Thinking errors to avoid if you want to be healthier and happier

This is a wonderful set of ideas from positive psychology researcher, Marie-Josée Shaar. You can find the original article here.

How many of these do you do? If you are like most of us, the answer is all of them. It takes a bit of discipline to avoid them. Start every day with awareness and a plan to move your brain away from these dead end errors.

Sunk Costs

We hate failure. The more time, energy, and money we’ve invested into something, the less we want to let it go, explains Daniel Kahneman in his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. So we watch a late night TV show until the end even if the episode is terrible and we know we’ll suffer from sleep deprivation the next day. We eat the whole Sumo-size dish the waiter placed under our nose, even if doing so requires us to loosen our belts.

Loss Aversion

We hate to lose, or to miss out on something. Kahneman, Knetsch, and Thaler estimate that losses have about twice the psychological impact of equivalent gains. When faced with a choice, we therefore tend to place more weight on avoiding loss than on trying to gain something else. That’s why we pick the happy hour over the gym session, read Facebook posts past bedtime, and cheat on our eating plan when an opportunity arises.

Optimism Bias

We like to think that we are immune to disease or protected from dangers by some invisible guardian angel. William Klein describes a tendency to think “It won’t happen to me,” a state of mind adopted by people who have unprotected sex or who choose the drive-through for daily sustenance.

In my wellness workshops, I often ask members of my audiences how many have below average driving skills. In a crowd of 200 people, I’ll typically see 5 or 6 hands go up, including mine since my husband has told me enough times that it would be tough for me not to know that my driving skills are below average! Similarly, most of us think we need less good sleep, food, mood, and exercise than others to function optimally and stay healthy.

Confirmation Bias

We love for our beliefs and opinions to be validated. This is so much so that we have an internal lawyer, working around the clock to make sure we give more weight to anything that agrees with us and discredit sources that disagree. This is called the Confirmation Bias.

Thus if you’re an avid runner, you’re more likely to find and remember recent information from Miller and colleagues that running doesn’t influence the likelihood of developing arthritis. If you’d rather go blind than go for a run, you’ll find discussions of the dangers of joint overuse, such as that published by PhysioRoom.com, more convincing and memorable.

The Urge to Fit In

Our fundamental need to belong is a powerful shaper of behavior. Just think of all the times you succumbed to regrettable choices due to peer pressure as a teenager (or how difficult it was to resist) and you’ll agree that the desire to fit in impacts us deeply.

Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler review 30 years of data from one of the longest-running epidemiological studies. They found that change doesn’t happen in a vacuum; it happens in networks. When we live in a culture that glorifies sleep deprivation, promotes fast food, normalizes high stress and engineers movement out of every activity, our health suffers. But Judd Allen and I have written about how to take advantage of the power of the group to move in the right direction.