Limiting your consumer choices will help too. At the supermarket, interesting packaging or new products compete for our attention. Sometimes it’s hard to decide which of the ten different brands of the same product to buy. In order to limit the number of choices and not get overwhelmed, make a list of exactly what you need before you go to the market, and stick to it.
Our friend Sam who fell into depression because he couldn’t decide what next job to pursue, found that narrowing his choices helped immensely. After a few weeks of his malaise, Sam’s wife encouraged him to seek the advice of a career coach, who helped him focus on one or two more immediate tasks and goals. His working memory was then able to better digest the information he had to consider, his stress lifted, and he became happier. He was able to make a list of potential jobs and started sending out his newly updated CV. Two weeks later, he landed an interview.
Confronting Fears and Challenges
One afternoon Ann, a corporate lawyer who had recently made partner, discovered a large bump in her lower back. She immediately started worrying that it was a cancerous tumor, but since she was so overwhelmed with her new job responsibilities, she avoided going to the doctor and tried to put the situation out of her mind. But the more she tried to suppress the thought, the more she kept going over catastrophic possibilities in her mind. Within a few weeks, she was very depressed. She had trouble focusing on work, got distracted in meetings, made faulty judgments on cases, and started to forget to return phone calls to her clients. In short, her working memory was impaired.
Some fascinating research suggests that failing to address our problems undermines our working memory. One such study conducted by scientists at Harvard, Cornell, and the University of Texas researched the fight-or-flight mechanism in mice and found that mice who ran away from a variety of challenging situations (such as interacting with bigger, more aggressive mice) suffered weight loss, lower sex drive, and insomnia, and they had a change in levels of a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). Previous research has shown that low levels of BDNF are associated with both a compromised working memory and depression, but the exact nature of this complex relationship has yet to be determined.
The mice who interacted with the larger mice had regular sleep, a healthy sex life, normal eating, and no change in their BDNF levels. The authors suggest that the discovery has an important implication: dealing with your problems enhances resiliency. They draw on Rachel Yehuda’s research on working memory and stress, which we discussed in Chapter 2, to highlight how resiliency is evident after exposure to stressful situations and resilient people show optimism in the face of adversity. So let’s return for a moment to Ann, who was busy at work and put off dealing with her problem. As a result, her working memory—and her work—was adversely affected by the stress. When Ann’s best friend pleaded with her to get over her fear of going to the doctor and get the bump checked out, she finally decided to listen to her. The doctor took a biopsy, and it turned out that the bump was not malignant. The bottom line is if you avoid dealing with your problems, it can diminish your working memory and make you more susceptible to depression. This can have a knock-on effect, because a poor working memory also undermines your ability to deal appropriately with the fallout that comes from avoiding problems in the first place. By dealing with your problems head on, you at least have the benefit of a fully functioning working memory so you can adapt to whatever comes your way.
Be Still and Be Happy
Meditation has long been linked to a sense of calm happiness. In a 2007 trial, Richard Davidson and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Madison used functional MRI brain imaging to see what changes in the brain occur during meditation. The team enlisted expert meditators, many of whom had over 37,000 hours of meditation experience, as well as a group of novice meditators. As the participants meditated in the brain scanner, they were barraged with distracting sounds, such as restaurant noise, a baby cooing, or a woman screaming. The researchers found that compared to the novices, those with the most meditation experience were better able to filter out the distractions. The brain scans also showed greater activation of the PFC—the home of working memory—in the most experienced group. The PFC was recruited because the brain scans were conducted during concentration meditation, a form of meditation that involves focusing attention on a small visual image or on the breath, a technique that requires working memory.
Amishi Jha and her colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania took this discovery a step further and found a more direct relationship among meditation, a strong working memory, and feelings of happiness. She looked at U.S. Marines who were feeling stressed before they were deployed for duty. One group meditated for thirty minutes every day for eight weeks and the other group for twenty minutes a week for eight weeks. After that period, the participants were asked to rate their positive and negative moods. The group that practiced for thirty minutes a day had higher working memory scores at the end of the eight weeks and reported more positive moods than the group that meditated less. We would speculate that the improvement in working memory enabled the Marines to more successfully filter out negative, stressful thoughts and instead focus on positive thoughts, thus improving their moods.
At the beginning of this chapter we met “Super Mario,” a man whose positive outlook allowed him to triumph over incredible adversity, and asked whether a strong working memory might have contributed to his happiness. Having examined the evidence, we think the chances are good. A strong working memory Conductor would have helped Mario ignore negative emotions and focus on the positive, even though there was every reason to believe that the miners might not be rescued. Also, because he was keeping himself busy—telling jokes, planning his children’s future, looking for escape routes, and helping devise innovative ways to accomplish everyday chores while underground—which engaged his working memory, rather than brooding on possible doomsday scenarios—his dopamine and serotonin levels likely remained relatively high, preserving a feeling of well-being.
If you are frustrated because your coworkers are bombarding you with emails and IM jokes, strengthening your working memory Conductor can help you eliminate these extraneous distractions and focus on getting your project in on time. If you’re feeling down because your spouse is complaining that the kids are arguing, the house is messy, and friends are arriving for dinner in fifteen minutes, building your working memory can help you focus on the fun to be had at the dinner party once you get your house in order and put the kids to bed.
Working Memory Exercises
Your working memory Conductor helps you to control your emotions, which is a big step toward experiencing more happiness. The following exercises will set you on the path to strengthen your working memory and gain better control over your moods and outlook.
1. Learn How to Manage Positive and Negative Emotions
An important step to happiness is being able to identify what makes you happy and what makes you sad. We use our working memory to focus on familiar emotional information. This exercise will help train your working memory to evaluate emotional words, so that you can learn to focus the positive, rather than the negative.
1 Below is a list of words. Don’t look at it!
2 Ask a friend to read the list of words aloud.
3 Listen for repeating words. When you hear a repeated word that was read out three words before, do this:Snap your fingersTell your friend whether the word is emotionally positive, negative, or neutral.
The answers are in bold on the list.
Word List
leaf
unfortunate
ecstatic