Despairing Over the Bad Habit of Second-Guessing? Try Mindfulness
It’s easier than it sounds
I have a hard time making decisions.
My behavior around decision-making is similar to when I grab a new book to read.
I ‘walk’ the book around for a while, taking it with me to the living room, to the park, to bed — wherever I usually read — before I finally sit down and open it. If the book has a long introduction, I sometimes read the intro and then let it sit for some days before I finally feel it is time to read the whole thing.
Not all books go through this ritual, of course. Some books I grab and start reading immediately. Others, I ‘walk’ for a while but end up returning them to the shelf. I don’t know if it is the book or my state of mind. Maybe a mix of both.
The ritual is preparation for a book I believe will teach me something important. I feel it’s going to be a fruitful relationship, and I want to prolong this feeling.
With decision-making, it’s the same.
Some decisions are easy to make: they just come to your mind. I don’t give it a second thought and just go on with my life. But others call for this ritual. I keep the possibilities in my mind for a while. And by doing so, it’s like at that moment, all the outcomes are true, and all the parallel universes co-exist.
Like Schrödinger’s cat, which can be simultaneously dead and alive, all the possibilities are real before I make the decision. Once I decide on one outcome, the others cease to exist.
It’s a Terrible Habit
Taking time to make a decision opens space for second guesses. And, oh boy, I second-guess a lot. I think about the possibilities so much I’m always afraid of making the wrong decision. And when I make a decision, I’m never satisfied because all the ‘what if’s’ will come next.
It’s an addictive thinking pattern that it’s hard to escape. I believe this is like an addiction because there is no easy solution.
In his book, The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg explains that habits are stored in the same part of our brain that saves our memories of emotions. So, like it or not, good or bad, our habits are tied to our feelings and sensations.
According to Duhigg, habits have four elements: a cue, a reward, a craving, and a routine. The first is the happening or feeling that triggers the behavior, which is the routine we engage in. The habit is as strong as our craving for the reward. How bad we want it.
In the book, he explains how he overcame his habit of having an afternoon cookie. It turns out what he was craving was really the pause from work, not the cookie itself. So just getting up and chatting with a colleague brought the same reward.
Is There a Reward in Re-thinking?
But how can someone change the habit of thinking and re-thinking? One would think the reward to be the feeling of accomplishment when we finally make a decision. But it isn’t. Because sometimes, making a decision leaves a feeling of emptiness.
In thinking over and over before a decision, the craving is the sense of controlling every possibility. That feeling of expectation that all the fantasies we create in our mind can become real. Because once we make a decision, if it fails to correspond to our expectations, it will only bring disappointment.
The trick is to learn to manage our expectations.
How can we do that? As someone who’s ‘addicted’ to thinking, I’ve been more or less doing it without knowing: being mindful. Although it sounds like a recent discovery, mindfulness is part of how our mind works. It is an innate human ability.
Mind Your Thinking Patterns
Mindfulness involves paying attention to what you are experiencing at the moment, including body sensations, your feelings and emotions, and your thoughts. Whatever experience you are living, you must get inside your head and observe what’s going on there.
It is similar to self-reflection but with a nuance. Instead of trying to make sense of what you are experiencing in your mind, mindfulness helps you monitor all the components of that experience.
As psychologist James Carmody (2009) explains, it requires some unlearning. Like we extract the meaning of an essay from how the whole text is structured, we interpret our thoughts and emotions based on how it all comes together in our minds. We make sense of our internal experiences automatically, almost as if we make sense of a text without much effort.
Mindfulness breaks down those experiences as if you break down the text to see how paragraphs are organized, how the sentences are structured, and what words were used. And it requires the same mental effort.
But as you practice, it becomes a habit. You start to notice your cycles of thoughts, feelings, and sensations and how they draw your attention. You become more aware of how you experience your problems and gain more power over your focus of attention.
So, now when I enter a loop of second guesses, I can detect it faster and get to the bottom. Is it really a problem that needs further examination? Or am I just getting attached to the might-happens and can’t let go of the fantasies? I catalog all the components of this internal experience: this is a thought, this thought is associated with this feeling, this feeling arouses that emotion, and so on.
Observing these thoughts, feelings, and sensations as if I were a visitor in my own mind becomes an emotionally neutral experience. Then I can either work out a decision or focus my attention on something else and leave the decision for later.
Reference:
Carmody, J. (2009). Evolving Conceptions of Mindfulness in Clinical Settings. Journal of Cognitive Psychotherapy, 23(3), 270–280. https://doi.org/10.1891/0889-8391.23.3.270
