Category Archives: Psychology

Arts, Books, Psychology, Science

Book Review: Agency

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: The father of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, offers a three-step plan that means you can take control of your own destiny

Shakespeare got it right: “All things be ready, if our minds be so,” says King Harry in Henry V. The scene depicts the English being vastly outnumbered by French forces, but he has no doubt what will bring about an English victory on St Crispin’s Day.

Sheer will, he tells the assembled Lords. Will is at the root of agency; willpower drives performance and success. Even in these depressed and uncertain times, that seems self-evident.

Over a half-a-century ago, however, the world-renowned psychologist, Martin Seligman, witnessed the collapse of will in his best student at Cornell University.

Faced with a project well within her capabilities she simply gave up, because she had convinced herself she couldn’t do it.

Her professor realised that, “in 1968, psychology had no vocabulary for what I wanted to say”.

For even the rival “camps” in his subject agreed on one thing: “Free will was an illusion. People were products – of conditioning, of unconscious drives, or forces beyond their control.”

It became Seligman’s mission to identify, “the most important force in human experience: agency – the belief that you can influence your own future”. He thought of his brilliant student giving up and wondered if she might have been able to learn how to persist, how to strive for what seemed impossible, and how to resist her own sense of inadequacy.

“Agency”, he writes, is “the audacious human belief that tomorrow can be better than today, and that we have the power to make it so.”

Seligman is widely respected as the founder of positive psychology – the scientific study of what makes life worth living and what can make people thrive.

He is known for his inspiring works on happiness, optimism, change, and wellbeing – yet he is most emphatically not to be mistaken for a self-help guru or therapist.

His bracing view that individuals can take control of their own lives is central. This hard-won optimism counters his own natural depressive tendencies by focusing on human strength, not weakness – as he insists, the most effective way to become more optimistic is through “mental toughness”.

Strict scientific data underpins whatever motivational advice readers may take from his many books.

This latest volume is perhaps the most ambitious, embracing a vast sweep of human history in order to assess how “agency” affects human progress and survival.

There are lessons for the individual in his analysis of why some societies thrive, why some flounder, and how whole civilisations can be swept away.

Seligman admits to being a pessimist himself, which perhaps explains his life’s work as a personal pep talk.

He identifies three elements that combine to form the energy behind “the belief that I can achieve my goals” – which is the agency driving the human spirit.

1. Efficacy is “my estimate of achieving a specific goal in the here and now”. 2. Optimism is about “achievement in the future”. 3. Imagination is “my mental representation of the range of goals I can achieve beyond the here and now”.

That three-step works on a personal level. But the whole drive of the book is societal too: “Efficacy causes trying hard, optimism causes persistence, and imagination causes innovation. This is exactly how agency causes progress.”

This is the core belief of the book. Without agency there is no action.

When a society is confident and forward-looking, progress occurs. When it is absent the result is stagnation – a malaise which, incidentally, some readers may recognise in Britain today.

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To illustrate his theory, Seligman conducts us on an exhilarating whistlestop tour through human history, seeking answers to the question, “Why some [people] crumble under life’s blows while others bounce back.”

Why are some individuals resilient while others exhibit “Learned Helplessness”? How does that play out across a whole culture? Is it inevitably true that “poverty . . . causes present-mindedness and wealth causes future-mindedness”? What does rigorous belief in an ideology or religion do to human agency? Just some of the fascinating and vital questions Seligman poses in this hugely important book.

His answers are to be found in history. He examines the later books of the Hebrew Bible and makes a comparison between their growth of human agency, and the writings of the Zhou Dynasty in China and the Golden Age of Greece: “Three unrelated civilisations across the globe and within a broadly comparable period, recognise the power of human agency and their gods retreat.”  

He compares the development of those three different cultures and observes that their Golden periods of success arrived once people had lessened their slavish belief in gods as the source of power, who therefore had to be obeyed. “When we mortals are thought to control our destiny, we actually do. When supernatural forces . . . are thought to control our destiny, we languish,” he notes. Readers should be reminded this is a book written by a psychologist.

Technology allows Seligman to dissect language, listing “agentic” words of action and determination and hope used through key texts and documents, which indicate the states of mind of individuals and societies.

After a cheerful and useful chapter called More Agency In Your Life (tips on how to learn optimism), Seligman does an extraordinary thing.

This brilliant book about human agency ends with what some critics’ regard as a kowtow to Artificial Intelligence (AI). He even shows how it can take his place in solving problems.

I did wonder if it had infected the brilliant brain of a man who has sought nothing but good, yet fails to grasp the obvious peril that the will of AI will banish human agency altogether.

– Agency by Martin Seligman is published by John Murray One, 400pp

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Health, Mental Health, Psychology, Wellbeing

Gratitude: Is it understood properly enough?

HEALTH & WELLBEING

THE word “gratitude” is ubiquitous and everywhere these days. On mental health leaflets and in magazine columns, it is also emblazoned on mugs and seen often on motivational posters. All this is the result of more than two decades’ research in positive psychology which has found that having a “gratitude practice” – such as jotting down three to five things you are thankful for most days – brings a host of psychological and physical benefits.

Most of us will not want to seem, well, ungrateful. Even amongst sceptics, it is likely that they too would have been persuaded to take up the gratitude habit. When we remember to do it, we will feel better: more cheerful and connected, inclined to see the good already present in our lives. Counting your blessings, whether that’s noticing a beautiful sunset or remembering how your neighbour went out of their way to help you earlier, is free and attractively simple. But there underlies the problem. In our eagerness to embrace gratitude as a cure-all, have we lost sight of its complexity and its edge?

In positive psychology, gratitude is generally defined as a wholly good thing, a spontaneous feeling of joyful appreciation. But back in 1923, the Harvard psychologist William McDougall believed gratitude – especially when directed towards another person, rather than an experience in the more abstract way of, say, being “grateful to be alive” – was more difficult and complex to understand. Of course, there was awe for the generosity of the human spirit, and tender feelings towards the person who had given up their time to help. But there were also quiet feelings of envy or embarrassment, a sense of the “superior power” of the helper and even what McDougall called “negative self-feeling” (which today we’d call “low self-esteem”). The Japanese expression arigata-meiwaku (literally: “annoying thanks”) gets to the heart of what he meant. Arigata-meiwaku is the feeling you have when someone insists on performing a favour for you, even though you don’t want them to, yet convention dictates you must be grateful anyway. There’s a reason all this feels so annoying: being grateful throws off the balance of power and increases feelings of obligation. There’s your benefactor at the top, bathed in a sunshine glow of generosity. And there’s you, at the bottom, doffing your cap.

It might seem mean-spirited to focus on how being thankful can also obligate, diminish, or even confuse us. But as #feelingblessed becomes a performative norm, these aspects of gratitude are even more important to understand, particularly for the role they play in how hierarchical structures are reinforced in our world. A bleak tale about compulsory gratitude is that of the 13-year-old orphan Eyo Ekpenyon Eyo II. In 1893, he travelled from his home in British-occupied west Africa to take up a scholarship in a missionary school in Colwyn Bay, Wales. Less than six months after arriving, Eyo wrote to his patron, expressing thanks but begging to return home. The cold weather had made him poorly, and he feared for his life. It was a reasonable worry since three west African pupils had already died at Colwyn Bay.

Some time later Eyo did secure a passage home, but not before the British press got hold of the story. In a vicious outpouring of anger, they called him “spoilt”, “ungrateful”, and a “little prince”; their language soaked in colonial assumptions about who ought to feel grateful to whom. Not much has changed since. In The Ungrateful Refugee the author Dina Nayeri describes how, as a child refugee from Iran, she was expected to feel “so lucky, so humbled” to be in the United States. Only later did she understand how this “politics of gratitude” had subtly worked to transform her human right to refuge into a gift, one that had to be repaid by staying submissive and uncomplaining, being a “good immigrant” who stayed firmly in her lane.

This connection between power and the demand for gratitude reaches into many parts of life. When people in high-power positions are made to feel insecure, such as by having their failings and shortcomings pointed out, they commonly berate those who they perceive as inferior to them for being ungrateful. Consider the recent incident in the White House when Donald Trump and JD Vance took Volodymyr Zelensky to task for failing to show sufficient gratitude earlier this year.

These costs are part of what psychologists now call the “dark side” of gratitude. One common objection to the gratitude movement is that it risks “toxic positivity”, encouraging people to ignore and repress more painful feelings. But feeling thankful can lead to other dangers, too. People are more likely to transgress moral codes on behalf of someone else if they feel grateful to them. Members of historically marginalised groups, including women and LGBTQ+ people, are less likely to complain about unfair treatment if they are reminded first how lucky they are compared with the past. And, as studies with women in abusive relationships show, when people have been gaslit into believing they cannot survive without an abuser, gratitude makes them feel obliged to stay. Is it apt to ask, then, whether all those motivational posters should come with caveats and health warnings?

Given these arguments there is a lot to think about while trying to jot down three things you feel grateful for so you can retire peacefully at night.

Yet, the lessons of the latest research remind us that, like all emotions, feeling grateful is neither wholly good nor wholly bad. Too little, and we risk being entitled or rude, alienating those who try to help us. Too much, and we may leave ourselves open to exploitation by amplifying the power someone holds over us. Context, as always, is necessary and should always be relative.  

There are strategies that help mitigate the risk. Focusing on circumstances rather than individuals (broadly, feeling grateful for or that, rather than grateful to) can side-step the issue of power. And if you notice someone – a boss, parent, friend, or partner – expecting more gratitude than you want to give, you might ask yourself why. What might seem like ungrateful behaviour in our hierarchical world may really be an act of self-preservation, even one of political defiance.

And sometimes gratitude does need to have an expiration date. For all we may feel thankful, sometimes we have to release ourselves from the burden and move on with our lives. Gratitude is important. But so is paying attention to its limits.

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Arts, Books, Psychology

Book Review: ‘How We Break’

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: How to survive when you’re at breaking point

THERE are various idioms containing the word break. One friend moans, “I feel just broken”, meaning she’s very tired. Another says, “It’s heart-breaking,” which is referring to something rather sad.

We can “break even”, where neither profit or loss is made and is seen as good practice, but when lovers “break up” it’s bad emotionally for all concerned. When the waves break on the shore, the meaning is not in question: they smash down and are changed. Similarly, a truly “broken-hearted” person will feel – in body, mind, and spirit – that life can never be the same again. And they are right.

And, so, what of the journey towards the breaking point? What stress must be applied to an elastic band, say, before it will snap?

In How We Break, health psychologist Vincent Deary suggests some answers for “navigating the wear and tear of living”. He shows how social circumstances can combine with individual genetics and unexpected external shifts to make each individual’s experience of stress unique.

Nobody – not even the most confident and strong among us – should think of themselves as invulnerable or immune. Events can combine to overwhelm you. A sudden shock can make almost anyone teeter on the edge and then fall.

How We Break is the second in a proposed trilogy series: How To Live. The first volume, How We Are, was published a decade ago. For publishing, that’s an unusual and significant gap: for the author himself suffered a sort of breakdown during the writing of this volume.

Since his subject matter is exhaustion, the physiology of stress and how so many of us seem to be permanently set in “fight or flight” mode, it should come as no surprise that Deary’s writing style becomes increasingly fraught as the book progresses.

There are times during the second part of the narrative when it becomes unclear whether he is writing “shrink-speak” for professional colleagues or providing information for the general reader. There is no doubt, though, depths of pain are quietly plumbed within these pages.

How We Are was about the acute difficulty of facing change, and the first part of How We Break continues the analysis of how “allostatis” can put such a strain on our minds, bodies, and spirits, that we face “trembling” before the point of “breaking”. Allostatis refers to the work of maintaining stability in the face of change. Parts one and two of this book explores the territories of what happens when we are pushed past our limits.

Deary draws on his extensive experience in an NHS clinic specialising in fatigue and uses case studies to show how people can suddenly be pushed over the edge.

We are introduced to “Sami”, a young care assistant (who also used to be his partner); “Anna”, a middle-aged woman who suddenly ceases to make sense of her life; and his own mother, Isobelle, whose emotional strength was eroded and sapped by frustration, bitterness, and regret.

Throughout, Deary provides an open invitation for the reader to ask questions about his or her own life. Yet, at times, he also seems to warn against overthinking – when we can “become hard work for ourselves”. There is convolution in the argument.

For his mother, listening to a ruinous inner “chorus” of recrimination and doubt proved disastrous. Rumination and withdrawal contributed to her depression, the downward negative spiral amplifying the other, in a process that increasingly had a momentum and a mind of its own. More rumination and withdrawal followed. The downward pressure was relentless.

That process – of plunging depression – can happen to anybody. Alarmingly, Deary points out that there are a staggering 16,400 accepted profiles “that qualify for a diagnosis of [a] major depressive disorder”. No wonder, then, that “thinking has become its own self-perpetuating problem”.

The author is painfully honest about his own psychological struggles as an effeminate child growing up in a working-class area on the west coast of Scotland. He was mercilessly teased at his comprehensive school, mocked for his appearance, turned into a “misfit”, and easily frightened as a child.

Such essential self-exploration and introspection underlines the deeply human plea which is the heartbeat of the book: more self-compassion is needed.

There is a depth of wisdom in Deary’s regret that society has neglected the idea of convalescence. Rest and recuperation are essential, yet increasingly (it seems), withheld. No time is allowed for the recovery of strength after childbirth, illness, family problems, and so on.

For all the modern emphasis on “mental health”, not enough is really known about the points at which people “tremble” then “break” (to use Deary’s own terms).

Some fortunate, and better-adapted souls are resilient and can cope, but others fall apart, at great cost to themselves, their families, and society. Our fast-moving, hyper-active, over-connected, multi-platform, anxious way of life and existence cuts people no slack.

What we can do about all this will be the subject of the third and final book in this series, How We Mend. Until then, Deary offers some pointers: “Beware mirrors. Which is to say, beware of becoming too entranced with your own opinions, stories, and concerns.

“Beware of becoming too preoccupied with yourself to the exclusion of the world. To prepare for life by looking in a mirror is to lose sight of who we really are and what we are preparing for.”

– How We Break by Vincent Deary is published by Allen Lane, 304pp

 

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