The applause was real, though I was ready to supplement it with a recorded track if necessary. Some of the audience popped up and headed over to the merch table. I set the mirror-printed tees apart from the rest, but left both versions available for the taking. To my great surprise, no one even noticed the aberrant print job. In fact, one fan, if I dare use that label, scooped up a first-edition version to take home as a souvenir. To her, the shirt looked contemporary and edgy, a visual experience that others who have not pledged allegiance to our friendship may be less likely to share.
The crowd called for an encore. But they must not have read the fine print on my concert posters. “One-trick tour” meant what every parent-friend with an only child has said to me when I’ve asked if they’re having more: “Nope. One and done.”
In this process of self-discovery, taking myself from a percussive nobody to a one-hit wonder, I’ve learned many valuable lessons. That I am not meant for a future in silk-screen printing is one of them. And, in fact, it may be the T-shirt fiasco that offers the biggest lesson of all. What we see might not be what someone else sees. Our perspectives are unique, and the malleability of our perspective is a source of opportunity. We can take advantage of the fact that our eyes may not see what is really printed on the page (or the shirt) in front of us, in order to see the world in a way that instead serves our aspirations best.
Using the Four Perceptual Tools to Improve Our Mental Health
There’s a part of our mental machinery that social psychologists call the “psychological immune system.” Just as our bodies have ways of fighting off bacteria and viruses to improve our physical health, our minds have their own ways of maintaining and improving our mental health.
Consider this example: Researchers at Ghent University interviewed almost four hundred Belgian singers auditioning for a spot on a television program that would launch their professional career. A week before the audition, the researchers asked the contestants how they would feel if they lost the competition. On average, the group expected they would feel really unhappy. Unfortunately for most, their dreams of stardom were dashed when they were not selected to advance to the next round. But when the researchers followed up two days later to ask how they were doing, the same individuals who had expected to be heartbroken reported feeling something more like “meh.” They didn’t feel the pain they’d expected.
You can find the same discrepancy between anticipated disappointment and experienced positivity among three-, four-, and five-year-olds who receive only one sticker as a prize, rather than two; and people who lose their jobs, live through a traumatic personal injury, or witness a tragedy. We experience a resiliency we don’t expect.
Reports of unlucky people’s positive mental status flummox many of us looking at their lives from the outside. We think, You tried so hard and lost. You gave up so much. We expect them, as they did themselves, to feel disheartened. But they don’t.
What we see is a result of the protective powers of the psychological immune system. Life’s unfortunate circumstances pack a weaker punch than they seem like they should. Our cognitive system is capable of some impressive cookery. It can take the really rather sour lemons in our lives and make some unexpectedly delicious lemonade.
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I conducted a survey asking people whether they thought they’d support a local organization raising funds for a national cancer-research charity. The vast majority of individuals—eight out of ten, in fact—said “absolutely” and explained that generosity is an important part of who they are as a person. But of course it’s challenging to foresee the hiccups of daily life that might stand in the way of translating our theoretical plans into concrete behavior. When we measured actual support after the event, among survey respondents drawn from the same pool, we found that only three out of every ten had opened their wallet and made a donation of any kind. Our best of intentions do not always translate into real actions.
But this is a fact that we try to hide, perhaps most readily from ourselves.
Our psychological immune system helps us in this regard. Consider the following nuance. In another survey, I asked people a few days after a different high-profile charity event whether they had supported the cause in some way. The time commitment had been more, and the financial buy-in bigger, so rates of support were lower than with the first event I tested. Here, only six out of every one hundred people said they had helped out. And this percentage tracked well with reports from local media. People were honest in telling me that, despite the fact that they found the charity a deserving organization, they had not in fact done what they thought was the right thing. But when I asked people a month later whether they had supported the event, the levels of reported support somehow climbed high. People were now misremembering their intentions, and reporting having acted in a way they had only hoped they would.
It can hurt our sense of self to feel like we haven’t lived up to our expectations of ourselves. One way we protect ourselves is by remembering the past in more favorable ways. Our brains craft summaries of our past deeds that are like little white lies to help us feel better about what we did or didn’t do. But that protective process can backfire in other ways. The problem is that accurately recalling not only our successes but also our shortcomings is essential for real growth and progress.
In this book, I offer four strategies intended to quite literally reshape the way we see the world. A narrow focus. Materializing. Framing. A wide bracket. Each of these strategies serves a different function. Knowing about each, we can better prepare ourselves for the multitude of difficulties that we stand to experience as we tackle life’s biggest challenges.
Many of those challenges require that we surmount the unintended consequences of our brain’s protective inclinations. We work hard to see ourselves, our surroundings, and our prospects in a positive regard. And sometimes this focus on strengths rather than weaknesses is motivational; at other times it can be debilitating.
What we see predicts in large part the choices we make, which is why our decisions about what to focus our attention on have such a big impact on our daily actions. When we’re looking for encouragement, we can find it through selective exposure to sources of inspiration. Orienting our visual frame around the people and things that support and represent our best intentions stacks the deck in our favor. We can inspire better decisions when we design the spaces we spend our time in to include visual sparks that align with our goals. But if we frame up the temptations, we threaten our prospects for achievement. If we leave the forbidden fruits in the bowl out on the countertop, we’re bound to snag one on the way out and take far too big a bite.
A narrow focus, too, misrepresents reality—but it may inspire an energy that gives birth to real change. When we set our sights on a far-off destination, we induce an illusion of proximity, creating a sense that something challenging is actually nearer and more possible. What might otherwise appear insurmountable is now deemed achievable. And we try for it.