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This is Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
There are moments in any journey when things can feel interminable.
You show up to work every day, do the same job, meet the same people.
At home, you wash the dishes, clean the bedroom, do the laundry.
On weekends, you watch the same TV shows, go for the same walks, talk to the same relatives.
One day starts to look like the next.
Weeks blur into each other.
And then you start to wonder, what am I really doing?
Where am I headed?
Am I making any progress at all?
We have different names for this phenomenon.
Writers say they are blocked.
Office workers talk about being in a rut.
People of a certain age call it a midlife crisis.
But they are all different ways of saying, I'm stuck.
This feeling of stuckness can be a particularly big impediment when it comes to making progress on long-standing goals.
There are few things as demotivating as the feeling that, no matter how hard you try, you never seem to get where you want to go.
Today we bring you the latest episode in our U20 series about the mental obstacles that can get in the way of our goals and resolutions.
We're going to explore how even the most talented and driven people can find themselves in a rut and what research suggests is the best way to get out of one of these emotional troughs.
How we get stuck, and powerful insights into how to get unstuck, this week on Hidden Brains.
All of us have had moments in our lives when we feel stuck.
We don't know what we want to do.
Or if we do know what we want, we don't know how to do it.
At New York University, psychologist Adam Alter studies the science of how to get unstuck.
Adam Alter, welcome to Hidden Brain.
Thanks so much, Shankar.
Adam, I want to play you a clip from a very dramatic and popular TV series.
This is from the season seven trailer of Game of Thrones.
For centuries, our families fought together against their common enemy, despite their differences.
Together,
We need to do the same if we're going to survive, because the enemy is real.
It's always been real.
Now Adam, you've spent some time thinking about this because, even as the TV show is wildly dramatic and packed with action, something very curious was happening to the writer of the series.
Tell me how George R.R.
Martin started writing this epic fantasy and what happened along the way.
Well, he started very successfully.
He wrote a number of books in the series and the gap between those books grew larger and larger, to the point where he experienced what he described as profound writer's block.
And he's expressed great puzzlement because he was so productive for so long but now says in interviews I don't really have an explanation for you.
I know you as the fans of the series are looking for the next installment.
It's been many years.
I just don't know what to say.
I just haven't been able to produce it.
And that's where we sit now.
So fans of the books are waiting for the next installment to be released, even as the TV show itself has been completed.
In an interview in 2018.
He said I know there are a lot of people out there who are very angry with me that Winds of Winter this is the sixth volume out of seven isn't finished.
And I'm mad about that myself.
I wish I finished it four years ago.
I wish it was finished now, but it's not.
But I've had dark nights of the soul where I've pounded my head against the keyboard and said God, will I ever finish this?
The show is going further and further forward.
He's talking here about Game of Thrones.
And I'm falling further and further behind.
What the hell is happening here?
And you can almost hear his own mystification about his own block here, Adam.
He's very distressed.
Yeah, it's interesting when you see someone who is such a colossal talent for writing these kinds of stories.
And yet still, we're not talking about being stuck for a day or a week or a month.
We're talking about a matter of many years.
And he has no idea what he's supposed to be doing moving forward.
So it's a very profound case of stuckness.
So you say that George R.R.
Martin and people like him might have something to learn from an experiment conducted many years ago by the psychologist Clark Hull.
What makes this experiment unusual is that the test subjects were mice.
Yeah, that's right.
Hull was a behaviorist and a lot of behaviorists in that period in the middle of the 20th century studied mice because they were very easy to study.
They were very interested in some very basic psychological principles that applied to mice just as they did to humans.
And so Hull used to create mazes for his mice and he would watch as they completed these mazes.
What do mice running through a maze have to do with a writer of epic fantasy novels getting stuck?
The thing that he noticed most was that the mice, when they first entered the maze, were quite slow to move.
They were puzzled by the situation that faced them.
But as the goal, whatever the goal was, whether it was a piece of food or whether it was exiting the maze.
As the goal came into view, they moved much more quickly.
And he described this as the goal gradient.
It's the idea that, at least subjectively, it feels to mice, and actually to humans as well, as though, as you can see, the goal in sight that the experience becomes almost metaphorically downhill.
It's much easier to bridge the gap between where you are and where you'd like to be.
And I think all of us have had this experience in one form or the other.
You know, you feel like the end is in sight, whether you're a runner, and you can see the finish tape in sight.
It does give you a bit of a spurt to get to the finish line.
But talk a minute about this goal gradient idea, because there's something really interesting that happens here at the start, the middle and at the end.
What happens, Adam?
Yeah, so the original idea that Hull described was that we're much quicker closer to the goal, but subsequent research has shown that it's a bit more complicated than that, that actually we slow down dramatically in the middle, when we're sort of unmoored.
We're somewhere between the beginning of the goal and the end of the goal.
And so we move quickly at the beginning because we have a bit of motivation, we're fresh, we're ready to go and we slow down in the middle.
And then as we get to the end of the process, we speed up again as the goal comes within view.
So it's a sort of U-shape.
You go quickly, then slowly, then quickly again.
Adam says it is revealing that George R.R.
Martin got stuck as he was slogging his way through the series.
The end of the series was some distance away, while the start of the project was in the distant past.
There's lots of evidence that the goal gradient effect plays a powerful role in many dimensions of our lives.
There are some studies that show that it applies to physical activity, but it applies just as much to mental activity as well.
So there were some studies that were run asking people.
For example, one of my colleagues, Andrea Benetzi, and his colleagues asked people to find words within words.
So he would give them a long word, and then he would say how many shorter English words can you find within the letters of this longer word?
And he did that nine times.
And what he found was that people were slowest around the fifth attempt, much slower than around the first or second, or eighth or ninth attempts.
And so this applies just as much in his studies to mental activities, where there's some motivation required, as it does to physical activities.
I understand this is also true when it comes to paying off credit card debt.
You know you make a good start at the beginning and if you get close to the end you feel like you have a spurt to finish off.
But the middle is really difficult again.
That's right.
Yeah, there's quite a lot of research on the financial implications of this.
Stuck in the middle effect, as it's known.
That shows exactly that that we pay off credit card debt quickly, then slowly, then quickly.
When we're donating to charities, you see something similar.
We donate much more readily and we donate larger amounts at the beginning, when the charity first makes the solicitation.
And then again, as the charity reaches its goal or approaches its goal, we donate again.
But in the middle process, say the charity is looking for 100000.
Around that 50000 mark you see a slowdown collectively in how much people give.
So you argue that one of the reasons that the middle of a project is so challenging is that there are fewer and fewer landmarks to mark our progress?
And you've compared the journey we take on a long project to the experience of a sailor on a ship traveling across the Atlantic Ocean from the United States to Britain.
Explain that analogy, Adam.
Yeah, so when you leave, imagine you're sailing from New York to, say, Southampton in Britain.
When you leave, you have a number of landmarks behind you and there's a lot of activity at the beginning of that journey, things that suggest that you're moving.
You can see how fast you're moving.
And when you get into the middle part of that journey, all you see is oceans, but you don't have any external cues that tell you how fast you're moving.
And so that middle period is a long period between leaving the land behind and then waiting for the next bit of land to come into view.
And so during that period in contrast to the beginning of the experience, you don't have a lot of feedback about your progress.
And that's demotivating.
It gives you the sense that you're not really making progress, even if you're moving quite rapidly.
And then, of course, as you approach Britain again, you see land, you might see parts of the British Isles.
And again you can start to see how fast you're moving and you're getting some external cues that are reinforcing.
They say, keep going.
You're almost there.
And I think that's how a lot of our goals function.
We have that middle period that can often be quite expansive, where we just have no sense that we're making progress.
And so that's greatly demotivating.
So is one solution then to try and create more landmarks in the middle?
I think so.
I think it's to shrink the middles as far as possible.
And there are different ways to do that.
In the case of sailing, there aren't that many options.
But what you want to do is to give yourself some sort of feedback that suggests that you're making progress.
And so you might create sub-goals.
Instead of thinking of the journey as a single goal from start to finish.
You might say well, I've got this map that I'm using to navigate through the Atlantic Ocean.
I know when I hit certain latitude or longitudinal measures, I know that I've reached a certain percentage of the way.
And that's obviously much easier to do when you're engaged in some sort of activity, whether it's running or whether it's some sort of mental activity.
You just kind of shrink the goal down.
You bracket it much more narrowly.
So you have these smaller sub-goals.
So runners often say my goal is to run the next mile or the next half mile, or even as far as my eye can see.
And you set a target and you run to that target.
And then you look at another target and you run to that target.
And it's the same principle again.
You're trying to be ending the race all the time.
Exactly.
Yeah.
You're sort of atomizing the goal.
You're turning it into its... most basic elements.
And at the very extreme point.
If you have ever run and feel that you're really struggling, it becomes a matter of taking one step at a time.
You know each step is its own little goal and you get your own little burst of positive feedback with each step.
I understand that you have employed a similar insight when it comes to writing.
What does that look like, Adam?
Yeah, so, you know, writing is very similar.
If you're writing something large like a thesis or a book or an article, it's.
There are different ways to construe that goal.
Now, obviously, if you zoom back far enough, the goal is to finish the book or finish the article.
But that's overwhelming in the same way that sailing a ship across the ocean might be overwhelming.
And so you might have this stuck in the middle experience, which I think a lot of people do.
The nice thing about writing a book is it's broken naturally into chapters.
So already, you've shrunk those middles down.
Let's say there are 12 chapters in a book that you're writing.
You've taken that large goal and you've made sure that the middle is smaller by having these 12 sub goals that fall under that larger umbrella.
But even within a chapter, you know, people will say every hundred words is my goal.
And I've often used that tactic, especially as the process of writing becomes difficult or when you're entering a difficult part of a story or a study that you're trying to describe.
What I find is that the goal for me shrinks as I am struggling more, as I become more stuck, and it grows again as the process of writing feels a bit easier.
And I find that shrinking and expanding happens constantly as I'm writing the book.
I understand that you sometimes set the timer on your watch for 60 seconds and aim to write until the timer goes off.
Why would you set a timer to write for only one minute?
Yeah, these are the most desperate moments, right?
You don't want to write for a minute and think about that as the height of what you're trying to achieve.
You obviously want to do much more than that.
But there are moments when writing is incredibly difficult in the same way that George R.R.
Martin describes it, where Any writing is a small victory.
And so what you can do is, just as a runner might say, every step is a little victory.
You might say that writing for 60 seconds, or even 15 or 30 seconds if you're very desperate, is its own goal.
And the idea behind that is trying to lubricate whatever.
Machinery is required to write for 10 minutes and then an hour, and then three and five and so on.
And I find that works pretty well, because there's a lot of inertia in a lot of these processes that are goal-based, where once you get the ball rolling, things seem to improve.
But getting the ball rolling can be really difficult.
And the best way to do that is to lower the bar as far as possible so it's barely above the ground.
And I think many people notice this.
When there's a deadline looming, suddenly people start working much faster.
And then, right as they approach the deadline, they sort of say I have all these ideas bursting at my head right now.
If I could only have another half an hour, I could get a lot of it down.
And so what you're basically saying is take advantage of that and create artificial deadlines in order to get yourself jump-started.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
And I think by constraining yourself, either by a deadline or by saying I'm only gonna write for a minute, Something about that process of constraining yourself is paradoxically liberating.
A lot of the extraneous material that might have been weighing on our minds and sapping limited mental resources goes by the wayside.
What's left is just this real sense of sudden clarity which I've always found really inspires great ideas and inspires a lot of activity, especially when I feel stuck.
The middle of any extended project can be a trap.
Becoming aware of this fact can help us prepare for the trap and to make plans to unstick ourselves.
But of course, the middle of projects is not the only reason people get stuck.
There are lots of other drivers and it turns out we create many of the problems ourselves.
When we come back, how we get in our own way and how to get out.
You're listening to Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
This is Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
Adam Alter is a psychologist at New York University.
He has studied why we get stuck and how we can get ourselves unstuck.
One thing he and others have found is that many of the obstacles that stand between us and our goals are created by us.
Adam.
In your book Anatomy of a Breakthrough, you illustrate one of these obstacles with a story about a musician.
I want to play you a clip of a song.
You and I Might be strangers However close we get sometimes It's like we never met But you and I
Adam, tell me Jeff Tweedy's story and the trap he once constructed for himself.
So Tweedy is the front man of the band Wilco, and he's a bit of a renaissance man.
He writes music, but he also writes books.
And he has described quite vividly his own experiences with writer's block in both contexts and talked quite a lot about how he's managed to unstick himself over time.
One problem that Jeff Tweedy has battled will be familiar to many people.
Perfectionism.
Perfectionism is paralyzing because what it basically does is it signals to you that, unless you're producing perfection, you're failing.
And so the feedback that you're getting constantly since most of us aren't perfect most of the time is negative feedback.
And it's demotivating.
And it also means that when you ask yourself at the end of a period, whether it's a few hours, or at the end of the day, whether you've produced anything Because perfectionism is essentially binary the feedback you get is that you have failed most days or many days.
And so people like Tweedy, who have created this trap for themselves, find that it's very, very hard to be motivated across time.
And so the products they create are few and far between, and then they often feel quite negative about what they've created.
So you say that Jeff Tweedy has come up with an ingenious way of battling this challenge.
What does he do?
Yeah, he has this great description.
This term, he says he pours out the bad material.
So the way he thinks about it and I think this is true of a lot of creative enterprises is the obvious stuff is stuff that's not particularly novel or interesting.
And that's the stuff that sits at the top of your head.
And what you've got to do is, if you imagine that all your ideas are essentially liquids sitting one on top of the other, you've got to pour out the bad stuff.
And that's what Tweedy describes.
He wakes up in the morning and he says, I've got to pour out the bad material.
And what's incredibly liberating about that, in contrast to perfectionism is this idea that you expect that to be mediocre.
And that's okay, because the way you think about it is, you're getting the bad stuff out of the way, so the good stuff can emerge.
And so I understand he deliberately sometimes tries to pour out bad stuff.
He tries to come up with bad stuff so the good stuff can then emerge?
Yeah, the nice thing about removing all requirements for quality is that quantity rises.
And so if being unstuck is about moving forward, the idea that you don't care about quality but you care only about something coming out anything coming out means that you get into this really great habit of actually making some progress later on.
And by even trying to write bad songs, he finds that that shows him what's good.
Because by making something bad, if you're as successful and as talented as he is, it shows you something about what you're not looking for.
And then later on, you use that as a sort of contrast point and you produce better material.
You argue that perfectionism is an aspect of a larger tendency we have, which is to understand goal pursuit in moral terms.
What do you mean by this, Adam?
People who succeed seem in some moral sense to be better than those who fail.
And I think that's tied to the idea that, you know, from hard work comes success.
And so, if you're constantly failing, perhaps you're not working hard enough, perhaps you're not capitalizing on whatever talents you might have, and so on.
And so there's a strong moral dimension to not succeeding.
I mean, it's also the case that I think many of us equate goals with self-respect.
So if we don't reach a goal, we feel like we've lost respect for ourselves.
Yeah, that's right.
I think humans as a species are completionists.
It's very important to us to finish things, even if the exercise is futile.
And so this idea of finishing something you start has a strong moral element to it.
When we turn ordinary goals into moral causes, we switch from being what social scientists call satisficers to maximizers.
Instead of asking if what we have accomplished is good enough, we adopt all-or-nothing thinking.
If you decide you want to run a marathon in under three hours and finish the race in three hours and ten minutes, this extraordinary feat of human endurance gets counted as a failure.
If you want to write five articles in the course of a year but only manage four, this means you've fallen short.
If you decide you want to save 1000 more in a savings account, putting away 880 can leave you feeling disappointed.
Thinking this way can contribute to a feeling of being stuck, or what Adam calls stuckness.
Yeah, those round numbers are really dangerous in all those contexts because they form artificial goals that we, I say, fetishize.
And I think that's an accurate description, because it's something that we take so seriously that really becomes a legitimate goal for us.
One of the other things that you and other researchers have found is that many of us have a tendency to focus on our own struggles, while imagining that others have it easy.
Talk about how this causes us to become stuck at them.
Yeah, I did some research and basically found that everyone essentially, in at least one respect, is stuck, but they also say that it feels very lonely and they imagine that they're the only ones in that position, which is a really interesting finding that even though we're all standing next to each other with these partitions, we don't know what other people are thinking.
Stuckness is often hidden from view.
And so we sort of imagine that it's just us facing those particular headwinds.
Whereas if you had the conversation with other people, you realize that we're all going through something.
And that's a really liberating experience when you actually do open up that conversation channel.
But even worse than not having conversations about the ways in which we're all stuck, we do have conversations about each other's successes.
I mean on social media.
You hear about people getting jobs or getting gigs or winning awards or good things happening to them.
And, of course, even if those good things actually are happening on a relatively rare basis.
That's mostly what we hear.
And the success stories end up clouding our impression of what's happening in our lives versus the lives of other people.
What people are doing on social media is they are sharing the very best 1 of their lives and keeping the other 99 the part that's complicated or messy or that involves stuckness or whatever they term failure from social media, for obvious reasons,
And so what you end up experiencing, if you're spending one or two or three or four hours a day on these platforms, is you're experiencing everyone else's successors, And that throws into stark relief how different your life is, where the other 99 is real and present and concrete for you.
And that doesn't involve success all the time.
Psychologists have a name for this phenomenon, where we all walk around thinking the same thing but believe we are the only ones having those thoughts.
They call it pluralistic ignorance.
Yeah, it's a psychological phenomenon where your experience of the world feels very lonely and because your understanding of the way other people experience the world is quite different.
And it usually happens when the thing we're talking about is hidden from view.
It only exists in your head.
So the classic research on this topic looked at drinking on college campuses.
And what the researchers found was that When people as individuals, report how they feel about drinking on campus, these are college students.
They basically say I think in general, we probably all drink a little bit more than we should on campus.
Some say we drink much more than we should.
But I think everyone else thinks that the drinking is fine.
And so that's just the norm.
And I deviate from the norm by thinking we're drinking too much.
But actually, when you ask each individual person, the same thing comes up time and time again.
Everyone says the same thing.
I think we're drinking a little bit too much, but I think everyone else thinks it's fine.
The reason they think it's fine is because all you see is the behavior of other people, which is that they're all drinking a huge amount.
And the same thing happens with stuckness that all you see is people making their ways through the world.
But what you experience from your own perspective is something quite different, which is that there are a lot of sticking points along the way And they are very, very prominent and very concrete for you and very visible and salient, but they are hidden when they apply to other people.
And so you get that same sense of pluralistic ignorance.
And in some ways, this speaks to the solution then, for this pluralistic ignorance, which is when you feel like you are alone in being stuck, it's really important to actually resist the impulse to withdraw into yourself and actually try and reach out to others.
Yeah, I think in any case of pluralistic ignorance arises only because there's a gap between what you experience and what you perceive in other people.
And the only way to break down that gap is to ask whether people in their own heads are experiencing what you're experiencing.
And very, very often the answer will be yes.
There is another way we get in our own way.
It's when we assume that progress towards our goals involves following a straight line.
Either you are proceeding down the path and making headway, or you're off track.
But in reality, a long journey is rarely a linear path.
This self-inflicted wound turns out to be a problem especially in countries like the United States.
Yeah, this actually goes back to some of the early research I did as a graduate student.
I was very interested in how different cultures perceive change.
And what I discovered is that in the West countries like the United States, We tend to experience change as rare.
We don't think it happens all that often.
And we tend to think of things as linear.
And so in some studies I gave people some stock charts and asked them to predict how the stock was going to perform.
Some of those stocks had done well in the past, and they tended to think they'd continue to do well.
Some had done poorly.
They expected them to continue to do poorly.
Or I'd give them some weather charts and I'd say hey, it's been sunny 10 days in a.
They would predict more sun.
Or if it had been raining, they predicted more rain.
But in the East, in Korea, in Japan, in China, you get the very opposite.
And so there's this interesting cultural difference where people in the East seem to predict much more change.
Variation balance correction.
When a stock's been doing well, the other shoe is about to drop.
And so the stock's probably going to decline.
When it's been doing badly, it's likely to do well.
It's been sunny.
It's going to start raining and so on.
And one of the interesting things about the view that the West seems to have of change which is that it's unusual is that it leaves you uniquely ill-prepared for the fact that life is not linear, that actually there are a lot of changes that happen constantly.
And we seem to be blindsided by that when we anticipate that there aren't going to be any changes.
But from the point of view of being stuck, you can now see a situation where, in fact, you're going through a period of an extended slump, for example, and it's easy to feel you know I'm never going to get out of this slump because again, I feel like if it's been raining nine days in a row, it's going to be raining the 10th day as well.
And, of course, that then contributes to my feeling of I will never get out of this rut that I'm in.
Yeah.
And so it's a sort of double-edged trap there, where you are blindsided when things go badly and when you experience stuckness, but also in the midst of that stuckness you can't imagine it ever ending.
You write about a video posted online by the actress Brie Larson.
She won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in the movie Room, and she's had leading roles in blockbuster movies like The Marvels.
In this clip, she talks about the secret of her success.
I got told no 98 to 99% of the time.
I know it's like hard to like fully wrap your brain around.
It's even hard for me to wrap my brain around and think of the fact that I've been on like thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of auditions.
It's sort of crazy.
So that's a lot of failure Adam, and not what you think of when you think about a very successful movie star.
So often we focus on colossal success, but for someone with Brie Larson's degree of success to be transparent about her failures and the fact that by her own account it's 98 to 99 of the time that she's failing, I think is really disarming and offers a real note of hope.
And so, not surprisingly, people really latched onto that video, and I found it a very interesting piece of evidence.
I'm wondering if there's an important insight here, which is that succeeding often means a sustained tolerance for failure.
I mean, it sounds paradoxical, but winners are not people who never lose.
They're people who can tolerate losing long enough for things to break their way.
Yeah, and there's a lot of research looking, for example, at the course of careers in various different pursuits.
They look at artists, they look at film writers, they look at book writers and other people and ask where is the most successful period of that artist's life's work?
And the answer is, it's hard to predict.
And there are people they describe as having early in their careers.
They have their biggest successes, some during the summertime, in the middle of their careers, and then some during the fall or the wintertime at the end of their careers.
And so yeah, you don't know necessarily where those periods are going to arise, but you have to stay in the game, keep pushing, even against maybe 98 to 99 of failure, as Larson describes, for the successes to emerge.
Now, perhaps because our model of success is the model of I buy a lottery ticket and I hit the jackpot on the first try.
That's the model.
Many of us think we have to achieve success in one fell swoop.
So we bet the house on some one thing and we say, this is going to be the golden ticket.
But of course, if that one thing fails, we've left ourselves nothing to fall back on.
Yeah.
I think this sort of binary view of success and failure in our culture is really, really damaging, because Success really, by that very narrow definition, happens very, very seldom.
And so there needs to be a stark reframing.
I think one of the best places to begin is to stop thinking about success as this kind of binary, instant outcome and to think of it more as a process or a journey or a system that you employ day after day.
So instead of saying success is writing 100000 words of a book, success needs to be something like waking up and writing 300 words today, or sitting for an hour and writing and seeing what comes out of that.
Because then at least you make it a narrower definition that means success happens much more often.
And you also move the domain of success into something you can control, rather than something that's outside of your control.
Exactly.
Yeah.
You bring the locus of control inside, which is really valuable, right?
Because it's empowering, as opposed to forcing you to throw your hands up and say I don't know what I can do about this.
You know, I'm at the mercy of all sorts of external constraints that I don't have much rollover.
And I think that's really, really hopeful and helps people move forward.
You know, I remember talking some years ago with another Adam.
This is Adam Grant at the University of Pennsylvania.
And he told me there was a strong correlation between artists who are successful and artists who are prolific.
You've looked at the same idea as well.
Can you talk about how, in some ways, taking more shots on goal makes it more likely to also take really good shots on goal?
Yeah, that's exactly right.
That quality and quantity are related strongly.
That the more times you try, the more likely you are to hit on a success.
And there are lots of reasons for that.
One is that obviously by trying more, you learn what works and what doesn't.
And so what you produce ultimately gets stronger over time.
But also sometimes it's hard to know what will succeed.
And so let's say there are 10 different ways to do something.
If you try three of them, you have a three in 10 chance of hitting whatever the jackpot is.
If you try all 10, one of them is gonna succeed.
And so you need to have those misses in order to ultimately have the success in aggregate.
And so it's a really important principle in any pursuit.
It doesn't really matter what you're doing, but trying multiple approaches experimenting, figuring out whether the dominant approach is the right one or whether you should try something a bit different, is the way forward.
We've looked at several ways that our own minds can become our worst enemies and cause us to become stuck.
Of course, sometimes the problem is not inside our own minds.
We're just dealing with a problem that is really difficult.
But it turns out, here too, there are things we can do and things we shouldn't do to get unstuck.
You're listening to Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
This is Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
Adam Alter is a psychologist at NYU who studies how we get stuck and how to get unstuck.
He has examined a number of mental traps we construct that can make it hard for us to extricate ourselves.
But sometimes the challenge is not inside our own minds.
The problems we face are inherently challenging.
But here again, it turns out that our minds can play an important role in finding our way to breakthroughs.
Adam, in a survey that you conducted, you asked people about their experiences getting stuck.
And one of your respondents talked about trying to learn to play the piano and another talked about trying to become a good artist.
Can you tell me what they told you?
Yeah.
So they both explained that they had made some steady progress earlier on in the experience but ultimately hit what they described as a plateau that they couldn't improve further.
They reached a particular point and then did not seem to continue to improve beyond that point.
So here's the one about the piano.
I've been trying to learn how to play the piano.
I was making steady progress, but in the last couple of years, I feel I haven't improved at all.
I continue to practice the basics, but I feel stuck and it's making me worry that I'll never improve.
It feels as if I'm wasting my time.
And then this one's from an artist.
I've hit a plateau and can't seem to improve further.
I need to practice, to put my nose to the grindstone, to improve my skill in drawing portraits and landscapes.
I need to learn how to be more creative and to find creative solutions to my problems.
If you have an exercise program and have been doing it for a while, you have very likely encountered the plateau effect.
Studies of athletes in nearly every sport show this too.
Adam cites one study.
This is research that looks at roughly 15000 people over about seven years and looks at a very simple training regime that they took part in and wanted to understand the effectiveness of this regime across time.
And what the researchers found was that for the first year, and sometimes two years in some of the respondents who were particularly responsive, people became fitter, they became healthier, they became happier in certain respects.
But beyond that two-year process there weren't great benefits to using exactly the same approach in the remaining three four five six, seven years.
And so by doing the same thing over, and over and over again, responsiveness declines, whether it's physical responsiveness to a training regime or whether it's the approach you've been using to learn the piano or to draw or paint.
And what explains this plateau effect, Adam?
One for the bodies in particular is that you become habituated.
And so your muscles perhaps adapt to what you're doing and they stop responding in the same way as they did earlier on.
They effectively become experts at coping with what you're throwing at them.
And the problem with expertise with respect to muscles is they stop needing to try quite so hard to do what it is you're asking of them.
And so as a result, because you're not stretching them further, they don't continue to improve.
And that's true of cardio fitness as well and various other forms of fitness.
So by changing things, you then reintroduce some stress into the situation, and that leads to greater improvement.
And really it's a similar idea with the piano or with art or with any other domain that you can do the same thing over and, over and over again.
And you might become more comfortable with it over time, but eventually that comfort just has no real value to you.
You need to change things.
And part of that is just making things a little bit more difficult, whether it's trying a new technique or stretching yourself in some other way.
Without doing that, you're basically going to hit this point of stagnation.
I want to talk about another kind of challenge we sometimes encounter.
Sometimes, the problems we're confronting are so complex that we find ourselves bewildered by the number of options before us.
And now throwing lots of spaghetti at the wall produces a mess rather than an insight.
Can you talk about this idea that sometimes reducing our own options can be a worthwhile strategy?
Yeah, I studied law as an undergraduate and one of the things they taught us very early on was you will always have too much information.
You know, you'll get facts about a particular case.
Most of them will be extraneous.
They're not really relevant to the kernel of the case that's really important to understand.
And your biggest job is to find what really matters, to simplify.
And I think that's an incredibly valuable skill to use in any situation, because so many things that we grapple with every day are complex by nature.
You know, it really doesn't matter what kind of work you do.
If you're a doctor, the process of diagnosis is going to be complicated.
If you're a lawyer, it'll be complicated.
If you're In trying to understand the financial markets, there'll be too much information.
And so I think the difference between being a great success and perhaps a more modest success is in learning how to instinctively figure out what really matters, stripping away what's not absolutely necessary and really imposing artificial constraints that make what might otherwise be overwhelmingly complex much simpler.
You write about the French artist Pierre Soulages, who has used a really unusual self-imposed restraint on himself in order to grant himself more freedom.
What does he do?
Yeah.
So Soulages talked about the fact that the business of art was complex, very complex.
Just so many materials at your disposal.
You have different media.
And then, of course, once you narrow down the medium, you then still have to decide on color.
And so what Solage decided quite early on was that he was just going to use black paint.
And by stripping away the question of color, of hue, he would leave himself with a much simpler set of decisions to make.
And so he could really focus and refine his understanding of how to use that one tone of paint to create the works that he was making.
And so he became known as the artist who only used black paint.
When you feel stuck because you have hit a dreaded plateau, the solution is to introduce change.
Start a new kind of workout.
If you are a writer of prose, try your hand at poetry.
If you're a musician, try playing your instrument with your non-dominant hand.
Adam has also studied the idea that reframing problems as challenges can be effective in getting yourself unstuck.
He has looked at one particular kind of problem that many people confront in workplaces and educational settings.
There's a very well-known phenomenon in social psychology known as stereotype threat, which is the idea that if you know that you belong to a particular group that is negatively stereotyped in a particular domain, just knowing that is overwhelming and it makes it harder for you to perform well.
So some of the research looked at women in mathematics, a domain that was, at least historically, in sexist norms, seen as the domain of men.
And so when women are reminded that they are women and they are trying to complete math tasks, there's some evidence that it becomes harder for them, because they recognize that, in addition to the baggage of having to overcome the challenges of the task, they also have to deal with the fact that they are part of a group that is negatively stereotyped in that domain.
So that's this idea of stereotype threat.
But a lot of what's experienced in a threat is subjective.
It's the way you perceive the situation.
And so this research I did looked at trying to take people at Princeton who were, like I was, from an underrepresented background in the sense that we weren't from feeder schools that tended to send lots of students to Princeton and to ask them to complete a math task.
And to have some of them think about that as a threatening situation, as a sort of test of their intellectual ability, and for others to just recognize that this was just a challenge, it was something fun that they were doing, and to turn the dial down on that experience of threat and to show that even if you're from that underrepresented background in that context, you are still able to overcome that particular task if you see it as a challenge rather than as a threat.
So it seems Adam, that there are times when we know what we want, but we're stuck because we don't know how to get there.
But at other times, we're stuck because we simply don't know what we want.
I want to play you a clip from a film that captures this feeling.
In the 2003 movie Lost.
In Translation, Scarlett Johansson plays Charlotte, a young woman who who feels adrift in her life, and she meets up with an over-the-hill movie star played by Bill Murray, and she asks him for guidance.
I'm stuck.
I just don't know what I'm supposed to be.
You know?
I tried being a writer, but I hate what I write.
And I tried taking pictures...
They're so mediocre, you know, and every girl goes through a photography phase.
So a motto that recurs in your book, Adam, is action above all.
What does that mean?
Yeah, it means that a lot of the book is about the emotional experience of being stuck and then about the mental strategies we can use to move forward.
But all of that ultimately is in the service of action.
Being stuck is about being physically in a particular place or mentally in a particular place and wanting to be somewhere else.
The only way you can change that is not changing how you emotionally appraise the situation, not with mental strategies, but ultimately the thing you have to do, more than anything else, is to act, is to move in a particular direction.
But why would action help us when we don't know where we want to go?
By acting, you reveal something to yourself.
If I don't know, if I want to be a painter, if I want to be a writer, if I want to be a doctor, if I want to be a lawyer, I can sit here and ponder that question.
To a certain point, there's value in that.
But eventually, thinking about it harder and more deeply just doesn't get me very far.
What will get me somewhere is to inhabit the life of an artist or a painter or a doctor or a lawyer, to take action, to do something.
That's a bit different.
And even if I'm moving in the wrong direction, even if art turns out not to be my calling, the law is not my calling, and so on.
I learn something about what either does work.
In the best case scenario or in the worst case scenario.
I'm eliminating what doesn't.
And that's tremendously valuable, certainly much more valuable than sitting still and just thinking, navel-gazing as it ultimately becomes.
You write about an interesting exercise involving the New York Times spelling bee.
Tell me what that puzzle involves and the hack to basically try and do better at it.
You get a series of letters before you and you have to make words out of those letters.
And the letters, when you first open the app, are in a particular configuration.
There's a central letter and then there are some letters six letters surrounding that central letter.
But there's a button that allows you to shuffle the order of those letters to randomly reallocate them.
And what's really fascinating is I didn't intuit this when I first started doing the puzzle.
But what I'll do today is I'll sit with the letters as they arrive when I open the app.
And I'll try to find words for, say, 10 minutes.
And I'll get to a certain level.
And usually it's not as far as I want to go.
There are different levels of achievement.
I always try to go for the top level.
And if I fall a little bit short of that, I'll hit the shuffle button it'll reorient the letters.
It'll change the order of them.
And what's fascinating is I've been staring at these letters.
It shouldn't matter where they are, but by moving them into a new position.
Suddenly a whole raft of new words appear and are available to me.
And it's If it can work in this very impoverished context where all you're looking at is exactly the same set of seven letters, just in slightly different places.
If it works there and unsticks you there, if you can adopt a pretty serious, profound change of perspective in other areas of life, the payback is pretty dramatic.
There's great return on that investment.
I want to talk about a challenge that you confronted in your own life.
And I think this might be a useful example of a problem that might be basically unsolvable.
You were in your late 20s and you felt torn between remaining in the United States, where you had great academic and career opportunities, and returning home to Australia and to your family.
Describe those two forces, Adam, and what it felt like to be pulled in different directions.
Yeah, this was an interesting moment.
I'd been in the United States for five years in grad school and, if all went well, I would have a PhD and then I would do something next.
I wasn't sure exactly what that next would be.
One option was to return back to Australia, to return to the country that I'd come from before.
I'm very close to my family, and I felt that it was difficult to be away from them for five years.
Another option was to keep moving forward in my career in the, But the experience of moving from grad school into the role of an assistant professor at NYU I found it overwhelming all over again.
I felt a little bit stuck.
I wasn't sure exactly what direction to pour my resources.
I felt a little bit unmoored.
And at the time I was 29 and thinking a lot about what it was like to be at the end of my 20s and moving into my 30s.
And I decided that I needed some big goal to act as a kind of orienting point.
And so I decided that I was going to run a marathon and to spend four months training with a team and to run the New York City Marathon.
And there was something profoundly unsticking about that activity of taking on that new goal that it gave me somewhere to pour my anxieties.
And it really felt like a great unsticking moment and, I think, liberated me to move forward in my life that I'd just started in New York City.
Why do you think running a marathon helps sort of figure out where you should live your life?
I mean, the two things seem completely unrelated to each other.
Yeah, they do.
So one of the things that happens this is why I mentioned that I was in my late 20s, just imagining being 30 is that that's one of the moments in life.
I have some research on this with a colleague of mine, Hal Hirschfield, showing that when our ages end in a nine 29 39, 49 and so on It's a moment when we zoom back and think about the meaningfulness of our lives.
We think about whether we're making the right life decisions.
We sort of see the passage of time much more vividly than we do at age say 24 25 34 35, in the middle of those decades.
And at that moment just having a goal imbued my life with meaning and sort of made me feel that I could move forward again.
Even if it was an unrelated goal, the mere fact of having that goal gave me that sense of momentum that I felt was important at that time in my life.
I mean, I think what I'm partly hearing is that when we are feeling stuck, feeling like we have movement in some domain of our lives, even if it isn't the primary domain in which we are feeling stuck, can be helpful in unsticking us.
Exactly.
Yeah, I think the sense of movement, the sense of velocity is more important than what the velocity specifically and narrowly concretely represents.
It's just the feeling that you are not stagnant.
Adam Alter is a psychologist at New York University.
He is the author of the book, Anatomy of a Breakthrough, How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most.
Adam, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.
Thanks so much for having me, Shankar.
After the break, your questions answered.
Researcher George Bonanno responds to listener questions and comments about his work on trauma.
We'll discuss his surprising and hopeful findings about how we cope with the worst that life can throw at us.
You won't want to miss it.
You're listening to Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
This is Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedanta.
To be human is to be vulnerable to suffering.
Poets and philosophers have told us for centuries that the twin side of happiness is grief.
The flip side of success is catastrophe.
A life filled with contentment is also going to have moments of despair.
When we lose a loved one or experience a serious injury or confront a natural disaster, many of us imagine that we will go through a predictable emotional journey.
Social media influencers.
Drawing from earlier psychological theories, tell us to expect various stages of grief in a fixed pattern.
The idea that people respond in a uniform way to challenges and suffering is simply not true, says Columbia University clinical psychologist George Bonanno.
In reality, people respond very differently to difficult times and circumstances.
George was my guest on two previous episodes titled The Trauma Script and How to Be More Resilient.
Today in our popular listener segment, Your Questions Answered.
We've invited George back to answer your questions about trauma and resilience.
George Bonanno, welcome back to Hidden Brain.
Thank you, Shankar.
Nice to talk with you again.
George, I want to start with a note from a listener named Janet.
Like a number of others, she experienced a major and abrupt loss.
Her father died by suicide when she was five.
He had been hospitalized for at least a year and had mental illness.
He had already been away from the home for so long that it didn't really change my day to day experience.
And I don't tend to cry a lot.
So my mother worried that I was not grieving enough.
And that made me feel bad. and guilty kind of.
Like, yeah, why aren't I more upset?
And then when I was 10, my oldest brother, who was 20, was killed in a car accident.
But again, his absence didn't affect my day-to-day experience.
And again, my mother was upset with me for not being more upset.
So George, Janet felt like she was being made out to be cold and unfeeling.
When we talked last, you told me about your own reaction to your father's death.
You didn't break down and you were surprised because tears failed to come.
Talk about the expectations we have about grief and the expectations that others have about how we ought to grieve.
Yeah, Janet's example is a really nice example of this.
These are painful losses obviously, but what we've learned is that everybody grieves in their own way.
The task of grieving is to recalibrate our minds to a world where the person is no longer alive.
However we do that is our own business in a sense.
There is no prescription on the best way to do that.
We have some natural responses sadness, moments of reflection in which we do that.
But whether or not somebody's outwardly showing grief or crying or not crying, or behaving differently or the same, none of those things really matter as long as that task is accomplished, as long as their brains are able to recalibrate.
And so you know, I feel very sympathetic towards Janet for what she went through and also for her feeling bad that she was in a sense castigated for not grieving properly, when in fact there is no proper way to grieve in that sense.
Hmm.
So your research findings contrast with our culture's dominant model of tragedy.
The five stages of grief.
We talked about this in our earlier conversation as well George, but talk about why it is that those five stages do not accurately represent what many people go through when they experience a tragedy or a setback.
First of all, as I mentioned when we talked before that they were originally, Kubler-Ross had proposed those stages as a descriptor of how people face their own death.
And I have no idea if that's what people do when they face their own death, because there isn't much work on that.
But they got foisted onto grief, onto what people do during bereavement, And they're very prescriptive.
And I think they became very popular because they're so prescriptive.
Grieving is a mysterious thing.
It's a painful event.
And we would like to have a roadmap.
We would like to have a plan, a kind of a prescription of what we're going to go through.
So it became popular in that sense.
But the research has never supported this idea that people go through these experiences.
Some people don't go through any of these experiences in any of these five stages.
They're just kind of a handy thing that people hold on to.
I think they often cause more harm than good.
We received a number of messages from listeners who said that this model you know where you start with denial, followed by anger, and then bargaining and then acceptance that this model didn't fit their grief.
And one of the messages came from listener Mary.
My husband and I lost our 18 and a half year old son when he was a freshman at UCLA and involved in an accident.
It came as very unexpected and was traumatic for us and for our other son, who at the time was a junior in college in Minnesota.
And what resonated for me with your conversation with George Bonanno was the discussion about the five stages of grief.
How that came about does not apply to losing a child or losing a spouse, because those stages It's just unrealistic to think that it's a linear path.
It's a different lens, a different experience when one loses a child, especially when it's at that time of life where you're just so optimistic and looking to the future ahead for them.
And in an instant, you realize that your future will never be what you expected it to be.
For me, the loss is something that's ongoing, because it's the loss of what I thought was going to be the case.
Talk about Mary's point here, George, that grief isn't always linear.
You say that grief sometimes takes the form of an oscillation between sadness and other kinds of emotions.
What does this oscillation look like and what purpose does it serve?
Mary's comment is very interesting in this regard.
Grief is very different depending on the type of loss.
The oscillation that we've observed is really part of the way that people seem to deal with loss.
We focus inward on what's essentially we need to reconcile.
We need to to come to terms with the fact that a person is gone.
And then we focus outward again.
I want to speak though to Mary's comment though about how losing a child is different.
There's much less research on the loss of a child because it's extra painful.
And a lot of parents who are grieving, they don't want to be in research.
But what Mary said, it really struck me that it is really kind of a loss of your future, a sense of you know.
We wrap up so many hopes and expectations and plans.
Images with our children
And to lose all of those really is a very difficult thing to work through, to do. to reconcile.
And it does take a long time, I think.
There's both the grief of the person's death and also the struggle with what it means that their lives are different than we thought.
We heard from another listener who also talked about the loss of an imagined future.
Her name is Emily.
Three years ago, I inherited a neuromuscular disorder from my mother.
Prior to that, I was a competitive athlete and I lost my housing because I could no longer use my body to work and was jumping from home to home just trying to survive.
I finally got housed and I'm so grateful.
But I wanted my previous life, and I still want that life back.
So Emily isn't mourning a friend or a relative George, but she still feels that loss of what might have been.
She can't help but think about the alternate version of her life where she is healthy.
Is there any research on how common this is after a traumatic event and whether these thoughts are helpful or harmful?
There is and there isn't but Emily's situation.
It resonates in general with the literature on grief.
What they share.
What Emily's experiencing with the loss of her role as an athlete and the death of a loved one, is that they're both the loss of an identity.
When we lose a person close to us, if they're part of our attachment systems, they're part of who we think of when we think of our lives.
We're losing part of our identity.
And it's very clear that in Emily's case I mean the very practical things that Emily has lost, but also this sense of who she was.
She was an athlete and that was a big factor in her life.
It provided her housing, it provided her identity.
It provided her a role in life, doing something that not so many people are able to do.
And losing that, I think, is very difficult.
I'm glad that Emily was able to get housing.
I hope that Emily can find other ways than to find a satisfying life.
Many people report these thoughts where they're constantly going back to a what might have been kind of conversation, where they're asking themselves what if this hadn't happened to me?
What if I hadn't lost someone?
I think this is a hallmark of many people who've been through a tragedy, imagining this counterfactual universe where things went on as normal.
Is this a healthy thing or is this an unhealthy thing, George?
I think it's probably healthy to some extent, because counterfactual thinking is a kind of a reconsideration of the different contingencies in life.
But I think ultimately those questions are difficult to answer.
If we're talking about a loss or a major physical illness, there often is no answer.
I experienced this actually myself, where I had a pretty serious neurological problem in my face that required brain surgery.
And it's extremely rare.
Less than a thousandth of a percent, I think, of the people in the U.S. experience this problem.
And the question of why me has no answer.
There's just so many random factors in life.
So I think I think at some point this becomes very counterproductive and dangerous.
And we know that one of the things leading to a worse reaction to loss is rumination.
That's when we begin to get into kind of this intractable grief.
Sometimes when we're experiencing a painful situation, we can feel like we're all alone.
But other times there are lots of other people around us who are also suffering as well.
We received a message from a listener named Audrey who says she survived a mass shooting at a house of worship.
I've learned a lot about trauma responses in the almost seven years since.
As George Bonanno pointed out, not everyone responds in the same way.
I found there were what I describe as concentric spheres of affectedness.
Those who were witnesses and survivors, occupy a sphere in the center and working outward, those who lost family members, first responders, injured and not people who might have been there but were not members of the clergy, members of each of the congregations in the building, the neighborhood, the city and so on.
Within each sphere, the response was quite different among individuals.
One thing I observed was that we all began healing more effectively once we started meeting with one another.
When an entire group suffers, something healing together seems to be effective, which could explain what Dr Bonanno pointed out about 9-11 survivors in New York.
They had to pull together.
George, what does the research show about healing from a tragedy when you have people around you who are also going through the tragedy with you?
That's a very interesting question.
On the one hand, it allows people to share the experience that maybe very few people do experience.
It may be very difficult for somebody not involved in the event to really understand what a person is struggling with.
So, in that sense, meeting with the people who were in the event, sharing experiences, supporting each other, can be extremely positive.
On the other hand, a concern I have and I'm not in any way suggesting that this happened in Audrey's experience, but this is a concern in general that we do know also that some of the support groups that tended to evolve around grief and other types of events can sometimes be counterproductive because they keep people kind of constantly re-experiencing the same pain.
Because somebody else would be experiencing the pain, even if another person has tended to move on a little bit.
So there's the danger there of kind of group think or group rumination around the topic.
That I think is real and needs to be pondered to some extent.
But my general take on this is yes, it could be very helpful, but it could also be harmful in some ways.
Hmm.
Can you also talk about Audrey's point about the concentric circles of people affected by a tragedy?
What do we know about how frontline workers or journalists or witnesses experience stress and grief?
And is it the case that the further you get from the epicenter of the disaster, the less affected that people usually are?
Well, that's an interesting question because that also will vary greatly depending on the event.
There was some evidence beginning to accrue, and it became known as the eye of the hurricane effect, that people right at the very epicenter of a natural disaster sometimes did better than all other people exposed to this event, because they got the most resources, because there was the most concern, because they were so close to the epicenter.
We saw this actually after 9-11.
And the schools, the schools that were right downtown, near the towers.
Those kids actually did a lot better than kids out in Queens and Brooklyn in some instances.
And those schools were, some of those schools are low resource schools.
They got very little attention and very little help.
Whereas the kids right downtown got a lot of attention, a lot of resources, a lot of concern, and they did much better.
If I may just say one more thing, you also mentioned first responders and journalists.
One of the things we've learned is that when there is a disaster, a lot of people are brought into those events with very good intentions, but they may or may not have much training in the kind of psychological challenges they're going to be exposed to.
They may not be prepared to see dead bodies or seriously injured people or a lot of pain and fear.
And the research has shown that many of those people who are coming to help will themselves end up being pretty severely traumatized from that kind of event, which is also a consideration in these kinds of you know how to respond to these events.
So in your research, George, you found three main patterns in how people respond to tragedy.
What are these patterns?
The three patterns are, first of all, chronic struggling, chronic symptoms.
And this is a pattern of people who've gone through the event.
They have struggled greatly in the beginning, and they simply cannot seem to recover from the event.
They, They continue to struggle over a period of time and eventually they end up struggling in a prolonged way, prolonged suffering.
If it's a traumatic event, they're kind of stuck reliving the event as if it could happen at any moment.
And they're in this sort of enduring state of anxious fear, in a sense.
We see that in a minority of people, but it's very painful.
The second pattern we see we call the recovery pattern, and this is a pattern in which people suffer greatly.
Initially they have an acute reaction and then they gradually begin to get better.
This takes some time, but they gradually begin to regain functioning the way they had previously functioned.
It may take a year, or sometimes two years before they begin to feel like their life has kind of returned to normal.
And finally, the third pattern we call the resilience trajectory, is basically the most common pattern we see.
This is the pattern we see in the majority of people that have been exposed to potential trauma or a loss.
They will struggle a little bit in the beginning.
They're feeling some distress, some sadness, some intrusive memories.
They're feeling the intensity of what has just happened.
They may feel this for days, weeks at the most, sometimes a little bit longer, but then they return to a relatively normal level of functioning.
They can be close to other people.
They can concentrate, do their job.
And we often refer to this as a stable trajectory of mental health.
This is the resilient pattern.
When we come back, nuances in how we think about trauma, resilience and different kinds of tragedies.
You're listening to Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
This is Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
There are many popular sayings about grief and loss.
Grief is the price we pay for love.
Grief is like the ocean.
It comes in waves.
You do not get over grief.
You can only learn to walk alongside it.
At Columbia University, George Bonanno, finds that science does not always support ideas that go viral on Instagram.
George, one of the things that makes the study of trauma difficult is that the origins of people's suffering can be very different.
Listener Lauren had a question about that.
She worries that much of the research on trauma focuses on single, life-changing moments.
What I find that the research is missing is complex trauma.
A lot of it focuses on a single life event. and the natural resilience around grief and loss.
However, trauma is far more complex than that.
You see this in domestic violence victims, who are silenced and swallow their trauma and live in abuse and have health complications.
There's a high correlation with cancer and there's obviously a high correlation in mental health PTSD depression, anxiety.
And I don't think that it's because they're not following a specific pattern to feel and embrace the pain and the ebb and flow.
I think that it is an unnatural experience, counterintuitive to the normal human experience.
And that is why it's more difficult to build resilience.
And it's very, very different.
Abuse is very different than losing someone.
Chronic abuse is very different.
George, what do you make of Lauren's argument?
Do we see different patterns of resilience with domestic abuse compared with say, the death of a spouse?
Yes, we do.
And I think I am very glad that Lauren made this comment.
I think this is actually quite astute, what she had said.
There are a few things I want to comment on.
Lauren mentioned complex trauma and I think complex trauma has become a buzzword in a sense for for this kind of repeating traumatic event.
But there's very little research and this, to me, is a kind of a major sin from the research world that we need to try to understand it.
But it's very hard to understand something like that.
It's very hard to study it because you need to follow people over time.
It is a fact that people find themselves in situations of repeated, very difficult and traumatic circumstances.
Chronic abuse is a prime example.
You know, repeated exposure to life-threatening events, poverty and violence.
When poverty and violence come together, you have the same situation.
People can become inured to it.
People can go on with enduring abuse because they see no way out, et cetera, but they are still suffering these sort of inhuman experiences.
What we see when we look at these events across the board is that people are really struggling when they're dealing with chronicity, when they're dealing with these events, that that don't stop and they don't show this low symptom, healthy pattern.
They don't necessarily show trauma or chronic symptoms either, but they show a lot of something they're struggling and they do have health problems.
Lauren had made this point, then she's absolutely right, because our system And this is a very important point
Our stress response system, which is, as I've said before, is a wonderful thing.
It was honed by millions of years of evolution.
That stress response system that we have is designed by evolution, if I can say that for acute life events.
It's designed for emergencies.
We are not built for chronic stress.
It is somewhat inhuman.
So when we are exposed to chronic abuse, chronic stress, chronic war, we begin to break down.
The systems, these finely tuned systems we have that are in sync with each other, begin to get out of sync.
We become dysregulated.
And that very quickly leads to health problems.
So you see people essentially, who are in the face of chronic trauma, chronic abuse, chronic war, chronic poverty and violence.
You see them limping along.
And I think that's the best way to put it.
They may be surviving, but they're not doing well.
And we can document that.
There just isn't enough research really to document that.
But I appreciate the question very much, Lauren.
George, we received lots of questions about how children experience loss and abuse and suffering.
Here's one from a listener named Vera.
I think the part that's missing here is in reference to childhood trauma, which was not discussed in this episode and which I think a lot of people recognize as being very impactful, especially for children who don't exhibit trauma the same way or trauma responses the same way that say, an adult would, or they don't process it the same way.
Lots of examples from the lives of people that I know.
And so it'd be interesting to come back with a discussion of the childhood trauma element.
What does the research have to say George, about potentially traumatic events in childhood and whether their impact and outcomes differ from setbacks that we experience as adults?
The point that Vera brought up is an interesting one.
There's some confusion about this out there.
And I think that's in part because much of the study of children and adversity focuses on really broad caustic environments poverty, chronic abuse etc.
And much of the research on adults has focused on acute life events, one-off traumatic events.
And they show different patterns.
Children tend to show more enduring symptoms, more struggle.
Even when they're not, say, developing PTSD, they're not doing that well.
They might show problems in school.
They might have health problems. that you don't see so much in adults.
But this, it turns out, is not about children and adults.
It's about the type of event.
Because there has been a lot of research on children who've gone through acute life events.
And children who go through these isolated acute life events look a lot like adults.
They show resilience at around the same level.
Some children are traumatized and don't do very well, but most actually do quite well and they do quite well for a long time.
By the same token, adults who have gone through chronic type events, which is say, civil war, they don't look very well.
They struggle the way children who've gone through chronic abuse struggle.
So I think there are nuances that we might think of that are specific to children, because children are developing beings.
So it's going to affect their development.
Now, even if we talk about children and adults, we still have to fine-tune this even more, because children is a pretty large category.
We know that children are very different than adolescents.
Adolescents, in a way, have a completely different experience.
So I want to make it clear that we still don't know that much about how different ages of children are going to affect this, because it's so complex.
There's still so much to know.
We received some questions that focused on how different people might respond differently to painful events.
Here's listener Jesse.
How does social identity in society gender race, economic background, place in the environment, such as being in an environmentally insecure place such as a constant flood zone, people who have a refugee status, etc.
Do these impact resiliency?
Do they diminish it?
Does it depend?
So how do demographic and environmental factors shape our response to setbacks and loss, George?
Great question.
I appreciate the question, Jesse.
They have an effect, but it's a surprisingly small effect.
There is a consistent gender effect, for example in the PTSD literature, that women tend to have slightly higher levels of PTSD.
However, that difference is tiny, really.
People have argued that women tend to be, because women are childbearing for the most part, that they have a different orientation to danger.
They're much more attuned to danger, and that makes a slight difference in the prevalence.
But again, it's a small difference.
The overlap between men and women is to such a large extent that most men and women show the same patterns.
We've seen differences in race, in how people respond to potential trauma.
But then those differences often go away when we control for economic differences.
Refugees are very interesting because refugees are going through so much, so very much.
But it turns out refugees actually cope remarkably well because they have to.
They just have no choice but to.
They're in situations where, if they succumb to the things they've been exposed to, that's the end of the story for them.
They won't survive.
So you see lots of differences like this and I think it's hard to generalize too much, but overall, because there's so much variability, the overall impact is quite minimal.
We received an email from a listener named Brian who asks I wonder if there is such a thing as trauma desensitization.
If a person experiences trauma after trauma after trauma, is it possible that they develop an immunity of sorts to new traumas?
What do you think, George?
That's a great, really interesting question.
We actually did a study on this at crime scene investigators and we found that the crime scene investigators didn't respond to some really highly aversive pictures we had.
But they also didn't respond when they were given relatively neutral pictures and The pictures were designed to interfere with some other tasks they were doing, whereas the average person was very much thrown off when they saw these disturbing pictures.
So the crime scene investigators were essentially not responding to much of anything.
They were just kind of going through in this, for lack of a better word, a little bit deadened to it.
So I think that that's the danger there is, that not just becoming desensitized to trauma, but being around a lot of serious pain and may just desensitize people in general.
They may adopt this kind of deadened kind of attitude.
I mean, you have to wonder then about people who are confronting suffering on a daily basis.
I'm thinking about doctors and nurses.
I mean, you're seeing people coming in and suffering every day, but you're seeing them every day.
And after some time is there a risk that you say okay, this is just one more broken knee, this is one more gunshot wound, it's just one more body in pain, and I can go on, and it's not very much.
Yes, absolutely.
In fact, we confronted this a little bit during the COVID-19 pandemic because and I collaborated with somebody in the emergency department at Columbia there's a culture in medicine and I think this is probably true among first responders, firefighters and a lot of other places, military as well there's a culture of stoicism, a sense that you're here to do this job and their own personal reactions are not relevant.
It's seen as, you know, your own problems are not in the picture here.
You're here to do this job and help these people.
And that has led to some casualties.
And I think during COVID-19, when emergency departments were being overwhelmed, there were some very high profile suicides from the emergency department staff.
And that led to a lot of reflection and examination of how the medical profession views itself.
And it led to.
Actually, what we learned when we looked into it was that a number of the emergency department staff were on their own creating informal kind of support networks to somehow process all this stuff that they were facing, because none existed.
And I think that led to some awareness and I honestly don't know what came of it, but it led to some awareness that this is not a good situation to not be able to talk about it.
Share stories decompress from these kinds of experiences.
It seems like it's really a necessary thing.
When we come back, listeners share some of the ways they've addressed tough times in their lives.
You're listening to Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
This is Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
Clinical psychologist George Bonanno studies how we respond to loss and tragedy.
One way many of us do this is by reaching out to others for help.
But sometimes the people we reach out to don't know what to say, so they don't say anything at all.
A listener named Colin has this suggestion.
I've worked with grief camps for many years.
And one of the most significant things I learned at camp was Becky Byrne, the founder of Annie's Hope in St.
Louis would have conversations with people about the person who had died, like any other conversation.
It was just paying attention to someone without laying all of this.
Oh, you must be so sad on top of it.
I just thought that was remarkable.
And I've tried to do that since.
So Collins suggests that, rather than trying to offer commentary to help someone suffering from a loss or setback, just paying close attention to them is itself a form of comfort.
There seems to be a deep wisdom in this approach, George.
Is there research on how best to talk to people who are going through grief or despair?
There is some research, not as much as as one would hope to see, but there is some research.
And what that research has shown is that there are comments or definite things that people can say, that that during bereavement that grieving people find annoying or unhelpful.
And they they run the gamut from, you know, you'll be fine or, you know, whatever.
I'm thinking about you or whatever that they might say.
And in fact, I think Colin's point was very well put and I embrace it.
I think that, in fact, what bereaved people I think probably most would value is somebody who's just simply there to talk with them, at whatever level.
A great example of this was actually I was writing a paper, I was doing a research study with a brilliant woman, a very wonderful woman named Lisa Capps, who is a linguist at Berkeley.
And she was given a cancer diagnosis at a terribly young age and was going to die in six months.
We were doing a research study at the time on bereavement.
And we were doing it remotely over the phone in those days.
And she said to me you know George, I would really like to just talk about the research when we meet.
I don't want to talk about my cancer.
I don't want to talk about facing death.
I just want to talk about the research.
And she had about six months to live.
And that's what we did.
She wanted to be just a normal person as best as she could until she died.
That was her choice.
So people have their ideas about what they want to do.
And I think it's very important for us who are in a supporting role to be sensitive to that and not to engage in canned responses or platitudes, because people do definitely react negatively to them.
A listener named Wendy reached out to share her story of managing grief.
Her husband passed away five years ago.
At first, Wendy and her then 14-year-old son tried to just get through the day.
She didn't like talking about her grief.
But then, after about six months, she started attending a grief class where people were required to tell the story of their partner's death.
People could barely get through their narrative, and it was just horrible.
People were crying.
I'm really uncomfortable.
But after they made us do this three times, the third time you do it it starts to become almost like a habit.
And I realized that the repetition makes it manageable.
And to this day I still feel like I can talk about it without losing things because of that practice.
The other thing they did, I didn't appreciate the time.
It was talking about your partner, like how you met, what you loved about them, and that just seemed normal and nice.
But a couple of years on, what I realized is the first few years your grief is about you, like everything you lost.
But as time goes on, I feel like that's, kind of gone away.
And it's more.
I think about what my husband lost, what he will never see or experience or be part of.
And people don't talk about him as time goes on.
And it's almost like they're dying again because they're their memories not even kept.
And you know, that's where my son comes in, because he you know he never wanted to talk about his father's death, refused and fine.
He was old enough that i didn't want to force him to to go to counseling.
But what he's very happy to do is talk about his, you know his dad's life and we talk about him all the time and laugh and remember you know good bad, goofy things about his dad and I think that's normal, that's healthy.
There's been debate in the field George, about the utility of getting people to talk about their grief.
In the aftermath of 9-11, for example, it was widely believed that getting people to describe their suffering and horror was a way to reduce their suffering and horror.
I just watched a very good movie, My Dead Friend Zoe, which is all about the importance of opening up and sharing one story of tragedy with others.
What does the research say about the utility of doing this, George?
It depends really on the type of the tragedy itself, the type of tragedy.
The comment that Wendy made about talking about a partner's death.
That's a very interesting point that she made.
And I think it makes a lot of sense in this particular case when one has lost a loved one.
Now, there are interesting treatments for people who are really struggling with grief now.
When part of that treatment is to review the death event, how the partner died in great detail.
And this is, I think, particularly useful when people are struggling to get over a loss.
And the reason seems to be because...
We often have beliefs about what the death event was for the person and how it related to us and what their experience was, what our experience was, whether we were in any way at fault or whether we had some sense of blame.
And when people who review the death event, they for the first time really take a good long look at it.
And it's a way of kind of putting clear in their minds this is what happened to this person that I love.
Sometimes some of the distortions that we imposed upon it drift away when we do that.
And as Wendy said, repeating this a few times, you get kind of used to it.
This is what happened.
And in a way, this is what our minds want to do.
Our minds want to say, yes, this is what happened.
I now have to live with this reality that this is what happened.
And I move on.
I recalibrate and and do whatever I need to do in my life.
So I think in this particular case it can be very useful.
I wouldn't say it's useful for anyone who's grieving.
I think it's useful for people who are struggling particularly with their loss.
But it's not something that everybody should be doing.
In fact, There is some research suggesting this is counterproductive for people who are basically not struggling afterwards.
It in a sense puts them in a situation where they become confused about what actually happened and maybe I should be grieving, or maybe I should be feeling more trauma symptoms, or maybe I am traumatized and I don't know it.
So it very much depends.
A listener named Mariah reached out to share how she dealt with two losses in rapid succession.
First, the loss of her brother in 2018 to a fentanyl overdose.
And then the following year, the loss of her infant son, Liam.
Here's Mariah.
So, after Liam died, I told myself that I would like take two weeks to just lie in a dark room, do nothing, be nothing, just grieve.
But in reality it wasn't really practical, and i think i lasted about five days, and somehow there was the impulse there to get up, to get out of bed, to move.
It was always there.
It was kind of like like a muscle memory that, in the beginning, i kind of relied on.
It was something instinctive.
At the same time though, i think that the fact that i had a job where i felt a lot of purpose, i had a lot of responsibility And I give major credit to like colleagues at the time who really let me return to work without too much handholding, without too much like awkwardness
So work was able to be this medium where people basically like treated me normal.
And it was a huge, it was a huge relief.
So all of that is to say that I really, I don't view resilience as like a character trait.
I don't think of it as a quality that some people have and some people don't have.
In my experience, it really is like a practice.
So, George, Mariah goes on to say that she was effectively compartmentalizing.
That's the way she thought about what she was doing.
But contrary to how that word is generally used, she felt that it was a good thing, a helpful thing.
Can it be?
Yes, absolutely.
I think that's absolutely correct.
What she was doing makes a lot of sense to me, and it's an experience that other people have experienced, have talked about.
It's the idea that I think returning to work is very important because it's a part of who we are.
So when we're struggling with grief, it's very important to remember that we do have a role in the world.
And it is a sort of a carbon compartmentalization, because maybe we'll return home to a quiet room or a quiet house and where the loss is still much more pervasive.
We might take that time to allow ourselves to feel that pain a little bit more then.
And that's very much what a lot of people do.
Moriah also points out that tragedies like the death of a child were a lot more common in the past, and it makes her think about how previous generations grappled with grief.
So I guess you know, on the one hand it kind of like bonds me to mothers everywhere and kind of reminds me that this tragedy is very common.
But it also kind of.
It kind of leads me to think that like, maybe we're a little too precious with grief, like maybe sometimes an appropriate response or strategy for tragedy right.
Like a resilience building framework, I guess, is like, okay, get out of bed and go to work.
Like I could definitely be oversimplifying it.
And I'm definitely only talking about my experience, but it kind of feels like nowadays we can afford to be derailed by tragedy.
Because we have this incredibly high standard of living where we're also not needed in the fields tomorrow and we don't have eight other kids to care for.
So it's not that the mothers of the 1800s were not resilient or they were or were not resilient.
I think it's that they lived in a society that had demands on them that necessitated what we would say are acts of resilience.
So George, there are millions of people in the world who are still in the situation that Mariah describes, and it makes me wonder how much of grief is cultural.
Different cultures around the world treat grief differently.
What can we learn from other cultures and other times?
Mariah's comments are really spot on, very astute actually.
There are definitely cultural differences in grief.
Grief varies greatly by culture and history.
Some cultures have very prescribed mourning ceremonies and people engage in these ceremonies whether they're grieving or not.
They do what the cultural practice dictates they do, and there's something very comforting in that, i think.
Uh, historically as well, we see these differences.
As mariah pointed out, there was a time when people had enormous numbers of children because so many of them died and they did grieve children, but they didn't grieve them the same way.
We think of it now, and i i like this point that mariah made that um, We have the luxury, in a sense, of indulging in our pain which, on the one hand, allows us to really become aware of what it feels like and the value of life.
But on the other hand, there's a danger in that we stay in that pain longer, for longer than we should.
So there's the imperative to get on with one's life, with maybe a little less now, because we're not in the fields, we're not fleeing predators, but these things do actually make us move forward.
So we see a lot of these cultural pressures to do things certain ways.
Some of them are time-worn and they work very well to give people what they need to do so they can move on.
George Bonanno is a clinical psychologist at Columbia University.
He's the author of The End of Trauma How the New Science of Resilience is Changing How We Think About PTSD.
George, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.
Shankar, it's been my pleasure.
Nice to talk with you again.
Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media.
Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Correll, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick and Nick Woodbury.
Tara Boyle is our executive producer.
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