A holistic guide to dealing with emotional vampires


Filed Under Relating to People | Sep 1, MDT 12:43 pm

Stopping emotional vampires I paint emotional vampirism with big, broad brush strokes. Most folks place vampirism under very tight constraints. I prefer treating the issue holistically — the people who leave us feeling drained are part of a larger system, and to effectively deal with them, we have to deal with the system that they belong to. That we belong to, actually.

We’re all members of a shared reality; we’re all subject to the same physical, natural, and psychological laws. The emotional vampires we meet are nothing more than the emissaries of these laws. This might seem like a silly distinction, and yet recognizing it can be incredibly empowering.  When you realize that it’s not the vampires that are the problem, but the laws of nature that allow them to exist, you’ll finally be in a position to really put an end to the energy leaks in your life.

It’s not enough to deal with the vampires — you got to deal with the circumstances that brought them into your life and the conditions that made you vulnerable to their presence.

Your vulnerability here is something that is uniquely your own.  Different people have different impacts on each other. Someone that leaves me feeling weak might leave you feeling empowered — and there’s rarely a simple reason behind these different reactions. Not only that, but these personal reactions are easily modified by circumstances.  Your diet, sleep schedule, personal hygiene, health, the environment your in, your recent personal history, all of these things can alter the way the people in your life make you feel.

Since no one has, as of yet, figured out all the rules and laws which govern our behavior and feelings, I can’t quite offer you a silver bullet for your problems. What I’d like to do, instead, is offer you a way of looking at them, a way that will let you avoid vampires and lure angels.

The key here is vulnerability. Knowing what you’re personally vulnerable to will allow you to make better decisions on how to live your life, on who you want in your life, and under what conditions you want to deal with the people you’ve let in.

Since we’re all vulnerable to different things under different circumstances, this will require a great deal of research and experimentation. Here are some tools and exercises that can help you map them out.

EXPERIMENT:

Steve Pavlina has pioneered the 30 day exercise. Basically, you spend thirty days trying something out to see how you react to it. It’s a methodical way of testing different lifestyle changes, and it can help you suss out what energizes you and what doesn’t.  You might find that a better diet might ward off vampire attacks, or starting an exercise regimen, or saying no more often. Once again, different things work for different people.

The Zenhabits forum is an excellent place to share the progress of your experiment. They have forums dedicated to monthly challenges, where people post about new habits they’re trying to acquire.  You don’t have to keep the habit at the end of it; after all, perhaps it just doesn’t suit you. Be open to failing.

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Mimicry, social belonging, and automatic behavior


Filed Under Relating to People | Aug 8, MDT 12:05 pm

Humans have a tendency of mimicking each other in subtle ways; put two people in a room together, and if one of them starts rubbing their nose, the other might end up doing the same thing without realizing it.

No one has provided a comprehensive answer as to why people behave this way, though there have been some interesting studies which have given us at least a partial understanding of why we mimic each other.

Recent experiments, for example, have shown that our sense of belonging has an impact on our mirroring habits:

In one experiment, participants played an online ball-tossing game with three other computer players, and were either excluded or included in the game. After reporting their enjoyment of the game and what they thought of the other players, participants were asked to describe a photograph to a female confederate who constantly moved her foot, but not enough so that it was consciously noticed by the participant. The researchers hypothesized that participants in the excluded condition would move their foot more to match the confederate.

In the next experiment, the procedure was kept mostly the same. This time, however, all of the participants were female. They were excluded from either a group of males or females during the ball-tossing game and interacted with either a male or female confederate during the photo description task. Participants were also questioned more thoroughly on how they felt after the game, such as how much they felt they belonged to the group. The researchers predicted that if the female participants were ostracized by females and later interacted with a female confederate, then they would mimic the confederate more than other participants.

The results, appearing in the August issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, provided strong support for the researchers’ hypotheses. In the first experiment, participants who had been excluded from the game mimicked the confederate during the second task more than other participants. In the second experiment, participants excluded by members of their own sex mimicked a confederate of the same sex more than participants in other conditions. There was also an inverse relationship between feelings of belonging and nonconscious mimicry.

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Afraid to ask for help? Don’t be.


Filed Under Relating to People | Jul 17, MDT 12:31 pm

need help?A recent paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology sheds light on a fact that I’m intimately familiar with. People underestimate how much help others are willing to provide them.

We expect others to say no when they’re much more likely to say yes.  Why is this?

The authors of the paper carried out six studies to answer that question. The first three studies found that participants frequently underestimated how likely people were to answer yes to a direct request for help. The following two studies involved manipulating the perspective of participants so as to elicit the underestimation effect. In other words, the researchers were able to manipulate their participants into being more pessimistic. That’s a good skill to have if you’re a misanthrope.

Which brings me to the last study they carried out. That’s the one that caught my attention. The researchers discovered, while exploring the  source of this pessimistic bias, that help-seekers were unlikely to focus on the social cost of rejection, the price people pay when they turn others down.

Rejection has a price. That’s something worth emphasizing. People, in most cases, don’t relish the thought of saying no to others, because saying no can carry some unpleasant consequences. Now, there are many variables to keep in mind. Context is key. However, it’s a good rule of thumb. Saying yes is often easier than saying no.

What’s fascinating about the last study is that the researchers have, in this instance, reduced the act of helping others to a benefit-cost ratio. People don’t help each other because they’re intrinsically good, they help each other because  the price of saying no is higher than  the price of saying yes.

Self-interest is what motivates people, not altruism.

For cynics, this research is soup for the soul. It points out, albeit unwittingly, that people are not angels. They’re selfish, and their selfishness makes them less likely to turn you down when you ask them for help.

Many people who suffer from depression have a hard time asking for help from others; one of the reasons is that they assume people either don’t want to help or are incapable of helping. In both cases, they are most likely right in their assessment.  People are often incapable and unwilling, but they’ll try to help anyways if you ask them to. Not because they’re good, but because they’re selfish.

Understanding this opens up a new world of possibilities. If you lower your standards, and accept the fact that people are, for the most part, terribly savage and uncaring, you can start milking them for what little good they’re capable of offering you.

And a little good can go a long way. People might not care about you, and they might not be capable of understanding where you come from, but they can do little things which can improve the quality of your life.

Ask for help if you need some. It’s a win-win proposition.  You’ll either get some help, or you’ll make someone feel bad for having to turn you down.