Quitting (previously published as Mastering the Art of Quitting) (9 page)

Our point here isn't to marginalize or understate the debilitating effect of clinical depression; it's to point out that sadness is, in
fact, a normal response to letting go of a goal, and that the “put on a happy face” stance—showing that quitting was the best thing that ever happened to you—is both unhealthy and counterproductive. Artful and conscious quitting requires that we permit ourselves to feel the loss of a goal—hence Klinger's identification of depression as a necessary component—and then work to regulate those feelings, rather than suppress them.

The bigger point is that suppressing our emotions doesn't work. We've already seen how exercising self-control in one area, including suppressing emotion, lessened the ability to perform in another. This brings us back to the recent findings of what happens to the brain when we do.
Dylan D. Wagner and Todd F. Heatherton
tested the limited-resource model of self-regulation by having participants undergo functional neuroimaging while emotionally valenced movies (positive, negative, and neutral) which were then followed by a difficult attention-control task (ignoring distractor words that were flashed on the screen while watching a movie). Half of the participants were told they had to ignore the words; the other half could read them. Then all the participants watched another series of emotional scenes. The researchers found that ego depletion increased reactions in the amygdala, especially in response to negative emotions. But others have argued that further research and neuroimaging may show that it's not just negative emotion that is affected by depletion and causes the amygdala to light up.

That's precisely what a series of
experiments conducted by Kathleen D. Vohs, Roy F. Baumeister, and others
suggest. While previous studies found that efforts at self-regulation weakened the ability to exercise restraint, researchers assumed that emotions and feelings stayed the same. New work, however, challenges that thinking; as Vohs et al. write,
“ego depletion may not change
what you feel as much as how strongly you feel it.” The statement is, of course, completely in sync with the neuroimaging results that showed increased activity in the amygdala after an exercise in self-control.

What this means is that impulses and restraint might, in fact, be “causally intertwined.” It may be that when restraint is weakened
through depletion, emotions and desires are felt more strongly. Ironically then, trying to exert self-control—a strategy for managing and regulating emotions—may, in the moment, simply heighten them. In a later chapter, we'll turn to alternative strategies for regulating emotion.

Motivational Disengagement

This aspect of disengagement involves both cognitive and emotional regulation.
Motivational disengagement
might as well be called “getting back on the horse” or “putting your ducks in a row,” as you are motivated to let go of one goal and begin thinking about pursuing another. This step requires that you actively reject goals that are either unattainable or don't serve your inner needs—that is, consciously rejecting extrinsic goals—and focusing on those that are attainable or tied to inner imperatives.

Behavioral Disengagement

Behavioral disengagement
works in the sphere of real-world choices, in which the person acts to quit the old goal and exhibits new behaviors oriented toward the achievement of the new goal. Among other things, behavioral disengagement requires flexibility and renewed focus. Because life has a way of throwing some of us curveballs that have nothing to do with drive or talent, sometimes even the most intrinsically motivated and satisfying goals must be given up for reasons that are beyond the individual's control. At moments like these, knowing how to quit artfully is a valuable skill.

That was certainly the case for Deidre, now twenty-eight, whose journey might have been different and a bit easier had she not been so persistent. She began swimming competitively at the age of seven, and the sport defined her childhood and early adolescence both literally and metaphorically. Other than going to school,
swimming is what she did—she had to give up practically everything else in its pursuit—and it defined who she was. She loved how she felt when she swam. Even now, all these years later, she is wistful, recalling “an incomparable feeling of exhaustion, of exhilaration, of feeling alive” in the pool. She dreamed of going to college on scholarship and then on to the Olympics, but unlike so many young people's dreams, hers were based in the possible.

Then, the summer before high school, she developed shoulder pain while she was training for the nationals. The diagnosis was chronic tendonitis in both of her shoulders, and the doctors recommended that she quit swimming at least temporarily, if not permanently. Her coach, though, wanted her to swim through the pain and so she did; it was the triumph of “quitters never win and winners never quit” and “when the going gets tough, the tough get going” over medical advice. Her condition worsened. She switched teams and, this time, her new coach encouraged her to take time off, which she did. Her physical symptoms were plain to see—she couldn't raise her hand in class, brushing her hair was torture, and she could barely manage getting dressed—but the invisible psychological pain of trying to let go was much harder.

Who was she if she weren't swimming? “If I weren't a swimmer,” she explains, “I didn't know who I was. My self-esteem, my sense of myself, my self-worth were all wrapped up in it and so much more.” So she went back to swimming after three months, and as she says, “I suffered along for a while. I couldn't make it past five hundred yards, which is nothing more than a short warm-up, without it causing a flare-up. I wasn't able to do the things I loved about swimming—that amazing feeling of a good workout, flying through the water, pushing myself to go faster.”

Deidre quit. She felt devastated, empty, and literally at a loss about what to do with herself. She worked hard at shifting her focus and identity—getting involved in acting and theater and other activities—and although she wasn't happy, she was beginning to be okay with not swimming. She was young, after all.

But the sirens of the water were still calling, and she hadn't stopped being receptive. That's precisely what happens when a satisfying and self-fulfilling goal slips from your grasp. She spent her junior year of high school abroad and, acting on a friend's encouragement, joined the swim team. She was, predictably enough, so much faster than anyone else that she won all the meets, even in her worst strokes. But the pain was back. She quit again, this time not just because of the pain but because that “good burning feeling” she'd once had wasn't there. Winning alone wasn't enough.

But she still wasn't done with swimming. Not surprisingly, the swim coach of the small liberal-arts college she attended was eager to have her and cut her slack about practices. She was fast enough that even without practices, she broke records and placed well in her school's conference. “It felt good to be appreciated so much,” she says. By junior year, though, the game was up; the inflammation got worse and she finally stopped swimming, though she stayed with the team as captain. After college, she still wasn't ready and worked at a local pool, teaching swimming and coaching the team. But finally, she had to quit that, too, because the small amount of swimming required to teach irritated her shoulders. Six years after her problems began, she finally quit for good.

The physical damage is still with her. “I have pain if I sleep on my arm,” she says. “And I can feel it when the weather changes, like an old war vet. I have a nearly constant reminder that it is okay to let go and say, enough is enough—that quitting is good sometimes and persevering can be damaging. I'm not naturally inclined to quit things, and I obviously needed a big wake-up before I got it. It's a lesson I carry with me.”

Deidre's reflections on her struggle to quit an important and self-defining goal that gave her pleasure offer an insight into why letting go can be both so difficult and valuable. She acknowledges both the internal and the external pressure to continue competing: “Swimming in college was probably a bad call for me physically, even though I loved being on the team. Yes, I was pressured by
friends and my coach, but in the end, I was easy to persuade. Swimming is a competitive sport (against the clock and your opponents) with a lot of pressure to always push yourself hard. I did worry that people would think I was wussing out. In the end, it was me who had the hardest time with my quitting.”

Wisely, she points out there is a “before” and an “after” connected to quitting: “Letting go of something that was so much a part of my life and my identity was in itself formative. But overall, quitting made me a more interesting and varied person than I might have been if I had continued swimming. I had so many experiences I wouldn't have had if I hadn't quit.”

Deidre has put what she has learned to good use as a therapist working with victims of domestic abuse, most of whom have trouble leaving their situations. “I can see what they're dealing with through the lens of my experience,” she says. “In a way, I'm able to use the personal lessons I learned. I truly understand how difficult it is to leave, even when you hurt. I can identify with how hard it is.”

Giving up something that has made you happy in the past is never easy. And happiness, after all, is the biggest goal all of us share.

The Pursuit of Happiness

If you were around for the Clinton-Gore presidential campaign, you doubtless remember the song that contains the line “Don't stop thinking about tomorrow.” Well, it turns out that no one needs to have worried, since human beings
can't
stop thinking about tomorrow or the future. In his book
Stumbling on Happiness
, psychologist Daniel Gilbert notes that approximately 12 percent of our daily thoughts are about the future:
“In other words, every eight hours
of thinking include an hour about things that are yet to happen.”

Why do we spend so much time thinking about the future? First and foremost, it's pleasurable, as Gilbert points out. We can imagine that tomorrow will be very different from today and that it
will fulfill our hearts' desires in ways that today doesn't. But—yes, there is a
but
—human beings aren't very good at assessing either the likelihood that the dream will come true or, more important, whether, if it did, the dream would actually make them happier.

Just for fun, before you continue reading, finish the following sentence, either in your imagination or on a piece of paper: “I would be happier if
.” Then imagine a goal or a plan that would make that moment happen. It could include buying a winning lottery ticket, getting a promotion, becoming a writer or a stock trader, finding the right mate, or anything else that would float your boat into sunny climes. There are, obviously, as many answers to that question as there are shells on Florida's Sanibel Island. Are you sure about your answer, that whatever you filled the blank with would truly deliver bliss? After you've nodded but before you pat yourself on the back and reassure yourself that you will be the exception to the rule, that you're not likely to overstate your chances of achieving happiness, and that you actually do know what will make you happy, continue reading.

Remember the above-average effect? How everyone thinks he or she is above average and therefore more likely to succeed at achieving a goal than other people? There are a number of corollaries to that effect. One of them is described by Daniel Gilbert:
“Americans of all ages expect
their futures to be an improvement on their presents.” In addition, as
Emily Pronin, Daniel Lin, and Lee Ross
note in their article “The Bias Blind Spot,” when people reflect on themselves and their views of the world, they tend to think that they are more objective and see things more realistically than other people do. We apparently have a blind spot when it comes to our own biases in thinking, but we are generous when we attribute those biases to others.

The above-average effect isn't, as it might seem, a gloss on American narcissism. But perhaps, as Gilbert suggests, it reflects our tendency (or even our need) to think of ourselves as more unlike other people than we actually are. As he puts it,
“we don't always see ourselves as
superior
but we almost always see ourselves as
unique.
”
Part of this attitude is a function of the human condition, of course; we know our thoughts and emotions intimately, firsthand, and from the inside while we can only glean what others (even significant others) feel and think by their actions and words from the outside. Moreover, as Gilbert notes, we like thinking of ourselves as unique; because we value our uniqueness, we overestimate how unique we are. And by the same token, we ascribe that same degree of uniqueness to others. This appreciation of individual difference—as opposed to seeing others as more like us than not—begins very early in life because even kindergarteners exhibit it. Alas, all of this means that not only are we likely to have overwrought confidence in knowing how we'll react tomorrow, but we're also unlikely to learn from or use the experiences of others to gauge how we might feel, because, well, they're too “different” to be of any use.

There's another glitch as well. Curiously, even though we are always thinking about tomorrow, we—and our brains—are actually tethered to today. (The word
tethered
is a deliberate choice, since human beings aren't, by nature, either grounded or present in today, in the Buddhist sense.) That's the problem with predicting future happiness; other biases get in the way of what the experts call
affective forecasting
, that is, knowing what we'll feel like tomorrow or in the future.

Timothy Wilson and Daniel Gilbert delineate four aspects
of predicting our happiness: the valence of our future feelings (whether they will be positive or negative); the specific emotions that we expect to experience; the intensity of those feelings; and how long those emotions will last. As soothsayers, we are better at some parts of predicting than others. In general, we are better at estimating whether a future event will make us feel great, good, lousy, or awful—so we're pretty much on target on the first aspect of valence. But when it comes to predicting the specific emotions we'll feel at some future event—it could be anything from moving into a new apartment to starting a new job, graduating from school, or getting married—
people tend to oversimplify
the emotions they'll feel, seemingly oblivious to the fact that most situations evoke a mix
of emotions. (You can be very happy about your new job, thrilled by your upward mobility, and excited about the pay but worried about succeeding in it, fretting about the transition, and stressing about changing your routines.)