Category: Psychology

Loneliness [en]

[fr] Sur la solitude.

This morning I stumbled upon the article Only The Lonely, in which Stephen Fry talks about depression, wanting to end things, mental health, and loneliness.

Here’s the passage that made me think a bit more about the nature of loneliness:

Lonely? I get invitation cards through the post almost every day. I shall be in the Royal Box at Wimbledon and I have serious and generous offers from friends asking me to join them in the South of France, Italy, Sicily, South Africa, British Columbia and America this summer. I have two months to start a book before I go off to Broadway for a run of Twelfth Night there.

I can read back that last sentence and see that, bipolar or not, if I’m under treatment and not actually depressed, what the fuck right do I have to be lonely, unhappy or forlorn? I don’t have the right. But there again I don’t have the right not to have those feelings. Feelings are not something to which one does or does not have rights.

In the end loneliness is the most terrible and contradictory of my problems. I hate having only myself to come home to. If I have a book to write, it’s fine. I’m up so early in the morning that even I pop out for an early supper I am happy to go straight to bed, eager to be up and writing at dawn the next day. But otherwise…

There are two important things here. The first is that feelings are there, and the question of whether you have the right to them or not is irrelevant. They are there. If you feel this way, then you feel this way. That way? That way. That’s it.

The bit on loneliness got me thinking. Everyone knows how lonely it can be to be in a relationship that has stopped functioning. How one can be at a dinner party surrounded by people and still be lonely.

Loneliness doesn’t have much to do with having human beings around you. What makes you “not lonely” is being connected to others in a meaningful way. Feeling recognized for who you are, and not for a social or professional persona you project when others are around. For me there is no contradiction in what Stephen tells us of his busy social life and his feeling of loneliness. It’s apples and oranges.

Having a social life does not mean you have authentic relationships with others.

3rd #back2blog challenge (10/10), with: Brigitte Djajasasmita (@bibiweb), Baudouin Van Humbeeck (@somebaudy), Mlle Cassis (@mlle_cassis), Luca Palli (@lpalli), Yann Kerveno (@justaboutvelo), Annemarie Fuschetto (@libellula_free), Ewan Spence (@ewan), Kantu (@kantutita), Jean-François Genoud (@jfgpro), Michelle Carrupt (@cmic), Sally O’Brien (@swissingaround), Adam Tinworth (@adders), Mathieu Laferrière (@mlaferriere), Graham Holliday (@noodlepie), Denis Dogvopoliy (@dennydov), Christine Cavalier (@purplecar), Emmanuel Clément (@emmanuelc), Xavier Bertschy (@xavier83). Follow #back2blog.

La pile de livres aspirationnelle: se construire un champ des possibles [fr]

[en] About the aspirational pile of books that I brought to the chalet with me.

Note: comme la plupart des billets que je publie ces jours, celui-ci a été écrit hors ligne durant ma petite retraite à la montagne.

Je suis au chalet, avec deux chats et une pile de livres, de quoi lire pendant probablement un mois. Une bonne douzaine. OK, un mois en ne faisant que lire.

J’en suis au premier bouquin que j’ai pris sur la pile. Entre-temps, j’ai quand même passé une demi-journée à trier/organiser mes photos (j’ai pris mon disque dur externe exprès) et je suis maintenant en train de rédiger mon 7e (septième!) article pour Climb to the Stars en quelques heures.

Pourquoi diable monter tant de livres pour quelques jours seulement? Je me suis posé la question. Je me la suis d’autant plus posé qu’on a abordé récemment avec Evren la question de la pile aspirationnelle de “choses à lire plus tard”. Je ne me leurre pas: cette pile de livres est totalement aspirationnelle.

Précisons tout de même que j’ai loué une voiture pour ma petite retraite à la montagne, ce qui me permet de ne pas trop me soucier du poids excédentaire de mes aspirations.

En fait, ce à quoi j’aspire, avec cette pile de livres, mon ordi plein de photos à trier, et mes doigts pleins d’articles à taper, c’est aussi le choix, le possible. Je veux être ici au chalet avec le choix de mes lectures, et non pas limitée et contrainte par un choix fait avant de venir.

Alors j’amène plus de livres que je ne peux lire. J’élargis un peu le choix. Je me laisse la liberté de suivre mon humeur. De butiner. C’est ce que je cherche un peu, ici loin de tout.

Chez moi, c’est un peu la même chose. Il y a dans ma bibliothèque plein de livres que je n’ai pas vus. Dans ma DVD-thèque (oui, encore, je sais) plein de films et de séries à regarder encore. Dans mon étagère vitrée, une bonne trentaine de thés.

Je veux être dans un contexte où j’ai le choix. Je peux sur un coup de tête lire ceci ou cela. Les habits et les chaussures, c’est sans doute la même chose — et les réserves dans le garde-manger.

Mais si on a lu The Paradox of Choice, on sait que cette liberté, ce choix ouvert auquel on aspire, eh bien il peut aussi être contre-productif. A trop devoir choisir on se fatigue. Trop de possibilités, ça angoisse.

On n’utilise qu’une petite partie des choix à notre disposition, et le reste pèse sur notre conscience. Ça me fait penser à cette étude où l’on demandait aux gens de planifier leurs menus sur un mois, et on comparait ensuite avec ce qu’ils mangeaient réellement. Pas trop de surprise: les menus “réels” étaient bien plus répétitifs que les menus théoriques. On croit qu’on va vouloir de la variété, mais en réalité, on aime aussi la répétition.

L’autre chose à laquelle ça me fait penser, cette histoire de pile aspirationnelle, c’est la bibliothèque d’Umberto Eco, dont il est question si ma mémoire ne me fait pas défaut dans “A Perfect Mess“, le parfait livre-compagnon à The Paradox of Choice cité plus haut. (Si c’est pas dans A Perfect Mess, c’est peut-être dans The Black Swan, autre livre indispensable.)

La bibliothèque la plus intéressante, c’est celle qui regorge de livres encore-non-lus. C’est elle qui contient peut-être le livre qui va bouleverser notre vie, mais qu’on n’a pas encore lu. (Plus j’y pense, plus il me semble que ça vient de The Black Swan, ce que je raconte.) Le potentiel pour le changement radical réside dans ce que l’on ne connaît pas encore.

Bon, ça rime à quoi, tout ça? Dans cette pile aspirationnelle, il y a plusieurs niveaux:

  • on aspire à un état où l’on aurait lu tout ça
  • on aspire à une liberté de choix qui, poussée à l’extrême, serait paralysante
  • on aspire à une vie où on aurait le temps de lire tout ça (le livre comme métaphore du temps de libre — même si on sait qu’on se prive activement d’avoir le temps de faire tout ce qu’on ferait si seulement on avait plus de temps)

En résumé: quatre jours au chalet, ce n’est pas assez!

The Trap of Happiness: Big Things and Small Things, Outside and In [en]

[fr] La clé, pour être heureux, n'est pas dans les événements ou circonstances extérieurs, mais dans nos activités. En nous, et non au dehors de nous. Ce n'est pas très intuitif, d'où le piège. ("Quand ceci ou cela arrivera, alors je serai enfin heureuse.")

I realized today that many of the things I agonize over, the big things of life, are probably not worth spending so much energy on.

These big things of life — work, relationships, where to live — are just the measly circumstantial 10% component of our happiness (50% is due to our happiness “set point”, and the remaining 40% depends on certain intentional activities).

If I’m agonizing over whether to pursue a relationship or not, whether to keep my current line of work or change it, stay put or move to another continent, I’m doing so because at some level, I believe those decisions hold the fate of my happiness. But they don’t.

This is not to say that major life changes have no impact on how we feel. Of course they do. And of course bad decisions can lead to pain and anguish. But if things are going reasonably well and the drive is to be happier, the research presented in The How of Happiness (which I’ve already blogged about) tells us that these major changes will probably have way less long-term effect on how happy we are than certain more modest-looking intentional activities that have been show to reliably increase happiness.

Major events give us a “happiness high”, which is maybe one of the reasons we keep on looking to them as the solution to our lasting happiness. Hence the trap of happiness:

We think that big important things like being in a relationship, having a great job, having kids or living in our dream city are going to make us happy, when in fact it is small day-to-day activities that make use happy.

So when we’re unhappy, we yearn for big changes and stay stuck on “if onlys” rather than doing something that will actually make us feel happier.

For me, there is an important corollary to this:

The key to our happiness is inside of us, and not in exterior events.

This is nothing new under the sun, but I think that today I have really understood it.

You see, in addition to agonizing over “big decisions”, I spend a lot of energy hoping or waiting for things to happen which I expect will make me feel happier. Things that are outside my control or depend on other people. Without getting into details, this energy sometimes pushes me down alleys where I do things which I know are doomed to failure, which I know are a bad idea (and I can even explain why), but I have a very hard time stopping myself from doing them.

And I have understood today that the way to fight these “dysfunctional” urges is to remember where they come from: they come from feelings of unhappiness that I’m trying to address in the wrong way. I’m trying to make big things happen outside of me, rather than certain small things that involve only me — the “happiness activities” or “intentional activities” Sonja Lyubomirsky describes in her book.

Not surprisingly, some of them are already part of my “toolkit” for making myself feel better. Before reading The How of Happiness, however, I think I just hadn’t measured how important they were. And now I have extra stuff to add to my happiness toolkit. Yay!

So I’m making a note: to fight my gosh-I-wish-I-wasn’t-heading-for-that-wall-again urges, pick an activity out of my happiness toolkit. And I’m putting “working on being happier through daily activities” above my big “existential issues” on the priority list.

I find it ironic, in a way, that something as important as how happy we are (I mean, a huge amount of what we do, we do because in some way we’re trying to be happy) can be influenced by so small and seemingly trivial things.

It does explain, though, how we can tumble from “happy” to “not happy” in just a few clicks, and climb back to “happy” by answering two e-mails and cleaning the bathroom sink.

It’s not rocket science.

Tears Do Heal — But Slowly [en]

[fr] Un retour d'Angleterre un peu difficile, des vagues de chagrin qui vont et viennent depuis trois mois que Bagha m'a quittée. Mais le chagrin, c'est notre réaction à la douleur de la perte. Le sentir, c'est avancer sur le chemin de l'acceptation.

I’ve had a handful of pretty miserable days upon my return from England. Feeling very sad again about Bagha’s death, and some other losses 2010 brought along with it. But this last couple of days have been better, because tears do heal, and spring is here.

Pencil Effect Sunday 26

Three months after Bagha’s death, I’m thankfully not bursting into uncontrollable tears in socially awkward settings anymore. It comes and goes. I might spend a week or ten days with hardly a tear, and then a wave hits and I’m going through stacks of tissues every day. I’m getting used to it.

I know I need to though, so I dive into the pain and grief when it comes — and when it’s appropriate to let myself do so.

When I’m “in”, it feels like my life is over, like it hurts so much that I’ll never get over it. It feels like some part of me will forever refuse to accept that he is dead and gone, refuse to accept that there is nothing I can do about it, and refuse to accept too that nothing will bring him back. It feels like I will never manage to move on and open my heart this much again, like I will be stuck in grief forever.

Of course I know this isn’t true, and outside of these moments of intense grief, I’m living my life pretty normally these days, despite my heavy heart.

But what I’m starting to understand — and understand really because I’m experiencing it — is that these moments of pain where I am so adamantly refusing to accept that Bagha has died, and I now have to live without him, are actually the very thing that is helping me accept it.

When I was told this it made immediate and perfect sense to me. I feel pain and sadness because I am facing the fact Bagha is dead. Even if my reaction (defense mechanism) to that pain is a futile refusal to accept that which is causing the pain (clearly a flavour of denial — “I want my cat back, I don’t want him to be dead”), it remains that if I am feeling that pain it is precisely because I am realizing or accepting a little more that my life from here onwards will be without him, and I have no choice in that matter.

That is why sadness and tears heal: they are the expression of a step forward in accepting a difficult reality. And though it feels sometimes that the steps are small and the road long, I know I am making progress, and that my heart will heal again.

Brené Brown on Vulnerability (TEDx Talk) [en]

[fr] Excellente présentation de Brené Brown sur la vulnerabilité et l'importance de celle-ci pour notre capacité à entrer en relation. A regarder absolument (il y a des sous-titres français si vous en avez besoin).

After a pretty unproductive day watching cars spawn and unhacking my blog, I settled down to watch a few videos I had stuck in Boxee over the last months.

First I watched Alain de Botton, who said very eloquently what I’ve been thinking for a few years now: if anyone can be anything, and we owe our successes to ourselves, we are also fully responsible for our failures, and that responsibility is crushing us and our self-esteem. I then went on to David Blaine, who held his breath for 17 minutes — more scary than inspiring for me (kids, don’t try this at home in the bathtub).

Finally, I listened to Brené Brown’s talk on vulnerability and connexion. It hit close to home, and I took some notes, which I’ll share with you in continuation with my mad crazy live-blogged notes of the Lift conference. But do listen to Brené directly:

In order for connection to happen, we need to let ourselves be seen.

Shame: if people see or know this thing about me, then I am not worthy of connexion.

The only thing that separates people who have a strong sense of worthiness from those who struggle to feel worthy of love and belonging is that those who have this strong sense of worthiness — they believe they are worthy of love and belonging. That’s the only difference.

The only thing that keeps us from connexion is our fear that we’re not worthy of connexion.

Courage to be imperfect.

Compassion to be kind to oneself and then to others.

Connexion as a result of authenticity. Let go of who you should be to be who you are.

AND vulnerability. They fully embraced it. They believed that what made them vulnerable made them beautiful. The willingness to say “I love you first”. The willingness to invest in a relationship which may or may not work out.

We numb vulnerability. But you can’t selectively numb the emotions you want, the difficult feelings. You numb everything else too.

We make everything that is uncertain certain. (Control.) We perfect. Including our children.

You’re imperfect, you’re wired for struggle, you’re worthy of love and belonging.

We pretend.

Let ourselves be seen. Love with our whole heart, even though there’s no guarantee. Practice gratitude and joy. Believe that we’re enough.

Thanks, Brené. You can follow Brené on Twitter or check out her blog.

Brain Downtime [en]

[fr] On a besoin de débrancher son cerveau -- avez-vous assez l'occasion de le faire?

My brain needs downtime. So does yours.

We’ve managed to make our lives so efficient that we’ve removed all the downtime that used to be part of them. We can work on the train, listen to podcasts while we clean and cook, why, we even read on our iPhones as we walk through town.

Sleeping just doesn’t cut it. Of course, we need sleep (that’s also body-downtime), but we need awake-downtime.

What’s your downtime?

For me, reading fiction and watching TV series qualify as brain downtime. My conscious mind is immersed in fiction, though I’m sure a lot is going on in the background. Sailing and judo qualify to, as does riding my exercise bike if I’m listening to music rather than a podcast.

When I’m on the bus and reading FML or flicking idly through my Twitter stream, is that brain downtime?

When I’m walking in the mountains, drinking a cup of tea on my balcony, watching the sun set, taking a bath, or meditating, that’s definitely brain downtime.

Do you get enough brain downtime?

L'effet chat [fr]

[en] I write a weekly column for Les Quotidiennes, which I republish here on CTTS for safekeeping.

Chroniques du monde connecté: cet article a été initialement publié dans Les Quotidiennes (voir l’original).

Une chose toute simple relevant pour moi du bon sens mais qui n’est pas évidente aux yeux de tous est ce que j’ai nommé “l’effet chat”, à défaut d’un meilleur mot.

Derrière l’écran, sans présence physique, les défenses psychologiques et l’anxiété sociale tombent. On ose plus, on est désinhibé. Sur le versant positif, on se livre plus, parlant de choses parfois trop difficiles pour le face-à-face ou le téléphone, expérimentant des choses nouvelles (oser dire “non” par exemple) que l’on pourra par la suite, petit à petit, transférer dans nos relations hors ligne.

Le revers de la médaille, c’est l’agressivité exacerbée, les escalades d’insultes, la malhonnêteté — qui profitent de s’infiltrer dans la brèche ouverte par l’écran protecteur. On n’a pas besoin de prononcer les mots non plus: les écrire les rend plus faciles.

Dans l’ensemble je vois l’effet chat comme quelque chose de positif. Un peu comme dans un espace protégé (groupe de partage confidentiel par exemple) les timides en nous osent un peu plus être eux sans tant de peurs qui les encombrent. Beaucoup de gens un peu mal à l’aise socialement (et ça ne se voit pas toujours!) apprécient les échanges en ligne, qui leur permettent de se sentir plus eux-mêmes, plus authentiques.

L’effet chat mène aussi à un sentiment d’intimité avec l’autre qui s’installe souvent très rapidement (d’où d’ailleurs la facilité de tomber amoureux en ligne, aussi étonnant que cela puisse paraître à celui ou celle qui n’en a jamais fait l’expérience). Le problème, c’est que ce sentiment d’intimité est dû en bonne partie au moyen de communication plutôt qu’à la personne en face. D’où certaines douches froides, surtout chez les chatteurs inexpérimentés, lors de la première rencontre en chair et en os.

Heureusement, avec l’expérience et le temps viennent la sagesse, et on apprend à rendre au chat ce qui est au chat, et au chatteur ce qui est au chatteur. Les rencontres humaines peuvent être belles, qu’elles se fassent au travers d’un clavier ou autour d’un café.

Less Extrovert Than I Thought [en]

[fr] J'ai réalisé qu'en fait je n'étais pas aussi extravertie que je l'imaginais. Cette "méconnaissance de moi", si je puis dire, m'amène à me surcharger un peu côté vie sociale (et vie professionnelle "avec gens"). En fait, j'ai aussi pas mal besoin de temps pour moi. Je vais être plus vigilante à l'avenir avec ça!

A couple of weeks back I found an MBTI questionnaire and took it. The result itself is not that surprising (ENTJ) — but what did catch my attention was that the test only evaluated me to be “slightly extrovert”.

I’ve long known that I do need alone time and can become over-socialized, but this test result has suddenly made me realize that I’m just probably not as extrovert as I viewed myself to be. I always thought that I was very extrovert, but come to think of it, it’s just not true.

I love being around people, but I do need a healthy dose of alone time if I’m going to keep my balance.

Now that I’ve put my finger on it, I’m going to pay more attention to making sure I have enough time to myself.

Face Blindness [en]

[fr] Un épisode de Radiolab qui parle de "face blindness", littéralement "être aveugle aux visages". J'ai un peu de ça (je ne reconnais pas les gens, mais je me souviens d'eux immédiatement quand ils me donnent leur nom). Episode intéressant à écouter.

I wrote some time ago about being bad with faces. I remember people, I just have trouble with faces. I’ve been paying more attention to this recently, and realized that I actually do “recognize” people — I know that I know them — but cannot “place” them or “identify” them based on their face alone.

This morning I listened to the Radiolab podcast “Strangers in the Mirror“, about face blindness (I love Radiolab).

Oliver Sacks, the famous neuroscientist and author, can’t recognize faces. Neither can Chuck Close, the great artist known for his enormous paintings of … that’s right, faces.

Oliver and Chuck–both born with the condition known as Face Blindness–have spent their lives decoding who is saying hello to them. You can sit down with either man, talk to him for an hour, and if he sees you again just fifteen minutes later, he will have no idea who you are. (Unless you have a very squeaky voice or happen to be wearing the same odd purple hat.)

Go and listen to it.

Like everything, face blindness is not all-or-nothing. I guess I have some degree of it (not as bad as Chuck or Oliver, though). My strategy is to tell people upfront. I’m also very good with names, so that helps compensate. I find myself using some of the strategies they talk about: looking for some distinctive feature in the face, making a mental note of eye colour or eyebrow shape, teeth. Some detail I can hang onto.

I’ve realized that I can in fact “recognize” or place people based on their faces, but it takes me a lot of time and energy and concentration to do so. Sometimes hours or days after I’ve seen the person. I’ll bump into somebody at the supermarket, I know I know the person, we say hi, but I have no clue who the person is. I’ll keep thinking about it, try and visualise the person (face, voice, movement, expressions) and see what context appears in my mind.

When watching movies, I’m often crap at differentiating actors that look similar. “Is this somebody we already know, or is it a new character?” Or if I see an actor in another movie/series, it can take me a long time to be certain I’ve recognized them. For example, Lisa Edelstein (who plays Dr. Cuddy in House) was playing the role of a doctor (!) in an episode of Without a Trace that I was watching a week or two ago. It took me a good 10-15 minutes to be sure this character was not the same as the in-house FBI psychiatrist (also a woman roughly the same age with long dark hair), another 10-15 to be certain I’d seen her before and realize she was Cuddy.

So, is my “problem” in the face blindness range or is it in the “link the face with the person” one? I wonder if there are any tests available for this kind of thing. I’m curious.

Apprendre à se dire non [fr]

[en] Saying no to others (when you don't want to do something) is one thing (it requires dealing with one's fear of displeasing the other), but saying no to yourself is another (which requires learning to deal with frustration). I'm not too bad at the first one, and on the way there with the second.

Dire non, ça se divise pour moi en deux catégories:

  • savoir résister à la pression d’autrui qui désire nous faire accepter quelque chose que l’on n’a pas particulièrement envie de faire (consciemment ou non)
  • savoir résister à ses propres élans de se lancer dans des choses nouvelles, que ce soit en réponse à la demande d’autrui ou par désir d’entreprendre (ses propres projets).

Il y a une limite un peu floue entre les deux (comme quand on veut rendre service — quoique), mais grosso modo, cette distinction permet d’appréhender le problème intelligemment.

En effet, dans le premier cas de figure, ce qui nous retient est la peur de déplaire à l’autre. Dans le deuxième cas, c’est la difficulté à se frustrer.

En ce qui me concerne, je n’ai maintenant plus trop de peine à dire non quand je veux dire non (premier cas de figure). Je crois qu’un pas important sur le chemin a été de refuser de donner une réponse “à chaud”, et de dire quelque chose comme “laissez-moi regarder ça, et je vous donne réponse dans 24h” ou bien “a priori je te dépanne volontiers, mais laisse-moi te dire demain si c’est vraiment possible pour moi ou non”. Vous voyez l’idée.

Par contre, me dire non à moi, c’est beaucoup plus difficile. Je suis d’ailleurs en plein dedans, là. J’ai toujours plein d’idées de choses à faire, la vie est pleine de choses fascinantes à entreprendre, et régulièrement, j’ai les yeux plus gros que le ventre de mon agenda.

Et alors il faut faire le tri. Accepter que je dois renconcer à faire certaines choses que j’aimerais beaucoup faire, pour pouvoir faire celles auxquelles je tiens encore plus. Cela demande d’être au clair de ses priorités. Si on refuse de hiérarchiser, on finit par vouloir le beurre et l’argent du beurre (sans mentionner le désormais incontournable fils de la crémière).