help yourself

I listened to this episode of Radiolab "Help!" about people who are "their own worst enemy", and it discusses various ways to help yourself. The first segment is about Zelda, a 60 year old woman's battle with smoking and the clever way she tricked herself into quitting. Her and her friend were activists for racial equality in the 1960's, and smoked the whole way through it. Her friend eventually gave up smoking, but she just couldn't do it. Many years later, they lived in different parts of the country, but met up to attend a conference together. When Zelda's friend picked her up from the airport and Zelda was smoking a cigarette, she said suprised "oh you still smoke?" and Zelda became very defensive. The convention went by without smoking being brought up again, but when her friend was returning her to the airport, Zelda told her "alright, if i ever smoke another cigarette, I'm going to give 5,000 dollars to the KKK!" and made her friend promise to hold her to that. And Zelda never smoked again. Anytime she got an urge to, thinking about te repulsive things the KKK does, and the idea of giving them her money, was a much stronger feeling than the craving for a cigarette. The show then goes on to discuss with neuroscientist David Engleman the battle between your different selves. He suggests that you look at it as an issue of time, where your different selves want diffrent payoffs at different times. When you smoke, you are satisfying the urge of your NOW self, but upsetting your self that sees the negative consequences like health complications in the future. However, more oftne than not the NOW self wins because that is the moment you are in. Why Zelda's trick was clever was that to fight the "i want a cigarette NOW" urge, the used her immediate hatred of the KKK to fight it. "i want a cigarette NOW" verus "cigarettes are bad later" became "i want a cigarette NOW" versus "i hate the KKK NOW" and knowing she promised to give money to the KKK if she smoked made her respond powerfully enough to stop smoking.

What is so intersting about this is not only the idea that there are different selves with different desires within the your mind, which I think we all can relate to on some level, but that there is an ability to trick your own mind. The more you understand about how you think, the more you control it. Zelda's trick took the power back from her impulsive mind, and show that you are capable of manipulating yourself. I like this idea a lot, and hope that with the more I learn about the mind through psych class and other things i read or hear, the better of a grip I will have on my own mind, and be able to have more control over the way it functions.