Beliefs are powerful. We need to use them wisely. Not by believing crazy stuff wildly out of touch with reality, but by believing in possibilities firmly within our potential to achieve.
The placebo effect is a good example of this. Taking a sugar pill that is believed to be efficacious isn't going to cure a Stage 4 cancer. However, it can have other positive effects, such as reducing pain.
Reading David Robson's book this morning, The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Change the World, I came across an interesting example of the power of belief in his "Limitless Willpower" chapter.
Experience in any profession tells us that some people find the same mental effort much more tiring than others. Just think of the people you know. While some are exhausted at the end of the working day, others seem to have boundless reserves that allow them to read hundreds of novels, play in an orchestra, or write a screenplay.
These individual differences may partly depend on our beliefs about the tasks themselves. You might have been brought up to think that reading is hard work, whereas playing music is a form of relaxation, or vice versa, and those beliefs will determine how tiring you find the respective activities.
That's worth bearing in mind if you're a parent, teacher, or manager giving instructions to other people. Dutch researchers have shown that simply being told that we may find an exercise to be energizing, rather than fatiguing, can reduce the sense of depletion so that participants are more persistent and focused -- so don't overemphasize the difficulty of a task before someone has tried it for themselves.
Even more powerful, however, are our expectations about our own capabilities and our reactions to hard mental work in general, according to some game-changing work by Veronica Job at the University of Vienna in Austria.
She has shown that our beliefs about the brain's resources -- whether we see them as finite or non-limited -- can powerfully change our experience of ego depletion and our capacity to remain self-controlled and focused under pressure.
This has to do with the brain's propensity to predict and expect certain things. If we expect that we'll be physically exhausted after running for a mile, likely that's what we'll experience. The brain tells the rest of our body, in effect, "This is as far as you're able to run, so the fatigue you're feeling is a message to stop running."
Likewise, if we believe that a certain mental activity is going to deplete our brain's limited resources, then probably we're going to feel tired after doing that thing. Expectations become reality. Robson writes:
Astonishingly, Job's results seemed to show that the consequences of ego depletion are real -- but only if you believe in it.
Since I've been meditating almost every day since 1970, some fifty-four years, I was particularly interested in the part of the "Limitless Willpower" chapter where meditation and Eastern philosophies were mentioned.
The limited view of willpower may be far more common in the West, but this attitude is not universal. Working with Krishna Savani at Nanyang Technological Institute in Singapore, Job has shown that the non-limited view of the human mind is much more common among Indian students than among people in the United States or Switzerland -- and their mental stamina is much greater as a result.
Job and Savani argue that the greater prevalence of the non-limited belief in India may arise from various religious traditions, including Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism: adherents practice mentally taxing activities that are explicitly designed to boost concentration and self-control.
They point to the yogic practice of trataka, which involves concentrating your vision on a single point -- such as a black dot or the tip of a candle flame -- while ignoring all other distractions. Trataka is essentially the kind of attention task that would have been used by Western scientists to deplete our resources.
For practitioners of yoga, however, it is seen as a way of "cleansing" the mind, preparing it for further concentration, and regular repetition of the exercise appears to cement the idea that focused mental effort can be energizing rather than fatiguing -- leading to greater concentration and self-control in many areas of life.
It is interesting to contemplate how different the scientific understanding of willpower could have been if the first experiments on mental fatigue had been conducted in a non-Western culture.
I ( 87 ) hang since 1984 most days some minutes
upside down.
Info. : Google : Inversion table.
Really refreshing
Plus my 432Hz music you can see/hear on
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As I said The Anahabd Shabd is also In A=432Hz
777
Posted by: 777 | April 06, 2024 at 02:14 PM