Too Much Is Not Enough

Suggestion, the use of imagination to manipulate subjective phenomena can be used to counter many addictive traps. This procedural skill requires a creative imagination and the ability to focus your attention for a long enough period to achieve the intended result. The payoff for investing effort to work with the experiential exercises described in this section is the enhancement of willpower

When you tell yourself to raise your hand it goes up, but when you tell yourself to calm down, become sexually aroused, or to salivate, you may not get the desired response. This is because consciousness is a property of the rational processing system, which can operate your skeletal muscles, but cannot directly control your passions.

There is, however, an indirect method by which you can exert conscious influence on your biological responses: Instead of willing the response, aim your attention to the stimulus that elicits the intended response. For example if you want to salivate, instead of telling yourself to salivate, imagine licking a juicy but sour lemon—the same approach works with sexual arousal, anger, and other emotional reactions.

Thought Experiment: Evoking a cringe – Take a few moments to relive a time when you embarrassed yourself, you will find that the more vivid the image and the more detail you can conjure up, the greater the cringe effect.

If you were able to experience the cringe, then you successfully initiated trance formation—that is, you willfully aimed your attention to a particular stimulus—in this case, an embarrassing moment—in order to produce the intended state change.

Because this is an early exercise and I wanted to make it easy, I used cringe imagery rather than efficacy-enhancing imagery, which would have been more useful for our purposes. Special exercises designed to strengthen your ability to use your imagination in an intended way are included in this kit precisely because most people actively resist efficacy enhancing imagery. Some people actually suppress images of themselves as competent or successful because they were specifically trained to be modest or self-deprecating. For some individuals, the bias against efficacy-enhancing imagery is a major obstacle. Below are two sources of it:

 Asymmetry of Positive and Negative Imagery: Because it is more threatening, negative imagery is more salient than positive imagery. Moreover, stimuli that promote incentive use are intrinsically more salient (hotter) than stimuli that promote self-determination—especially during high-risk situations.

 Bias Against Self-Suggestion: Paradoxically, it is easier to accept a suggestion from a hypnotist—who may know nothing about you or your situation—than it is to accept your own suggestion. A popular misconception is that there is an authentic you and pretending to be better than you are would simply be prideful self-delusion. People resist positive self-suggestions because they view efficacy-enhancing imagery as intentional lies about the authentic you. In fact, there is no authentic you. The one that shows up at any given time is the one that emerges from your current subjective reality. Barry performs better socially when he perceives himself as clever and attractive than when he feels socially inept and shame-worthy. Even though the former appraisal is more accurate and helpful than the latter, Barry acts as if the more salient suggestions were valid. By so doing, Barry transforms these negative suggestions into objective reality by performing poorly.

Please click here to download a free audio file that invites you to experience hypnotic and other trance formative phenomena. Even though you will perform these exercises in a relaxed environment and have the aid of an audio, maintaining your focus on the target stimuli—despite internal and external pulls on your attention—requires a kind of mental strength. Using this method to escape pathogenic trances in real time is considerably more difficult than evoking the intended phenomenon during practice. Exercising your faculty of aiming attention as described in the thought experiments in this section will strengthen your ability to resist the pull of salient distracting stimuli.

We are all condemned to the limitations of subjective reality and so our perceptions and appraisals are creations of the Psyche and not unbiased representations of objective reality. Our understanding of reality is always distorted in one way or another, as different stimuli capture attention, elicit emotional reactions, and thereby bias state-dependent phenomena. When you become angry your perceptions and response tendencies change. The anger that produced these changes does not exist in the objective world; it is a subjective experience that was created by and exists solely within you. The truth when you are angry is different than the truth when you are contrite.

One client, who was working on an anger problem, reported that during a chaotic situation at an airport ticket counter someone kicked him in the back of the leg. When he turned around to “confront the asshole” he confronted a handicapped girl in a wheelchair, which had rolled, out of control, down a ramp and hit him. He reports that she was terrified by the rage on his face when he turned around. His subjective reality changed instantaneously as a result of the new information, although objective reality now included an apologetic adult and a terrified little girl.

Your motivational state is, to a large extent, determined by the stimulus that captures your attention. Some stimuli are more attention grabbing than others. Stimuli that are particularly salient can elicit a state change without your conscious intention. Stimulus Salience refers to how bright or attention grabbing a stimulus is, not necessarily how meaningful it is. The picture of one child suffering as a result of an earth quake may be more salient and elicit a greater emotional reaction than statistics of thousands killed

If there were a rattlesnake by your feet, you would be in a different emotional state (fight-or-flight) than you are in now, and it would be hard to pay attention to this text. This adaptive response results from our descent from organisms that noticed threatening stimuli; those who did not react quickly and powerfully are not our ancestors. A rattlesnake in the room with you is both salient and meaningful. But for an individual with snake phobia, even the idea of a snake—which is not objectively dangerous—can elicit a state change that is not adaptive.

Reward refers to the pleasurable effects of using an incentive. Reinforcement refers to the effect using the incentive has on future behavior. Reinforcement not only strengthens the behavioral sequence that lead to the incentive, but also enhances the salience of stimuli associated with it. The Karma of repeatedly experiencing powerful reinforcement is not only the creation of autonomous paths to relapse, but that stimuli associated with getting or using the incentive become increasingly capable of capturing your attention and eliciting unintended state changes—or trance formations. As a result of their association with the incentive, certain stimuli—persons, places or things—become salient. If you allow them to capture your attention they can elicit trances that will distort your perception, motivation and other state-dependent phenomena in ways that are counter to your interests.

Your biology, past reinforcement history, and current social environment determines what is salient. Your rational processing system gets to determine what is meaningful. To follow your path of greatest advantage you will have to know what it is, and develop the competence to resist the pull of highly salient stimuli and willfully select the target of your attention.

Suggestions are invitations to explore a particular subjective reality. Whether the entity that creates it is a hypnotist, salesman, or you, the suggestion is always a creative fiction rather than a claim of objective validity. Typically, the suggestion is designed to promote the interests of its creator—unless that entity is neurotic.

The interests of the stage hypnotist are served when the subject performs foolishly and the audience laughs; the interests of the salesman are served when the customer buys. Your interests are served when you get yourself to act as you intend despite the influence of local conditions that would promote relapse.

The method of hypnotic suggestion, demonstrated by stage hypnotists, can be a powerful tool in the service of behavior change. But because the procedure is portrayed as comedy, the public has developed the wrong idea of how it works. The popular misconception that hypnosis compels the mindless subject to obey the suggestion of the controlling hypnotist probably results from the stage demonstration called the challenge—for example: “Your leg is getting heavier and heavier/you can try to lift your leg/but it will be so heavy/that you won’t be able to do it.” This sounds like a battle of wills between the hypnotist and the subject, but it is not. In fact whatever happens is produced completely by the subject and is an intra-personal rather than an inter-personal phenomenon. After you have read the explanation, you can experience this classic hypnotic phenomenon by exercising your faculty of imagination with the Heavy Shoe audio invitation.

As you will see, the script is full of lies, such as “your shoe is made of lead/ your leg is too heavy to lift” Scripts such as this are used to demonstrate that simple verbal suggestions can influence the experience and behavior of a cooperative subject. The demonstration can produce humorous or shocking consequences when the subject acts as if the reality suggested by the hypnotist were actually true. Acting as though an objectively false suggestion were true—e.g., your shoe is made of lead—produces behavior that would appear absurd to an observer, and so the audience, who are not asked to buy into the false suggestion, finds it humorous.

Barry’s Neurotic Trance
But some things are neither true nor false. Are you a hero or a loser? There is no objective answer to that question. Concepts like that exist only within your mind. But how you perform in the real world depends, to a large extent, upon your subjective reality at that moment. The heroic version of you would react differently than your loser persona. Consider Barry’s predicament: He wants, very badly, to perform well, but his self-evaluative perspective produces the wrong trance:

Barry exhibits a much sharper wit in social environments where he expects to perform well than in situations that evoke his “loser” persona. The appraisal: “I’m a loser,” or the expectation: “I will perform well,” exists only in Barry’s mind and not in the objective world. Nevertheless, his subjective reality influences how he will behave in the objective world. Whether he reacts to the snide insult at the office party with a witty come back or humiliation depends to a large extent on his subjective reality at the time. His retort is more likely to be clever if he is in a confident trance than if he is in his “loser” trance. He wants to bring on the clever version of himself and enjoy a social victory for a change, but he expects to be weak and intimidated as usual. Observers who know Barry have their predictions—one expected an embarrassing pause and another expected him to say something stupid. But these expectations exist only in their minds. Whatever Barry actually does becomes part of objective reality, while all the other possibilities fade into oblivion.

It would be good for Barry if he performs well during his crisis. But there is a conflict between his intentions—to be the cool and clever Barry—and his expectation of humiliation. Will his expectations or his intentions determine which Barry shows up at the critical moment?

Expectations have the advantage—both Barry and his friends believe them to be true. From our dispassionate perspective we can see they are merely creative fictions which are neither true nor false. Barry’s only real limitation is the one that he created.

Unlike insults and injuries that come from outside and tend to heal with time, Barry’s recursive problem has been with him for a long time and continually diminishes his fun, increases his misery, and prevents him from establishing an intimate partnership. Such problems tend not to go away by themselves but strengthen with practice.

The illusion of state permanence, a variation of the Soul Illusion, refers to the tacit premise that we will always perceive things as we do now. This may be true for you now as you read, as it is for my clients during their therapy sessions. If only you had access to these cognitive gifts when next you encounter a high-risk situation. Sadly, this is not to be. Instead, you will be influenced in the same way you were the last time you were in a similar circumstance.

The hypnotic state clients experience in my office as a result of a formal trance induction is just one of the many different trances they experience throughout their day. Subjective experience emerges from the Psyche’s attempt to interpret sensory input. The interpretations are biased by a range of factors, including beliefs. For example, skiers with different beliefs about their abilities may experience different subjective realities on the same slope.

There is nothing unusual about hypnosis—everything we experience is trance phenomena. You can evoke one kind of trance by listening to a trance formation audio file, but you don’t need a formal hypnotic induction to change your experiential state. Consider the following thought experiment:

Thought Experiment: The Emergency. Imagine that you just got a message that someone in your family had been seriously hurt in an automobile accident and you must get to the emergency room right away. Your biological state would change immediately and you would run or drive there as fast as you could, heart pounding, thoughts racing, and experiencing great distress. When you got there and discovered the report was untrue, you would experience relief, a very different trance. Objectively, the report was never true, yet it had a great impact on your physical and emotional state.

State-dependent phenomena—including motivation, perceptual bias and response probability distribution—are determined by the subjective reality that existed in your mind, not by what was objectively true.

Your subjective reality is a creative fiction that you are continually inventing. To be sure, your overt behavior becomes part of world history (and so can never be undone), but the trance that gives rise to it is purely subjective and does not exist outside your consciousness.

Doing Mode refers to interacting with the world in a goal directed way. The OPEN Path exemplifies Doing Mode. You notice a discrepancy between the way things are and the way you want them to be so you develop a plan to achieve your goal, execute it, and observe how it worked so you can modify your actions accordingly. In contrast, Being Mode refers to experiencing the here and now without trying to accomplish anything.

Suffering naturally evokes Doing Mode to solve the problem and end the suffering. When you attempt to solve a personal problem, your attention will often focus on the difference between the way you are and the way you want to be. If you are not careful, this perspective can be a seductive trigger for ruminative self-focus. Ironically, intending not to fall into this trap can set up a self-critical reaction when you catch yourself ruminating, “I’m ruminating again, after I told myself not to.”

Pathogenic rumination can be evoked by almost anything, and overcoming it requires that you recognize that you are doing it, so that you can disengage from it. But this, of course, implies Doing Mode, which is likely to trigger self-evaluation and ruminative self-focus, and the recognition that you have fallen back into it again.

This is an extraordinarily destructive trap, but it is so compelling. One approach to escaping it is to develop the meta-cognitive ability to intentionally switch from Doing Mode to Being Mode, and thereby awaken yourself from autonomous problem-solving and the state-dependent phenomena it engenders, and instead experience the here and now without interpretation.

Mindfulness
Mindfulness is a mental discipline that promotes awakening and may be defined as: Sensitivity to present experience with non-judgmental acceptance.

Much of our behavior occurs autonomously in the service of one goal or another. As we go about our daily lives, we are typically preoccupied with the past or future while our actions in the present are generally mindless sequences of behavior in the service of some local goal, such as driving to the store. In contrast, mindfulness involves keeping attention in the present moment without judging it as good or bad—calmly and consciously observing and accepting whatever is happening in the here and now.

Thought Experiment: Mindfulness Meditation. Focus your attention on the sensation of the air as it passes in and out of your nostrils with each breath. Each time a thought or feeling arises, notice it, but don’t analyze it or judge it, and return your attention to the breathing. Don’t approach this exercise with the expectation that anything special will happen (that is the very trap we seek to escape through this exercise). As you follow your breath you will notice that a range of thoughts, images and sensations arise in your consciousness and elicit reactions. Your task is to intentionally suspend the impulse to characterize or evaluate what you are experiencing, and instead to experience the here and now directly without filtering it in any way.

Meta-Cognitive Awareness—the appreciation that subjective reality is the state-dependent creation of a biological creature at a particular moment (not necessarily an accurate reflection of the objective truth) can free you from the Soul Illusion. The understanding that thoughts and emotions are not necessarily valid and may be distorted in perverse ways when local conditions elicit pathogenic trances, makes it possible for you to exercise your will. When local conditions influence your appraisals and response tendencies in ways that promote relapse, your task is to recognize this and to re-capture your attention so that you operate the vehicle in accord with your core motivation.

Awakening
The exercise of will often involves a meta-cognitive shift from the perspective of the creature to the perspective of the operator of the creature. For example, when the spouse abuser recognizes that he is in one of his angry Mr. Hyde trances, he has learned to consult the reminder card [described in the next section] that says: “I am probably reading this because I want to act out my anger, but that would be a mistake. Instead I will practice reducing my anger and acting in accord with my interests and principles.”

Developing the ability to awaken from the Mr. Hyde trance and act according to his core motivation—stay out of jail and re-establish a rewarding lifetime partnership—is a non-trivial challenge. This same challenge of awakening from a pathogenic trance faces the individual with an incentive use disorder. In both cases, good outcome requires a meta-cognitive shift from the state-dependent perspective that would motivate destructive behavior to the detached perspective of an interested but uninvolved spectator.

Thought Experiment: Meta-cognitive perspective of a conflict. During a high-risk situation see if you can detach from Doing Mode so that you can observe your sensations and thoughts with acceptance. Use language to describe, the two conflicting forces: Cravings or urges that pull you toward the incentive, and the forces which pull you in a different direction. After you finish, it is recommended that you write about your experiences, describing as best as you can the details of these motivations—your experience of them, their priority now, their priority then, and any conclusions you may have about your core, or true, motivation.

The critical component of the exercise of will is the meta-cognitive shift.

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference,” is an eloquent statement of the Enlightened Path.

Here is the way to know the difference: The only things you can change are your thoughts and actions; everything else is outside of your control. Consider how the Serenity Prayer applies to ruminative self-focus. “The things I cannot change” include outcomes, the past, what people think of me. I must have the serenity to accept these realities.

Given your awareness of situations or personal characteristics that diminish the quality of your life, it is natural to apply your problem-solving skills to improve things. The goal is clear enough: Maximize pleasure and desirable outcomes and minimize pain and miserable outcomes. Unfortunately, problem-solving methods applied to the self tend to trigger self-evaluation and hence ruminative self-focus, which in turn increases the likelihood of suffering and bad outcomes.

Ironically, problem solving in the service of escaping suffering, or achieving gratification, drives the recursive mechanism. The irony shows up in many neurotic and addictive disorders. For example, individuals with social phobia are often successful at minimizing social contact, which prevents the exposure to social situations, which is the cure for social phobia. Substance abusers are notorious for coming up with ingenious methods to access their chemical of choice despite the heroic efforts of families or treatment programs to protect them—the relapse, of course, exacerbates their suffering.

“Accept the truth, even if it is not what you expected or wanted” is the kind of advice one might give a child. In domains of low self-efficacy, even otherwise competent adults revert to the mentality of childhood. Children are attached to outcomes, react emotionally when their efforts are frustrated, and tend to focus on themselves, how they feel, and how valuable they are.

At the theoretical level, the scientific method is flexible in its openness to new facts and ideas. At the procedural level, it is rigid; a good scientist adheres, without exception, to good scientific process. You can be confident that (s)he followed the procedures exactly as described in the publication’s method section. The Enlightened Path requires adherence to good process: Honor your commitments exactly as described and without exception! Be aware of this responsibility when you compose your plan. Do not look for or accept loopholes!

On the Enlightened Path, whatever happens is nature’s way of teaching you the principles of cause-and-effect. Performance errors that in the past would have triggered ruminative self-focus, are instead used in the service of personal growth by increasing your understanding of cause-and-effect relationships. Following the Enlightened Path requires that you perform as intended without exception . . . except when there are exceptions.

Rather than react to unexpected and unpleasant data with self-focused rumination, you are to use the information to develop a more accurate appreciation of the relevant cause-and-effect principles that influence your subjective experience. The truth wants to set you free!

An Exquisite Irony
As you follow the Enlightened Path, you will discover the truth about how you actually respond during real-time crisis. The truth is what it is, and it can be cruel. However, the truth can only set you free if you can accept it. Your challenge is to prevent your reaction to learning the truth from provoking ruminative self-focus and other drains on your motivation and cognitive resources.

Planning itself involves attachment. The very attempt to achieve a goal implies that reaching this goal is desirable. When I feel bad, I am motivated to figure out what to do so I will feel better. But this requires that I check whether or not my tactics are working. If I detect, failure, that means my tactics are not working and I should change them. Sadly, most people interpret negative feedback as evidence of their intrinsic defects or worthlessness, which begins the self-focused ruminative sequence that is never helpful.

Individuals who take on a task as demanding as this one must be open to the truth, yet avoid the judgmental reactions that would trigger neurotic rumination and the impaired performance it brings about. Preventing ruminative self-focus from hijacking your cognitive resources is a critical challenge. Discovering the truth about cause-and-effect, rather than avoiding looking at it, is what enables you to benefit from the lessons that nature is trying to teach you. The Enlightened Path requires that you be awake and open to the truth, no matter how ugly or cruel.

Please click here for implications of the enlightened path on recovery from dependence on an incentive to cope with the experiences of life.

• Is light a particle or a wave?
• Is the electron here or not here?
• Am I the most important thing in the universe or am I merely dust and ashes?
• Should I follow a rigid or a flexible path?

Oddly, the best answer to each of these questions is: Yes! Both of the incompatible alternatives are valid at the same time.

Because we do not have direct access to objective truth, our understanding of reality is riddled with paradox. The enlightened path refers to the ability to cope with such paradoxes. This path is not available to the young, for it requires the maturity to accept ambiguity and the limitations of one’s understandings and influence.

The Watercourse Way

The Tao is a metaphor for the natural order of things. Water follows the path of least resistance. Appreciating and working with the cause-and-effect principles of hydrodynamics enables the construction and maintenance of irrigation and plumbing systems that work. Just as the flow of water is influenced by lawful principles such as gravity, the course of your biography is influenced by lawful principles such as the PIG [a small immediate payoff is more influential than a much larger but delayed payoff]. Appreciating and working with the natural laws of the Psyche is the way of the will.

It is not the water’s fault that it is influenced by gravity, nor is it yours that you are influenced by the PIG. You are, however, responsible for taking factors such as the PIG—the hyperbolic relationship between the immediacy of a payoff and its influence on state-dependent phenomena—into account when you develop a plan to escape an addictive trap.

You are not responsible for having fallen into an addictive trap; there are a range of biological, psychological, and social cause-and-effect principles that combined to produce your current predicament. However, now that you are an adult and have recognized that you have a problem, you are responsible for overcoming it so you can act in accord with your interests and principles.

You have now examined two defining strategies for coping with addictive traps. Soon you will design a plan to guide yourself through the heroic challenges you are bound to encounter. You will then have to follow the plan through a real world full of predictable and unpredictable circumstances that would motivate you to abandon it. How flexible should you be? At one extreme is the Impeccable Path in which you rigidly adhere to your plan with no exceptions, at the other extreme is an OPEN Path where errors are opportunities for growth.

The Enlightened Path is a middle way and contains elements of both. You must honor all commitments without exception, but you must only commit to what you can control.  You control your behavior and attitudes, but not outcomes! You can accept responsibility for what you do, but it would be imprudent to accept responsibility for the outcomes of what you do; forces other than you have an influence on how events play out in the objective world. So be careful about committing to improving your life or to repairing relationships; you may have less control over such things than you think.

This middle way is an opportunity to apply the scientific method, in a gentle and forgiving manner. The Enlightened Path presupposes that your understanding of reality will always be imperfect, so you must be open to disconfirming information and use it to nurture your understanding of cause-and-effect.  Please click here for exercises that can enhance your ability to follow this path.

Relapse is common because we are all vulnerable to the Soul Illusion: During high-risk situations we will not be as motivated to avoid lapsing as we are now. This is not a problem for followers of the Impeccable Path, because they do not have to make plans. They have no choices other than rigid adherence to their commitment. The OPEN Path is more complicated.

To follow the OPEN Path you would develop an Implementation Intention such as, “When I encounter high-risk situation X, I will execute tactic Y.” You have to exercise your will to carry out your plan, and then, like a scientist, you would observe what happens. If you get the expected outcome, you are on the right track. Congratulations! However, if things did not work out as you expected, nature is telling you that cause-and-effect play out differently than you thought, and you must modify your plan to account for this new knowledge. Then, you would execute the new plan and be open to the feedback nature gives you, and so forth. Over time you will develop a more sophisticated understanding of cause-and-effect in your universe and a progressively more realistic and effective set of coping tactics.

The OPEN Path refers to: Outcome, Plan, Execute, Nurture:

1. Choose an Outcome you want.

2. Develop a Plan to achieve it.

3. Execute the plan.

4. Nurture your understanding through observation and modify the plan accordingly. Go back to step #3.

Example of H’s plan: “At the wedding reception, whenever I think of drinking alcohol, I will take a sip of club soda and focus on my family.” Later, he will review his observations, asking himself: “What can I learn from this experience?” “What helped and what did not?”
The Truth Will Set You Free!
The objective of the OPEN Path is to improve your understanding of cause-and-effect through observation. If your predictions were good enough for you to create a plan that worked well, congratulate yourself, and note what you did that was effective. Success has a lot of information value: There are many ways to fail, but few ways to succeed.

However, if things did not go as predicted, nature has taught you something you did not know before. The task now is to appreciate that you received something of value, rather than a rebuke, and use this new information to improve your understanding so you can modify your plan accordingly. You might make some adjustments or abandon the tactic completely in favor of a different approach. As you continue to accept natural feedback and use it to improve your coping abilities, you will become progressively more effective.
Self-Forgiveness
The follower of the OPEN Path seeks truth as revealed by observation. Personal experiments are conducted primarily to ask a question of nature and receive an answer. These experiments are risky. Unexpected results are common; if we knew what would work we would not have to do the experiment.

Performing these experiments requires courage. Unfortunately, many people with addictive disorders are relentless promoters of self-hate. The inevitable setbacks and hard times are taken as proof of their intrinsic worthlessness or of the hopelessness of their situation.  The solution to this problem is presented in the next Blog Entry.

Despite their repeated relapses most people never develop sufficient respect for the challenge they face. Instead they believe their previous failures reflect their own defectiveness. If they appreciated what they were up against, they would not make shallow commitments.

Once you make up your mind to control your appetites, the only thing preventing you from giving in to a temptation is your commitment not to. Failing to honor a commitment sets the precedent that you can make a commitment and then violate it. This precedent weakens the ability of future commitments to influence your behavior. The critical error of making and then breaking a commitment can transform an excessive appetite into dependence. The transition is gradual and the individual is generally not aware of the process while it is happening.

The point of making a commitment is to freeze your motivation, so that your future behavior is determined by your commitment to follow your plan rather than by local temptations. A commitment is your guarantee that you will adhere to your plan even when it would be easier or more pleasurable to defect. If you fail to honor your guarantee you have made a liar of yourself, and future guarantees will be worth less.

Making a commitment is like making a bet. If you adhere to it you win and your willpower is enhanced; if you fail, you lose and the strength of your will diminishes.

Odysseus and the Sirens

In a different era Odysseus had to sail within earshot of the Sirens. No sailor could resist their seductive call. The penalty for giving in to this irresistible temptation was death by drowning—the fate experienced by all who had come before. Appreciating the danger, Odysseus filled his men’s ears with wax so they would not be able to hear the Sirens. Odysseus wanted to hear what the Sirens sounded like, but he knew that if he did he would be unable to resist their pull. The heroic solution: Odysseus pre-committed his future behavior by ordering his men to tie him to the mast of the ship.

The plan was successful—when the ship sailed past the island, the Sirens called, but the men could not hear them and kept rowing. Odysseus heard the Sirens, but did not (could not) give in to the temptation, because he was bound to the mast.

Four Lessons
1. Odysseus made his plans in advance. He knew that once he heard the Sirens it would be too late to influence his own behavior—their call would have transformed him from a potent warrior to a helpless victim. You would do well to use Odysseus’ humility as a model. Understand this: When you encounter a high-risk situation you will not have the strengths that are available to you now, and you are not likely to come up with an effective response during the crisis. To succeed you must have a well planned, well rehearsed coping tactic already in place.

2. Engineer your environment to minimize your exposure to temptation: avoid high-risk situations and people—at least until the healthy habits have strengthened.

3. Because no sailor had ever survived the temptation of the Sirens, some might take a defeatist attitude and passively accept the inevitable loss. But Odysseus was a hero (he had high self-efficacy) and so he approached the challenge as a problem to be solved. He devised a good plan and executed it well.

4. The most important lesson is, even though Odysseus experienced irresistible temptation, he did not give in to it. Before reading on, think back to the story . . . how did he do it?

Having respect for the irresistible power of the Sirens, he pre-committed his future behavior by having himself bound by strong rope. Likewise you can pre-commit your future behavior by being bound by your word. For example: “I am not experiencing temptation now, but I know that I will. So I give my word that no matter what the circumstance I will keep distance between me and the incentive.” Willpower refers to your ability to adhere to your commitment despite the influence of local factors that would pull you astray.

Willpower—the power of your intention to influence real world events—is a creation of the Psyche and can be gained or lost according to how you actually perform.

Thought Experiment: Earnest promises. You announce that you need to move some bulky furniture. Ernest, who owns a pickup, offers to help. You point out that he often makes such promises and has let you down many times. He replies, “But this time I really mean it.” He seems sincere, but he seemed sincere the other times too. The objective world demands that the furniture gets moved. Should you count on Ernest showing up or make your plans assuming he won’t? Events in the objective world have not happened yet so we don’t know for sure whether or not Ernest will show up. However, your expectations will be based upon what you have learned about how seriously Ernest has taken his previous commitment to you.

When you make commitments to yourself, are you earnest? Failing to honor your word weakens subsequent commitments—telling yourself: “But this time I really mean it” is not an effective rescue. On the other hand, each time you honor a commitment you enhance your willpower.

Understand this: Once you decide to change your ways, you must permit no exceptions to occur!

Note that the word “decide” is derived from the root “cide,” which means “to kill,” as in sui-cide, homi-cide, insecti-cide. When, for example, an alcoholic makes the decision to quit drinking, it is understood that (s)he means to kill, once and for all, the option to drink alcohol, and thereby lock out drinking in the future. (The requirement of absolute adherence to the commitment is equally important for those who choose moderation rather than abstinence as an outcome goal.)

Typically, one decides to control an impulsive behavior when its costs are more salient than its benefits. Your commitment is your promise to adhere to the plan in all circumstances. Willpower is the measure of your ability to deliver on that guarantee. Willpower is not static, and your capability of overriding the influence of the PIG can increase or decrease according to certain lawful principles. Local conditions such as negative emotional states or exhaustion can deplete this power. So, like an athlete, it is important to train hard to develop your strength and be vigilant for circumstances that would deplete it. Please click here for more about Will and Subjective Reality.