries already made, while the path we believe we know better than to traverse may still contain much to be explored. By maintaining a beginner’s mind and leaving ourselves open to possibilities that might seem absurd we may discover the solution to a problem we are facing in an unexpected location.

While we are learning, and practicing what we are working to learn, we can become discouraged as we find that we have not yet met our expectations of where we would like to be, or are not progressing as quickly as we’d like. While having goals and expectations is important for beginning to practice, they can also end up hurting our practice if failing to meet them causes us to get discouraged and to stop practicing. On discouragement when practicing Suzuki said:

Even when you practice zazen alone, without a teacher, I think you will find some way to tell whether your practice is adequate or not. When you are tired of sitting, or when you are disgusted with your practice, you should recognize this as a warning signal. You become discouraged with your practice when your practice has been idealistic. You have some gaining idea in your practice, and it is not pure enough. It is when your practice is rather greedy that you become discouraged with it. So you should be grateful that you have a sign or warning signal to show you the weak point in your practice. At that time, forgetting all about your mistake and renewing your way, you can resume your original practice. This is a very important point.

Often when we practice something with a particular goal in mind we can become discouraged as we fail to meet our expectations. It is then that we should remind ourselves that it is more important that we are taking the time to practice than necessarily hitting our goals as quickly as we would like to. If we maintain consistent and deliberate practice then eventually we will improve at what we are working at, perhaps not as quickly as we would like, but eventually.

When attempting to learn anything practice is critical, both as part of the initial learning process and then later to actually retain what we have learned. Regarding practice and the importance of it in life-long learning I was reminded of a quote from Charlie Munger which I had read in Charlie Munger: The Complete Investor by Tren Griffin:

I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up, and boy, does that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you …. So if civilization can progress only with an advanced method of invention, you can progress only when you learn the method of learning. Nothing has served me better in my long life than continuous learning. I went through life constantly practicing (because if you don’t practice it, you lose it) the multidisciplinary approach and I can’t tell you what that’s done for me. It’s made life more fun, it’s made me more constructive, it’s made me more helpful to others, and it’s made me enormously rich. You name it, that attitude really helps.

We can spend a lifetime learning about a wide variety of topics, but if we don’t frequently go over the material and find a way to practice it, we are liable to quickly forget what we have learned. Munger offers a suggestion for how to go about a practice of life-long learning:

Develop into a lifelong self-learner through voracious reading; cultivate curiosity and strive to become a little wiser every day.

By developing a habit of frequent reading and consistently practicing it we can slowly build up our knowledge over time. Of course as part of this it is also important to try to maintain a beginner’s mind throughout, as the acquirement of knowledge works to restrict our thinking to what we know, or think we know, we should leave ourselves open to all possibilities

Resolutions

As the new year approaches most people start thinking of what resolutions they’d like to make for the new year, to attempt to improve their life and themselves. I just read Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic, which had some good advice for living life and working to improve oneself. One quote in particular seemed especially appropriate at this time of year, as people are creating their resolutions for the next year. Regarding making plans for the future, Seneca said:

I shall put myself under observation straight away and undertake a review of my day – a course which is of the utmost benefit. What really ruins our characters is the fact that none of us looks back over his life. We think about what we are going to do, and only rarely of that, and fail to think about what we have done, yet any plans for the future are dependent on the past.

When making resolutions most people tend to think only of what they would like to become or achieve and don’t consider their past and factor their own past behavior into their plans for the future. Instead of just focusing on the future, we should first look back at our past, particularly the previous year, and attempt to identify what mistakes we have made, or the things we wanted to do, but did not, before attempting to plan for the future. Our past can give us a strong indication of how we will likely behave going forward, despite our best intentions, and taking that into account, we can create a better and more realistic plan for the new year.

Instead of creating a single, large, difficult resolution, that will most likely get abandoned, or forgotten, after a month or two, we should instead break it down into smaller, more attainable goals that we can keep track of on a weekly or monthly basis. A large resolution is typically too vague, allowing us to put it off, after all, we’ve got the entire year to work at it. By dividing up a large goal into smaller, specific steps we can make more continuous, incremental progress towards our overall goal.

In addition to too vague goals, one of the other biggest impediments to attaining or accomplishing our goals is distractions. We allow ourselves to get distracted surfing the Internet or watching television instead of working towards our betterment. We end up doing what is easy, or tell ourselves that we’ll take a short break, then hours later find we’ve gotten distracted and haven’t accomplished what we’d intended to do. On distractions Seneca had this to say:

Let us cut out all distractions and work away at this alone for fear that otherwise we may be left behind and only eventually realize one day the swiftness of the passage of this fleeting phenomenon, time, which we are powerless to hold back. Every day as it comes should be welcomed and reduced forthwith into our own possession as if it were the finest day imaginable. What flies past has to be seized at.

It’s easy to get distracted, especially when we are trying to work on something difficult, although even when we have free time, the choice between doing something productive that can benefit us in the long-term and indulging in a short-term distraction requires an exercise of willpower and long-term thinking.

If we allow distractions to continuously occupy our time, we can find ourselves looking back at the past and wondering where the time went and realize that we have nothing to show for it. By seizing each day and working, no matter how little, towards our overall goals, we can look back at where we started and find that we’ve made large gains through a series of small steps.

Regarding distractions I was reminded of what another famous stoic, Marcus Aurelius had to say in Meditations:

Do external things distract you? Then make time for yourself to learn something worthwhile; stop letting yourself be pulled in all directions. But make sure you guard against the other kind of confusion. People who labor all their lives but have no purpose to direct every thought and impulse toward are wasting their time–even when hard at work.

In addition to the obvious distractions, mindlessly surfing the Internet or sitting on the couch watching television, we can find ourselves seemingly actually working at something, but the work has no real benefit. Often when we have real work that we are supposed to be doing, but are not sufficiently motivated to do at the time we create busy work for ourselves, as a way to avoid working on our real task, while also being able to tell ourself that we’re still working. This busy work is just another form of distraction that can prevent us from achieving our goals. On trying to avoid and eliminate these distractions Marcus suggests:

Because most of what we say and do is not essential. If you can eliminate it, you’ll have more time, and more tranquility. Ask yourself at every moment, “Is this necessary?”

While this is an incredibly simple way to try to avoid distractions, it is not so easy to do. It requires the awareness to remember to question what we are doing and why we are doing it. A good way to practice and develop this awareness is through meditation, where as you focus on your breathing, you should attempt to recognize when your thoughts are wandering, and return your focus back to your breath.

Although distractions can prevent us from accomplishing our goals, they are also a necessity. Without having some kind of outlet, we’d never be able to relax and replenish our willpower so that we can continue to work towards our goals with purpose and meaning. The trick is to find and work to eliminate or minimize the unnecessary distractions, while leaving ourselves the occasional release.

A key to avoiding distractions is to make resolutions, or set goals, that are attainable and measurable, by having something relatively small to work at, and being able to see our progress towards a goal, it helps to provide us with a feedback loop that can help motivate us to continue making progress, and working towards our goals.

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