Is a new high-income job offer worth accepting if it means commuting an extra hour to work? People often have to make tough choices regarding whether to endure some level of discomfort to take advantage of an opportunity or otherwise walk away from the reward. In making such choices, it turns out that the brain weighs our desire to go for the reward against our desire to avoid the related hardship.
In previous research, negative mental states have been shown to upset this balance between payoff and hardship toward more ‘pessimistic’ decision making and avoidance. For example, scientists know that people experiencing anxiety have a stronger-than-normal desire to avoid negative consequences. And people with depression have a weaker desire to approach the reward in the first place. But there is still much we do not know about how the brain incorporates feelings into decision making.
Neuroscientists at Kyoto University’s Institute for Advanced Study of Human Biology (WPI-ASHBi) have connected some of the dots to reveal the brain networks that give anxiety influence over decisions. Writing in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience, the group has published a review that synthesizes results from years of brain measurements in rats and primates and relates these findings to the human brain.
“We are facing a new epidemic of anxiety, and it is important that we understand how our anxiety influences our decision making,” says Ken-ichi Amemori, associate professor in neuroscience at Kyoto University, ASHBi. “There is a real need for a better understanding of what is happening in the brain here. It is very difficult for us to see exactly where and how anxiety manifests in humans, but studies in primate brains have pointed to neurons in the ACC [anterior cingulate cortex] as being important in these decision-making processes.”
Thinking of the brain as an onion, the ACC lies in a middle layer, wrapping around the tough ‘heart’, or corpus callosum, which joins the two hemispheres. The ACC is also well-connected with many other parts of the brain controlling higher and lower functions with a role in integrating feelings with rational thinking.
The team started by measuring brain activity in rhesus macaques while they performed a task to select or reject a reward in the form of food combined with different levels of ‘punishment’ in the form of an annoying blast of air in the face. The potential choices were visually represented on a screen, and the monkeys used a joystick to make their selection, revealing how much discomfort they were willing to consider acceptable.
When the team probed the ACC of the monkeys, they identified groups of neurons that activated or deactivated in line with the sizes of the reward or punishment on offer. The neurons associated with avoidance and pessimistic decision-making were particularly concentrated in a part of the ACC called the pregenual ACC (pACC). This region has been previously linked to major depressive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder in humans.
Microstimulation of the pACC with a low-level electrical pulse caused the monkeys to avoid the reward, simulating the effects of anxiety. Remarkably, this artificially induced pessimism could be reversed by treatment with the antianxiety drug diazepam.
With knowledge of the pACC’s involvement in anxiety-related decision-making, the team next searched for its connections to other parts of the brain. They injected viruses at the specific sites that instructed nerve cells to start making fluorescent proteins that would light up under microscope observation. The virus then spread to other connected nerve cells, revealing the pathways other areas of the brain linked to this center of ‘pessimistic’ thought.
The team found interconnections with many parts of the prefrontal cortex at the front of the human brain, which is associated with higher cogitative function and reasoning. They also noted a strong connection with labyrinth-like structures known as striosomes.
Amemori explains, “The function of the striosome structure has been something of a mystery for a long time, but our experiments point to these being an important node linking pessimistic decision-making to the brain’s reward system and dopamine regulation.”
The team noted a further connection, namely that between these striosomes and another more distant region, the caudal region of the orbitofrontal cortex (cOFC) at the front of the brain. This part is also known to be involved in cognition and decision-making.
When the team repeated their brain monitoring, microstimulation, and virus tracing studies in cOFC, they found a very similar influence on the monkey’s tendency toward pessimistic decision making. Curiously, the pACC and the cOFC also shared many of the same connections to other parts of the brain.
The team was able to generalize these findings in primates to humans by drawing comparisons with the body of knowledge in human brains studies based on magnetic resonance imaging or MRI.
Amemori says, “The many parallels in brain activation point to a common mechanism for both humans and monkeys. It’s important that we have associated striosomes and their extended network with decision making under an anxious condition, and we hope that this study will be useful toward developing brain pathway-specific treatments for neurological and psychiatric disorders in humans.”
anyone else’s brain ever reach that point where it’s like ‘okay that is enough decisions for today. if you behave and say nite nite now, we will consider allowing you to make some decisions tomorrow. as a treat. but right now the quota has been filled. you have maxed out on decisions. hush hush child, go brush your teeth it is beddy-bye time chop chop, no more decisions for u sleepy bitch.’
Between executive disfunction and anxiety on top of ADHD, I’ve had days where I’ve overthought and second guessed my way to this point within a few hours of waking!
It’s a rather loaded idea, a career. I certainly don’t want to be dedicated to my job above all else, the midnight workaholic who forgets the faces of her friends. Exhaustion is not a status symbol. Yet employment is important. I expect to spend around a third of my waking hours in the next decade working at a job of some kind, likely looking at a screen perched over a desk. As I’ve been pondering my (ugh) career options, I’ve found it helpful to keep a few things in mind:
1. Your job doesn’t have to be your work
I want to work on things that are important to me. I don’t have to do that work at a job.
I grew up surrounded by artists; that my work doesn’t need to be done at my job is axiomatic to me. Ask an artist what they’re working on and hear about the hours he spent stitching the wings for the dragonfly puppet or how she’s finally moved on to inking the graphic novel or how they just can’t get the grandfather actor’s theme music to work in C minor. Ask the same artist how they’re paying the bills and hear about tending bar or laying concrete floors or partners with steady incomes.
You can’t define your work simply by your waged labour. If we did this, we’d think of T.S. Eliot as a bank clerk and Kafka as an insurance officer. That false promise, do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life, obscures that nature of work. One of my favourite essays, In the Name of Love by Miya Tokumitsu, describes the flaws of tethering our self-actualization to our jobs:
If we believe that working as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur or a museum publicist or a think-tank acolyte is essential to being true to ourselves — in fact, to loving ourselves — what do we believe about the inner lives and hopes of those who clean hotel rooms and stock shelves at big-box stores? The answer is: nothing.
We have to acknowledge that some jobs are both necessary and emotionally unfulfilling. Even in the aftermath of your personal favourite utopian revolution, someone is probably going to have to clean the bathroom. Similarly, there is worthwhile work that deserves your time—that you may indeed love to do—but that is profoundly unlikely to pay your bills.
Your job doesn’t have to be your work. It’s just a starting point; your career decisions will involve choosing jobs and choosing work. The internet already contains goodadvice about deciding what to work on. I’ll leave with this thought: is there anything you find yourself drawn to, that you approach with a half-grinning-half-wincing resignation? Some project or activity that is kind of self-indulgent and you should maybe avoid it but also maybe you just can’t?1 Think about making it part of your work.
2. You can quit to explore the decision space
One of the best decisions I ever made was to quit school when I was 13. I wasn’t way more productive in my parents’ kitchen than I would have been a classroom. I did, however, learn a lot about the scope of my decision space.
Even as a preteen, I had this urgent sense that I had to constantly be moving along The Path: an inexorable progression from good grades in high school to a university diploma with trailing internships to a worthwhile job and a future of accumulated promotions. To be off The Path was failure, panic, the worst thing in the world.
Yet after quitting school I was off the path, doing not much other than watching anime and reading physics textbooks, and it didn’t seem to set me back. When I decided to return to school, I had a much healthier attitude. I knew I wasn’t a student just because it was my only option.
Do you have to keep trying to pass the MCAT because you wanted to be a doctor when you were sixteen? Do you have to get a graduate degree because school hasn’t trained you for anything other than more school? Do you have to stay in your office because you can’t stand another awkward year learning to get along with a new set of managers? No, you don’t. You have options, too.
If you feel an urgent constraining dread about your career, because there may not be anything beyond the decisions you’ve already made: quit. Get an exhausting job washing dishes and live in a crappy apartment for a year. Seriously. You can go back on The Path later if you want to.
If you quit, you’ll have to come up with a reason to go back, and you might do better for having one. If nothing else, quitting expands the decision space. It may even be one of the best decisions you ever make.
3. The non-work aspects of your job are important
What have you liked about the jobs you’ve had so far? Was it the work you did? Across six co-op terms, the work I did probably accounted for less than half of my job satisfaction. I can sit irritably at a desk and feel equally unproductive on DNA models or database management or image processing.
What did I like? Regular feedback. Multiple projects to juggle. Long to-do lists. Co-workers who laugh at my jokes. Cal Newport argues that the characteristics of great jobs are work-independent things like autonomy and relatedness. I agree: the actual work you are doing at your job may matter less for your satisfaction than the pace of your work day or the office hierarchy.
Think about what non-work aspects of a job are important to you. This blog post by Philip Guo compares academia and software industry along ten useful dimensions; read it and decide if things like external recognition and time flexibility matter to you. Ask yourself weird questions, like: would you rather be off-key as a voice in a chorus or off-beat as the beatboxer on its side? I would rather my off-key note be covered by the rest of the voices and I see the same tendency in my preference for jobs where I’m a part of a tight-knit team. My friend Malcolm, who is a team of one at his company, would rather be the solo beatboxer who can adapt what he’s doing when he slips off beat.
You already know your job doesn’t have to be your work. When choosing a job, know the kind of non-work characteristics it should have to keep you satisfied.
Looking among those (ugh) career options of mine, my thoughts are scattered, yet: I know my quest for good work is separate from my job search. I know I won’t be trapped along a path by previous decisions: I can always quit and explore the decision space. I know I can find a job with satisfying characteristics without knowing the work I want to do. I think… I think I’m even looking forward to my career.
I personally feel this way about sailing tall ships and figuring out gnarly systems biology, while I feel I ought to be working on making people suffer less. I’m trying to hack my motivation, don’t worry. ↩︎
“The turning over of a new year is an opportunity to create ourselves anew. How? The key, I suggest, is in shifting our understanding of the choices we make. […]
The view of choice as a matter of calculating maximal value is assumed in cost-benefit analysis, government policy making and much of economic theory. It’s even embedded in the apps you can download that purport to help you decide whether to buy a new car, get married or change jobs. At the heart of this model is a simple assumption: that what you should choose is always determined by facts in the world about which option has more value — facts that, if only you were smart enough to discover, would make decision-making relatively easy.
But the assumption is false. […] Options can be “on a par” — different in value while being in the same overall neighborhood. If your alternatives are on a par, you can’t make a mistake of reason in choosing one instead of the other. Since one isn’t better than the other, you can’t choose wrongly. But nor are they equally good. When alternatives are on a par, when the world doesn’t determine a single right thing to do, that doesn’t mean that value writ large has been exhausted. Instead of looking outward to find the value that determines what you should do, you can look inward to what you can stand behind, commit to, resolve to throw yourself behind. By committing to an option, you can confer value on it.
When we choose between options that are on a par, we make ourselves the authors of our own lives. Instead of being led by the nose by what we imagine to be facts of the world, we should instead recognize that sometimes the world is silent about what we should do. In those cases, we can create value for ourselves by committing to an option. By doing so, we not only create value for ourselves but we also (re)create ourselves.”
*
Read Ruth Chang’s TED Talk on ‘How To Make Hard Choices’ here [transcript]
Notions of willpower are easily stigmatizing: It becomes OK to dismantle social safety nets if poverty is a problem of financial discipline, or if health is one of personal discipline. An extreme example is the punitive approach of our endless drug war, which dismisses substance use problems as primarily the result of individual choices.
Such a fantastic read on a topic that permeates our health and social systems.
Value is the regard, importance, worth, usefulness, esteem one considers a person or thing. Value is also what sets the bar for consumer decision making. If something is of value to the consumer, and they have access to the resources to pay for it, the sale commitment is achieved.
Get to the point – what is the value you can give, with your goods and services?…
The deep dive in business is the gathering for information, to be ready and prepared for negotiations. Its the knowledge and understanding gained which helps to build confidence, based on awareness.
A key aspect of preparing entrepreneurs for building their business, is the importance of understanding their surroundings, profiling and scenario planning. Its uncertainty that…
Not too long ago an Arcturian being visited me. He gave me advice that I had not asked for… certainly not unwanted advice. As a matter of fact it was information I’d long been seeking.
One thing that until now I’d long been befuddled by, is how to determine higher will from just plain will; there is a huge difference after all. (Higher will involves making decisions that meet us up with the big picture of all that we hope to achieve in this existence, whereas ordinary will, could also be described as whimsical desire, or making rather random decisions.)
Well, the Arcturian being made it clear that though no one approach is 100% accurate in consistently making choices that serve oneself well, to keep in mind that “as above, so below, as within, so without.” Hence, in deciding which approach to take, it’s thrifty to consider what those you most admire would do in the situation at hand, and compare it against the most likely response of those whose actions you often least approve of in similar matters.
Compare them, then measure your response to that comparison.
So it’s all about harnessing the value of exterior reflections. In the end it’s probably that simple. Sounds right on…
Sometimes, there are situations in life when everything feels like it’s coming crashing down.
Things may have been going smooth - but suddenly everything has flipped, and things could not be worse.
You may feel like crying constantly. You may feel like things are getting too difficult and things are too much for you to take on.
At this point, you may be compelled to take sudden decisions.
Here are some things to keep in mind:
1. Do not make decisions based on short term feelings. What you feel TODAY, you may not feel TOMORROW.
2.Talk to people you’re closest to. Mom, best friends - talk things out. You may fear vulnerability, and you might be scared of being judged. But sometimes you need to hear a third person’s perspective, and to get a reality check or advice. You’re not an encyclopaedia - you don’t have all the answers to life. It’s okay to seek them from elsewhere.
3. Write your feelings down. Note down your body changes. Has there been loss of appetite? Are you binge eating? How is this situation affecting you physically, mentally, emotionally? Keeping a record of it is helpful, not only for yourself but also in case you need to go to a doctor.
4.Cry it out. Don’t keep your emotions in. Crying will may not solve your problems but it sure as hell will help at least a little bit to get things out of your system.
5. It’s okay to focus on emotions first and solutions later. You can only identify solutions to your problem if you know what you’re feeling and why you’re feeling it. There’s no time constraints to this - it differs person to person.
6. If anything, seek professional help. Often, life’s biggest problems don’t seem as big as they once were in the past. Having a solid support system is difficult at times and can also be emotionally draining for your friends or family. At that moment, don’t feel shame in talking to a counsellor or therapist - you never know, it could turn your life around.
If anyone is curious what she says directly after this quote:
When one or the other of these thought patterns makes it hard to throw things away, we can’t see what we really need now, at this moment. We aren’t sure what would satisfy us or what we are looking for. As a result, we increase the number of unnecessary possessions, burying ourselves both physically and mentally in superfluous things.
The best way to find out what we really need is to get rid of what we don’t. Quests to faraway places or shopping sprees are no longer necessary. All you have to do is eliminate what you don’t need by confronting each of your possessions properly. The process of facing and selecting our possessions can be quite painful. It forces us to confront our imperfections and inadequacies and the foolish choices we made in the past.
Many times when confronting my past during the tidying process I have been so ashamed. My collection of scented erasers from primary school, the animation-related goods that I collected in junior high school, clothes I bought in high school when I was trying to act grown up but which didn’t suit me at all, handbags I bought even though I didn’t need them just because I liked the look of them in the shop.
The things we own are real. They exist here and now as a result of choices made in the past by no one other than ourselves. It is wrong to ignore them or to discard them indiscriminately as if denying the choices we made. This is why I am against both letting things pile up and dumping things without proper consideration. It is only when we face the things we own one by one and experience the emotions they evoke that we can truly appreciate our relationship with them.
There are three approaches we can take towards our possessions. Face them now, face them sometime, or avoid them until the day we die. The choice is ours. But I personally believe it is far better to face them now. If we acknowledge our attachment to the past and our fears for the future by honestly looking at our possessions, we will be able to see what is really important to us.
This process in turn helps us to identify our values and reduces doubt and confusion when making life decisions. If we can have confidence in our decisions and launch enthusiastically into action without any doubts holding us back, we will be able to achieve much more. In other words, the sooner we confront our possessions the better. If you are going to put your house in order, do it now.
IF MARIE KONDO HAD BEEN ANAKIN’S JEDI MASTER HE NEVER WOULD HAVE TURNED TO THE DARK SIDE
Reblogging both for Star Wars and for genuine Kondo Advice™️
