by Steve Rose | Apr 5, 2019 | Addiction and Recovery
We all know a friend or loved one who needs to make some changes in their life. You may have tried to offer this person advice, tough love, or give up altogether, feeling powerless.
You see them heading down a road to self-destruction, but don’t know what else we can say or do to make them change.
Can you change someone’s behavior?
You can’t change people, but there are things we can do to help them change themselves. This involves listening, developing empathy, and asking questions to help them figure out their own reasons for change.
Working in the addiction field has taught me invaluable lessons on the power of communication to help people gain motivation for change.
Do More Listening and Less Talking
This is the art of holding space.
Holding space is the foundation to effectively helping people who are looking to change a behavior, grieve a loss, or explore options for the future. You can have all the best techniques, but if you are not effectively holding space, they will likely be ineffective.
Holding space is a concept that has become popular in the counseling field and simply means being present with the other person, creating a non-judgmental environment, and allowing the other person to work through their thoughts and emotions.
In our fast-paced world, we often turn into efficient problem-solvers, analyzing, focusing, and fixing, feeling as if we are not doing enough if we are not always doing something.
This approach to counseling originated with Carl Rogers’ humanistic psychotherapy. Watch “Carl Rogers and Gloria to see a true master of holding space.
When you hold space for someone else, you offer them the gift of your presence. You provide them with support without taking their power away. You are simply there, present and highly engaged.
At its core, holding space creates a sense of safety in the other person. They feel safe to express their authentic thoughts, feelings, and desires without feeling shut down, ignored, or judged.
Once you have engaged someone on this level, you have formed the foundation of a helpful relationship and are ready to explore potential paths toward change.
Collaborate Rather Than Control
When helping someone change, you may feel tempted to take control. If they fail to act, you feel frustrated, wondering why they won’t listen to your advice and why they keep needing our support when the path is so clearly laid out.
Out of anger, you may temporarily ignore them or resort to tough love. You may try to manipulate them using bribes, threats, or ultimatums. You may even take responsibility for them, filling out forms or making phone calls on their behalf.
So how do you help someone change when they seem to be resisting all of your well-intended efforts? Collaborate with them.
Collaboration is like a dance. We give and take, meeting the person where they are, guiding the flow of the dance while remaining in harmony with one another. The goal is to guide them toward action, not force them into submission.
To use another metaphor, we must be like travel agents of change. We may be experts on the matter, but we can never really know what kind of trip will be best for the individual until we collaborate with them.
Even when the plans are set and the trip is booked, it is not our job to go on the trip with them. If things get rocky on the trip, they can call us for support, but it is not our responsibility to fly out to rescue them.
People need space to feel empowered when making changes. When we become confrontational controllers, we disempower people, making them feel incompetent.
When we collaborate with them, guiding the change-process, we empower them to take responsibility for changing, giving them the ability to see small rewards accumulate by their own volition. As these rewards start to accumulate, motivational momentum snowballs into action.
Recall what it feels like when a parent or significant other lectures you regarding one of your shortcomings. You may feel anger, resentment, or perhaps a sense of guilt. If these negative emotions spur you to action, the result is usually only short term.
You do whatever it takes to get rid of the painful emotions but fall back into your default way of acting. Lecturing and criticism may be a Band-Aid solution, but it fails to get to the core of the issue, leaving the person feeling disempowered.
Like a travel agent, the best way to collaborate with someone is to ask them questions. For example, notice the difference in tone between the two following statements: You’re so lazy! Stop procrastinating and get your work done! vs. It looks like you’re really struggling. What are some things you can do to get started on your work?
Collaboration solves underlying issues by encouraging a problem-solving mindset rather than spurring temporary action driven by the desire to avoid criticism.
When helping people change, you are often tempted to take the lead. We want to direct them on how to make the change, tell them what they need to do, and perhaps even begin doing some of it for them.
We may find ourselves working harder than the other person, wondering why they won’t take control over their life. If we find ourselves in this situation it may feel like we are helping, but we have become part of the problem.
When you over-help you take away the other person’s power. You take away their sense of autonomy, a core psychological need. When you do this, you are taking away a significant amount of their intrinsic motivation without even realizing it.
To avoid this form of counterproductive helping, you need to focus on building the other person’s sense of power. In short, empowerment is the product of collaboration.
Collaborative and empowering
conversations have these key elements: unconditional positive regard, a guiding
spirit, and open-ended questions.
Unconditional positive regard is a concept used in Carl Rogers‘ humanistic psychotherapy. It requires setting aside one’s judgments about another individual, empathizing with them, and assuming the best of them. When someone irritates us, it can be difficult to have unconditional positive regard, but when we start with empathy, we can understand the context of their behaviors, not taking it personally, and not blaming them for being “bad, lazy, or stupid”. We can see them as an imperfect individual, like ourselves, striving to live a “good” life. When we have unconditional positive regard, we empower individuals to see the best in themselves, inspiring them to act accordingly.
A guiding spirit requires one to guide rather than direct. Directing people consists of telling people what to
do, whereas guiding is a form of collaboration with the other person. Guidance is like being a travel agent. You can offer feedback, but the work necessarily requires eliciting direction from the other person. Guidance empowers individuals to participate, making it more likely they will stick to a plan. We want to do things we’ve come up with, not things we have to do.
Open-ended questions empower individuals by allowing them to explore their own reasons for making a change. As opposed to closed-ended questions that only require a simple yes or no, open-ended questions give the other person power to expand on their response in their own terms. For example, notice the difference between these two scenarios:
Closed
You: Does your gambling cause you distress?
Friend Yes.
Open
You: What are some things about your gambling that cause you distress?
Friend: I feel guilty because I haven’t told my spouse about my
spending
Open-ended questions invite elaboration, empowering the individual to lead the course of the conversation.
When we know their story, we can then use further open-ended questions to guide them toward making changes, using questions such as, “what are some things you can do to start making changes in this area?”
Empowering conversations are far more likely to lead to change because we are helping the other person fulfill the basic psychological need for autonomy/ self-direction.
When people feel in control, they feel motivated. This is why the combination of unconditional positive regard, a guiding spirit, and open-ended questions is so powerful.
How to have Mindful Conversations
One of the most difficult parts of skillful communication is also the simplest: remaining present.
We may become distracted by other people walking by, other things happening in our lives, and even by our own thoughts or judgments about the other person. We can have all the conversational skills in the world, but if we do not mindfully engage, none of it matters. Here are a few tips you might consider next time your mind
starts to disengage or criticize:
Get curious. When you approach others with a sense of authentic curiosity, your mind engages, hungry for more information. This approach requires you to approach every new interaction as a student, observing
the unique social nuances, thoughts, or behaviors of others, always learning about what makes people tick. When you get curious, everything becomes a new learning experience, making the most mundane situations seem novel.
Remember that everyone has their reasons. This is particularly useful when confronted by what we may interpret as ignorance, rudeness, or hostility. When conversational violence occurs, most people react,
reflecting back the violence they receive. As skillful communicators, we can choose to act rather than react. When we remember that everyone has their own reasons why they behave the way they do, we don’t take their words personally, giving us the necessary emotional distance to engage the person with a spirit of empathy.
Pay attention to the other person’s reactions. Mindfulness practices are not simply based on presence. This is a common misconception. If this was the case, one could blunder through life but would be vindicated so long as they did it while remaining in the present moment. At its root, mindfulness demands more than just presence, it requires one to be aware of actions and reactions. What this means is an awareness beyond oneself, allowing one to notice the subtle causes and effects of one’s own behavior and the behavior of others.
This could mean noticing how your shocked facial expression may be a reaction to the person’s story. In turn, you may notice how this reaction may lead to a reaction in the other person who stops sharing, not wanting to be a burden. Being aware of reactions helps us engage in mindful conversations, understanding how we affect others, as well as how others affect us.
Mindfulness is the foundation for maintaining a collaborative spirit while holding space for another person. Without it, we may accidentally make the other person feel like a burden, causing them to clam up or react with hostility.
I learned this the hard way when speaking to a young woman who began sharing her extensive history of drug use, in addition to describing a traumatic experience in her past. After she mentioned her recent visit to the AIDS society, I was so shocked by the number of difficulties she was facing, I didn’t realize I had looked like I’d just seen a ghost.
Without being mindful of my body language, I had accidentally triggered her to immediately disengage, feeling like she was being a burden on me. She dashed out of the room, apologizing. Weighing heavy on my conscience, this situation often replays in my mind, reminding me to be mindful of how unintentional actions often provoke negative reactions from others.
It may be easier to blame others for disengaging from us, telling ourselves they just never listen, when in fact the problem may be us. Engaging mindfully means remaining present to sense the subtle interplay of action and reaction. In order to know if you are unconsciously causing others to disengage, try some of the above techniques. Getting curious helps you focus on the individual and their story, reducing the likelihood of distracting mental chatter.
Remembering that everyone has their own reasons for doing what they do helps us maintain empathy when dealing with frustrating situations. It helps us remain present and emotionally grounded, allowing us to better observe how our actions produce positive or negative reactions.
Mindfulness is the foundation to collaboratively holding space. It helps us pause before jumping in when we try to “save†the other person through tough love. It helps us maintain unconditional positive regard, creating a space where the other person feels safe to share their experiences.
Once we know how to create a space for change, we need to know what to do with it. Although it may be useful to simply hold space, especially when someone is grieving, holding space is only part of the broader process when helping people make important changes in their lives.
Beyond creating an environment for change, the next section dives into specific language techniques proven to increase motivation to change. These are powerful skills used by leading addiction councilors and have been tested by hundreds of scientific studies.
I have tried to simplify these techniques by summarizing the most important points so you can use them in your everyday interactions with individuals looking to make changes in their lives.
Help Them Find Their Own Reasons For Change
“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
Those seeking change look toward the mountain ahead, ambivalent to whether they should make the trek. They want to get to the top, but are comfortable and safe on the ground.
Torn between these two competing desires, one may seek out professional advice on mountain-climbing, buy all the top-notch gear, and painstakingly plan their route, perpetually putting off the climb. This is the danger of putting the “how” before the “why”
You may know people who have procrastinated by planning perfectionist plots, while never getting to the hard work of making a change.
The problem with this approach is that it continues indefinitely, leaving the person desiring the end-goal, yet not having the level of motivation required to take action. The reason for this lack of motivation is the lack of focus on why one is pursuing a goal in the first place.
When we connect with our own reasons for taking a course of action, we become motivated on a core emotional level, providing the necessary fuel for action.
When someone comes to us looking for advice on how to make a change, we need to pause before jumping in and offering our assistance. Is this person stuck in perpetual planning? Perhaps they already know the answer and are constantly seeking advice instead of actually of taking action.
This gives them a false sense of accomplishment without having to start the hard work of change. We all love to help others and feel important when someone asks for our advice, but perhaps we need to take a step back sometimes and ask them why they want to make this change.
In practical terms, the conversation may look like this:
Friend: I’m having difficulties with my weight and want to get back to the gym, what kind of exercises do you recommend?
You: It looks like you are interested in making some big changes; can you first tell me more about your reasons for making this change?
Possible reasons that may surface during the conversation may include the ability to healthfully care for family/ loved ones, to have more energy throughout the day, or perhaps even spiritual/religious reasons.
Whatever the reason, rather than jumping to give advice, you can help them better by first having a conversation about their reasons for change.
The best map is useless if you’re not ready to take the voyage. Talking about our why is the fastest way to build motivational momentum. Clinical studies on this technique demonstrate that getting the other person to talk about their own reasons for change correlates with increased successful outcomes.
Miller and Rollnick call this “change talk,†in their practice of motivational interviewing (MI). Studies looking at the effectiveness of this technique show “change talk†is the “active ingredient of MI.â€
Whether you use their MI technique or not, this active ingredient can be repackaged to suit your own approach to conversations about change.
So how do you get the individual to state their own reasons for change?
Listen carefully for a reason, and then reflect that reason back to them in your own words, encouraging them to continue talking about it. Here is a simple example:
Friend: I guess if I start going to the gym more often, I could take better care of my elderly mother.
You: It looks like your mother means a lot to you
Friend: Yeah, she was always there for me, so I really want to be there for her.
Whatever you reflect, you will hear more. Therefore, reflecting change talk gets you more change talk. Note that this also works in reverse. If you are not selective in your reflections, you may be encouraging more counter-change talk, keeping the person entrenched in past behaviors.
To unlock the “active ingredient” of motivation, keep your ears on alert for change talk, and
then focus your reflections, encouraging the other person to continue talking
about their own reasons for change.
Here is a simple breakdown of the different ways you can use reflection to elicit more
change talk:
Simple Reflection: this consists of reflecting the exact words or phrases used by the individual.
Example:
Friend: I feel guilty about my gambling because sometimes I spend more than I can afford and I know I should be saving my money.
You: You feel guilty when you spend more than you can afford.
When using a simple reflection, be careful not to sound like you are simply parroting the other person’s words. If done without a spirit of empathy, it can appear cold and mechanical. One way to avoid this is to remember some of the unique words or phrases used by the individual throughout the conversation and incorporate
them back into your conversation at a later point.
Labeling: this consists of simply identifying what you are observing about the other person.
Example:
*Friend appears agitated after describing failed diet attempts*
You: This really frustrates you.
Complex reflection: this consists of finishing the other person’s sentences or paragraphs by guessing
what they mean. It is also one of the most powerful forms of reflection, avoiding the risks of simple reflections and labeling. The key to this technique is that the dialogue should flow as if it were a single person
speaking.
Example:
Friend: When I come to the casino I find it difficult to control my spending.
You: The games are so engaging and you lose track of time.
Friend: The other day I was here for six hours and it only felt like one.
You: …and before you know it, you’re spending a lot more money than you
planned on spending.
Note that you need to sometimes go out on a limb and take a guess at what phrase may accurately represent the other person’s experience. If you are not on the mark, the other person will correct you. If they correct you, adjust your reflection to fit their experience, maintaining a spirit of empathetic concern or curiosity.
Summarizing: this requires simply summarizing everything
the other person said recently in the conversation.
Example:
Friend: I tried going to a therapist to deal with my gambling because my partner was frustrated with my spending and told me I had to go, but I don’t think it helped because I keep wanting to gamble, but I also don’t want to upset my partner. I just feel lost and overwhelmed because my relationship is very important to me.
You: So you’re feeling lost and overwhelmed because you enjoy gambling, but your partner thinks you are spending too much and wants you to get help. You value your relationship so you sought help, but you feel that it was not helpful for you.
Mirroring Body language: this requires maintaining a posture and expression resembling the individual with whom you are speaking.
Example:
*Friend stands with hands half in pockets, at a 45-degree angle to you,
with a casual facial expression*
*You mirror this posture and demeanor in a way that is natural to you
and your own current state*
Note that mirroring is something humans do naturally when we are in harmony with other individuals. Therefore, becoming conscious of this instinct can allow us to be more aware of when we are not in alignment with someone.
Gently adjusting our physical presence in alignment with the other person may not only allow a better connection to develop, but it can also make us feel more open and empathetic toward the other person. In addition, note that you should adjust your body language carefully, never feeling forced or unnatural.
In summary, reflection builds connection and increases motivation by encouraging the other person to continue talking about their own reasons for change.
Rather than simply listening, asking questions, and offering feedback, incorporating a large dose of reflection into your conversations will help you better connect with others, in addition to increasing their likelihood of making a change by further exploring their why.
Get Commitment, Not Just Agreement
Have you ever had a conversation with someone that had left the other person showing commitment, but they somehow repeatedly fail to implement any lasting change? “You’re right,” they say, leaving you feeling like a conversational superhero.
It feels good to have the other person recognize we are right. But if we measure our effectiveness by the other person’s agreeableness, praise, or optimism at the end of the conversation, we are misleading ourselves. We cannot measure real change by these variables.
So, what creates real commitment to change? The answer is simple, yet often difficult to implement because it requires us to put our egos in the back seat. Rather than hearing “you’re right,” the goal is to hear “that’s right.”
Although it may sound like an inconsequential difference in wording, it can mean the difference between temporary agreement and lasting change. When someone says, “you’re right,” they are agreeing with the factual accuracy of your advice or feedback.
When someone says, “that’s right,” they are agreeing with the fact that you have identified how they are feeling. The difference is the latter is a sign of empathy.
You can make all of the factually correct suggestions in the world, but if the other person does not feel understood, they are not likely going to implement the suggestions in the long term.
Former FBI negotiator, Chris Voss, makes this distinction in his book Never Split the Difference. He recalls a time in his early years when he had been working on a suicide hotline. After one of his calls, he felt like a rock star. The man on the other side of the line showered him with “you’re right,” validating all of his hard work and skill.
With a sense of accomplishment, he leaned back in his chair after the call, expecting the same praise from his supervisor who had overheard the conversation. Rather than receiving praise, the supervisor told Chris this was one of the worst calls he’s heard. This is when he learned the difference between giving advice and giving empathy.
The key to lasting change does not lie in your ability to make the other person think you’re right. The key to lasting change lies in the ability of the other person to convince themselves through their own reasons for changing.
Rather than seeking praise and validation for your suggestions, you should be relatively invisible in the process so the other person feels like they are coming up with the suggestions and action plan on their own.
Conclusion
Let’s review how each of the elements discussed thus far come together to create the optimal conditions when helping someone change.
Holding space for someone so they can convince themselves of their reasons for changing requires us to ask open-ended questions about some of the things that are valuable to the other person. This may include topics related to core psychological needs, including mastery, autonomy, and relatedness.
When they begin sharing, we are only required to listen, reflecting these reasons back to them to ensure we are understanding them properly, in addition to observing and labeling their emotions as they share, facilitating empathy and getting to “that’s right,”.
Hopefully, this guide has provided you with some helpful tips on how to help someone change. If all else fails, remember to maintain personal boundaries. We can’t make people change, we can only offer our help.
by Steve Rose | Apr 3, 2019 | Suicide and Mental Health
On the go? Listen to the audio version of the article here:
Suicide causes pain to everyone surviving the loss of a loved one. You may feel despair, confusion, and even anger.
How could they cause so much pain to their loved ones? How could they be so selfish?
These questions are common and understandable. When you are not in a state of suicidal thinking, your mind perceives the world very different from someone in this state.
Although it may look selfish, someone in a state of suicidal thinking actually perceives themselves to be a burden on everyone. This distorted perception leads to the belief that others would be better off without them.
Rather than a selfish act intended on causing pain, those who die by suicide are intending the opposite. To illustrate this point, I’ve collected some excerpts on this theme from a great article from Sarah Schuster. One of her anonymous contributors states:
“It feels like nothing matters anymore, not even you. You’ll start to feel like a burden, like you’re pulling everyone down with you and they’ll be better without you.”
This often turns into self-blame causing low self-esteem and self-worth:
“You scroll through your phone contacts in your moment of deepest need and believe that there isn’t a single person who would help you without resenting you. At that moment you feel as if you’ve been lying to yourself all along about how much you matter.”
This sense of worthlessness isolates the individual from others, making it feel like no one can relate to their feelings:
“You feel like you already no longer exist, like you are in the way, useless, worthless, unworthy and a burden. It’s like an elephant sitting on you, holding you down, keeping you from living but somehow keeping you alive, making you watch lifeless and numb as everyone carries on around you unaware you even exist, unaware you are fighting inside.”
This perceptual perversion extends further, making the person feel like no one would even notice they were gone:
“Empty, useless, unwanted, not good enough. Those feelings are what make you start to think about those dark thoughts which turn into those questions that you ask yourself, ‘Is it worth it?’ ‘Does it matter anymore?’ ‘Will anyone miss me?’”
Far from believing they will inflict pain on their loved ones, this line of distorted thinking can even extend into believing one would be leaving one’s children better off:
“Why must I continue breathing? Why must I keep getting out of bed everyday when I am so incredibly tired? Feeling utterly worthless, to the point that you wonder if your own children would be better off without you around.”
These cognitive distortions are a form of emotional reasoning. In a state of suicidal thinking, painful emotions flood the person’s consciousness, drowning reason, convincing them that their feelings are real.
If someone you know has died by suicide, they are not selfishly neglecting the feelings of others. At the time of a serious attempt, they may believe they are leaving others better off. Deep down, they feel like a burden.
In my previous post, I talked about the opposite of feeling like a burden. I talked about feeling useful. As I said in that post, If you are lacking a sense of purpose, consider how you can make yourself useful to yourself, your family, and the broader society. Usefulness creates purpose, connecting us with something beyond ourselves, preventing us from feeling like a burden.
If you are already making yourself useful, but find yourself using it as a form of external validation to cope with a sense of lacking self-worth, you’ll need to go back to self-care. As I said before, the most useful thing you can do is to first be useful to yourself.
If you are trying to be a hero to everyone else while neglecting your own needs, it might be helpful to work through your cognitive distortions around self-worth. If this is the case, you may be suffering from codependency and I would recommend finding a therapist who specializes in cognitive-behavioral techniques.
Suicide risk is heavily influenced by one’s sense of oneself within one’s interpersonal relations. Suicide may look selfish, but it is highly social. We are social beings who want to feel like we are contributing to a broader purpose. When this sense of contribution is not present, we may experience depression. When we perceive ourselves to be a burden, this depression deepens, further distorting our sense of selves.
Suicide is often the opposite of a selfish act. This distorted sense of oneself as a burden makes suicide seem like an altruistic act.
If you’ve lost someone to suicide, this does not mean you should blame yourself. This distorted view of oneself as a burden is not necessarily based in reality. No amount of reassurance can help someone in this state.
If you or someone you know is suffering from suicidal thoughts, it is important to talk to your doctor and seek psychotherapy from a qualified therapist. If it is a crisis, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is available (in the US). Seek out your local Crisis Centre and speak to a professional.
If you want to read more about this topic, I highly recommend the book, Why People Die By Suicide, by Thomas Joiner.
by Steve Rose | Mar 6, 2019 | Addiction and Recovery
On the go? Listen to the audio version of the article here:
Is social media this generation’s heroin? Are we raising a generation of social media junkies, dropping in and out of the “real world,” always chasing that next like-button high?
I’ve dug into the research to answer the question of why we are addicted to likes on social media, and this is what I’ve found:
Likes on social media are addictive because they affect your brain, similar to taking chemical substances. Likes symbolize a gain in reputation, causing you to constantly compare yourself to your peers.
Let’s look at the research in more depth.
Also, if you or someone you know is struggling with mental health issues, you can check out my resource page for suggestions on how to find help.
What’s Happening In Your Brain?
Although it seems harmless, recent evidence suggests that social media use activates the same reward centers in the brain triggered by addictions to chemical compounds.
Even though we are not consuming a chemical, compulsive social media use can be classified as an addiction. So if social media use can be classified as an addiction, what does it do to your brain?
Recent neurological research points to the importance of the brain’s reward-circuit. Meshi et al. (2013) used functional neuroimaging data to uncover the impact of Facebook use on the nucleus accumbens; the brains pleasure-center within the reward-circuitry:
“…reward-related activity in the left nucleus accumbens predicts Facebook use.”
Also, they found “gains in reputation” to be the primary reward stimulus. The brain’s mechanism for processing self-relevant gains in reputation through Facebook use mirrors the reward circuitry activated through addiction to psychotropic substances.
According to Polk (2015), addiction fundamentally results from a prediction error in the brain. When the nucleus accumbens is stimulated beyond an expectation, the ventral tegmental area (VTA) releases dopamine, encouraging learning, as held by the Rescorla-Wagner model. Polk emphasizes the role of dopamine as a neurotransmitter associated with craving and reward expectation, putting individuals at risk of compulsive behaviors when reencountering a trigger associated with the potential reward.
This reward circuitry applies to digital addictions such as Facebook through the stimulus of unexpected gains in perceived reputation when sharing a piece of content.
Likes, comments, and shares are all potential sources of these unexpected gains, stimulating the nucleus accumbens, activating the dopamine response from the VTA.
Over time, the nucleus accumbens adapts to the dopamine response, requiring increasing stimulation.
This may come in the form of seeking more likes, comments, shares, or spending an increasing amount of time using social media technologies, even at the peril of our safety and the safety of others while driving.
Recent legislation banning the use of hand-held technologies while operating a motor vehicle is a response to this increasingly prevalent addiction.
The impact of Addictive behaviors on the brain reflects changing attitudes toward addiction.
Addictions were once considered a moral issue based on the weak-will of the user. Then, addictions became classified as a disease under the medical model. More recently, addictions are often viewed as an ineffective way to cope with unmet life needs.
This humanistic approach is supported by the evidence explaining how social media and heroin have more in common than we might expect. As Adam Curtis states in an interview with the New York Times:
“On a social-media network, it’s very much like being in a heroin bubble. As a radical artist in the 1970s, you used to go and take heroin and wander through the chaos and the collapsing Lower East Side, and you felt safe. That’s very like now. You know you aren’t safe, but you feel safe because everyone is like you. But you don’t have to take heroin, so it’s brilliant. You don’t get addicted, or maybe you do. Mostly you do.”
A recent study on heroin use argues that everything we know about addiction is wrong. The main findings demonstrate that individuals were not abusing substances because they were chemically hooked; they are abusing substances because of a deeper underlying issue; they lack a sense of social belonging and connection.
This is why it is relatively easy for a socially connected individual to stop using painkillers after an operation when compared to individuals who are dealing with deeper issues such as social isolation.
But if Facebook is a social media platform, does it solve our underlying connection problem, or does it make it worse?
Does Social Media Isolate Us?
It depends on how you use it.
Facebook’s mission is to “Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” But is social media actually bringing us together?
As a sociologist, I took a look at the research. Here is what I found:
Social media use is correlated with depression and low well-being. Yes, this conclusion itself sounds depressing, but let’s take a look at the data.
A 2016 study surveyed 1787 19-32-year-old men and women, finding social media use was “was significantly associated with increased depression.”
Another 2016 study found the following:
“Taking a break from Facebook has positive effects on the two dimensions of well-being: our life satisfaction increases and our emotions become more positive.”
Internet use is correlated with decreased loneliness among older adults. So it’s more complicated than the above studies might suggest.
According to this 2015 study looking at individuals 65 and older:
“Higher levels of Internet use were significant predictors of higher levels of social support, reduced loneliness, and better life satisfaction and psychological well-being among older adults.”
How you use social media makes a difference. According to another 2016 study on the correlation between Facebook and well-being, the researchers found:
“Specific uses of the site were associated with improvements in well-being.”
So what made the difference?
Individuals who used Facebook to build relationships with strong ties received the benefits, while those who used it for wide broadcasting did not. Therefore, they concluded the following:
“People derive benefits from online communication, as long it comes from people they care about and has been tailored for them.”
Another 2016 study found the same for Instagram:
“Instagram interaction and Instagram browsing were both related to lower loneliness, whereas Instagram broadcasting was associated with higher loneliness.”
Antisocial uses of social media can be addictive. As described above, neurological research used functional neuroimaging data to uncover the impact of Facebook use on the nucleus accumbens, the brain’s pleasure-center within the reward-circuitry.
The researchers found “gains in reputation” to be the primary reward stimulus. The brain’s mechanism for processing self-relevant gains in reputation through Facebook use mirrors the reward circuitry activated through addiction to psychotropic substances.
This reward circuitry applies to digital addictions such as Facebook through the stimulus of unexpected gains in perceived reputation when sharing a piece of content.
Likes, comments, and shares are all potential sources of these unexpected gains, stimulating the nucleus accumbens, activating the dopamine response from the VTA.
Over time, the nucleus accumbens adapts to the dopamine response, requiring increasing stimulation. This may come in the form of seeking more likes, comments, shares, or spending an increasing amount of time using social media technologies.
Social Media does not necessarily make us more ‘social.’ It can further isolate us from family, friends, loved ones, or co-workers when abused as an addiction, spurring us to spend ever-more time constructing our carefully curated online identities, constantly seeking out more ‘likes’ to validate our self-worth.
Although social media can isolate us through voyeurism and identity-construction associated with social comparison and reputational enhancement, this is not the full story.
There are many non-addictive ways social media can be used.
Social media can be social when used in social ways. It can bring together international families grieving the loss of a loved one, connect soldiers in combat with their families back home, rekindle long-lost friendships, or as Facebook itself says:
“…help you connect and share with the people in your life.”
Social media is social when used in ways that help build deeper connections between us.
Facebook is a social media platform, but that does not necessarily mean it makes us more social. It can further isolate us from family, friends, loved ones, or co-works when overused.
In her recent book, IGen, Jean Twenge writes about the generation born after 1994, finding high rates of mental health issues and isolation:
“A stunning 31% more 8th and 10th graders felt lonely in 2015 than in 2011, along with 22% more 12th graders”…[.] All in all, iGen’ers are increasingly disconnected from human relationships.
She argues the increasing level of screen-time and decreasing level of in-person interaction leaves Igen lacking social skills:
“In the next decade we may see more young people who know just the right emoji for a situation—but not the right facial expression.”
This lack of in-person interaction leaves Igen vulnerable to mental health issues:
“iGen is on the verge of the most severe mental health crisis for young people in decades. On the surface, though, everything is fine.”
This idea that everything is fine on the surface comes from the need to present an ideal version of oneself online:
“…social media is not real life. Her photos, which looked like casual snaps, actually took several hours to set up and up to a hundred attempts to get right…”
Social media platforms encourage rampant voyeurism, drawing us into someone else’s constructed world, spurring us to spend ever-more time constructing our own carefully curated online identities for others to see.
Our friend-lists are paper-trails of past acquaintances, giving us a little window to voyeuristically peer into their lives, casually connect, or rekindle a friendship.
Paradoxically, we can feel alone in a sea of social media connections. Like Riesman’s (2001) “lonely crowd,” we are perpetually other-directed, scanning, and finger-scrolling screens, searching for a kind of stimulation that never seems to fulfill our sense that we are good enough.
How Social Media Affects Self-Esteem
Picturesque portraits in Machu Picchu, selfies in the sand in Santorini, engagements, children, and new homes remind us of how we always seem to be missing out on life’s milestones and adventures. We curate our online identities, attempting to live up to an impossible standard, ever-more concerned with our digital reputation.
According to a Pew Research report on Teens, Social Media & Technology, they report the following experience of a 15-year-old girl:
“It provides a fake image of someone’s life. It sometimes makes me feel that their life is perfect when it is not.”
This perfectionism is amplified by new technology on social media platforms that automatically edit your photos. Dr. Hamlet, from the Child Mind Institute, states the following:
“…there’s a so-called “pretty filter” on Instagram and Snapchat. Beautifying filters are used almost reflexively by many, which means that girls are getting used to seeing their peers effectively airbrushed every single day online. There are also image altering apps that teens can download for more substantial changes. Facetune is one popular one, but there are many, and they can be used to do everything from erase pimples to change the structure of your face or make you look taller.”
Rae Jacobson, from the Child Mind Institute, presents the experience of a young woman in the following passage:
“Look,” says Sasha, a 16-year-old junior in high school, scrolling slowly through her Instagram feed. “See: pretty coffee, pretty girl, cute cat, beach trip. It’s all like that. Everyone looks like they’re having the best day ever, all the time.”
The article goes on to describe the problem with this perfectionism is negative social comparison:
“Kids view social media through the lens of their own lives,” says Dr. Emanuele. “If they’re struggling to stay on top of things or suffering from low self-esteem, they’re more likely to interpret images of peers having fun as confirmation that they’re doing badly compared to their friends.”
The negative emotion produced by this social comparison can result in an attempt to bolster one’s low self-esteem by attempting to gain more likes on their own photos.
The problem with this short-term solution is that it creates long term problems, like any other addiction. Rae Jacobson goes on to state:
Teens who have created idealized online personas may feel frustrated and depressed at the gap between who they pretend to be online and who they truly are.
Social media is addictive because pretending to be someone else online further reinforces the idea that you are not enough. Receiving several likes is a temporary solution, but genuine self-esteem suffers in the long run.
As selfies gain popularity on Instagram, the research findings from a 2017 study on the topic reveal some important lessons. Here are the highlights:
• Selfie viewing was negatively associated with self-esteem.
• Groupie viewing was positively associated with self-esteem.
• Frequent groupie viewing led to increased life satisfaction.
• Frequent selfie viewing led to decreased life satisfaction.
• Need for popularity moderated the relationship between selfie viewing and self-esteem.
• Need for popularity moderated the relationship between selfie viewing and life satisfaction.
In our selfie-obsessed Instagram culture, findings like this are important to consider. Mindlessly scrolling through Instagram selfies may be affecting us more than we think.
What Makes New Social Media Different?
I grew up in the era of MSN messenger, chat rooms, message boards, and MySpace. I remember feeling heavily drawn to connecting with my friends online, often communicating more online than in person. But these online social platforms are fundamentally different from today’s platforms.
Today’s social platforms are more than a neutral space to communicate with friends. They are miniature broadcasting platforms.
I still remember a time before the Facebook ‘like’ button. The button was introduced in 2009 and made the platform more than simply about commenting and sharing. In 2016, the ‘reactions’ button came out, further allowing users to share their emotional reactions to your content.
The ‘like’ button amplified the social comparison potential. In an article featuring an interview with Dr. Max Blumburg, be states:
“…you’re making yourself vulnerable to the thoughts of others, so it’s not surprising that if it doesn’t elicit the reaction you’d hoped for your pride takes a hit. We’re seeking approval from our peers and it’s not nice when we don’t get it – you want people to think your ‘content’ is funny/interesting/likeable. ‘If you have low self-esteem and you don’t do well on social media, you’re going to feel particularly bad.
We are all miniature media companies, in a sense. The responsibility to manage one’s reputation online has skyrocketed since the development of these advanced technologies.
The thought of having a career as a social media celebrity was unthinkable not too long ago. Now, social media influencers are a key aspect of mainstream marketing.
We’re all having to become our own marketers online. This is something I think about quite a bit, given the fact that I created this website for the purpose of sharing my ideas in a non-traditional way.
Although you can use social media to further your professional career and build connections with like-minded people, it is important to be mindful of when it is having a negative impact on your life.
If you suspect your internet use may be having a negative impact, you can try the free Internet Addiction Test here.
Controlling Your Social Media Use
As described throughout this article, social media can be an addiction, like any other substance. For those struggling with an addiction to social media, you are not alone.
This is a very common issue that can be treated through self-help activities, psychological treatments, counseling, support groups, in addition to writing and introspection.
If you are simply looking to prevent any issues, it could be helpful to be mindful of the way you are relating to social media. If you find you are constantly seeking likes and validation, perhaps taking a break might help you clear your head.
Finding hobbies or new activities to engage in could help build your sense of self, in addition to building an in-person peer group.
If you decide to return to social media use, it is important to set limits on how long you intend to spend on it, how often you intend to check it, and considering whether or not you are using it in a meaningful way to connect.
It could also be helpful to turn off your push-notifications, so you are not getting constant beeps or buzzes.
If you are still having difficulties, treatment may also be helpful. Internet addiction is becoming increasingly recognized and can now be formally diagnosed in the DSM.
Treatment looks different for each individual, based on their unique experiences. Based on my research into evidence for psychotherapeutic treatments, Cogitative-behavioral approaches seem to have the highest level of evidence supporting their effectiveness.
Although this is the case, non-therapeutic factors such as therapist-patient relationship and therapist empathy are also correlated with effective treatment.
If you are seeking treatment for internet addiction, talk to your health care provider about coverage. In my home province of Ontario, these services are offered free of charge, including residential treatment programs, due to their association with government-funded problem gambling treatment services. Although this may greatly vary between jurisdictions, it is still worth looking into.
In Conclusion
Social media can be beneficial when used in ways that help build deeper connections between us. For example, the studies on the social media habits of the elderly demonstrate this lesson. Using social media in a balanced way to meaningfully connect with persons in your life can help relieve social isolation.
Unfortunately, social media is quickly becoming one of the strongest forces that divide us. We are drawn into the race for likes, competing with our followers, constantly comparing ourselves to an artificial ideal. We need to be conscious of how we use social media platforms so they can bring us together rather than divide us.
Getting rid of social media altogether is not the solution. The problem is not social media itself, but rather, the way we use social media.
Consider the place of social media in your own life. Is it acting as an opiate, numbing you to underlying issues? Or is it helping you stay connected to those who mean the most to you? Feel free to share your experience below.
by Steve Rose | Mar 4, 2019 | Identity, Purpose, and Belonging
On the go? Listen to the audio version of the article here:
Do you ever feel lost in life?
Or are you bored to death by a soul-destroying repetitive job requiring little to no creativity?
At moments like these, you may feel like your life lacks purpose. But what does it mean to have a sense of purpose?
A sense of purpose means dedicating yourself to a cause beyond yourself. It’s a goal that fuels your motivation in life, giving your life meaning and direction, inspiring you to make a significant contribution to the world.
If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health issues, you can check out my resource page for suggestions on how to find help.
Purpose Gives Life Meaning
The psychologist Victor Frankl states that humans are driven by the necessity to seek meaning in their lives by committing to a cause or purpose outside themselves.
If an individual is unable to find a meaningful commitment, the suffering they experience leads to despair. If they are able to find a meaningful commitment, any suffering they experience will be met with resilience and the strength to preserver toward their goals.
Frankl is a living example of this philosophy since he survived two concentration camps in Nazi Germany through his commitment to the goal of rewriting and publishing his book that was nearly finished before being taken away when he entered the camp. His book can be found here: Mans Search for Meaning.
Since this drive to find meaning is essential for human beings, according to Frankl, a lack of meaning leaves an “existential vacuum” whereby one is susceptible to a state of despair.
We often ineffectively cope with this form of suffering by conforming to others, seeking simple fleeting pleasures, or by demonstrating superiority over others. All of these routes lead to unconscious suffering since they simply repress the existential vacuum produced by the lack of meaning. They do not actually fill the vacuum by creating meaning.
In other words, rather than feeling the pain, it is numbed by the temporary pleasure of stimulants, depressants, or the feeling of superiority. This is the root of addiction.
Working toward a meaningful goal is replaced by drugs, alcohol, excessive television-watching, internet games, or on the other hand, an obsession focused on success or acquiring power over others.
Purpose Gives You Direction
I often hear people accuse others of being lazy. This is especially true regarding the baby-boomers attitude toward millennials who are perceived as self-entitled brats who don’t know the value of hard work and can’t put their phones down.
“Kids today…” they say; “…they are not willing to work hard as we did.”
Is there an epidemic of laziness among today’s youth? Or is this another case of an older generation in misalignment with values, beliefs, and norms of a younger generation.
I don’t believe there an epidemic of laziness. Today’s youth are not lazy, they are lost. Unlike the baby boomers, millennials can’t rely on a standard life-course involving smooth and predictable transitions between each stage.
Baby boomers are right when they say, “the world was simpler then.” Social structures were much more stable, bound by stronger cultural norms regarding gender, sexuality, as well as the meaning of adulthood and family.
If you didn’t fit into normal gender ideals, sexual orientations, or take on normal adult responsibilities, you were probably marginalized and considered weird.
Now, everything is becoming weird. Actually, weird is the new cool. Millennials are freer to experiment with the way they present their gender, who they engage with sexually, and how they make their money.
Although we’ve seen progress regarding tolerance, millennials are now tasked with navigating a highly fluid, highly complex social milieu where there are fewer clear signposts directing them along their life-course.
Today’s youth see a multitude of paths but don’t know which way to go. Simply finishing high-school no longer guarantees a long line of employers offering you a position. Even finishing a post-secondary degree can’t guarantee that! Personally, I’ve finished three post-secondary degrees and still wonder if I’ll ever have stable employment.
There has been an explosion of both opportunity and uncertainty. Today’s youth are not lazier than the last generation’s, they are just more lost.
Human beings function best with a clear sense of direction and purpose. Remember those essay assignments in school when the teacher told you to just write whoever you want? They were always the hardest.
When the regulations are clear, students thrive. When they are vague, students flounder, put it off, or take much longer to complete the assignment. Loosely structured assignments do not cause students to become lazy; the lack of regulation makes them feel lost.
We need to look at how our social environments may be doing the same thing.
Nietzsche tells us that when we have a “why” we can overcome almost any “how”. Rather than berating millennials, calling them lazy and unmotivated, we need to consider whether or not they have something to be motivated to move toward.
In a world with so many options, we need to offer forms of institutional support that can provide direction for youth who are coming of age in this complicated age.
This may come in the form of updated career counseling classes in schools, peer-support groups for young entrepreneurs, or community programs that give young people a chance to apply and build on their unique skills.
What is the Meaning of Life Purpose?
A sense of purpose is key to living a meaningful life. It is the heart of passion and it can bring us to deeper levels of long-term happiness, providing resilience amidst great hardships.
A sense of purpose is something we often talk about wanting, seeking, or having, but it is somewhat elusive in our world of ongoing life-projects, characterized by multiple careers in a highly fluid world.
So what does purpose actually mean?
The concept of “purpose” comes from the Anglo-French “purpos” referring to an intention, aim, or goal. Broadly speaking, it can refer to purposely getting drunk on the weekend, purposely caring for your loved ones, or even purposely putting the toilet seat down; therefore, purpose is goal-oriented action.
In order to talk about the specific type of purpose I alluded to in the intro, we will need to refine the concept. But before we can refine the concept, we need to figure out the role of purpose in one’s life. This means defining the purpose of life-purpose.
In other words, the purpose of life-purpose can be called the end-goal of life-end-goals, the end of all other ends, or the ultimate end. In regular English, this simply translates to the question: why do we do what we do?
Luckily, Aristotle is a handy tool that can be used to fix this particular type of philosophical entanglement. Aristotle states that happiness is the ultimate end, meaning that all other goals are in some way directed toward the goal of happiness.
Therefore, the purpose of life-purpose is happiness. But before moving further, we need to look at what Aristotle means by happiness.
Distinct from hedonistic fleeting pleasures, Aristotle conceptualizes happiness as “eudemonia” which translates to “good spirit,” or in other words, “living well.” For Aristotle, living well/ living a good life means living virtuously in accordance with one’s reason, based on his ethics of moderation laid out in the Nicomachean Ethics.
To summarize the conceptual progress thus far, we can say that the purpose of life-purpose is to direct one toward living a good life. Therefore, a sense of purpose in life is distinct from the sense of purpose one feels during everyday goal-oriented tasks like grocery shopping because it acts as an overarching meta-purpose.
What this means is that it is a purpose that shapes all other purposes in alignment with an idea of the good. For example, if one’s life-purpose is heavily governed by a commitment to the flourishing of one’s children, one’s goals while grocery-shopping may be shaped by this overarching goal, moderating the type of foods one chooses to buy.
Therefore, the function of life-purpose is regulative. It curbs our short term desires/ hedonic purposes in order to align our actions in accordance with a conception of the good.
To again recap, I first established that the purpose of life-purpose is to direct one toward a conception of a good life. I then established that life-purpose has a regulatory function. Since both its purpose and function are morally regulative, life-purpose can also be called, “moral purpose.”
Aristotle refers to the concept of moral purpose when he states: Character is that which reveals moral purpose, exposing the class of things a man chooses or avoids. Aristotle’s virtue ethics places a strong emphasis on character development through individual will-power.
I want to pose a sociological counterbalance to Aristotle’s existentialism. In other words, I want to go deeper into the concept of moral purpose by demonstrating its social basis.
Sociologically, the concept of morality is strongly rooted in the work of Emile Durkheim. Similar to Aristotle, Durkheim makes a link between morality and happiness:
But it appears fairly certain that happiness is something besides a sum of pleasures. Pleasure is local; it is a limited affection of a point in the organism or conscience. In short, what happiness expresses is not the momentary state of a particular function, but the health of physical and moral life in its entirety.
For Durkheim, making fleeting pleasures one’s primary purpose is to live in a constantly unsatisfied anomic state of unregulated desire:
Unlimited desires are insatiable by definition and insatiability is rightly considered a sign of morbidity. Being unlimited, they constantly and infinitely surpass the means at their command; they cannot be quenched. Inextinguishable thirst is constantly renewed torture. To pursue a goal which is by definition unattainable is to condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness.
Although complete happiness is a goal that is unattainable, the goal of eudemonia is a distinct pursuit since it is the end at which all things aim. The pursuit itself is the fulfillment of eudemonia, not an end-goal.
Although Aristotle and Durkheim share a comparable definition of happiness, Durkheim is a helpful tool for getting at the social source of moral purpose, distinct from its manifestation through individual willing. In other words, Durkheim helps us understand the types of social environments that facilitate moral purpose.
Durkheim states, “for the sentiment of duty to be fixed strongly in us, the circumstances in which we live must keep us awake.” He places emphasis on the importance of strong social bonds that facilitate a sense of duty. Examples include religious life (in traditional contexts) and one’s occupational group (in modern contexts). Durkheim states:
…when community becomes foreign to the individual, he becomes a mystery to himself, unable to escape the exasperating and agonizing question: to what purpose?
For Durkheim, moral purpose is bound up with community life.
Put simply, purpose means having a goal that regulates individual action, in accordance with the values of a broader social environment.
How to Build a Sense of Purpose
These days, we’re always being told to find our passion. I think this is pretty bad advice.
It’s like telling someone who is unhappy to simply “find happiness”. If you’re trying to find your passion in a fog of purposelessness, you’re likely going to stumble around in a directionless haze, tormented by frustration.
Lacking purpose is an issue for many groups including the elderly, retirees, veterans, former high-level athletes, recent graduates, or those going through a mid-life crisis.
Erik Erikson described this phenomenon as the conflict of identity vs. role confusion, experienced in adolescence. I would go further than Erikson and argue this is not just an adolescent issue, but a universal issue that can be experienced at any age. Our sense of self is influenced by our social roles, so any kind of major life transition can provoke an identity crisis, affecting our sense of purpose.
So what is the antidote to purposelessness? Make yourself useful!
In theory, it sounds easy. It’s not too hard to find someone needing help. The problem is that you can’t be useful to anyone else if you’re not being useful to yourself first. So here is step one:
Be useful to yourself. Take care of your basic needs. organize the clutter in your physical environment and the chaos in your day-to-day life. Prioritize your sleep, nutrition, and exercise. If all of this sounds overwhelming, start small. As Jordan Peterson says, “Clean your damn room!” But as he also says, “Cleaning up your room involves cleaning up far more than your room.” Doing something useful for yourself is the first step in reorienting yourself amidst the mental fog of purposelessness. As the fog begins to thin out, you can start to see beyond yourself. This leads to step two:
Be useful to your family or close friends. Once you’re adequately useful to yourself and can help from a place of genuine giving, you can be useful to others close to you. I mention “genuine giving” because many people try to be useful to others without addressing their own needs first. This often results in codependent relationships where you do things for others to fill a lack of self-esteem in yourself. It is an experience of toxic shame where we constantly feel the need to prove ourselves and receive external validation. Once you’ve worked through these personal issues and can engage in close interpersonal relationships based on genuine heartfelt giving, the next step is this:
Be useful to the broader society. Once you’ve addressed your personal needs and can be of service to those closest to you, you can be useful to the broader society. This may happen in various ways. You can be useful in your work, volunteer roles, leisure activities, or even as an activist contributing to some form of social change. The key is that your way of contributing fits your unique personal strengths. Misalignment between your strengths, values, and interests can hinder your level of usefulness and the resulting level of purpose you feel toward the role. Finding alignment between your abilities and your role requires first knowing your strengths and cultivating them.
Since I recently turned thirty, I can say this is the greatest lesson I’ve learned during my twenties. Throughout the past decade of post-secondary education, I’ve had to constantly adjust the focus of my sociological studies to keep the purpose alive.
In the beginning, it was hard to imagine how sociology could be useful beyond the walls of academia, but that didn’t matter at the time. As in step one (be useful to yourself), sociology helped me make sense of the world, improved my critical thinking skills, and built my knowledge of history, politics, and human behavior. I learned how to write, how to present, and how to conduct myself in a professional environment.
Studying sociology was useful for me, but once I started my doctoral program, I questioned whether this was enough. It was hard to see how theorizing about “modernist discourses in a post-structural context” was useful to the broader world. Social theory often turns into an intellectual game of 3D chess played among career academics creating ever-new cleverly articulated problems that may or may not have any relation to the world outside the ivory tower. Luckily, I learned a lot while becoming skillful in the art of intellectual language games, but I had only been useful to myself.
After the first year of my doctoral program, my purpose became foggy. I asked myself, “What is the purpose of a university?” I knew the answer had to be something beyond self-enrichment, but I had become so entangled in theoretical jargon, I couldn’t even come up with a real problem to study. Here is an embarrassing excerpt from my original dissertation proposal draft:
“I will address the cultural meaning of technology in the context of recent developments in prosthetic technologies…. Building on the calls for a sociology of impairment that goes beyond the impairment/ disability dualism, while remaining critical of technological progress by engaging in a sociology of the prosthetic in order to consider the cultural meaning of technological enhancement for bodies marked as impaired.”
I was deep in the fog and couldn’t connect my own skills and interests to a broader social need. If you’ve been following my blog, you may know by now that I have come a long way since then. By the end of my second year, I began reading war memoirs and discovered that many veterans are having serious issues adjusting to civilian life. They were struggling to find purpose in a world where they no longer feel useful. This was the moment I knew what I needed to study. I could make myself useful by shedding light on this important issue.
Shortly after discovering a renewed sense of purpose, I started this blog. It has served as a way to work through ideas in dialogue with non-sociologists, helping me keep my focus relevant and in touch with real issues.
Since graduating three years ago, I’ve learned how to be useful in therapeutic contexts, working directly with individuals who suffer from an addiction. As I continue learning and practicing, hopefully, my usefulness grows, fueling a sense of purpose.
I never expected to end up in the addictions field. Simply trying to find a passion was not enough. I had found a passion for sociology but needed to rethink my usefulness to maintain the passion.
If you have lost your passion for something or are struggling to regain a sense of purpose after a major life transition, consider how you can make yourself useful to yourself, your family, and the broader society.
As Emerson states, “The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful…”. When you put happiness first, you find disappointment. When you put usefulness first, happiness follows.
A Sense of Purpose Can Save Your Life
“If you try to do only for yourself, you’ll only get so far in life. If you reach out to touch other people, you can fix your own soul.“ Bryan A. Wood
This idea was inspired by a comment from a fellow blogger who said this philosophy saved his life. He writes:
…once I’ve accepted that my life is fundamentally expendable, no longer worth living, I get on with it and do what I can, each act of generosity makes me feel better about myself, rebuilds my confidence if not my validity, sometimes it’s a long hike, a very long time alone.
when a caller at a distress centre where I volunteered asked once if I had found my own reason for living after my own bouts with myself, I answered that maybe it was to be there to help him, where would he be if I weren’t? I think that helped us both.
I’ve encountered this same sentiment of salvation through service in my interviews with Canadian veterans of Afghanistan. Upon leaving the military, one veteran stated:
You lose the sense that you are serving your country. Serving your country tends to be an undervalued activity, but it is one that veterans have embraced. Unlike any other profession, they put their life on the line. What they are looking for is something like what they just left, and that doesn’t exist anymore, so that’s why so many people don’t actually leave the military; they go to the reserves or they go into organizations that deliver projects to the military or they go on as trainers.
This individual stated that his step-son who also served in the Canadian Forces valued service and that although he embraced the value of his generation of making a lot of money in the banking industry, his heart was in public service and he spent a great deal of his spare time serving his military reserve-unit.
With service comes a sense of contribution. Therefore, losing the community one served creates a need to regain a sense of contribution. As one veteran states: “no one tells us, ‘hey, you’re still worthy of making a contribution.'” Facilitating social environments that give veterans the opportunity to apply their skills in civilian professions allows them to potentially regain a sense of service, reducing the risk of suicide in this population.
People die by suicide because of a sense of thwarted belonging and a perceived sense of “burdensomeness“ as discussed by Thomas Joiner. Therefore, even individuals who belong to a supportive group and are surrounded by loved ones may still be at risk of suicide of they feel like a burden to these people. The opposite of burdensomeness is the sense of meaning and purpose that comes with contribution/ service to a cause larger than oneself. A sense of meaning through service provides psychological resilience amidst the darkest states of suffering.
Conclusion
A sense of purpose means finding a sense of commitment to a goal or cause beyond yourself. When you lack a sense of purpose, you feel lost, unmotivated, and have difficulty finding meaning in life. Addictions are a common way to cope in the short term, compounding the issue in the long term.
If you are lacking a sense of purpose, it might be helpful to consider ways to make yourself useful. This does not necessarily mean waiting until you have advanced skill-sets. You can simply start by being useful to yourself and those around you.
by Steve Rose | Apr 19, 2018 | Veterans in Transition
Having experienced the intense training, sense of mission, and communal bond offered by the military, many of the veterans I spoke with during my research had some profound insights on life.
Veterans can teach us a great deal about the meaning of purpose, leadership, work ethic, community, and meaning.
Throughout my research, their insights transformed the way I look at the world, so I thought it might be helpful to pass along their messages here.
Lessons on Purpose
We need to stop sleepwalking through life and build a strong sense of purpose.
In the military, members experience a high level of communal purpose. This sense of communal purpose and belonging offered in the military is unparalleled in civilian life. As one veteran states:
“We are all in the same spot, eating the same shitty ration pack food, getting the occasional phone call home, but not minding it because we were all in the same boat, we know that it could be any of us at any time and suddenly everything is everyone’s, and for that moment in your life it’s true communal living, the closest you can ever get to pure altruism.”
Sociologically, altruism means a high level of social integration. This is common in communal contexts where each person depends on the group, taking on group identity. As another veteran states:
It’s not a job, we’re always military…. I miss being in the forces every day, it’s who I was…. My team kept me going.”
This sense of group identity is not simply symbolic. Members are not bound by flags, uniforms, or titles alone. It’s what these things represent that matters: how you contribute to the larger group.
Military group identity is about your role within a larger system where everyone depends upon on one another. As written in Memoirs of an Outlaw: Life in the Sandbox:
“We had relied on one another to have our backs and would have given our lives to protect the others. We had built a relationship that was stronger than just rank: we were a family, a brotherhood, sewn together by trust, respect, blood, tears, and sweat. Everything we had built together was slowly being torn apart.”
During the transition, veterans become individuals again. By this, I mean the need to rebuild a sense of individual purpose; an identity outside the group.
The difficulty here is that humans are not wired to simply rebuild an identity in isolation. We can have a sense of our own unique abilities, values, and interests, but without a way to connect these things with a larger group, we feel isolated and lost.
Veterans may have a sense of their unique individual skills, but struggle with how to apply them in a civilian context. As a veteran states:
What do I do now? everybody’s kinda sleepwalking through life here, there’s no purpose, nobody stands for anything, life seems very shallow after that.
Having experienced life in a highly altruistic military context, veterans see the world through a different lens. This lens can help us critically reflect on our social world and what it means to have a sense of purpose.
If you’re lacking a sense of purpose, feeling like you’re sleepwalking through life, consider the quality of your social environment.
Are you working in a toxic individualistic culture marked by little regard for the larger group? As Simon Sinek states:
“We are drawn to leaders and organizations that are good at communicating what they believe. Their ability to make us feel like we belong, to make us feel special, safe and not alone is part of what gives them the ability to inspire us.”
We are the best version of ourselves when we connect our individual skills, values, and interests with something larger than ourselves. A sense of purpose is forged in the interaction between the individual and society. This sense of reciprocal contribution matters, but is often lacking. Rather than simply looking inward, we need to look both inward and outward.
How are your social environments facilitating or blocking a sense of communal purpose?
How can you operate within your social environments more effectively to contribute to a healthy culture of trust and common purpose?
If you find yourself in a highly toxic social environment, how might you draw personal boundaries, remove yourself, or perhaps find a better social environment?
Lessons on Leadership
Forget the outdated stereotype of the docile soldier who only follows orders. Contemporary military strategy requires leadership capacity throughout the chain of command.
The concept of the “Strategic Corporal” has been developed to describe the increased level of responsibility given to individuals on these lower levels of the chain of command in recent military operations.
In their early 20s, a serving member may be given far more responsibility than the average civilian will gain in a lifetime. They are at the forefront of implementing Canada’s foreign policy, making decisions under strict legal regulations and global scrutiny.
They must act, despite the risk and high-pressure conditions. Shirking responsibility can have fatal consequences. Civilian employers can learn a great deal from a service member’s version of leadership.
All too often I encounter the idea that the military promotes blindly following orders, rigid conformity, and a dictatorship style of leading.
This is understandable since most people nowadays don’t have any contact with the military world and likely don’t have close relationships with those who have served.
Before listening to the experiences of several Canadian Veterans throughout my research, I had similar prejudices.
Here I will dispel these myths about military leadership and highlight what we can learn from it. But this does not mean it is perfect. Since the military functions in high-pressure political contexts, it brings out the worst and the best in individuals.
When leadership fails, it fails hard; but when it succeeds, it far surpasses any Fortune 500 company in terms of its functional efficacy and capacity to create a meaningful work environment. This is particularly the case regarding life on deployment.
Besides a few horror stories I heard regarding career-obsessed officers and bureaucratic ineffectiveness, here are some of the valuable lessons I’ve learned from ground-level service-members who participated in operations in Afghanistan.
“Hiring a veteran” is not an act of charity. Organizations that claim they “hire veterans” in the same way they make vague PR statements about “going green” are missing the point.
The Real Meaning of a Mission Statement
We’re all familiar with the stuffy and stale company mission statements: vague, jargon-laden, and neglected.
Barnes and Noble is another typical example with their vague aspiration: “to operate the best specialty retail business in America, regardless of the product we sell.” Mission statements need to be actionable missions, not PR statements.
Veterans know the true value of a mission. When asked about their motivation in combat, the most common answer I received was to get the mission done and to do it while keeping themselves and those around them alive.
Missions in combat are not statements of vague idealistic philosophical aspirations, they are practical, specific, are held in high regard due to the operational importance of group integration.
Mission statements should be specific, able to guide everyday practice, and function as an integrating force that a great leader draws upon an exemplifies to rally a team toward a common cause.
Rather than robotically following a mere series of orders, good missions provide an overarching sense of collective purpose that makes the smaller tasks meaningful.
Strategic Adaptability
Several Veterans I spoke with served in small remotely posted units, as part of the light infantry. Distinct from the old chessboard “clash of nations,” the contemporary battlefield is highly ambiguous. Fatal attacks are a constantly looming threat of landmines, IEDs and an enemy who blends in with the general population are a few examples.
In addition, Veterans have had to adapt to the extreme conditions of a military deployment. One Veteran I spoke with said that working in the baking industry afterward seemed far more rigid and uniform than his dynamic experience leading a combat unit.
The need for strategic adaptability in a constantly changing battlefield produces dynamic leaders throughout the ranks. Battled conditions and market conditions are mirroring each other to a degree. Distinct from the stereotype of perpetually punitive drill-instructor, military operations develop adaptive skills and the ability to motivate a team amidst the constant uncertainty of life on deployment.
The Value of Service
The common theme amongst the Veterans I spoke with regarding their experience with/ as great leaders is that great leaders have this pastoral quality.
Soldiers in combat don’t take bullets for one another because they were instructed to do so by senior management; they do it because of their passionate commitment to their unit. The ideal leader is someone who demonstrates passionate commitment, care, and service by example.
Veterans know about leadership at a deep level because it is so fundamentally essential in the life or death conditions of military operations. This deep understanding makes them highly valuable to civilian organizations.
Veterans are like “military alumni” who have graduated with, an MBA in enduring adversity and a PhD in resourcefulness, as Steven Pressfield states. Veterans know the meaning of a mission, the function of “strategic adaptability,” and the value of “service.” In other words, they deeply understand the attributes of a great leader.
Lessons on Civilian Life
Many of us may believe that life in the military would feel like an iron cage, constraining our freedom to live the lives we want, but throughout my research, I have found that Veterans often see civilian life in this way.
Although the military provides a much higher level of social regulation, it’s the high level of unregulated consumerism in civilian life that feels like the iron cage, preventing individuals from living more meaningful lives.
Sociologists have been critiquing this modern phenomenon since the 19th century in Weber’s description of the spirit of capitalism, Marx’s critique of economic capital, and Durkheim’s theory of anomic suicide from unregulated consumption.
The main critiques are that there is too much emphasis on trivial issues, a sense that the West is cut off from the deep suffering from injustices experienced throughout the world, and that modern capitalist societies have a lack of social solidarity based in a sense of loyalty and interdependence. Speaking to the first two issues, one Veteran states:
“It’s hard to care about things you should care about in civilian life.”
Another states:
“There was just an overwhelming sense that nothing mattered”
Bryan Wood mirrors this sentiment in his memoir, Unspoken Abandonment. After witnessing the profound tragedy of war, his sense of what mattered in life was uprooted. Referring to the conversations of co-workers he states:
“I couldn’t believe the kind of silly bullshit these people thought mattered in life. I couldn’t believe I once thought these same things were important.”
Another states:
“Everything’s amazing here and people are still miserable; now try making friends with those people.”
In addition to the sense of triviality and disconnect, Veterans also offer strong critiques of consumer individualism. As an individual I spoke with states:
“Once we are done our tour, once we leave, we are thrown back into our Canadian society where we are back to dog-eat-dog competition, individualism and materialism, and even if suffering from PTSD or difficulty with adjusting to life back in Canada, we would rather redeploy on a dime and get back to that balance that being in combat brings, that leveler of us all.”
Another states:
“The bond is very strong between service-people and there’s a lot of importance placed on relationships as soon you join a team everybody will intuitively connect as much and as fast as they can with people around them, and that would actually freak out my civilian counterparts.”
Veterans often return to civilian life unable to find meaning in the modern rat-race and miss the strong interpersonal bonds of loyalty and interdependence found within their unit.
Although the military may look like an iron cage, we need to consider how civilian life’s invisible constraints keep us from living more meaningful lives.
When the things we own begin to own us, we lose sight of what really matters.
Lessons on Self-Actualization
Abraham Maslow said self-actualization is “to become everything that one is capable of becoming,” which sounds very similar to the old U.S army recruitment slogan, “Be All (That) You Can Be.”
My interviews with Canadian Veterans of Afghanistan support the idea that the military can facilitate self-actualization; the problem is that this can often contribute to issues among individuals leaving the military who are unable to maintain this high level of self-actualization due to the relative lack of self-actualizing institutional supports in civilian life.
The concept of self-actualization has been overly individualized and we need to recognize that it can only be achieved by engaging with the world rather simply thinking and reading self-help books.
Do an image search of “self-actualization” and you will see a common theme of solitary individuals, usually on mountain peaks. Distinct from the image of liberated mountain meditators, the military is a prime example of an institution that can facilitate self-actualization, particularly among those who were able to put their training into practice.
The regimented communal structure of the military contributed to an elite mentality that tested personal limits, pushing individuals to expand their skills as they took on high levels of responsibility. A former service-member told me:
“There were rules to the army, there was a reason for people to do better and to be better.”
Another characterized this elite mentality in the following statement:
“I was just another loser. I went from being the guy who the governor of Kandahar calls when he needs to talk to people who are important on our side to being another schmuck who likes to throw his socks next to the hamper, puts his feet up on the table, and kind of wants to sleep and just do nothing while he’s on leave.”
The military not only motivated individuals to do better and to be better, but it also provided a mission and a sense of purpose often lacking in civilian life.
Self-actualization requires more than solitary introspection. Self-actualization happens by doing.
Lessons on Adversity
The phrase, “don’t sweat the small stuff” really takes on a new meaning to someone who can say, “at least I’m not being shot at,” when they’re having an off-day.
Enduring the constant risk of mortar attacks and IED strikes, witnessing extreme poverty, and having to perform at peak levels for long hours in 140°F heat are some of the adversities serving members face.
In the civilian world, “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff” is a book people keep in their drawer to remind themselves that the world is not going to end when the copier gets jammed.
Despite the daily reminders, it is difficult to truly internalize this maxim unless you’ve seen adversity. Serving members coming back from Afghanistan have witnessed more adversity than most individuals in comfortable developed Western nations can ever imagine.
Civilian employers can learn from the impact of adversity on the veteran’s ability to focus on what matters. As Steve Pressfield states
“The returning warrior may not realize it, but he has acquired an MBA in enduring adversity and a Ph.D. in resourcefulness, tenacity and the capacity for hard work.”
How does a veteran successfully reintegrate into civilian life? One answer to this question may lie in the warrior ethos.
The warrior ethos is an existential outlook that embraces the warrior virtues of selfless commitment and perseverance in the face of adversity. The U.S. Army embodies these virtues in its Warrior Ethos creed:
I will always place the mission first.
I will never accept defeat.
I will never quit.
I will never leave a fallen comrade.
In The Warrior Ethos, Steven Pressfield defines the ethos as a sense of honor gained through the virtue of selflessness, toughness, and the desire to excel. Selflessness, he says, is the absolute core of the warrior ethos. He illustrates the virtue of selflessness in the following story:
Plutarch asked, “Why do the Spartans punish with a fine the warrior who loses his helmet or spear but punish with death the warrior who loses his shield.” Because helmet and spear are carried for the protection of the individual alone, but the shield protects every man in the line.
Along with the virtue of selflessness, the willingness to embrace adversity is also a central virtue for the warrior ethos.
In The Unforgiving Minute, Crag Mullaney illustrates this virtue in a chant he recalls from his training at West Point:
“If it ain’t raining, we ain’t training’; you gotta love being cold wet and miserable. Love the suck men, love the suck.”
Civilians often don’t understand why anyone would want to plunge themselves into such harsh conditions, especially since military service is completely optional.
The civilian world—far from a warrior culture—values luxury and comfort, the pursuit of individual goals, and success is measured by one’s monetary achievement.
Although monetary achievement is a key marker of civilian success, the warrior’s salary is not strictly monetary. Steven Pressfield states:
There’s a well-known gunnery sergeant in the Marine Corps who explains to his young Marines, when they complain about pay, that they get two kinds of salary; financial salary and a psychological salary. The financial salary is indeed meager. But the psychological salary? Pride, honor, integrity, the chance to be part of a corps with a history of service, valor, glory; to have friends who would sacrifice their lives for you, as you would for them, and to know that you remain a part of this brotherhood as long as you live. How much is that worth?
The military cultivates the warrior ethos in its individual members through elaborate training methods and ritualized behavior.
Once an individual leaves the military institution, the external constraints of a warrior culture no longer direct their behavior.
So how can one regain a sense of purpose and belonging in civilian life? The warrior ethos must be internalized and applied to new endeavors. Pressfield writes:
“As soldiers, we have been taught discipline. Now we teach ourselves self-discipline.”
When one’s war is over, the new battle of civilian transition begins. The virtues of the warrior ethos make veterans highly valuable employees or entrepreneurs.
Conclusion
Although these lessons are learned in the military, they give veterans insight into virtues that are often neglected in civilian life.
Are you sleepwalking through life? Or do you have a vigorous sense of purpose?
Are you trying to “self-actualize” by overthinking it? Or are you getting out into the world and trying things?
And next time you’re going through a bit of adversity, perhaps you can take solace in the fact that at least you’re not being shot at.
These are some of the lessons that stuck with me during my conversations with Canadian veterans.
