I was headed to bed at midnight when I noticed the glow at the bottom of my 18-year-old daughter Serafina’s bedroom door. 

“Are you going to bed soon?” I asked.

“I just need to finish studying for my math test after I’m done with science,” she said, in the tense and tight vocal tones of someone working beyond fatigue.

In Serafina’s high school years, I felt powerless to relieve her stress as she raced from dance practices to homework to volunteer commitments. But now I know what I wished I’d done sooner: helped her find moments of awe. 

What is awe? Awe is the feeling of encountering vast mysteries that we don’t immediately understand. We find awe in the “eight wonders of life,” everything from noticing someone’s exceptional courage and strength to experiencing the power of nature or feeling transported by soaring music or by the collective movement of people dancing. 

Brief moments of awe are good for us. For instance, research my colleagues and I conducted found that children who felt awe were more generous. They spent more time on a tedious task that benefited refugees and were more likely to donate their reward for participating in the study—a chocolate snack or a ticket to a local museum—to refugee children. Awe also benefited the children themselves by making them feel more relaxed and connected to others.

Once you know what to look for, awe isn’t hard to experience. You can find it in moments of daily living—listening carefully to a thunderstorm, watching documentaries, marveling at the human dramas in a city, or watching the dusk sky turn to night. As for Serafina and me, we instituted a nightly walk before she graduated high school where we ritualistically touched a large cedar tree up the road from our house.  

Don’t think you have to travel to an exotic locale or learn the finer points of classical music to find awe.  

Do pause and look for moments of awe every day and help young people notice them as well. When you go for a walk, notice the large and the small—the canopy of trees as well as the individual flowers and blades of grass. If you’re building a music playlist, add songs that make you feel connected to the larger world. Begin conversations with open-ended questions that point to mysteries rather than answers. Feeling awe is an antidote to our high-stakes, stressed-out, highly competitive times. 

With awe, wonder, and gratitude,

Dacher  

Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley and faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center, is the author ofAwe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life. He also hosts the podcast The Science of Happiness and teaches the online course Awe in Education: Creating Learning Environments that Inspire, Motivate, and Heal.  Previously published on Character Lab.

The post Small Wonders: Finding Everyday Moments of Awe appeared first on Getting Smart.

We define proactivity as taking initiative. Why is proactivity so important? 

It’s often harder to get started than to keep going on a task. And the closer you get to achieving a goal, the easier it gets. So you could argue that the hardest part of reaching a goal is getting started. Research shows that there are times when it’s easier to get started—for example, when you feel like it’s the beginning of a new era. “Today is the first day of the rest of your life”—that cliché is actually helpful. If you feel like today is the start of a new time period, you are more motivated to start working toward goals. 

How can parents and teachers help kids get started on projects? 

Saying “just do it” isn’t very useful when you feel overwhelmed. It helps to break things down into smaller steps and tell yourself consciously, “All I’m doing today is getting started on the first step, and I’m not going to worry about the rest. Today is a good day for getting started.” Once you’ve done the first small thing, the next small thing is easier to do. The next day, you can say to yourself, “Today is a good day to get started on step two.” Before you know it, you’ve completed the whole task. 

Sometimes parents see a project due in a week and think their kid should be working on it, but the kid thinks there’s no rush. What’s a good way to talk about deadlines?

The two different viewpoints—feeling a sense of urgency when a task is due in a week or feeling like there’s still a lot of time left—are both totally valid. There’s only a problem if people clash in those views, when one person feels like, “Why are they not working on this? They should be doing things because they only have a week,” and the other person thinks, “It’s not due for a whole week. What’s the rush?” I think the best way to bridge the gap is to talk about the difference in perception and set deadlines you both agree on. You have to be very explicit about what the kid plans to do and when they plan to do it to avoid miscommunication.  

How can parents and teachers help kids manage their time for long-term projects?

It’s possible to shift people’s perception of time—how close or far into the future something feels. If you show the deadline in a very large timeframe like the school year and the assignment is due in a month, it feels a lot closer than if the timeline only spans two months, so the deadline is right in the middle. With little visual tricks, you can shift people into feeling motivated to get working. 

You can also break down the project into smaller steps and set intermediate deadlines. You can ask kids, “What will you do per week?” and establish weekly deadlines so they don’t leave everything to the end.

What’s one easy thing we can do to help kids be more proactive?

Help them practice thinking into the future. My own kids don’t often do that spontaneously, so I have to encourage it. I’ll ask them, “What do you want to happen a year from now? What do you want to do between now and then?” So they practice planning out tasks and steps to reach goals. I’ll also talk to them about fun things, like a trip we will take this summer, and what we have to do beforehand. Do we need to buy luggage? What will we pack? I think this kind of explicit planning is a skill that can transfer over to other areas, like academics. 

What do you think people get wrong about proactivity? 

People believe that some kids are proactive and others aren’t. But they might just see the proactive impulses of one kid more than another. Maybe the other kid is being proactive in ways that aren’t as obvious. Or maybe they just haven’t had the circumstances that push them to show those qualities. 

Everybody can be proactive. Everybody has the potential to be a champion for their ideas and get started on things and be inspiring to others. Proactivity is a quality we all have—it’s just about giving space to it and showing it to the world. Originally published by Character Lab, a nonprofit advancing scientific insights that help kids thrive.

The post Jump Start: How to Encourage Proactivity appeared first on Getting Smart.

In the mornings, as I walked from the train station to the office, I planned my day by making a to-do list in my head: the scientific articles I would read, the data sets I would analyze, and—most urgent of all—the piercing insights into human nature that it was my job to discover.

Each evening, I trudged back to the station, again ticking through my mental checklist, but this time sizing up my performance against the expectations I’d set for myself that morning. Time and again, when comparing my to-do list with my got-done list, I found myself falling short. 

But one day, something very strange happened. At the midpoint in my commute home, without any conscious intent, my thoughts began to shift. Instead of cursing my weaknesses, I thought, and even said aloud sometimes, very softly: I’m a nice person. I’m a nice person. I’m a nice person.

By the time I boarded my train, I was done with my little mantra—until the next day when I walked home. And again, after inventorying my failures, I found myself saying quietly: I’m a nice person. 

What kind of person walks around giving themselves compliments? Was I a narcissist? What was going on? 

It turns out that there’s a technical term for this practice: values affirmation. And what it boils down to is recognizing, and reinforcing, the personal values you hold most dear.

When you affirm a core personal value, you shore up your sense of self-worth. You broaden your perspective: Instead of zooming in on your inadequacies, you switch to a wide-angle view that includes your resources and opportunities. Research also shows that the majority of adults spontaneously engage in some form of values affirmation. And the more people are in the habit of doing so, the happier, healthier, and more hopeful they are. 

Over time, I made progress in my research and learned a lot about what makes most successful people special, including this: Nobody has passion and perseverance unless what they do aligns with their values.

Try values affirmation for yourself. Take a moment and think of a value you hold dear, whether it’s kindness, creativity, gratitude, or integrity. Whatever it is, name it. And then say to yourself: Come what may, I know who I am. Your values are your foundation and your compass, too. Trust them, and they will lead you home.

With grit and gratitude,

Angela

The post Know Thyself: Your Values Are Your Compass appeared first on Getting Smart.

Earlier this year, I was so excited to get together with my youngest brother and his family for the first time since the pandemic—and to meet my new nephew. So when we settled into the living room to catch up, I couldn’t understand why I suddenly wanted to flee. My brother and I have a close relationship, and I love his wife.

As this fear washed over me, I realized I hadn’t shared extended time in person with anyone outside my household in over three years. I’m prone to social anxiety in this kind of situation, and it had grown since I’d been out of practice facing it.

It turns out, my reaction was exactly what research would predict. In a classic three-phase study, participants were shown pictures, some of which were followed by an “annoying but not painful” electric shock. Not surprisingly, the participants developed a fear response to the shock-paired pictures.

Next, participants were shown the same pictures without any shocks, and their fear responses went way down. In the absence of harm, they learned not to be afraid.

What happened in the final phase, when participants were tested again without being shocked? You might expect that they would show little fear since they had learned that the pictures don’t mean they’re about to get an annoying zap. But that’s not what happened. Instead, their fear returned.

When you face what you’re afraid of and nothing bad happens, you feel less afraid. But that doesn’t mean your anxieties are erased, never to return. When you haven’t confronted a fear in a while, your brain defaults to the safest assumption—which means being on guard for danger.

Don’t react to others’ unexpected fear with criticism, such as “I thought you were over this already!”

Do face your fears consistently and in multiple contexts, which minimizes an anxious response—and help the young people in your life do the same. Conquering fear doesn’t mean getting rid of it once and for all. It means deciding to face it as often as you need to so nothing gets in the way of living the life you want.

With courage and gratitude,

Seth

Seth J. Gillihan is a clinical psychologist and the author, most recently, of Mindful Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: A Simple Path to Healing, Hope, and Peace.

The post Echoes of Fear: Consistent Exposure Keeps Anxiety at Bay appeared first on Getting Smart.

Today, I’ve asked Cassie Holmes to share her Tip of the Week.

Ashley and I have been friends since we were 12 years old. When we find a way to schedule a dinner for just the two of us, away from kids and work and endless to-do lists, it’s a special treat.

As we sat down, Ashley placed her phone face down on the table. “Aren’t you proud of me? This way I won’t be distracted.”

Though I applauded her intentions, research finds that friends who dine with their phones on the table feel less engaged and enjoy their dining experience less compared with those whose phones are kept out of sight. Seeing a phone serves as a reminder (to everyone) of all the other tasks they could and “should” be doing at that moment.

Yet this was a moment worth paying attention to. My research shows that ordinary experiences—like a meal shared with a loved one—can produce as much happiness as extraordinary experiences, such as vacations to Belize or Paris. But this is only true for those who recognize their time as precious. Whether due to age or even a simple reminder that life is finite, people become more likely to notice and savor simple joys: the sky changing color as the sun goes down, the laughter of family at the dinner table, a kiss on the forehead to say goodnight.

At the restaurant, I asked my friend whether she wouldn’t mind putting her phone in her purse. Laughing about my nerdy commitment to happiness, she obliged and actually seemed grateful for the nudge. Then, we easily settled into our groove, excitedly chatting and truly catching up.

Don’t think it’s enough to turn over your phone to avoid being distracted by it.

Do pay attention to the joy in the everyday. Protect your happiest activities from distraction by designating these times as “no phone zones,” say at dinners with friends or family, and explain to kids the reasons why. Putting your phones out of sight puts your other to-dos out of mind—and allows you and your loved ones to actually enjoy each other and what you’re doing.

With joy and gratitude,

Cassie

Cassie Holmes is a professor at UCLA Anderson and the author of Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most.

The post Center of Attention: Noticing Joy in the Everyday appeared first on Getting Smart.

“I think the geometry track is the way to go.”

“But I’m really worried about putting too much pressure on him.”

When our 11-year-old son, Henry, was entering middle school, his mom and I were torn about whether it would be too stressful for him to join the most accelerated math track. That track devotes twice as much daily class time to math, setting kids up to take more advanced courses in high school.

Succeeding in that accelerated track would open many doors for Henry academically down the road. But there has been an alarming rise in stress-related mental health problems among adolescents in this country in recent years—even before the pandemic. We don’t want our son to succeed academically at the cost of his happiness and mental health.

What can parents do? Help kids think about stress with synergistic mindsets.

Synergistic mindsets combine two ideas. First, when you’re learning something new, struggle and frustration don’t mean you’ve reached your limits—they’re signs that you’re expanding those limits.

Second, the uncomfortable feelings you have under intense stress—tightness in the stomach, a pounding heart, heavy breathing—are not signs that you’re headed for failure. That’s your brain recognizing you’re facing a major challenge and marshaling your body’s resources to give you the boost you need to succeed. That pounding heart and heavy breathing, for example, are helping deliver an extra liter of oxygen-rich blood each minute to your brain and muscles to help them perform at peak levels.

Research finds that when adolescents learn how to interpret difficulty and stress in this way, they experience fewer depressive and anxiety symptoms under stress. Their bodies also show the physiological hallmarks of a person thriving, rather than foundering, under intense stress.

Adolescence is a stressful stage of life. Treating stress like the enemy steers teens away from the challenges they need to help them mature into capable, independent young adults.

In the end, Henry decided to pursue the challenging path, and so far, he’s loving it. When he struggles with a difficult math problem or feels a little overwhelmed by the workload, we remind him of these synergistic-mindset insights to help him feel resolve rather than discouragement. These insights also help him see mistakes for what they are: a valuable part of the learning process; not a humiliating sign that he doesn’t have what it takes to succeed.

Don’t think stress is always a bad thing. Although rest is important, and each person must decide how hard to push themselves in pursuit of ambitious goals, stress is often an opportunity for personal growth.

Do explain the benefit of synergistic mindsets. A deeper appreciation of the valuable role stress plays in our lives can help adolescents to pursue the big, ambitious dreams they have for themselves without sacrificing their mental health and well-being.

With gratitude,

Chris

Christopher J. Bryan is an assistant professor of business, government, and society at the University of Texas at Austin, McCombs School of Business.

The post Tough New Growth: A Combination Mindset that Can Build Resilience appeared first on Getting Smart.

I believe in personality plagiarism.

Why? Because imitation is not only the highest form of flattery, it’s also one of the fastest forms of learning.

For example, before writing my first scientific paper, I made a small pile of published articles that were especially lucid and compelling. Then I reread them. And I made notes in the margins: Begins with a quote. Short sentence at end of paragraph. Big idea up front.

And then, without delay, I sat down to mimic what I’d observed.

It may seem that copying what other people do is cheating. Many of my students assume that I want them to figure everything out on their own. But it turns out that a great deal of human learning is imitation. We were all born to copy-paste.

For instance, master pastry chef Corrado Assenza learned not only by doing but also by watching: “I learned by looking, watching his hands making the recipes.”

Tennis pro Tim Gallwey has observed: “Almost all tennis players have experienced playing over their heads after watching championship tennis on television. The benefits to your game come not from analyzing the strokes of top players, but from concentrating without thinking and simply letting yourself absorb the images before you…”

A few years ago, I had a conversation with Toby Cosgrove, the former chief executive of Cleveland Clinic. I asked him how someone who at the beginning of his career was told he lacked talent later became the most eminent cardiothoracic surgeon in the world. This was his response:

I worked and worked and worked at refining the craft. And then I changed the way I did things over time. I went and watched other people do things. In fact, I used to call them my “innovation trips.” I would go all over the world and take my notebook and watch other surgeons and various techniques, and I would pick things up from them and incorporate them in my practice. It was a constant quest and I was always looking for ways to do something better.

These stories are supported by science. Random-assignment experiments confirm that copy-pasting the successful strategies of acquaintances can help you reach your own goals.

Don’t think that copy-pasting what you admire is by definition cheating. Without question, it’s wrong to take someone else’s work and pass it off as your own. But it’s right to find inspiration in the way other people live their lives.

Do reflect on how much you’ve learned from other people. And share stories of your greatest copy-paste moments with the young people in your life. Teach them to ask, at the start of any great endeavor, “Who else has done this before me? How did they do it? And what can their example teach me?”

With grit and gratitude,

Angela

The post Imitation Is Inspiration: Copy-Paste Your Way to Success appeared first on Getting Smart.

“You’re depressed and need help.”    

“Not going to happen.”

So begins and ends countless discussions when we ask teens to open up about mental health. I have seen so many loving parents fall into this pattern—urging action but getting resistance in return. Sometimes this direct strategy works, but often it does not.

What can be more effective? Motivational interviewing. 

Motivational interviewing is a way of talking to someone who needs support but doesn’t want to be told what to do—which is most of us. This method can be particularly useful with teens, who are at a stage in life where, naturally, they’re looking to establish an identity separate from their parents.

How does motivational interviewing work? Inside each and every one of us, there is a kind of committee—inner voices that can disagree with each other. When a parent asks their child if they need help, one of these voices might be enthusiastic (Yes, please help me), but another, louder voice wants to keep things just as they are (No, go away!).

Research shows that if you listen carefully, you can hear the ambivalence and then, gently, support your child’s own inclination to change. By asking thoughtful questions, you can help your child arrive at a good decision all by themselves. For example, you might ask: “If you did decide to get help, what qualities would you look for in a therapist, given what you know about yourself?”

Ask with curiosity and listen without judgment. If your child sounds ambivalent, echo back both sides. Start with the reluctance, insert an and, then state the pro-change side they’ve expressed. For instance, if your teen reports a pattern of disrupted sleep, you can say, “Part of you wants to manage on your own without help, and another part hopes that a doctor would have some good ideas.”  

Using motivational interviewing takes a lot of patience. But it often produces better results for someone you love who does not yet see the need for support the way you do.  

Don’t tell a young person there’s something wrong with them and expect an enthusiastic response.

Do listen for subtle clues of interest in change, then use motivational interviewing to encourage, engage, and support it.

With gratitude,

Ken

Ken Duckworth, chief medical officer of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), is the author of You Are Not Alone: The NAMI Guide to Navigating Mental Health—With Advice From Experts and Wisdom From Real People and Families.

The post Getting to Yes: How to Spur Treatment for Mental Health appeared first on Getting Smart.

My 12-year-old son came home from school one day, his head hanging low. A kid had been teasing him, and he lashed out in return. Things escalated until he found himself in a fistfight on the playground, other kids egging him on. He knew “it probably wasn’t the best thing to do.”

I was disappointed in my son—hadn’t I raised him to be a better person than that? When I asked him why he did it, he said, “Sometimes I care more about my ego than about myself.”

This motivation to protect and enhance our sense of self is what psychologists call self-integrity.

Life is full of threats to self-integrity. You didn’t get a promotion. A friend slighted you. Even when there’s no actual threat, your mind drifts to possible ones: Maybe I’ll choke under pressure at the next game. Maybe I’ll fail the big exam. And so on.

When our self-integrity is threatened even momentarily, we are more likely to conform to others who offer validation, even when their views are wrong, reckless, or hateful.

We might think that people who engage in destructive or anti-social behavior lack character, that they’re bad seeds who have a history of disciplinary problems. But research finds that’s often not the case. One of the strongest predictors of teens’ bad behavior isn’t their attitude but social norms—what they think other teens endorse, especially the ones they want to be like. In this study, the teens who conformed most to anti-social norms were the ones who, like my son, worried about being accepted.

That’s why punitive approaches to disciplinary problems in school, especially suspension, do more harm than good. Punishment doesn’t help teens feel like they belong. What’s the alternative? Activities that affirm the self, that help people to get in touch with their core values and live them out in word and deed.

Don’t jump to the conclusion that bad behavior reflects bad character.

Do consider the possibility that bad behavior comes from a desire to belong and be seen. Help the young people in your life reflect on their most cherished values. Then they can join volunteer groups, sports teams, and other extracurricular activities that allow them to express and act on those values. In my son’s case, he became an avid member of a sports club, where he learned and lived out the values of effort and teamwork—and found a powerful source of self-integrity and belonging.

With affirmation and gratitude,

Geoff

Geoffrey L. Cohen, the author of Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides, is a professor of psychology and the James G. March Professor of Organizational Studies in Education and Business at Stanford University.

The post Alter Ego: Using Values to Fight Peer Pressure appeared first on Getting Smart.

By: Ayelet Fishbach

“What beautiful music!” I exclaim as my 9-year-old son practices violin. He’s used to this praise; I give compliments like that most days. But every once in a while I skip it, and when I do, I can see the disappointment on his face when he’s finished.

Am I a bad mom? Conventional wisdom says that consistency is key to parenting, since it enables your child to predict how you’ll react, leading to good behavior. And it’s true that children need some level of predictability in their lives, particularly when it comes to discipline.

But research suggests that inconsistent gifts and praise can have a greater effect on motivation. While we all like to live in a predictable world, we often respond more strongly to unpredictable rewards.

In one experiment, my colleagues and I told participants they’d be paid if they could drink about one-and-a-half quarts of water in 2 minutes or less. In one condition, we offered people a $2 fixed reward. In another, there was an uncertain reward of either $2 or $1. The certain reward was a better deal, yet many more people successfully met the challenge when assigned an uncertain reward. Resolving the uncertainty—whether they would win $1 or $2—was significantly more motivating than winning $2 for sure.

There are several reasons why uncertainty is motivating. First, what scientists call “intermittent reinforcement”—rewarding behavior on some but not all occasions—makes it harder to know when rewards will show up. If you very often, but don’t always, praise your child for completing their chores, they’ll keep up the good behavior in the hopes of receiving praise the next time.

Second, uncertain incentives are challenging, and challenge is motivating. So, for example, athletes stay motivated because of—not in spite of—the fact that victory is never assured.

Finally, uncertainty can be exciting. Think about the appeal of lotteries. Not knowing whether or not you’ll win a prize makes you excited to play. Resolving uncertainty is psychologically rewarding.

Don’t assume that if kids are always praised for finishing their homework, they’ll be more likely to do it.

Do compliment young people for a job well done, just not every time. And pick rewards out of a hat when they complete chores—the surprise prize might keep everyone motivated to get things done.

With gratitude,

Ayelet

Ayelet Fishbach, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, is the author of Get It Done: Surprising Lessons From the Science of Motivation.  

The post Uncertain Incentives: Inconsistent Rewards can be Motivating appeared first on Getting Smart.