Why “The Secret” is a big steaming pile of manure

Paper we’re looking at: From Thought to Action: Effects of Process- Versus Outcome-Based Mental Simulations on Performance

I’m going to ask you one of the worlds most annoying questions right now, and hope you forgive me… “Have you heard of ‘The Secret’”?

If you have, you know the basic concept it spouts – “Picture what you want, and your thoughts will vibrate out into the universe and manifest what you want!”

Of course it sounds like hooey. Of course it sounds like utter bunk. And, so, of course it’s sold about a bajillion dollars worth of books and spawned a whole industry of metaphysical mumbo-jumbo.

What’s most surprising to me, though, is that I’ve had otherwise intelligent people talk to me about this as if it’s something worthwhile. Sure, sometimes they preface it by saying “Now I don’t believe in any of the mystical magical stuff, but if we take that away, what it’s really doing is getting people to think about their goals – and that’s a good thing, isn’t it?”

That’s what this paper is about. It answers the question “Does spending more time thinking about your goals help you achieve them?”

Sure, I love this paper because it has some awesome research in it. Sure, I love it because it gives me the tools to make it MUCH more likely that I’ll achieve the goals I set for myself.

But mostly, I love this paper because I can reference it to all those “Secret” pushers, and give them a great big “IN YOUR FACE!”

Okay – Let’s look at the paper. Here’s the “Short Attention Span” version:

“The big message is simple – It’s not NEARLY enough to just visualize what you want. Instead, you have to visualize HOW you plan to get there. Just visualizing what you want is actually linked with LOWER performance than no visualization, where visualizing HOW to get what you want is linked with higher performance.

“Additionally, just visualizing what you want is linked with working less than planned on the goal, whereas process visualization is linked with working as planned or slightly more.”

The paper starts off by reviewing what we know about mental simulation (we can call it daydreaming, visualizing, what have you). There are 2 key elements of mental simulation for our discussion today:

1. It makes courses of action seem real or true – when people actively imagine future events, as opposed to reading or passively hearing about them, “they later express greater confidence that the events will actually occur.”

2. Imagining how events are going to happen lets us consider the structure or sequence of the event, the consequences of it, and basically puts us into strategic planning mode. For example, it gets us asking “If this deal goes through, what does that mean for the time I’ll be able to spend with my kids? What does it mean for my ability to keep up with the work?”

So not only does thinking about processes or events beforehand make us much more confident that those things will happen, it also lets us think about whether we WANT those things to happen.

This is all pretty cool already, and we haven’t even come close to the best parts!

One of the big take-aways from this paper is that we have to separate mental simulation with respect to goal setting into at least 2 categories – Outcome simulation & Process Simulation.

Outcome simulation is when we visualize the OUTCOME. It’s visualizing the mansion you want to live in, or standing on the first place spot on the podium, or being told “You’re being promoted!”

Process simulation is very different – Here, what we simulate is everything that needs to happen in order to reach the goal. So here we’d imagine training for the sport where we hope to end up on the podium; we’d imagine the different jobs or projects we’d need to complete well to be promoted – in short, we imagine HOW we’re going to reach the goal, not just that we’re going to reach it.

These 2 ways to use mental simulation are worlds apart – After all, it’s a lot more fun to imagine all the wonderful things that you want, than it is to imagine the work you’ll have to do to get them. But it’s also a lot more fun to nap than to exercise, and guess which one gets better results?

The study in this paper involved taking undergraduate students, splitting them into 4 groups, and giving them different ‘goal setting’ instructions. The first group was the control (obviously), the 2nd group was given only Outcome visualization instructions, the 3rd group was given only Process visualization instructions, and the 4th group was given both process & outcome instructions.

“Participants in the process simulation group were instructed to mentally simulate themselves studying for the exam, that is, to visualize when, where, and how they might study for the exam to achieve a high grade on the exam.”

“Participants in the outcome simulation group were instructed to mentally simulate themselves attaining a high score on the exam - that is, to visualize themselves having completed the exam and finding out that they achieved a very high score on the exam.”

So what happened in the study? Well, the results weren’t earth shattering, but they WERE statistically significant. Here’s what was found:

1. Students in the control group & the outcome group both studied about 5 hours less than they’d planned to study.

2. Students in the process group studied about an hour less than they’d planned to study, while students in the combined group studied more.

3. Students in the outcome group did the worst. They would have been better off not doing any sort of goal setting (they were about 5 percentage points below the control group).

4. Students in the “process only” group were 3% above control – Nothing earth shattering, but that puts them 8% above the “Outcome” group.

Quote from the paper:

“The beneficial effects of process simulation stemmed largely from its effects on problem solving activities, specifically planning and on the regulation of emotional states. In particular, process simulation participants reported having a detailed plan compared to participants in the other experimental conditions.

Focusing on the process needed to achieve a goal also enhanced other problem solving activities, specifically increasing the number of hours of study time participants devoted to preparation for their midterm. Process simulation also led to a decline in anxiety associated with the exam.”

One final note, that will likely be a post of its own in the not too distant future (it was a throwaway side note in this paper, too…)

“The outcome simulation perspective predicts that envisioning a desired outcome will help to bring about the desired goal. The self-help literature is replete with such advice. However, the results suggest that envisioning the desired outcome did not prompt effective actions to bring about the desired goal. In fact, outcome simulation can have negative effects on goal-directed behavior. [Researchers] reported similar results in a series of studies on the effects of positive fantasies.”

It goes on to explain that researchers found that when people spend a lot of time thinking about the positive outcome, they’re actually LESS likely to succeed than a control group.

They suggested that this might be because people believe the success is more likely to happen (remember that from way back at the start?), and because they simulate the experience of having that success – All of which prevents them from appreciating or thinking about the efforts that will be required to actually ACHIEVE that success.

That’s a BIG kick in the teeth to the hippy dippy “If you can see it, you can be it” and “just put it on your vision board” BS that’s so often sold to us.

The paper finishes off with a WONDERFUL quote, which I’ll finish off this post with as well:

“Common wisdom … has suggested that an “I can do it” strategy of envisioning a desired outcome can have a self-fulfilling effect on goal attainment. However, the current research does not support this belief. The results of the present research suggest that a more successful strategy for goal attainment may be to answer the mundane question “How can I do it?””

Want to be brilliant? SLEEP MORE!

Paper we’re looking at: Sleep inspires insight Ullrich Wagner

If you’re like me, the concept of “Uberman” or polyphasic sleep is like a holy grail. The usual patter goes something like this:

“Hey, did you know that DaVinci only slept for a total of about 2 hours per day? Yeah, apparently he napped for 20 minutes every 4 hours.”

It was popularized on Seinfeld, and it’s made the rounds among bloggers & others who are looking for weird things to do. Mens health got into the game, with this article.

At first blush, it’s such a nice fantasy – Cut out all that ‘useless’ time you spend sleeping, and do more productive things! Finally get all that work done! Learn for the love of learning! Become the person you’ve always wanted to be, but never had time to become!

Sadly, it’s a pipe dream. The first clue, of course, is that NOBODY does this for any period of time. Some try it, and some can even manage to do it for weeks (sometimes a couple of months), but nobody sticks with it. That, in and of itself, should tell us something.

But this paper’s not a slam on the polyphasic sleep pipedream. In fact, it doesn’t even mention polyphasic sleep. This paper is about the link between sleep and learning, and more importantly, the link between sleep and INSIGHT.

Because this short paper destroys ANY illusion that polyphasic sleep is a good idea for any sort of growth, and shows us why getting sleep is so critical – ESPECIALLY if we want to generate insights or understanding on things we’ve learned, or problems we’re trying to solve.

Here’s the “big idea” from this paper: Learning something (ie a rule set), then sleeping, then getting a chance to test out that rule set makes it MUCH more likely that you’ll be able to extrapolate & find “hidden patterns” in said rule-set. In other words, you can go beyond what’s explicitly taught a LOT more reliably if you get sleep between initial learning & next application.

The experiment performed as the backbone of this paper is incredible – Not just in the findings, but in the authors ability to conceive of an experimental framework that could be used to test “insight.”

Think about that for a second – How would YOU go about creating a test to see if people had some insight about something they learned? How could you do it in a way that you could be sure that the insight was ONLY related to sleep, and not other factors?

Here’s how this study did it. I’m going to give you the exact instructions the study used.

Paper Excerpt:
"On each trial, a different string of eight digits was presented. Each string was composed of the digits ‘1’, ‘4’, and ‘9’. For each string, subjects had to determine a digit defined as the ‘final solution’ of the task trial (Fin). This could be achieved by sequentially processing the digits pairwise from left to right according to two simple rules.

"One, the ‘same rule’, states that the result of two identical digits is just this digit (for example, ‘1’ and ‘1’ results in ‘1’, as in response 1 here).

"The other rule, the ‘different rule’, states that the result of two non-identical digits is the remaining third digit of this three-digit system (for example, ‘1’ and ‘4’ results in ‘9’ as in response 2 here). After the first response, comparisons are made between the preceding result and the next digit.

"The seventh response indicates the final solution, to be confirmed by pressing a separate key. Instructions stated that only this final solution was to be determined and this could be done at any time. Not mentioned to the subjects, the strings were generated in such a way that the last three responses always mirrored the previous three responses. This implies that in each trial the second response coincided with the final solution (arrow). Subjects who gain insight into this hidden rule abruptly cut short sequential responding by pressing the solution key immediately after the second response."

End Excerpt

The subjects were broken up into 3 groups. One group did the task in the morning, then stayed up all day, then slept the night through. The second group did the task at night, then stayed up all night. The 3rd group did the task at night, then had 8 hours sleep.

So who did better? It was the group who did the task before sleep. And they did better by a WHOPPING margin.



Often we’ve been told that we should review notes & journal entries & such before sleep. We’ve been told that we should think about problems we want to solve before sleep.

This research suggests that that’s a pretty darned good idea. It suggests that sleep is where we take sets of rules & experiences, and turn them into genuine insights.

Chalk up another win for team sleep!

What you don’t know, makes you happier?!?!?!

Paper we’re looking at: The Pleasures of Uncertainty: Prolonging Positive Moods in Ways People Do Not Anticipate – Dan Gilbert et al

We’ve all heard the cliché “Everything happens for a reason.”

Of course, we’re all smart enough to question the wisdom of that, too – Does everything really happen for a reason, or do we just find a reason afterwards for what’s happened?

But psychologists pose a more interesting question: Is it healthy to LOOK for a reason for the things that happen?

Like all important questions, there is no single and simple answer here. But we HAVE learned some amazing things about the answer to this question, which impacts ALL of us, every day.

We all have what can be thought of as a psychological baseline when it comes to happiness. It’s different for everybody, and the easiest way to think about it is like a thermostat. So let’s play with that analogy for a minute. Let’s assume that warming up means getting happier.

Some people walk around at 50 degrees – They’re pretty sour, most of the time. Other people walk around near 80 degrees – these are the people who always seem to be happy – you know, the people you want to smack.

Whenever something happens (either good or bad), there is a change in mood. People who start off happier will get even happier with good news, and people who start off depressed will get even more depressed with bad news.

BUT – And here’s the kicker – within a certain period of time, they’ll always return to their base level.

This isn’t surprising – You take the first bite of a chocolate bar, and it makes you happier. It tastes wonderful. But before you’re even done eating it, you’re back to whatever your base level was before you started. The key to eternal happiness, unfortunately, is not in endless chocolate bars.

So the million dollar question is – How can we increase the lapse between feeling happier & going back down to the baseline, and how can we DECREASE the time between feeling sadder, and moving back up to the baseline?

That’s what this paper is all about.

Here’s the meat of the paper: Finding meaning in ANY event brings us back to our baseline faster and more reliably than assigning NO meaning to the event.

Quote from the paper: “Studies of bereavement, for example, have found that people who are able to find meaning in the death of a loved one cope better than people who are unable to find any meaning in their loss. Pennebaker and colleagues found that people who write about traumatic events (typically for 15 min on 3 consecutive days) experience remarkable long-term benefits. The people who benefit the most are those who begin with disjointed, incoherent accounts of their trauma but end with coherent, organized accounts, presumably because the writing exercise helped them make sense of their negative experiences.”

There is more useful knowledge in that one paragraph than by all the books of Dr. Phil combined.

It’s worth a second thought – and a third, and a tenth, and a hundredth thought. When you find MEANING in a traumatic event, when you can “make sense” of things, you experience tremendous long-term benefits. When you see things in terms of meaninglessness, or random acts, you lose out on those benefits.

[We’re going to focus on some of Pennebaker’s research in the future – for now, it’s enough to keep in mind that he found HUGE benefits in writing about traumatic experiences in order to ‘make sense’ of them.]

So what about the flip side, then? The theory that pops up here is that if we experience something POSITIVE, we’d actually be happier if we didn’t know why it happened. (Think about the concept of the ‘Random Act of Kindness’ – When somebody does something nice for you, for no apparent reason, it makes you happier for longer than if they did something nice for you for a very predictable reason.)

Quote from the paper: “In addition to predicting that a dose of uncertainty following a positive event will prolong the pleasure it causes, we expected that people would not recognize in advance the role of uncertainty. In fact, given that uncertainty is often associated with negative affect, people might predict the opposite, namely that they will derive less pleasure from uncertain positive events than certain ones.”

There was a really cool study done here – Here’s the description:

“Participants watched an abridged version of the movie Rudy, the true story of Daniel Ruettiger, who dreamed of attending Notre Dame and playing on the football team. Rudy does not have much athletic skill, but he makes the team through grit and determination only to warm the bench at every game.

“At the last home game of Rudy’s senior year, his teammates insist that he get to play, so the coach puts him in on defense in the closing seconds—at which point Rudy breaks through the line and makes a spectacular tackle… After watching the film, participants read two versions of what happened to Rudy after he graduated from college, which described equally positive outcomes that differed in their details. Participants in the certain condition were told which version was true of Rudy, but participants in the uncertain condition were not.

“We predicted that people in both conditions would be in a positive mood immediately after watching the film but that this positive affect would last longer in the uncertain condition.”

Here’s what they found. In almost EVERY case, people indicated beforehand that they’d prefer to be CERTAIN. They wanted to know.

But who was happier, for longer, after the experiment? Who’s “uplift” lasted? Well, you can probably already guess that it was the people who were left with uncertainty. They didn’t know exactly what happened, so there was some ‘mystery’ or some uncertainty. They couldn’t completely make sense of the narrative, and they were left happier, longer, because of it.

“The present studies suggest that people’s actual experiences will be more pleasurable if they know that an event will be positive but there is some uncertainty associated with it (a moderate amount of uncertainty, perhaps). People should not walk out of a movie theater before the film ends if they are not sure whether the ending will be happy or sad. Once they have determined that the hero and heroine will end up together, however, and live happily ever after, perhaps they should head for the exit before they find out exactly how the couple made it to the altar.”

The experiments done in this paper bring up some VERY intriguing points, and should give us all some pause. First, they remind us that when bad things happen, we’re not doing ourselves any favors by ruminating about them – instead, we should be trying to make sense of it. To put it into a narrative that makes sense, even if that sense making doesn’t seem like a particularly happy story. We’re reminded in this paper that people are basically sense-making machines, and that when bad things happen, we do better when we can think about it in a logical way.

But we’re also left with an intriguing “flip side” to that coin – namely, that when GOOD things happen, working to make sense of it or to remove the ‘mystery’ will only serve to deflate us more quickly. So don’t be afraid to leave some unanswered questions when good things are happening – You’ll be happier, longer, than if you figure it all out.

We’re All That Gullible

Paper we’re looking at: "You Can't Not Believe Everything You Read" by Daniel T. Gilbert, Romin W Tafarodi, and Patrick S. Malone

You know what’s weird? We all use the word “gullible” a lot, but it’s actually not a real word. Not in the dictionary. It’s just one of those things we say that’s not real.

Did you believe me? Was I convincing there? Did you run to dictionary.com to check if I was a lying sack of sugar?

Well, I was lying, of course. Gullible is a word. And chances are, you’ve seen that particular joke a time or 12 before. So why did I bother saying that here?

Because it dovetails in PERFECTLY with the paper we’re going to look at. Gilbert & his team show something that’s damn near magical in this paper – Namely, that we believe EVERYTHING we read or hear, and then work actively to DISBELIEVE it.

Think about that for a second. For now, it doesn’t matter if you believe it’s true – I’ll show you the studies they did to prove this. But think about the implications.

First, it means that it’s hard to disbelieve. It’s hard mental effort. When we look at some of Baumeisters papers, we’ll see that effort (mental energy) is a physical quantity, fueled by glucose. But for now, let’s just agree that mental effort IS effort, that it takes energy, and so when we’re tired, or “drained”, or low on mental energy, we don’t have as much to expend.

Fair enough so far, I know.

So what that means, assuming Gilbert is correct in this paper, is that if we’re operating on REALLY low energy, we won’t be able to DISBELIEVE anything. We’ll be the prototypical sucker – believing anything we’re told, because we can’t summon up the energy to disbelieve it.

Now, I don’t know about you, but that’s pretty scary to me.

It also explains a lot.

For example, it explains why cults ALWAYS take at least a few steps towards reducing the followers energy, especially in the “early” days. Whether it’s feeding them gruel, or having them go through strenuous physical exertion, it’s pretty clear that they’ve understood this concept for a long time – When people don’t have physical energy, they don’t have mental energy. When they don’t have mental energy, they lose their ability to disbelieve. When they lose their ability to disbelieve, they’ll believe any stupid thing you tell them about you spaceship to God and sign over all their money to you.

Hmmmm – Anybody here hungry, tired, and interested in joining a cult?

I kid, I kid.

It also suggests, though, that if you’re distracted after “learning” something, that you’re more likely to believe it. And THIS could be something VERY dangerous for all of us, especially as the world constantly gets more and more distracting.

“The company’s in great shape” you read on a memo, then the phone rings and you answer it. Now, you’re much more likely to believe that the company’s in great shape, even if you forget about the memo. And even if the memo had gone on to say “Compared to Enron.” You read it, you got distracted, you believe it.

Is it that simple? Are we THAT gullible? Probably not. But let’s take a look at Gilberts research here, before we feel too confident…

The first thing to consider is how he assessed how much mental energy the subjects in the studies had. In these studies, he put them under “cognitive load”, a fancy schmancy way of saying that he busied them with other things. Basically, multitasking. In one study, he used time pressure instead of cognitive load. In other words “Here’s 30 minutes worth of information. You’ve got to process it all in 3 minutes.” Gee, that sounds like most companies I’ve worked with….

A quote from the paper: “The most basic prediction of this model is that when some event prevents a person from "undoing" his or her initial acceptance, then he or she should continue to believe the assertion, even when it is patently false.”

That’s a pretty scary prediction.

So let’s back it up.

In the first experiment in this paper, there were 68 subjects who were to act as judges, and determine sentencing for a defendant. They were told that the reports they read had both true and false statements in them, and even more helpfully, the false statements were color coded. (Wouldn’t it be nice if we could pick out falsities & lies in real life so easily?) The false statements exaggerated the severity of the crime.

Here’s where the experimental part comes in. The subjects were split into 2 groups. Group 1 just read the file, and was told to discount the false statements.

Group 2 was given the same instructions, but at the same time they were reading it, they were also subjected to a “digit search” task – basically, they were keeping their brain occupied doing this other search, looking for certain numbers while reading the report. As I said before, the real-world term for this is “Multi-Tasking.” They had to split their attention. Sound familiar?

So what happened? Well, the group that had to split their attention recommended sentencing that was TWICE as severe as the group that didn’t split their attention. In other words, they appeared to believe the “lies”, even though they were conveniently color coded, because they didn’t have enough mental energy to DISBELIEVE them after reading.

There were a couple of additional experiments done in the paper – if you’re interested in reading about them, you can certainly look at the paper. Now, though, I’m going to move past the experiment section, and pull out some select quotes from the analysis & discussion section of this paper.

“Gilbert et al. found that speed reading a false statement increased the probability that subjects would later recall the statement as true, but that assessing the veracity of a false statement had no such effect. In other words, time pressure affected memory for the veracity of a false statement in much the same way that interruption did.”

If you have time, you’re not going to remember falsehoods as truths later on. But if you’re speed reading, just rolling along without thinking about it too much, or skimming and not taking the time to actually ASSESS what you’re reading – Then you’re in a world of trouble.

“Research on human lie detection has consistently uncovered a truthfulness bias, that is, a tendency for people to conclude that others are telling the truth when they are not.”

This makes me feel a lot better – because I KNOW there have been a lot of times in my life where I’ve “believed the best” of people. It’s good to know that I’m not alone in the “sucker” section of life – and, really, I think it speaks volumes about the GOODNESS of most people that we have a bias to assume people are being truthful with us. We’re not as jaded and cynical and hard-hearted as we’re often portrayed.

One final quote from this paper: “People, then, do have the potential for resisting false ideas, but this potential can only be realized when the person has (a) logical ability, (b) correct information, and (c) motivation and cognitive resources.”

I think the first 2 are pretty self evident – It’s not really a shock to find out that people who have very poor logical reasoning skills, or who are lied to, might buy into some really awful ideas.

But that third point – the “Motivation and cognitive resources” is a doozey. Because it’s telling us that without enough “mental energy”, or without some stake in the game, that we’re much more likely to passively believe something that we’d otherwise be very quick to disbelieve.

As a side note, I’d like to point out that along with cults, hypnotists have been using these concepts for years, often in ways that are very helpful to people. We’ve all heard the stories of people who quit smoking through hypnosis, or who gained confidence, or who had some positive effect (though we usually hear these stories about second or third-hand accounts – for some reason, few people ever tell the story about how THEY decided they needed hypnosis…)

Hypnotists have long understood the power of the “confusion induction” – in other words, they’re overloading the cognitive faculties of the subject. That way, they’re FAR more likely to be “believed”, and when the subject believes they don’t crave cigarettes anymore, or when they believe that they enjoy exercise, then they’re far more likely to act accordingly.

Last words on this paper: It’s REALLY important that you be wary of putting yourself in a situation where you might “learn” falsehoods, especially if you’re in a low mental energy state, or you know you won’t have the time to evaluate the material being presented well.

Because time pressures and low-energy are both factors in believing things that we’d otherwise quickly label as false, we need to be especially aware of when those things are acting on us, and take steps to ensure that they don’t negatively impact us in situations where “learning” something that’s false could have negative consequences on our lives or in our jobs.

Power of the Mind – It’s even weirder than you think

Paper we’re looking at: “Mind-Set Matters: Exercise and the Placebo Effect” by Alia J. Crum and Ellen J. Langer

We’ve all heard about the Placebo effect, right? It’s that crazy thing where your mind makes your body act like it EXEPCTS it should. So it’ll make you feel better when you’re sick and are given “medicine”, even if that medicine is only a sugar pill.

In fact, the “sugar pill” is the most common way to describe a placebo. But the placebo effect is way weirder and way more powerful than just feeling better when you’ve got the sniffles, as this paper shows.

Here’s just some of the craziness explaining the placebo effect that leads off this paper:

• Subjects exposed to fake poison ivy developed real rashes
• People imbibing placebo caffeine experienced increased motor performance and heart rate (and other effects congruent with the subjects’ beliefs and not with the pharmacological effects of caffeine)
• Patients given anesthesia and a fake knee operation experienced reduced pain and swelling in their ‘‘healed’’ tendons and ligaments.
• The mere presence of a doctor increases patients’ blood pressure

Look at those again. It’s utterly freaking ridiculous and amazing. Those are some VERY real effects from doing nothing more than convincing people they SHOULD see effects.

These just scratch the surface of the placebo effect, of course. For the bulk of this post, we’re going to look at the research that Alia Crum did on what seems to be another CRAZY question:

Are the benefits of exercise just an example of the placebo effect?

Now, she did something VERY cool here. Instead of looking at whether or not you could convince somebody who wasn’t exercising that they were (which would be pretty hard to do) to see if there was any placebo effect, she went the other way – And looked at people who ARE doing exercise every day, but probably don’t think of it that way.

Specifically, she looked at chamber maids in hotels. These women are doing physical work ALL DAY long, far exceeding the surgeon generals recommended daily exercise requirements. All the sheet folding, floor scrubbing, and cart pushing adds up over a day – If you don’t believe me, try cleaning a few dozens rooms in a hotel and see how good you feel at the end. :)

So Alia broke the chamber maids up into 2 groups, and made sure that there was only one group per hotel. Group 1 was given a detailed description of how everything they did could be looked at as exercise – EG: “Changing linens for 15 min burns 40 calories, vacuuming for 15
min burns 50 calories, and cleaning bathrooms for 15 min burns 60 calories.”

Group 2 was told about the benefits of exercise, but they weren’t told that their work itself could constitute exercise or specifically how they were burning calories & exercising as they did their jobs.

So what happened? Get ready for the crazy. From the paper:

“After only 4 weeks of knowing that their work is good exercise, the subjects in the informed group lost an average of 2 pounds, lowered their systolic BP by 10 points, and were significantly
healthier as measured by body-fat percentage, BMI [Body Mass Index], and WHR [Waist to Hip Ratio]. These were small but meaningful changes given the state of health the subjects were in, especially considering that the change occurred in just 4 weeks. All of these changes were significantly greater than the changes in the control group.”

So with NO changes, and only being informed that what they were doing constituted exercise, these women:

• Lost weight
• Improved their blood pressure
• Built more muscle
• Had smaller waists

So what the hell happened here? Nothing, and everything.

The women in this study thought about things they were already doing in a new way. Before the study, they thought about the work they were doing as work. It wasn’t exercise, because exercise was something you had to go out of your way to do.

Thanks to the study, though, they were able to have a small but significant change in the way they looked at the world. They could work AND exercise at the same time, and in fact had been all along. When they realized this, without changing a SINGLE THING, they got all the health benefits of exercise.

That’s damn near magic.

It suggests a couple of things for the rest of us, both on a practical and philosophic level.

First, it suggests that by opening our minds and learning to think about things in new ways, we can create a TREMENDOUS positive impact on our lives. How can we find areas where we’re actually being healthier than we thought? How can we find ways where we’re smarter, or more skilled, or more talented than we thought?

Second, it implies that our minds are RIDICULOUSLY powerful, but if we’re not VERY clear about what we’re doing, then our minds won’t give us all of the benefits that are there.

Remember, these women didn’t do any MORE exercise – They just shifted perspective and realized they’d been exercising all along. That suggests that it’s not just the physical exercise itself that’s important for health, but really understanding WHEN and HOW we’re exercising.

So, are there other areas of your life where your mind is keeping you from getting all the benefits you could and should be getting?

If you think no, then you haven’t been paying attention.

First post

"Know Thyself."

It's hard to do that at the best of times. And we're never in the best of times, are we?

This blog is about happiness & success & fulfillment & all of the other things we get when we really know ourselves - in other words, when we understand what makes us tick, what throws us off track, and what we can REALLY do to influence our own happiness & success.

It's not an easy thing to do. Especially since there are hundreds of so called "experts" out there willing to give us the 7 step formula to ultimate happiness & success, even though there's nothing in the world to suggest that there is such a thing.

And there's precious little help from the people who DO know the answers to the questions we're asking - the researchers & scientists & psychologists who've spent their life REALLY studying these things. Because in order for them to get the funding they need to continue their research, they need to publish in academic journals, which wouldn't be any harder to read if you translated them to Spanish, then to Japanese, then back to English.

This space is all about translating it back into English. About giving EVERYBODY the opportunity to benefit from what the academics have been learning about REAL human psychology over the past 50 years or so.

The general format is this: I'm going to introduce a paper, write about what it found, and explain how that applies to us all out here in the real world.

There's some ridiculously wonderful stuff coming - Some absolutely fascinating experiments & findings, things that will make you go "Oh, THAT'S why I did that...."

It's essential reading for anybody concerned with happiness, relationship success, financial success, goal achievement, you name it.

And the best part? There is no "magic wand" BS. There is no "Hey, once I was a bit overweight and was broke, now I'm in great shape & make $1,000,000 per hour and I'm going to give you the 3 secrets that'll let you do it with no effort." There's hard evidence, and sources, and all of the other stuff that the self helpers don't want to give you.

Enjoy