“Any idiot can face a crisis; it’s this day-to-day living that wears you out.”

— Anton Chekhov

Do your days feel non-stop? Is your to-do list bottomless? The drudgery of everyday life is exhausting. Too often our days seem to be both bursting-at-the-seams yet unfulfilling. They have become a thankless game of Wac-A-Mole, but with no chance of winning even a sorry-looking stuffed toy.

“Everything I do these days feels like a ‘have to,’ not a ‘want to,’” one patient told me. Her observation made me think about how often the words “I have to…” roll off my tongue.

I have to pick up my kids.

I have to walk the dogs.

I have to work out.

I have to meet my friend for coffee.

I have to return my sister’s call.

I have to work on a talk I am giving next week.

I have to go to San Francisco for the APA conference.

The list goes on and on…

There is a begrudging tone to these pronouncements. “Have to” statements imply burden and obligation. They conjure dread and tedium. An “ugh” or exasperated sigh may as well accompany them. Using this turn of phrase connotes a passive existence and serves as a reminder that one’s days are dictated rather than self-directed.

There is evidence showing that how we talk to ourselves and others shapes how we experience the world. For instance, using your name and third-person pronouns (e.g., he, she, it, itself, they, them) to refer to yourself during a stressful moment can enhance your ability to control your thoughts, feelings, and behavior. In other words, asking “Why is Samantha upset?” instead of “Why am I upset?” has been shown to be an effective emotional regulation tool.

Reframe it

The more I learned about how language matters, the more I paid attention to what came out of my mouth. I realized that every time I said “I have to…” I glossed over the positive emotions that might accompany the task and extinguished the potential for gratitude. Drudgery swallowed the possibility of delight.

A simple remedy to disrupt this habit is to replace the phrase “have to” with “get to.” Saying “I get to meet my friend for coffee” and “I get to give a speech” reminds me of how unbelievably lucky I am. Instead of dwelling on the obligation, I became more aware of the appreciation I have for the opportunity to engage in these activities. When I have to do things, I feel compelled and beholden. When I get to do things, I am reminded of the privilege and the pleasure of the task and how the task connects to what I care about the most.

While there are plenty of things in our daily lives that are hard to get excited about, there is also a lot that deserves our delight.

Bottom Line: Watch your words. Don’t confuse the “have tos” with the “get tos.”

On that note, I get to write a new newsletter 😀

I must have refreshed my browser 1,000 times last week, hoping for an update and some positive news about the Titan submersible. Endless experts weighed in—engineers, explorers, and former passengers—offering insight and opinions about what might have happened to the lost vessel. Along with everyone else, I was glued to the story. Those promising knocks on Wednesday morning offered a glimmer of hope. Of course, by Thursday, we all learned the tragic fate of the five people on board.

Why was this story so captivating?

Even Adele stopped her concert to ponder this question. And, why, after over 100 years, does the story of the Titanic still have this siren-like hold over us?

Director James Cameron offered some thoughts about the enduring symbolic significance of lost vessels in a 2005 interview in The Independent:

“Wrecks are human stories. They teach us something about ourselves.”

A recent article in The Washington Post explains the ongoing fascination with the Titanic as likely due to human interest in the passengers’ stories coupled with the unique characteristics surrounding the shipwreck. After colliding with an iceberg, the ship took over two and a half hours to sink. Instantaneous catastrophes don’t give us time to ponder possible outcomes and, in a dark way, provide some solace. Did they suffer? is the first question asked after a tragedy. On the Titanic, the prolonged terror, the unfolding drama, and the impossible choices give it a mythic but also human quality.

It’s the stories that captivate us—especially extreme and one-of-a-kind stories. It a recent working paper, Harvard Business School’s Thomas Graeber describes how our memories hang on onto unique tales but quickly forget numbers. He calls this the story-statistic gap. Few remember how many people were on board the Titanic. It’s the vivid details we hang onto.

To push back on the narrative that the fate of the Titan submersible was so riveting because those involved were wealthy and white, consider the boys trapped in the flooded cave in Thailand in 2018 and the Chilean miners who were sealed inside a mountain for 69 days in 2010. Perhaps what makes all these stories so gripping is one cannot help but wonder, what would I do in that situation?

We often assume that these harrowing moments bring out the worst in people, but this isn’t the case.

A recently published report about the emergency response to the terrorist attack at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester in 2017 found that, “the heroism shown by very many people that night is striking.” An article by Steve Taylor in The Conversation highlights how altruism often prevails. During the horror that unfolded in the terrorist attack at the Bataclan theatre in Paris in 2015, where 89 people were killed, a security guard risked his own life to help over 400 people escape. A woman who was pregnant at the time described his actions:

My life will never be long enough to thank him for what he did. And thanks to him, my baby has a mother. We saw the worst things that night, the worst human beings ever. And then we saw the best things.

Stories of bravery and goodness abound. Here is one that helps explain my ongoing fascination with the Titanic. My great-great-grandparents were passengers and died that fateful night. As the ship sank, my great-great-grandfather turned down a seat in a lifeboat nothing that there were women, children and younger men to be saved. My great-great-grandmother was offered a spot but refused to leave her husband’s side. “Where you go, I go,” she said before handing her sable coat to her maid who was among the seven-hundred passengers rescued. A survivor reported seeing them on deck, arm in arm, as the lifeboats pulled away and a wave swept them into the sea. My daughter is named after their youngest daughter, Vivian.

Beyond the tragedy, it’s the decency and dignity that remain.

“Remember when people used to be nice to each other?” I have heard some version of this on countless occasions and have voiced it myself. The perception that the world used to be a kinder gentler place is widespread. People across the aisle, across the world, and of all ages lament the demise of morality. Declining human decency seems to be one of the few areas where most people are actually in agreement.

But it isn’t true…

In a paper published this month in Nature, experimental psychologist Adam M. Mastroianni and Daniel Gilbert of Harvard University explored the illusion of moral decline—specifically the erosion of kindness, honesty, respect and basic human decency. In a nutshell, here is what they found:

• Participants believed that morality has declined across the board—in every decade and in every nation studied.
• They believed the decline began somewhere around the time they were born, regardless of when that was, and they believed it continues to plummet.
• They believed the decline was a result both of individuals becoming less moral over time and because the “good people” have died off and been replaced by less good people.
• They believed that people they personally know and the people who lived before they did are exceptions to this rule.

The authors conclude:

About all these things, they (the participants) were almost certainly mistaken.

Using data surveys administered between 1965 and 2020 that asked about moral behavior, Mastroianni and Gilbert found that the decline is all in our head. They didn’t find any meaningful change in acts of kindness such as volunteering or lending a hand to a stranger. Moreover, they found that people are more cooperative than they used to be. Of note, the 2022 World Happiness Report found a sizable increase in helping, donating, and volunteering across the globe. A related study published in Scientific Reports found that small acts of kindness are frequent and universal. In fact, people help each other about every two minutes. In other words, goodness is alive and well.

If decency hasn’t declined, why do we think it has?

Mastroianni’s awesome Substack Experimental History boils it down to two converging psychological tendencies:

1. When thinking about the past, we wear rose-tinted glasses.

Studies have shown that when people recall events from the past, the negative ones are more likely to be forgotten or even misremembered as a positive. Remember that test you failed in high school? At the time, it felt catastrophic. Today, you look back and roll your eyes at how dramatic you were being. This is also known as the Fading Affect Bias.

2. When thinking about the present, we wear doom-and-gloom glasses.

We have a bias toward negative information in the current moment. It disproportionately captures our attention. Watching the news and scrolling through Twitter is a constant reminder of how horrible people are to each other. Non-stop exposure to awful behavior contributes to the illusion of moral decline. Unless you are a fan of Goodable, which I highly recommend, it can feel like we are all going to hell in a handbasket.

Believing morality is on the wane has consequences. In addition to the aspiring despots who prey upon this faux nostalgia, it impacts how people relate to one another. When we underestimate kindness in others, we are reluctant to ask for help or comfort. We are also less likely to provide it if we don’t trust the person in need.

“Ow… Ow… That hurts soooo much… Ow…” My patient was literally howling in pain. It was the middle of the night and I was the intern assigned to draw her blood for a procedure in the morning. The thing was, I hadn’t even poked her yet. Admittedly, I was a terrible phlebotomist but she didn’t know that. For her, the prediction of pain had created the experience of pain.

Increasing evidence shows how expectations shape reality:

If you expect a lecture to be boring, you’ll probably end up being bored.

Anticipating election stress in the future is enough to put you in a bad mood today.

If you have a negative attitude about aging, you’re more likely to experience cognitive and physical decline.

Believing stress is bad for you makes it more likely to damage your health.

Our brains are prediction machines, constantly simulating future scenarios. What we expect to see determines what we pay attention to. The brain fills in gaps and deletes details that don’t adhere to our expectations. This is especially true in ambiguous situations where we filter information according to our underlying beliefs.

The expectation effect in action.

Where is the toothbrush in this messy bathroom?

University of California, Santa Barbara

Most people spot the small one but miss the larger one behind it. What you expect to see literally determines what you see.

What you hear is determined by what you expect to hear.

There are countless examples demonstrating how assumptions shift the way we process information. Expectations change behavior and even physiology. A recent study found that assumptions about how full one would be after a meal impacted hunger and subsequent food consumption. On two different occasions, participants were served an omelette for breakfast. The first time, they were told it was a two egg omelette. The second time they were told it was a four egg omelette. The reality is that on both occasions it was a three egg omelette. When people thought they had eaten the smaller breakfast—the two egg omelette—they were more likely to report feeling hungry again after two hours compared to when they had eaten the bigger breakfast. They were also more likely to eat more for lunch and snack more throughout the day.

Expectations can lead us astray.

This is especially true when it comes to stress and mental health. Most research has focused on the implications of stressors that have already occurred, but what about the toll of anticipatory stress. Can anticipatory coping help us manage anticipatory stress?

Researchers Greg Feldman and Adele Hayes described four types of behaviors people turn to to deal with predicted upcoming stressors:

1. Problem Analysis: Actively contemplating the causes and meaning of the future stressor.
2. Plan Rehearsal: Envisioning the steps required to solve the anticipated stressor.
3. Stagnant Deliberation: Dwelling on the upcoming stressor but not finding any solutions.
4. Outcome Fantasy: Daydreaming and fantasizing about desired outcomes.

Not surprisingly, Stagnant Deliberation and Outcome Fantasy were considered to be the least helpful responses to anticipated stressors. Problem Analysis and Plan Rehearsal helped people feel confident in their ability to cope.

Psychiatry has traditionally focused on the past, but what if our mental health depends more on how we think about the future?

In Tomorrowmind, psychologist Martin Seligman asks this question and explores how prospection—the ability to consider the future—impacts health. He argues that distorted and overly pessimistic thinking about the future drives depression and likely contributes to helplessness and other mental disorders.

As I thought about healthy prospection and how expectations shape reality, I couldn’t help but think about how the current conversation about mental health may be inadvertently making things worse. Is it possible that mental awareness efforts may be backfiring? As Oxford psychologist Dr. Lucy Foulkes recently wrote about in an op-ed in StatNews:

Campaigns and social media posts just churn out the message that there’s this problematic thing called anxiety, and so people start interpreting all the lower-level stuff as symptomatic of a disorder. That’s unhelpful in itself — some people find it scary and stigmatizing to believe they might have a mental disorder. But I think it might be worse than that: interpreting common difficult emotions (like anxiety) might actually bring on these symptoms, in a self-fulfilling manner.

If a person believes their anxiety is the sign of a disorder, this can lead to changes in their self-concept — they will say to themselves and others “I am an anxious person” or “I have anxiety.” They might also start to change their behavior. In particular, they might start avoiding the things that make them anxious, and the people around them support this. But in the long run, avoidance prolongs and exacerbates anxiety symptoms. In other words, the changes in self-concept and behavior could actually generate anxiety in a way that becomes self-fulfilling.

While awareness efforts have enabled some individuals to recognize and report previously under-reported mental health problems, her research suggests it has also led to over-interpreting and over-pathologizing common psychological experiences. Expecting difficulties to damage mental health may ultimately be exacerbating symptoms and distress.

“There were many terrible things in my life and most of them never happened.” — Michel de Montaigne

“Only boring people get bored” … I have said this to my kids on countless occasions. Boredom has always been something I eschewed—in my mind, it is on par with laziness and suggests a lack of curiosity and purpose.

Many are uncomfortable with the thought of being bored.

A study published in Science found that people preferred receiving electric shocks to being left alone with nothing to do. How hard is it to sit alone in an empty room for 15 minutes with absolutely nothing to do? Apparently, very. Before the alone time began, the researchers administered a brief electric shock to demonstrate what it would feel like. Most participants described it as unpleasant. Some even said that they would pay money to not be shocked again. That changed once the experiment was underway. In the 15 minutes of solitude, 67% of the men and 25% of the women zapped themselves. Even the researchers were shocked by the shocks. “I’m still just puzzled by that,” commented one.

An aversion to boredom is easier to indulge these days thanks to the distraction machines in our pockets. Whenever there is a moment of downtime, cat videos and celebrity fashion faux pas and breakups beckon. In the digital age, preoccupation is a permanent state of being. Over-stimulation is our default mode. Our minds are always busy. Our attention always has somewhere to land. TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter are bottomless reservoirs of entertainment and diversion.

But what if boredom is something to be embraced and celebrated, a state of being to lean into?

What if sitting there and doing absolutely nothing is good for the brain? Researchers from Trinity College found that being bored can actually be good for us because it opens the door to creativity and meaningful activity.

German philosopher Martin Heidegger identified two levels of boredom: superficial and profound.

Superficial boredom — the most common state of boredom — refers to a situational restlessness in which people desire distractions. Waiting for a train and standing in line are typical experiences of superficial boredom.

Profound boredom — a less recognized state of boredom — refers to an existential discomfort where people struggle with their sense of self, but ultimately can result in the discovery of passion or meaning. Profound boredom stems from an abundance of uninterrupted time spent in relative solitude, which can lead to a state of apathy and existential questions like Why am I here? What is it all for? These uncomfortable ponderings pave the way for more creative thinking and activity.

Devices that promise an abundance of information and entertainment offer a temporary escape from superficial boredom but get in the way of finding more meaningful experiences. Plus, pacifying superficial boredom this way tends to backfire. Excessive social media consumption leaves people feeling empty and with regret. “The problem we observed was that social media can alleviate superficial boredom but that distraction sucks up time and energy, and may prevent people progressing to a state of profound boredom, where they might discover new passions,” said Dr. Timothy Hill, co-author of the study.

Dr. Hill continued. “Profound boredom may sound like an overwhelmingly negative concept but, in fact, it can be intensely positive if people are given the chance for undistracted thinking and development.”  Letting our thoughts meander unlocks creativity and refreshes the browser that is our brain. Boredom is a window we are always trying to close. As this study suggests, throwing it open may be a better strategy.

As Neil Gaiman said, “The best way to come up with new ideas is to get really bored.”

So rekindle your relationship with boredom. Put down your phone. Turn off that podcast. Look out the window. Find more time to do nothing.

Maybe it’s time to replace “Only boring people get bored” with “Only interesting people get bored.”

When someone is going through a rough patch, the typical recommendation is that they speak to a professional about what is bothering them. Articulating one’s feelings and challenging negative thought patterns, the thinking goes, is the best way to help an individual manage stress. A study published in The Journal of Positive Psychology turns this assumption on its head. Rather than focusing on an individual’s issues, the findings suggest that the best medicine for feeling down is doing something for someone else.

The study involved 122 people who had moderate to severe symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress. Participants were split into three groups. Two of the groups were assigned classic cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) interventions: either planning social activities (Group 1) or cognitive reappraisal (Group 2). The third group was instructed to perform three acts of kindness a day for two days out of the week. Acts of kindness were defined as “big or small acts that benefit others or make others happy.” Participant autonomy was emphasized. When, where, and for whom they completed the activities was completely up to them. Examples of acts of kindness participated later reported included giving someone a ride or baking cookies for a friend.

The good news is that everyone in the study got better.

At the 10 week mark, all three groups showed an increase in life satisfaction and a reduction of depression and anxiety symptoms but those who engaged in acts of kindness experienced the biggest boost. Moreover, this strategy showed a clear advantage over the other two CBT-based interventions in feelings of connectedness with others, “Social connection is one of the ingredients of life most strongly associated with well-being. Performing acts of kindness seems to be one of the best ways to promote those connections,” explained David Cregg, co-author of the study. It is worth noting that simply planning social activities (Group 1) was not enough to make people feel connected. There is something uniquely beneficial about performing acts of kindness that makes people feel that they are part of something larger than themselves.

The research also revealed why performing acts of kindness was so effective: it helped people take their minds off their own depression and anxiety symptoms.

It turns out that doing good deeds reduces self-absorption which often manifests during stressful periods. We often assume that people who are feeling sad or anxious have enough on their plate. The last thing we want to do is burden them with helping someone else. The results of this study suggest that our intuition is misguided. Doing nice things for people and focusing on the needs of others may actually help people with depression and anxiety feel better about themselves.