By OLIVER BURKEMAN
The holiday season poses a psychological conundrum.
Its defining sentiment, of course, is joy—yet the strenuous effort to be joyous
seems to make many of us miserable. It's hard to be happy in overcrowded
airport lounges or while you're trying to stay civil for days on end with
relatives who stretch your patience.
So to cope with the holidays, magazines and others are
advising us to "think positive"—the same advice, in other words, that
Norman Vincent Peale, author of "The Power of Positive Thinking," was
dispensing six decades ago. (During holidays, Peale once suggested, you should
make "a deliberate effort to speak hopefully about everything.") The
result all too often mirrors the famously annoying parlor game about trying not
to think of a white bear: The harder you try, the more you think about one.
Variations of Peale's positive philosophy run deep in
American culture, not just in how we handle holidays and other social
situations but in business, politics and beyond. Yet studies suggest that peppy
affirmations designed to lift the user's mood through repetition and
visualizing future success often achieve the opposite of their intended effect.
Fortunately, both ancient philosophy and contemporary
psychology point to an alternative: a counterintuitive approach that might be
termed "the negative path to happiness." This approach helps to
explain some puzzles, such as the fact that citizens of more economically
insecure countries often report greater happiness than citizens of wealthier
ones. Or that many successful businesspeople reject the idea of setting firm
goals.
One pioneer of the "negative path" was the
New York psychotherapist Albert Ellis, who died in 2007. He rediscovered a key
insight of the Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome: that sometimes
the best way to address an uncertain future is to focus not on the best-case
scenario but on the worst.
Seneca the Stoic was a radical on this matter. If you
feared losing your wealth, he once advised, "set aside a certain number of
days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare,
with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: 'Is this the
condition that I feared?' "
To overcome a fear of embarrassment, Ellis told me, he
advised his clients to travel on the New York subway, speaking the names of
stations out loud as they passed. I'm an easily embarrassed person, so in the
interest of journalistic research, I took his advice, on the Central Line of
the London Underground. It was agonizing. But my overblown fears were cut down
to size: I wasn't verbally harangued or physically attacked. A few people
looked at me strangely.
Just thinking in sober detail about worst-case
scenarios—a technique the Stoics called "the premeditation of
evils"—can help to sap the future of its anxiety-producing power. The
psychologist Julie Norem estimates that about one-third of Americans
instinctively use this strategy, which she terms "defensive
pessimism." Positive thinking, by contrast, is the effort to convince
yourself that things will turn out fine, which can reinforce the belief that it
would be absolutely terrible if they didn't.
In American corporations, perhaps the most widely
accepted doctrine of the "cult of positivity" is the importance of
setting big, audacious goals for an organization, while employees are
encouraged (or compelled) to set goals that are
"SMART"—"Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and
Timely." (It is thought that the term was first used in a 1981 article by
George T. Doran.)
But the pro-goal consensus is starting to crumble. For
one thing, rigid goals may encourage employees to cut ethical corners. In a
study conducted by the management scholar Lisa Ordóñez and her colleagues,
participants had to make words from a set of random letters, as in Scrabble.
The experiment let them report their progress anonymously—and those given a
specific target to reach lied far more frequently than those instructed merely
to "do your best."
Goals may even lead to underachievement. Many New York
taxi drivers, one team of economists concluded, make less money in rainy
weather than they could because they finish work as soon as they reach their
mental target for what constitute a good day's earnings.
Focusing on one goal at the expense of all other
factors also can distort a corporate mission or an individual life, says
Christopher Kayes, an associate professor of management at George Washington
University in Washington, D.C. Prof. Kayes, who has studied the
"overpursuit" of goals, recalls a conversation with one executive who
"told me his goal had been to become a millionaire by the age of 40…and
he'd done it. [But] he was also divorced, and had health problems, and his kids
didn't talk to him anymore." Behind our fixation on goals, Prof. Kayes's
work suggests, is a deep unease with feelings of uncertainty.
Research by Saras Sarasvathy, an associate professor
of business administration at the University of Virginia, suggests that
learning to accommodate feelings of uncertainty is not just the key to a more
balanced life but often leads to prosperity as well. For one project, she
interviewed 45 successful entrepreneurs, all of whom had taken at least one
business public. Almost none embraced the idea of writing comprehensive
business plans or conducting extensive market research.
They practiced instead what Prof. Sarasvathy calls
"effectuation." Rather than choosing a goal and then making a plan to
achieve it, they took stock of the means and materials at their disposal, then
imagined the possible ends. Effectuation also includes what she calls the
"affordable loss principle." Instead of focusing on the possibility
of spectacular rewards from a venture, ask how great the loss would be if it
failed. If the potential loss seems tolerable, take the next step.
The ultimate value of the "negative path"
may not be its role in facilitating upbeat emotions or even success. It is
simply realism. The future really is uncertain, after all, and things really do
go wrong as well as right. We are too often motivated by a craving to put an
end to the inevitable surprises in our lives.
This is especially true of the biggest
"negative" of all. Might we benefit from contemplating mortality more
regularly than we do? As Steve Jobs famously declared, "Remembering that
you are going to die is the best way that I know to avoid the trap of thinking
you have something to lose."
However tempted we may be to agree with Woody Allen's
position on death—"I'm strongly against it"—there's much to be said
for confronting it rather than denying it. There are some facts that even the
most powerful positive thinking can't alter.
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