Mind Traps
Wasting our precious time — obliviously

Tim Johnson

That book lost its appeal on page 52, but you see it through to the end. Boardwalk and Park Place are long gone, but the boring Monopoly game grinds on. These things may not seem like such a big deal  — a few minutes, a few hours misspent — but they add up. “By the end of the day it’s a considerable sum of wasted moments,” says Dr. André Kukla, a professor emeritus of psychology and philosophy at the University of Toronto.

In his recent book, Mental Traps (Doubleday Canada), he documents 11 pernicious traits that trip us up. One of these self-defeating characteristics is misguided persistence — working toward a goal that has already lost its value — the ho-hum movie, the boring book, the gone-stale game.

Another is jump-the-gun anticipation — starting on a task before it makes sense to do so. You plow into a research project before you get the details you need to do it right. Fixation is also a common pitfall: you spin your wheels even after it’s clear that doing so will accomplish nothing. Example: you’ve completed all preparations for a dinner party an hour before the guests arrive, but continue to repeat tasks and watch the clock instead of going for a walk and coming back refreshed.

“Most people don’t know they get caught in mental traps,” says Kukla. “Even when the behaviours are called to their attention, they don’t recognize them as the waste of time they are.” But these well-below-the-radar habits can sap energy and undermine happiness. “By the end of the day, their cumulative effect may be an entirely unaccountable exhaustion,” he writes.

Kukla believes that Newton’s law of inertia — an undisturbed body remains at rest but once roused travels in a straight line until it is stopped — also applies to our minds. “Once we formulate an intention to perform an action, that creates inertia, which keeps us moving along that path.”

Such mental leg irons result from our need to control our lives, or maximize intentionality. “Our society has enthroned intentional activity as the most important activity in all circumstances.” Evolution may be at work here. Inertia might make people more predictable, allowing others to anticipate what they will do. It may have developed as necessary precondition for human social co-operation.

So, if you’re hard-wired for it and society demands it, how do you avoid it? You can try to be more spontaneous, but that’s tough. “Being spontaneous isn’t so much a matter of doing something as a matter of ceasing to form intentional plans,” says Kukla. “And you can’t really give instructions for how not to do something.” His solution is thought watching: taking a few minutes of quiet each day to practise non-intentionality, allowing your thoughts to come and go at will. “All the mental traps we encounter will make an appearance during this time, and because we are not distracted by other activities, we can more keenly observe and understand them. And by recognizing them, perhaps we can quit them. “This is not a complete cure, but it goes a long way toward one,”Kukla says.