If you've ever suffered even mildly from insomnia, you'll know that the human brain is a badly made piece of equipment. If you deliberately try to use it to focus on falling asleep, you'll not only fail, but actually exhaust yourself more. You'd demand a refund if you bought a lawn mower that made your grass grow longer or a kettle that made tap-water freeze - yet such flaws seem built into us. Seriously: it's almost enough to make me doubt my otherwise rock-solid belief in Intelligent Design.
Thankfully, we have the ingenious piece of psychological trickery known as the "symptom-prescription", originally attributed to the Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, best-known for work inspired by his own direct experience as a concentration camp survivor. If you're plagued with anxiety, Frankl observed, then trying to stop feeling anxious will only compound the situation. If you blush easily in public, any attempt to stop will just make you acutely aware of how much you're blushing, and embarrassed about the blushing itself. A symptom-prescription is exactly what it says: an instruction to focus your attention on trying to do more, not less, of whatever is causing you a problem. One cognitive psychologist, Rian McMullin, reports having successfully used the method with compulsive hand-washers: when asked to wash their hands many more times than they felt compelled to, they slowly managed to exert conscious control over the behaviour, and then reduce it.
Perhaps this particular strain of reverse psychology is also what's at play in the famous parenting principle known as Smoke The Whole Pack, and which doesn't receive much official endorsement these days (though I know of several people who swear that being made to do this, after their mother or father discovered them trying a cigarette, is why they don't smoke today). You can use the principle on yourself less aggressively, though. If you're beset by worries, choose a specific time and place for worrying about things, then go there at the appointed hour and focus on nothing but worrying, suggests Beverley Potter, in her book The Worrywart's Companion. Or if you're procrastinating on a work project, try sitting at your desk and energetically doing nothing at all for a full hour: it's close to impossible.
In the same spirit, though the detail is a little different, the blogger Marc Andreessen, presents his list of productivity tips at tinyurl.com/yq7skx. They're not all for everyone, but his "anti-to-do list" may change your life. Take a blank piece of paper, he suggests, and write things down on it only after you've done them, rather than spending all day confronting a long and depressing list of uncompleted tasks. "Each time you do something, you get to write it down and you get that little rush of endorphins that the mouse gets every time he presses the button in his cage and gets a food pellet," Andreessen writes.
Deep down at the level of our brain-wiring, we may all be rodents in cages, but at least we can aspire to be happy ones.
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
