According to the Oxford dictionary, a paradox is a noun that has two meanings:
1. A seemingly absurd or contradictory statement or proposition which when investigated may prove to be well founded or true.
2. A person or thing that combines contradictory features or qualities.
I love paradoxes because they are sometimes funny and usually also quite insightful. Listening to the audiobook version of the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu was like listening to one paradox after another. This was especially surprising to me because it is an ancient book of wisdom. So a great paradox is much more than just a cliche, even though it can appear like that over time.
Below is a list of some of my favourites, starting with one from the Tao Te Ching:
“New beginnings are often disguised as painful endings” – Lao Tzu
2. “Who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you’re saying.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
3. “I’d rather be hated for who I am, than be loved for who I am not” – Kurt Cobain
4. “I refuse to join any club that would have me for a member.” – Groucho Marx
5. “You know what the issue is with this world? Everyone wants a magical solution to their problem, and everyone refuses to believe in magic.” – Alice in Wonderland
6. “I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.” – Socrates
7. “Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.” – Rumi
8. “We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their behaviours.” – Stephen Covey
9. “If you don’t risk anything you risk everything.” – Mark Zuckerberg
10. “The more we do, the more we can do; the more busy we are, the more leisure we have.” – William Hazlitt
11. “Only you can take responsibility for your happiness…but you can’t do it alone. It’s the great paradox of being human.” – Simon Sinek
12. “If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done?” – George Carlin
13. “Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.” – Frank Herbert
14. “Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.” – Oscar Wilde
15. “Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.” ―Mahatma Gandhi
16. “He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.”― Michel de Montaigne
17. “A lot of people never use their initiative because no-one told them to.” – Banksy
18. “If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide to prove that they should value it? If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument could you provide to show the importance of logic?” ― Sam Harris
19. “Let go of certainty. The opposite isn’t uncertainty. It’s openness, curiosity and a willingness to embrace paradox, rather than choose up sides. The ultimate challenge is to accept ourselves exactly as we are, but never stop trying to learn and grow.” ― Tony Schwartz
20. “If you don’t get what you want, you suffer; if you get what you don’t want, you suffer; even when you get exactly what you want, you still suffer because you can’t hold onto it forever. Your mind is your predicament. It wants to be free of change. Free of pain, free of the obligations of life and death. But change is law and no amount of pretending will alter that reality.” – Socrates
“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.” — Isaac Asimov
The Longevity Project
Over 1,500 of the most promising and brightest boys and girls were recruited in 1921 by Lewis Terman. Unfortunately, he died in 1956, but the study continued for decades afterwards. All participants were born around 1910 and studied for 80 years or until they died. It was then possible to figure out who lived the longest and why.
Although each child was potentially gifted, not all lived long and happy lives. Fortunately, analysis of this extensive data has taken place for over twenty years at The University of California in Riverside.
The study’s significant findings are summarised in the 2011 book “The Longevity Project: Surprising Discoveries for Health and Long-Life from the Landmark Eight-Decade Study” by Howard Friedman and Leslie Martin. I listened to this audiobook recently and was quite surprised with some of its key results:
1. Living honestly is essential.
“A key part of one of the healthy paths is called ‘The High Road.’ Such an individual has good friends, meaningful work and a happy, responsible marriage. The thoughtful planning and perseverance that such people invest in their careers and relationships promote long life naturally and automatically, even when challenges arise.”
2. Please do NOT send your children to school earlier than their peers.
“Starting formal schooling at a very early age was not a great idea for most. Children need unstructured playtime, and they need to get along with their peers; starting young seemed to alienate them.”
3. Illness is NOT random.
“Those that live longer are often healthier throughout their years and (managed to) avoid serious ailments altogether.”
“Those who are healthier tend to be happier, and those who are happier tend to be healthier.”
“It’s never too late to choose a healthier path. The first step is to throw away the lists and stop worrying about worrying.”
“Thinking of making changes as taking ‘steps’ is a grand strategy. You can’t change major things about yourself overnight. But making small changes, and repeating those steps, can eventually create that path to a longer life.”
4. Good marriages lead to better health, especially for men.
“Marriage is only health-promoting for men who are well-suited to marriage and have a good marriage. For others, it is more complicated.”
“Women who stayed single, were widowed or got divorced often thrived more than women who were married to troublesome husbands.”
“Men who stayed divorced were at high risk for premature mortality.”
5. Divorce during childhood predicts early death in adulthood.
“The strongest social predictor is parental divorce, as it often pushes the child into many unhealthy directions, including heavier drinking and smoking, less education, lower career achievements and a greater risk of later divorce themselves.”
6. Follow the long-term recommendations that are right for you.
“The long-lived did not find the secret to health in broccoli, medical tests, vitamins or jogging. Rather they were individuals with certain constellations of habits and patterns of living. Their personalities, career trajectories and social lives proved highly relevant to their long-term health, often in ways we did not expect.”
“You need to make changes that will be sustainable in the long term. We say, if you don’t like jogging, don’t jog! Instead, begin doing things that you enjoy and can keep up, like a walk at lunchtime with a friend or vigorous gardening.”
“The usual piecemeal suggestions of relax, eat vegetables, lose weight and get married are lifesaving for some, but neither effective nor economical for many.”
“Some of the minutiae of what people think will help us lead long, healthy lives, such as worrying about the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids in the foods we eat, actually are red herrings, distracting us from the major pathways. When we recognise our long-term healthy and unhealthy patterns, we can begin to maximise the healthy patterns.”
7. Conscientiousness is the most critical personality factor for longevity.
“Conscientiousness is very important. Unconscientious boys, even bright ones, are more likely to grow up to have poor marriages, smoke more, drink more, achieve less education, be relatively unsuccessful at work, and die younger.”
“Conscientious people stay healthier and live longer for three reasons:
First, they do more things to protect their health.
Secondly, they are biologically predisposed to be healthier, and
Lastly, they end up in more beneficial situations and relationships.”
8. Working hard can be helpful for you.
“Those who worked the hardest often lived the longest…especially if they were involved in meaningful careers and were dedicated to things and people beyond themselves.”
“It was clear that working hard to overcome adversity or biting off more than you can chew — and then chewing it — does not generally pose a health risk. Striving to accomplish your goals, setting new aims when milestones are reached, and staying engaged and productive is what those heading to a long life tend to do. The long-lived didn’t shy away from hard work; the opposite seemed true.”
9. Resilience is protective for health.
“Depending on the circumstances, a traumatic event such as parental divorce could contribute to a longer life if the child learned to be resilient.”
“Resilience is important, and can be achieved via a sense of personal accomplishment, the strength of character and maturity.”
“Combat veterans are less likely to live long lives, but surprisingly the psychological stress of war itself is not necessarily a major health threat. Rather, it is a cascade of unhealthy patterns that sometimes follows. Those who find meaning in a traumatic experience and can reestablish a sense of security about the world usually return to a healthy pathway.”
10. Human connection is essential.
“Having pets can improve well-being, but they do not help people live longer and are not a substitute for friends.”
“People who feel loved and cared for report a better sense of well-being.”
“The clearest health benefit of social relationships comes from being involved with and helping others.”
“It is important to be well-integrated into your community.”
“Connecting with and helping others is more important than obsessing over a rigorous exercise program.”
“The groups you associate with often determine the type of person you become — healthy or unhealthy.”
The Harvard Study of Adult Development began in 1938. It is sometimes also called ‘The Grant Study’.
This longitudinal prospective study aimed to identify predictors of healthy ageing in real-time.
For 79 years, it has examined the lives of 268 physically and mentally healthy Harvard college sophomores from 1939–1944 until their death, including eventual US President John F. Kennedy. It has also incorporated many of their offspring and 456 disadvantaged inner-city youths who grew up in Boston between 1940 to 1945.
Earlier this year, I listened to the 2012 audiobook by George Vaillant, titled “Triumphs of Experience.” He was the previous director of the study.
The primary research findings include:
1. “Alcoholism is a disorder of great destructive power.”
Alcoholism precedes marital difficulties and is the leading cause of divorce, with 57% of divorces traced to alcoholism.
Alcoholism can also lead to the later development of depression and neurosis.
Alcoholism is the most significant predictor of early death alongside cigarette smoking.
2. “Above a certain level, intelligence doesn’t matter.”
There is no significant difference in income earned by men with an IQ of 110–115 compared to men with an IQ higher than 150.
3. “Ageing liberals have more sex.”
While political ideology has no significant impact on life satisfaction overall, most liberal men continue to have an active sex life into their 80s. In contrast, conservative men are likelier to cease having sex by 68.
4. “For good or ill, the effects of childhood last.”
A warm childhood relationship with the mother predicts greater financial earnings later in life ($87,000 more than males who had uncaring mothers), greater effectiveness at work later in life, and a three times lower risk of dementia in old age.
A warm childhood relationship with the father predicts lower rates of anxiety and pessimism during adulthood, increased life satisfaction later in life, reduced difficulties in letting others get close and greater enjoyment of vacations throughout life.
5. “It is not one thing for good or ill — social advantage, abusive parents, physical weakness — that determines how children adapt to life, but the quality of their total experience.”
It means that what goes right during childhood matters much more than what goes wrong.
If bad things happen, as long as they are outweighed by the good, you are likely to still turn out okay.
“Bleak childhoods were not always associated with bleak marriages.”
“Restorative marriages and maturing [psychological] defences” are “the soil out of which resilience and post-traumatic growth emerge.”
6. “People really can change, and people really can grow. So childhood need be neither destiny nor doom.”
7. “Even the death of a parent was relatively unimportant by the time the men were fifty. By age eighty, men who had lost parents when young were as mentally and physically healthy as men whose parents had lovingly watched them graduate from high school.”
8. “Prudence, forethought, willpower, and perseverance in junior high school were the best predictors of vocational success at age fifty.”
9. “All fifty-five Best Outcomes had gotten married relatively early and stayed married for most of their adult lives. Proportionately three times as many of the Best Adjusted men enjoyed lifelong happy marriages as the Worst.”
The effect of marriage was even starker for the inner-city men of the Glueck Study: “two-thirds of the never-married were in the bottom fifth in overall social relations, 57% were in the bottom fifth in income, and the study raters classified 71% as mentally ill.”
“It turned out that happy marriages after eighty were not associated either with warm childhoods or mature defences in early adulthood — that is, you don’t have to start ‘all grown up’ to end up solidly married.”
10. “It was the capacity for intimate relationships that predicted flourishing in all aspects of these men’s lives.” In other words, “Happiness is love. Full stop.”
Spouses’ mutual dependence on each other was associated with happy and healthy marriages. For example, 76% of the men still alive at age eighty-five said their marriages were happy.
“Most of the men who flourished found love before thirty, and that was why they flourished.”
See the latest director of the study Robert Waldinger talk about the key findings from the Harvard Study of Adult Development for more information. His TED talk has millions of views:
I hope you find these highly significant findings as fascinating as I do.
They also give us scientifically supported indicators of what to do if you want to live a happy, healthy, and long life.
Just the other day, I was having a debate with a client about isolation versus loneliness.
He believed that social contact with others was a more significant predictor of well-being, whereas I thought how close we felt was more important for long-term health and happiness.
In other words, he thought that the number of interactions with others was more important than the quality of the relationships. I was solidly on team quality over quantity when it came to the type of relations that we wanted in our lives.
Because I wasn’t sure whose position was more supported by research, I further explored the issue.
My aim in writing this post is to define the difference between isolation and loneliness clearly. I will then highlight what the scientific evidence suggests.
Isolation
The Merriam-Webster dictionary for English language learners defines isolation as:
“The state of being in a place or situation that is separate from others: the condition of being isolated”
Notice with this definition that there is no emotion connected to it. It merely indicates being isolated or separate from others.
Someone could choose to live a solitary life in isolation, and they may be happy with their choice. Alexandra de Steiguer, a shy individual who spent a lot of time alone when she was a child, chooses to isolate herself each winter as the sole ‘caretaker’ of the Oceanic Hotel on an island in New Hampshire. For the past 19 winters, she has spent months on the island without any guests.
de Steiguer states:
“it’s the thing I look forward to every year… When I come out here it’s like a homecoming. All those details of mainland life just fall away.”
She later says:
“Being alone (has) it’s advantages. It’s peaceful, and I can use my imagination…It makes me feel connected to life (and the natural world) in a way that I don’t normally feel.”
I don’t think I could do what she does, especially after watching ‘The Shining’, but each to their own.
Henry David Thoreau also glorified isolation and solitude in his famous book ‘Walden; or Life in the Woods’, stating:
“I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”
To write the book, Thoreau built a cabin near a pond in 1845 and lived there for the next two years.
He also highly valued simplifying life and reconnecting with nature:
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
Before you think about selling up everything in Emile Hirsch’s ‘Into the Wild’ style and moving to the wilderness by yourself, it is important to highlight two things first:
Thoreau walked into the nearby town of Concord, Massachusetts, almost daily and received visitors regularly.
In ‘Into the Wild’, Hirsch’s character Christopher McCandless (**spoiler alert**) dies after eating a poisonous plant and concludes, “Happiness only real when shared.”
When solitude doesn’t involve nature and someone forces it upon you, it is often considered a devastating form of punishment. For this reason, various prisons use solitary confinement all over the world. However, prisons often violate human rights with solitary confinement. For example, the UN’s Mandela Rules state that humans must not be “without meaningful human contact for more than 15 consecutive days” (Martin, 2016).
People would rather be out in the prison yard where they could be stabbed or beaten up instead of in isolation, making me realise that humans are social creatures. Too much time in isolation can lead to active psychosis or acute suicidality in approximately one-third of the prisoners exposed to solitary confinement (Rodriguez, 2016). It can also lead to crippling social anxiety for prisoners once released into society (Breslow, 2014).
Consequently, I can’t help but feel that except for a few individual cases or people who are very introverted, too much isolation does more harm than good.
Loneliness
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines loneliness as:
“Sad feelings that come from being apart from other people”
Notice the focus of the definition is on the feelings of sadness. Unlike isolation, loneliness suggests a deficit and a longing for companionship and a genuine connection that is not there.
As JD in ‘Scrubs’ suggests, it is also possible to feel lonely in a crowded space, even though you could not be considered isolated:
So what is more damaging — being separate from others, or feeling apart from others?
The Village Effect
Our brains light up during human interactions, primarily in-person face-to-face contact. Online communication and passively watching videos don’t have the same effect.
In her 2017 TED talk, Susan Pinker looks at different reasons why people live longer, including the role that relationships play:
As you can see in the graph above, minimising isolation and loneliness was more critical for staying alive than someone’s BMI, activity level, smoking and drinking behaviours, or even their heart health and blood pressure. While these factors are still relevant, having constant and close relationships is almost essential for our long-term health and longevity. Quantity, or level of integration, is seen as slightly more important than the closeness of relationships or quality — one point for my client.
Either way, in her book ‘The Village Effect’, Pinker suggests that we would all benefit from the type of interconnectedness that a small village lifestyle provides.
Pinker also believes that we would benefit more by increasing our in-person face-to-face contact and cutting back our use of technology to better connect with others.
Alone Together
Another fascinating book that I read in 2017 was ‘Alone Together’ by Sherry Turkle.
Turkle’s 2011 book also highlights the difference between how often we interact with other people and how sad, disconnected or alone we feel.
Her 2012 TED talk nicely summarises the negative aspects of technology and how it is leading to a greater sense of loneliness, even though it is easier than ever to remain in contact in some way or another:
As Turkle says:
“we use conversation with each other to learn how to have conversation with ourselves. A flight from conversation can really matter, because it can compromise our capacity for self reflection. For kids growing up, that skill is a bedrock for development.”
Turkle concludes:
“we’re lonely, but we’re afraid of intimacy. (We want) the illusion of companionship, without the demands of friendship.” (As a result, we) expect more from technology, and less from each other. (We imagine, that with technology), we’ll never have to be alone.”
It’s pretty scary stuff when you think about it. However, Turkle’s findings indicate that loneliness is more damaging than isolation, so one point for me.
Other Research
Social isolation is associated with:
an increased risk of depression (Hari, 2018),
more heart disease (Barth, Schneider, & von Känel, 2010),
a more significant risk of infectious illness (Cohen et al., 1997),
a higher risk of major depressive disorder (Hari, 2018),
increased blood pressure (Hawkley et al., 2010)
heightened cortisol (Cacioppo et al., 2000)
elevated inflammation (Steptoe et al., 2004), and
increased risk of heart disease, functional decline and early death (Patterson & Veenstra, 2010; Perissinotto, Stijacic Cenzer & Covinsky, 2012).
A 2013 study titled “Social Isolation, Loneliness and All-Cause Mortality in Older Men and Women” looked at 6,500 men and women over 51 from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing between 2004 and March 2012. After taking demographics and health at baseline into account, social isolation significantly predicted later mortality, but loneliness did not (Steptoe, Shankar, Demakakos & Wardle, 2013).
Both loneliness and social isolation were associated with an increased risk of mortality. Still, reducing isolation was considered more critical in reducing the risk of premature death than loneliness. Furthermore, loneliness did not add to the risk of early death for already socially isolated people (Steptoe et al., 2013).
Final Outcome and Recommendations
THE VERDICT: SOCIAL ISOLATION IS MORE DANGEROUS THAN LONELINESS!
I am surprised to be wrong, but I am glad to have a bias pointed out whenever it occurs. I have never felt socially isolated, but I have felt lonely, so my own experience must have influenced my opinion to some degree.
Social isolation is more hazardous to our long-term health than the subjective feeling of loneliness. However, both of these states are potentially damaging, and you should take steps if you are experiencing them regularly.
Lifeline recommends the following strategies for overcoming social isolation and loneliness:
“Connect or reconnect with friends and family — staying in contact with loved ones can prevent loneliness and isolation. If your family don’t live nearby, technology can help you keep in touch.
Get out and about — regular outings for social functions, exercise, visiting friends, doing shopping, or simply going to public places can help.
Get involved in your community — Try a new (or old) hobby, join a club, enrol in a study, or learn a new skill. Try looking online at your local TAFE/Community College, library or community centre for things in your area that might be interesting to you.
Volunteer — helping others is a great way to help yourself feel more connected.
Consider getting a pet –pets are wonderful companions and can provide comfort and support during times of stress, ill-health or isolation.
Get support — If loneliness and social isolation are causing you distress, you should discuss your concerns with a GP, counsellor or a trusted person.”
Engaging in treatment with a clinical psychologist could help if social anxiety or other mental health difficulties contribute to your isolation or loneliness. If not, the meetup website is an excellent resource for getting out there, trying some new things, and meeting some new people.
As George Valliant says:
“Joy is connection… the more areas in your life you can make connection, the better.”
In the classic Sociology book ‘Bowling Alone’, Robert Putnam argues that social capital (reciprocal connections among people) has been in a steady decline ever since its peak in 1964.
By 2000, the average American was 58% less likely to attend a club meeting than an individual only 25 years earlier. It may not seem like a big deal until you realise that regularly participating in a social group halves your risk of dying in the next 12 months.
It’s not just the joining of groups that have changed either. For example, we are 45% less likely to invite friends to our place and 33% less likely to have dinner around the table with the whole family. We are also 40% less likely to join a bowling league, surprisingly the number one participation sport in the U.S. (Putnam, 2000).
This overall decline in social capital has also resulted in a loss of mutual trust. For example, from 1966 to 1998, the proportion of Americans who endorsed trusting the federal government “only some of the time” or “almost never” rose from 30% to 75%. Without this trust in others, we no longer know who to turn to for help and support when needed.
Why Has Social Capital Declined?
Putnam believed that some of the main culprits for the loss of social capital were:
The changes in family structure. More people live alone, in a single-parent home, or decide not to have children.
Suburban sprawl and longer commutes. With less time, energy and interest for leisure and social activities outside of work and commuting.
A generational effect. Older generations (pre-boomers) have been consistently more civic and socially engaged than the Baby Boomers, who have been more civic and socially engaged than generation X’ers, who have been more civic and socially engaged than Millennials. The only thing that Millenials do more than older generations is hours spent volunteering individually.
Technology has led to the privatisation of leisure time. The more people watch TV or spend time on social media or their smartphones, the less time they spend involved in social capital-type activities. Putnam believed that TV might have contributed up to 40% of the overall decline in social capital since 1965. The internet and smartphones have increased this privatisation of leisure since 2000.
How Much Time do People Spend on Technology?
The 2013 documentary ‘The Mask You Live In’ has some pretty scary statistics about how much technology is consumed by male children and teenagers. For example, in the U.S., the average boy:
* spends 40 hours a week watching television, including sports and movies.
* spends 15 hours per week playing video games.
* spends 2 hours per week watching porn, with 21% of young men using porn daily.
The Potential Consequences of Excessive Technology Use
Although some people write off the TV, video games, and the internet as harmless forms of entertainment that help keep kids safe, out of trouble and off the streets, they come with their risks and potential consequences. For example, the following data in ‘The Mask You Live In’ documentary:
* 31% of young males report feeling addicted to the video games they play.
* 50% of parents don’t monitor the content or ratings of video games, even though 90% of games rated appropriate for children over 10 contain violence.
* By 18, the average male has seen 200,000 acts of violence on screen, including 40,000 murders.
Exposure to violent media may:
* lead to children becoming less sensitive to the pain and suffering of others,
* lead to children becoming more fearful of the world around them, and
* lead to children behaving in more aggressive and harmful ways towards others.
Exposure to pornography:
* increases sexual aggression by 22%.
* increases the acceptance of rape myths (that women desire sexual violence) by 31%
— The Mask You Live In
The typical response by the content producers to statistics like these is that the content we watch doesn’t impact our behaviour.
BUT if this was the case, WHY do we have a multi-billion dollar advertising industry?
IF media images don’t affect people’s subsequent behaviour, WHY would commercials, or product placements exist?
WHY would companies be happy to pay millions for 30-second Super Bowl commercials?
BECAUSE the COMPANIES paying for the commercials and the marketers producing the commercials THINK that WHAT WE SEE IMPACTS OUR BELIEFS AND BEHAVIOURS.
If a 30-second commercial can change our attitude or behaviours towards something, why won’t seeing 200,000 acts of violence before 18?
Who is fooling who? The general public, or the multi-billion dollar corporations and industries?
The Problem of Smart Phones and Digital Streaming
Since 2013, the problem of technology has only gotten worse, and it is now eating into even more of our leisure time, as shown in this clear depiction by Adam Alter in his 2017 TED talk:
The New York University psychologist presented data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to show that sleep, working, commuting and activities of daily living (cleaning, showering, eating etc.) have all taken up a similar amount of time over the past ten years.
As shown in the red (data from the mobile app ‘Moment’), what has changed is how much time we spend looking at screens. It used to be only minutes in 2007. Now our phones, laptops and tablet usage is taking up most of our free time and dramatically cutting into our social and leisure time, much like TV had previously done in the second half of the 20th century.
Unlike TV, this has not been by accident, with today’s most brilliant minds often focusing on how to attract and sustain our attention on their games, sites, and apps. Alter explored this brilliantly in his recent book ‘Irresistible’, which I put in my top 40 favourite psychology books countdown.
A 2017 review by Brendan Meagher on the Australian Psychological Society Website introduced me to the term ‘problematic mobile phone use’. It is “an inability to regulate one’s mobile phone use, which has negative consequences in daily life” (Billieux, 2012).
Australia is now fourth in the world in terms of smartphone usage. 84% of us have a mobile phone, with 85% of teenagers and young adults exceeding 2 hours of screen use on their phones every day. The average for all Australian mobile phone users is 2.5 hours a day, which adds up to 38 days per year. We check something on our phones 30 separate times each day, and 45% of Australians now say that they couldn’t live without their phones (Meagher, 2017). The scariest statistic is that 42% of Australians over 18 still use their phones while driving, despite this creating a much higher risk of car accidents (Rumschlag, 2015).
Consequences of Excessive Mobile Phone Use
Mobile phone overuse has similarities to addictions or substance use problems, including tolerance, withdrawal, and daily-life disturbance (Kwon et al., 2013).
Adverse consequences include increased risk of aggression, sleep disturbance (Yang et al., 2010) and physical health problems (Lee & Seo, 2014).
It can also negatively impact relationships, lead to fewer social interactions across a week, and impair academic performance (Kuss & Griffiths, 2011).
Is Your Mobile Phone Use Problematic?
If you are unsure, Meagre recommends considering the following questions:
* Do you think you spend too much time using your mobile phone?
* Has your mobile phone use caused problems in a relationship?
* Do people say that you spend too much time on your mobile phone?
* Does the time you spend on your mobile phone stop you from doing other tasks?
* Have you tried to cut down your mobile phone use?
* Have you used your mobile phone while driving or crossing a road?
Could You Cut Down Your Screen Time?
If you answered yes to any of the above questions like I did, you might benefit from tracking your usage and seeing how much time you spend on your phone actively doing something.
I bought the full version of the app ‘Moment’, as recommended by Adam Alter. I didn’t try to change how much I used my phone to get an accurate baseline for the first week. My average was 1 hour, 48 minutes of screen time a day. Less than the national average, but still not how I wanted to spend my spare time.
I then took on the ‘Bored and Brilliant Challenge’ on the ‘Moment’ app for the following week and set the goal of less than 1 hour of screen time each day.
The ‘Bored and Brilliant Challenge’ was first developed by Manoush Zomorodi after she realised just how long it had been since she had last felt bored, thanks to always being able to look at her phone whenever she had a spare second. She also realised that she had very little time to let her mind wander without this time of boredom, which was when she had her best creative ideas. She then decided to set a challenge on her podcast for her listeners, which became the focus of her subsequent book of the same title.
On day 1, the aim was to observe my phone usage.
On day 2, I aimed to keep my phone out of reach and in my bag instead of my pocket.
On day 3, the aim was not to take any photos.
On day 4, the aim was to delete an app that I used more than I wanted to. So I deleted Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn from my phone.
On day 5, I took a fake cation and put my phone in aeroplane mode to have fewer distractions during the day.
On day 6, I aimed to observe things that I would have missed if glued to my phone, especially while on public transport.
On day 7, I tried to make something creative. It consisted of me cooking a nice meal for dinner, and it didn’t taste too bad either.
As the above data shows, I managed to pick up my phone three times less per day. My baseline was nine less than the average Australian already, but I’m glad to reduce it to 18 times per day.
The second picture is interesting to me. My phone use took up 7% of my waking life across the challenge. It still seems too much, but it was a decent drop from 12% of my waking life the week before.
As shown in the data above, the average person who takes on the ‘Bored and Brilliant Challenge’ creates 58 minutes more free time each day by cutting down their phone usage. That’s nearly an extra hour each day to do whatever you want. If people feel time-poor already, that might be a lovely feeling.
Other Suggestions for Cutting Down Screen Time
Book social outings or join a club or sports team. Exercise is also great for mental and physical health, so combining socialising with exercise is recommended.
Develop a list of other non-screen activities that you may enjoy and can do regularly.
Stop channel surfing on your TV — figure out which shows you want to watch ahead of time and record them. It increases the enjoyability of the programs you watch and cuts down how much time you spend watching TV as you can fast forward through commercials.
If you use a TV streaming site such as Stan or Netflix, decide if there is a program you really want to watch and how long you want to watch it before you switch it on. Then, you can set the alarm or reminder to help manage binge-watching.
Stop leaving your TV on in the background or switching it on as soon as you get home. Listening to most music is likely to be more relaxing than watching TV.
Install the app or plugin ‘Freedom’ on your computer. Freedom helps you block specific sites you can waste time on and makes it easier to set limits for yourself.
Conclusion
Hopefully, with everything discussed here, you can now see the potential pitfalls of excessive technological devices, especially those involving bright screens.
If you feel rushed, always complain about being busy, spend too much time on your phone, or want to find more time for social and leisure activities, I encourage you to consider the role that technology plays in your life. Suppose there is an area where it is becoming problematic or causing you distress. In that case, I recommend implementing any of the above suggestions or challenges to see what difference it can make in your life.
John Gottman is a legendary relationship researcher. He began using “The Love Lab” as his research centre at the University of Washington in 1986.
Here, he would have couples stay in the apartment at The Love Lab, and watch as they bring up an old topic that they would typically fight about. During this conflict, he would also film the couple and measure their vitals or physiological responses.
By 1992, Gottman became so accurate at predicting which couples would eventually divorce that he published a study on it. His findings successfully indicated with 91% accuracy which of the 57 couples would later break up after recording them deal with conflict for only five minutes.
How Do You and Your Partner Fight?
The main thing that Gottman realised was what we now know as conflict style. The average therapist will say that the most healthy conflict style is a validating or compromising conflict style. With this style, the partner will want to discuss the issue calmly and rationally, talk about how the couple can resolve the problem, and collaboratively develop an amicable solution that will work well for both parties.
Now Gottman found that if both parties or people in a disagreement had this validating or compromising conflict style, it worked well and didn’t predict a later break up. It wasn’t the case if only one person was validating or compromising in their conflict style. If their partner was avoidant, volatile or passive-aggressive in their conflict style, this mismatch was more predictive of a later divorce.
What might be surprising to therapists is that if both people were avoidant in their conflict style, their outcome tended to be no worse than if they were both validating. So if you prefer to only focus on the good and not discuss any of the issues in your relationship, you may not need to start bringing stuff up. Instead, it would be best if you found a partner who also prefers to sweep the bad things under the rug rather than discuss any problematic issues. However, if your partner needs to bring things up, you may need to, too, if you want your relationship to be happy and work out in the long run.
Similarly, if your ideal conflict style is to be volatile and get everything off your chest regardless of how you say it, this can work if your partner wants to be volatile too. Again, you are likely to fare just as well as the validating or avoidant couples, and much better than if you prefer to be volatile and your partner does not.
Which Conflict Style Is Ideal for Your Relationship?
It turns out that deciding upon which conflict style is likely to work best for you and your partner, and then both doing this is more important than figuring out which conflict style is best in general. For example, some relationships may work out precisely because the bad stuff is avoided and never discussed. Others may be passionate and work because each partner gets everything they think and feel off their chest. And another couple may work out because they chat about the important things without losing their temper and work together to come up with a solution while both choosing to let some of the more minor things go.
Whether you prefer to be avoidant, compromising or validating in how you manage conflict, try to see if you can get on the same page about how to best deal with disagreements with your partner. Being on the same team about how you want to try and manage fights will give you the best chance to maintain a happy and healthy relationship. On the other hand, if you can’t get on the same team about how you want to fight, Gottman’s research findings indicate that your different conflict styles are more than likely to be the end of your relationship one day.
If you want to learn more, Gottman has some great books that I would highly recommend reading, including:
The Seven Principals for Making Marriage Work: A Practical Guide from the Country’s Foremost Relationship Expert
Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love
The Man’s Guide to Women: Scientifically Proven Secrets from the “Love Lab” About What Women Really Want
The Relationship Cure: A 5-Step Guide to Strengthening Your Marriage, Family and Friendships
The Science of Trust: Emotional Attunement for Couples
Why Marriages Succeed or Fail: And How You Can Make Your Last
The five factor personality model has been researched and written about extensively. If you have never taken a Big Five Aspects Scale before, you can find out what your results are for under $10 at the Understand Myself website. A free version called the IPIP-NEO can also be found here.
Main Findings Based on the Five-Factor Personality Model
Judge, Heller & Mount (2002) found that highly conscientious people are most satisfied with their job (.26 correlation), followed by highly extraverted people (.25 correlation), then highly agreeable people (.17 correlation), then those who are high on openness to experience (.02 correlation) People high on neuroticism were negatively correlated with job satisfaction (-.29 correlation). My introversion is the only aspect that may negatively impact how much I enjoy a job.
For academic performance, Poropat (2009) found that agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness to experience correlate significantly to academic performance. Conscientiousness was related to academic performance in a way that was largely independent of intelligence. My personality style likely helped me to do well in school and complete eight years of university studies.
For intimate relationship satisfaction, Malouff, Thorsteinsson, Schutte, Bhullar and Rooke (2009) found that low neuroticism, high agreeableness, high conscientiousness and high extraversion were all correlated with greater relationship satisfaction. These variables did not vary significantly from men to women or from unmarried to married individuals. Unfortunately, my introversion and low enthusiasm in particular make it a bit harder for me to be satisfied in intimate relationships.
For citizenship, Chiaburu, Oh, Berry, Li, and Gardner (2011) found that people that are low in neuroticism, high in extraversion and high in openness to experience are more likely to engage in more individual, organization and change-oriented citizenship. Again, not being too extraverted and enthusiastic holds me back a little here.
For occupational type, Barrick, Mount and Gupta (2006) found that extraverts are most likely to enter an enterprising career (.41 correlation). People that are high on openness to experience are most likely to enter an artistic career (.39 correlation). Some say therapy is more art than science, which may indicate why I have chosen this over a career in research.
For clinical disorders, Malouff, Thorsteinsson and Schutte (2004) found that psychological disorders are more closely linked with high neuroticism, low conscientiousness, low agreeableness and low extraversion. Healthy populations in comparison to clinical populations show higher levels of extraversion and lower levels of neuroticism. Again, my introversion puts me at a greater risk.
For alcohol abuse, Malouff, Thorsteinsson, Rooke and Schutte (2007) found that people that are low on conscientiousness, low on agreeableness and high on neuroticism are more likely to have difficulties with alcohol. These individuals are less likely to improve through treatment. Another meta-analytic finding by Malouff, Thorsteinsson and Schutte (2006) found that these three factors are also significantly related to smoking prevalence. Never smoked, but have drunk more than I should have at times. If I want to cut down, my personality style should help me.
For physical activity, Sutin and colleagues (2016) found that lower neuroticism and higher conscientiousness is associated with more physical activity and less sedentary behaviour. Higher extraversion and more openness to experience is also associated with more physical activity ,and that these variables don’t change much based on age or sex. Consequently, being a bit introverted is the only factor that lets me down.
For workplace harassment, highly neurotic people are most likely to be exposed to workplace harassment (.25 correlation), with highly extraverted and conscientious people least likely to be harassed (.10 correlation). I thought Susan Cain said it was good to be an introvert in her book ‘Quiet’, but there doesn’t seem to be much that is positively linked with Introversion?
What About Individual Faults and Virtues?
Even though across the population as a whole there seems to be benefits to being extraverted, agreeable, conscientious, open to experience and not neurotic, there are advantages and disadvantages to each trait, particularly at the extremes.
Extremely sociable, extraverted people can be dominant and impulsive, while introverted, quiet people can easily become isolated and depressed.
Extremely open people can be scattered and overwhelmed by their own thoughts and ideas, while closed-minded people may become narrow and inflexible.
Exceptionally conscientious people can be obsessive about order, judgmental and rigid, while their more carefree counterparts may be messy, undisciplined and careless.
People very high in emotional stability may engage in risky, dangerous behaviour, while those who are more neurotic can become so preoccupied by anxiety and pain that they are unable to function.
Finally, extremely agreeable people may never stand up for themselves, while those who are too disagreeable can be aggressive, callous and bullying.
To find out your individual faults and virtues on each of the five personality factors, the Self Authoring program can help you to clarify your own personal traits and help you to clarify what you would like to strengthen and improve. Below are my results:
Extraversion/Introversion Faults
Can spend too much money
Keep in the background
Lose opportunities because I am too isolated
Am too quiet around strangers
Find it difficult to approach others
Bottle up my feelings
Feel drained by social interactions
Have a social circle that is too small
Extraversion/Introversion Virtues
Feel comfortable around people
Don’t mind being the center of attention
Can take charge and lead
Am skilled in handling social situations
Am often happy
Can listen well
Do not always talk about myself
Enjoy time in natural surroundings
Let other people have the spotlight
Think before I act
Agreeable/Assertive Faults
Avoid conflict even when it is necessary
Will sacrifice my own feelings for the comfort of others
Can bottle up my feelings until I become resentful
Am polite to a fault
Trust people too easily
Can be detached and cold when others are hurt and upset
Agreeable/Assertive Virtues
Trust people
Am interested in people
Feel others’ emotions
Inquire genuinely about others’ well-being
Know how to comfort others
Make people feel at ease
Am a good peacemaker
Am aware that malevolence exists in the world
Conscientiousness/Carelessness Faults
Get obsessed with details and lose the big picture
Cannot stand to be late for an appointment
Feel that I am being unproductive if I relax
Believe that I have to be flawless
Can be contemptuous of other people and of myself
Find it difficult to get down to work
Neglect my duties
Frequently make excuses
Am sometimes willing to bend the truth to get out of an obligation
Feel unmotivated to complete my work
Conscientiousness/Carelessness Virtues
Have a very long attention span and can work without being distracted
Do things according to a plan
Strive for efficiency and economy
Pay attention to details
Am extremely reliable
Always arrive at appointments early or on time
Am very goal-oriented
Do what I say I am going to do
Know how to go with the flow
Don’t waste my time thinking about little details
Emotional Stability/Low Stress Tolerance Faults
Am sometimes not afraid of things I should be afraid of
Don’t appear to learn as well from my mistakes as others do
Don’t pay enough attention to costs and potential future dangers
Often take counterproductive or unnecessary risks
Blow little things out of proportion
Let my fears stop me from doing things I want to do
Emotional Stability/Low Stress Tolerance Virtues
Am difficult to offend
Am in control of my emotions
Calm down quickly when I do get upset
Seldom get disturbed or upset
Am rarely incautious
Am a cautious, careful person
Don’t rush into things before I feel comfortable
Am good at identifying the risks in new situations
Openness/Traditionalism Faults
Pursue too many activities at the same time
Am interested in so many things that I don’t know what to focus on
Have a hard time planning for the future because I am interested in everything
Have a hard time making up my mind because I can always see all the sides of an argument
Am so interested in creative activities that it is hard to concentrate on things that are practical
Have had a hard time forming a clear identity
Have done crazy things just because I was curious about what might happen
Openness/Traditionalism Virtues
Am quick to understand things
Can handle a lot of information
Catch on to things quickly
Am always learning new things
Spend time reflecting on things
Can always see new possibility in things
See the value in tradition and custom
Am resistant to radical, dangerous thoughts
So, as you can see above, your personality style is never all good or all bad. I’m sure that even if you are introverted, disagreeable, careless, neurotic and closed to new experiences, there will still be some virtues associated with your personality style. I also think that, even though it may be more of a challenge, it is still possible to find the right career or job and the right relationship and friendships for you.
You may not be the right fit for everyone or everything, but no one is. What is more important is to first try to understand yourself, change what you would like to and are able to, accept what you do not want to or cannot change, and then find the places and people that love and appreciate you for who you are.
I’ve been afraid to say this for a while because of how it will be perceived, but my favourite book of all time is actually a textbook. So before you think that makes me someone you would never want to speak to, I’ll ask if you have ever read anything by Irvin Yalom, American Psychiatrist and Author?
His book ‘Existential Psychotherapy’ is a true masterpiece he worked on for 10 years and is written as eloquently as any of his other titles, including ‘When Nietzsche Wept’, the best fiction novel award winner in 1992.
What is Existential Psychotherapy?
Existentialism is the philosophical exploration of existential issues or questions about our existence that we don’t have an easy answer for. We all suffer from anxiety, despair, grief and loneliness at times in our lives. Existential Psychotherapy tries to understand what life and humanity are about.
In the book, Yalom explores what he considers to be our four most significant existential issues in life:
Death
Freedom
Isolation
Meaninglessness
These existential issues or ultimate concerns are “givens of existence” or “an inescapable part” of being an alive human in our world. He shows how these concerns develop over time, how we can run into problems with each of these issues, and what they might look like in patients coming to therapy. He also talks about how we can try to live with these concerns to negatively impact our lives less, even if we don’t have clear-cut solutions to them.
Let’s go through each of these ultimate concerns…
1. Death
Homo sapiens, or humans, as far as I know, are the only species in the animal kingdom that are aware that one day they are going to die.
The first time I heard this, it fascinated me and made me wonder if life would be more comfortable not being aware that one day we cease to exist.
Imagine it. Life is going well. Then suddenly, it is no more. No worry about what the future holds. We are born. We experience life. Then we are no longer there. No fear. Just nothingness.
Being aware that we will die shapes and influences our lives much more than we would like to admit. This is because so many of our anxieties and phobias at their core are fear of some loss or death.
Irvin Yalom says that while the actuality of death is the end of us, the idea of death can actually energise us.
If we don’t know when we will die, being in touch with the fact that one day everything will vanish is enough to overwhelm some people and make them panic.
For others, it is enough to make them follow the maxim of carpe diem and helps them to seize the day by appreciating everything they have so that they can make the most of the precious time they have left on this planet. Time is really just a bright spark of lightness between two identical and infinite periods of darkness — one before we are born and one after.
Death is the ultimate equaliser, for no matter how much we have achieved or done with our time on this planet, the truth is that we will all one day die.
It is also true that we will not know exactly when death will happen. It might be with a car accident tomorrow, from cancer in ten years, motor neurone disease in twenty years, a heart attack in thirty years, a stroke in forty years, or during our sleep in fifty years.
Because our knowledge of our inevitable death is so inescapable and hard to confront and deal with directly, we instead focus on smaller and more manageable worries or concerns in our lives that we can do something about if we want to. If we successfully address all these minor concerns, however, we then come in contact with our fear of death again, and the cycle repeats itself.
Most people tend to have one of two basic defence mechanisms against their fear of death:
A. They can think that they are “special” and that death will befall others but not them, and try to be an individual and experience anxiety about life.
Or
B. They can think they are an “ultimate rescuer” and try to fuse with others and experience anxiety about death (their own mortality and that of their loved ones).
A breakdown of either of these defences can give rise to psychological disorders:
narcissism or schizoid characteristics for the “special” defence, and
passive, dependent or masochistic characteristics for the “ultimate rescuer” defence.
In general, trying to be an individual is a more empowering and effective defence than fusing with others. Still, the breakdown of either can lead to pathological anxiety and/or depression.
The way to feel better about death anxiety is through an exercise called “disidentification”:
To begin with, ask yourself the question “Who am I?” and write down every answer that you can think of.
Then, take one answer at a time, and meditate on giving up this part of yourself, asking and reflecting on what it would be like to give up this part of yourself and your identity.
Repeat this with all the other answers until you have gone through all of them.
You have now disidentified yourself from all parts of your identity. See how you feel, and if there isn’t still a part of you, that feels separate from all the labels you give yourself. This provides comfort and reduces anxiety about death and life for a lot of people.
What I try to manage death anxiety is to only focus on whatever is most important to me that I can do something about in any given moment. I try to appreciate and be grateful for the time that I have had with each important person in my life. I try to be as fully present in the moment and with others as I can be. I try to use every moment and meeting as an opportunity to impact someone’s life positively. That way, I’ll hopefully not have too many regrets and be glad for the time I have had on this planet, no matter how long it ends up being.
2. Freedom
The second ultimate concern is about freedom, responsibility and will.
Every country in the world talks about fighting for the freedom of its citizens and about taking away some people’s freedom to ensure the safety and security of all. Therefore, the existential dilemma is how much freedom do we give up to others to feel safe and secure, or how much safety and security do we give up to feel genuinely free? Are these concepts in direct opposition, or is it sometimes possible to have enough of both?
Responsibility means taking full ownership of:
“one’s own self, destiny, life predicament, feelings, and if such be the case, one’s own suffering” — Irvin Yalom
In the past, one’s life was set out for them by their parents or society, and many people struggled to fight for the right to live an authentic and genuine life.
These days, most people struggle instead with the amount of choice that they have in their lives. They come to therapy because they don’t know what they want to do or how to choose, given all of the available options. They also know that if no one else is telling them what to do, it is ultimately their responsibility if things do not work out the way they want them to. People wish to choose for themselves but fear not having someone to blame when things don’t work out.
There are various defences that we engage in to avoid responsibility and shield ourselves from freedom, including:
compulsivity
displacement of responsibility to another
denial of responsibility (“innocent victim” or “losing control”)
avoidance of autonomous behaviour, and
decisional pathology
We can do something over and over again to relieve anxiety or stop thinking about things. This can present as OCD, hoarding, or any addiction ranging from technology to drugs and alcohol and even dependency on others.
We can try to coerce others to make decisions for us or seek out and find controlling partners, bosses or friends. But, we can also play it safe and try to do what we think everyone else does; focus on keeping up with the Joneses, engaging in passive activities that don’t require much effort, and feeling stuck in an unfulfilling relationship or career.
The problem with giving up the responsibility for how our lives turn out is that it creates an external rather than an internal locus of control. Depression and other forms of psychological disorders are more highly correlated with an external locus of control. It can also lead to learned helplessness, where people no longer feel like they can do anything to change their life in a positive direction.
The way to manage the responsibility and freedom paradox is to developan internal locus of control. This is generally more beneficial for most people’s well-being unless we blame ourselves or change things out of our control. This includes what has happened in the past, what other people do or say, and acts of nature.
The serenity prayer nicely spells out how we should approach responsibility:
“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference.” — Reinhold Niebuhr
Paradoxical intention is a good antidote too. This means that we try to do the opposite of what we typically do for a period of time and keep an open mind and observe how things go. We can then see if the outcome is better than what we usually do or if it has taught us something about what will be best for us going forward.
Anything that creates a double bind is potentially helpful for encouraging people to take more responsibility in their lives. One way is to remind someone who struggles to make their own decisions that by not deciding, they are still making a choice not to choose. This means that no matter what they do, it is impossible not to make a decision that impacts the direction of their lives. Even if we choose to follow what someone else wants us to do, we still choose to do this. Therefore, why not take responsibility for our own lives and forge our own paths?
3. Isolation
There are three types of isolation:
“A. Interpersonal isolation: isolation from other individuals, experienced as loneliness
B. Intrapersonal isolation: parts of oneself are partitioned off from the self, and
C. Existential isolation: “an unbridgeable gap between oneself and any other being.”
A common way that people try to escape from existential isolation is to fuse with another fully. This is also a strategy for dealing with death anxiety, with people trying to be the “ultimate rescuer” of someone else. It can lead to an individual feeling temporarily less alone. Unfortunately, however, the less isolated we are from others, sometimes the more isolated we are from ourselves.
Other people try to overcompensate for their feelings of isolation by never relying on anyone and trying to be fully independent. Both extremes can have negative consequences.
The main thing we can do to manage our feelings of isolation is to realise and accept that we are social creatures and have always relied on others to survive. This drive creates a desire to feel closer to, more understood, and more connected to people than we can ever achieve and sustain.
Growing up, many people feel loved and comforted in an unbalanced relationship towards their needs being met over their parents. They then try to reenact this within their adult relationships and usually end up feeling resentful, angry and disappointed as a result.
Yalom believes that a good relationship involves “needs-free love”, which is about loving someone else for their sake. This is opposed to “deficiency love”, a selfish love where we only think about how useful the other person may be to us. Creating a relationship where you want the best for the other person is a healthier way to manage interpersonal isolation than demanding for them to meet every need for you.
Some of the best solutions to intrapersonal isolation are to have time to get to know ourselves through practices such as journaling, therapy and meditation. Introverts may need to have more of this time than extroverts, so it’s important to tune into how agitated or lonely you feel to know if you have found the right balance or not.
Unfortunately, existential isolation cannot be fully breached, and therefore needs to be accepted, as it is out of our control. To feel the pain that comes with this isolation and our desire not to have it is challenging, but it can help reduce the intensity of the feeling. Being grateful for the meaningful connections we have in our lives and trying to strengthen them without losing our sense of self is another way to lessen the intensity of the feeling.
4. Meaninglessness
According to Yalom and many non-religious philosophers, humans are meaning-seeking creatures in a world without a universal sense of meaning. As a result of this, most of the world turn to a religious or spiritual belief system of one type or another that clearly lays out the meaning of the world and our purpose in it. People who truly believe these systems often provide a lot of clarity, reassurance, and guidance. The tricky part is that these belief systems can vary widely, and it is hard to know which one is more correct than another or if some of them are even harmful.
What we do know is that most belief systems tend to agree that
“it is good to immerse oneself in the stream of life”.
People can try to find meaning through:
A. Hedonism: Seeking out pleasure and positive experiences and trying to avoid pain,
B. Altruism: Dedication towards a cause that helps other people, and
C. Creativity: Transcending oneself through art.
Many philosophers believe that both the search for pleasure and the search for meaning are paradoxical. By this, they mean that happiness and meaning or purpose in life are tough to achieve when they are aimed at directly, but possible if they are aimed at indirectly.
So if you or someone that you know is complaining about a lack of meaning in life, try to see if there are other issues. If possible, address these other issues first, and see if your worry about meaninglessness has lessened or gone away.
The best indirect way to increase a sense of purpose and meaning in life is to build kindness, curiosity and concern for others. This is often best done by helping out with a charity, joining a club, fighting for a cause, or attending a group activity or group therapy.
Yalom strongly believes that a desire to engage in life and satisfying relationships, work, spiritual and creative pursuits always exists within a person. Therefore, the key to managing meaninglessness is to remove the obstacles that prevent the individual from wholeheartedly engaging in the regular activities of life.
We may never be able to find the absolute meaning of life. However, what we can do is work at creating a life that is personally meaningful to us.
This will be an unfiltered post. No thinking things through. No edits. Just reflections on life, age, and anything else that pops into my head. Here goes nothing:
Turning 33 feels weird.
I feel old at times, especially in my body.
I still feel like a child at other times, and I wonder whether I will ever feel like a proper adult.
I can’t believe I have so much grey hair now.
It’s strange to wonder where the time has gone.
Yet when I think about it, I really have done a lot and had many amazing experiences in my time on this planet.
I’m happier now than I have ever been before.
We never really know how our life will turn out.
I couldn’t have planned for what has occurred in my life, yet, amazingly, things have turned out the way they have.
I’m excited about the future.
I used to get scared about the idea of getting older, but I don’t anymore.
I’ve stopped searching for the right answers these days and instead focus on asking and living the right questions.
I don’t regret much from my past, even though some of it really sucked at the time.
I still don’t fully understand people, even after I have studied psychology for 8 years, seen patients since 2010 and read over 200 psychology books.
I will never fully understand myself or someone else, which is okay as long as I keep trying to learn and grow.
33 is a palindrome.
When I was younger, I would have seen 33 years old as “really old” and “over the hill.”
I thought that I would have been a parent by now.
I am glad that I haven’t just tried to follow the crowd and live a traditional life.
I used to think it was better to receive gifts from others, and now I can see how it is better to give.
I worried and stressed way more than I needed to as a child.
I focused on my body image and appearance way too much as a teenager.
I’ve never really looked after myself that well regarding what I put into my body. This will eventually catch up to me if it hasn’t already.
I’ve let go of being perfect, which feels great.
Not everything happens for a reason, but we can learn something from everything that we go through.
Everyone suffers in life to some degree.
Everyone has baggage.
Life isn’t about getting the best job, house, partner, but the best one for you and your lifestyle and values.
No one truly knows what the future holds, and that is both exciting and scary.
It’s much better to only focus on trying to change what is in my control.
Having unconditional positive regard and compassion for others is tough to do but really rewarding if you can.
Living an honest and ethical life is so much less tiring in the long run than being dishonest, self-centred and egotistical.
There are many kind people out there, and being kind to others is the best way to see it.
Thanks for reading these last three years, and happy holidays to you all!
Life traps are self-defeating ways of perceiving, feeling about, interacting with oneself, others, and the world.
If you want to get a sense of what your life-traps may be, the book ‘Reinventing your life’ by Jeffrey Young is an excellent place to start, as it goes into 11 different ones. If you want a more in-depth analysis, however, then go and see a Psychologist who specialises in Schema Therapy.
A Psychologist has much more thorough and scientific questionnaires that can give you results on 18 schemas (life-traps), help you identify your most common traps, and show you what you can do both in therapy and outside of it whenever you realise that you have fallen into a trap.
My Life-traps
I have taken the Young Schema Questionnaire (YSQ-L3) three times to help identify my main life traps. The first time was at the beginning of 2014 when I was stuck in the middle of a complicated relationship while also trying to complete the last part of my Doctoral thesis and play basketball at a semi-professional level.
The second time was in April 2017, when I was in a Clinical Psychology job that I loved. I had also stopped playing basketball at such an intense level and played with some friends (and without a coach) twice a week, which was way more fun.
The most recent time was August 2018, where I had just finished up my work in private practice in Melbourne, Australia and was about to leave my friends and family to volunteer for two years in Port Vila, Vanuatu, as part of the Australian Volunteers Program (funded by the Australian Government).
I want to share these results with you to show you that:
context influences personality and how people view themselves, the world and others,
personality and ways of perceiving yourself, relationships, and the world can change, and
Even though it is possible to grow and improve over time, we all still fall into traps at times, which is okay. It’s about identifying when you have fallen into a trap and then knowing what you need to do to get out of it.
When looking at the results, a 100% score would mean that I have answered every item for that life-trap a 6, which means that they describe me perfectly. The higher the % score, the more likely I will frequently fall into this life trap.
By looking at the table above, the green items indicate an improvement in comparison to the prior assessment, meaning that these life-traps are a little bit less powerful for me. The yellow indicates no change since the last assessment, and the red indicates a worse score, meaning that these life-traps may have a more powerful sway over me.
From 2014 to 2017, 7 out of the initial top-10 life-traps had improved, one stayed the same, and two had worsened. Two additional traps not included in the initial top 10 had worsened and made the list (Negativity/Pessimism & Mistrust/Abuse).
From 2017 to 2018, seven out of the 2017 top ten life traps had improved yet again, with one staying the same and two becoming worse. One additional trap (Vulnerability to harm/illness) had increased. Still, I believe this was due to the medical and safety briefings that I had been going through in the preparation of moving to Vanuatu for 2 years.
Overall, I am less likely to fall into any life trap in 2018 than in 2014 and 2017. For example, the average of my top ten in 2014 was 53.29%, whereas in 2017, it was 48.28%, and in 2018, it was 46.13%.
I also rated 21 items a 6 (= describes me perfectly) in 2014, only five in 2017, and none in 2018. This means that I am much less likely to get completely pushed around by my life traps. However, they still have some sway on me, especially the self-sacrifice and the emotional deprivation schemas, and to a lesser degree, punitiveness and subjugation.
Here is Young’s description of these schemas:
SELF-SACRIFICE: Excessive focus on voluntarily meeting the needs of others in daily situations, at the expense of one’s own gratification. The most common reasons are: to prevent causing pain to others; to avoid guilt from feeling selfish; or to maintain the connection with others perceived as needy. Often results from an acute sensitivity to the pain of others. Sometimes leads to a sense that one’s own needs are not being adequately met and to resentment of those who are taken care of.
EMOTIONAL DEPRIVATION: Expectation that one’s desire for a normal degree of emotional support will not be adequately met by others. The three major forms of deprivation are:
Deprivation of Nurturance: Absence of attention, affection, warmth, or companionship.
Deprivation of Empathy: Absence of understanding, listening, self-disclosure, or mutual sharing of feelings from others.
Deprivation of Protection: Absence of strength, direction, or guidance from others.
SUBJUGATION: Excessive surrendering of control to others because one feels coerced — usually to avoid anger, retaliation, or abandonment. The two major forms of subjugation are:
1. Subjugation of Needs: Suppression of one’s preferences, decisions, and desires.
2. Subjugation of Emotions: Suppression of emotional expression, especially anger.
Subjugation usually involves the perception that one’s own desires, opinions, and feelings are not valid or important to others. Frequently presents as excessive compliance, combined with hypersensitivity to feeling trapped. Generally leads to a build up of anger, manifested in maladaptive symptoms (e.g., passive-aggressive behaviour, uncontrolled outbursts of temper, psychosomatic symptoms, withdrawal of affection, “acting out”, substance abuse).
PUNITIVENESS: The belief that people should be harshly punished for making mistakes. Involves the tendency to be angry, intolerant, punitive, and impatient with oneself for not meeting one’s expectations or standards. Usually includes difficulty forgiving mistakes in oneself, because of a reluctance to consider extenuating circumstances, allow for human imperfection, or empathize with one’s feelings.
Three out of my top four life traps have improved since 2014, but emotional deprivation, unfortunately, continues to climb with each assessment. I think that self-sacrifice, subjugation, and emotional deprivation schemas may be common life traps for people who decide to become psychologists. The therapeutic relationship is meant to be one-sided and focused on the patient or client’s needs, not the psychologist’s needs. For this reason, psychologists must get their relational needs met outside of their job and get their own therapy if needed to ensure that they can have a space about them. I wonder how these life traps will continue to evolve over the next two years in Vanuatu…
How Can Life-traps Be Overcome?
The first step to changing anything is awareness. If you are not aware that you are falling into any traps, it means that you either don’t have any, or you are so enmeshed in your experience that you cannot see them.
Once you are aware of your traps, the next step is to understand them and why they occur for you. Most life traps originate in childhood typically, which is why most psychologists and psychiatrists will ask about your upbringing and your relationship with your parents in particular.
Life traps are actually considered to be adaptive ways of coping with maladaptive environments. This means that your life traps were probably quite useful in the particular family dynamic that you had, or you wouldn’t have developed them in the first place. For example, my family often called me a martyr when I was younger because it didn’t matter what I wanted. In reality, it was just much more comfortable to let everyone else decide and take charge. Then if things didn’t work out, others couldn’t blame me. I saw it as a win-win but often didn’t get what I wanted because I didn’t speak up and then complained that my parents loved my siblings more, who were more than happy to speak up and ask for what they wanted.
However, once you move out of the family home, these coping methods are generally ineffective. They tend to become maladaptive ways of interacting with yourself, others or the world. If I keep playing the martyr and refuse to speak up as an adult, my needs still don’t get met. As a result, I may become excessively demanding of others as a counterattack measure (not likely for me), or I may try to escape from all relationships where I need to speak up about my needs. Either way, it keeps the life trap going, and it isn’t helpful.
I need to realise that there are relationships out there where it is beneficial for me to speak up, as people then know what I want and respond effectively to the situation at hand. It still doesn’t “feel right” when I think about telling others my wants or needs (and I’m not sure if it ever will), but I logically know that it is the best approach for me to take going forward. If I want to break free from my main life traps, I must learn to speak up reasonably when important to me (and others). By doing this, eventually, the life traps will become much less prevalent and less powerful too.
If you have been trying with therapy for a long time but don’t think you are getting anywhere, please seek a Psychologist with experience in Schema Therapy. Also, if you are stuck in a relationship where your needs aren’t being met, it could help too.
Learning about Schema Therapy and undergoing training in it has taught me more about my own personal life traps than anything else that I have done before and really does give me a sense of what my most significant challenges are going forward. I’ve made a lot of progress so far, but there is still a long way to go, and that is okay. I know that I will continue to improve with acceptance, self-compassion, patience, reflection, and perseverance, and I am confident you can too!
Dr Damon Ashworth
Clinical Psychologist
P.S. For a full description of the other 14 maladaptive schemas, please click here.
Damon Ashworth Psychology 
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