Free Quitting (previously published as Mastering the Art of Quitting) by Peg Streep Page A

direction. To let go on a cognitive level, we need to manage those intrusive, white-bearthoughts. These thoughts might be a preoccupation with how we might have succeeded if we’d only persisted or various other second guesses or variations on the theme. Have you ever had a filling fall out or a loose tooth? You know how your tongue, no matter how you try to stop yourself, keeps going back to the tooth, feeling the rough edges? White-bear thoughts are just like that, and they happen automatically. Daniel Wegner explains that since the mind searches for whatever thought, action, or emotion the person is trying to control, the “ironic monitoring” process can actually create the mental contents for which it is searching. That’s why the unwanted thought rebounds into the mind.
    Wegner and his colleagues conducted numerous experiments to see what, if anything, could stop those thoughts of white bears from coming back. Their findings are pertinent to the strategies for cognitive disengagement we’ll be suggesting, and they underscore (even though it hardly needs more emphasis) why those intrusive thoughts are so damn hard to get rid of. The researchers tested whether focusing on a distractor —another thought brought to mind—would end the return of the intrusive white bear. Some participants who were asked to suppress the thought of a white bear were told to focus on a red Volkswagen whenever the white bear came to mind. While thinking about the red VW didn’t help suppress their white-bear thoughts, it did stop them from becoming preoccupied with the white bear later. The focused distraction—honing in on a red VW—instead of a focus on random things stopped the white bear from getting linked to the VW. The focused distractor stopped the rebound effect that researchers had noted before.
    What’s the lesson here? Wegner explains: “If we wish to suppress a thought , it’s necessary to become absorbed in another thought. The distractor we seek should be intrinsically interesting and engaging to us, and even if it is unpleasant, it should not be boring or confusing.” As we’ll see in the next chapter, being able to focus not just on a distractor but also on a new goal or aspiration—that is, beginning to reengage in a new goal as you disengage from another—is key to the whole process.
    Alas, the white bear isn’t the only immediate problem. It turns out that any energy you invest in ridding yourself of those distracting thoughts will actually lessen the amount of energy you have to spend on other tasks. Ego depletion is the term Roy Baumeister coined for this phenomenon, but it might just as easily be called willpower , as he does in his popular book of the same name. Whether you call it ego , self , or willpower , it is not an infinite resource. When we humans seek to regulate an impulse or a thought, we do so at the cost of reducing our ability to control other impulses, thoughts, or actions. Ego or self is more like a limited source of energy—brain energy, as it happens—than not. While it has become fashionable for the media to insist that human beings are good multitaskers, Baumeister’s work and that of others suggests the very opposite.
    The experiment conducted by Baumeister and his colleagues was simple in its design. Researchers asked participants to fast before they showed up, and then ushered them into a room that smelled of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. There were bowls of cookies and radishes on the table. Some students were told they could eat the cookies, others were told they couldn’t eat the cookies but had to eat at least three radishes, and the rest were told they could eat nothing. Then the students were instructed to solve a puzzle that, unbeknownst to them, was in fact insoluble. The folks who had to both resist the cookies and eat the radishes gave up on the puzzle first—in fact, much more quickly than