Category Archives: Psychology

Arts, Mental Health, Psychology

You May Have To Create Your Own Motivation

MOTIVATION AND HABITS

Confucius once said, “It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop.”

Sometimes you want to undertake a new project because you are excited about the challenges it holds as well as the end result. At other times you would like to achieve the end result, but you are not stimulated by the steps you will have to take to get there. This is particularly true of goals based on self-improvement such as “getting fit”. We know the end result will be good, but if we enjoyed the process we would already be doing it!

In these situations it can be useful to add motivation to your process. This can be as simple as writing yourself a list of tasks that you can cross off as you go or awarding yourself intrinsically for each milestone you achieve. Perhaps, even, you could put a small amount of money to one side, to access only when you hit a target.

Forming habits is also a key factor in being motivated which will hopefully lead to the success you desire.

Research by University College London showed that it takes, on average, around 66 days for most routines to become habit. Crucially, however, the studies found that the harder the habit, the longer it took to form and that some people simply didn’t find habit-forming easy and therefore they would form habits over a longer timescale. Perseverance is the essential ingredient.

Take it easy on yourself. Don’t worry about missing one day here and there when establishing your new routine (the same research found that this did not materially affect the development of a habit) and don’t worry if it is taking you longer to get into your new routine than you think it should – the important thing to recognise is that you are on your way to building a new habit that will help in your drive to be more successful.

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. Add A Little Nothing Into Your Day

Adjusting your schedule to allow for the time you’re going to spend on your new project or adventure is one of the first steps. But so too is finding an extra ten minutes to do nothing. For that ten minutes just sit and be idle. Perhaps you could spend this time preparing yourself mentally for the challenge ahead, or just mulling over your project.

A study published in Psychological Science found that a daily dose of doing “nothing” actually increases your productivity and makes you more likely to commit to a certain goal or objective. Allowing yourself ten minutes of downtime to be mindful and restore your energy will make you more effective when you actually get down to work.

. Be Firm Yet Flexible

You will have good days and bad days, and discipline is finding a way to persevere regardless of what kind of day you are having. Set yourself an upper time budget and a lower time budget so that you can flex your schedule around the realities of your life.

The upper time budget is for the good days, so you can take advantage of days when you have plenty of energy and enthusiasm and do a little more without burning yourself out. Conversely, the lower time budget is for days when you are tired or down. It may be less time than you think you need, and it might not make a huge contribution to your project, but doing at least something, however little, toward your project will help you to form your routine.

Completing a task is much easier when it is a habit.

. Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation

Intrinsic motivation is internal motivation. It is when a person is driven to achieve a goal for its own sake and feels that the completion of the goal is its own reward.

Extrinsic motivation is motivation driven by an external reward. An example of this might be practising your baking in order to win a baking competition.

Research shows that extrinsic motivation works well to inspire shorter bursts of productivity, while intrinsic motivation is the most effective in driving your long-term goals.

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Arts, Philosophy, Psychology, Science

Philosophy: David Hume

EMPIRICIST & ESSENTIAL THINKER (1711–1776)

– A narrative and critique on the philosophy of David Hume

David Hume is the philosophical hero of modern day sceptics and empiricists, renouncing all knowledge except that which can be gained from the senses. Alas, as Quine would later famously say, echoing Hume, what can be garnered from the senses is, after all, not much.

From Locke, Hume had drawn the conclusion that all human knowledge is based on relations amongst ideas, or “sense impressions”. Anything not given in experience is mere invention and must be ruthlessly discarded. As a result he denies the existence of God, the self, the objective existence of logical necessity, causation, and even the validity of inductive knowledge itself. His aim is twofold: at once demolitionary – to rid science of all falsehoods based on “invention rather than experience” – and constructive, to found a science of human nature. Much impressed with how Isaac Newton had described the physical world according to simple mechanical laws, Hume had a mind to do something similar for the nature of human understanding. His Treatise on Human Nature is a painstaking study in experimental psychology in search of general principles. In this, however, Hume can be seen as being spectacularly unsuccessful, primarily because his whole taxonomy of “impressions” and “ideas” is derived from the much discredited Cartesian model. Nevertheless, Hume’s negative program is a devastating example of the power of logical critique. His sceptical results, especially regarding induction, remain problematic for modern philosophers.

Hume observes that we never experience our own self, only the continuous chain of experiences themselves. This psychological fact leads Hume to the dubious metaphysical conclusion that the self is an illusion, and in fact personal identity is nothing but the continuous succession of perceptual experience. “I am,” Hume famously says, “nothing but a bundle of perceptions”. Following a similar line of thought, Hume notices that the force that compels one event to follow another, causation, is also never experienced in sense impressions. All that is given in experience is the regular succession of one kind of event being followed by another. But the supposition that the earlier event, the so-called “cause”, must be followed by the succeeding event, the “effect”, is merely human expectation projected onto reality. There is no justification for believing that there is any casual necessity in the ordering of events.

Hume’s scepticism does not stop there, and the belief in causation is just a special case of a more general psychological trait: inductive reasoning. Inductive reasoning is the process that leads us to make generalisations from observing a number of similar cases. For example, having observed many white swans but no black swans, one might seemingly be justifiably led to the conclusion that “All swans are white”. Equally, being aware that men often die, we conclude “All men are mortal”. But such generalisations go beyond what is given in experience and are not logically justified. After all, black swans were found in Australia, and there is always the logical possibility of coming across an immortal man. Hume claimed that inductive reasoning could not be relied upon to lead us to the truth, for observing a regularity does not rule out the possibility that next time something different will occur. Since all scientific laws are merely generalisations from inductive reasoning, this so-called “problem of induction” has been pressing for philosophers of science. Trying to show how induction is justified has taxed them throughout the 20th and 21st Centuries. Karl Popper is notable for offering the most promising solution to Humean scepticism. Popper’s brand of scientific method, ‘falsificationism’ gave rise to a whole new area of debate in the philosophy of science. According to Popper, the mark of a scientific theory is whether it makes predictions which could in principle serve to falsify it.

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Mental Health, Psychology, Science

Schools of Thought: Humanistic Psychology

HUMANISTIC PSYCHOLOGY

THE move towards cognitive psychology came about through frustrations with what were seen as the limitations of psychoanalysis and behavioural psychology. In the 1950s, another movement within psychology also began to gain ground – one that rejected all the main strands of psychology: psychoanalysis, behavioural psychology, and the emerging cognitive psychology approach. This fourth approach has become known as humanistic psychology.

Rather than seeing the human psyche as a minefield of conflicting parts of the self, driven by primitive urges (as the psychoanalytic approach was characterised), or viewing the self as the result of myriad stimulus-response exchanges that make us who we are (as behaviourists do), or seeing the reasons for our beliefs and actions as residing in our perception and cognition of what’s around us (as the cognitive psychologists are doing), humanist psychologists view the individual as a whole person with their own free will, desires, responsibilities, passions, aims, and aspirations. In short, all the kinds of things that make us human. For the humanists, the concept of mental health for far too long had been obsessed with reducing negative states such as anxiety or depression. The humanists wanted mental health to be all about striving for something better, like happiness or fulfilment.

What do you really want from life?

Two key thinkers are the pioneers of the humanist psychologist movement. One is Abraham Maslow, best known for his 1954 concept of the “hierarchy of needs,” which dates from 1943, and which presents an image of what people really want from life – and the idea for striving for something for its own sake. Having established lower-order needs – such as food, shelter, belonging, self-esteem – we seek knowledge, meaning, and, ultimately, the realisation of our full potential.

The second, Carl Rogers, shared Maslow’s view that humankind seeks this higher state of self-actualisation, making the most of our talents or education or skills. And along with that, we seek positive regard, which can be love, or simply respect, from others. In his 1961 book On Becoming a Person, he discussed some of the conditions necessary to achieve this state – a discussion that was to form the basis of a client-centred therapy (later renamed “person-centred” therapy). At its heart is the concept of unconditional positive regard – the kind of parental love that children can enjoy no matter what they might do, and which gives them a freedom to take risks and discover what they like doing. In cases where children receive only conditional positive regard, parental love may only be won through good behaviour or excellent performance, with the risks of the child becoming a perfectionist or neurotic later in life. Client-centred therapy could redress this by the therapist providing the unconditional positive regard, and allowing the client to start finding their own way toward their self-actualising goals.

The “I” and the “me”

For Rogers, an important theoretical aspect was the self concept. There are two parts to it: the “I” that does stuff, and the “me” that the “I” sometimes thinks about, such as when we say “I am ashamed of myself.” The self concept develops as we grow up, and we are happiest, Rogers believed, when we have congruence between the “I” and the “me” – that is, minimal conflict between the perceived self and the kind of behaviours we actually find ourselves doing.

Rogers developed his “Q Sort” test – a kind of personality test using a deck of flash cards – to measure levels of this congruence, which allowed for some degree of quantitative testing to demonstrate correlation between congruence of the self concept, and other measures of well-being or social adjustment.

Nonetheless, humanistic psychology is often characterised as being more of a qualitative than quantitative strand of psychology. By contrast, positive psychology is a related branch that also has as its goal not simply a reduction of psychological pain, but more positively, the advancement of well-being – looking, for example, at the science of happiness, or how creativity is stimulated: in many respects, another route to the summit of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

. See also Positive Psychology

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