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**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Right? That's hard, because so much I think about relative to exercise and working out and building strength, because it's hard, and it doesn't matter how many times you do it, it's always hard in some way or another and you're like, "This should be easy; the gas pedal should make me go" and y... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I too also like the framework that this operates or gives us traction or distraction. That is keying off of the name it to tame it. If you don't have-- so as you're listening to this, thinking it's either traction or distraction - now you have a mental framework to operate from when it comes to dist... |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Yeah. I love how he puts this. He says, "Time management is pain management." Ain't that's so true? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Right? Because if I can manage my time, I manage the discomfort that I feel. He goes into and identifies four psychological factors relative to pain. Because if we acknowledge that distraction is always this unhealthy escape from reality, this escape from pain... He says "These tend to be bore... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** The one that resonated with me on that list was rumination, which is our tendency to keep thinking about bad experiences. Or if you've ever chewed on something-- this is quoting from his book... If you've ever chewed on something in your mind that you did or that someone did to you or over something... |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** \[16:35\] Right. So this is what I talk about a lot when working with patients, is recognizing those ways of thinking or behaviors, and going -- not just the awareness, but like, why is this going on for me? What is a signal of ruminating to you? Is there something that you haven't dealt with ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. What is it, dummy? |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Right?! \[laughs\] Yeah. No, it could be so many different things, but that's why it's so valuable to investigate and examine in greater depth instead, of just getting upset with yourself of like, "Gosh, Adam, here you're doing it again. What's wrong with you?!" and now you're stuck criticizin... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, it is around unsettled when I find myself doing it. In all honesty, there's times when actually rumination can be positive, because there's a variation of rumination where I'm examining a scenario, maybe an unsettled scenario, whatever it might be, and I'm just looking at all the different fac... |
The keyword in his book says, "Unstoppable. You can't stop." That's where I'm like, "Pump the brakes. Do what you say. What's going on here? Where is this originating from?" And going back to time management being pain management, in his book-- I'm gonna quote from his book. "If distraction costs us time, then time man... |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Right. Yeah, and so both sides of the coin would be looking at what's feeding the ruminating, but at the same time, looking at how can I set up some guardrails so that I'm not spending my time in that way, so that it's less painful? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What about motivation? I mean, we're all motivated by something. If we're optimizing for something, we want to go a direction for a reason; in his book, he says, "The drive to relieve discomfort is the root cause of all of our behavior, while everything else is an approximate cause." Now we've said ... |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** \[20:16\] Yeah. Well, motivation is to have comfort, but I have to say, there's a myriad of things relative to that, because our experiences or biases or ways in which we've been conditioned relative to comfort or discomfort is also a facet of that. I mean, who has the same pain threshold or m... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's true. |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** I mean, part of this too, having been in athletics throughout my childhood, it was being able to differentiate different kinds of pain. Like, "Am I hurt? Am I injured? Do I need to stop training? Or am I uncomfortable and this is unpleasant, because I feel like I can't breathe because I'm push... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. I love that the distinction about pain though; it's like, "Are you injured or you're just hurt?" Because if you're injured, you've gotta stop. Yeah, you've gotta go get medical help. But if you're hurt, it's in many cases psychological. So I do like the drive here. It's like, discomfort and co... |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Sure, and so what have you repeated and what have you done over and over that tells you this is uncomfortable? And I would say that there's a lot of associations. If I'm looking at the way in which emotion and memory work together by past experiences, my brain is going to be motivated differen... |
I think I've shared this, but I remember when I was training and I was an adolescent at the time living in the desert climate, and we used to train beyond school hours during the summer. So I would have trained for about four to five hours, and then before we could eat lunch, I had to go outside and run for a few laps ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** The opposite, yeah. |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** \[24:01\] We're talking motivation. What motivates me? Well, making progress, feeling good, feeling like there's more of what I want. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It happens a lot too in many successful things - the one way to think about a framework to use is not what do you want to be, it's what do you not want to be? So in this case, what do you not want to feel? |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Sure. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** If running-- I couldn't imagine running in the summertime here in Houston, because it's so humid. I think it was 87F yesterday temperature-wise, but the humidity was so high that the weatherman said it actually felt like it was near the hundreds... Because it was 87F degrees, but the humidity took i... |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** That is not comfortable. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That is discomfort for me, so I'm going to avoid that. But the framework, the mental framework to consider though, whether you're building something, whether you're making something, building a company, building a life, defining your life, what you optimize for, identifying your values, what you wan... |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Yeah, and I think for people to recognize - motivation is always going to involve some other aspects that we find aversive, uncomfortable, all of those things we would like to avoid, hence why we're distracted away from what we'd like to do. And this is why I work with people and try to help t... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Well the key there is goals, and to have goals, you have to have values, and so you have to understand what you actually value, which is very difficult, I suppose. There are some people who don't seem to have a way, and will even self-admit, "I don't seem to have a way, career-wise, a trajecto... |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Yeah, I loved this. In the book Indistractable, he quotes Russ Harris, who is the author of The Happiness Trap. He describes values as, "How we want to be, what we want to stand for, and how we want to relate to the world around us." We've talked about perspective a lot throughout our conversa... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[28:13\] I love the question you have here in the notes - what is keeping you from your top speed? I love that. That's what you're talking about - these guard rails, these fences, these containers, helping you to define this path. |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** He goes on to say a value is like a guiding star; it's the fixed point we use to help us navigate our life choices. And so recognizing not just what we want to do, but why we're going to do it. Why did I go to school for as long as I did? Because there's a fair amount of discomfort relative to... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. That's something happened to me over the weekend, actually. I was gonna do something - without any context, so I'll just be very vague. So forgive the vagueness, but I had something on my mind that was very-- I had a lot of passion involved in it, and a lot of brain space involved in it, and I... |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Yeah. But what you did is in that moment, you zoomed out and you were able to ask yourself that fundamental question "why", and then go, "Am I going to make time for this, because do I or don't I value this thing?" |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, back to this - time management is pain management. If I placed my time in that, sure, I may not endure actual literal pain, but as a variation of that, maybe the pain is taking away from the amount of time I dedicate to family time on my weekend. So that is painful to me. To get ten years down... |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** \[32:14\] Another analogy to think about is an anchor, and that our values really anchor us so we don't drift too far by the things like pop-ups that distract us. I think about this with my kids when they're on technology more now than they've ever been with changing times, and they're so dist... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I don't know how to say that, honestly. I thought about it, too. |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** He talks about this interconnected nature of our lives with concentric circles. So thinking about the smaller circle embedded in a bigger circle, and then a larger circle etc, and he put the mind and body at that center, like yourself. You have to start by managing -- like, you value yourself,... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Absolutely. It's controlling the inputs, not the outcomes. In his book, he's got similar concentric circles, which is where we're framing this from, where it's like you're in the middle there. It's life domains, as described in the book, life domains. You've got concentric circles, you've got you in... |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** \[laughs\] But I like to think of so many of these things relative to management, and I don't like the word 'control', because we don't have full charge or full control over ourselves or our lives, and that's what this gets at, of going "I can only manage what I'm doing. What have I got? What'... |
\[36:30\] So there's so much more a way in which managing our distraction or getting traction involves being deliberate, not just haphazardly, or today, or occasionally, but repeatedly over time, over and over again. |
I love at the end, when he's talking about some of these tools, and one of the things he talks about is fun and play. So we've talked about motivation and distraction. These are actually tools we can use to keep us focused. Hallelujah! |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, fun and comfort are associated. I mean, if I'm comfortable, I'm having fun, to some degree. So I would say, yeah, have fun and play. Plus, we know that play is an activity you can get lost in, the state of flow comes into play there, you can learn easier in play; there's lots of things that ha... |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Yeah, so I love it. Ian Bogost is a professor of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology, and he's written actually a number of books relative to challenging and changing this way in which we think about fun and play, and he writes, "Fun is the aftermath of deliberately manipu... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I have a perfect example. |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Yeah? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I've been playing-- so I have a Nintendo Switch, and I'm not much of a gamer, I swear I'm not. I play maybe one or two games, almost never. I'm not much of a gamer. I do like games though. But I've been playing Donkey Kong, and if you've played Donkey Kong on Nintendo Switch or even the Wii U,... |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** That's awesome. That's so cool. Have you heard of this other conference, too? Did you know that there's a boring conference? There is. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** No. I would be so bored. |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** \[39:51\] \[laughs\] I learned about this years ago; I forget what other book I'd been reading... But yes, people actually go and investigate the mundane, ordinary, obvious things that you might see as trivial or pointless, but become fascinating when you look deeper. Wouldn't that be so fun? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I should have actually known about this, and I'm sad I didn't, because that's what the book, The Design of Everything, that book that most designers have read or should have on their bookshelf at some point in their life - it's like you're examining the design of a chair; everyday, boring objects. N... |
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