A lack of mental chatter
Working with Chip Heath was the most eye-opening work experience of my life. Period. Why?
You don’t get to see what life is like behind the curtain for someone else very often (if ever), and over the course of our years of group calls, I saw him unencumbered by having to spend time defending his every decision, deflecting unsolicited advice, or exposure to messages that he was, somehow, doing things wrong.
There was a complete lack of mental chatter. Of second-guessing himself.
Chip’s publicity photo is at least a decade old. When I booked a photographer to get my latest headshot a few months ago, my first thought was oh, that’s coming up soon—I won’t have time to get Botox. I’ve never gotten Botox. What put that thought in my head to begin with, when I don’t read women’s magazines or have any friends who’ve discussed getting Botox? A lifetime of hearing about it, seeing flawless faces on social media, getting judged and seeing others judge.
Men seem to be the default experts of all ideas, save for communication, parenting, or shaking off haters—but I’m tempted to say that there’s a special reason why women are underrepresented in the area of dispensing productivity advice.
Today, I had two emails to write: one to someone who had no idea that his behavior made a woman feel incredibly unsafe during a Zoom meeting, which ended up being a life-or-death issue that sent a very unsavory message to every other woman at the meeting. Another email was to a work accountability buddy who spent the entirety of our previous call giving me unsolicited advice on something that, if I’m being honest, he should have been asking me for advice about. He simply launched into a monologue.
In addition, I had to block a contact for someone who got my information off of a phone list and has been sending me unwanted messages. I had to ban someone from this newsletter.
That shit is tiring. But because it’s the kind of crap that can’t be quantified in a study, here’s the big question: how can you get other people to take it seriously?
This is your brain on status
Evolution
When you’re lower on the totem pole, you’re expected to be more sensitive to the needs of others; underlings have to wait their turn to keep the dominant ones happy, who are free to focus on doing whatever they want to do. Using the areas of your brain associated with mentalizing—thinking about what others are thinking about—is associated with more metabolically taxing, recently-evolved areas of the brain; there are real physical costs associated with the emotional labor of constantly being expected to think about what other people might do or say, especially when you’re not sure which set of rules they’re judging you by.
Being able to control your attention is key‚ if not the key, to confidence. Self-affirmation, thinking about your own bright spots, and remembering times when you’ve won helps you add more points to the I GOT THIS side of the scale. I ask researcher Cameron Anderson about gender differences, specially, how status interactions in all species relate humans expecting women to be higher on the trait of social concern.
“I’m aware of all of that, and I’m still doing it,” he says. “We have a 10-year-old daughter, and I’m watching myself reward her every time she shows emotional sensitivity to other kids. And I’m not doing the same thing to my 7-year-old boy.” Something can seem a little off when women confidently approach their own rewards by focusing on their personal projects, or failing to put other people’s needs first.
“A tendency to think too much about other people’s perspectives can lead to heightened anxiety,” says anxiety researcher Jacob Hirsh. Women are hit on multiple fronts, constantly being expected to consider others’ perspectives while deriving more of our self-worth from relationships. “Women are exposed to more conflicting expectations,” says Hirsh.
an excerpt from Can You Learn to Be Lucky
Women are exposed to more conflicting expectations
This past year, I’ve been paying closer attention to the dynamics of my social interactions—how they make me feel, who said what, etc.—and have been completely blown away by how draining it is to get unsolicited advice. A lot of unsolicited advice comes from people who seeking validation for their way of doing things, but fail to consider how it makes the other person feel.
Can you imagine telling someone you genuinely respect “you know, you might want to consider changing your behavior, Malala”?
If someone was happy and content with the direction of their life (career, health, relationships, finances), what would make you say “you need to try this thing”? You’d only say that if you thought that your idea was better than whatever that person was doing.
Even if our advice has good intentions, unsolicited advice sends the message that you should be doing something different. You’re clearly unaware of this piece of information that I have—otherwise, you’d be doing it a different way.”
which is another way of saying “I’m looking down on what you’re doing,” or “You could be doing that better,” or “You’re doing it wrong.”
People seeking validation for their ideas put others on the receiving end of questioning and second-guessing themselves, and feeling controlled and criticized.
Spoiler alert: section A was an except from my book, which ended like this:
On the subway, one man approaches. I don’t move my arm. I pretend like I don’t see him. Attention flows up the status hierarchy, and not looking at someone sends the message that you are irrelevant, so I don’t look. Not paying attention to people makes me look like a bitch, but ignoring the possibility of negative evaluation is precisely what’s required to get stuff done. In a simpler world, the entire story of confidence could be summarized thusly: approach rewards. The world tries to complicate that story, but it’s up to us to keep it to that.
The guy on the subway gets in my face. We only exist in our bodies, and feeling comfortable and strong in your own skin without needing the approval of others to feel good—or not deriving your self-worth from what others say about your actions and appearance—builds the kind of confidence that can’t be taken away by random strangers.[1] “You have a real problem, you know that, missy?” I turn away. Thanks to five billion years of evolution, the brain of the baller has mastered the fine art of not giving a flying fuck.
Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.
Theodosius Dobzhansky
Hot take: Everyone is logical.
Kids who grow up in an unstable environment are in surroundings where, during 95% of their development, they learn that patience does not pay off because things might not pan out.
Energy and time are limited, so organisms have to choose how to allocate their resources in a way that allows them to survive long enough to reproduce. Animals and other self-organizing entities that survive by exploiting what works, or doing one thing really well, or exploiting what works, follow what’s known as a slow life history strategy. Others come from more chaotic environments and develop adaptations that make sense in a chaotic environment: get what you can, right now!
We run into problems when we assume that everyone has access to the same information that we do.
Three if you count the man who had to let me know that he wrote a LinkedIn update on the same topic as my book, and figured that we clearly needed to be on each other’s radar.
Then, it dawned on me: maybe other women don’t have time to write productivity advice because they’re also too busy writing “your LinkedIn update/unsolicited opinions do not make you an expert. Stop making women feel unsafe,” and using all of my emotional energy to not punch my computer
Both of these men like to think of themselves as “one of the good ones.”
My take? Everyone is rational. We run into problems when we make assumptions about what information the other person has, and judge them for not seeing the world the same way that we do.
We judge people for not valuing what we value:
- Why pay so much money to fly when you can drive for less? Maybe they value not driving more
- Why have their friend take the photos instead of paying more to get professional-looking ones? Maybe they’re saving money for a better website. Maybe they had a bad experience with a photographer
- Why go to the gym instead of just going for a run around here? Maybe they want to get away from your nagging ass
- Why are you printing that receipt, scanning it, and sending the PDF instead of just emailing the receipt? Because this person was somehow scarred using technology once and is scared of “ruining the internet for everyone.”
- Why are they voting for a party that doesn’t have their financial interests at heart? Maybe they believe that their political party does have their best interests at heart because everyone in their family says so.
- Why wouldn’t you go to therapy with a daughter you abandoned? Maybe you didn’t like what she told you, don’t feel like she respects you, and don’t need that kind of energy in your life. Maybe you grew up around dysfunctional behavior and don’t realize that your behavior is abnormal.
We run into problems when we don’t take people’s history into consideration. We think that people are being illogical when we make assumptions about what people should value. A lot of things have been written about this in terms of economics and politics: for example, why people vote against their best interests.
Existing theories propose that fast (phasic) dopamine fluctuations support learning, whereas much slower (tonic) dopamine changes are involved in motivation. We examined dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens across multiple time scales, using complementary microdialysis and voltammetric methods during adaptive decision-making. We found that minute-by-minute dopamine levels covaried with reward rate and motivational vigor. Second-by-second dopamine release encoded an estimate of temporally discounted future reward (a value function). Changing dopamine immediately altered willingness to work and reinforced preceding action choices by encoding temporal-difference reward prediction errors. Our results indicate that dopamine conveys a single, rapidly evolving decision variable, the available reward for investment of effort, which is employed for both learning and motivational functions
The basal ganglia receives inputs from all over—areas associated with reward, cognition, and motor control— before sending information back to those places. It’s intricately linked to motivation, our ability to initiate bodily action. “In evolution, being smart counts for nothing if it does not lead to acting smart.”
Cybernetics is why it feels good to make progress on our goals. Getting positive feedback about our performance—that we’re on our way to achieving our goals—creates what’s known as a discrepancy-reducing loop. : the closer we get to successfully finishing things that are meaningful to us, the better we feel, and the more energy or vigor we’re able to recruit (magically!) to achieve that very thing. Because we need to accomplish things while being stingy about energy, “positive feeling results when an action system is making rapid progress in doing what it is organized to do.”
If the invest-and-accrue model of success was really as vital to the story of our species as breathing, why it is such an easy process to disrupt?
Organisms need to live long enough to successfully pass down their genes to subsequent generations, but many roads lead to Rome.
Survival is a dynamic interplay of all of life’s parts; an inherent property of evolving, complex dynamic systems. Various mechanisms incurring robustness of organisms actually facilitate evolution, and evolution favors robust traits