Tag Archives: psychology

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A Blog Post In Which I Over-think My Tendency To Over-think

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I think far too much. Ask anyone who even knows the first thing about me, and they will all say the same thing. Thinking too much isn’t always a bad thing. I think it might be connected to my need to listen to jazz music while I study and my love for reading and my general ability to sometimes make good decisions. And all of those things are good.

But sometimes, it is a very bad thing. There are several reasons for this.

1) Thinking too much paralyzes. It keeps you from actually doing anything. Sometimes I get so caught up in the theoretical components of an activity, that I never actually do the activity. I am guilty of this in responsibilities as small as reading e-mails. I think about how great it would be if I set a little time apart each day to answer all my e-mails. And while I am thinking about this, my inbox piles up and my time disappears. But if I answered e-mails as they came in, I would have plenty of time for them.

2) Thinking too much leads to bad thoughts. When you think too much, it is impossible to think good thoughts all the time. Invariably, then, less than good thoughts creep their way into your mind. Often, I find myself thinking about how I am going to fail at something. And even more often than that, I find myself thinking about how I compare to other people. Spending time comparing myself to others is probably the biggest time-suck I engage in. It makes no sense. As I am thinking about how I measure up to other people, they are getting even farther ahead. Some people might argue that I shouldn’t think about it like that, but I do. And it is helpful to think that if I just did the work, I would stand a much better chance of measuring up. You can’t do anything standing still.

3) Thinking too much causes a decrease in self-confidence. If I listened to my head all the time, I would really hate myself. My apartment is rarely clean, my inbox rarely empty, my work rarely done, my dreams rarely achieved, and my relationships rarely deep. But what my head doesn’t tell me is that all of those things are within my ability to change. I just need to stop thinking and get up and do them.

What are you thinking about? How much you hate these questions? Leave a comment anyway. I would love to hear from you!

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Mythologizing Greatness

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I asked a friend the other day if she could marry any person in the world regardless of age, class, or other such restrictions who it would be. She answered Barack Obama. That makes some sense to me. She’s pretty liberal and stuff. So it’s cool.

I don’t really know how I would answer the question myself. I feel like I would probably pick a celebrity too, like Emma Watson or Zooey Deschanel or Janelle Monae or someone like that. There are probably a lot of people who would call that shallow, I suppose. But I think it’s something really different than shallow. It has to do with the “Great Man (or Person) Theory.”

The Great Man Theory developed in the nineteenth century as a way of talking about history. It theorizes that important changes are made by a few good people or heroes. In the modern day, the GMT got translated into leadership theory, and now people talk a lot about how influential one person may be for a corporation or an organization.

The GMT, though, has been mostly disproved. History is not changed by one person. It’s changed by a bunch of driven people working together, some more publicly than others.

The big problem with the GMT, though, is it mythologizes people. We think that there is this class of people out there that never deals with any of the things that we deal with – that they are always focused on changing history for the better. This is just false. People are people are people. Abraham Lincoln failed at almost everything he did until he became president, including a marriage.

Sometimes when I’m really down for whatever reason I like to tell myself that maybe I’m just not one of those people who can change things – that I’m not committed enough, not focused enough, that I let the day-to-day weigh on me too much. But I think that’s mostly a lie. The people we look up to, the people who are making a difference are not people who are living without relationship issues, or self-confidence issues, or family issues. They are just people who have decided that there are more important things. And they are people who have figured out how to convince other people that there are more important things as well.

I’ve been learning a lot about Teach for America recently. And whether you agree with their mission or not, there’s one thing you have to admit. Wendy Kopp has figured out how to make people realize that education is far more important than your romantic relationships, your career problems, or sometimes even your ambition. If you talk to a TFA recruiter, you probably won’t be able to get off the topic of education for hours and hours. Because Wendy has made it that important.

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People Problems

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I knew someone once who started almost every piece of advice with, “I was feeling that same way about a month or two ago.” Whether that statement was true or not, it always got me steamed up. I don’t exactly know why. I just know that every time I heard that phrase I wanted to pick the world up and drop it on someone’s head a la Lil Wayne.

I’m in this Psychology of Personality class this quarter, which is really swell. And I enjoy it a lot. But I have a major beef with all of the personality theorists that we’ve studied so far. They all think that development is linear – that as we come across new conflicts and resolve them, we become a more full and better person. And I just think that’s silly.

Right now, we are learning about Erik Erikson. He believed that life development consisted of eight epigenetic stages. That’s just a fancy way of saying that each stage grows on top of the other and that if we get messed up in one stage, then it ruins the other stages for us. Each of these stages is marked by a conflict, and if we navigate the conflict correctly, we learn a new “ego skill” or virtue. The conflict in the first stage, for instance, is trust vs. mistrust. And if we navigate it correctly, we acquire hope. That first stage happens before we are a year old.

I don’t even know how to understand this.

These conflicts are never resolved. Aren’t we constantly dealing with whether or not to trust the world? Or take Stage 3’s conflict, initiative v. shame and doubt. This supposedly happens before you are 6. But pretty much every college student I know routinely bounces back and forth between hard-working and lazy, self-loathing bum (myself included).

I don’t think there are “teenage” problems or “adult” problems or “kid” problems in this world. I just think there are people problems.

What are your people problems?