You Aren't Motivated Because of Black-and-White Thinking |
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Black-and-white thinking makes people neatly divide their pursuits into extreme categories.
Some struggle to see the overlap between their more and less successful pursuits, thus avoiding the latter.
While it's easy to use negativity as an excuse to avoid something scary, that doesn't make it true.
Many struggle with knowing where to start. They may know what they want, or at least have some general sense of it, but can’t seem to motivate themselves to pursue it. While it’s true that difficulty with beginning tasks is associated with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and major depressive disorder, being symptoms of both, and obsessive compulsive disorder, which entails analysis paralysis, it’s also associated with the way we perceive the world and how we tend to learn about it.
Some people meaningfully struggle with conceptual overlap. This means that fuzzy categories scare them. To them, a thing is either a thing or it isn’t. Very binary; very black-and-white. The world only makes sense when everything in it is neatly organized and categorized. So, if you're this type of person, it’s easy to divide up your successes and failures. There are those things in which you naturally excel and those that feel impossible to complete. Missing the overlap between the categories, it then becomes just as easy to avoid engaging with the latter group. Why bother if you’re just going to fail? In this rigid world, the question feels nonsensical because its answer is seemingly self-evident. Therefore, one ought to continue to only engage in tasks that feel achievable.
In treatment, this individual may tell you all about why one set of tasks is manageable and another isn’t, believing they possess a perfect understanding of how things are. They’ll inform you of all of the ways they manage to motivate themselves to initiate and complete the manageable set while telling you why none of that can apply to the other set. Engaging in one set may feel more natural, automatic, routine, and predictable. And the other may feel too open, chaotic, and unstructured. Again, black-and-white thinking. One set is this, and the other is that. Yet, how often is anything that bifurcated? So, I may ask a patient: Instead of telling me what makes them different, can you point to their similarities? Is the chaos of one set found in the other? And are the harmony and predictability of that set found in the first?
As an example, imagine the manageable set includes exercising. So, you’re able to motivate yourself to lift weights and run; you track your progress and feel proud of yourself for it. Doing so indicates your conscientiousness, determination, and resilience. On the other end, imagine you want to become a stand-up comedian. You often fail to write jokes, can’t seem to manage your stage fright, and find it challenging to function without a guide. On the surface, these appear to be two completely different pursuits. And, one may believe they elicit two distinct sets of traits. While exercise fosters the above ones, stand-up comedy may instead engender fear and self-loathing. However, it’s more accurate to say that each endeavor merely contributes to those emotions; neither causes them.
That’s meaningful because we can begin to consider our interpretations, along with the overlaps. To continue with our example, we may ask: Have any of the initial traits been applied to those scary pursuits? Have you ever been diligent and resilient in comedy? Have you ever persisted despite writer’s block or stage fright? Have you ever just decided to act despite feeling you haven’t prepared enough? Most of the time, the individual isn’t starting from scratch, although it may feel that way. But the point is: Feelings don’t always represent facts. Here, the feeling symbolizes all-or-nothing thinking. Stand-up comedy may feel too scary because it (with your associated traits) feels as though it’s completely dissimilar to something you’re obviously good at. The reality is that you’re probably not as great at exercising, it isn’t as natural as you believe, and you’re likely not terrible at comedy. Black-and-white thinking, to be emotionally meaningful, tends to exaggerate—the individual views categories in extremes.
So, it may help to remind yourself that your mind is essentially tricking you. Following introspection about their traits overlapping in distinct pursuits, the individual may ask themself: Are the tasks themselves so different? Is exercising that rigid and evident or did I have to decide on what form of exercise and which style to pursue? Did I have to pick a particular guide and find out where to learn about what to do? Did I have to make a decision from multiple options? Next, they may consider where stand-up comedy can be rigid and predictable. Can I decide to spend an hour a day attempting to write jokes? Can I hold myself responsible for creating content, even if I don’t love it? Can I feel proud of myself just for fulfilling my goals, even if the results don’t feel like they matter (e.g., it may be more challenging to see the results of your comedic pursuit, as opposed to those of exercising)? And, can I seek out some sort of guide or mentorship on my journey? While comedy is more open-ended, there can still be some structure, especially since jokes tend to follow frameworks.
While black-and-white thinking may be motivating by making you feel overconfident in one area, it can easily stifle you. It’s easy to be critical and negative, pointing out differences; it’s much harder to discover what makes things similar. While negativity makes us feel safer, giving us excuses to avoid pursuits and people, it doesn’t mean that we are, at least not in any way that really matters.
What Is Perfectionism?
Take our Perfectionism Test
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