The The The The hidden power of words remains absolutely remarkable to me. Not only that, I find their dominance over our mental faculties also quite stunning. Today I have had a fairly lazy day and I finally got around to doing some highly useful things but not the things that I wanted to get done for the day. Eventually I stopped what I was doing and thought about what I wanted to do next. I had two things on my list, ‘Write a blog article’ and ‘Continue with the e-book’ and I then immediately noticed the washing up that I hadn’t done, the pile of papers lying around me, the dusty floor and the fact that I hadn’t eaten much today.

In the past, I would have bunked off and done one of those other activities that just popped into my head. I would have done them because, in the moment of wanting to do ‘write an article,’ it suddenly seemed very difficult. Fortunately, I now recognize what’s going on. My brain is continuously seeking instant gratification; moving away from pain and difficulty and towards pleasure and ease. In this case, doing the washing up seemed far more preferable than thinking about what to write, preparing to write and then doing it.

Regular readers are probably aware of my obsession with procrastination and overcoming it, so when I got these thoughts of easier distractions I immediately thought, “Okay, at this moment, writing an article seems relatively hard but actually it isn’t. I’ll just roll out the ‘How-To-Do-List and that will get me back onto the path of righteousness,” only this time I didn’t get the relief that I normally feel. I still felt tension about this demand to do things right now and then it clicked. It was because it was late in the day and I was supposed to be going out for beer and dancing. It was impossible to do those two things immediately and the shortage of time enhanced my negative emotion (in this case despondency and feeling put upon). Then I had a brainstorm, instead of saying I want to do those things I instead said that I want to complete those things today. I felt immediate relief.

How could it possibly happen that a simple change of word brought so much relief? It happens because our minds take many words, especially verbs, so literally. Verbs represent actions, which for the brain means an instruction. Setting the instruction also sets up an objective desire against which we measure our performance. The feedback generated from this, between reality and desire creates our emotional state during that time. The verb ‘to do’ transmits the desire to take immediate action resulting in the instantaneous completion of the objective desire. Since most things that we put on our to do list are not capable of being finished instantaneously then anything that we put on the list starts to generate negative emotion. This emotion is usually very mild but the difficulty of the task and the immediacy of the requirement heighten the emotion.

By substituting ‘to complete’ instead of ‘to do’ for my desired objectives I took away the desired need for an immediate result. I received immediate emotional relief and made the objective more reasonable to carry out as I didn’t demand instantaneous, or near instantaneous, results. My thoughts of doing the washing up vanished (I guess that’s some kind of reward) and I got back on-track (geeky article finished, now time to trip the light fantastic). It never ceases to amaze me how a change in just one word can make the impossible seem possible. Do you have any tales of word substitution that changed your performance? I’d like to add them to my arsenal, so do let me know!

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[Photo by extranoise]