How to Stop Overthinking—28 Practices

How to Stop Overthinking—28 Practices

Many of us get caught up in overthinking. It’s very common.

We analyze things excessively. We worry too much. We replay things over and over in our head. We ruminate.

It’s a big problem for many people.

In my Traps Test, with responses from more than 600 people around the world so far asking about more than 60 common traps that inhibit people’s quality of life, overthinking is the number-one trap. (See my article, “18 Signs You’re Overthinking,” to determine whether you struggle with this.)

The question then becomes how to stop it.

 

How to Stop Overthinking

Fortunately, there are many things we can do to address our overthinking. Below are 28 practices from which we can choose.

  1. Catch ourselves in the act of overthinking. If we can bring this habit into our awareness, then we can begin reprogramming our brains with more enjoyable and productive ways of thinking. Author Melody Wilding recommends using a pattern interruption technique such as silently saying “stop” when we start overthinking. Or we can swipe our hand to the side, symbolically casting our overthinking away.
  2. Recognize that a key to success in life is taking more action more often. One of the biggest mistakes we make in our lives is having a thought-to-action ratio that’s way too high. Change the focus from problems and worries to solutions and actions.
  3. Decide to become a person of action instead of an overthinker. Enjoy getting lost in doing things.
  4. Recognize that our thoughts are like a dial, not a switch. This insight from David Thomas, author and Director of Family Counseling at Daystar in Nashville, teaches us that we can’t switch off our thoughts, but we can turn the volume down on rumination and negative thoughts.
  5. Practice making quick decisions. Start with small things and count down from three: “three, two, one… choose.” Then go with it. Get used to a faster decision cycle and note the results.
  6. Determine what’s creating fear in us. Get better at recognizing how many of our fears are false phantoms, much like the childhood monsters we feared under our beds. And get better at overcoming our fears.
  7. Focus intensely on something. Listen to music and focus intently on something in it, like the lyrics or the guitar line. Or study a drawing or painting and examine the shapes, lines, and colors.
  8. Learn what our overthinking triggers are and avoid them. They could be certain social media accounts, news sites, or sticky situations with certain people.
  9. Give ourselves a time budget for how long we’re allowed to think about something. Then choose to move on after that.
  10. Develop our confidence and learn to trust ourselves more.
  11. Determine the things that we do have control over and focus on them. If we’re worried about an important upcoming meeting, we can do a great job preparing for the meeting and then make sure we get a good night’s rest and arrive early to set up. Then we can be satisfied that we’ve done our job.
  12. Get better at letting things go. We’re probably placing way more weight on things than the situation warrants. People think way less of us than we imagine.
  13. Change our thoughts into questions. For example, we can shift a thought from “I can’t believe I said that” to “What could I say differently next time?”
  14. Get some exercise. This leads to a reduction in stress hormones and comes with so many benefits, including better mood and higher greater energy levels.
  15. Get out into nature. Our brains become calmer and sharper after we spend time in nature, according to researchers.
  16. Try relaxation techniques such as deep breathing or yoga.
  17. Do things that interest us and that occupy our attention (e.g., fun activities and hobbies).
  18. Connect to our senses. Try the “54321 grounding method,” in which we take deep breaths and become aware of our surroundings and then look for five things we can see, four things we can touch, three things we can hear, two things we can smell, and one thing we can taste.
  19. Journal. Writing our thoughts and feelings down can stop us from ruminating. It can restore a sense of control. Journaling doesn’t have to be formal or structured. We can just write down our thoughts as they arise.
  20. Help others with small acts of service or simple acts of kindness. This is a great way to add more meaning and connection in our lives while also getting us out of our own heads.
  21. Lean into positive relationships. By being with others, we can connect, have fun, support each other, and silence our mental gremlins.
  22. Replay happy memories. Relive good times. Talk with an old friend or flip through a cherished photo album.
  23. Find sanctuary—places or practices of peace that reconnect us with our heart. (See our article, “Renewing Yourself Amidst the Chaos.”)
  24. Go out on adventures. They make us feel more fully awake, alive, and free. It’s hard to ruminate when we’re climbing a mountain or trekking in new areas. (See my article, “Why We Want Adventure in Our Lives—And How to Get It.”)
  25. Bring awe into our lives. How much can we worry when we’re gazing at the cosmos or studying the intricacies of a spider web? (See my article, “The Power of Awe in Our Lives.”)
  26. Engage in prayer or worship. By doing so, we can rise above the immediate concerns of our overactive mind and tap into something larger than ourselves.
  27. Meditate. It can calm our sympathetic nervous system and decrease our anxiety, stress, and emotional reactivity.
  28. Talk to a friend—or a professional therapist or counselor. Getting things off our chest can reduce our propensity to keep thinking about them.

Clearly, there are many things we can do to stop overthinking. The point isn’t that we must do all of them. We should experiment with the ones that are most appealing and see which ones work the best.

We should also note here what doesn’t work in trying to overcome overthinking. According to the research, we can’t just tell ourselves not to have certain thoughts. That can lead to more thoughts on the subject at hand. For example, if we’re told not to think of something, our brains will do the opposite and think about it. Instead, we need to replace negative thoughts with different and better ones.

Wishing you well with it.
Gregg

Take the Traps Test

We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.

 

Reflection Questions

  1. What helps you stop overthinking?
  2. What new practices will you try?

Personal Values Exercise

Complete this exercise to identify your personal values. It will help you develop self-awareness, including clarity about what’s most important to you in life and work, and serve as a safe harbor for you to return to when things are tough.

 

Tools for You

 

Related Articles

 

Appendix: Support Resources

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

Join our community. Sign up now and get Gregg Vanourek’s monthly inspirations (new articles, opportunities, and resources). Welcome!

 

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Gregg Vanourek is a writer, teacher, TEDx speaker, and coach on leadership and personal development. He is co-author of three books, including LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives (a manifesto for integrating our life and work with purpose, passion, and contribution) and Triple Crown Leadership: Building Excellent, Ethical, and Enduring Organizations (a winner of the International Book Awards). Check out his Best Articles or get his monthly newsletter. If you found value in this article, please forward it to a friend. Every little bit helps!

18 Signs You’re Overthinking

Many of us get caught up in overthinking—excessively analyzing something or dwelling on possibilities. We think about some things—mostly bad things—too much and for too long.

It can be mentally replaying embarrassing moments or worrying about an upcoming meeting. Our thoughts spiral out of control when someone mentions out of the blue that we need to talk.

There are two prevalent forms of overthinking: ruminating (involuntary, compulsive thinking) and worrying (fretting about potential problems or imagining bad outcomes).

Overthinking is very common. In my Traps Test, with responses from more than 600 people around the world so far asking about more than 60 common traps that inhibit people’s happiness and quality of life, overthinking is the top trap.

According to researcher Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, 73% of people aged 25 to 35 admitted to overthinking at some point in their lives. She found that overthinking is more common among women, but common for men too. When author Jon Acuff and Dr. Michael C. Peasley asked 10,000 people if they struggle with overthinking, 99.5% of respondents said “yes.” What’s more, 73% reported that it made them feel inadequate, and 52% said it left them feeling drained.

Take the Traps Test

We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.

 

18 Signs of Overthinking

Overthinking can include the following:

  1. having trouble shutting off our thoughts
  2. criticizing ourselves excessively for something we did in the past
  3. having so many thoughts and not knowing where to begin
  4. cycling through possible scenarios in our minds
  5. fearing that we’re not enough and that others will judge us harshly or reject us
  6. frequently wondering what others are thinking of us
  7. assuming the worst and imagining terrible outcomes (catastrophizing)
  8. bombarding ourselves with negative self-talk
  9. having trouble making decisions
  10. getting caught up in “analysis paralysis” and not moving forward on things
  11. second-guessing our decisions
  12. changing our mind often
  13. fearing that we’ll never get better or that our situation won’t improve
  14. mentally replaying awkward moments
  15. getting stuck in negative thought loops and uncomfortable emotions
  16. feeling anxious, restless, or unsettled often
  17. experiencing mental fatigue
  18. having a hard time focusing on the present moment (because we’re thinking about the past or the future)
“While you were overthinking, you missed everything worth feeling.”
-Nitya Prakash, Indian writer

 

Reflection Questions

  1. To what extent are you struggling with overthinking?
  2. How is it affecting your mental health and well-being?
  3. What will you do to tame your overthinking dragons?

 

Tools for You

Quality of Life Assessment

Evaluate your quality of life in ten key areas by taking our assessment. Discover your strongest areas, and the areas that need work, then act accordingly.

 

Related Articles

 

Appendix: Support Resources

“A crowded mind
Leaves no space
For a peaceful heart”
-Christine Evangelou, writer

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

Join our community. Sign up now and get Gregg Vanourek’s monthly inspirations (new articles, opportunities, and resources). Welcome!

 

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Gregg Vanourek is a writer, teacher, TEDx speaker, and coach on leadership and personal development. He is co-author of three books, including LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives (a manifesto for integrating our life and work with purpose, passion, and contribution) and Triple Crown Leadership: Building Excellent, Ethical, and Enduring Organizations (a winner of the International Book Awards). Check out his Best Articles or get his monthly newsletter. If you found value in this article, please forward it to a friend. Every little bit helps!

Time to Check the Path You’re On?

Article Summary: 

How to know if we’re on the wrong career path—or the wrong path in life? Is there a right path? How to decide and move forward?

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Sometimes in life we may wonder if we’re on the wrong path. Things can feel off. We may wonder if we’re pursuing a path that doesn’t align with who we are and our core values and aspirations. We can wonder if the path we’re on is taking us somewhere we want to go.

At the end of all our hard work, all our pursuit, what’s the destination we’re headed to? Is it a worthy one? Is it good and true? Does it represent our true nature, resonate with something deep inside us, and honor the life we’ve been given?

“What is the use of running when we are not on the right road?”
-German proverb

 

Are There “Right” Paths and “Wrong” Paths?

This notion of a “path,” of course, is a metaphor that represents our current direction—in work and in our life more broadly. Evaluating our path naturally raises questions about whether our path is right or wrong. Is that an accurate and helpful way to think about it?

Yes and no.

When we talk about a “right path,” we mean one that aligns with who we are and our core values and aspirations—one that’s taking us somewhere we believe to be good and worthy of our efforts. A “wrong path” doesn’t do those things.

In that sense, there are right and wrong paths. But in reality, things aren’t often so clear and binary.

There are no perfect paths, and there isn’t only one good or right path for us.

Also, we’re not bad, stupid, or behind if we haven’t figured out our path yet—or if we discover we may want to change course.

Life can be challenging, messy, and unclear. We may have changed as a person, causing us to want to head in new directions. And that’s okay.

What’s more, we’re all different. Some people want career advancement. Others want entrepreneurial venturing or creativity. Still others want flexibility and freedom, while some want balance or stability.

There’s a place in life for adventure. For wandering off the path and exploring.

We don’t always have choices about our work. Sometimes there are real constraints and barriers, so we have to keep our heads down and work in what’s available to support ourselves and our families. (We must also be honest and not conflate rationalizations with real needs.)

Here’s the key: it’s critical to stop walking sometimes and take a look around to see where we are and where we’re headed. Is our direction still a good and worthy one or is it time to change? The key is to be clear and intentional in choosing—and then brave and committed in moving forward.

Take the Traps Test

We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.

 

Signs We’re on the Wrong Path

Making a good assessment of the path we’re on can be difficult because we can be on autopilot and not even mindful of the path we’re on. (See the article, “Are You Sleepwalking through Life?”)

Sometimes our view is obstructed by the trees and branches around us, making it hard to see the big picture. And sometimes we’ve been walking a long way while looking only at the ground in front of us without gauging our location and direction. Do we still want to get to where we’re going?

Sometimes we’re reluctant to assess things because we sense that we’re not going to like the result.

“I had fallen into a life that was not what I wanted, and I couldn’t see any way to escape from it without tossing a live grenade into the carefully constructed world I had built…. Maybe I didn’t need to be defined by my achievements and how fast I could get there, but instead by what brought me joy and happiness and inspired my passions.”
-Alisha Fernandez Miranda, My What-If Year: A Memoir

How to know how we’re doing? Here are ten signs that we may be on the wrong path:

  1. Not liking our work or not feeling engaged and energized by it
  2. Regularly wishing we were doing something different and dreaming about working in other fields
  3. Longing to go back and make different decisions
  4. Missing fun and joy in our work
  5. Feeling that our work no longer has relevance, meaning, or significance
  6. Lacking enthusiasm and motivation for our current path and what we’re doing
  7. Living the success script of others
  8. Feeling our life is passing us by
  9. Feeling like we’re living someone else’s life—chasing the goals and dreams of others
  10. Envying people who have summoned the courage to travel their own authentic path (or “LIFE entrepreneurs”)

 

How We Got There

It’s common for people to find themselves on a wrong path—or to question the direction they’re headed. Life tends to have its twists and turns.

Here are some of the things that can get us off track:

Childhood programming. Some parents steer us heavily toward certain paths of their own preference. They may be trying to live vicariously through their children or viewing their children’s choices as a reflection of their own worth.

“…make no mistake about it, well-meaning people around you—friends, family, work associates, and others—
will push you to run someone else’s race.”

-Dr. Nicholas Pearce, professor, Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management

People-pleasing. Maybe we put others’ needs or preferences ahead of our own when we chose our path. (See “People-Pleasing: Why We Do It and How to Stop It.”)

We’re often lacking important context when we make career decisions in our young adulthood. We don’t know what we don’t know. In fact, we think we know it all.

“Oh no! I just realized—I let a 20-year-old choose my husband and my career!”
-anonymous middle-aged woman in a career seminar cited in Douglas T. Hall, “The Protean Career”

We may have stumbled into career choices instead of choosing them deliberately. Maybe we didn’t have a good sense of our options. Or we made a panic choice because we needed money.

When we’re younger, it’s easier to adopt the values of our peers or of society instead of blazing our own path. Early in our career, we often make work decisions exclusively or mostly on compensation, but as we go through life we learn more and more about the importance of other things in addition to that: meaningful and engaging work, good managers and colleagues, autonomy, a chance to learn and grow, work-life balance, job security, and more. Early on, we tend to overweight the extrinsic factors and underweight the intrinsic ones. For many, the intrinsic factors become more important over time. The career ladder is also a social ladder of sorts, with all kinds of social comparisons built in, causing us to choose paths based on ego and status.

An impatient climb. Sometimes we’re so focused on climbing the career ladder as quickly as possible that we don’t take the time to consider which wall the ladder is up against.

Sometimes we make choices based on reasons that don’t hold up over time. For example, we choose based on comparison or a need to be viewed as successful. Or we’re in the trap of caring too much about what others think when making our own choices—or the trap of viewing life as a race and perhaps feeling behind.

Quality of Life Assessment

Evaluate your quality of life in ten key areas by taking our assessment. Discover your strongest areas, and the areas that need work, then act accordingly.

 

The Problem with Walking the Wrong Path

When we’re on a flawed path, we’re likely to be dissatisfied with our life or work. We may feel like we’re settling instead of going for what we really want—or like we’re playing small.

In the end, the biggest problem is that we’re very likely to feel pangs of regret when we look back if we don’t make changes.

“Growth is painful. Change is painful.
But nothing is as painful as staying stuck somewhere you don’t belong.”
-Mandy Hale

 

What to Do When Doubting the Path We’re On

Thankfully, there are many things we can do when we suspect we need a course correction:

Get perspective on the whole of our lives—including how our work fits in with the other important areas of our lives (like health, family, education, hobbies, and travel)—and the limited time we have to live them. (Consider taking this Quality of Life Assessment.)

Tempus fugit. (Time flies.)
Memento mori. (Remember that you will die.)

Question any beliefs about which path to take because of what others think, starting with our parents but also including friends and colleagues.

Press pause on being in “climbing mode” (striving to move up the ladder of success) and dive back into “discover mode” (learning about who we are and what we want to do in the world). Who are we? What are we good at? What do we get lost in? Who do we like to serve, and how? (See my TEDx talk on “Discover Mode” for more on this.)

We can know ourselves more deeply when we are clear about things like the following:

Spend time alone and tap into our deeper wisdom via reading and reflection. Clarify what happiness, success, and the good life are to us—without mindlessly accepting others’ definitions of them. Get clear about what we want and need out of our work.

Do a path check. Ask the following: Does my current path align well with who I am and who I’d like to be? Is it a good fit with my core values? Is my current path taking me closer to the life I want? Think not only about what we’ll do if we stay on our current path but also about who we’ll become. And who might we become if we blazed a new trail?

Determine why our current work isn’t a good fit at this point in our life. Where are the breakdowns? This can help us make improvements in our next chapter.

Recognize that we’re not likely to get epiphanies or clear directions. The way forward is likely to be unclear and challenging for a while. Account for that and give ourselves grace for it.

Recognize that logic and analysis will only take us so far. We should also engage our hearts and tap into our deeper wisdom.

Get input from people who have our back. Have open discussions with family and friends—and perhaps a mentor or coach. Consider joining a small group to air out tough issues in a safe environment of confidentiality and trust.

Get some distance from people in our current work environment and industry. This can help us gain perspective and different vantage points. And it can help us resist some of the social pressures holding us back.

“Change always starts with separation…. maintaining some degree of separation from the network of relationships that defined our former professional lives can be vital to our reinvention.”
-Dr. Herminia Ibarra, London Business School professor and expert on career transitions

Embrace our uniqueness—our interests, passions, preferences, and idiosyncrasies—as part of our identity and part of what’s valuable and precious in life.

Consider taking a sabbatical from our current work, if possible. A sabbatical is an extended period of time away from work, often for travel or study. The Sabbatical Project describes it as “a sacred human ritual for what you want to do differently in life—even if for just a little while.” It notes that sabbaticals can help address burnout and can spark profound changes in people that benefit not only themselves but also those around them.

Learn about and experiment with possible new paths via simple probes. Start with small steps. Be open and curious. There are many ways to run such probes, including research, conversations, volunteer work, consulting projects, internships, job rotations or shadowing, board service, “life design interviews” (asking people who are currently doing work that interests us to learn more about it), and more. Dr. Herminia Ibarra, a London Business School professor and expert on career change, notes that a “test-and-learn approach” is much more likely to be successful than a “plan-and-implement approach.”

Summon courage to change the path we’re on. Any such changes are likely to come with substantial internal and external resistance, so we’ll need to summon our courage to start and to persist through obstacles. Don’t let the fear of making a mistake or choosing poorly stop us from taking necessary actions. Expect a flood of terror and excitement in the process, not to mention confusion and doubt. It comes with the territory. (See my article, “Getting Good at Overcoming Fear.”)

Don’t think we need to get everything right from the outset. Our choices don’t have to be forever. Give ourselves room to try things, assess, and recalibrate. Our progress is likely to be halting for a while.

Don’t waste time and energy on blaming others for the path we’re on. Would we rather be happy about the path we’re on or have someone to blame for steering us astray? Our life choices are ours and ours alone.

Don’t believe it’s selfish to do what we want with our life. Far from it. What example are we setting for our children, friends, or family if we give up on our dreams?

Find someone who’s done a good job of changing career paths and ask them to share how they went about it and what they learned along the way. Sometimes it’s helpful to learn from others who have been on a similar journey with comparable influences and pressures.

Place our career choices in the larger context of what’s most important in our lives. For some, it’s all too easy to overweight the importance of work in our lives while losing sight of other important things like family, health, spiritual practices, and more.

Recognize that the further we get on a certain path, the harder it is to switch to a different one—and that it’s our ego that makes it harder. If we need a path change, it’s better to determine that as early as we can.

Take full responsibility for our lives and the decisions we make—as well as the impact we have on others. (See “The Power of Taking Full Responsibility for Your Life.”)

Enjoy the process of living, learning, growing, and serving. Don’t focus too much on the results we hope to achieve. Results are of course essential, but they’re not in our full control. Better to focus on what’s in our control and enjoy our journey as much as we can.

Recognize that we’re likely to have different preferences for paths at different phases of our life. Sometimes an old path has served its purpose and it’s time for a new one.

Pay attention to the clues that have been left for us in our lives—the signs and signals we’ve gotten from our passions and dreams. What fills us with energy, and what makes us feel most alive? Those are all pieces of the puzzle we can put together in our own unique way.

“What did you want to do when you were five years old?… Don’t give up on those visions you used to have, no matter how far-fetched and unrealistic they are. Investigate them…. A heart-centered desire could be hiding within even the most far-fetched of dreams. Maybe you said you wanted to be an astronaut, but maybe what you meant is the idea of exploring somewhere new fascinates you. Maybe you said you wanted to be a ballerina, but you were intrigued by the idea of putting more beauty into the world. Maybe you said you wanted to be a firefighter, but what you meant was you wanted to help people.”
-Haley Pace, “Before You Climb, Make Sure the Ladder is Placed to the Right Wall”

Identify the red threads in our work. What are the patterns we keep returning to? What projects engage us the most deeply? Which ones repel us? Which groups do we most like to interact with and serve?

Consider several new options. Don’t limit our consideration set to just one possible new path, as that’s far too limiting. In their book, Designing Your Life, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans note that we should never select our first solution to any problem and that we tend to choose better when we have lots of good ideas to choose from.

Stop delaying action. Stop waiting for the perfect moment or perfect clarity. Get going. Think about what we’d do if we only had a year to live. What would we do then?

“For the past year, I had been waiting for something to happen, and it never did.
I was tired of waiting. It was time….”
-Warren Brown, lawyer turned entrepreneur

Consider that our most likely regret will revolve around not making changes, as opposed to attempting changes that may not work out as planned. Consider the cost of not taking action in our decision calculus. What’s the cost of our current course?

Pray or meditate for clarity and guidance. Meanwhile, have faith that we can find a good new path if we persist and take appropriate action over time.

“Chart your own course!… Your life is your art, and I am constantly working to create mine. My business is my passion.… I get so excited talking about it and helping women realize that you can leave a loveless full-time job and create the life you desire.” -Kimberly Wilson, yoga entrepreneur and author

 

Conclusion

In the end, there’s an important time element at work with these decisions. The past is past. The key question is where we are now and where we’re heading. Are we on a good and true path based on who we are, what we value most, and what kind of life we’d like to live, with whom, and how?

We’re sure to face resistance in making changes, but the real question is whether we want to bet on ourselves and a better future or stick with where we’re headed. And we must see that our path is not a solitary one. We must connect it with those we care about so we walk together, support each other, and help each other while having a positive impact in the world. Otherwise, it’s just a long and lonely road to nowhere.

 

Reflection Questions

  1. Do you have doubts about the current path you’re on?
  2. If so, what are they?
  3. How long have you had them?
  4. Is it time for a path check—or for a start in a new direction?

 

Tools for You

Personal Values Exercise

Complete this exercise to identify your personal values. It will help you develop self-awareness, including clarity about what’s most important to you in life and work, and serve as a safe harbor for you to return to when things are tough.

 

Related Articles

 

Related Books

  • Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career (Harvard Business School Press, 2004).
  • Annie Duke, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (Portfolio, 2022).
  • Amy Porterfield, Two Weeks’ Notice: Find the Courage to Quit Your Job, Make More Money, Work Where You Want, and Change the World (Hay House, 2023).
  • Bruce Feiler, Life Is in the Transitions (Penguin Press, 2020).
  • Christopher Gergen and Gregg Vanourek, LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives (Jossey-Bass, 2008).

 

Postscript: Quotations on Our Path

  • “It’s better to fail trying to do what you really care about than to succeed at something else.” -Mark Albion
  • “…surely we can do better than having to look back on our lives and regret that we lived by someone else’s priorities.” -Greg McKeown, writer
  • “Some of us think that holding on makes us strong; but sometimes it is letting go.” -Hermann Hesse
  • “Most people are controlled by fear of what other people think. And fear of what, usually, their parents or their relatives are going to say about what they’re doing. A lot of people go through life like this, and they’re miserable. You want to be able to do what you want to do in life.” -Janet Wojcicki, professor, University of California at San Francisco
  • “I lost a lot of time and wasted a lot of energy by running after achievements to validate myself. It was all about how many things I could have on my resume… trying to live up to others’ expectations of me. It was like living on junk food…. It took me sixty years to trust myself.” -Karin Weber
  • “The most freeing experience of my life thus far has been to… be unapologetically myself, and to stand in my own light.” -Hannah Rose, therapist and writer
  • “If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will.” -Greg McKeown
  • “The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.” -Joseph Campbell
  • “The story of the human race is the story of men and women selling themselves short.” -Abraham Maslow
  • “The first step toward change is to refuse to be deployed by others and to choose to deploy yourself.” -Warren Bennis
  • “In a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.” -Warren Buffett, legendary investor
  • “There is a time of departure even when there’s no clear place to go.” -Tennessee Williams
  • “Humans are creatures of least resistance. We take the road most traveled, or the road best paved. So much of our behavior runs on autopilot.” -Aline Holzwarth, applied behavioral scientist
  • “Every worker needs to escape the wrong job.” -Peter Drucker, management expert
  • “…the sensible man considers his steps.” (Proverbs 14:15, New American Standard Bible)
  • “Don’t just climb the mountain because it’s there. Really think about whether that’s the mountain you want to climb.” -Kim Smith, entrepreneur
  • “She’s the kind of girl who climbed the ladder of success wrong by wrong.” -Mae West, actress, singer, and comedian
“Begin with the end in mind… It means to know where you’re going so that you better understand where you are now and so that the steps you take are always in the right direction. It’s incredibly easy to get caught up in an activity trap, in the busy-ness of life, to work harder and harder at climbing the ladder of success only to discover it’s leaning against the wrong wall.” -Stephen R. Covey, leadership author and educator

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

Join our community. Sign up now and get Gregg Vanourek’s monthly inspirations (new articles, opportunities, and resources). Welcome!

 

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Gregg Vanourek is a writer, teacher, TEDx speaker, and coach on leadership and personal development. He is co-author of three books, including LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives (a manifesto for integrating our life and work with purpose, passion, and contribution) and Triple Crown Leadership: Building Excellent, Ethical, and Enduring Organizations (a winner of the International Book Awards). Check out his Best Articles or get his monthly newsletter. If you found value in this article, please forward it to a friend. Every little bit helps!

The Trap of Workaholism–And What to Do About It

Article Summary: 

Everything you need to know about workaholism (work addiction): its prevalence, signs, causes, and costs—and how to overcome it.

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Many people today struggle with workaholism—being addicted to work and struggling to switch it off or stop thinking about it

Psychologist Wayne Oates coined the term “workaholism” in 1971 in his book, Confessions of a Workaholic: The Facts About Work Addiction. He defined it as “the compulsion or the uncontrollable need to work incessantly.” In 2014, researchers C.S. Andreassen, J. Hetland, and S. Pallesen defined work addiction as “being overly concerned about work, to be driven by strong and uncontrollable work motivation, and to spend so much energy and effort into work that it impairs private relationships, spare-time activities, and/or health.”

According to researchers, work addiction has both a behavioral component (working long hours consistently) and a psychological component (being obsessed with work). It’s a serious problem for many.

 

A Cautionary Tale About Workaholism

Gerald Chertavian grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Lowell, Massachusetts with a strong work ethic. After business school, he moved to London to be with his fiancée. Following a frustrating first job experience there, he was approached with an opportunity to buy into a technology company on the verge of bankruptcy. They had precious little to go on, but he decided to go for it.

The challenges were fierce, but Gerald was committed. For years, he pushed and pushed, until one day it was too much. As he told us in an interview for LIFE Entrepreneurs:

“I looked over the side of my desk in London. It was 2 a.m. and I couldn’t see the ground. It was just black. I couldn’t even see the rug below me. It was like looking into the abyss.”
-Gerald Chertavian

This talented and vigorous young man early in his career could have worked himself to death. It was a stark wake-up call.

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The Value of Hard Work

Concerns about workaholism shouldn’t be equated with a critique of hard work. There’s incredible value in hard work (especially in smart hard work), from opportunities for learning and growth to success and wealth creation.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, there’s another problem: sloth. Many people fall into the trap of not working hard enough and later come to regret it.

Aristotle famously wrote about the “golden mean” of virtue between two vices. So, between sloth and overwork, the golden mean is hard work—ideally work with purpose, passion, and impact. But that’s a far cry from work addiction.

Workaholism shouldn’t be conflated with hard work, a strong work ethic, dedication, conscientiousness, loving what we do, or occasionally working extra hard to complete an important task. These are all good. By contrast, workaholism takes us into the territory of preoccupation, compulsion, and addiction, with the associated loss of self-control and continuation of excessive work despite negative consequences.

If we love our work, that doesn’t mean we’re addicted to it. But if we’re a workaholic, it’s easy to convince ourselves that we work so much because we love it or because we need to when we actually don’t.

Workaholism is also not the same as having an overly demanding boss who piles way too much work on our plates—or as the excessive work sometimes demanded by startups, turnarounds, or crises. Work addiction, in short, is not the same as work overload. (That’s a different problem.)

 

The Prevalence of Workaholism

The prevalence of workaholism is hard to pin down because it’s hard to define precisely and even harder to measure. And even when it gets measured, there are challenges with getting nationally representative data sets.

Nonetheless, psychologists estimate that about 10% of Americans struggle with work addiction. Research from a nationally representative random sample in Norway using the Bergen Work Addiction Scale found that 8.3% of the population there struggles with work addiction.

These may not be huge percentages, but they add up to massive numbers of people. According to Zippia Research, 55% of Americans (55%) didn’t use all of their paid time off in 2022.

Researcher Brene Brown jokes that when they start having support meetings for workaholics, they’ll have to rent out football stadiums.

 

Signs of Workaholism

How to know if we struggle with workaholism? It comes with a number of telltale signs, including:

  • feeling preoccupied with work even outside normal working hours (we can’t stop thinking about it)
  • being the first one in the office and the last to leave
  • not taking a lunch break and other breaks
  • working often on weekends*
  • working more than is needed or expected of them
  • having a hard time stopping work
  • feeling physical and emotional distress when we’re not working, much like the withdrawal symptoms from other addictions
  • lacking margin in our lives and suffer from “time poverty” (an acute feeling of having too much to do and not enough time)
  • sacrificing time with our spouse/partner, children, and friends because we’re so consumed with work
  • suffering negative consequences from working so much, whether physically, relationally, or otherwise.

The Bergen Work Addiction Scale is a psychometrically validated assessment instrument developed by testing 12,000 Norwegian workers from 25 different industries. See the image below and consider doing a quick check.

Source: Clockify, https://clockify.me/workaholism-facts

According to the research, workaholics tend to be status-conscious, hyper-competitive, and achievement-oriented. They have high standards (e.g., must be the best) and tend to be self-critical. Often, they have a strong need for success and external validation.

Workaholics may also struggle with close relationships, vulnerability, and intimacy due to a fear of disclosing flaws. And they may neglect their inner life given their focus on external achievements.

Edward Hallowell writes in his book, Crazy Busy, that it can become a habit so entrenched that it makes you “a slave to a lifestyle you don’t like but you can’t escape.” According to Clockify, a company that helps organizations track how much time people spend working on tasks, the top ten traits of workaholics are the following:

Source: Clockify, https://clockify.me/workaholism-facts

Workaholism can show up in different ways. For some, it may be a standard compulsion that’s fairly consistent over time. For others, it gets progressively worse. And for others, it involves binge-working in fits and starts.

Some people are good at hiding their workaholism from others, knowing that it brings conflict or disappointment, so they sneak in work when others can’t see it.

According to researchers, workaholics often make things harder for themselves by placing more pressure on themselves, making their work more complicated than necessary, and hesitating to delegate work when possible or to seek social support when they’re struggling. They may also be attracted to high-pressure jobs with intense demands.

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Causes: Where Workaholism Comes From

Where does workaholism come from? Researchers have discovered several sources. Here are the main ones:

Childhood causes. Many workaholics grew up with overly demanding or overly protective parents. This can set up long-term behavioral patterns that can be difficult to escape.

Our identity. Author Stephen R. Covey noted that some people have a work-centered identity. (See my article, “Is Your Identity Wrapped Up Too Much in Your Work?”)

In her book, The Gifts of Imperfection, Brene Brown notes that some people consider exhaustion a status symbol and view “productivity as self-worth.” Others have an achievement identity. Shirzad Chamine, best-selling author and chairman of the Coaches Training Institute, has identified what he calls a “hyper-achiever” as one of ten “saboteurs” that inhibit our effectiveness and enjoyment:

“The Hyper-Achiever makes you dependent on constant performance and achievement for self-respect and self-validation. It keeps you focused mainly on external success rather than on internal criteria for happiness. It often leads to unsustainable workaholic tendencies and causes you to fall out of touch with deeper emotional and relationship needs. Its lie is that your self-acceptance should be conditional on performance and external validation.”
-Shirzad Chamine, Positive Intelligence

Emotional causes. If we feel guilty or anxious when we’re not working, it’s easy to numb those feelings by working incessantly. Some people suffer from “productivity guilt”—having a constant nagging feeling that we should be doing more.

Personality factors. Many workaholics struggle with perfectionism, neuroticism, or obsessive-compulsive tendencies. They may have a “Type A” personality characterized by ambition, aggressiveness, and intense achievement striving.

Running from pain. At a deeper level, workaholism is sometimes more about running away from something that running toward the glories of work. There may be great emotional pain, discomfort, shame, or trauma driving it.

“…workaholism is a surprisingly effective distraction from emotional and spiritual problems.”
-David Brooks, The Second Mountain

There’s an interesting question about the direction of causality here. It’s clear that workaholism can and often does lead to significant distress in our lives. But researchers have discovered that, for many people, workaholism is also a response to distress in their lives, such as emotional disturbance or anxiety. In other words, it’s caused by distress but also adds to distress, a double whammy.

“We are a culture of people who’ve bought into the idea that if we stay busy enough,
the truth of our lives won’t catch up with us.”
-Brene Brown, Daring Greatly

 Fear. Sometimes the compulsion to work and work comes from a place of fear—fear of not being enough or of disappointing people. Seen in this light, work addiction becomes a matter of overdoing things to avoid the things we’re afraid of (but too often doing damage in the process).

Motivational factors. If we’re highly motivated by extrinsic factors like financial or status rewards, we can tell ourselves that working all the time will bring us the satisfaction and happiness we crave. (See “The Most Common Myths About Happiness.”)

Cultural influences. Some organizations and even nations have a culture that lionizes work and achievement over other values. People living in different countries can have widely varying outlooks on the importance of work.

“American culture valorizes overwork, which makes it easy to slip into a mindset that can breed success addiction.”
-Arthur Brooks, From Strength to Strength

 

The Problem with Workaholism

Workaholism, like all addictions, can come with a high—sometimes devastating—cost. Here are some of the problems it can cause in different areas of our lives:

Workaholism can contribute to physical health problems, including:

  • cardiovascular disease
  • higher systolic blood pressure
  • insomnia

These are all serious problems. Notably, some languages now have words for “death from overwork” (karoshi in Japanese and guolaosi in Chinese).

It can also contribute to mental health problems, including:

  • higher levels of mental distress and emotional exhaustion
  • chronic stress
  • anxiety
  • depression

Workaholism can lead to relationship problems, including::

  • less time with family and friends
  • more work-family conflicts

Workaholism can have negative effects on our work, including:

  • more job stress
  • greater chance of burnout
  • lower job satisfaction
“Findings suggest that workaholism is related to negative outcomes such as increased job stress, work–life conflict, burnout, decreased job and life satisfaction, and poor physical and emotional/mental health…. workaholism was not related to higher levels of performance or job satisfaction; rather, it was related to many negative outcomes such as burnout, job stress, lower job satisfaction, and poorer emotional/mental and physical well-being.”
-Malissa Clark et al., “All Work and No Play?”

Researchers note that work addiction doesn’t necessarily lead to better performance. That makes sense because we’re all human and have limits. At some point, there are diminishing marginal returns for the extra work put in.

Workaholics may get a short-lived rush from completing an important project, but they quickly turn their attention to the next item on their to-do list, placing them squarely on the hedonic treadmill.

Workaholism also leads to lower life satisfaction and more life regrets. In her work as a palliative nurse, Bronnie Ware noted the top regrets of people who were in the process of dying. The second most common regret among her patients was this:

“I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.”

Her point here isn’t that hard work is bad in and of itself.

The problem is when we let our work crowd out so many other important things such as our health and close relationships with family and friends. By working too much, we’re optimizing for one aspect of our lives (our work) while harming other important aspects.

Quality of Life Assessment

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The Secondary Effects of Workaholism

Unfortunately, the negative effects don’t stop there. There are also secondary effects of work addiction that spill over into other domains.

For starters, workaholism can lead to secondary addictions (e.g., to alcohol, drugs, pornography, etc.).

According to empirical research, work addiction is also related to poor family relationships, family dysfunction, and marital dissatisfaction. Writer John Eldredge likened it to having an affair with his work.

It can lead to neglecting children or missing family events and milestones (e.g., the birth of a child, sports tournaments, dance recitals, graduations). (See my article, “Five Words that Changed Me as a Parent.”)

Work addiction in parents can lead to problems with their children’s mental health. According to a 2022 study of 527 Lithuanian workers, “perceived work addiction of both mother and father was related to higher levels of work addiction of their adult child.”

And what are the opportunity costs of all these extra hours spent working instead of engaging in other worthy endeavors? For example, how can we take care of our aging parents and grandparents or struggling relatives if we’re so consumed with our work?

Also, our communities and nations suffer when many people are addicted to work. How can people find time to build community and participate actively as citizens when they’re working so much?

The physical exhaustion associated with work addiction can also lead to ethical lapses. According to former President Bill Clinton, “Every important mistake I’ve made in my life, I’ve made because I was too tired.”

What’s more, workaholism may be contagious in some workplaces. According to researcher G. Spruell, “Workaholism practiced by even just one member of a work group can suck the spirit right out of the team” and can cause “destructive competitiveness among coworkers.” Overly demanding leaders can create a toxic culture of workaholism in their organization, leading to dissatisfaction, resentment, burnout, absenteeism, high turnover, lower performance, and great personal damage and regret among workers.

 

What to Do About Workaholism

Addressing the problem is difficult because many workaholics are in denial about their addiction (see “Self-Deception: Why We Do It and How to Stop It”)—and because many workplaces reward people for workaholic behavior.

“…work 16 hours a day, and you’ll probably get a promotion.”
-Arthur Brooks, “The Hidden Link between Workaholism and Mental Health”

Thankfully, there are many things we can do to address work addiction:

Track our time. Carefully log how we spend time for several days (or a week). Then go back and review which activities give us energy and a sense of meaning, versus which ones drain us or seem pointless. Consider whether the amount of time we’re spending working versus addressing other important priorities accurately reflects our core values.

Be brutally honest with ourselves. Stop avoiding and pretending. Decide to push past self-denial and face the reality and implications of our choices.

Ask those who know us best. Sometimes, it’s hard for us to see or admit but all too clear to others.

Set boundaries on our work time. Set a weekly maximum number of hours and limit email to certain hours, except under extraordinary circumstances. According to a February 2023 Pew Research Center study, workers with higher incomes and postgraduate degrees were most likely to say they regularly respond to work emails and messages outside of work hours. Though many people are rightly concerned about the exploitation of lower-income workers, it seems that many upper-income workers and managers are exploiting themselves.

Focus on only a few key priorities each day. Avoid the trap of being overly ambitious with expected accomplishments each day. That can set us up for a cycle of stress and overwork. Being realistic about daily and weekly accomplishments can help a lot. (Consider using the Ivy Lee Method: give ourselves no more than six important tasks per day, listed from most important to least important. Then address them in order of priority, and without moving to the next task until the current one is complete.)

Schedule important, non-work priorities. This can help make sure that other important priorities don’t get crowded out of our busy schedules.

Be intentional about time away from work. When we’re used to working hard, it can be easy to become unintentional and passive when we have free time. There’s nothing wrong with chilling out, but if we let it turn into mindless numbing with too much binge-watching or doom-scrolling, it will only make us more anxious and tired. Meanwhile, we’ll have lost important opportunities to connect with family and friends and to do fun things.

“Unless a person takes charge of them, both work and free time are likely to be disappointing.”
-Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, psychologist and author

Think about who we’re giving so much of our lives away to—and whether they’re worth it. In her article, “The Wages of Overwork,” writer and journalist Ann Helen Petersen writes, “Leaders are more than happy to exploit workers’ most anxious or engrained inclinations towards overwork.”

Make sure we’re giving enough time to the important people in our lives. According to research, our close relationships are the most important contributors to our happiness and quality of life.

Address the underlying issues that cause us to seek refuge in overwork. Do the inner work of discovering what’s causing us to engage in overwork and what we’re running from. These insights can give us clarity about the problem(s) we must address.

Be clear about our purpose and values. This helps us focus on what’s most important in our lives.

Develop good habits of recovery, renewal, and self-care such as:

Shift our focus from ego and personal achievement to connection with and service to others. Work addiction is often a selfish and lonely way of life. When we stay focused on connection and service, we can avoid getting trapped by our ego.

Remember our mortality. We will all die, and we don’t know when. Remembering this can help us determine what’s important in our lives right now.

Work with a therapist or join a support group (e.g., Workaholics Anonymous).

Regularly review how we’re doing in all the important areas of our lives. (See my Quality of Life Assessment—which you can set up for regular reminders.) By reviewing each area (e.g., family, health, friends, education, work, service, activities, finance), we can see which ones are neglected and problematic—and then take appropriate action.

“Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling five balls… work, family, health, friends, and spirit. Work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. But the other four balls are made of glass. If you drop one of these, they will never be the same.”
-Brian Dyson, former CEO, Coca-Cola Enterprises

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Coda: The Cautionary Tale

Remember Gerald starting into the abyss at 2 a.m. in his London office after years of overwork? Here’s what happened next:

“Right there, I realized that I wasn’t doing what I needed to do with my life. Then I went home and gave myself grades as a father, husband, friend, community member, and businessperson, and I only got one A—and the A was as a businessperson. I said that’s the last time in my life I’m going to look in the mirror and give myself those grades, period.”
-Gerald Chertavian**

 

Reflection Questions

  1. Are you suffering from or at risk of work addiction?
  2. How is it affecting your health, relationships, and quality of life?
  3. What will you do about it?
  4. Which of the above practices will you start with?

 

Tools for You

 

Related Articles & Traps to Workaholism

 

Postscript: Quotations on Workaholism

  • “If you think your busyness is some kind of prestige symbol, think again.” -Chris Brogan
  • “Busyness is not a marker of intelligence, importance, or success. Taken to an extreme, it is much more likely a marker of conformity or powerlessness or fear.” -Christine Carter
  • “You cannot be really first rate at your work if your work is all you are.” -Anna Quindlen
  • “Overwork sucks us into a negative spiral, causing our brains to slow down and compromising our emotional intelligence.” -Annie McKee, author and advisor to top leaders
  • “No matter how much value we produce today—whether it’s measured in dollars or sales or goods or widgets—it’s never enough. We run faster, stretch out our arms further, and stay at work longer and later. We’re so busy trying to keep up that we stop noticing we’re in a Sisyphean race we can never win.” -Tony Schwartz, journalist, author, founder, The Energy Project
  • “My worry was that I would become addicted to success. It’s a delicate and dangerous zone—the interface between success and significance—to get as much success as you can without getting captured by it, becoming its prisoner.” -Bob Buford, Half Time
  • “Every addiction arises from an unconscious refusal to face and move through your own pain. Every addiction starts with pain and ends with pain. That is why… there is so much unhappiness, so much pain… They bring out the pain and unhappiness that is already in you.” -Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
  • “Human beings have always employed an enormous amount of clever devices for running away from themselves, and the modern world is particularly rich in such stratagems. We can keep ourselves busy, fill our lives with so many diversions, stuff our heads with so much knowledge, involve ourselves with so many people, and cover so much ground that we never have time to probe the fearful and wonderful world within. More often than not we don’t want to know ourselves, don’t want to depend on ourselves, don’t want to live with ourselves. By middle life, most of us are accomplished fugitives from ourselves.” -John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal

 

Sources:

  • Andreassen, C. S., Hetland, J., & Pallesen, S. (2014). Psychometric assessment of workaholism measures. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 29(1), 7–24.
  • Morkeviciute M., Endriulaitiene A. Understanding Work Addiction in Adult Children: The Effect of Addicted Parents and Work Motivation. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2022 Sep 8;19(18):11279.
  • Spruell, G. 1987. Work fever. Training and Development Journal, 41: 41-45.

* We should note that in today’s economy, many people choose to work nontraditional hours, as opposed to the standard Monday to Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Of course, choosing to do so isn’t in and of itself a sign of work addiction.

** Gerald Chertavian and his team built that company, Conduit Communications, into one of Britain’s fastest growing companies, eventually having more than 130 workers in several countries and earning more than $18 million in annual revenues. Six years later they sold it for a significant return and made millionaires out of many of their colleagues in the process. He later founded YearUp, a national 501(c)3 workforce development organization committed to ensuring equitable access to economic opportunity, education, and justice for all young adults—no matter their background, income, or ZIP code.

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Gregg Vanourek is a writer, teacher, TEDx speaker, and coach on leadership and personal development. He is co-author of three books, including LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives (a manifesto for integrating our life and work with purpose, passion, and contribution) and Triple Crown Leadership: Building Excellent, Ethical, and Enduring Organizations (a winner of the International Book Awards). Check out his Best Articles or get his monthly newsletter. If you found value in this article, please forward it to a friend. Every little bit helps!

The Trap of a Victim Mentality—And What to Do About It

Article Summary: 

What a victim mentality is, signs of it, where it comes from, its many costs, and what to do about it.

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When we have a victim mentality, we believe that bad things we experience are the fault of others and will keep happening so there’s no point in changing. We may even feel that the world is against us.

Essentially, we identify ourselves as a helpless victim of negative circumstances. It’s a form of self-sabotage and often comes with an addiction to drama.

When we have a victim mentality, we have thoughts like the following:

Why me? (Again.)
Why can’t I ever catch a break?
Why did this happen to me?
Why didn’t they love me more?
Why don’t they call me more?

We wallow in our misery and feed on the neediness that comes with it.

“I am miserable therefore I am.”
Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries,
“Are You a Victim of the Victim Syndrome?”

We should pause here and note that we all experience hardships and some people do go through terrible experiences, from war, poverty, disease, tragedy, and loss to violence, rape, assault, abuse, and more. Far too many people are victims of violence or crimes.

But there’s a difference between being a victim of such things and having a victim mentality. The mentality of victimhood can be strong regardless of the circumstances. With a victim mentality, someone can exaggerate the extent of harm done, misattribute it (e.g., taking neutral scenarios or ambiguous information and interpreting them as hostile), and/or add to the pain by ruminating on them or blowing them up. This can go on for years, or decades, or even a lifetime unless we break the cycle.

“You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.” -Maya Angelou, poet and civil-rights activist

 

Signs of a Victim Mentality

How to identify the signs of a victim mentality? With a victim mentality, we’re likely to engage in several of the following behaviors:

  1. believe that bad things happen to us consistently
  2. feel sorry for ourselves
  3. believe that most aspects of our lives are negative and beyond our control
  4. feel powerless to make changes
  5. believe that others are generally more fortunate than we are
  6. feel repressed anger or self-pity
  7. focus on bad things and all we lack (what Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy call being “in the gap”)
  8. feel frequently embattled
  9. put ourselves down often
  10. feel trapped in life
  11. take things personally
  12. feel defensive or even hypervigilant around others, expecting to be hurt
  13. often make choices that lead to pain or suffering
  14. blame others often
  15. ruminate over past events and negative feelings while holding grudges and resurrecting past sleights
  16. dwell on negative comparisons with others
  17. endure bad behavior or circumstances without doing anything about it
  18. refuse help when it’s offered—sometimes not even accepting that there may be a solution—perhaps getting defensive or feeling attacked when someone tries to help because it could undermine our victim identity
  19. keep finding and staying with people who treat us poorly—and sometimes rejecting people who treat us well
  20. make excuses and avoid responsibility for things
  21. have a hard time trusting people (including ourselves), sometimes being suspicious of their motives
  22. judge and criticize others in order to feel okay about ourselves—and often dividing people starkly into good or bad categories without gray zones
  23. jump to conclusions about others and cut them out of our lives in dramatic fashion without considering other sides of the story
  24. want our victimhood to be acknowledged and affirmed by others
  25. struggle to see the suffering of others
  26. distrust authority
  27. assume there are biases involved in keeping us down
  28. feel a sense of entitlement
  29. live in the past

“Whatever has happened to you in your past has no power over this present moment, because life is now.”
Oprah Winfrey, media entrepreneur and philanthropist

Unfortunately, a victim mentality can be contagious, and we can attract others who have a propensity to complain and blame.

 

Where It Comes From

A victim mentality can come from many sources. The most common source, according to many psychologists, is childhood. There are many possibilities here, from excessive criticism or having unmet needs to parents who railed about the injustice of life—and how we’re suckers if we trust others.

A victim mentality can be passed down for generations (and exploited by political campaigns and social medial algorithms). It can also originate from various forms of neglect or abuse.

“Many of these children harbor such deep anger toward their parents that they unconsciously desire to remain dysfunctional, as a way of getting back at them. Dysfunction is their way of showing their parents how they have messed up…. These children cannot see, let alone consciously accept, that they are now causing most of their own pain.”
-Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries, “Are You a Victim of the Victim Syndrome?”

A victim mentality can also arise from betrayal, in which people betray our trust (especially repeatedly), or from violence or trauma. These experiences can damage or destroy our self-esteem and make us passive, submissive, or unable to set appropriate boundaries.

The common denominator is significant inner pain and distress.

Take the Traps Test

We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.

 

 

Why People Do It

Why do people adopt a victim mentality? What are the underlying motivations at work? A victim mentality is a coping mechanism (often subconscious) in which we’re actually seeking validation or help from others, albeit in unproductive ways.

In many cases, it’s an attempt to gain attention, love, or approval. In victim mode, we enjoy the attention or sympathy we get from others. Psychologists call this “secondary gain,” a phenomenon in which there are some benefits associated with not resolving a problem, such as feeling pleasure when we receive attention or concern. And it can feel liberating to give up responsibility for addressing our problems by wallowing in victimhood.

We may harbor a subconscious desire to continue the pattern of victimhood because it can bring us attention and keep us in the center of a drama, thereby stroking our ego. Playing the victim can also be an attempt to manipulate people, sometimes coming from a narcissistic personality disorder.

Low self-worth can aggravate this mindset. We may blame ourselves for our predicament but lack the capacity to acknowledge or address it.

Fear is also a common denominator. When playing the victim, we may be able to avoid vulnerability and taking risks.

 

The Problem with a Victim Mentality

Clearly, there are many contributing factors. But it’s essential to understand that having a victim mentality comes with a hefty price, both in terms of our mental health and our life and work more broadly.

In terms of our mental health, having a victim mentality can:

  • drain our mental and emotional energy, leaving us with less strength and will to make improvements
  • lead to frustration, anger, resentment, bitterness, and helplessness
  • harm our mental and emotional wellbeing
  • be used as a justification for other maladaptive behaviors, including numbing behaviors like drinking or taking drugs
  • undermine our resilience, making us less equipped to deal well with tough situations in the future
  • increase our risk of anxiety and depression

In our life and work, having a victim mentality can:

  • lead to blaming others for our problems
  • make us want to withdraw from friends, family, and colleagues
  • result in self-pity and giving up
  • lead us to avoid challenges
  • reduce our sense of agency
  • prevent us from taking necessary actions
  • harm our relationships
  • lower our performance
  • become a vicious cycle in which we respond poorly to tough situations, only inviting more challenges and a sense of futility
  • become an entrenched identity in which our sense of victimhood is pervasive
“Once you have identified with some form of negativity, you do not want to let go, and on a deeply unconscious level, you do not want positive change. It would threaten your identity…. You will then ignore, deny, or sabotage the positive in your life.”
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

Ultimately, having a victim mentality doesn’t give us anything satisfying or worthwhile. And it backfires because it drives people away from us, leading to further isolation and loneliness, which are terrible for us.

Essentially, we’re feeling aggrieved about our lives while we keep shooting ourselves in the foot.

Quality of Life Assessment

Evaluate your quality of life in ten key areas by taking our assessment. Discover your strongest areas, and the areas that need work, then act accordingly.

 

 

The Victim Mentality in the Workplace

In the workplace, people with a victim mentality can negatively affect those around them. When a team has someone with such a mindset, it can:

  • make people defensive
  • damage relationships
  • prevent trust
  • hurt team morale
  • reduce productivity
  • be contagious, leading to a collective downward spiral

A victim mentality is not only an individual phenomenon but also a collective one, according to researchers, with groups falling into this mindset. That can be a daunting challenge for managers.

“…people with a victim mentality are very difficult to handle.”
-Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries, “Are You a Victim of the Victim Syndrome?”

 

How to Stop Playing the Victim

What to do about it? Psychologists note that we learn victimhood—it’s an acquired not inborn personality trait—and that we have the capacity to overcome it.

If we’ve experienced real trauma or abuse, it’s ideal to disclose it as early as possible to trusted family members, friends, or trained professionals, as that can lead to more support and quicker processing and healing. Beyond that first step, there are many things we can do to break this cycle:

Recall that we all experience negative emotions. The key is to avoid wallowing in them.

Develop a healthy view of ourselves and our capabilities—and build our confidence and assertiveness by preparing well for important projects and focusing on learning and developing as we go.

“…what helps victims best is the development of a healthier self-concept.”
-Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries, “Are You a Victim of the Victim Syndrome?”

Stop ruminating on our problems and focus instead on something more positive (like what we’ve learned). (See my article, “What to Do About Overthinking, Rumination, and Worrying.”)

Catalog our strengths—including our knowledge, skills, and abilities—and brainstorm how we can use them to overcome our challenges.

Recall situations in which we’ve overcome adversity and challenges. We may be more resilient than we think.

Change our self-talk by analyzing and questioning our beliefs, disputing the idea that we’re a helpless victim. For example, we can ask whether our identity as a victim is true, and whether our current beliefs are useful or harmful to us.

Stop hanging out with people who are wallowing in victimhood. Spend more time with positive and proactive people.

Learn about the victim mentality and its consequences via books, articles, podcasts, videos, or conversations.

Realize that we still have agency even though life is sometimes unfair and comes with pain, loss, and heartache.

Be honest with ourselves and see a victim mentality for what it is: self-sabotage. Prepare to move beyond it.

Decide to let go of the victim mentality and choose to be happy and thrive.

Forgive others and ourselves and make peace with our past.

Take responsibility for the whole of our lives, regardless of whether we experienced anything unjust or unfair.

“If it’s never our fault, we can’t take responsibility for it.
If we can’t take responsibility for it, we’ll always be its victim.”

-Richard Bach, writer

Be kind and caring to others and find ways to serve them. By doing so, we’ll escape our unhealthy preoccupation with ourselves and our dramas.

“Constructive action is the opposite of victimized brooding.”
-Dr. Robert W. Firestone, clinical psychologist

Engage in regular self-care practices, such as:

  • Exercise, since it helps regulate the chemicals in our brain in ways that boost our mood and motivation
  • Good sleep and eating habits
  • Grounding and relaxation practices like yoga, meditation, or deep breathing
  • Avoidance of harmful ways of coping, such as numbing and substance abuse

Develop a gratitude practice. (See my article,The Trap of Not Being Grateful.”)

Recognize the patterns of when we feel like a victim. Recall the kinds of things that help us break these downward spirals.

Reach out to a therapist, counselor, or support hotline when needed. Options include:

Personal Values Exercise

Complete this exercise to identify your personal values. It will help you develop self-awareness, including clarity about what’s most important to you in life and work, and serve as a safe harbor for you to return to when things are tough.

 

 

How to Help Others Stop Playing the Victim

What can we do if friends or colleagues are caught up in a victim mentality? There are many things we can do:

First, avoid judging them harshly. Keep in mind that they may have gone through great difficulties or even trauma that we’re not aware of. Don’t label them. Recall that being or feeling like a victim can be hard enough without labels and associated stigmas, not to mention blaming the victim.

Don’t play their grievance game. By listening attentively to their tales of woe, we’re enabling them, not helping them. Redirect the conversation to more productive territory. Set boundaries while still showing care and compassion.

Offer encouragement. Remind them of the things they’re good at and of the things they’ve accomplished previously.

Offer help with finding solutions. Ask them what they’d do if they had the power to fix things. Help them brainstorm ideas for making progress, starting small, such as with a short list of readily achievable steps they can start taking now. Help them realize they have the capacity to solve things. Avoid swooping in as the hero and fixing things or giving them answers.

“People dealing with individuals with a victim mindset should recognize that there is a difference between rescuing and helping.” -Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries, “Are You a Victim of the Victim Syndrome?”

Help them gain a larger perspective beyond their own challenges. It’s vital for them to realize that many others are in need or pain as well.

Manage expectations. Quick fixes are rare here. Help them avoid impatience in overcoming the victim mentality, which could lead to them giving up and feeling worse. Overcoming it can be especially challenging because for many it’s embedded deeply in their identity—and has been for a long time. It may be hard for them to see themselves clearly and honestly—and to make the needed changes.

 

Conclusion

A victim mentality can become debilitating if we let it.

Bad things happen to all of us, but we have a choice as to how we interpret them and what we do in response. That may not be easy or fair, but in the end our lives are what we make of them.

“I am not what has happened to me. I am what I choose to become.”
-Carl Jung, Swiss psychiatrist

 

Reflection Questions

  1. Has a victim mentality crept into your mindset?
  2. How is it affecting your life, work, and mental health?
  3. What will you do about it, starting today?

 

Tools for You

Take the Traps Test

We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.

 

 

Related Articles

 

Postscript: Inspirations on Avoiding Victimhood

  • “…an individual’s sense of personal control determines his fate.” -Dr. Martin Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life
  • “Apathy and depression are the prices we pay for having settled for and bought into our smallness. It’s what we get for having played the victim and allowed ourselves to be programmed.” -Dr. David R. Hawkins, Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender
  • “Most people are in love with their particular life drama. Their story is their identity. The ego runs their life. They have their whole sense of self invested in it.” -Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
  • “…even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change, may rise above himself, may grow beyond himself, and by so doing change himself. He may turn a personal tragedy into a triumph.” -Victor Frankl, Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor
  • “The difference between the hero and the victim is the way they react to the pain they experience.” -Donald Miller, business executive and author
  • “…people suffering from the victim syndrome are prone to aggravate the mess in which they find themselves. Strange as it may sound, they are often victims by choice. And ironically, they are frequently successful in finding willing victimizers.” -Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries, “Are You a Victim of the Victim Syndrome?”
  • “While you can’t control your experiences, you can control your explanations.” -Dr. Martin Seligman, psychologist
  • “Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.” -Napoleon Hill
  • “Turn your wounds into wisdom.” -Oprah Winfrey
  • “Self-pity is our worst enemy, and if we yield to it we never do anything wise in the world.” -Helen Keller
  • “A victim identity is the belief that the past is more powerful than the present, which is the opposite of the truth.” -Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
  • “The one thing you can’t take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of one’s freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance.” -Viktor Frankl

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

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Gregg Vanourek is a writer, teacher, TEDx speaker, and coach on leadership and personal development. He is co-author of three books, including LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives (a manifesto for integrating our life and work with purpose, passion, and contribution) and Triple Crown Leadership: Building Excellent, Ethical, and Enduring Organizations (a winner of the International Book Awards). Check out his Best Articles or get his monthly newsletter. If you found value in this article, please forward it to a friend. Every little bit helps!

The Trap of Being Unrealistic

Many of us have fallen into the trap of being unrealistic—of being overly optimistic and downplaying the difficulties we’re likely to encounter.

This is not a new problem. In fact, it’s been documented across the ages. In the 5th century B.C., Thucydides, a Greek historian and Athenian general, wrote, “it is a habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for.” Julius Caesar, a Roman general and emperor in the 1st century B.C., added, “Men willingly believe what they wish to be true.”

The idea of unrealistic optimism also famously goes back to German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. He wrote that we live in “the best of all possible worlds.” Voltaire famously mocked Leibniz’s theory in his satirical novella, Candide. In that story, Professor Pangloss is teaching a young man named Candide that “all that is is for the best” in this, the “best of all possible worlds,” and “everything is right.” After witnessing and experiencing much suffering and misfortune, though, Candide eventually comes to his own conclusion that “we must cultivate our garden” and not rely on idealistic thinking.

 

Examples of Being Unrealistic

Examples of being unrealistic abound in our lives:

We may expect to be able to stick to a diet or exercise plan without having any setbacks.

In school, perhaps we expect to get good grades in all subjects—or to have everyone like us.

When it comes to relationships, we may think they should be easy or effortless, just like in the movies. Our partner should be willing to change to suit our needs.

At work, perhaps we presume we’ll have a great job with an excellent, caring boss and fun, supportive colleagues. Opportunities will appear, and we’ll get that raise or promotion.

When we start a new venture, we assume it will succeed despite the obstacles and long odds.

And when we retire, everything will be easy.

Of course, it’s possible to be realistic in one setting and unrealistic in another.

Take the Traps Test

We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.

 

 

The Problem with Being Unrealistic

When we’re being unrealistic, we get in our own way and set ourselves up for failure, frustration, and self-criticism. We diminish our happiness and strain our relationships, building resentment.

With unrealistic notions, we make poor decisions and cause ourselves more stress. We feel stupid or incompetent if we don’t achieve our goals.

Sometimes, the stakes are even higher. Indulging in unrealistic hopes can sometimes crush our spirit.

 

The Stockdale Paradox

In his book, Good to Great, Jim Collins told the harrowing story of James Stockdale, a U.S. Navy vice admiral and aviator officer held captive for more than seven years during the Vietnam War.

Admiral Stockdale was the highest-ranking U.S. military officer in the “Hanoi Hilton” prisoner-of-war camp in Vietnam. He was tortured more than twenty times and had no rights, no release date, and no reason to believe he would survive or see his family again.

When Collins asked him how he survived such horrendous conditions, Admiral Stockdale replied, “I never lost faith in the end of the story. I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”

Collins then asked Stockdale which of his fellow prisoners didn’t make it out.

“The optimists,” Stockdale replied, “…they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”

“This is a very important lesson,” Stockdale continued after pausing. “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” Collins famously called this the “Stockdale paradox.”

The key, it appears, is not blind faith and optimism or dreary resignation, but rather disciplined acknowledgement of reality accompanied by ultimate conviction and faith over the long haul with a commitment to overcome and endure. Without disciplined realism about the current state of affairs, we’re lost to false hope.

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Cognitive Biases that Impede Our Thinking

Unfortunately, striking this tricky balance is complicated by the way our brains are wired. Research from eminent psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, among many others, has shown that we humans have many cognitive biases—systematic errors in thinking that influence how we make decisions—which lead to distorted perceptions and faulty judgments. They occur automatically and unconsciously over a wide range of our thinking. Researchers have identified at least 58 cognitive biases and heuristics (mental shortcuts we use to make decisions).

Examples of cognitive biases related to being unrealistic include:

  • Optimism bias: our tendency to overestimate the likelihood of experiencing favorable events and to underestimate the likelihood of unfavorable ones.
  • Overconfidence bias: our tendency to overestimate our abilities.
  • Illusion of control: overestimating our ability to control events.
  • Planning fallacy: our tendency to underestimate the time, costs, and risks of future actions and to overestimate their benefits.
  • Positive illusion: our unrealistically favorable attitudes towards ourselves or those close to us.
  • Competition neglect: ignoring the likelihood of competitors undertaking the same venture we’re planning.
  • Confirmation bias: our tendency to favor information that confirms our beliefs or hypotheses.
  • Dunning–Kruger effect: when people with low ability at a certain task overestimate their ability at it.
“What we like to think of ourselves and what we really are rarely have much in common….”
-Stephen King, The Drawing of the Three

According to cognitive neuroscientist Tali Sharot, a whopping 80% of us have an optimism bias. Importantly, we’re oblivious to it. This can lead to problems in many areas, from planning, budgeting, saving, and insurance to our propensity to get medical checkups.

According to researchers, we tend to overestimate our positive attributes (e.g., competence, intelligence, attractiveness) and underestimate our negative ones (e.g., character flaws, mistakes). Some telling examples*:

  • The vast majority of us consider ourselves above average.
  • 70% of high school seniors believe their leadership skills are above average.
  • 25% of people believe they’re in the top 1% in their ability to get along with others.
  • 94% of college professors say they’re doing above-average work.

Researchers have found that there are many benefits of optimism, from better health, longevity, and moods to improved motivation, coping, and perseverance. But researcher and author Shawn Achor notes that “optimism become maladaptive when it causes us to grossly overestimate our current abilities.”

So, optimism is better than pessimism in most situations, but optimistic realism is better than blind optimism. We need to learn to be reasonably optimistic without drifting into the land of fantasy and naivete—without becoming unrealistic. How?

 

How to Escape the Trap of Being Unrealistic

Here are seven things we can do to avoid being unrealistic in our thinking:

  1. Clarify what our expectations are (best to write them down) and where they came from.
  2. Evaluate whether our expectations are appropriate.
  3. Take an inventory of the time, resources, energy, and motivation we have available. Assess our limits, noting that we don’t have unlimited resources.
  4. Recall that there are always external factors outside our control. Keep the focus on things we can control and bear in mind that things can change.
  5. Balance our high expectations with acknowledgment of risks and potential setbacks. Outline not just the best-case scenario but also the base-case and worst-case scenarios to ensure we have a fuller picture of the range of possible outcomes.
  6. Adjust expectations as we go, if needed, based on new information.
  7. Document how things turn out after the fact and compare them to our initial expectations to see if we’re being unrealistic regularly. This can help us calibrate our expectations going forward.

Personal Values Exercise

Complete this exercise to identify your personal values. It will help you develop self-awareness, including clarity about what’s most important to you in life and work, and serve as a safe harbor for you to return to when things are tough.

 

 

How to Address Lack of Realism in the Workplace

Of course, being unrealistic isn’t just a problem for individuals. It’s also a problem for teams and organizations.

“For every one of our failures, we had spreadsheets that looked awesome.” -Scott Cook, co-founder, Intuit

Here are nine steps we can take to make teams and organizations more realistic:

  1. Balance the team with diversity and different viewpoints.
  2. Create a team culture that welcomes and even rewards tough questions, rigorous debate, and conscientious exploration of options, including “psychological safety.”
  3. Recruit and activate a diverse external network of advisers while noting the limits of the expertise of others and the risks of deferring too much to authority figures.
  4. Look at problems from many angles.
  5. Test ideas systematically—and proactively look for their potential weaknesses while remaining curious about information that doesn’t fit current assumptions.
  6. Beware of simple ideas and overly simplistic solutions.
  7. Be humble about the extent of our expertise.
  8. Seek information from other fields.
  9. Engage with people who disagree and be open and curious about their viewpoints.

Note: For an excellent resource, see Hans Rosling’s book, Factfulness (Flatiron Books, 2018).

Hans Rosling
“Everyone seems to get the world devastatingly wrong. Not only devastatingly wrong, but systematically wrong.” -Hans Rosling, Swedish physician, academic, and author

Kahneman notes that debiasing ourselves is very difficult: it’s much easier to train people to detect bias in others. So, it’s a big mistake to attempt this on our own. (See the Appendix for three techniques we can use to avoid the trap of being unrealistic.)

 

Conclusion

For decades, we’ve been hearing about the power of positive thinking. Optimists are lionized in many cultures, while pessimists are dismissed. These notions, it turns out, are only half right.

We do want optimism and positive thinking. They are, in fact, helpful. And setting high standards can be useful, as it can help motivate and inspire us.

But optimism and positive thinking are also dangerous in many cases. They do better when supplemented with a healthy dose of realism that acknowledges the actual facts on the ground and avoids the many tricks our brains play on us when we’re enamored with hope and possibility.

“Keep your eyes on the stars, but remember to keep your feet on the ground.” -Theodore Roosevelt

 

Reflection Questions

  1. Are you being unrealistic about some things in your life and work?
  2. To what extent have you fallen into the trap of being unrealistic?
  3. What will you do about it, starting today?

 

Related Articles

 

Tools for You

Take the Traps Test

We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.

 

 

Appendix: Three Ways to Inject More Realism into Our Teams

Managers can use the following techniques to help ensure their teams aren’t going off the deep end with excessive optimism:

I. “Pre-Mortem” session: instead of doing a “post-mortem” review after the fact, in a “pre-mortem” a team imagines that a project or new venture has failed, and then works backward to determine what could lead to the failure. The pre-mortem is effective because it rewards people for creatively finding flaws in the current plan before it’s too late. (Check out this video of Kahneman explaining the pre-mortem.)

II. “Kill-Thrill” session: This approach has two stages:

  • Kill”: Brainstorm all the challenges with the idea or proposal and the reasons why the venture may not work. In other words, “kill” it with criticism.
  • Thrill”: Next, brainstorm ideas for how to make the venture idea work, addressing the problems or risks noted earlier. Bring it back from the dead.

A version of this Kill-Thrill exercise has been used for a long time at Merck. Source: Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur, Business Model Generation (John Wiley and Sons, 2009).

III. “Creative Abrasion”: In this approach, teams question each other and try to destroy each other’s ideas but are then asked to articulate the other side of the argument. Such friendly duels can sharpen thinking and lead to innovation. Bob Taylor used this technique successfully at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center in the development of the ARPAnet, the network that became the basis for the Internet. Source: Walter Isaacson, The Innovators (Simon & Schuster, 2014).

 

Postscript: Inspirations on Being Appropriately Realistic

  • “Set realistic goals, keep re-evaluating, and be consistent.” -Venus Williams, tennis champion
  • “The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.” -William Arthur Ward, writer

* Sources: Chip and Dan Heath, Switch (Crown Business, 2010) and Adam Grant, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World (Penguin, 2016). Peter Borkenau and Anette Liebler, “Convergence of Stranger Ratings of Personality and Intelligence with Self-Ratings, Partner Ratings, and Measured Intelligence,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65 (1993), 546-553. David Dunning et al., “Flawed Self-Assessment,” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 5 (2004).

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

Join our community. Sign up now and get Gregg Vanourek’s monthly inspirations (new articles, opportunities, and resources). Welcome!

 

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Gregg Vanourek is a writer, teacher, TEDx speaker, and coach on leadership and personal development. He is co-author of three books, including LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives (a manifesto for integrating our life and work with purpose, passion, and contribution) and Triple Crown Leadership: Building Excellent, Ethical, and Enduring Organizations (a winner of the International Book Awards). Check out his Best Articles or get his monthly newsletter. If you found value in this article, please forward it to a friend. Every little bit helps!

Gratitude and Recognition in the Workplace–The Benefits and Top Practices

Gratitude and Recognition in the Workplace— The Benefits and Top Practices

We don’t need to look at the data on “quiet quitting” and the “great resignation” to understand that many workers today feel undervalued and underappreciated. They feel like disposable widgets in a heartless organization.

Though recognition is a fundamental human need, many managers think that having a job and salary with benefits should be thanks enough for their workers. Those managers may not only be stressed but also unappreciated themselves.

But they’re missing something fundamental. In a previous article, “The Trap of Not Being Grateful for What We Have,” we saw that gratitude can lead to better moods, more happiness, better sleep, lower blood pressure, less stress, and more

What about gratitude at work?

 

10 Benefits of Gratitude in the Workplace

According to researchers, gratitude and appreciation in the workplace can:

  1. boost worker health, wellbeing, and optimism
  2. help improve the work environment and organizational culture
  3. facilitate closer and better relationships among co-workers and between works and their managers
  4. help managers be more effective
  5. help protect workers from stress and burnout
  6. help make workers more enthusiastic about their work and motivated to do a better job
  7. help reduce employee turnover
  8. produce more trust and teamwork
  9. generate higher job satisfaction
  10. lead to better performance
“…study after study has shown that no one is immune from the motivating effects of acknowledgement and thanks.”
Mark Goulston, “How to Give a Meaningful ‘Thank You,’” Harvard Business Review, February 2013

Here’s a sample of some of the research on gratitude and recognition in the workplace:

  • According to a 2023 Great Place to Work survey, recognition was named by workers as the most important driver of great work.
  • In a Glassdoor survey, 81% of workers reported they’re motivated to work harder when their manager shows appreciation for their work.
  • In another survey, 40% of working Americans say they’d put more energy into their work if they were recognized more often for their efforts.
Research on gratitude and appreciation demonstrates that when employees feel valued, they have high job satisfaction, are willing to work longer hours, engage in productive relationships with co-workers and supervisors,
are motivated to do their best, and work towards achieving the company’s goals.
Christine M. Riordan, “Foster a Culture of Gratitude,” Harvard Business Review, April 2013

Quality of Life Assessment

Evaluate your quality of life in ten key areas by taking our assessment. Discover your strongest areas, and the areas that need work, then act accordingly.

 

The Problem with Lacking Gratitude and Recognition

It also cuts the other way. Problems abound when gratitude and recognition are missing at work.

In a January 2023 Workhuman report, 46% of workers reported feeling only somewhat valued and 11% reported not feeling valued at all in their workplaces. What’s more, those numbers are worse for women and workers of color, with 48.8% of women and 49.3% of workers of color reporting that they feel undervalued.

According to a 2023 Wakefield survey of 400 U.S. adults, 42% of workers overall say their organization lacks the strong culture of appreciation that’s essential for their success. It also found that workers who feel appreciated are more than seven times more likely to feel completely secure in their jobs.

In a 2022 poll, 59% of workers reported that they’ve never had a boss who truly appreciates their work, and 29% say they’d willingly give up a weeks’ worth of pay for more recognition from their employer.

According to a 2021 survey of 1,417 American workers, 49% of the workers said they had quit a job before because of a lack of recognition. And according to a study of 1,714 adults conducted by Harris Interactive for the American Psychological Association, half of all workers who say that they do not feel valued at work reported that they intend to look for a new job in the next year.

People may take a job for more money, but they often leave it for more recognition.”
-Dr. Bob Nelson

 

8 Ways to Bring More Gratitude into Our Workplaces

Worker recognition is a $46 billion market globally. Based on the data above, though, it’s clear that many managers and or have much work to do on this important front.

According to a Templeton Foundation survey, of all the places people express gratitude, workplaces are among the places where people are least likely to express it. What a shame.

What to do? Below is a punch list of gratitude-related workplace practices. (As you read through it, use it as a checklist to determine how you’re doing in each area—and consider getting input from your team as well.)

Employ simple expressions of appreciation via notes, letters, or emails. These can be surprisingly powerful for the recipient, especially since many people almost never receive thanks or praise in the workplace.

Launch appreciation programs and success celebrations (e.g., of accomplishments, launches, retirements, etc.) via events, newsletter features, appreciation parties, etc.

Create opportunities for workers to interact with their customers, users, or other beneficiaries of their products and services. This helps them get a sense of the value experienced.

Give simple gifts or rewards. This can be free meals, gift cards, event tickets, or company swag (tech accessories, bags, drinkware).

Encourage peer-to-peer recognition among workers. This can be done via thank-you notes or in meetings.

Give gratitude journals to workers to help them keep gratitude top of mind.

Educate workers about the benefits of gratitude and the many different gratitude practices they can consider. Distribute blogs, articles, videos, or books. (See my previous article, “The Trap of Not Being Grateful for What We Have.”)

Initiate a 30-Day Gratitude Challenge. Some tips on how to go about it:

  • Make an organization-wide announcement so people understand what it is and how it will work.
  • Ensure that the senior management team is actively involved with and communicating about it far and wide.
  • Promote it creatively via promotional materials (posters, flyers, etc.) and social media.
  • Consider providing incentives for participation, such as gift cards, meals, or a half-day Friday.
Take time to appreciate employees and they will reciprocate in a thousand ways.
Dr. Bob Nelson, expert on worker recognition

Leadership Derailers Assessment

Take this assessment to identify what’s inhibiting your leadership effectiveness. A critical and often overlooked tool for your leadership development.

 

How to Do It Well

In addition to the “what” of workplace gratitude and recognition efforts, it’s also important to think about the “how.” Some tips:

  1. Workplace gratitude and recognition efforts don’t have to be big and complicated. They’re often better when they’re simple and straightforward.
  2. Recognize people and express gratitude to them both in private sometimes and in public other times. Both are necessary.
  3. Thank people at key moments. It can be in the middle of a big push, during a stressful period, or after a big win. Pay attention to timing. Thank people immediately or very soon after the relevant action.
  4. Express appreciation for going above and beyond the call of duty. Acknowledge the effort and sacrifices involved with their work. Share what it means to you and the organization.
  5. Ensure expressions of appreciation are specific, relevant, and authentic. They can also be spontaneous. Standard, generic thank-you’s can be counterproductive.
  6. Personalize the thanks and recognition. Tailor them to the recipient.
  7. Pay attention to frequency. Many leaders don’t recognize and thank their people nearly enough. Researchers* have identified three levels of gratitude in the workplace:
    • Episodic gratitude, in which workers feel grateful for a particular experience.
    • Persistent gratitude, in which workers have a stable tendency to feel grateful for their organization or work context.
    • Collective gratitude, in which many, most, or all the members of an organization feel persistent gratitude. Why not shoot for more persistent and collective gratitude?
  8. Add in some creativity and fun. Many of us have sterile and joyless workplaces that lack life and heart. What a shame. In their book, The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman, and Kaley Warner Klemp noted a clever example in which a couple weeks before the year-end holiday party, the organization asked workers to write three to five qualities that they most appreciated about each member of their team. The organization gathered all the qualities listed for each person and turned them into a word cloud. At the party, the word clouds were displayed anonymously around the room, with names hidden. Workers were asked to guess which word cloud was theirs, and they held a contest to see how many people could be correctly identified via the word clouds.
  9. Smart leaders also build celebrations into the rhythm of their organizations. In their book, Corporate Celebration: Play, Purpose, and Profit at Work, Terrence Deal and M. K. Key outline different types of celebration at work, including:
    • Celebrations with seasonal themes or organizational anniversaries
    • Recognition ceremonies
    • Celebrations of collective accomplishments (e.g., new office or product launch)
    • Personal transitions: entrances and exits
  10. Make sure no one is left out in the larger scheme of gratitude and recognition efforts over time. Appreciation is especially important for front-line workers who often bear the brunt of customer complaints. Think of salespeople, service personnel, customer support staff, and call center workers—and how cruel and vindictive stressed-out customers can be sometimes.

Take the Traps Test

We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.

 

The Dark Side of Gratitude in the Workplace

The benefits of gratitude are clear and powerful, but as with most things, there are some nuances to consider. In some cases, dynamics around gratitude can become problematic, according to researchers. For example, it can cause resentment if gratitude becomes like a type of currency in a relationship or team, with one or more people feeling underpaid or exploited. Also, those who receive large gifts or favors may struggle to establish appropriate boundaries, in part due to expectations around reciprocity.

We should also be wary of gratitude that’s based on flawed foundations like obligation, shame, or guilt. Some people, including narcissistic or toxic leaders, may seek to manipulate people via gratitude. For example, if we feel we should be grateful to our boss for our job, it can make us blind to their flaws and harms. That gratitude can also make us more willing to violate our values to protect them if they misbehave.

Researchers have also found that gratitude in the workplace can solidify existing power structures, with low-power group members dependent on high-power ones, and high-power group members pacifying low-power group members with expressions of gratitude. (For more on this, see “Gratitude Traps: Why We Should be Critical of Gratefulness.”)

 

Conclusion

Too many workers today feel undervalued and unappreciated. Gratitude and recognition are key components leaders can employ to humanize the workplace, giving people a sense of pride and belonging for their efforts and contributions.

 

Reflection Questions

  1. How are you doing when it comes to recognizing and thanking your colleagues?
  2. Have you checked with your team or surveyed your organization to determine how well you’re doing with gratitude and recognition—and in which areas you need work?
  3. What more will you do on this important front, starting today?

Personal Values Exercise

Complete this exercise to identify your personal values. It will help you develop self-awareness, including clarity about what’s most important to you in life and work, and serve as a safe harbor for you to return to when things are tough.

 

Related Articles

 

Tools for You

 

Postscript: Inspirations on Gratitude in the Workplace

  • “When a manager recognizes an employee’s behavior, personally and sincerely, both feel proud, gratified, and happy. There’s a human connection that transcends the immediate culture to create a shared bond. The power of this bond is stronger than you might think; indeed, it’s the power that holds together great organizational cultures.” -Erik Mosley and Derek Irvine
  • “Employees who report receiving recognition and praise within the last seven days show increased productivity, get higher scores from customers, and have better safety records. They’re just more engaged at work.” -Tom Rath, author and consultant
  • “The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between, the leader is a servant.” -Max DePree, former CEO of Herman Miller and leadership author

* Source: Fehr, Ryan & Fulmer, Ashley & Awtrey, Eli & Miller, Jared. (2016). The Grateful Workplace: A Multilevel Model of Gratitude in Organizations. The Academy of Management Review. 42. See also Waters, L. (2012). Predicting Job Satisfaction: Contributions of Individual Gratitude and Institutionalized Gratitude. Psychology, 3, 1174-1176.

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

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Gregg Vanourek is a writer, teacher, TEDx speaker, and coach on leadership and personal development. He is co-author of three books, including LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives (a manifesto for integrating our life and work with purpose, passion, and contribution) and Triple Crown Leadership: Building Excellent, Ethical, and Enduring Organizations (a winner of the International Book Awards). Check out his Best Articles or get his monthly newsletter. If you found value in this article, please forward it to a friend. Every little bit helps!

The Trap of Not Being Grateful for What We Have

The Trap of Not Being Grateful for What We Have

With the way our brains work, it’s easy to take things for granted and not be grateful for what we have. We may appreciate things for a while but then start discounting them. The result is that we can go through long periods of our lives without noticing and acknowledging the good things.

When we fail to appreciate what we have, it can lead not only to less happiness but also potentially to self-absorption and a sense of entitlement. Meanwhile, we’re missing out on the incredible benefits of gratitude.

 

What Is Gratitude, Exactly?

Dr. Robert Emmons, Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Davis, and one of the world’s top experts on gratitude, defines it as follows:

a felt sense of wonder, thankfulness, and appreciation for life.

Jeremy Adam Smith, editor of Greater Good magazine, calls gratitude “the mental tool we use to remind ourselves of the good stuff.”

Gratitude is multifaceted and can include appreciation, being thankful for what we have, thanking people, counting our blessings, savoring things, and even contemplating abundance.

Its power is evident not only in hordes of modern scientific studies but also in centuries of shared wisdom. All the major religions—including Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism—celebrate and encourage gratitude. Many of the great spiritual teachers have been powerful exemplars of walking through life with a grateful heart attuned to the wonders of the universe.

If the only prayer you ever say in your whole life is ‘Thank you,’ that would suffice.
-Meister Eckhart, German theologian and mystic

Gratitude isn’t about mindless optimism. Feeling grateful doesn’t make us naïve or willfully blind to the challenges we face or the traumas we’ve experienced. Dr. Emmons noted that even our national symbol of gratitude, Thanksgiving, occurred after nearly half the pilgrims died after a tough year with a harsh winter and scarce food.

Finally, being grateful doesn’t mean passively accepting everything as it is now. We can be grateful for what we have even while we’re working on overcoming obstacles and pursuing exciting opportunities.

Learn to be thankful for what you already have, while you pursue all that you want.
-Jim Rohn, entrepreneur and author

There’s also a difference between an automatic feeling of gratitude that we may experience from time to time and a proactive choice to be grateful for what we have as much as possible. In the latter case, it’s a choice, a mindset, and a perspective on life, not just something that occasionally washes over us and fades away. Dr. Emmons, for example, distinguishes between feeling grateful and being grateful.

 

Why We Struggle with Gratitude

Many of us have a lot to be grateful for, potentially including family, friends, health, freedom, safety, and more. Even just being alive.

Why do we take so many things for granted? Enter “hedonic adaptation,” our natural human tendency to become rapidly accustomed to changes in our circumstances and then settle into that new baseline as if nothing had occurred.

We start to take nice things—like a gentle breeze, spring flowers, the change of seasons, the smell of pine trees, a good job, a close friend—for granted. Our positive emotions can fade after a while, and we can start to feel entitled to things. Not good.

Meanwhile, with the way our brains are wired, we tend to focus on what we’re missing instead of appreciating what we have. Our evolutionary biology has given us a “negativity bias,” with positive things having less weight in our thoughts than negative ones.

The trap of ingratitude can also be aggravated by materialism, with an excessive focus on money and possessions, and entitlement. Other contributing factors include our tendency to be self-absorbed or even narcissistic sometimes, as well as our desire to be independent and self-reliant.

Part of the problem is failing to see how interconnected and mutually dependent we are. It’s easy to miss how unworkable our lives would be without schools, teachers, hospitals, doctors, nurses, police officers, firefighters, custodians, roads, bridges, soldiers, engineers, and more.

Cynicism and envy also inhibit gratitude, as does complaining.

Entitlement and self-absorption are massive impediments to gratitude.
-Dr. Robert Emmons, Professor of Psychology, University of California, Davis

Take the Traps Test

We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.

 

The Benefits of Gratitude in Our Lives

Feeling gratitude has an astonishing number of benefits. According to researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky in her book, The How of Happiness, “The expression of gratitude is a kind of mega-strategy for achieving happiness.”

She and other researchers have found that gratitude can:

1. Magnify good feelings and improve our wellbeing, including greater happiness and life satisfaction. (In fact, it’s one of the most important contributors to our wellbeing.)

“If you want to find happiness, find gratitude.”
-Steve Maraboli, author

2. Lead to better mental and physical health (including better sleep, lower blood pressure, and a stronger immune system).

3. Bring us vitality and energy.

4. Expand our capacity for optimism.

5. Reduce anger, bitterness, self-centeredness, materialism, envy, and greed (all of which inhibit happiness). Gratitude tends to reduce our tendency to compare ourselves to others.

6. Lead to greater generosity, kindness, and helpfulness (what the researchers call “prosocial” behaviors), in part due to a desire to reciprocate, in the process reinforcing prosocial and moral behavior.

7. Help us form closer and better relationships with family and friends—and maintain those relationships over time. (It’s been described both as a “booster shot” for long-term relationships and as an “upward spiral,” since when we’re more tuned in to the value of our family and friends, we treat them better, in the process fortifying those bonds.)

8. Give us access to a wider social network, more friends, and greater social support—and make it less likely that we’re disconnected and lonely.

9. Have lasting positive effects on our brains, including an orientation toward enjoying it when other people thrive (a prosocial outlook).

10. Shift our attention away from negative emotions (like fault, lack, criticism, regret) and toward positive ones (like benefit, abundance, joy), making it harder for us to ruminate and dwell in negativity. This works because our minds can only focus on so many things at once: if we’re thinking about good things, we’re also crowding out the bad things.

11. Help us cope with and build resilience in the face of stress and traumatic events (including, according to the research, cancer diagnoses, campus shootings, natural disasters, and wars). Those who feel grateful regularly tend to experience fewer and less intense traumatic memories.

In fact, it is precisely under crisis conditions when we have the most to gain by a grateful perspective on life.
In the face of demoralization, gratitude has the power to energize.
In the face of brokenness, gratitude has the power to heal.
In the face of despair, gratitude has the power to bring hope.
In other words, gratitude can help us cope with hard times.
-Dr. Robert Emmons, Professor of Psychology, University of California, Davis

12. Help us be more forgiving.

13. Boost our self-worth and self-esteem. (We feel more confident and capable when we realize how much others have done for us or how much we’ve accomplished.)

14. Be a great antidote to complaining and feeling like a victim since it focuses our attention on what we value and appreciate.

15. Help us maintain perspective, as we place our trials and tribulations in the larger context of abundance and privilege.

16. Thwart the problem of hedonic adaptation, in which we grow rapidly accustomed to the things we previously wanted. With gratitude, we stop taking as many good things for granted.

17. Help our children and youth. More grateful adolescents and college students show greater interest in school, do better academically, have better relationships, and enjoy their school experience more.

18. Help people with drug and alcohol addiction recovery.

19. Provide some protection against depression and suicidal ideation.

Quality of Life Assessment

Evaluate your quality of life in ten key areas by taking our assessment. Discover your strongest areas, and the areas that need work, then act accordingly.

 

How to Bring More Gratitude into Our Lives: 19 Practices

With all these benefits of gratitude, the question now arises: how to summon it? How to bring more of it into our lives? Here are several research-based techniques to choose from:

1. Enjoying experiences. Several studies have found that people felt more grateful after having an experience (e.g., concert, restaurant outing) than they did after purchasing a material good (e.g., clothing, jewelry). We often enjoy not only the experiences themselves but also the build-up of anticipation before them and the relishing of their memories afterward.

2. Savoring. According to psychologist Fred Bryant from Loyala University, when we savor things (e.g., a brilliantly prepared meal in a cozy setting with friends), it increases their effect on our mood and helps them last longer in our memories—especially when we express our gratitude for the experiences. Even better when we mark the experience with a ritual (e.g., a short prayer before we eat or a cozy bedtime routine with the kids).

3. Silent mental thanks. Just marking our grateful feelings with a silent thought of appreciation can go a long way. We can also try loving-kindness meditation, an ancient Buddhist practice in which we cultivate goodwill and universal friendliness toward ourselves and others.

4. Visual reminders of what we’re thankful for. The idea here is to keep them in front of us, so we don’t lose sight of them. We can use Post-It notes, photos, pictures on the wall, or other simple ways to keep them front and center.

5. Gratitude journaling. Writing down things that make us feel grateful. It doesn’t have to be in a journal. We can simply write down the good things in our life (e.g., what we like about our home, family, friends, pets, work, community, or world; what we’re good at; what we’ve achieved; what opportunities and privileges we have; etc.) A fun way to do this is to write them on scrap paper and place them into a gratitude jar. The things we write down don’t have to be profound. We can be grateful for a cup of coffee on the deck, or the funny little things our pets do. Researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky recommends doing this once a week, not daily, for most people, so it doesn’t become rote. But the key is to do it in a cadence that works best for us. (See my article, “Journaling: Benefits and Best Practices.”)

6. Gratitude letters. Write a letter to a person who has helped us, noting what we’re thankful for. It could be a family member, friend, colleague, mentor, teacher, or coach.

7. Gratitude visits. In this case, we not only write a gratitude letter but also take it and share it with the person, even someone we haven’t seen in a long time. These meetings can be very meaningful and powerful for both people.

8. “Three good things.” Write down three things that went well for us and note their causes. Here are some tips on how to do it from the Greater Good Science Center:

Each day for at least one week, write down three things that went well for you today, and provide an explanation for why they went well. It is important to create a physical record of your items by writing them down; this can be more helpful than simply doing this exercise in your head. The items can be small, everyday events or more important milestones (e.g., ‘my partner made the coffee today,’ ‘My grandparents were happy when I brought them groceries,’
or ‘I earned a big promotion’). To make this exercise part of your daily routine, some find that writing before bed is helpful.

-Source: “Three Good Things,” Greater Good in Action

9. “Benefit appraisal.” When we receive a gift, consider its benefits and note the intentions of the gift-giver—as well as the costs they’ve incurred in giving it to us (e.g., money, time, effort). This will help provide a fuller appreciation of the gifts we get.

10. Digging in the dirt for gratitude nuggets. Find reasons to be grateful even under tough circumstances. Sometimes that boss who fired us did us a huge favor. Or that person who broke up with us ended up helping us in ways we couldn’t see at the time.

11. “Mental subtraction.” Imagine what our lives would be like if something positive hadn’t occurred. (Researchers call this the “George Bailey effect,” after the classic film, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” in which George’s guardian angel shows him all the lives he’s impacted and what life would have been like in his town without him.

12. Loss or death reflection. We can imagine we never got that raise or promotion, or that new apartment or home. In one study, researchers asked people to imagine the sudden disappearance of their partners from their lives. Those who did so became more grateful for their partners. In another study, researchers discovered that undergraduate students asked to imagine dying experienced more gratitude than students asked to reflect on a typical day.

Because our very existence is a constant benefit that we adapt to easily,
this a benefit that is easily taken for granted.
Reflecting on one’s own death might help individuals take stock
of this benefit and consequently increase their appreciation for life.

-Araceli Frias et al., 2011*

13. Situational contrast. Compare where we are now with the tough times we’ve experienced. By seeing the contrast, we can more fully glimpse and appreciate the magnitude of the changes. Think of what we’ve learned or gained in the meantime, even if it’s lessons about mistakes to avoid or wisdom earned the hard way—or just the fact that we were able to survive and move forward. Consider how things could be worse—sometimes much worse.

14. Recasting. This means reframing a loss into a potential gain, flipping negativity into positive channels for gratitude. According to researchers, subjects who engaged in grateful recasting had more closure, healing, and redemption as well as less unpleasant emotional impact from upsetting experiences. They also demonstrated fewer intrusive memories (e.g., wondering why the bad event happened, whether it could have been prevented, and whether they caused it to happen).

Processing a life experience through a grateful lens does not mean denying negativity. It is not a form of superficial happiology. Instead, it means realizing the power you have to transform an obstacle into an opportunity.
-Dr. Robert Emmons

15. Thought swapping. Observe ungrateful thoughts we have and swap in grateful thoughts instead. (Example: Switch from “I can’t believe she said that” to “I’m thankful for how she works so hard at planning those outings.”)

16. Asking gratitude-inducing questions. For example:

  • What lessons did I take away from that experience?
  • Are there benefits that I can see now even though the experience was hard at the time?
  • Has the experience helped me become the person I want to be?

17. Sharing gratitude. Here are three simple ways to do so:

  • Find a “gratitude buddy” who we can share our cherished moments with—and who can help us stay on track and stick with our gratitude practices.
  • Build the sharing of gratitude into our routines, such as a family dinner. Go around the table and have each person say at least one thing they’re grateful for that day. In his book, The Happiness Advantage, author Shawn Achor tells the story of African CEOs he works with who did this with their kids. They discovered not only that it made them think of more things they’re grateful for but also that their kids held them accountable for it, refusing to eat dinner until the exercise was complete.
  • When a visitor comes to town, share the people, places, and things we love and appreciate with them.

18. Build some variety into our gratitude practices. If we do the same gratitude practice repeatedly, it may become stale. We can counter this by varying our approach.

Keep the strategy fresh…. Write in a journal some weeks, talk to a friend other weeks,
and express gratitude through art (photography, collage, watercolor) during other weeks.
-Sonja Lyubomirsky, Professor of Psychology, University of California, Riverside

19. Calendarize our gratitude practices. Enter them into our schedule so it becomes something we do consistently.

Most of these gratitude practices are both easy and free. The point isn’t that we must do all the things above. Not at all. Just doing one can be powerful.

These gratitude practices force our brain to scan for positives in our life, eventually training the brain to notice good things.

 

Conclusion

Feelings of gratitude can be intense as they wash over us and fill us with warmth and light. We shudder with appreciation and love. Our lives are uplifted.

We can choose gratitude regardless of our circumstances. We can redeem our bad experiences by focusing on the good that we still have or that came out of them.

The gold standard of gratitude isn’t just to feel it occasionally, or just to will it into our lives, but to make it a habit that ends up up-leveling our mental outlook in big ways.

Every day, think as you wake up, ‘I am fortunate to be alive.
I have a precious human life. I am not going to waste it.’”
-Dalai Lama XIV

 

Reflection Questions

  1. Have you fallen into the trap of taking things for granted?
  2. What are you grateful for?
  3. Which gratitude practices resonate most with you?
  4. What will you do to enhance your gratitude practice, starting today?

Personal Values Exercise

Complete this exercise to identify your personal values. It will help you develop self-awareness, including clarity about what’s most important to you in life and work, and serve as a safe harbor for you to return to when things are tough.

 

Tools for You

 

Related Articles & Books

 

Videos on Gratitude

 

Postscript: Inspirations on Gratitude

  • “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.” -Cicero
  • “Of all crimes that human creatures are capable of committing, the most horrid and unnatural is ingratitude.” -David Hume, Scottish Enlightenment philosopher
  • “The roots of all goodness lie in the soil of appreciation for goodness.” -Dalai Lama XIV
  • “Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn’t learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn’t learn a little, at least we didn’t get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn’t die; so, let us all be thankful.” -Buddha
  • “Gratitude is one of the sweet shortcuts to finding peace of mind and happiness inside. No matter what is going on outside of us, there’s always something we could be grateful for.” -Barry Neil Kaufman
  • “What you focus on expands, and when you focus on the goodness in your life, you create more of it. Opportunities, relationships, even money flowed my way when I learned to be grateful no matter what happened in my life.” -Oprah Winfrey
  • “It is not happiness that makes us grateful. It is gratefulness that makes us happy. Every moment is a gift. There is no certainty that you will have another moment….” -Brother David Steindl-Rast, Catholic-Benedictine monk and scholar
  • “No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night.” -Elie Wiesel, writer, activist, Nobel laureate, and Holocaust survivor
  • “Let gratitude be the pillow upon which you kneel to say your nightly prayer. And let faith be the bridge you build to overcome evil and welcome good.” -Maya Angelou
  • “Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.” -Melody Beattie
  • “When you appreciate the good, the good appreciates.” -Tal Ben-Shahar
  • “The thankful receiver bears a plentiful harvest.” -William Blake
  • “…it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich.” -Dietrich Bonhoeffer
  • “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” -1 Thessalonians 5:16-18
  • “When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.” -Gilbert K. Chesterton
  • “He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has.” -Epictetus
  • “When asked if my cup is half-full or half-empty my only response is that I am thankful I have a cup.” -Sam Lefkowitz
  • “When you are grateful, fear disappears and abundance disappears.” -Tony Robbins
  • “…it’s when you feel least thankful that you are most in need of what gratitude can give you: perspective. Gratitude can transform any situation.” -Oprah Winfrey
  • “Living in a state of gratitude is the gateway to grace.” -Arianna Huffington
  • “The real gift of gratitude is that the more grateful you are, the more present you become.” -Robert Holden
  • “Gratitude opens the door to the power, the wisdom, the creativity of the universe. You open the door through gratitude.” -Deepak Chopra
  • “Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving; let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise!” -Psalm 95:2
  • “What separates privilege from entitlement is gratitude.” -Brené Brown
  • “Be grateful for what you already have while you pursue your goals. If you aren’t grateful for what you already have, what makes you think you would be happy with more.” -Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
  • “Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance.” -Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose
  • “Piglet noticed that even though he had a Very Small Heart, it could hold a rather large amount of Gratitude.” -A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

* Source: Frias, A., Watkins, P., Webber, A., & Froh, J. (2011). Death and gratitude: Death reflection enhances gratitude. The Journal of Positive Psychology. 6. 154-162.

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

Join our community. Sign up now and get Gregg Vanourek’s monthly inspirations (new articles, opportunities, and resources). Welcome!

 

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Gregg Vanourek is a writer, teacher, TEDx speaker, and coach on leadership and personal development. He is co-author of three books, including LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives (a manifesto for integrating our life and work with purpose, passion, and contribution) and Triple Crown Leadership: Building Excellent, Ethical, and Enduring Organizations (a winner of the International Book Awards). Check out his Best Articles or get his monthly newsletter. If you found value in this article, please forward it to a friend. Every little bit helps!

The Trap of Thinking It’s Too Late for Big Things in Our Lives

Are we living a good life?
Have we been pursuing our dreams?
If we were to die tomorrow, would we be happy with our life, knowing we’ve lived well?
Or are we thinking it’s too late to live a good life and pursue the things we want in life—our goals, dreams, or adventures?

These questions may be uncomfortable, but they’re essential in informing our quality of life and whether we experience a sense of fulfillment.

 

The State of Our Dreams

Most of us have goals and dreams. Common examples include having a family, traveling around the world, building a dream home, running a marathon, writing a book, living abroad, learning a language, climbing a mountain, achieving financial security or independence, starting a new venture, and things like visiting every state (or continent) or every national park.

With 11.6% of the U.S. population (37.9 million people) living in poverty in 2021, about half the world population living on less than $6.85 (USD) per person per day, and about 9.2% of the world population (719 million people) living in extreme poverty, on less than $2.15 a day, even having these dreams is a privilege.

According to the 2016 Global Dreams Index Survey, polling 5,484 women aged 18 and older in 14 countries across six continents, about half the world’s female population isn’t satisfied with their current lives and has given up on their dreams. But of the women who did pursue their dreams, 82% were satisfied with life.

According to a 2021 Moneypenny survey, only 7% of Americans reported that they were working in their dream career, and 54% overall report that they’re happy in their job (with 19% unhappy and 27% neither happy nor unhappy).

According to a survey of more than 2,000 Americans, 22% reported that they pursued one of their childhood career aspirations, while 78% reported that they didn’t. Of those who ended up in a childhood dream job, 88% reported that they’re happy with their current job, versus 70% for those who didn’t (but 70% is still high).

Source: Trade-Schools.net, https://www.trade-schools.net/learn/childhood-aspirations

When it comes to our views of the good life, recent data shows that they’ve been changing recently. Today, more people focus on good health, a simple and balanced life, and meaningful connections with people. Meanwhile, insufficient income is the top obstacle to the good life, with 62% of respondents noting that as a top hindrance.

Quality of Life Assessment

Evaluate your quality of life in ten key areas by taking our assessment. Discover your strongest areas, and the areas that need work, then act accordingly.

 

Changes in Life Expectancy and Retirement Patterns

As many people consider whether it’s too late to pursue goals and dreams, the context has changed significantly when it comes to life expectancy and retirement. For starters, people are now living longer on average. In 1960 (the first year the United Nations started tracking global data), average life expectancy was 52.5 years. Today, it’s up to 72 years. Average life expectancy for U.S. children born today is about 76 years.*

What’s more, the concept and practice of retirement are also changing rapidly. According to 2022 Gallup research, the average retirement age among U.S. workers is currently up to age 61 from age 57 in the 1990s. Today’s workers report that they expect to retire at age 66, on average. Meanwhile, the percentage of people aged 55 to 74 who are retired is declining, because people are working longer.

 

Think It’s Too Late? Not So Fast

Given that context, let’s revisit the question of whether we think it’s too late to pursue our goals and dreams. My friend Karin has been a teacher, real estate broker, stockbroker, sales manager, and vice president at a global financial services company. At age 60, she chose to pursue some new endeavors that called to her heart and spoke to her core values.

Karin earned a degree in spiritual psychology and became active with writing, photography, hospice, counseling prisoners, camps for children with cancer, coaching, and travel. The depth and joy she’s added to her life since making those changes are incalculable.

She’s not alone. Consider these examples of people who have proven that we have incredible potential to do things—sometimes big things—later in life:

  • At 61, Mahatma Gandhi led the Salt March to protest the British salt tax imposed on the people of India, walking about 200 miles (320 kilometers).
  • Colonel Sanders started Kentucky Fried Chicken when he was 65.
  • At age 65, Laura Ingalls Wilder published the first book in the Little House on the Prairie series.
  • Noah Webster published his first dictionary when he was 70.
  • Peter Roget published the very first thesaurus when he was 73.
  • At 75, Barbara Hillary, a cancer survivor, became one of the oldest people and the first black woman to reach the North Pole.
  • Grandma Moses, the American folk artist who was featured on the cover of TIME magazine, started painting when she was 78.
  • Japanese skier and alpinist Yuichiro Miura climbed to the top of Mount Everest at age 70 and then again at 80.
  • At age 85, German classical scholar Theodor Mommsen received a Nobel Prize in Literature.
  • At 92, Gladys Burril ran a marathon.
  • Australian country and western artist Smoky Dawson composed, recorded, and released a new album at age 92.
  • At 100, Teiichi Igarashi climbed Mt. Fuji in Japan.

And remember: even Scrooge made some big changes later in life.

Paolo Coelho quote

We should be careful here. These may be fun and inspiring examples, but the point of life isn’t achievements and world records.

For some, those kinds of adventures and accomplishments are motivating and meaningful. Others are interested in savoring life and spending time with their loved ones, books, or hobbies—or giving back in ways that are meaningful to them. The point isn’t adopting someone else’s dream or trying to impress people. Rather, it’s to live our own good life—and be sure we don’t play small and abandon the things we want to do for lame reasons that won’t stand the test of time.

Take the Traps Test

We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.

 

7 Reasons Why We Fall into the Trap of Thinking It’s Too Late

There are many reasons we can fall into the trap of thinking it’s too late for important things we want to do. For example:

(1.) We’ve been so busy living and managing our daily responsibilities that we haven’t carved out enough time and energy to work bigger things.

(2.) We feel trapped by financial commitments or constraints. According to a 2023 CNBC / Momentive survey, 58% of Americans report living paycheck to paycheck. Sometimes lack of financial resources is a major impediment, but for some, it can be a rationalization.**

(3.) We feel like it’s not practical or even a bit crazy to pursue some big goals and dreams. They may appear out of reach. And we may not be in the habit of pursuing them.

(4.) We feel comfortable on our current path. It may feel like a heavy lift to resurrect some of those aspirations and get to work. We may be weighed down by inertia or complacency.

(5.) We may feel pressure from family, peers, or others to remain on our current path or to fit into a more traditional definition of success. It may be that we’re letting ourselves get boxed in by others and what they want for us (or what we think they want for us)—or by conventional views.

(6.) We fear going out of our comfort zone and failing in the attempt. Fear is indeed the great inhibitor, not just in this case but also with most hard things in life. But in many cases, our fears are phantoms conjured by the ancient part of our brain stem and no longer relevant for the modern world and our current circumstances.

(7.) We may lack confidence. It’s likely that doubts will creep in when we think about big things we’d like to do. So we may abdicate and retreat. Needlessly.

Most people don’t do what they love. It’s true….
And the older you get, and the more you look around,
the easier it becomes to believe that you’ll end up the same. Don’t fall for the trap.
-Nicolas Cole, writer and gamer

 

The Problem with Thinking It’s Too Late

These beliefs and rationalizations have real consequences. Feeling that it’s too late to pursue our deeper ambitions or live the life we want has big downsides.

According to researchers, as we contemplate our lives, we typically regret the things we didn’t try or do the most (more than the things we tried that didn’t work out) in the long run. According to Dan Pink’s American Regret Project survey, “inaction regrets outnumbered action regrets by nearly two to one.”

I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing
I might regret is not ever having tried.
-Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO, Amazon

In their book, Who Do You Want to Be When You Grow Old? The Path of Purposeful Aging, Richard Leider and David Shapiro note that it’s not uncommon as we age to look back on our lives and regret things we haven’t done. Many people are living what they call the “default life,” which can prompt some tough questions:

“Where did all the time go?
How did my life pass so quickly?
Why did I squander my one precious opportunity for living?”

When Richard asks older people about their biggest challenges, one of the common themes is “the fear of having missed out on life’s opportunities with no time left to catch up.” Enter the “late-life crisis.” In the book, Leider and Shapiro note that the “late-life crisis… really is a thing”—and that it affects both men and women. They cite recent research that about a third of people over age sixty experience it and that it’s “characterized by dissatisfaction; a loss of identity; an expectations gap and the feeling that life has peaked.”

Personal Values Exercise

Complete this exercise to identify your personal values. It will help you develop self-awareness, including clarity about what’s most important to you in life and work, and serve as a safe harbor for you to return to when things are tough.

 

How to Stop Thinking It’s Too Late: 12 Steps

How to interrupt these unhelpful thought patterns and the sense of futility that accompanies them? There are several things we can do to escape this wasteful trap:

(1.) Pay attention to whether we have limiting beliefs that are holding us back. Examples of such common beliefs: we’re not smart or talented enough; we lack the confidence or creative capacity to do what’s needed; we’re stuck; we’re not ready; we’re damaged goods.

(2.) Get clear on what we want in our next chapter. It helps to know our purpose, core values, and vision of the good life. Talk to friends and loved ones about our goals and dreams. Brainstorm and journal about our future possibilities. Revisit those childhood aspirations and revel in the enchantment of dreaming again.

(3.) Recognize that our capacities and potential in many areas increase as we age. Although we were stronger and faster when we were younger, we gather more knowledge, experience, wisdom, and insight as we age—as well as more connections. These are powerful assets when it comes to doing big things. When we’re older, we’ve shed some naive habits and beliefs from our wide-eyed youth, and we’re better at discerning patterns and understanding what it takes to navigate complexity and overcome challenges.

(4.) Let go of outside expectations—of caring too much about what others think. Focus instead on who we really are, what we really want, and where we want to go in the coming years.

(5.) Map how we spend our time. Too often, we waste large swaths of our days on things that are either questionable, trivial, or even counterproductive. If we stopped those things (or even some of them) and swapped in planning, preparation, and action on our aspirations, we could make good progress on things that matter. Also, identify what we must stop doing to free up margin for the new endeavors.

(6.) Calendarize the most important things we must do. Take the things we really want to do, break them into preparatory actions and steps, and then place those actions onto our calendar and integrate them into our daily and weekly routines.

(7.) Start small and build from there. Too often, we let the perfect be the enemy of the good. We talk ourselves out of even trying. We’re intimidated by the unknowns and what may seem like an insurmountable climb. The problem is that we’re discounting the compound effect of daily, disciplined action and the motivation it provides.

(8.) Form new habits that support our big ambitions. When we develop new habits and repeat them often, we not only re-wire our brain but also change our identity—our conception of ourselves. Create systems and routines that support our progress toward the things we want to do and keep making improvements.

(9.) Be mindful of who we spend time with. The people we hang out with influence us deeply. There’s a big difference between being around people who encourage and inspire us versus people who criticize and belittle us. Some lift us up while others hold us back. Too often, we’re complicit in remaining oddly loyal to people who are only using or abusing us.

(10.) Revel in the excitement of doing something big and bold. Something that touches our heart. A rousing adventure. Bold endeavors, uncertain initiatives, and daring ventures stir our souls and bring us back to life.

(11.) Recall that we’re all mortal—and with an uncertain expiration date on this planet. Nobody knows when their time is up, so we should take full advantage of the time we have now. (See my article, “What Reflecting on Death Can Teach Us about Living.”)

Keep death daily before your eyes.
-St. Benedict

(12.) Note that this business about pursuing goals and dreams doesn’t have to be a solitary or selfish endeavor. Far from it. We can team up with like-minded dreamers and seekers. And we can build service and impact into our plans and commitments. By pursuing our dreams, we may very well inspire others to do so as well.

Ultimately, if you give up on your dreams, you teach your children to give up on theirs.”
-Kate Owen

 

Conclusion

It’s a cliché to say it’s never too late and, of course, that’s not entirely true. Sometimes it is too late. Like when we’re dead and gone. But that doesn’t mean that the sentiment behind it is wrong. It isn’t.

The key is distinguishing between when it is truly too late and when it isn’t. And the point is that way too many people think it’s too late when in reality they’re deluding themselves or hiding. Here’s to snapping out of that delusion and honoring the gifts we’re given. Right now.

Richard Bach quote

 

Reflection Questions

  1. Have you fallen into the trap of thinking it’s too late to pursue your goals and dreams?
  2. If so, which ones? What aspirations are lying dormant within you?
  3. How has that thought prevented you from bringing more excitement, meaning, and fulfillment into your life?
  4. What will you do about it, starting today?
The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest,
how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated.
And the only thing people regret is that they didn’t live boldly enough,
that they didn’t invest enough heart, didn’t love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.
-Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes

 

Tools for You

Take the Traps Test

We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.

 

Related Articles

 

Appendix: Tips on Purposeful Aging

In their book, Who Do You Want to Be When You Grow Old? The Path of Purposeful Aging, Richard Leider and David Shapiro offer helpful recommendations for things we can do to age purposefully, including:

  • Recall the finest chapter(s) in our lives so far, think about what made it so, and brainstorm ideas for how we can bring those qualities into the next chapter.
  • Think about someone who has aged gracefully in ways we admire—and what that might suggest about what’s possible for us.
  • Press the “reset button” in our lives and get clear our purpose—on why we get up in the morning.
  • Consider whether we’re honoring our core values (or not), and what changes we can make to do more of that.
  • Ask whether we’re living the good life (which they define as living in the place we love with the people we love doing the work we love that’s on purpose). If not, ask ourselves how we can move in that direction.
  • Get clear about what we want our legacy to be.

Who Do You Want to Be When You Grow Old? The Path of Purposeful Aging, Richard Leider and David Shapiro

 

Postscript: Inspirations on Avoiding the “Too Late” Trap

  • “It is never too late to be what you might have been.” -unknown (often attributed to George Eliot)
  • “The way to live our vision on a daily basis is to understand that right now is the only time we have.” -John Hanley
  • “Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.” -Sydney J. Harris
  • “It matters only that you manifest your genius; it doesn’t matter when. It’s never too late or too early.” -Mark Victor Hansen, author, trainer, and speaker
  • “It’s never too late to give up what you are doing, and start doing what you realize you love.” -Hans Rosling, Swedish physician and academic
  • “You are not too old and it is not too late to dive into your increasing depths where life calmly gives out its own secret.” -Rainer Maria Rilke, Austrian poet
  • “Every time you suppress some part of yourself or allow others to play you small, you are in essence ignoring the owner’s manual your creator gave you and destroying your design.” -Oprah Winfrey
  • “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” -Chinese proverb
  • “You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it true. You may have to work for it, however.” -Richard Bach, Illusions
  • “Retire from your job but never from meaningful projects. If you want to live a long life, you need eustress, that is, a deep sense of meaning and of contribution to worthy projects and causes, particularly, your intergenerational family.” -Stephen R. Covey, author
  • “The old… should, it seems, have their physical labors reduced; their mental activities should be actually increased. They should endeavor, too, by means of their counsel and practical wisdom to be of as much service as possible to their friends and to the young, and above all to the state.” -Marcus Tullius Cicero, Roman philosopher and statesman
  • “I believe that it is not dying that people are afraid of. It’s something else. Something more unsettling and more tragic than death frightens us. We’re afraid of never having lived. Of coming to the end of our days with the sense that we were never really alive. That we never figured out what life was for.” -Harold Kushner, American rabbi and author
  • “I think I don’t regret a single ‘excess’ of my responsive youth—I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn’t embrace.” -Henry James
  • “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you have imagined.” -Henry David Thoreau
  • “Age puzzles me. I thought it was a quiet time. My seventies were interesting and fairly serene, but my eighties are passionate. I grow more intense as I age…. To my own surprise I burst out with hot conviction.” -Florida Scott-Maxwell, Jungian analyst

* Note, though, that the human life span hasn’t changed much, according to researchers. Average life expectancy has increased so much in large part because survival rates among children have increased dramatically due to economic, social, and technological advances and greater access to medical care and nutrition.

** Researchers have noted that older people aged 75 to 90 with better economic, social, and health resources were more likely to report goals related to social and physical activities and leisure—and less likely to report goals related to recovery of their health. And older people who lacked social resources were at greater risk of having no personal goals. Source: Saajanaho M., Rantakokko M., Portegijs E., Törmäkangas T., Eronen J., Tsai L.T., Jylhä M., Rantanen T. Life resources and personal goals in old age. European Journal of Aging. 2016 Jun 1;13(3):195-208.

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

Join our community. Sign up now and get Gregg Vanourek’s monthly inspirations (new articles, opportunities, and resources). Welcome!

 

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Gregg Vanourek is a writer, teacher, TEDx speaker, and coach on leadership and personal development. He is co-author of three books, including LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives (a manifesto for integrating our life and work with purpose, passion, and contribution) and Triple Crown Leadership: Building Excellent, Ethical, and Enduring Organizations (a winner of the International Book Awards). Check out his Best Articles or get his monthly newsletter. If you found value in this article, please forward it to a friend. Every little bit helps!

Are You Sleepwalking through Your Life?

It may be hard to believe when our lives seem so frenetic at times, but many of us are sleepwalking through our lives—passively going through the motions of life while not feeling awake and alive.

This kind of “life sleepwalking” is different, of course, from physical sleepwalking (also known as somnambulism), in which we get up and walk around while in a state of actual sleep. But both forms of sleepwalking are similar in the sense that we’re engaging in everyday activities but not really conscious of what we’re doing.

“If we’re honest, sleepwalking describes many of our lives. You look like you’re awake while you’re not; you walk around talking to people while you’re out cold. We get up, we talk, we do our jobs, and we go back to bed never having been fully awake. You’ll know this is happening to you if you look back on your day and can’t remember the conversations you’ve had, the things you experienced, and the beauty you saw.”
-Bob Goff, Dream Big

 

How to Tell If We’re Sleepwalking: 10 Signs

Though we may forget it sometimes, our lives are precious, and it would be great to be present for them as much as possible. How can we tell if we’re in the trap of sleepwalking through our lives? We’re at risk of sleepwalking when we:

  1. have trouble getting out of bed in the morning or getting going
  2. go through the motions at work and just get through our days
  3. lack clarity—when we don’t know (or avoid thinking about) who we are and what we want
  4. berate ourselves with negative self-talk that dulls our spirit
  5. numb ourselves with binge-watching shows, doom-scrolling social media, or excessive work and busyness but without tying our actions to larger goals
  6. avoid hard truths or uncomfortable feelings instead of dealing with them
  7. defer our dreams and postpone our happiness
  8. aren’t living in alignment with our purpose and core values
  9. complain about things in our life instead of doing things about them
  10. feel overwhelmed often
“Trust me, your soul has been waiting for you to wake up to your own existence for years.”
-Elizabeth Gilbert, writer

Take the Traps Test

We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.

 

How to Stop Sleepwalking through Our Lives

Fortunately, there are many things we can do to escape the trap of sleepwalking. For example, we can:

Be mindful of the trap of sleepwalking and look for examples of it in our lives so we can do something about it.

Recognize that many people struggle with sleepwalking. Note that there are shrewd social media companies with powerful technologies and algorithms whose business model involves getting us to become passive scrollers on their platforms—and in the process sleepwalkers in our lives.

Note that this trap of sleepwalking isn’t an identity. It’s something we can get trapped in but not something we need to let define us.

Ask ourselves if we want to change and improve our lives by escaping this trap.

Recognize that making changes in our lives is rarely easy and often requires focused effort and discipline to keep working at it over time—but that it does eventually get easier once we build momentum and that it’s well worth it.

Consider what it would feel like to be fully awake and alive, what it would be like to enjoy our lives and pursue our passions and hobbies.

Remember that we’re all going to die and that we don’t know when. Recognizing the preciousness of life can help us snap out of the sleepwalking trance. (See my article, “What Reflecting on Death Can Teach Us about Living.”)

Get clear on our purpose, values, and vison of the good life so we can be more deliberate in doing the things that will bring them into our lives.

Fill our lives with things that matter to us. This will vary by person and depend on what chapter of life we’re in. It could be spending meaningful time with our spouse, children, or friends. Working on that life dream. Building a new enterprise or product line. Getting that degree or certificate. Learning that language. Writing that book. Going to those dream places. We can’t sleepwalk our way there.

Limit our time on our devices, social media, and streaming sites, since they can be wildly addictive and time-consuming (and thus life-consuming). According to Zippia Research, the average American spends 5 hours and 24 minutes on their mobile device daily and checks their phone 96 times per day, on average (about once every ten minutes).

Be present in the moment we’re in without letting our mind race back to the past or ahead to the future. According to researchers, mindfulness can improve our mood and increase our positive emotions while decreasing our anxiety, emotional reactivity, and burnout. Also, it may have positive impacts on our brains, hearts, and immune systems.

Focus on taking more action in our life and work—and earlier—without as much deliberation and hesitation. This can help snap us out of the sleepwalking trance.

Form a small group of trusted friends or colleagues and meet periodically to provide each other support, a sounding board (e.g., people checking in with each other if there may be a problem with sleepwalking), and accountability for chosen commitments in a safe place of confidentiality, trust, and respect.

Build sanctuary and moments of silence into our lives to give us peaceful time alone to reflect on where we’re headed and how we’re feeling about things.

Journal about our life and work, including our thoughts, feelings, and challenges. This kind of journaling can help us see the patterns in our lives, including traps like sleepwalking.

Create and use an affirmation or mantra for avoiding the trap of sleepwalking (e.g., “I’m fully awake and alive, and I refuse to sleepwalk through my life”).

Take full responsibility for our lives and work and how we spend our time. We should be careful not to surrender our agency by playing the victim and blaming others.

Quality of Life Assessment

Evaluate your quality of life in ten key areas by taking our assessment. Discover your strongest areas, and the areas that need work, then act accordingly.

 

Are There Versions of Sleepwalking that Can Be Good?

We should be careful not to take a concern about the dangers of sleepwalking too far. Avoiding the trap of sleepwalking through our lives doesn’t mean that we must become hyper-productive automatons who are always doing something. (That’s a whole other problem.)

There’s most definitely an important place for renewal and rest in our lives, for enjoying entertainment, for rest and relaxation, and even for boredom sometimes. Our lives don’t always have to be productive and serious. There are also chapters of challenge in our lives in which we’re thrown off course. That’s both natural and common.

The key is intention and proportion. Are we consciously choosing those things and savoring them, or have we abdicated control of our lives and become zombies going through the motions?

 

Conclusion

When we’re sleepwalking through our lives, we’re doing a disservice to ourselves and the people and things we care about. We’re not being good stewards of our precious time, and we’re squandering the limited days we’re given to enjoy our lives, connect deeply with others, feel vital and alive, and make a positive difference in the lives of others. Much better to wake up and craft our life and work intentionally.

“This day will never come again and anyone who fails to eat and drink and taste and smell it will never have it offered to him again in all eternity. The sun will never shine as it does today…You must play your part and sing a song, one of your best.”
-Herman Hesse, German-Swiss poet

 

Reflection Questions

  1. To what extent are you falling into the trap of sleepwalking through your life, or certain parts of it?
  2. How is it affecting your quality of life and work performance?
  3. What will you do about it, starting today?

Personal Values Exercise

Complete this exercise to identify your personal values. It will help you develop self-awareness, including clarity about what’s most important to you in life and work, and serve as a safe harbor for you to return to when things are tough.

 

Related Articles

“Compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake.”
-William James, American philosopher and psychologist

 

Tools for You

 

Postscript: Inspirations on Avoiding the Trap of Sleepwalking

  • “It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten-track for ourselves.” -Henry David Thoreau
  • “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.” -William Shakespeare
  • “Never be passive about your life… ever, ever.” -Robert Egger, social entrepreneur
  • “Let us consider the way in which we spend our lives.” -Henry David Thoreau
  • “There is…only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist…The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.” -Martha Graham
  • “I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow; than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist.” -Jack London
“For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos.”
-D.H. Lawrence, English writer

 

Bonus: Your Soundtrack for Stopping Sleepwalking

If you’re looking for some musical inspiration to help you stop sleepwalking through your life, check out these songs:

“And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile. And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife. And you may ask yourself, Well, how did I get here?  Same as it ever was, same as it ever was…. You may ask yourself, What is that beautiful house? You may ask yourself, Where does that highway go to? And you may ask yourself, Am I right, am I wrong? And you may say to yourself, My God, what have I done?”
-song lyrics excerpted from “Once in a Lifetime” by Talking Heads

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

Join our community. Sign up now and get Gregg Vanourek’s monthly inspirations (new articles, opportunities, and resources). Welcome!

 

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Gregg Vanourek is a writer, teacher, TEDx speaker, and coach on leadership and personal development. He is co-author of three books, including LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives (a manifesto for integrating our life and work with purpose, passion, and contribution) and Triple Crown Leadership: Building Excellent, Ethical, and Enduring Organizations (a winner of the International Book Awards). Check out his Best Articles or get his monthly newsletter. If you found value in this article, please forward it to a friend. Every little bit helps!