Poke Me If You Like (and Don’t Like) Me

Cultivate Connections

We are social creatures and crave companionship. So why do we often push the very people we care about away?

The 19th Century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was one of the first to explore this paradox that became known as “the porcupine’s dilemma.” It is a metaphor for how we simultaneously crave and reject intimacy and balance guardedness and vulnerability.

Imagine the following:

One cold winter’s day, a group of porcupines crowded together for warmth. However, the pain from the mass of quills soon caused them to separate again, until the cold forced them back together. And so they continued on this yo-yo, moving from one source of discomfort to another, until they found a distance that allowed them to live but without the benefits of the full warmth of community.

Schopenhauer observed that human relationships were remarkably similar. We sometimes poke the people we need the most.

Research corroborates Schopenhauer’s observation and sheds light on our inner porcupine. It turns out that people who live in fear of rejection are the most likely to retreat from others. It’s preemptive behavior.

Unfortunately, channeling one’s inner porcupine is a no-win strategy. Indulging in the I-will-leave-you-before-you-leave-me strategy doesn’t work for the human porcupine, nor does it work for the recipient of the imaginary sharp spines. Both end up alone.

My advice: Trim those quills.

I wish you all the best,

Dr. Samantha Boardman

Reality Check: Who Are You & What Are You Doing?

Maximize mood

Who has time to think about the “big questions” in life? Most people I know are too busy and overwhelmed these days with the demands of daily life to press pause and ponder existential issues.

Being honest, even if you did have the time, would you want to grapple with these big questions? Or rather, with the answers. As one patient — who we’ll call Patient Nietzsche for this piece — told me bluntly, it’s easier to avoid them:

Do you know what scares me the most? Being alone with my thoughts. I start thinking about my life and questioning my choices, and getting philosophical. I would rather focus on what I need to pack for my business trip or buy at the grocery store than what I am doing with my life.

I know exactly what Patient Nietzsche means. These questions often pop up when I am in transit — on an airplane, on a train, or driving somewhere. When I’m physically bound to one place. My knee-jerk response is to avoid them and to dive into a book or pray for strong WiFi so Instagram can save me from contemplating the meaning of it all. Why reflect when I can watch a cat video instead?

As tempting as it is to push them away, research shows it is worth the time and effort to channel your inner Jean-Paul Sartre. In a study entitled Suppressing Spiritual Struggles: The Role of Experiential Avoidance in Mental Health, the authors found that people who embrace existential and spiritual struggles and reflect on their values and beliefs are emotionally healthier than those who don’t.

As Dr. Julie Exline, one of the co-authors of the study explains:

Regular avoidance can make it difficult to identify, work toward or experience the qualities that lend a sense of purpose to life.

Taking the time to think about what matters to you is a great way to bring your values front and center in your life. When your daily decisions reflect your priorities and not just what you feel like in the moment, you strengthen your resilience and build your emotional reserves.

Here are a few questions to get you started:

Where am I headed and what is my ultimate personal goal?

How does my daily life reflect my priorities?

What do I value and how do my choices impact my values?

What are my responsibilities to my community and to make the world a better place?

Examining our values grounds us. Think of them as a compass to help make the right decisions at the right time.

I wish you all the best,

Dr. Samantha Boardman

Are You Good Company?

Cultivate Connections

There are some people we naturally love to be around. They are like sunspots, giving off warmth and radiating good energy. There are others we avoid like the plague. They suck the energy out of room and make us feel self-conscious and insecure.

Continue

I wish you all the best,

Dr. Samantha Boardman

What a Bucket of Popcorn Says About You

Optimize Everyday

In the un-put-downable book Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, the authors describe a famous popcorn study. Moviegoers were given a soda and a free bucket of popcorn on their way to see a 1:05 matinee of Mel Gibson’s Payback in 2000. They were handed either a medium size bucket or a large bucket—as the authors describe, looked like “the sort of tub that had once been an above-ground swimming pool.”

Unbeknownst to the moviegoers, the popcorn was stale. It was intentionally nasty— it had been popped five days earlier and was so stale that it “squeaked when you ate it.”

The researchers were exploring whether people with the bigger buckets would eat more popcorn. To precisely measure how much people ate, they weighed the buckets before and after the movie. The results shocked them: those with the large buckets ate 53 percent more popcorn than those with the medium size buckets. They quote the author of the study, highlighting how across the board, a bigger bucket leads to more eating:

We’ve run other popcorn studies, and the results are always the same, however we tweaked the details. It didn’t matter if our moviegoers were in Pennsylvania, Illinois, or Iowa, and it didn’t matter what kind of movie was showing; all of our popcorn studies led to the same conclusion. People eat more when you give them a bigger container. Period.

This research has implications for public health. As this study shows, people eat out of habit regardless of whether the popcorn tastes like Styrofoam peanuts. So rather than trying to educate them about switching habits or encouraging them to adopt better-snacking behaviors, there is a simple solution. Give them smaller buckets.

As the authors conclude: