Arguably, the primary cause of human
distress is when our deeds do not measure up to our desires, or when our short
term behavior does not correspond to our long term goals. Put in another way, a major source of our
unhappiness is that we often ‘want’ something that has long term or predicted
utility, yet end up ‘wanting’ something that has utility only in the moment, or
‘decision utility’ (e.g., when we surrender to distraction rather than complete
a more valuable task). To remedy the emotional discomfort this creates, we can
rationalize why we should not want something (like the fox disparaging the
unattainable grapes), or not appraise what we would otherwise have wanted (just
avoid thinking about the grapes). Thus if we reduce the value of what we want by
reappraising it or being merely mindful of it, we will be far less upset at its
loss.
This latter concept of ‘mindfulness’
reduces wanting and the emotional problems that ensue due to wanting not by
reappraising events, but by not appraising them at all. Although rooted in
religious (Buddhism) and philosophical tradition (Stoicism), contemporary
explanations of mindfulness are based upon cognitive psychology and the
complementary perspective of cognitive neuroscience[i].
Cognitive psychology implies that wanting correlates with non-affective mental
processes, and this idea conforms to the emphasis in cognitive neuroscience on
the cortical structures that comprise the rational or ‘rationalizing’ aspect of
the brain. Because wanting is a uniform
concept, the practice of mindfulness (as well as meditation for that matter)
uniformly reduces all wanting through eliminating or reducing the continuous
appraisal that is an elemental aspect of wanting. Thus in mindfulness
everything in the perceptual field is observed and not appraised. Because of
this, mindfulness practice generally occurs outside of one’s working day.
The problem with this approach is that
when the perspective of ‘affective neuroscience’ is considered that gives far
greater prominence to the mid-brain systems that modulate affect, ‘wanting’ always contains an affective component
that represents the activity of sub-cortical structures, namely dopaminergic
midbrain systems, that increase the immediate or decision utility of behavior
but may conform or dis-conform with the long term or predicted utility of
behavior[ii]. If they conform, then we have productivity,
creativity, relaxation, and ‘happiness’, but if they do not conform, we have
non-productivity, non-creativity, stress, and ‘unhappiness’. Thus wanting is not an indivisible thing, and some types
of wanting may be good for you and others not so good. Hence, it would be more
logical to be mindful towards those wants that lead you astray than those that
keep you on the straight and narrow. In other words, it is best to be mindful
of our irrational wants than our rational ones. The problem thus is not to
avoid appraisals that may lead us to want, but to avoid those appraisals that
lead us to ‘mis-want’[1]. Thus a
mindfulness strategy must focus on non-judgmental awareness of the short term
wants that dis-conform with long term goals.
By non-appraising what we should be mindful of rather than what we
could be mindful of, we can expand
the applicability of mindfulness to
all our working day. By being mindful of
distraction or distractive thoughts but not our workaday behavior, we can gain
the benefits of mindfulness without constraining our rational wants that
populate our day. Thus mindfulness can be expanded in scope to encompass all of our daily activities without
losing its therapeutic power to reduce and control harmful emotions.
Above is an excerpt from my new e-book on the psychology of the internet:
[1] Mis-wanting may represent
distractive, addictive, or obsessive behavior (e.g., excessive rumination) in
which the momentary affective ‘urge’ to perform mis-matches the objective or
predicted long term value of that behavior.
[i]Holzel, B., Lazar, S., Gard,
T., Schuman-Olivier, Z. Vago, D., and Ott, U.
How Does Mindfulness Meditation
Work? Proposing Mechanisms of Action From a Conceptual and Neural Perspective. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(6), 537–559
[ii] Berridge, K. (2009)'Wanting and Liking: Observations from the Neuroscience and Psychology
Laboratory, Inquiry, 52: 4, 378—398
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