Data gathering: We gather data by controlling where and how thoroughly we focus our attention. The danger lies in not adequately regulating the data flow.
If we refuse to allow ourselves to attend to something, our data-gathering system is said to be overdeveloped. Little to no information is getting in to the executive functioning portion of our psyche meaning we don’t have sufficient data to process. If we hold our attention on one thing until we are emotionally swamped, we have an underdeveloped system. Too much information is getting in, we are unable to sort or prioritize the data and we lose perspective. Obviously, a well-developed data-gathering system is what we strive for, allowing in a beneficial, productive level of data.
What makes data gathering difficult is that our minds leap so quickly to what they think they are supposed to attend to that we don’t realize that there is actually a cascade of little steps that occurs along the way. Let me slow down that cascade of events so you can start to distinguish where you could make changes and take control.
A worried mind tends to react instantly, and when our mind reacts instantly it favors default settings, an efficient and adaptive tendency. When challenged, therefore, the mind defaults to our preferred data-gathering stance. So, if we want to improve our ability to control our defensive system, we have to figure out what tends to be activated within us. We do this by monitoring our anxiety level because each data-gathering strategy precipitates a different level of anxiety.
1) To ignore data eliminates anxiety. No worries. This numb place is very pleasant. We all seek relief here. If we only occasionally pretend that taxes aren't coming due, our cholesterol levels are just fine or those progress reports will just write themselves, we needn't be too concerned. But if we routinely avoid data, our lives will be running entirely on default systems. A pattern of disengagement will emerge. Life seems easier than it is because we are not being challenged by uncomfortable pressure from our world. Existential philosopher Karl Jaspers called this “the hardened egocentricity of the non-involved.” (He had a way with words!) Again, this is the over-developed data-gathering position. We are shut off from life.
2) To be overwhelmed by data creates debilitating levels of anxiety. We freeze up like those poor, dumb deer. We all also spend some time in this unpleasant place. But when this strategy starts to control us, we are better off giving it a close look. Life seems more difficult than it is because we are getting too much feedback from our world about how awful things can be and we lose our ability to stand back and gain perspective. Jaspers referred to this state as “the bewilderment of passion, in a state of radical agitation without the clarity of transcendence.” For instance, new parents often scare themselves to a standstill by trying to read every available book on child raising. Trapped in an under-developed data-gathering position, we are besieged by life.
3) To face life with some aplomb allows us to titrate anxiety to a noticeable but manageable level. We feel some fear but engage in life nonetheless. Luckily, we all manage to get here much of the time. Examples of this powerful place would be asking your boss for a raise despite appropriate trepidation, revisiting the yearly budget with your spouse, or moving beyond your comfort zone by going off alone on a new adventure. Life becomes a rich series of learning experiences because we have a tolerable amount of data coming in. We are participating robustly in life.
The first step in effective data gathering, then, requires us to rethink our relationship with anxiety. We no longer want to simply eliminate it, for it is diagnostic of the current default setting for our data-gathering system. It is also – at a moderate, purring level – an appropriate reaction to the fact that life is difficult. As Sören Kierkegaard described it:
Anxiety is our best teacher. I would say that learning to know anxiety is an adventure which every man has to affront if he would not go to perdition either by not having known anxiety or by sinking under it. He therefore who has learned rightly to be anxious has learned the most important thing.
And, if we can shift our attitude about anxiety to see it as an important indicator of how much we’re challenging ourselves, this new attitude will accomplish an additional important thing. It will lessen our anxiety about having anxiety and replace it with a curiosity about having anxiety. This marvelous emotional switcheroo is made possible by the fact that our brains love curiosity so much that inquisitiveness tends to dominate the limbic system and push aside anxiety or fear. As a result, our level of anxiety will be reduced from what existentialists consider to be a neurotic level (anxiety on top of anxiety – or panic) to the merely normal level of anxiety (simple anxiety – the murmur of being fully alive).
Therefore, counter to what you may have thought, we need to detect levels of anxiety that are both too high and too low. By doing so, we will be discovering which of the two unhelpful stances we have adopted at any particular boundary situation and we will be able to modify it slightly.
The second step is to force ourselves to change our immediate focus.
If we find we are too complacent due to being over defended, we learn to lower our shields ever so slightly to let in more truth. By this I mean, we force our minds to engage the facts that we have been ignoring as we work to tolerate our increasing anxiety. The point is to continue to gather data until our anxiety starts to paralyze us. Then we allow our mind to revert back to its preferred defensive stance until our anxiety lowers again. For instance, if our anxiety is so low about how to spend our unanticipated free hour that we are staring numbly out the window, we will want to pull our attention back into the room and think about how precious the next hour is.
If we find we are too apprehensive due to being under defended, we practice turning our gaze away from the fearful object for a moment or two. Because the mind will not tend to respond to the request to focus on nothing, we learn to give it something else to think about as a replacement. The classic cognitive/behavioral intervention called thought stopping involves carefully visualizing a bright, red stop sign as a distraction. Other strategies include using humor, music, reading, exercise, conversation or even, in some very difficult situations, counting to 100 by sixes – anything that will give us a moment’s break from the hyperfocus. If we find ourselves paralyzed with indecision about how to spend our precious next hour, we may need to focus on the hummingbirds outside our window for a moment while our anxiety subsides.
If we can only initially manage the new behavior of forced engagement or forced disengagement for 15 seconds, that’s fine. We try it for 15 seconds and retreat into the safe familiarity of our default setting. Perhaps next time we can maintain the new behavior for 20 seconds. The more we practice these thought struggles, as with all new behaviors, the better we get at them.
With each glance toward or away, we increase our capacity to tolerate a new level of anxiety. Eventually, our mind develops the skill and trust that allows it to maintain a good, semi-permeable focus – letting in just the right amount of data. We will also learn to act more quickly in a boundary situation to control our focus before we allow our anxiety to be either turned off or turned up. As our ability to select an appropriate level of attention increases, we can rest assured that our defenses are appropriately self-protective rather than subversive – they work for us rather than against us.
Data cleaning: Once an adaptive level of data has made it through our attention filter, we need to be able to assess it for reliability and applicability. The danger in this second step is that we are all biased, meaning we are prone to accepting some “dirty data” that agree with our position and ignoring some “clean data” that disagree. If we wish to have our data banks full of accurate information, we need to surmount our reliance on our biases in order to seek out problems in our data sets. This huge step requires two skills: understanding the role of biases in human development and sidestepping the closed-mindedness of biases with adversarial collaboration. In case you’re wondering why the description of this step in data analytics is so short, it’s because these two skills are covered in detail in Section I of the website. If you are reading this website in random order and haven’t gotten to those articles yet, I urge you to stop for a minute and look them over.
Data analytics: Once the spreadsheet in your mind has sufficient, clean data, it’s time to make some decisions in preparation for taking action. Problems arise with this step because that last sentence is a lie. We never have sufficient, clean data. We humans are always forced to make choices without enough information, meaning each and every decision we make is one of existential faith.
Existential faith is the result of our being aware of the givens of existence in order to base our life choices on an accurate assessment of contingencies rather than magical thinking. Another way to put it is this: when we bravely face existential reality (we are unique creatures responsible for our choices even though we have no idea what we are doing or what Fate has in store for us), we are more likely to have the adult ability to take our lives seriously, hold ourselves accountable, find mastery delightful, bounce back from adversity and have a good social support system for ourselves. Once we accept that making decisions based on existential faith is the best we can hope for, some of our mewling eases up and our decisions will be more robust.
This section of data analytics is short like the last one because every single article on this website addresses the existential faith needed to support wise choosing.
Data use: Since the point of data analytics is to make a sound decision, the entire process would be fatuous if we fail to implement our hard-won choice. Again we are in the heart of existential thought and again there are whole articles dedicated to the skills underlying this crucial facet of data analytics. In a nutshell, what we are looking at here is the will system – using our willpower to initiate actions that we want to enact (our will) leading us toward the alluring future we are dreaming about (our will to power.)
You can see from all the links in the article so far, many, many skills underlie the ability to defend ourselves well. When you combine that complexity with cultural shame around appearances of defensiveness, you can see why all of us struggle a bit to defend ourselves well.
Here is one more little gotcha.
The heart/mind trap
We need to circle back to the speed with which our mind sends us into self-protective mode in order to correct another problematic aspect of unexamined defensiveness. Our minds have been shaped by our experiences to react quickly to perceived threats. This is quite the thing if we are surprised by a snake in the jungle. But too often the level of threat doesn’t match what the brain surmises it to be. Sometimes the skinny, curvy thing on the ground is a stick. Hypochondriasis jumps to mind as an example of over-reacting. When we train our brain to be extremely fear-driven relative to our health, each and every bodily phenomenon can drive us into the arms of internet sleuthing about grave disease possibilities. You can see how this creates a vicious circle of self-inflicted anxiety. Mother worry is another example of brain shaping that can cause unnecessary stress.
If, on the other hand, our brain has been trained to pretend things don't matter, it will be too quick to slam the door on legitimate concerns. You really don't want to whistle your way through one of life's jungles. Your cholesterol levels have to matter to you.
It can be disconcerting to acknowledge that we may have gotten a little wobbly in terms of brain ownership. Therefore we need to be gentle with ourselves when we seek to identify any sloppiness relative to how we are training our brain. Again, anxiety provides the clues for our exploration. After an episode of panic over something that turned out to be a bit of nothing or feeling alarmed when we ignored something we should have attended to, we need to think carefully about where our default settings are coming from.
Our reactions come from the heart. Now, you and I know that this is not exactly true, but, for our purposes here, we can take it as gospel. Our heart is the part of our body that alerts us to danger. It is what we sense when we feel fear. So what matters to our heart will be what causes us to feel fear. What the heart fears is loss – loss of something that matters to us such as health, status, friendships or our children. Where the heart wants to go, the brain will follow.
The heart, however, is superstitious in that it will hyperfocus on the most protective data instead of regarding the whole statistical picture. It’s true that when the stakes are very high, we need to attend to data that can warn us of potential pitfalls. But most of the time, our hearts are so self-protective that we lose our perspective. When we lose perspective, we scare ourselves, and our preferred defense system kicks into gear. The heart wants to avoid pain at any cost and will therefore try to marinate your brain in worse-case scenarios. Thus, sometimes the brain needs to lead. To that end, a wise brain owner will prepare their mind for leadership by practicing all the psychological skills outlined in this section of the website. Every step we take toward building a more responsible present for ourselves is a step toward being more capable of using our defenses wisely. Plus our levels of pessimism, paranoia or obsessiveness will ease as we gain confidence in our resilience, resulting in less need for self-protection.
All that is to say, debriefing after a jarring event with an eye toward savvy statistical analysis will teach our brains how to guide our hearts away from unnecessary pain caused by being either over defended or under defended.
The pith
To recap the process of designing a good defensive system: You learn to control the focus of your mind by first finding where it wants to send its attention. Your typical level of anxiety will tell you where your mind tends to go. If you're terribly anxious, you metaphorically have your nose pressed right up against the middle of the threat. If you're complacent to the point of numbness, you have turned your back on important data. If either of these states describes your level of anxiety, make sure you have eliminated shame and then get curious about how much you can move the focus of your mind. Shift your attention as necessary until the incoming flow of information is balanced between your ability to handle the anxiety and the need for incoming data. Existentialists believe that if you’re a little nervous, you’re probably a lot alive.
Positive behavior facilitates further positive behavior. In this case, because we are calmer about our ability to defend ourselves well, we will feel more confident. With confidence comes expanded boundaries and, ironically, less need for defensiveness. We are able to be more open to input because we feel safe within ourselves.