Texas, 1985. Seventeen undergraduates sit in a university laboratory, trying not to think of an Ursus maritimus—otherwise known as a polar bear. Five minutes earlier, a researcher named Daniel Wegner had given the instruction, “For the next fifteen minutes, please try not to think about white bears.” [1]
“The mere act of trying not to think about polar bears triggered a paradoxical effect,” writes Kelly McGonigal in her book, The Willpower Instinct. “People thought about [the polar bear] more than when they weren’t trying to control their thoughts and even more than when they were intentionally trying to think about it.”
This phenomenon, dubbed the ironic rebound effect, isn’t limited to polar bears. How often have we tried to suppress a negative emotion—fear, anger, disgust, sadness, loneliness—only for it to resurface even more intensely than before? Indeed, it’s a self-perpetuating cycle that we can’t avoid.
One solution to ironic rebound, says Wegner, is to give up. When you stop controlling unwanted thoughts and emotions, they stop controlling you. But another idea, which builds on Wegner’s idea, is to give up control. Not over your thoughts, that is within the trichotomy of control, but over your Thinking Mind.
“When you close your eyes and try to eliminate any thoughts (and fail miserably like the rest of us), obviously your mind is thinking,” writes Mark Manson, author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, on what he calls, the Thinking Mind. “But if your mind is thinking, then who is observing the mind thinking?” [2]
The answer, says Manson, is the Observing Mind. Put another way, your mind watching your mind. As evident from the above example, the problem with the Thinking Mind is that we don’t completely control it.
For the undergrads, their Observing Minds was watching their Thinking Minds indulge in polar bears, even though it was telling their Thinking Minds NOT to indulge in said bears.
Most of our psychological and emotional stress happens, says Manson, because our Thinking Mind and Observing Mind are “fused,” and we don’t recognize the difference.
You can’t suppress fear or anger or disgust. That’s a given. These emotions, among others, are inevitable and attempts to squash them are all but futile. But we can observe our emotions. You’re not angry with parter; you felt anger, but you weren’t controlled by it. To quote Ryan Holiday, “There is the event itself and the story we tell ourselves about what it means.” [3]
The final word belongs to Manson:
“Emotions are not a choice. Behavior is.”
Notes
[1]The Willpower Instinct by Kelly McGonigal.
[2] Mark Manson introduced me to the Two Minds in his free eBook, How to Change Your Life, available here.
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