Mental Traps_ The Overthinker's Guide to a Happier Life - Andre Kukla [39]
Not surprisingly, some things are best done by prescription and some by impulse. Each mode of action has its own province. For example, projects that require the coordinated efforts of several people usually have to be approached prescriptively. If you and I are to carry a large sofa down the stairs, we must establish and adhere to certain ground rules. I can’t let go of my end simply because I have an impulse to rest. On the other hand, when we’re on vacation and free of any scheduled obligations, it would be foolish to continue to eat lunch precisely at noon regardless of whether we’re hungry. Here the rule of impulse makes our life more pleasant without bringing any disadvantages in its wake.
We fall into the trap of regulation when we prescribe our behavior in a situation where impulse would be a better guide. We regulate when we eat simply because it’s lunchtime, go to bed because it’s bedtime, or decide ahead of time how we will greet intimate friends who would no longer be surprised at anything we might blurt out. To be sure, we may also commit the opposite error of acting impulsively when we should be following a prescription. We don’t want our surgeon or our airline pilot to be guided by the whim of the moment. We want these people to have a plan. But overimpulsiveness is not a mental trap. By definition, mental traps are injurious habits of thought. Overimpulsiveness, however, is an insufficiency of thought. Like bankruptcy or breaking a leg, it’s a misfortune of another order.
Prescribing our behavior is a trap even when prescription is as good a guide as impulse. That is to say, impulse wins if it’s a tie. There are two reasons for this. The first is that prescribing is a species of work—it’s something that happens only if we do it. Impulse, however, arises by itself, without requiring any effort on our part. If both modes of functioning are equally effective, we might as well relax and let impulse do it. The same can be said of the far more frequent situation wherein we can’t tell whether a prescriptive or an impulsive approach would be more desirable.
The second reason that impulse wins ties is particularly important. In the course of discussing the previous nine traps, I’ve had several occasions to refer to the phenomenon of mental inertia. This is the tendency of agents to continue with what was begun, just because it was begun. It’s clear that the inertial tendency is a major cause of falling into mental traps. It propels us into persistence by causing us to keep working after the value of the goal is lost; it makes us fixate by causing us to keep working when there’s nothing to be done; it lands us in resistance by causing us to keep working toward an old goal when it’s time to do something new; and so on. The inertia to complete project X is produced when we adopt the intention to do X—equivalently, when we prescribe X for ourselves. Impulse, on the other hand, is inertialess. If we adopt the project of whistling “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” we will experience at least a little bit of difficulty in stopping in midstream (as it were). But there’s no difficulty in stopping if we start to whistle the same tune impulsively, without telling ourselves to do it. This is a reason to prefer impulsivity to prescription, all other things being equal. By acting on impulse, we avoid the inertia that can so easily precipitate us into mental traps.
Some ways of regulating our behavior are subtler than others. The most uncouth is simply to ignore the impulse and follow a prescription when impulse is the better guide. Our previous examples of regulation, such as eating lunch simply because it’s noon, all belong to this category. Some of us are so entirely ruled by prescription that we seem no longer to be aware