Quitting (previously published as Mastering the Art of Quitting) (8 page)

Without the ability to disengage, people will continue to live in conflict, unhappily and unhealthily. Luckily, true goal disengagement is a skill that can be cultivated and learned.

 

Chapter Three

Quitting As an Art

By now, you've realized that while the culture says that quitting is the easy way out, genuine disengagement isn't.
Goal disengagement takes place
on what might be thought of as four levels simultaneously: cognitive, affective, motivational, and behavioral. In plain language, those are the levels of thought, feeling, motivation, and action. As we describe and explain these levels, it will become clear that modifying motivation and behavior are wholly dependent on achieving cognitive and affective disengagement.

For disengagement to work, it must subvert many of the automatic and habitual processes of the mind that keep us persisting no matter what, along with battling cultural pressure. Letting go on every level, it would seem, isn't as easy it looks.

Cognitive Disengagement

The part of disengagement that requires us to clear the mind (the working memory, to be more precise) of intrusive thoughts is called cognitive disengagement. Here the white-bear problem, the automatic process mentioned in Chapter 1, comes into play, along with other forms of rumination that effectively keep our thoughts going round on the carousel instead of in a new direction. To let go on a cognitive level, we need to manage those intrusive, white-bear
thoughts. These thoughts might be a preoccupation with how we might have succeeded if we'd only persisted or various other second guesses or variations on the theme. Have you ever had a filling fall out or a loose tooth? You know how your tongue, no matter how you try to stop yourself, keeps going back to the tooth, feeling the rough edges? White-bear thoughts are just like that, and they happen automatically.
Daniel Wegner explains
that since the mind searches for whatever thought, action, or emotion the person is trying to control, the “ironic monitoring” process can actually create the mental contents for which it is searching. That's why the unwanted thought rebounds into the mind.

Wegner and his colleagues
conducted numerous experiments to see what, if anything, could stop those thoughts of white bears from coming back. Their findings are pertinent to the strategies for cognitive disengagement we'll be suggesting, and they underscore (even though it hardly needs more emphasis) why those intrusive thoughts are so damn hard to get rid of. The researchers tested whether focusing on a
distractor
—another thought brought to mind—would end the return of the intrusive white bear. Some participants who were asked to suppress the thought of a white bear were told to focus on a red Volkswagen whenever the white bear came to mind. While thinking about the red VW didn't help suppress their white-bear thoughts, it did stop them from becoming preoccupied with the white bear later. The focused distraction—honing in on a red VW—instead of a focus on random things stopped the white bear from getting linked to the VW. The focused distractor stopped the rebound effect that researchers had noted before.

What's the lesson here? Wegner explains:
“If we wish to suppress a thought
, it's necessary to become absorbed in another thought. The distractor we seek should be intrinsically interesting and engaging to us, and even if it is unpleasant, it should not be boring or confusing.” As we'll see in the next chapter, being able to focus not just on a distractor but also on a new goal or aspiration—that is, beginning to reengage in a new goal as you disengage from another—is key to the whole process.

Alas, the white bear isn't the only immediate problem. It turns out that any energy you invest in ridding yourself of those distracting thoughts will actually lessen the amount of energy you have to spend on other tasks.
Ego depletion
is the term
Roy Baumeister coined for this phenomenon, but it might just as easily be called
willpower
, as he does in his popular book of the same name. Whether you call it
ego
,
self
, or
willpower
, it is not an infinite resource. When we humans seek to regulate an impulse or a thought, we do so at the cost of reducing our ability to control other impulses, thoughts, or actions. Ego or self is more like a limited source of energy—brain energy, as it happens—than not. While it has become fashionable for the media to insist that human beings are good multitaskers, Baumeister's work and that of others suggests the very opposite.

The experiment conducted by Baumeister and his colleagues was simple in its design. Researchers asked participants to fast before they showed up, and then ushered them into a room that smelled of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. There were bowls of cookies and radishes on the table. Some students were told they could eat the cookies, others were told they couldn't eat the cookies but had to eat at least three radishes, and the rest were told they could eat nothing. Then the students were instructed to solve a puzzle that, unbeknownst to them, was in fact insoluble. The folks who had to both resist the cookies and eat the radishes gave up on the puzzle first—in fact, much more quickly than the students who'd eaten the cookies and those who'd eaten nothing. The students who had to do double duty resisting something yummy and eating something unpleasant also reported being more tired. Baumeister concluded that the energy used to control one impulse leaves less energy to regulate other choices and actions.

Baumeister and his colleagues ran additional experiments, all of which confirmed a pattern of ego depletion that resulted from not just exercising self-control (not eating cookies or eating radishes) but making choices. Participants in one experiment were divided into three groups, one of which was required to read a speech advocating a rise in tuition at the university. Given that the participants
were students, it's fair to assume that no one was for a tuition hike. The second group (called the “high choice”) was handed folders that contained speeches either for tuition raises or against; they were told it would be appreciated if they would read the pro-hike speech but that the choice was entirely up to them. The third control group didn't have to read any speech. The participants were then given the same puzzle—the one that couldn't be solved—as the one given in the resisting-temptation experiment. Although the participants who'd been given no choice (having to read a speech they most certainly disagreed with) and those with no speech to read persisted in trying to solve the puzzle, those who had to choose between speeches gave up on the puzzle much faster. This led Baumeister and colleagues to conclude that
“acts of choice draw on the same limited resource
used for self-control.”

Other experiments showed
that suppressing emotion resulted in ego depletion too—something else to keep in mind when you consider the effort artful quitting entails. The following experiment has implications not just for letting go on the cognitive level but also for the management of emotions—an undertaking that is an important part of artful quitting as well. Baumeister and coworkers had half of the participants watch a video and told them to suppress their emotions; the participants were also told that their expressions would be videotaped as they watched. Those in the control group were also told that they would be videotaped but were instructed to “let their emotions flow.” Half in both groups watched a Robin Williams riff, while the remainder watched the tearjerker scene in which the daughter is dying of cancer in
Terms of Endearment.
After a ten-minute break, all of the participants were asked how hard it had been to comply with the instructions and then were given thirteen anagrams to unscramble. Not only did the group that tried to suppress emotion report that it had been hard to do so, but this group also fared significantly worse on the anagram test.

Ego depletion isn't just a theoretical concept, as shown by a recent study of the brains of participants who had engaged in acts of self-control. We'll turn to this study in greater detail later, but
for now, we note some findings by
Dylan D. Wagner and Todd F. Heatherton
at Dartmouth. The researchers found that the MRIs of the brains of participants who had tried to self-regulate showed increased activity in the amygdala, the part of the brain—along with the prefrontal cortex—responsible for managing emotion.

The brain's wiring for persistence also gets in the way of cognitive disengagement on a completely unconscious level. It's what's called
the
Zeigarnik effect
. Bluma Zeigarnik's experiment, conducted in 1927, was the first to demonstrate how the brain deals with unfinished business—specifically a goal that was consciously selected and then unselected—but its results have been replicated many times since. The experimenters told people to work on jigsaw puzzles and to keep at it until they finished. But some of the participants weren't permitted to finish, and even though they were put to work at other tasks—to distract them from the initial goal and to substitute another in its place—when these participants were tested, they had thought about the unfinished task with twice as much frequency as the other tasks, even though they were told not to think about it. The Zeigarnik effect explains why so many people get stuck in a loop when they quit a goal or situation; it's as though the unconscious is nudging them to go back and finish what they started.

Again, this doesn't mean that letting go of intrusive thoughts is impossible; it simply underscores that the habits of the mind need to be dealt with systematically. While we'll explore how to manage intrusive thoughts in later chapters,
the recent work of E. J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister
sheds new light on the Zeigarnik effect and how it can be moderated. Their first experiment tested whether intrusive thoughts could be eliminated. The researchers had one group write about two important tasks that needed to be completed in the next few days, along with an explanation of what would happen if they weren't completed. The participants also assigned a numerical value indicating the importance of the task, ranging from 1 to 7. The second group was given the same instructions as the first but was also told to come up with a plan to complete the two tasks. The third (control) group simply wrote about completed
tasks. All of the participants were then given a section of a popular novel to read and were tested on it.

Masicampo and Baumeister found that participants who made plans weren't distracted by intrusive thoughts; in fact, they reported no more intrusive thoughts than the participants in the control group who had only reflected on completed tasks. More important, those with a plan performed better on the reading tests, showing greater focus and less distraction than those who had detailed incomplete tasks alone. The key is that no plans were actually implemented, nor did the participants actually move any closer to completing the tasks. Apparently, just making a plan, without making real progress, is enough to reduce the Zeigarnik effect.

Further studies explored how accessible the goal remained to the unconscious; again, planning reduced the number of intrusive thoughts. Another experiment showed that when people made plans to complete the goal that they were actually going to implement, they had fewer intrusive thoughts even when they were working on an unrelated task. But while planning helped manage unwanted, intrusive thoughts, two other experiments found that planning did little to alleviate the emotional stress and anxiety associated with unfulfilled goals.

Importantly, while making plans to fulfill goals—even ones that were meant to be implemented—did help tamp intrusive thoughts, the action did nothing to change the emotional content. Planning does, however, begin the motivational and behavioral process.

It turns out that when it comes to managing emotions, human beings are drawing on the same limited resources as those they use for managing self-control and thought.

Affective Disengagement

Affective disengagement
, one aspect of artful quitting, involves the management and regulation of the unwanted emotions that are a common consequence of abandoning or quitting a goal. We've
already seen how, in Tim's case, his own negative feelings about quitting colored how he talked about his experience and how he presented himself to potential employers. Feelings of frustration, a sense of inadequacy, and even depression accompany the act of quitting so regularly that it's been suggested that being depressed is actually not just a component of goal disengagement but a normal one.

In his seminal 1975 article, Eric Klinger
argued that a coherent and predictable cycle of emotions accompanies giving up a goal, just as the striving for a goal produces its own cycle. He identified four consequences of goal setting, explaining that the consequences affect “actions, the contents of thoughts and dreams, sensitization to goal-related cues, and perceptual qualities (or at least memories and interpretations of those qualities) of goal-related stimuli.” He asserted that there was equally a coherent cycle of disengagement, instead of random or highly individualized responses to letting go of a goal. The disengagement cycle goes as follows: a reinvigoration of efforts (renewed activity accompanied by disbelief that the goal is unattainable); aggression (protesting the loss of the goal or assigning blame for its loss); and then depression followed by recovery and acting on new goals. These aren't completely discrete stages; nor do they necessarily follow this precise sequence. But they are coherent. He also pointed out that these cycles of disengagement could vary greatly in duration and intensity, ranging from minor disappointments that you can quickly recover from (“Because my 5 pm meeting ran late, I will miss Billy's soccer game”) to those that can last for months (“The love of my life has left me and I am bereft” or “I've lost my job and I'm worried about my future”). Klinger wrote that “in most cases depression is a normal, adaptive, nonpathological [sic] process which, despite its being a nuisance, need cause little concern for the psychological viability of the depressed individual.” He went even further to say that depression could be seen “as an important kind of information from which one can deduce new plans for self-fulfillment.”