My top-five mental tricks

I’m in the middle of reading Reframe Your Brain, by Scott Adams, and it has inspired me to write up some of my own strategies for self-improvement and coping with life’s inefficiencies. Without further ado, here are five of my own “reframes” that have served me well, and could even be life-changing in the right circumstances.

Avoid temptations by slightly delaying them

How often do you have a craving you know you’ll immediately regret? Maybe something small, like Friday night Dominoes—but you’re down to your last $20 and you’ll eat it too quickly and feel sick, anyway. Maybe something bigger, like an expensive gaming PC you’ll barely touch after the first few days. It could even just be the next sugary snack from the kitchen cupboard.

Something that has worked very well for me is—firstly—not to judge or dwell on the craving. Instead, I set a time in my head when I am allowed to have whatever it is I’m craving. For the snack that might be the next half or quarter hour. Pizza delivery: an hour or so in the future. Major purchases might get put off until pay day.

I give myself permission without judgement because there’s a very good chance that the craving will have passed by the appointed time. An additional rule I might apply is that I have to start over with a new time if I miss the appointed time and the craving comes back. Often, I’ll not even notice and the craving will simply pass out of mind.

I’m not anxious, I’m excited

I forget where I learned this trick, except that it ultimately came from an actual psychology study. The key insight is that, physiologically, anxiety and excitement are the exact same thing. The study participants were tasked with an anxiety-inducing activity, such as public speaking. Before taking the stage, they clapped their hands and announced to themselves: “I am excited.” This simple mental shift had profound effects on their performances.

I have found this trick to be useful even for generalized anxiety. If I’m working on a project and start to feel anxious, instead of allowing it to negatively affect my work, I pause, clap, and tell myself that what I’m actually feeling is excitement. It can help to have some concrete reasons already in mind for why you should be excited, if needed.

I’ve even used this with some success to get over my anxiety of flying. For me, it’s mostly the take-off (and its lead-up) that causes anxiety, and I’m fine once we’re in the air. So, I tell myself that I’m not anxious—I’m excited to get to the good part of the flight. It’s always good enough to get me into the seat, at least.

The 5-year regret horizon

This one is very simple. Anything that happened more than five years ago simply did not happen. Missed opportunities, professional setbacks, friendship-ending arguments: if it was more than five years ago, it has now rolled off your emotional credit report.

The moment something pops into your head from college and you begin to ruminate, visualize a large STOP sign, remind yourself that it happened over 5 years ago, and refocus on something more recent. Odds are, whatever that is won’t get its hooks as deeply into you, and your mind will be free to move onto more productive thoughts.

The only goal is to start

One of my most counter-productive instincts ever has been to set benchmarks at the outset of trying to form a new habit. It feels good to have a schedule in mind (when getting started running/jogging, for instance) of so-many minutes or so-many miles a day. That schedule itself feels amazingly like progress, but it is the exact opposite!

Take a wild guess how many days in the first month I felt up to running for a solid 45 minutes before I had even laced up my sneakers. Funny enough, it did not take very long at all until you couldn’t have dragged me off the treadmill once I got warmed up. The days that I actually got on the treadmill and then tapped out at 10 minutes were few and far between. There was zero correlation between the amount of motivation I felt beforehand and how much energy I had once I got started.

Again: all the schedule and my benchmarks did was make it less likely that I would even get on the treadmill at all. Once I got on the treadmill, the benchmarks had zero to do with keeping me on it. The schedule was 100% a drag on my new fitness habit.

What actually did help was literally anything that made it more likely that I would just get off my ass and start. Clean workout clothes set out with my running shoes. A full water bottle that was easy to drink from when mid-stride, waiting by my keys. A go-to playlist queued up on my phone.

Maximize for just getting started, minimize anything that gets in the way of getting started, and worry about the 45th minute after the 44th minute, and not a second before.

Effective fantasizing for better sleep

Like many people, I used to have an awful time getting to sleep at night. Many nights, my brain just would not shut down. I won’t elaborate further: this might be one of the few truly universal human experiences.

I stumbled upon the strategy that has worked for me quite by accident. Wish fulfilment fantasies, by themselves, weren’t enough to pierce the bubble of anxiety and rumination to calm my brain down. What did the trick was painstakingly fleshing out the details. The more pedestrian the details, the better. I call these exercises “sleep teasers.”

An early sleep teaser of mine was to imagine waking up in the sickbay of the starship Voyager, lost in the Delta Quadrant. This wasn’t just a Mary Sue author-insertion fanfic. Instead, I worked my way through what my first days on the ship might realistically entail: being assigned quarters, having to program the replicators with my favorite junk foods, figuring out how to become a useful and valuable new crew member with skills four centuries out-of-date. Absolutely zero space battles or warp core breaches.

The fantastical-but-mundane nature of sleep teasers seems to be important. Another one I’ve used often is to imagine that I’ve proved (or disproved) a famous open mathematical problem. I’m utterly unqualified ever to do such a thing, but I’ve read books on the subject and have a general mathematical education, so it becomes more a game of mathematical fiction: coming up with a means of proof that would sound plausible enough to your average hard science fiction enthusiast. Sometimes these confabulations have prompted questions or personal insights into the real-life mathematics involved, but that’s just a bonus, if it happens.

Playing the lottery can help, if you have some detail-prone but low-key dream that jackpot money alone could enable. What exactly would it take to set up an animal sanctuary? Or to move back to your home town and open a book store on the square? What’s important is a balance between the pleasantly unrealistic fantasy and the mental problem-solving to work through. On the Voyager, I still got to meet and interact with the characters. Having proved the Riemann Hypothesis, I got to bask in the fame and collect my just rewards.

Whichever sleep teaser I settle on any given night, I tend to quickly settle into a pattern, retracing many of the details of the same mental story. This familiarity and routine, I’ve found, leads inexorably to sleep.