A common challenge faced by my clients is an inability to stop thinking about something that's obsessing them:
- An intractable problem in the business.
- An interaction that went badly in some way.
- A difficult relationship with a colleague or in their personal life.
- Or simply the existential risks that accompany leadership in uncertain times.
While this is an oversimplication, there are three factors that explain much about why we can't simply "turn off" unwanted thoughts:
Emotions Are Attention Magnets
As I've written before, psychologist Victor Johnston describes emotions as "discriminant hedonic amplifiers," meaning that they boost various signals in our mental landscape, drawing our attention toward certain issues and events and away from others. In other words, emotions are attention magnets. [1,2] This is a "feature" that can feel like a "bug." [3] Unlike the slow, methodical process of logical reasoning, in which the narrow window of consciousness allows us to focus on a relatively small number of objects, emotions allow us to process vast amounts of data from multiple sources at once, rapidly alerting us to potential opportunities and threats. (To be clear, emotions do not work in opposition to logical reasoning--rather, they're essential inputs into the process. [4])
As a species we obviously benefit from this capability--that's the feature. The late psychologist Daniel Wegner noted that it's essential for emotions to be able to interrupt conscious thought and capture our attention:
It is clear that emotion should not be very susceptible to willful control. If we could turn off all our emotions, feel no pain, never laugh, not be gripped by fear or despair, stop being excited, and so on, we could easily end up dead... It is good, in other words, that when we feel an emotional state, our normal purposes and interests succumb to an influence beyond our control. The priority of emotions over will is important for our survival because it allows our plans to be interrupted by the immediate pressures of reality. [5]
The dilemma is that emotions are a "quick and dirty signal," in the words of neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux. [6] Just because we have an emotional response to a situation doesn't mean that it's actually worth our attention. Compounding the problem is the fact that negative emotions have a much stronger and long-lasting impact than positive ones. [7] My clients never complain about being unable to stop thinking about all the good things in their lives. So while we benefit as a species, the magnetic pull of negative emotions can make it profoundly difficult for us as individuals to put them out of mind when it would be helpful to do so--that's the bug.
"Meta-Thoughts" Contain "Object Thoughts"
Wegner used the terms "meta-thoughts" and "object thoughts" to describe two different types of thinking:
The term cognition refers to thinking; meta-cognition is the term for thoughts about thinking. Loosely speaking, the process of thinking is something people do to things inside their head. This definition highlights the most obvious quality of thought--its character of having an object. We think about things, and the curious quality of thought is that it requires something to be about... Meta-cognition occurs when thought takes itself as an object. [8]
An attempt to stop thinking about something that's obsessing us is a meta-thought (the effort to stop thinking) about an object thought (the thing that's obsessing us). We're constantly engaged in the process of directing our attention toward (and away from) various possible objects, as we weigh the costs and benefits of attending to (and ignoring) each object:
All meta-cognition can be viewed as the relative emphasis or de-emphasis of object-level thoughts... The result is...a relative concentration on certain object-level thoughts or a relative suppression of certain object-level thoughts... At the meta-cognitive level, the mind registers what is okay, or not okay, at the object level. Meta-cognitions are preferences for our minds, wishes about what we might think. [9]
The challenge, Wegner notes, is that a meta-thought directing us to stop thinking about a particular object thought contains the problematic object thought itself:
When meta-cognitions do step in, they must lumber into the light of the conscious window to try to change the view. As it turns out, this is a key part of their inability to succeed in the immediate suppression of a thought... Our difficult time with thought suppression comes when, in this sequence of conscious thoughts, we get the idea to suppress a current thought. The suppression meta-thought ("I'd rather not think of a white bear") is here, but the thought ("white bear") is here, too. As long as we hold the meta-thought in the conscious window, the thought will be there... We cannot split the thought from the meta-thought, even though this is the very purpose of the meta-thought. [10]
Mental Control Is Taxing
Any effort to direct our thinking is a form of "mental control," and all forms of mental control involve what psychologists refer to as "System 2" thinking, a term coined by Keith Stanovich and Richard West [11] and later popularized by Daniel Kahneman. "System 1" thinking, in Kahneman's description, "operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control." In contrast, System 2 thinking,
...allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration. [12]
But System 2 processing is a finite mental capability--we cannot concentrate or direct our attention indefinitely--and so we've evolved a set of mechanisms to ensure that we preserve this precious resource for those situations that truly require it. We have an "attention budget," and, as Kahneman notes, "If you try to go beyond your budget, you will fail." [13] We can experience "ego depletion," in which efforts at self-control and restraint (including, but not limited to, mental control) are perceived as fatiguing, eventually resulting in suboptimal decision-making. [14]
And we follow "the law of least effort," seeking to expend as little mental energy as possible, taking cognitive shortcuts to arrive at imperfect but serviceable answers to the questions we face. [15] As a consequence of these dynamics we typically experience efforts at mental control as taxing and even unpleasant, which often causes us to give up--at which point our attention returns to the magnetic objects of our obsession.
So what can we do when we're unable to stop thinking about something that's obsessing us? There's no simple answer, of course--we won't overcome two million years of evolutionary psychology, nor would we want to even if it were possible. But there are some helpful steps we can take:
- Dedicate time for "bounded worry." Research suggests that allowing ourselves to fully explore our concerns for a set period of time allows us to minimize our worries during the rest of the day. [16]
- Cultivate our capacity for emotion regulation. We can't control our feelings, but we can influence them.
- Commit to a consistent mindfulness practice. Meditation in particular can enhance our capacity for mental control--although note that it should be regard as a workout in attention management, not a break from stress.
- Engage in healthy distractions. We can't extinguish unwanted "object thoughts," because they're smuggled in by our "meta-thoughts"--but we can substitute alternatives that capture our attention.
- And, as always, write about it and talk about it with people we trust. (And possibly consider working with a coach.)
Footnotes
[1] To Stay Focused, Manage Your Emotions
[2] Why We Feel: The Science of Human Emotions, page 156 (Victor Johnston, 1999)
[3] "It's Not a Bug, It's a Feature" Trite--or Just Right? (Nicholas Carr, Wired, 2018)
[4] Antonio Damasio on Emotion and Reason
[5] White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts: Suppression, Obsession, and the Psychology of Mental Control, page 123 (Daniel Wegner, 2nd edition, 1994)
[6] The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life, page 163 (Joseph LeDoux, 1998)
[7] Bad Is Stronger Than Good (Roy Bauermeister, Catrin Finkenauer, Ellen Bratslavsky, and Kathleen D. Vohs, Review of General Psychology, 2001)
[8] Wegner, pages 43-44.
[9] Ibid, page 49.
[10] Ibid, pages 55-56.
[11] Individual differences in reasoning: Implications for the rationality debate? (Keith Stanovich and Richard West, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Volume 23, Issue 5, October 2000)
- Stanovich and others have gone on to point out shortcomings in the System 1/System 2 framework, while affirming its utility, and it is certainly sufficient for the purposes of this discussion. For more, see Dual-Process Theories of Cognitive Processing: Advancing the Debate (Jonathan Evans and Keith Stanovich, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2013)
[12] Thinking, Fast and Slow, pages 20-21 (Daniel Kahneman, 2013)
[13] Ibid, page 23.
[14] Ibid, pages 41-42.
- As I've noted before, early research on ego depletion suggested that varying levels of glucose in the bloodstream played a significant role in the process, but this conclusion has not been supported by more recent studies, and the underlying neurological mechanisms are still being explored.
[15] Ibid, pages 35-40, page 99.
[16] Cited by health journalist Lea Winerman in her report on a presentation by Wegner at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association: Suppressing the "white bears" (Lea Winerman, Monitor on Psychology, Volume 43, No. 9, October 2011)
For Further Reading
Attention Surplus Disorder (Anxiety and Distraction)
White Bears and Car Crashes (Thinking About Thinking)
Don't Just Do Something, Sit There! (Mindfulness for Busy People)
The Art of Self-Coaching: Attention (Stanford GSB Class of 2016 Reunion)
Photo by apol-photography.
