© 2021 Diana Hill, PhD

In graduate school, I had a sticker on my water bottle that said, “My thighs carry me up the mountain.” I was researching Dialectical Behavior Therapy for eating disorders at the time, and spent most of my days with young women who were doing everything society had told them to do to be successful. Yet, they were coming to treatment because their lives were miserable. These women were Olympians of unhealthy striving. Often, I would point to the sticker and ask clients, “I wonder what would happen if you harnessed the energy you put into battling your body, and turned it toward what you really care about? What mountains would you want to climb if you were free to choose?”

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, many of us are contemplating our own mountains. What seemed vital two years ago can feel less important in the context of current times. With growth mindsets, we might ask ourselves, what are we striving for and where do we want to place our precious energy?

As a woman in eating disorder recovery myself, I have had a long-term, ambivalent relationship with striving. Striving has served me well (you don’t get a Ph.D. without a healthy dose of persistence). However, when used in an unhealthy way, it leads me to become self-focused, psychologically rigid and stuck in cycles of doing more while never feeling like I am doing enough.

When we strive to avoid uncomfortable emotions, follow our minds’ inflexible rules, or base our self-worth on external achievements, we get caught in a modern-day samsara of meaningless drive.

As the pandemic pounds on, I’ve been wondering how we harness our steadfastness and “gumption”, as Dr. Allison Briscoe-Smith would say, without getting caught in the unhealthy aspects of striving? How can we flexibly turn our efforts toward cultivating purpose-driven goals that benefit the greater whole? In other words, how can we move from striving to thriving?

I’ve turned toward modern psychology, contemplative practice, and my personal experience for answers.

The Striving Brain

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Striving is neither inherently good nor bad. I liked Rick Hanson’s definition of striving as, “sustained effort, typically in the face of resistance” when we discussed the topic. To survive as a species, we need to strive at times.

Evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote a 1973 essay called “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution.” Not a whole lot in psychology makes sense either except in the light of evolution. According to Paul Gilbert, founder of Compassion Focused Therapy, every human being has evolved to accomplish three tasks: (1) to seek out resources, (2) to avoid threats, and (3) to rest and recuperate. We are the ancestors of those who were successful at finding food and a mate, avoiding the saber-toothed tiger, and resting in safety with others.

But there’s an evolutionary mismatch between our old brain and our modern times that makes this trickier today. Our drive and threat systems are overstimulated every time we pick up our phones. Additionally, deep restoration and safety in community is difficult for many of us in the face of racial oppression, pandemic stress, climate change, and deep political divide.

Striving is perpetuated when our brain’s reward system is stimulated with positive and negative reinforcers. When we achieve “likes” on Facebook or praise for a better body, dopamine is released into the Nucleus Accumbens to signal reward. This also signals us to remember what we did so we will do it again (positive reinforcement). Neuroscientist Matt Johnson spoke with me on the Psychologists Off the Clock podcast about his book Blindsight on the neuroscience of marketing. He explained that Dopamine is a “wanting” neurohormone, not a “having” one. Dopamine creates craving-for-more. In The Craving Mind, Jud Brewer argues this type of reward-based learning can lead us to become addicted to pretty much anything, including ourselves.

The same brain areas that light up with pleasurable stimuli are activated when we successfully avoid discomfort. When striving helps us sidestep uncomfortable feelings like anxiety, not fitting in, or not measuring up, our reward pathways are activated again. This negatively reinforces us to keep at it, even if it makes these feelings worse in the long run.

The human mind complicates things with language. As language evolved, so too did the mind which solves problems, mentally forecasts, simulates, compares, and creates “shoulds” and expectations for ourselves and others. Inflexible rules like “I should be married…done with school…retired by now” or “I have to do it perfectly…have enough time…be ready to start a project” become blocks to being effective. Steve Hayes, ACT co-founder, describes in A Liberated Mind: “Our remarkable allegiance to verbal rules is a major contributor to psychological inflexibility. We follow them so strictly that we never deviate even when they are making our problems worse—sometimes horribly worse” (p. 84). Many of our belief systems around striving and achievement developed while in education systems that rewarded outcome over process, and families who used criticizing, shaming and pointing out mistakes to motivate.

Battling our unhelpful rules and “shoulds” is one option. But trying to control thoughts can also make them worse. The paradox of control is: the more you try and control what you don’t want to feel and think, the more likely you are to feel and think it. Research on this paradox of thought control dates back to the 80s with Daniel Wegner’s classic White Bear study demonstrating the “ironic process theory”. Try to not think about a white bear and your mind starts monitoring for it. Try to not think about one of your shoulds, and the more likely it will harass you.
The reward pathways associated with striving are old and powerful. Our mind’s rules and shoulds can be well-worn and convincing. A mismatched mind can lead us to avoid uncomfortable feelings, pursue goals that lack meaning, or keep us stuck in rules, shoulds and unrelenting standards. It’s not our fault that our “tricky” brains get hooked in these unhelpful loops.
But it is our responsibility to train our minds to chart a different path—one that is more satisfying and purpose-driven in the long run.

Creative Hopelessness

Early in the pandemic when the stress of working motherhood and being a therapist was taking its toll, I noticed my unhealthy striving cycle rearing its head. Despite exhaustion, I found myself working more, comparing myself to others, and becoming increasingly rigid.

My frenemy was back. So, I sat down and wrote a list of signs of stressful striving I was seeing in myself and my clients.

• Doing more but never feeling like I do enough
• Competing with people who don’t have the same goals as I do
• Neglecting important domains of my life to get ahead
• Listening to my mind like it’s a drill sergeant
• Being exhausted and burnt out
• Reaching achievements and goals but still feeling dissatisfied
• Meeting others obligations instead of meeting my own
• Neglecting my body’s needs
• Living out of alignment with my deepest values

When clients come to therapy stuck in behaviors not working for them, I often start with creative hopelessness.

It may sound like an unusual way to launch therapy, but creative hopelessness is a powerful tool in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) that opens the door to change. With creative hopelessness you take an honest look at your attempts to control and avoid your inner experiences and the costs of that avoidance. You make contact with the unworkability of your behavior (that’s the hopelessness part) and consider the possibility of living differently (let’s get creative!).

In ACT, creative hopelessness exposes our roundabouts of attachment and avoidance, and cultivates willingness to take the exit ramp.

The first step in creative hopelessness is to get curious about your striving cycle. Curiosity just may be our superpower, according to Dr. Jud. Curiosity helps us approach unworkable habits with an open, non-judgmental mind so that we can see our cycles clearly enough to step out of them.

Like most behaviors, stressful striving often follows a predictable pattern of trigger→ behavior–> result. For example:

• Triggers: uncomfortable thoughts, feelings, or sensations such as thoughts that you aren’t doing enough, feelings of anxiety, or craving for status, perfection, certainty, or control
• Behaviors: avoid these thoughts and feelings by staying busy, fixing yourself, procrastinating or striving to get ahead
• Results: in the short-term feel relief from uncomfortable thoughts and feelings and feel in control; in the long-term feel regret, burned out, and disconnected from your values.

Our brains tend to pay more attention to short-term rewards over long-term consequences. Creative hopelessness highlights the negative long-term costs of our avoidance behavior so that our brains learn it is not what we truly want. We become aware of the point of diminishing returns of our avoidance so we can freely choose a different route.

To cultivate creative hopelessness ask yourself these questions:

1. What inner experience am I trying to control/fix/avoid in my unhealthy striving?
2. What are the short and long-term costs of my avoidance and control?
3. If I harness the energy I put towards unhealthy striving and turn it toward what I care about, what would I choose?

The Righting Reflex

Often when we feel ready to change a behavior, we approach it with a “fixing” mindset. We see something is wrong and we want to set things right. I remember a conversation I had with Stephan Rollnick, the co-developer of Motivational Interviewing (MI) about how the “righting reflex” often backfires. MI is a widely used, evidence-based treatment for motivating change, that is effective for substance use, athletes, even hostage negotiation. Dr. Rollnick told a story about trying to convince his 8 year old not to wear muddy shoes. The more convincing he did, the more his child argued the other side. Even he gets caught in the paradox of control sometimes! Co-founder of ACT, Kelly Wilson, reminds therapists this in Mindfulness for Two, when he suggests that people are not problems to be solved, but sunsets to be appreciated.

Humans can be ambivalent about making change, and we often have a part of ourselves that wants to change and a part that doesn’t. When we feel pushed to change, we inevitably argue against it. This resistance to change can also happen in our relationship with ourselves.

Seeing ourselves as broken and needing fixing, can send us onto a whole other striving cycle of self-improvement, undermining our own intrinsic motivation and learning. The “subtle aggression of self-improvement,” as meditation teacher Bob Sharples has termed it, tends to cause more harm than good.

We can learn a lot from Motivational Interviewing about how to approach change in ourselves. The spirit of MI is grounded in partnership, compassion, acceptance, and freedom to choose, and the counselor uses a communication style of affirmation, reflection, and collaborative exchange. Shifting from an aggressive relationship with ourselves, towards a more accepting, compassionate, patient, and encouraging one is the secret to motivating ourselves. Accepting that we are ambivalent about change and affirming the goodness of our intentions, supports us in letting go of the rope when we are in a tug of war within.

Letting Go

If you have been gripping something for a long time, it’s uncomfortable to let go. Sometimes I have clients hold a pen in their fist as tightly as they can for about a minute and then slowly let it go. At first, their hand feels crampy and curled, and it takes a while for it to unfurl again. Choosing to let go of attachment and avoidance as our coping strategies and accepting our inner experience can feel a little crampy at first. But eventually it is liberating to find that with your hand freed up, it can do a lot more things you care about.

I learned this firsthand during my second year of graduate school when, once again, I was in the samsara of striving. Only 1% of applicants are accepted into Clinical Psychology programs, and like many high achieving institutions, they are a breeding ground for unhealthy strivers. It didn’t take long for me to slip into old patterns of control, perfectionism, and overdoing. Although I didn’t have words for it yet, I intuitively knew I was “hooked” like a fish swimming in a stream getting caught and pulled in the wrong direction. I made a bold choice to withdraw from my program. I still remember the courage I needed to call my advisor and tell her I had to leave graduate school to support my own recovery. Freed from unhealthy striving, I chose to study yoga at the Eldorado Mountain Yoga ashram in Boulder, Colorado. It was there that I learned about Aparigraha—the last yama in Patanjali’s Eight Limbs of Yoga.

The yamas are ethical guidelines by which to live in relationship to yourself and others. Patanjali’s yamas include:

• Ahimsa: non-violence
• Satya: honesty
• Asteya: non-stealing
• Brahmacharya: right use of energy
• Aparigraha: letting go of attachment

Shifting unhealthy striving takes satya to notice when we are hooked, and aparigraha to surrender our attachment to control. It was only through letting go that I was able to return the following year to graduate school and redirect my research towards mindfulness and acceptance-based interventions for eating disorders. I sought mentorship with Debra Safer at Stanford University, and began finding my way toward a more skillful form of striving—striving to help others who, like me, were stuck in a hole and digging themselves deeper.

Letting go of unhealthy striving often involves making contact with the discomfort that has been driving our doing. Acceptance does not mean you have to like something, approve of it, allow for harm, or resign. Acceptance is the willingness to turn toward your current experience, and make space for it. When we let go of trying to control our inner experience through striving, we make room to choose our values instead.

Practicing acceptance requires turning towards unwanted thoughts and feelings with courage ‒ a “handshake with beautiful monsters,” as Tsokny Rinpoche teaches. When we gently turn toward and open ourselves to our full experience, as opposed to trying to fix it, we may find that acceptance offers us gifts, such as freedom, peace, understanding and deeper meaning.

Choosing Values

When you look back on your life so far, what has mattered most to you? If you could meet your future self, looking at your life right now, what would they say matters now? What does it mean to you to have a rich and meaningful life? What if you strove for what you really care about, instead of avoiding discomfort or pursuing pleasure, status or unimportant goals? These are some of the questions I grapple with in therapy and in my own life.

Values are the glue cementing our daily actions to something greater than ourselves and our struggles. When talking with clients about values, they often say, “I value my health” or “I value my family.” Your health, your family, your career are domains in which you live your values. Values are the qualities of action you bring to those domains that create meaning; qualities like kindness, inclusivity, and responsibility. What type of mother, friend, employee do you want to be? What would you say brought you the most meaning at the end of your day? Values are not goals with ends. Instead, values provide a direction to guide you and are deeply personal.

Living your values is a lot like playing a guitar. The strings are the domains of your life, and your values are how you play them. Like a guitar, our values frequently get out of tune. Similar to a musician tuning a guitar, tuning your values is a never-ending life process. Tuning-up takes awareness—listening in and noticing feelings of regret or discrepancy. Are you acting in ways that don’t line up with the type of person you want to be in the world?

Choosing to strive toward values is also intrinsically motivating. According to Edward Deci and Richard Ryan’s self-determination theory, you are more likely to be motivated to change and grow when you have autonomy, competence, and connection. Freedom to choose your values, as opposed to them being chosen for you, is central to motivation and change.

Values inspire us to stay committed to what we care about even when life challenges us. Unlike rules, values are flexible and are actions you can take in the here and now, not something we achieve in the future.

We are often caught in the trap of saying “I’ll feel better when…”. Clients will frequently tell me, “I’ll feel better when…”:

• School is over
• I find my life’s partner
• I’m less anxious
• I lose weight
• Life gets back to normal
• My kids sleep through the night

Values are not about waiting for a future point when you feel better. In fact, as Steve Hayes shared with me on Psychologists Off the Clock, the goal isn’t necessarily to “feel better” but to “get better at feeling”. Discomfort and uncertainty are part of being human, and you are even more likely to experience discomfort when you pursue things that are meaningful to you such as parenting, intimate relationships or playing big.

Happiness researchers Oishi and Westgate (2020) have explored the question: What does it mean to have a good life? They outlined three dimensions of happiness:

1. Hedonic well-being: pleasantness, comfort, safety and stability
2. Eudaemonic well-being: purpose, meaning and devotion
3. Psychological Richness: interest, variety of perspectives, and novelty

All three dimensions of happiness contribute to a well-lived life. And although research shows having more money may correlate with the first type of happiness (comfort and pleasure), it is less associated with happiness that comes from having purpose, meaning and curiosity. Living your values, stepping outside of your comfort zone, and embracing vulnerability are uncomfortable at times. However, by doing so you can cultivate a more meaningful and psychologically-rich life.

Committed Action

In the summer of 2020, I had the opportunity to interview Dr. Helen Neville, an author on the APA’s Guidelines on Race and Ethnicity in Psychology and founder of the Psychology of Radical Healing Collective. That interview changed my perspective on what it means to strive. In preparation for the interview, I poured over the APA Guidelines only to find that many of them started with the word “strive.” Some examples of the guidelines are “Psychologists strive to recognize and engage the influence of race and ethnicity in all aspects of professional activities as an ongoing process” and “Psychologists strive for awareness of their own positionality in relation to ethnicity and race.”

These guidelines are aspirational in nature and demonstrate the “good kind of striving.” When I asked Dr. Neville to be interviewed, she asked me if she could bring other members from the Radical Healing Collective with her as a whole group interview. Dr. Neville described how they work collectively with no one member at the helm—writing papers, generating ideas. As a whole, they have a common ambition of radical hope and healing for people of color. When our aspirations and efforts turn toward a collective good, such as striving for social justice, to end climate change, for housing the unhoused, for mentally healthy kids, for our own recovery from addiction, for kindness and compassion, these are different kinds of striving.

During the same summer in which I wrote my signs of unhealthy striving, I began a list of what it looks like to move from striving to thriving. Here are a few items on my list:

• Setting goals based on your values
• Prioritizing important domains of your life
• Pausing to take perspective on yourself and others
• Being present and working hard
• Balancing effort with surrender
• Having wholesome purposes
• Taking time off, even if you feel guilty
• Setting clear boundaries
• Using effort to benefit the greater whole
• Choosing cooperation over competition
• Enjoying your life

In ACT, committed action is taking action, toward your values, even in the face of obstacles. Committed action is also about compassion toward yourself as you make mistakes, get out of tune, and tune-up over and over again. Committed action takes our striving habit loop and turns it into a values-rich one. The triggers may remain the same (anxiety, unhelpful thoughts, urges) but we respond to them differently, by pausing, getting present, and choosing our values. The long-term consequence is a life that has meaning and richness. It’s a life we can feel proud of at the end of the day.

Thriving with Psychological Flexibility

Putting it all together, to shift from striving to thriving, requires psychological flexibility: the ability to open up and allow for your inner experience, to choose what matters most in the present moment, and to act on that choice. Psychological flexibility is associated with better mental health, persistence in maintaining health goals, family cohesion, and work and athletic performance. During the pandemic, psychological flexibility has been associated with less spillover effects of stress on kids, less marital discord, and lower depression and anxiety associated with pandemic stress.

Moving from striving to thriving is a collective venture. Much like bees who link legs and “festoon” to move toward hard-to-reach places as they build their honeycomb, we are being challenged as a species to tackle what seem like impossible tasks. If we can harness our striving for the good, put our efforts where our values are, and practice compassion with ourselves and each other in the process, this will give us an opportunity to step into the realm of possibility.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Diana Hill, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist and co-author of ACT Daily Journal: Get unstuck and live fully with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. She is a co-host of the popular Psychologists Off the Clock podcast and offers regular teachings in compassion and ACT through InsightLA and Mindful Heart Programs. Through her online teachings, executive coaching, clinical supervision, and private therapy practice Diana encourages clients to build psychological flexibility so that they can live more meaningful and fulfilling lives. Diana practices what she preaches in her daily life as a mom of two, homesteader, and yoga teacher. Follow her on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter (@drdianahill) to get tools to build psychological flexibility into your daily life.

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Posted by mkeane on Thursday, October 7th, 2021 @ 3:09AM
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