Hidden Brain - You 2.0: How to Break Out of a Rut

Episode Date: August 7, 2023

There are times in life when the challenges we face feel insurmountable. Authors succumb to writer's block. Athletes and artists hit a plateau. People of a certain age fall into a midlife crisis. These are all different ways of saying: I'm stuck.  This week, in the kickoff to our annual You 2.0 series, psychologist Adam Alter shares his research on why we all get stuck at various points in our lives, and how to break free. Do you like the ideas and insights we feature on Hidden Brain? Then please consider supporting our work by joining our new podcast subscription, Hidden Brain+. You can find it in the Apple Podcasts app, or by going to apple.co/hiddenbrain. Thanks! 

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. There are moments in any journey when things can feel intominable. You show up to work every day, do the same job, meet the same people. At home, you wash the dishes, clean the bedroom, do the laundry. On weekends, you watch the same TV shows, go for the same walks, talk to the same relatives. One day starts to look like the next. Weeks blur into each other. And then you start to wonder, what am I really doing? Where am I headed? Am I making any progress at all? We have different names for this phenomenon. Writers say they are blocked.

Office workers talk about being in a rut. People of a certain age call it a midlife crisis. But they are all different ways of saying, I'm stuck. Today, we begin our Parenelyie popular annual series, U2.0. In past years, we have explored ideas about how to communicate better or build stronger relationships. In the coming weeks, we will explore a variety of new ideas to help you thrive.

This week on Hidden Brain, new research into the science of feeling stuck and powerful insights into how to get unstuck. All of us have had moments in our lives when we feel stuck. We don't know what we want to do. Or if we do know what we want, we don't know how to do it. At New York University, psychologist Adam Alter studies the science of how to get unstuck. Adam Alter, welcome to Hidden Brain. Thanks so much, Shankar.

Adam, I want to play you a clip from a very dramatic and popular TV series. This is from the season 7 we're going to survive. Because the enemy is real. It's always been real. Now Adam, you've spent some time thinking about this because even as the TV show is widely dramatic and packed with action, something very curious was happening to the writer of the series. Tell me how George R.R. Martin started writing this epic fantasy and what happened along the way. Well, he started very successfully.

He wrote a number of books in the series and the gap between those books grew larger and larger to the point where he experienced what he described as profound writers block. And he's expressed great puzzlement because he was so productive for so long, but now says in interviews, I don't really have an explanation for you. I know you as the fans of the series are looking for the next installment. It's been many years. I just don't know what to say. I just haven't been able to produce it. And that's

where we sit now. So fans of the books are waiting for the next installment to be released, even as the TV show itself has been completed. In an interview in 2018, he said, I know there are a lot of people out there who are very angry with me that wins of winter. This is the sixth volume out of seven, isn't finished. And I'm mad about that myself. I wish I finished it four years ago. I wish it was finished now, but it's not. But I've had dark nights of the soul where I've pounded my head against the keyboard and said, God, will I ever finish this? The show is going further and further forward. He's talking here about Game of Thrones, and I'm falling further and further behind what the

hell is happening here. And you can almost hear his own mystification about his own block here at him. He's very distressed. Yeah, it's interesting when you see someone who is such a colossal talent for writing these kinds of stories. And yet still, we're not talking about being stuck for a day or a week or a month.

We're talking about a matter of many years. And he has no idea what he's supposed to be doing moving forward. So it's a very profound case of stuckness. So you say that George R.R. Martin and people like him might have something to learn from an experiment conducted many years ago by the psychologist Clark Hall. What makes this experiment unusual is that the test subjects, one mice? Yeah, that's right. Hall was a behaviorist, and a lot of behaviorists

in that period in the middle of the 20th century studied mice because they were very easy to study. They were very interested in some very basic psychological principles that applied to mice just as they did to humans. And so Hull used to create mazes for his mice and he would watch as they completed these mazes. What do mice running through a maze have to do with the rider of epic fantasy novels, getting stuck? The thing that he noticed most was that the mice when they first entered the maze were quite slow to move. They were puzzled by the situation that faced them.

But as the goal, whatever the goal was, whether it was a piece of food or whether it was exiting the maze, as the goal came into view, they moved much more quickly. And he described this as the goal gradient. It's the idea that, at least subjectively, it feels to mice and actually to humans as well as though, as you can see the goal in sight, that the experience becomes almost metaphorically downhill. It's much easier to bridge the gap between where you are and where you'd like to be. I think all of us have had this experience in one form or the other. You feel like the end is inside, whether you're a runner and you can see the finish tape inside. It does give you a bit of

a spurt to get to the finish line. But talk a minute about this goal gradient idea because there's something really interesting that happens here at the start, the middle, and at the end. What happens at it? Yes, so the original idea that Holda's cried was that we're much quicker closer to the goal, but subsequent research has shown that it's a bit more complicated than that, that actually we slow down dramatically in the middle when we're sort of unmoored, where somewhere between the beginning of the goal and the end of the goal. And so we move quickly at the beginning because we have a bit of motivation,

we're fresh, we're ready to go, and we slow down in the middle. And then as we get to the end of the process, we speed up again as the goal comes within view. So it's a sort of u-shape. You go quickly, then slowly, then quickly again. Adam says it is revealing that George R.R. Martin got stuck as he was slogging his way through the series. The end of the series was some distance away, while the start of the project was in the distant past. There's lots of evidence that the goal gradient effect plays a powerful role in many dimensions of our lives. There are some studies that show that it applies

to physical activity, but it applies just as much to mental activity as well. So there were some studies that were run asking people, for example, one of my colleagues, Andrea Bonetti, and his colleagues asked people to find words within words. So he would give them a long word, and then he would say how many shorter English words

can you find within the letters of this longer word. And he did that nine times. And what he found was that people were slowest around the fifth attempt, much slower than around the first or second or eighth or ninth attempts. And so this applies just as much in his studies to mental activities where there's some motivation required as it does to physical activities. activities where there's some motivation required as it does to physical activities. I understand this is also true when it comes to paying off credit card debt. You know, you can, you make a good start at the beginning and if you get close to the end, you can, you feel like you have a sport to finish off, but the middle is really difficult again. That's right. Yeah, there's quite a lot of research on the financial implications of this,

this stuck in the middle effect as it's known that shows exactly that, that we pay off credit card debt quickly, then slowly, then quickly. When we're donating to charities, you see something similar. We donate much more readily and we donate larger amounts at the beginning when the charity first makes the solicitation. Then again, as the charity reaches its goal or approaches its goal, we donate again. But in the middle process, say the charity is looking for $100,000, around that $50,000 mark,

you see a slowdown collectively and how much people give. So, you argue that one of the reasons that the middle of a project is so challenging is that there are fewer and fewer landmarks to mark our progress. And you've compared the journey we take on a long project to the experience of a sailor on a ship traveling across the Atlantic Ocean from the United States to Britain. Explain that analogy, Adam. Yeah, so when you leave, imagine you're sailing from New York to say Southampton in Britain. When you leave, you have a number of landmarks behind you and that, you know, there's a lot of activity at the beginning of that journey. Things that suggest that you're

moving, you can see how fast you're moving. And when you get into the middle part of that journey, all you see is ocean. But you don't have any external cues that tell you how fast you're moving. And so that middle period is a long period between leaving the land behind and then waiting for the next bit of land to come into view. And so during that period, in contrast to the beginning of the experience, you don't have a lot of feedback about your progress and that's demotivating. It gives you the sense that you're not really making progress even if you're moving quite rapidly.

And then of course, as you approach Britain again, you see land, you might see parts of the British Isles and again you can start to see how fast you see land, you might see parts of the British Isles, and again you can start to see how fast you're moving, you're getting some external cues that are reinforcing. They say, keep going, you're almost there. And I think that's how a lot of our goals function. We have that middle period that can often be quite expansive, where we just have no sense that we're making progress, and so that's greatly demotivating.

So is one solution then to try and create more landmarks in the middle? I think so. I think it's to shrink the middle as far as possible, and there are different ways to do that. In the case of sailing, there aren't that many options, but what you want to do is to give yourself some sort of feedback that suggests that you're making progress, and so you might create sub-goles. Instead of thinking of the journey as a single goal from start to finish, you might say, well, I've got this map that I'm using to navigate through the Atlantic Ocean. I know when I hit certain latitude or longitudinal measures,

I know that I've reached a certain percentage of the way. And that's obviously much easier to do when you're engaged in some sort of activity, whether it's running or whether it's some sort of mental activity. You just kind of shrink the goal down and you bracket it much more narrowly, so you have these smaller sub-galls. So runners often say, you know, my goal is to run the next mile or the next half-mile, or even, you know, as far as my eye can see, and you set a target, and you run to that

target, and then you look at another target, and you run to that target. And it's the same principle again. You're trying to be ending the race all the time. Exactly. Yeah. You're sort of atomizing the goal. You're turning it into its bait most basic elements. And at the very extreme point, if you have ever run and feel that you're really struggling, it becomes a matter of taking one step at a time. You know, each step is its own little goal and you get your own little burst of positive feedback with each step. I understand that you have employed a similar insight when it comes to writing. What does that look like, Adam?

Yeah, so, you know, writing is very similar. If you're writing something large, like a thesis or a book or an article, there are different ways to construe that goal. Now, obviously, if you zoom back far enough, the goal is to finish the book or finish the article. But that's overwhelming, in the same way that sailing a ship across the ocean might be overwhelming. And so you might have this stuck in the middle experience, which I think a lot of people do. The nice thing about writing a book is it's broken naturally into chapters. So already, you shrunk those middles down, let's say there are 12 chapters in a book that you're writing. You've taken that large goal and you've made

sure that the middle is smaller by having these 12 sub-goles that fall under that larger umbrella. But even within a chapter, you know, people will say, every hundred words is my goal. And I've often used that tactic, especially as the process of writing becomes difficult or when you're entering a difficult part of a story or a study that you're trying to describe, what I find is that the goal for me shrinks as I am struggling more, as I become more stuck, and it grows again as the process of writing

feels a bit easier. And I find that shrinking and expanding happens constantly as I'm writing the book. I understand that you sometimes set the timer on your watch for 60 seconds and aim to write until the timer goes off. Why would you set a timer to write for only one minute? Yeah, these are the most desperate moments, right? You don't want to write for a minute and think about that as the height of what you're

trying to achieve. You obviously want to do much more than that. But there are moments when writing is incredibly difficult in the same way that George R.R. Martin describes it, where any writing is a small victory. And so what you can do is just as a runner might say, every step is a little victory. You might say that writing for 60 seconds,

or even 15 or 30 seconds if you're very desperate, is its own goal. And the idea behind that is trying to lubricate whatever machinery is required to ride for 10 minutes and then an hour and then three and five and so on. And I find that works pretty well because there's a lot of inertia in a lot of these processes that are goal based, where once you get the ball rolling, things seem to improve, but getting the ball rolling can be really difficult. And the best way to do that is to lower the bar as far as possible,

so it's barely above the ground. And I think many people notice this, you know, when there's a deadline looming, suddenly people start working much faster, and then right as they approach the deadline, they sort of say, you know, I have all these ideas bursting at my head right now, if I could only have another half an hour, you know, I could get a lot of it down. And so what you're basically saying is take advantage of that and create

artificial deadlines in order to get yourself jump started. Yeah, that's exactly right. And I think by constraining yourself, either by a deadline or by saying, I'm only going to write for a minute, something about that process of constraining yourself is paradoxically liberating. A lot of the extraneous material that might have by saying I'm only going to write for a minute, something about that process of constraining yourself is paradoxically liberating. A lot of the extraneous material that might have been weighing on our minds and sapping limited mental resources goes by the wayside.

What's left is just this real sense of sudden clarity, which I've always found really inspires great ideas and inspires a lot of activity, especially when I feel stuck. The middle of any extended project can be a trap. Becoming aware of this fact can help us prepare for the trap and to make plans to unstick ourselves. But of course, the middle of projects is not the only reason people get stuck. There are lots of other drivers and it turns out we create many of the problems ourselves. When we come back, how we get in our own way and how to get out. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Adam Alter is a psychologist at New York University. He has studied why we get stuck and how we can get ourselves unstuck. One thing he and others have found is that many of the obstacles that stand between us and our goals are created by us. Adam, in your book, anatomy of a breakthrough, you illustrate one of these obstacles with a story about a musician. I want to play you a clip of a song. How I look close we get sometimes It's like we never met But you and I I think we can take it

Adam tell me Jeff Tweety's story and the trap he once constructed for himself. So Tweety is the front man of the band Wilco and he is a bit of a renaissance man. He writes music, but he also writes books. And he has described quite vividly his own experiences with writers' block in both contexts and talked quite a lot about how he's managed to unstick himself over time. One problem that Jeff Tweety has battled will be familiar to many people. Perfectionism. Perfectionism is paralyzing because what it basically does is it signals to you that unless you're producing perfection, you're failing. And so the feedback that you're getting constantly,

since most of us aren't perfect most of the time, is negative feedback. And it's demotivating. And it also means that when you ask yourself at the end of a period, whether it's a few hours or at the end of a day, whether you've produced anything, because perfectionism is essentially binary, the feedback you get is that you have failed most days or many days. And so people like Tweety who have created this trap for themselves find that it's very, very hard to be motivated across time. And so the products they create, few and far between,

and then they often feel quite negative about what they've created. So you see that Jeff Tweed has come up with an ingenious way of battling this challenge. What does he do? Yeah, he has this great description. This term, he says he pours out the bad material. So the way he thinks about it,

and I think this is true of a lot of creative enterprises, is the obvious stuff, is stuff that's, you know, not particularly novel or interesting, and that's the stuff that sits at the top of your head. And what you've got to do is, if you imagine that all your ideas are essentially liquids sitting one on top of the other, you've got to pour out the bad stuff, and that's what Tweety describes. He wakes up in the morning and he says, I've got to pour out the bad material. And what's incredibly liberating about that in contrast to perfectionism is this idea that you expect that to be mediocre.

And that's okay because the way you think about it is you're getting the bad stuff out of the way so the good stuff can emerge. And so I understand he deliberately sometimes tries to pour out bad stuff, he tries to come up with bad stuff. So the good stuff can then emerge? Yeah, the nice thing about removing all requirements for quality is that quantity rises. And so if being unstuck is about moving forward, the idea that you don't care about quality,

but you care only about something coming out, anything coming out, means that you get into this really great habit of actually making some progress later on and And by even trying to write bad songs He finds that that shows him what's good because by making something bad if you're as successful and as talented as he is It shows you something about where you're not looking for and then later on you use that as a as a sort of contrast point and you produce better material You argue that perfectionism is an aspect of a larger tendency we have, which is to understand goal-presued in moral terms. What do you mean by this atom? Yeah, I think people who succeed seem in some moral sense to be better than those who

fail. And I think that's tied to the idea that, you know, from hard work comes success. And so if you're constantly failing, perhaps you're not working hard enough, perhaps you're not capitalizing on whatever talents you might have and so on. And so there's a strong moral dimension to not succeeding. I mean, it's also the case that I think many of us equate goals with self-respect. So if we don't reach a goal, we feel like we've lost respect for ourselves. Yeah, that's right. I think humans as a species are completionists. It's very important to us to finish things even if the exercise is futile.

And so this idea of finishing something you start has a strong moral element to it. When we turn ordinary goals into moral causes, we switch from being what social scientists call satisfiesers to maximizers. Instead of asking if what we have accomplished is good enough, we adopt all or nothing thinking. If you decide you want to run a marathon in under three hours and finish the race in three hours and ten minutes, this extraordinary feat of human endurance gets counted as a failure. If you want to write five articles in the course of a year, but only manage four, this means you fall in short. If you decide you want to save a thousand dollars more in a savings account,

putting away $880 can leave you feeling disappointed. Thinking this way can contribute to a feeling of being stuck or what Adam calls stuckness. Yeah, those round numbers are really dangerous in all those contexts because they form artificial goals that we, I say, fetishize and I think that's an accurate description because it's something that we take so seriously that really becomes a legitimate goal for us. One of the other things that you and other researchers have found is that many of us have a tendency to focus on our own struggles while imagining that others have it easy. Talk about how this causes us to become stuck at them.

Yeah, I did some research and basically found that everyone essentially, in at least one respected stuck, but they also say that it feels very lonely and they imagine that they're the only ones in that position, which is a really interesting finding that even though we're all standing next to each other with these partitions, we don't know what other people are thinking, stuckness is often hidden from view. And so we sort of imagine that it's just us facing

those particular headwinds, whereas if you had the conversation with other people, you realize that we're all going through something. And that's a really liberating experience when you actually do open up that conversation channel. But even worse than not having conversations about the ways in which we're all stuck, we do have conversations about each other's successes. I mean on social media, you hear about people getting jobs or getting gigs or winning awards or good things happening to them. And of course, even if those good things actually are happening on a relatively rare basis, that's mostly what we hear. And the success stories end up

clouding our impression of what's happening in our lives versus the lives of other people. What people are doing on social media is they are sharing the very best 1% of their lives and keeping the other 99% the part that's complicated or messy or that involves stuckness or whatever they term failure from social media for obvious reasons. And so what you end up experiencing, if you're spending one or two or three or four hours a day on these platforms, is you're experiencing everyone else's successes. And that throws into stark relief how different your life is, where the other 99% is real and present and concrete for you. And that doesn't involve success all the time.

Psychologists have a name for this phenomenon, where we all walk around thinking the same thing, but believe we are the only ones having those thoughts. They call it pluralistic ignorance. Yeah, it's a psychological phenomenon where your experience of the world feels very lonely because your understanding of the way other people experience the world is quite different. It usually happens when the thing we're talking about is hidden from view. It only exists in your head. So the classic research on this topic looked at drinking on college campuses.

And what the researchers found was that when people as individuals report how they feel about drinking on campus, these are college students, they basically say, I think in general, we probably all drink a little bit more than we should on campus. Some say we drink much more than we should. But I think everyone else thinks that the drinking is fine.

And so that's just the norm. And I deviate from the norm by thinking we're drinking too much. But actually, when you ask each individual person, the same thing comes up time and time again. Everyone says the same thing. I think we're drinking a little bit too much, but I think everyone else thinks it's fine. The reason they think it's fine is because all you see

is the behavior of other people, which is that they're all drinking a huge amount. And the same thing happens with stuckness that all you see is people making their ways through the world. But what you experience from your own perspective is something quite different, which is that there are a lot of sticking points

along the way. And they are very, very prominent and very concrete for you and very visible and salient, but they are hidden when they apply to other people. And so you get that same sense of pluralistic ignorance. And in some ways, this speaks to the solution then for this pluralistic ignorance, which is when you feel like you are alone in being stuck,

it's really important to actually resist the impulse to withdraw into yourself and actually try and reach out to others. Yeah, I think in any case, a pluralistic ignorance arises only because there's a gap between what you experience and what you perceive in other people. And the only way to break down that gap is to ask whether people in their own heads are experiencing what you're experiencing. And very, very often the answer will be yes.

There is another way we get in our own way. It's when we assume that progress towards our goals involves following a straight line. Either you're proceeding down the path and making headway or you're off track. But in reality, a long journey is rarely a linear path. This self-inflicted wound turns out to be a problem especially in countries like the United States.

Yeah, this actually goes back to some of the early research I did as a graduate student. I was very interested in how different cultures perceive change. And what I discovered is that in the West, countries like the United States, we tend to experience change as rare. We don't think it happens all that often. And we tend to think of things as linear. And so in some studies, I gave people some stock charts and asked them to predict how

the stock was going to perform. Some of those stocks had done well in the past and they tended to think they'd continue to do well. Some had done poorly. They expected them to continue to do poorly. Or I'd give them some weather charts and I'd say, hey, it's been sunny 10 days in a row. What are you think's going to happen tomorrow? They would predict more sun, or if it had been raining, they predicted more rain. But in the east, in Korea, in Japan, in China, you get the very opposite. And so there's this interesting cultural difference where people in the east seem to predict much more change, variation, balance, correction.

When a stock's been doing well, the other shoe is about to drop, and so the stock's probably gonna decline when it's been doing badly, it's likely to do well, it's been sunny, it's going to start raining and so on. And one of the interesting things about the view that the West seems to have of change, which is that it's unusual, is that it leaves you uniquely ill-prepared for the fact that life is not linear, that actually there are a lot of changes that happen constantly, and

we seem to be blindsided by that when we anticipate that there aren't going to be any changes. But from the point of view of being stuck, you can now see a situation where in fact you're going through a period of an extended slump for example and it's easy to feel, you know, I'm never going to get out of the slump because again I feel like if it's been raining nine days in a row it's going to be raining the tenth day as well. And of course, that then contributes to my feeling of, I will never get out of this rut that I'm in. Yeah. And so it's a sort of double-edged trap there where you are blindsided when things go badly and when you experience stuckness, but also in the midst of that stuckness, you can't imagine it ever ending.

You write about a video posted online by the actress, Brie Larson. when you experience stuckness, but also in the midst of that stuckness, you can't imagine it ever ending. You write about a video posted online by the actress, Bri Larson. She won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in the movie Room, and she's had leading roles in blockbuster movies like The Marvels. In this clip, she talks about the secret of her success.

I got told no, 98 to 99% of the time. I know it's hard to fully wrap your brain around. It's even hard for me to wrap my brain around. I think of the fact that I've been on thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of auditions. It's sort of crazy. So that's a lot of failure, Adam,

and not what you think of when you think about a very successful movie star So often we focus on colossal success But for someone with with Brie Larson's degree of success to be transparent about her failures and the fact that by her own account It's 98 to 99% of the time that she's failing. I think is really disarming and and offers a real note of hope And so not surprisingly that people really latched onto that video and I found a very interesting piece of evidence. I'm wondering if there's an important insight here, which is that succeeding often means a sustained tolerance for failure. I mean,

it sounds paradoxical, but you know, winners are not people who never lose. They're people who can tolerate losing long enough for things to break their way. Yeah, and there's a lot of research looking, for example, at the course of careers in various different pursuits. They look at artists, they look at film writers, they look at book writers and other people, and ask, where is the most successful period of that artist's life's work? And the answer is, it's hard to to predict and there are people they describe as having early in their careers, they have their biggest successes, some during the summer time in the middle of their careers, and then some during the fall or the winter time at the end of their careers.

And so yet you don't know necessarily where those periods are going to arise, but you have to stay in the game, keep pushing even against maybe 98 to 99% of failure is loss and describes for the successes to emerge. Now, perhaps because our model of success is the model of, you know, I buy a lottery ticket and I hit the jackpot on the first try, that's the model. Many of us think we have to achieve success, you know, in one fell swoop. So we bet the house on some one thing and, you know, so we say this is going to be the golden ticket, but of course, if that one thing thing fails we've left ourselves nothing to fall back on

Yeah, I think this sort of binary view of success and failure in our culture is really really damaging because Success really by that very narrow definition happens very very seldom And so there needs to be a stark reframing I think one of the best places to begin is to stop thinking about success as this kind of binary instant outcome. And to think of it more as a process or a journey or a system that you employ day after day. So instead of saying success is writing a hundred thousand words of a book, success needs to be something like waking up and writing 300 words today or sitting for an hour and writing and seeing what comes out of that because then at least you make it a narrower definition that means success happens much more often.

And you also move the domain of success into something you can control rather than something that's outside of your control. Exactly. Yeah, you bring the locus of control inside which is really valuable, right? Because it's empowering, as opposed to forcing you to throw your hands up and say, I don't know what I can do about this. I'm at the mercy of all sorts of external constraints that I don't have much role over. And I think that's really, really hopeful and helps people move forward.

You know, I remember talking some years ago with another Adam. This is Adam Grant at the University of Pennsylvania, and he told me there was a strong correlation between artists who are successful and artists who are prolific. You've looked at the same idea as well. Can you talk about how in some ways taking more shots on goal makes it more likely to also take really good shots on goal? Yeah, that's exactly right. That quality and quantity are really good chart angle? Yeah, that's exactly right. That quality and quantity are related strongly, that the more times you try, the more likely

you are to hit on a success, and there are lots of reasons for that. One is that obviously by trying more, you learn what works and what doesn't, and so what you produce ultimately get stronger over time. But also, sometimes it's hard to know what will succeed, and so let's say there are ten different ways to do something. If you try three of them, you have a three-intention of hitting whatever the jackpot is. If you try all 10, one of them is going to succeed. And so you need to have those misses in order to ultimately have the success in aggregate.

And so that's a really important principle in any pursuit. It doesn't really matter what you're doing, but trying multiple approaches, experimenting, figuring out whether the dominant approach is the right one or whether you should try something a bit different is the way forward. We've looked at several ways that our own minds can become our worst enemies and cause us to become stuck. Of course, sometimes the problem is not inside our own minds,

we're just dealing with a problem that is really difficult. But it turns out, here too, there are things we can do and things we shouldn't do to get unstuck. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Adam. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Adam Alter is a psychologist at NYU who studies how we get stuck and how to get unstuck. He has examined a number of mental traps we construct that can make it hard for us to extricate ourselves. But sometimes, the challenge is not inside our own minds. The problems we face are

inherently challenging. But here again, it turns out that our minds can play an important role in finding our way to breakthroughs. Adam, in the survey you conducted asking people about their experiences getting stuck, and one of your respondents talked about trying to learn to play the piano and another talked about trying to become a good artist. Can you tell me what they told you? Yeah, so they both explained that they had made some steady progress earlier on in the experience, but ultimately hit what they described as a plateau, that they couldn't improve

further. They reached a particular point and then did not seem to continue to improve beyond that point. So here's the one about the piano. I've been trying to learn how to play the piano. I was making steady progress, but in the last couple of years,

I feel I haven't improved at all. I continue to practice the basics, but I feel stuck and it's making me worry that I'll never improve. It feels as if I'm wasting my time. And then this one's from an artist. I've hit a plateau and can't seem to improve further. I need to practice to put my nose to the grindstone,

to improve my skill in drawing portraits and landscapes. I need to learn how to be more creative and to find creative solutions to my problems. If you have an exercise program and have been doing it for a while, you have very likely encountered the plateau effect. Studies of athletes in nearly every sport show this too. Adam cites one study. This is research that looks at roughly 15,000 people over about seven years and looks at a very simple training regime that they took part in, and wanted to understand the effectiveness of this regime across time. And what the researchers found was that for the first year

and sometimes two years in some of the respondents who are particularly responsive, people became fitter, they became healthier, they became happier in certain respects. But beyond that two-year process, there weren't great benefits to using exactly the same approach in the remaining three, four, five, six, seven years. And so by doing the same thing over and over and over again, responsiveness declines whether it's physical responsiveness

to a training regime or whether it's the approach you've been using to learn the piano or to draw a paint. And what explains this plateau effect, Adam? One for the bodies in particular is that you become habituated. And so your muscles perhaps adapt to what you're doing, and they stop responding in the same way as they did earlier on. They effectively become experts at coping with what you're throwing at them. And the problem with expertise with respect to muscles is they stop needing to try quite so hard

to do what it is you're asking of them. And so as a result, because you're not stretching them further, they don't continue to improve. And that's true of cardio fitness as well, and various other forms of fitness. So by changing things, you then reintroduce some stress into the situation, and that leads to greater improvement. And really, it's a similar idea with the piano or with art or with any other domain

that you can do the same thing over and over again. And you might become more comfortable with it over time, but eventually that comfort just has no real value to you. You need to change things, and part of that is just making things a little bit more difficult, whether it's trying a new technique or stretching yourself in some other way without doing that, you're basically going to hit this point of stagnation. I want to talk about another kind of challenge we sometimes encounter. Sometimes the problems we're confronting are so complex that we find ourselves bewildered by the number of options before us.

And now throwing lots of spaghetti at the wall produces a mess rather than an insight. Can you talk about this idea that sometimes reducing our own options can be a worthwhile strategy? Yeah, I studied law as an undergraduate and one of the things they taught us very early on was you will always have too much information. You know, you'll get facts about a particular case. Most of them will be extraneous. They're not really relevant to the kernel of the case that's really important to understand. And your biggest job is to find what really matters, to simplify. And I think that's an incredibly valuable skill to use in any situation because so many things that we grapple with every day

are complex by nature. It really doesn't matter what kind of work you do. If you're a doctor, the process of diagnosis is going to be complicated. If you're a lawyer, it'll be complicated. In trying to understand the financial markets, there'll be too much information. And so I think the difference between being a great success

and perhaps a more modest success is in learning how to instinctively figure out what really matters, stripping away what's what's not absolutely necessary and really imposing artificial constraints that make what might otherwise be overwhelmingly complex much simpler. French artist Pierre Solage, who has used a really unusual self-imposed restraint on himself in order to grant himself more freedom. What does he do? Yeah. So Solage talked about the fact that the business of art was very complex. You have just so many materials at your disposal. You have different media. And then, of course, once you narrow down the medium, you then still have to decide on color.

And so what Salaj decided early, quite early on, was that he was just going to use black paint. And by stripping away the question of color of hue, he would leave himself with a much simpler set of decisions to make, and so he could really focus and refine his understanding of how to use that one tone of paint to create the work that he was making. And so he became known as the artist who only used black paint.

When you feel stuck because you have hit a dreaded plateau, the solution is to introduce change. Start a new kind of workout. If you are a writer of prose, try your handed poetry. If you're a musician, try playing your instrument with your non-dominant hand. Adam has also studied the idea that reframing problems as challenges can be effective in getting yourself unstuck. He has looked at one particular kind of problem that many people confront in workplaces and educational settings.

There's a very well-known phenomenon in social psychology known as stereotype threat, which is the idea that if you know that you belong to a particular group that is negatively stereotyped makes it harder for you to perform well. So some of the research looked at women in mathematics, a domain that was at least historically in sexist norms seen as the domain of men. And so when women are reminded that they are women and they are trying to complete math tasks, there's some evidence that it becomes harder for them because they recognize that in addition to the baggage of having to overcome the challenges of the task, they also have to deal with the fact that they are part of a group that is negatively stereotyped in that domain. So that's this idea of stereotype threat, but a lot of what's experienced in a threat is subjective. It's the way you perceive the situation.

And so this research I did looked at trying to take people at Princeton who were like I was from an underrepresented background in the sense that we weren't from feeder schools that tended to send lots of students to Princeton and to ask them to complete a math task. And to have some of them think about that as a threatening situation, as a sort of test of their intellectual ability.

And for others to just recognize that this was just a challenge, it was something fun that they were doing, and to turn the dial down on that experience of threat and to show that even if you're from that underrepresented background in that context, you are still able to overcome that particular task if you see it as a challenge rather than as a threat. So it seems Adam that there are times when we know what we want, but we're stuck because we don't know how to get there, but at other times we're stuck because we simply don't know what we want. I want to play you a clip from a film that captures this feeling. In the 2003 movie Lost in Translation, Scarlett Johansson plays Charlotte, a young woman who

feels adrift in her life, and she meets up with an over-the-haired movie star played by Bill Murray, and she asks him for guidance. I'm stuck. I just don't know what I'm supposed to be. I tried being a writer, but I hate what I write and I tried taking pictures, but there's some mediocre, you know, every girl goes through photography phase. So a motto that recurs in your book, Adam, is action above all. What does that mean? Yeah, it means that a lot of the book

is about the emotional experience of being stuck and then about the mental strategies we can use to move forward. But all of that ultimately is in the service of action. Being stuck is about being physically in a particular place or mentally in a particular place and wanting to be somewhere else. The only way you can change that is not changing how you emotionally appraise the situation,

not with mental strategies, but ultimately that thing you have to do more than anything else is to act, is to move in a particular direction. But why would action help us when we don't know where we want to go? By acting you reveal something to yourself. If I don't know, if I want to be a painter, if I want to be a writer, if I want to go. By acting you reveal something to yourself. If I don't know if I want to be a painter, if I want to be a writer, if I want to be a doctor, if I want to be a lawyer, I can sit here and ponder that question to a certain point there's value in that, but eventually thinking about it harder and more deeply just doesn't get me very far.

What will get me somewhere is to inhabit the life of an artist or a painter or a doctor or a lawyer to take action to of an artist or a painter or a doctor or a lawyer to take action to do something that's a bit different. And even if I'm moving in the wrong direction, even if art turns out not to be my calling, the law is not my calling, and so on, I learn something about what either does work in the best case scenario or in the worst case scenario, I'm eliminating what doesn't. And that's tremendously valuable, certainly much more valuable than sitting still and just thinking, naval gazing, as it ultimately becomes.

You write about an interesting exercise involving the New York Times spelling bee, tell me what that puzzle involves and the hack to basically try and do better at it. You get a series of letters before you, and you have to make words out of those letters. And the letters, when you first open the app are in a particular configuration.

There's a central letter, and then there are some letters, six letters surrounding that central letter. But there's a button that allows you to shuffle the order of those letters to randomly reallocate them. And what's really fascinating is I didn't intuit this when I first started doing the puzzle, but what I'll do today is I'll sit with the letters

as they arrive when I open the app. And I'll try to find words for say 10 minutes and I'll get to a certain level. And usually it's not as far as I want to go. I want to, there's different levels of achievement. I always try to go for the top level. And if I fall a little bit short of that, I'll hit the shuffle button.

It'll reorient the letters. It'll change the order of them. And what's fascinating is I've been staring at these letters. It shouldn't matter where they are, but by moving them into a new position, suddenly a whole raft of new words appear and are available to me. And it's, if it can work in this very impoverished context,

where all you're looking at is exactly the same set of seven letters, just in slightly different places. If it works there and un-sticks you there, if you can adopt a pretty serious, profound change of perspective in other areas of life, the payback is pretty dramatic. There's a great return on that investment. I want to talk about a challenge that you confronted in your own life, and I think this might

be a useful example of a problem that might be basically unsolvable. You were in your late 20s and you felt torn between remaining in the United States where you had great academic and career opportunities and returning home to Australia and to your family. Describe those two forces, Adam, and what it felt like to be pulled in different directions. Yeah, this is an interesting moment. I'd been in the United States for five years in grad school. And if all went well, I would have a PhD in,

then I would do something next. I wasn't sure exactly what that next would be. One option was to return back to Australia, to return to the country that I'd come from before. I'm very close to my family, and I felt that it was difficult to be away from them for five years. Another option was to keep moving forward in my career in the United States. And so I did that.

But the experience of moving from grad school into the role of an assistant professor at NYU, I found it overwhelming all over again. I felt a little bit stuck. I wasn't sure exactly what direction to pull my resources. I felt a little bit unmoored. And at the time, I was 29 and thinking a lot about what it was like to be at the end of my 20s and moving into my 30s. a lot about what it was like to be at the end of my 20s and moving into my 30s. And I decided that I needed some big goal to act as a kind of orienting point.

And so I decided that I was gonna run a marathon and to spend four months training with a team and to run the New York City marathon. And there was something profoundly unsticking about that activity of taking on that new goal that gave me somewhere to pour my anxieties. And it really felt like a great unsticking about that activity of taking on that new goal, that it gave me somewhere to pull my anxieties and it really felt like a great unsticking moment and I think liberated me to move forward in my life that I just started in New York City. Why do you think running a marathon helps sort of figure out where you should live your

life? I mean, the two things seem completely unrelated to each other. Yeah, they do. So one of the things that happens, this is why I mentioned that I was in my late 20s just imagining being 30, is that that's one of the moments in life. I have some research on this with a colleague of mine, Hal Hirschfield, showing that when our ages end in a nine, 29, 39, 49 and so on, it's a moment when we zoom back and think about the meaningfulness of our lives. We think about whether we're making the right life decisions. We sort of see the passage of time much more vividly than we do at age, say, 24, 25,

34, 35 in the middle of those decades. And at that moment, just having a goal imbued my life with meaning and sort of made me feel that I could move forward again, even if it was an unrelated goal, the mere fact of having that goal gave me that sense of momentum that I felt was important at that time in my life. I mean, I think what I'm partly hearing is that when we are feeling stark, feeling like we have movement in some domain of our lives,

even if it isn't the primary domain in which we are feeling stark, can be helpful in unsticking us. Exactly. Yeah, I think the sense of movement, the sense of velocity is more important than what the velocity specifically and narrowly, concretely represents. It's just the feeling that you are not stagnant. Adam Alter is a psychologist at NYU. He's the author of the book, An Atomy of a Breakthrough.

How to get unstuck when it matters most. Adam, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain. Thanks so much for having me, Shankar. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Annie Murphy Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Quarelle, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brains executive editor. Next week in our YouTube.io series, how to build habits that work for who you are now and who you'll be in the future. If we start to think about how we relate to our future selves,

then it can start to shed some light while we sometimes act in these ways that may seem shortsighted. If you love the ideas we explore on the show and would like to support our work, please consider joining our new podcast subscription Hidden Brain Plus. You'll find conversations you won't hear anywhere else. Plus, we'll bring you a feature called Your Questions Answered, where some of our most popular guests respond to listeners follow-ups about their work. You can find these and other episodes for

subscribers by going to the Apple Podcasts app and searching for Hidden Brain. Or you can find these and other episodes for subscribers by going to the Apple Podcast app and searching for Hidden Brain. Or you can find us at apple.co slash Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon. you