Don’t trust your gut feelings… when making important decisions

by Dr. Z. | Thinking repetitively about future and past painful feelings, events and failures, Taking my thoughts too seriously

Reading Time: 3 minutes

When having to make important decisions – e.g. should I apply for this new job? Should I marry this person? Should I buy this property? Should I continue dating this person? What school should I enroll my kid in? Should I move to another city? Some very popular advice that most people give us, is “trust your gut feelings.”

This is a hot topic every time I discuss it because I radically disagree with it when it’s presented as an absolute without taking into consideration a person’s situation, context, and history. Most importantly, the popular advice of “trust your feelings” is not congruent with what we know these days in decision theory, social psychology, and organizational psychology.

What D. Kahneman and Tversky taught us about gut feelings and decisions?

Here is a summary of the key ideas from two scholars: Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky, 1982) who were interested in “heuristics and biases.” They were curious about how people make mistakes, how people learn, and how people make knwoledge-based decisions. After spending hours analyzing complex cognitive processes, they identified two types of systems to understand how the mind operates:

System 1 is effortless, quick, automatic, and of associative nature.
System 2 is controlled, effortful, logical, and rule-governed. Intuition is considered to be a part of System 1, and like other cognitive processes, only sees what it wants and expects to see.

Any new idea that doesn’t fit what is supposed to be – according to our mind and based on previous associations in system 1 – is ambiguous and therefore, is quickly dismissed. Then, our mind pushes us to believe that we “know this already” and we end up missing opportunities for learning by experience or deeper examinations of that new data.

Our mind doesn’t like ambiguity and prefers to hold on with white knuckles to familiar interpretations. Scary, right?

Kahneman’s findings have been applied to organizational psychology, in particular, to understand decision-making processes. In 2003, Harvard Business Review magazine conducted a survey of executives from a private firm about gut feelings. Their findings revealed that 45 percent of the executives relied more on them than on the data when making decisions about their businesses. An interesting finding, right? This is perhaps another reflection of the advice “trust your gut feeling.”

Interestingly, and a large body of research has established that there is no relationship between an effective decision a person makes based on trusting their gut feelings and the outcome of it unless a person has expertise in a particular topic.

Are gut reactions ever helpful to make decisions?

Basically, gut reactions are extremely helpful only when expertise goes along with them (Dane, Rockmann, & Pratt, 2012). For instance, a firefighter, after participating in more than fifty rescue operations, has the expertise to trust his gut feelings, whereas a firefighter who is participating in an operation for the first time may have gut feelings pulling him in all directions and opening the possibility of making the wrong decision.

How to make skillful decisions?

So, when facing a decision, and listening to the words “trust your gut feeling,” I invite you to step back and distinguish emotional noise from true awareness.

Gut feelings usually come with a sensation in our body (such as butterflies in our stomach), and strong judgment thoughts or problem-solving thoughts about what to do right away, right now. It’s like a very loud and demanding soundtrack.
True emotional awareness, on the other hand, has a different quality. Instead of demanding immediate action, it’s more like having a soft soundtrack that points out what matters.

Lastly, just to clarify, I’m not saying that paying attention to our feelings is not important, of course, it is. I’m saying that taking the advice of “trusting your gut feelings” without looking at the uniqueness of your situation and your experience can lead you to problematic situations. For instance, meeting someone for the first time and getting a strong feeling that they’re the one you want to spend the rest of your life with, without taking the time to get to know them.

Emotions are to be felt; some emotions are to keep and learn from, and other emotions – perhaps a lot – are to be noticed and then, tossed.

Semi-annual values-based review

by Dr. Z. | Accepting negative stories about myself and questioning my abilities, Criticizing, judging, & attacking yourself, Disengaging and using safety crutches, Doing things right, perfect & precisely: perfectionism, Overanalyzing, doubting, & indecisiveness, Procrastinating, postponing and delaying, Searching for certainty, predictability, & re-assurance, Taking my thoughts too seriously, Thinking repetitively about future and past painful feelings, events and failures

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Most people use the end of the year as a time for reflection, planning, and assessing how things have been for them. I personally like to set mini-quarterly reviews on my schedule along with reset time and spend more time in a mid-year review. I very much welcome a moment to pause, reflect on what has happened, what’s next, and how I want to live my life.

So, instead of looking strictly at goals or accomplishments, I like to reflect on the:

The actions I took – whether they took me closer to or further away from my values
Internal struggles I had with some ways of thinking and feeling
Learnings I had in different areas of my life.
Check any themes that have emerged

That’s why I called this process “values-based year review,” and you can do it any time that works for you. More than having a specific time to complete this review, it is more important to reflect on how you have been living your life, what makes it challenging, what happens under your skin when pursuing what matters, and what you need to do next to be the person you want to be.

If you want to do your own values-based mid-year review, here is a 21-page template you can use; it includes a description of 9 areas, a values thesaurus, a values dashboard and reflective prompts for each area in your life.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD YOUR VALUES-BASED REVIEW TEMPLATE

As I reflected in the last couple of moments, below are the theme, highlights, and key learnings that emerged for me.

Chaos and connection

2020 and the beginning of 2021 were very challenging times. The pandemic unfolded, Black Lives Movement, a presidential election in the United States, unexpectedly losing close friends, and my health being affected made it one of the hardest years and also, one of the most compassionate ones.

You see, as a full-time psychologist, specialized in fear-based struggles – I’m sure many of my colleagues relate to this – we breathe and live situations related to all types of fears every single day. But, when you have an insurmountable amount of stressors around you, those experiences augment exponentially.

Yet, for over 12 months we all did our best to show up to the people we work with and care about while acknowledging our vulnerabilities, limitations, and common humanity. If you’re a provider in mental health reading this newsletter, my sincere appreciation for all that you did the last couple of months!

In the midst of all the political, environmental, social, cultural, and economic chaos we went through, in one way or another, my connections with others were also reinforced, for the most part, revitalized in some cases, and renewed in others. It was in those catching-up moments that I realized, once again, that life is all about connecting with others and creating memories with the ones we love. It was in those moments that I experienced “chaos and connection” co-existing next to each other.

Key learnings

Savouring every moment that comes my way allows me to find new rhythms
Life is much more manageable when I’m around people that get me
Showing up to my friends as the best I could is essential to growing my friendships.
Being flexible when unexpected things happen is fundamental to keep doing what matters.
I undeniably have a low tolerance for bureaucracy and institutional fakeness.
Being self-employed is one of the best things I have ever done in my life.
Being real with people is fundamental to building long-lasting relationships

Highlights

My thirst for creating resources and owning my content has grown tremendously. Here are the highlights from the last 6 months and some from 2020 – 2021:

I discovered Ness Labs and for the first time, got exposed to a group of kind, bright, and incredible collaborative people from all over the world, interested in science-based ideas and related fields. It was absolutely mind-blowing and still is, that this group is non-hierarchical and non-clicky by nature; it’s 100% collaborative.It doesn’t matter which school you went through, who you’re associated with, who you collaborated with, what’s your expertise, or who is in charge.Ness Labs is a culture of collaboration.You know something that could be helpful to another person, you offer it; you have an idea that could be helpful to another person you offer it. You don’t know something, you ask for it. You don’t need to be the expert but a co-creator of knowledge. And trust me when I say that this was mind-blowing to me, I mean it. While I’m not an academician, I have been part of academic and professional environments that, as nice as they are, all are structures around hierarchy, seniority, and under-spoken clickiness.
My book Living beyond OCD got published and with it, a comprehensive resource to tackle Obsessive Compulsive Disorder using Acceptance and Commitment Skills.
Co-authored a book on process-based therapy that will be released in 2022.
Finished a manuscript for people prone to high achieving and perfectionistic actions.
Collaborated in two research projects looking at the effectiveness of the interventions described in two of my books (papers have been submitted already, yay).
Got a bike – a lifesaver and mood buster.
Hosted many zoom calls with friends all over.

Playing-it-Safe: A project from the heart:

The question of “how can we get unstuck from ineffective playing-it-safe moves so we can live a meaningful, fulfilling, and purposeful life?” is fundamental in my work, and my thirst for answering it has grown significantly.

Playing-it-safe has been one of the highlights of what has been a weird year.

In 2020, I launched the Playing-it-Safe newsletter and the Playing-it-Safe podcast without knowing how these projects were going to be received. For the last few months, I’ve sent out this newsletter every Wednesday in an effort to share research-based skills derived from behavioral science, Acceptance and Commitment ‘Therapy, reflections, and resources related to fear-based struggles.

You have witnessed the evolution of my style in the podcast as it’s a new way of creating resources for me and have heard me trying different formats. Little by little, right?

The response from all of you to these resources has been bigger and much better than I could have expected. Thank you for keeping in mind these resources!

It’s my goal that Playing-it-safe continues to grow and get better in the next months. I have some exciting plans in the works for it. Stay tuned!!!

Thank you for spending some time with me each week.

I think learning to relate skillfully to fear-based emotions is a very important topic and I’m excited to continue creating more resources about it in the coming months. What am I missing? Is there something that you’d like to see me write about in the future? If so, please send me an email at doctorz@thisisidoctorz.com.

As always, if you think a friend of yours would be interested in fear-based reactions, please share this newsletter with them!

3 questions to organize your day, do less, & have more in life

by Dr. Z. | Thinking repetitively about future and past painful feelings, events and failures

What does your week look like? Do you have a lot of stuff to do? Are you taking time off? Do you have errands to run? How do you organize what you have to do for the day?

Maybe you’re using an app (e.g. Todoist, Apple calendar, Trello, Evernote, Google calendar), a paper & pencil organizer, or maybe you rely on a mental to-do list in your head.

There are so many ways to organize our day; there are even Time Coaches that help you to make the best of your day. So many systems have developed around these ideas (e.g. Getting Things Done, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Deep Work, The 4-hour Workweek). And these days, artificial intelligence may even answer questions about how to set tasks for our day.

All those approaches, in general, are focused on accomplishing goals and checking tasks off from a to-do list. But, is our life all about getting things done? Is our life centered around productivity?

Don’t get me wrong, it’s definitely necessary to complete tasks, and we definitely need to keep track of them, I just don’t think it’s everything. A well-lived, rich, and intentional life is also about creating meaning and purpose in different areas of our lives and nurturing ourselves as we move forward.

So, here is one of the ways I approach my day when things get ultra-busy:

I choose a value-based activity for the day
There are different areas of our lives that we care about – relationships, career, personal growth, spirituality, health – and nurturing them allow us to have richer, fulfilling, and expansive lives.

I choose one instrumental activity I have to do
There are all types of errands we have to do – paying bills, doing laundry, mopping the floor, mailing stuff, and many more. And as much as we may not like them, not doing them may be a relief in the moment, but later on, is a recipe for stress.

I choose one self-care activity that is soothing
Our lives also require fun, enjoyable, pleasurable stuff to reset our brain, recharge, and replenish our energy.

So, putting this approach into action, looks like this:

One value-based activity for the day
Nurturing my relationships is important, so I choose to call a friend in my home country, Bolivia.

One instrumental activity I have to do.
Doing grocery shopping.

One self-care activity that is soothing
Being close to the ocean has always been soothing for me; so a bike ride close to the water allows me to feel the smells, appreciate the view, move my body and disconnect a bit.

This is not the perfect way to organize your day, but one way that maybe helpful when feeling overwhelmed looking at the long list of things you have to do. I sometimes use this approach for day-to-day life and use other platforms for large projects.

Nice to meet you!

by Dr. Z. | Thinking repetitively about future and past painful feelings, events and failures

As I was attending a virtual gathering, I got introduced over zoom to another person. In response, I naturally said “nice to meet you.”

Oh boy with the virtual gatherings, and yet, that’s the time we’re living in these days!

There are many variations to say welcome to someone. Google suggests: please to meet you; a pleasure to meet you; lovely to meet you; how do you do?

What’s your greeting when meeting a new person?

We say “nice to meet you” even though we don’t know how the conversation is going to go, whether we may enjoy this person’s company or not, but we do it to be polite at the moment.

Yet, is that what we tell ourselves when feeling uncomfortable, anxious, or panicky?

Seriously, what do you tell yourself when experiencing discomfort?

Quite unlikely we say “nice to meet you to that annoying feeling, right?

It’s hard to remember that “any uncomfortable experience you have, is not your enemy or the assassin of your day.”

It’s hard to remember that “the more you pretend not to have a feeling, the more that the feeling stays present with you, and the less you do with your life in those moments.”

It’s hard to remember that “tolerating discomfort” is no different than frowning firmly until your wrinkles hurt (at least in my case).

It’s hard to remember that “those uncomfortable experiences can be watched, observed, and noticed without becoming a puppet of them.

It’s hard to remember that “those yucky experiences” don’t need to be the recipients of your energy, efforts, and enthusiasm of the day.

So, if you don’t want to sink along with those unbearable experiences, you may want to consider:

To intentionally choose to have an uncomfortable experience – accepting it for as it is without rushing into solving it, fixing it, or replacing it.
To intentionally accept those annoying experiences without necessarily liking them.
To intentionally make room for that discomfort without judging it.
To intentionally lean into those experiences as they are, without rushing there – action land.
To intentionally say yes – willingness – to those experiences and then allowing them to be there.

This may sound like nice words, as it did for one of my former students when he asked me: “Patricia, is it really going to help to just notice uncomfortable experiences and do nothing?” In case your mind pops up with a thought along these lines, here is what we know so far about acceptance and willingness:

Let’s go back in time to 2003, when a pioneering study conducted by Georg Eifert and Michelle Heffner was looking at the effects of acceptance versus control for people prone to anxiety. In this study, participants were asked to breathe air with slightly elevated levels of carbon dioxide, and were then randomly assigned to two groups: one group was instructed to practice breathing techniques and the second was instructed to practice acceptance exercises.

Keep in mind that participants in both groups were basically breathing carbon dioxide enriched air, which will naturally evoke involuntary, uncontrollable, and uncomfortable physiological sensations.

The results of this study were quite interesting. To start, all participants reported physiological reactions like sweating, accelerated heartbeat, heavy breathing, and so on, just like when having a panic attack. Nearly half of the participants that relied on breathing techniques dropped the study and lost control. However, participants who didn’t fight their physiological reactions, and instead accepted them, reported less fear of their physiological sensations and less catastrophic thoughts about their effects.

As the research on acceptance-based processes continued to move forward, there was another variable added to these studies: the frame in which these skills are introduced to a person. Over the years, many studies showed the impact of practicing acceptance.

The construct of acceptance was initially very provocative because it countered all the previous research on control-based responses. These days, however, talking about acceptance-based processes is the norm. In fact, this is maybe one of the most common processes across third wave therapies (more on it in another post).

Acceptance is a core skill when you’re struggling with an emotional switch that goes on and off anytime, anywhere, and you act too soon on it (emotion regulation).
Acceptance is also the core process within exposure-based interventions, whether you’re dealing with a phobic reaction, chronic worry, pesky obsessions, or any other related fear-based struggle because it helps you to be curious about your experiences as they happen.

Going back to my former student’s question: Is it really helpful to sit with yucky experiences that come our way? My answer is yes, it does help. Research has continually shown us that.

But you cannot sit with those troublesome feelings and say “nice to meet you” without saying “yes” to them.

Rabbit holes, worries, and what to do about them

by Dr. Z. | Thinking repetitively about future and past painful feelings, events and failures

Reading Time: 3 minutes

An adult man, in his mid-thirties, walks slowly towards a microphone. He stands up stoically, opens his mouth, his face makes the natural gestures of someone talking, and yet, guttural sounds come out of his mouth followed by awkward silence. No words can be heard from his mouth, only noise.

Have you watched the movie “King’s Speech?” If no, I super-encourage you to do so; of course, only if you’re as into watching movies as I am (as you know by now).

In this film, Geoffrey Rush and Colin Firth do an amazing job acting as a psychologist and King George VI of England struggling with the fear of public speaking respectively.

George VI is scared about talking in front of others, stutters occasionally, but stutters much more when feeling anxious, when having to give speeches, when having to hold a microphone or when giving an interview to hundreds of people.

George VI taps into what we know happens when you care about something: all your fears, worries, and anxieties get amplified, maximized, and elevated to a level that it feels like you’re in a rabbit hole.

Richard, a Jewish gay man, was ready to be in a committed relationship, so he enrolled in a Jewish dating service for the gay community. After carefully crafting his profile with touches of his life represented in different pictures, he starts exchanging texts and phone conversations with potential partners. When catching up with his friends, he shared among the people he had been interacting with. Some of them were smokers, others were too fat, others eat pork regularly, others were vegan, others too short, others too tall; others loved to party too much, others seemed too religious; others were not smart enough; others were not financially stable; others were too nerds. Back to his apartment, when sitting in front of his laptop, he thought to himself “what if I don’t ever find a person? What if I made a mistake breaking up with my ex? Would I die alone, old and bold? Would I ever have a family of my own? What if I fall down in my apartment, have a concussion, and there is nobody to help? That night, Richard tried to fall asleep, but his mind kept coming back with thoughts of him being a loser, broken and unlovable. Richard really cares for living a family life, connecting with a partner, and growing together. And yet, his mind was relentless coming up with all types of worries.

When something matters to us we get concerned about messing things up for ourselves and others. We worry about things going south.

What Richard was missing is that behind all those worries, he was afraid of choosing the wrong partner; he was afraid of ending up with an imperfect partner. But, when he took those worries as facts, he ended up feeling bad about himself, hopeless, stopped connecting with potential partners, and visualized how he will end his days.

What’s behind your worries? What are your worries masking?

Can you do an inventory of the worries that are currently showing in your mind as you put your intention into something you deeply care about?

Going back to Richard, is it wrong that he was worried about finding the partner of his dreams? Not necessarily. But, what Richard was missing is a micro-skill: differentiating when going into a rabbit hole could be helpful and when it wasn’t.

Worries are creations of your dynamic minds and not necessarily thoughts to dwell on over and over for hundreds of times. I don’t think you want to spend your life as a dedicated, dutiful, and committed worrier, right?

Next time you find your mind taking you into a rabbit hole, ask yourself these questions:

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The many shades of avoidance, dirty words, & powerful moves

by Dr. Z. | Procrastinating, postponing and delaying, Disengaging and using safety crutches, Overanalyzing, doubting, & indecisiveness, Thinking repetitively about future and past painful feelings, events and failures

When was the last time you felt anxious, worried, or scared? How did it feel?

Feeling anxious is not your fault; anxiety just happens and although it feels super-uncomfortable, it’s a natural, adaptive, and healthy reaction we experience to a potential threat.

You may be wondering if it’s natural, why it feels awful and why for some people it’s like living in hell.

The answer is in how you respond to your anxious feelings when they show up! What do you do when feeling anxious? How do you handle that anxious state?

There are two variables that differentiate an effective response from an ineffective response when dealing with fear-based reactions:

(a) The way you think of fear-based reactions.

(b) The way you respond to fear-based reactions.

Let’s dive into these two variables:

(a) The way you think of fear-based reactions

When feeling scared, anxious, afraid, or in panic, you may have learned to look at those experiences in ways with a negative lens and take all those thoughts as the absolute truth with capital T.

Popular thoughts about fear-based reactions are:

– Thinking of fear-based reactions as “bad.”
E.g. I shouldn’t be feeling afraid.

– Thinking of fear-based reactions as “a sign that you’re in danger.”
E.g. When noticing that your heart is beating fast, you may have thoughts that it is a sign that you may have a heart attack.

– Underestimating your ability to handle those feelings
E.g. I won’t be able to manage my anxiety.

– Overestimating a catastrophic ending
E.g. it will be really bad, terribly bad.

Quick clarifications:

– I’m not saying that fear-based reactions are fun, easy to have, and enjoyable; I know they suck and yet, we’re wired to have them.

– There are times in which we’re definitely surrounded by threat – e.g. someone pointing a gun at us, someone stealing our purse, etc. – but most of the time, the degree of threat our mind perceives – perceived threat – is related to how we interpret a feeling, thought, sensation, or a situation.

The tricky part with how you’re thinking of fear is that Instead of acknowledging that your mind is trying to protect you, as it usually does, you get consumed with those thoughts and act accordingly: you avoid whatever is starting a fear-based reaction.

(b) The way you respond to fear-based reactions

Humans, we don’t like to be in discomfort, struggle, or basically being in pain. So, naturally, we run away, minimize, and do everything we can to get out of an uncomfortable situation. A common response to anxiety is experiential avoidance.

Experiential avoidance refers to all the things we do to avoid unpleasant feelings resulting in short-term relief but making things worse in the long term. There are five basic types of avoidant behaviors:

Situational Avoidance

With this form of avoidance, you stay away from anything that triggers fear-based reactions like:

– People
E.g. you avoid your new manager, mother-in-law, or police officers

– Places
E.g. elevators, trains, and planes

– Animals
E.g. spiders, rats.

– Objects
E.g knives, plastic bags, needles..

– Activities
E.g. eye contact, public speaking, asking a question in a group, large parties.

Cognitive Avoidance

Cognitive avoidance refers to all the thinking strategies you do privately in your mind to avoid any form of anxiety. There are different forms of cognitive avoidance:

– Suppression
Actually saying to yourself, “don’t think about that. Just don’t go there.”

– Worrying
Thinking about all potential what-if scenarios in the future.

– Rumination
Thinking about past scenarios and running them over and over in your mind.

– Replacing thoughts
Sometimes, people attempt to replace one distressing thought, image, or memory with positive content.

– Mental rituals
You may pray in a specific way as a way to protect yourself from something bad happening, but if for whatever reason you don’t do so, you cannot move on with your day.

Somatic Avoidance

When dealing with somatic avoidance, you do your best to not experience internal physical sensations associated with fear. For example, you may be hypervigilant if you experience shortness of breath, feeling hot, feeling fatigued, and so on.

Emotional Avoidance

With this particular form of avoidance, you intentionally try to minimize, suppress, & get rid of uncomfortable emotions. An example is Harold, who struggled with not knowing if he made a bad decision at work so, when feeling uncertain, he began drinking in an effort to avoid this feeling.

Preventive avoidance

S. Hoffman & A. Hay (2018) in a review of different types of avoidant behaviors, identified what is called “preventive avoidance.” Preventive avoidance are all those actions that you do to prevent your experiencing fear-based responses either before or after a triggering situation. For example, if you’re intensely afraid of making a mistake, you may check the task you’re working on multiple times; or after sending an email, you may call the person who received it to make sure you didn’t say anything offensive.

As you can see, avoidance has so many shades; sometimes you may be engaging in one specific form of it or a combination of them. The reality is that these types of avoidances co-exist with each other and don’t show up in isolation. I only broke down the concept of experiential avoidance to help you to consider how you’re responding to a triggering situation and how – without knowing – you may be feeding into the cycle of anxiety.

Just to clarify, while avoidance makes things worse when dealing with worries, fears, anxieties, and obsessions, it’s not a dirty word. Sometimes, avoidance can be adaptive; for instance, when dealing with a problem at work, you may have this urge to talk to others about it because you feel very anxious and receiving emotional support makes those feelings go away and doesn’t interrupt your day-to-day life; pretty adaptive, right?

The challenge is when using experiential avoidance as your go-to response to anxiety-provoking situations; in the short-term, avoidant behaviors help you to avoid an unpleasant moment, but tomorrow you must face the likelihood of the same uncomfortable situation welling up again and again. It’s like the depth and height of what you do is limited by your day-after-day attempts to avoid bad experiences that are, ultimately, unavoidable.

Now that you’re familiar with particular ways of thinking about fear-based reactions and different types of avoidances, I hope you can see how both variables can lead you from experiencing anxiety as a natural emotional state – that we all experience – to a problem that needs to be solved.

At the end of this long newsletter, I want to leave you with three questions for you to ponder about any avoidant behaviors you’re doing right now.

– What am I avoiding that I want to approach?

– What do I want to do that I’m afraid of?

– What’s the fear holding me back from?

– How is this affecting my day-to-day life?

Learning to make room for any fear-based reactions, without letting them take over our life is possible. And it all starts with dissecting our fears.

Awareness is one of the most powerful moves you can start practicing.

Do you want to get unstuck from wrestling with worries, fears, anxieties, obsessions, and ineffective playing-it-safe actions?

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