Our OCD comes from over-thinking

INFPs think too much. We’re information gatherers. The strength of our Perception score determines how far into overdrive our secondary cognitive function of External Intution (Ne) runs. INFPs with high Perception scores get stuck in the “what if”. When we get stuck, the external doesn’t get processed by our Introverted Feeling (Fi) so we don’t move on.

In doing so, we lose touch with our Ideal and our Ideal Self. We start losing track of those things that we have built towards that ideal life we wanted. We start getting anxious that our tenuous grasp on our ideal life is slipping further away so we fall into OCD behavior.

For example, when I was in my early 20′s before I had a girlfriend and learned how to have balanced relationships, I would over-think situations meeting girls. Was this person a potential girlfriend and not just a friend? Was that an I-think-you’re-cool-smile or was that an I-wish-you-would-ask-me-out smile? What action I took depended on how I interpreted body language, word choice and all the minute details of all interactions. A brief phone call or a passing hello turned into hours of analysis later.

Ideally, I wanted girlfriend who loved and understood me. My over-thinking was causing that ideal to slip away. If she was the one, shouldn’t this entire process be natural and I shouldn’t be obsessing? The more I obsessed, the more un-ideal the situation was becoming. To lessen my anxiety, to stop thinking so much, I attempted to control my external environment by imposing order. I would be obsessive about washing dishes or putting books a certain way. A myriad of little quirks sprung out of nowhere all because I was over-thinking a relationship that didn’t even exist yet.

Obsessive compulsion is caused by anxiety. INFP develop that anxiety because when we get stuck in thoughts that we feel are moving us from our Ideal. It’s much like being stuck in traffic when we have to be somewhere. Where we have to be is our Ideal. Being stuck in our heads is us analyzing the traffic. Are the cars starting to move? Maybe we won’t be that late. Maybe we’ll give it just a couple of minutes. We look about for more information instead of deciding we have enough information to move on.

Instead, if we had decided that were stuck, we could have made new plans, called and rescheduled. Instead INFPs hold onto this Ideal destination whether it’s the perfect person or the perfect job or the perfect life. We think we can still have that perfection if we can impose some order through repetition of sometimes quirky behavior.

OCD behavior is exhibited in many different ways among INFPs. Usually, the OCD behavior has minimal impact to our lives during our over-thinking phases. Eventually INFPs let go of whatever is taking so much energy. However, if that over-thinking phase persists too long, INFPs have a tendency to shut down.

The Signs:

1. Refusal of the new. INFPs love experiences especially new ones in areas we enjoy. If an INFP loves trying new restaurants and turns down the opportunity to do so then it’s a sign that the INFP is over-thinking. We turn down new experiences we love because our brain is too busy to enjoy the new experience. If we try something new when were in an over-thinking phase, we’ll miss out because we’re only be partly present.

2. Control of environment. For me, it’s massive cleaning. For others, it could be organizing of the trivial. INFPs will try to compel order onto things of little consequence. The reason why we act upon things of little consequence is because we know that if we make a mistake, it won’t matter.

3. Withdrawal and isolation. INFPs ignoring important relationships is the biggest sign of trouble. INFPs do need alone time, but if we feel more tired after the alone time then our thoughts are too pre-occupied to let us recharge.

The Solution:

The only way INFPs can break out of the over-thinking/OCD cycle is to make a decision. We need our Fi to kick in to determine if something feels right or wrong. You can’t make that decision for us but you can make it easier for a decision to be made.

1. Impose order for us. Do the laundry, wash the dishes, take over the trivial or better yet get them done when we’re not looking. If an INFP can’t get caught up in OCD busy-work, we’re forced back into our heads where we’ll have to confront our issues.

2. Bring perspective. You bring perspective by living your life not ours. I like hearing about how other people live and approach their life. People that are passionate about how they deal with problems and how they embrace successes, give me something solid that I can relate my life against. Seeing someone living their life in front of me creates a sharp contrast to living in my head that’s causing the disruptive OCD behavior.

3. Make us a better offer. Offer us a distraction. When the INFPs that I know are in over-thinking mode, I get them out. We do stuff like hiking, dancing, going to a bookstore to get them out of their head and into their bodies. Offering distractions isn’t difficult because we don’t want to be alone in our heads during these phases.

It’s only when INFPs over-think for extended periods that cause disruptive OCD behavior. Most of the time, our OCD comes across as mild quirks. Those quirks don’t go away. You’re just stuck with them so enjoy.

The Care and Feeding of INFPs

Part 1 – INFPs need alone time
Part 2 – Speaking INFP

The most important thing I learned from Robert Kiyosaki about real estate investment was that a house isn’t an asset. It’s a liability. I don’t own it. The bank does. It costs me utilities, maintenance, insurance, taxes and interest each month. Over a 30-year loan, I will have paid over 80% in interest. I would then need to sell my house for at least three times it’s current value in order to break even.

A house is a liability because I’m still responsible for it even though I don’t own it yet. If I don’t make a payment, the bank takes the house away along with all the money I’ve put into so far. If the house burns down and I have no insurance, I still owe the bank the money I borrowed.

Don’t get me wrong. I love being a homeowner. Owning a house fits my lifestyle, but I have no illusion that owning a house that I live in will make me a financial profit. People buy houses thinking they’re making an investment when in reality they’re taking on debt.

This is how I feel about dreams. INFPs think following a dream is an investment for future happiness, but sometimes it ends up costing us more than we realize.

Our Dreams as Investment

All dreams have a payoff, a Return on Investment (ROI). That ROI on achieving our dream is usually in the form of happiness and fulfillment. No one dreams great dreams that will leave them feeling unfulfilled and unhappy.

One of my dreams is to climb Kilimanjaro. In order to do that, I’ll have to invest time and energy getting into shape, research and taking the time away from family. I have to invest resources by buying gear, plane ticket and a guide. In return, I hope to get a sense of fulfillment by crossing an item off my To Do List. I hope to get happiness in the form of a new experience. I hope to learn something that I can share with others. My ROI in the form of happiness, fulfillment and growth will be worth more to me than the investment of time, effort and money.

Everyone has dreams with payoffs in excess of the investment we put in. Whether it’s the 10,000 hours to become an expert at writing or running our own business, whether it’s the scrimping and saving to buy our first house, we invest in our dreams because we think we will feel better and happier after accomplishing those dreams.

However, INFPs do two things that give us poor returns on our dreams. INFPs sacrifice the now for the eventually. We hold jobs we don’t like or put up with people we don’t want in our lives if we see it as a means to achieving our dreams. On the other side, INFPs with our terrible grasp of delayed gratification, sacrifice tomorrow for today. We put stuff on credit card. We blow off our commitments. We take it easy now and hope that the future will work itself out on its own. We have to invest better.

Dreams in Changing Market Conditions

The problem chasing a dream for a future payoff is that the dream may not pay off later. Sometimes bad things happen. I could trip and break my leg the day before the flight to Kilimanjaro. Luckily, catastrophic luck is uncommon. What’s more common for INFPs is achieving a dream we no longer want.

The ROI in achieving a dream is usually happiness, fulfillment and growth. When we stop wanting what we’ve worked for then we don’t feel happy or fulfilled in achieving our dream . We end up feeling wishy-washy, regretting the wasted time and effort.

One example is students who change majors. As they learn more about their profession, they become less enchanted with the prospect of doing that profession day-to-day. Even worse, an INFP gets a job they dreamed about and it turns out to be less than ideal, but they’re stuck at that job to pay off student loans and establish a life beyond school.

Not wanting what we’ve worked for happens because of changing market conditions. That market is you.

In the early 2000′s, people invested in real estate because they heard others were making money in real estate. Housing prices had been rising for decades so many made the assumption that housing growth would continue. They invested heavily leveraging themselves beyond their means. When the housing market crashed in 2005, those investors were left with more debt than the value of their house. Getting rid of their investments produced negative ROI, but they couldn’t afford to continue paying.

INFPs make the same basic assumption. Just because a dream makes us happy today, doesn’t mean that it will continue to make us happy tomorrow. Our dreams make us happy in today’s market i.e. how we are today. However, we change. Our values change. Because those values change, we make different decisions including the decision of which dreams will make us happy. INFPs leave jobs we once considered dream jobs and leave relationships with that person we once thought was “the one” because those things no longer make us happy.

As we grow, we can’t guarantee ourselves that dreams that make us feel happy and fulfilled now will continue to do so.

Happiness on Happiness Return

In real estate, a different way to view ROI is Cash on Cash Return (CCR). CCR is the percentage return based on the actual cash invested. If we put $20,000 down on a house and we rent the house for $200 over the cost of mortgage and expenses, then our CCR would be 12% annually ($200 x 12mo / $20,000). If the market takes a dive and we lower rent to only net $85/month, we still make a 5% return which is better than sticking $20K in a bank to collect interest.

Happiness on happiness return is the amount of happiness that we get now in doing those things to achieve our payoff later.

We achieve a high rate of happiness on happiness return by investing in our happiness now in order to achieve our dreams. It’s finding happiness in journey, in the tasks we need to do today so we can make our dreams happen tomorrow. This way, even if our dreams change, we don’t regret our time and effort invested because what we were doing made us happy.

Making a Better Investment

Our dreams give us our individuality. It propels our growth. The moment we stop investing in our dreams is when apathy and entropy take over our lives. The object is to invest more wisely.

1. Get out of bad investments

We tend to hold onto a bad investment in hopes that it will turn the corner. We stay in bad relationships. We continue doing work that makes us unhappy. We don’t want to take a loss because it means we failed.

Zero-based thinking
The quickest way to know if your dream has become a bad investment is to ask: knowing what I know now, would I have gotten into this in the first place? If the answer is no. It’s time to get out.

The 80/20 Rule
Getting out isn’t easy. If it’s a job you don’t like but you need to pay rent, you often times can’t quit outright. Simplify things you want to get out of by applying the 80/20 rule which states 80% of results comes from 20% of efforts. Figure out the 20% that achieves your current results and do only those tasks. That way you do less, freeing up energy to be used for transitioning to the next dream.

2. Educate yourself

Investing requires a modicum of financial literacy to avoid simple mistakes that could become potentially disastrous. Investing in dreams requires basic emotional literacy to avoid mistakes. You have to know yourself before you can be true to yourself.

Figure out values
If your doctor told you that you had a month to live, what you spend that month doing? Whatever you answer is your highest value. If you answered that you’d spend time with my family instead of finishing up that project at work, family is a higher value than work. Dreams that don’t align with values are discarded and we lose our investment of time.

Figure out needs
When we no longer want a dream, it doesn’t mean the need that dream was going to meet has gone away. We have six critical needs. Maybe the job we wanted would have made us feel special (Critical Importance need) but then we realized that we’d never be very good at it so we quit our schooling for that job. This doesn’t mean our need for Critical Importance is gone and we still need to find something to meet that need.

3. Find leverage

Investing $20K in shares of stock only gets a return on $20K. Putting $20K down on property can get a house costing over $200,000. That is leverage. Finding the right lever for your dreams can help you move mountains.

Write down goals
This doesn’t have to be a list. It can be a journal. It could be a blog. Once goals are written, it solidifies from the ether of INFP wishful thinking into a practical lever that keeps us accountable to our integrity.

Don’t reinvent the wheel
Someone has that job we want or that relationships we’ve dream of. Find the people that started where we started and are currently where we want to go and learn how they did it. We don’t need to spend the thousands of hours of trial and error like they did. Our task is to use those hours to figure out a way to do what they did in a way that will keep us interested, engaged and happy now.

I’ve always been lucky. It started when my family had to flee my native country and start all over dirt-poor. My dad was forty and I was five. I was even luckier when the first company to employ my dad closed. I ended up moving away from my only friend at 10 years old. The luckiest thing to happen to me occurred at age 22. After months of working up the nerve to ask this girl I liked out on a date, she stood me up.

Immigrating to America allowed me an education. Had we stayed, I would be doing back-breaking labor in a country where the average annual salary is $3000 US/year. My dad getting laid off forced us to move to a city with activities that held my interest, activities unavailable in a town of 2000 people. So instead of drinking at the lake on weekends during my high school years, I was competing in fencing at the local university. Moving to a big city kept me out of trouble and out of jail.

Because the girl didn’t show, I decided to dance for the first time. I was too disappointed to be self-conscious. So that night, I discovered my love for dancing. Four years later, my future wife noticed me on the dance floor at a club. We started taking ballroom, swing and tango classes together. Those dance lessons taught us to work together to excel in a cooperative activity. They taught us about our differing learning styles and the ways we dealt with frustration and conflict. I attribute part of the success of our marriage to what we learned about each other in those early dance lessons.

The Nature of Luck

Psychologist Richard Wiseman did a ten year study into the nature of luck. In 2003, Wisemen published a book called The Luck Factor. His site contains a brief article about his study.

In one experiment, Wiseman placed an advert asking for people who intended to buy lottery tickets. Out of 700 people, Wiseman discovered, not surprisingly, that the lucky ones didn’t win more than the unlucky ones. Our perception of our own luck doesn’t affect pure chance.

What about activities that aren’t pure chance? Wiseman asked a group of participants to count the number of photographs in a sample newspaper. The unlucky people averaged two minutes to count the photos. The lucky people took seconds. The second page held a message that took up half the page. The message read, “Stop counting — There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.”

What Wiseman concluded was that people who perceive themselves to be lucky generate their own good fortune. That luck consisted of four principles.

Four Principles of Luck and INFPs

1. Creating and noticing chance opportunities

Noticing opportunities requires overcoming selective attention. Watch the video below.

When I first saw this video on Techdirt, I didn’t see the gorilla. For INFPs, counting the ball being passed is our focus on our idealized version of how our lives should be. The gorilla is opportunities we miss because we so doggedly focus on creating this singular vision of our lives.

INFPs agonize over finding that job that makes us feel fulfilled. We struggle finding that right person to share our lives. All the while, that perfect person or perfect job could have already passed us by. Those ideals make INFPs specifically focused instead of generally focused. Everything gets filtered by our ideals. If we don’t see the situation as ideal then it’s no good to us so we dismiss it.

INFPs need to account for change. Situations and people who may not be ideal now could be ideal later.

Perfection is easy to find, but hard to recognize.

2. Following our Intuition

Opportunities rarely hold up signs saying, I’m an opportunity. It’s a friend a who wants you to meet someone. It’s a feeling that nudges us to do something we otherwise wouldn’t do.

About a decade ago, an college crush came back into my life briefly through a few emails. She recommended some books by Robert Kiyosaki. I rarely read non-fiction, but something told me to read these. Kiyosaki’s books changed my views about work and money. I recommended those books to my ENTJ brother who runs with ideas that compel him. He’s five years younger than I am, but because of those books, he got into real estate and is now less than a decade from retiring.

Although INFPs have a good intuition, that intution can lead us into trouble when we project. We make more of an opportunity than it really is. This becomes apparent in our interactions with others. INFPs don’t often meet people with whom we strongly connect. With new people we like, we have a tendency to project our values onto them. We try to explain to ourselves why we like them by making stuff up in our head based on how we feel. Then we feel betrayed when their actions don’t match up to values we projected on them.

After enough let downs, we think our intuition is suspect but it’s really our interpretation of our intuition that’s faulty.

3. Having Positive Expectation

Lucky people expect good things to happen to them. It’s the Reticular Activation System (RAS) part of our brain not wishful thinking. What car do you drive? How often do you notice other people driving that same car?

Among the RAS’s functions is its “ability to consciously focus attention on something. In addition, the RAS acts as a filter, dampening down the effect of repeated stimuli such as loud noises, helping to prevent the senses from being overloaded.” Our RAS controls what we pay attention to and what we filter out.

Lucky people don’t filter out opportunities because they have the positive expectation that good things will happen to them. It’s self-fulling prophecy. Because they expect good things to happen, they are more open to notice the opportunities to make good things happen in their lives.

Positive expectation requires INFPs to be open which isn’t something we learn naturally. Over years of being hurt from misunderstanding, we don’t let ourselves out, but instead we let people in. INFPs develop an us versus them mentality. We put people through exhaustive hoop-jumping before we let them into our inner world. Keeping the world at arms length keeps us from opportunity.

4. Seeing the Good from the Bad

A zen proverb states, “Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.”

If we get hit by a car and lose the use of our legs, that is pain. Pain is random and beyond your control. Whether we decided to to mope or play Murderball (quad rugby) is entirely up to us.

Interpretation controls attitude. Attitude affects how we act. When bad things happen, attitude determines how quickly we move on and try again. Lucky people are glass-half-full people. A glass half-empty is also half-full so either view is right. But which is more useful? People who see lack operate from an attitude of lack. People who see abundance act from a place of abundance. Like attracts like.

Interpretation stems from belief and INFPs hold onto beliefs dearly. However, multiple beliefs about the same situation may be valid. INFPs adopt beliefs that feel most right without ever questioning which beliefs are the most useful.

For example, say an INFP gets dumped. We can interpret it two ways. Our ex was either right or wrong in dumping us. If we believe they were wrong then we start looking for signs we missed of why our ex was a bad person. On the other hand, if we believe our ex was right then we look to ourselves to figure out how to not make the same mistakes. Which belief is more useful?

Practical Luck

Luck is nothing more than increasing the probability of a desired outcome. We do that by increasing the odds of finding opportunities that help us and making the most of out opportunities we notice.

Let say I blindfolded and stuck you twice as far a normal from a dart board. If you threw enough darts, you’ll eventually hit the bulls-eye by pure chance. Now, I take off the blindfold. I send you back to the right starting position. I give you a darts expert to teach you proper technique and to make corrections. You’re chances of hitting the bulls-eye have greatly improved.

Lucky people unconsciously use the principles of luck to increase their probability. What lucky people do unconsciously, anyone can learn to do consciously.

Go out.

Sitting at home isn’t increasing our odds of good things happening.

Wiseman’s study found that lucky people are more social. Lucky people are pleasant so more people like them. Because others like them, they will do things for them. Those things can include recommending people for jobs that haven’t been advertised yet, introducing people who would later become friends or significant others.

By ourselves, we can’t notice everything and be everywhere. A strong social network gives us more eyes and ears that are looking out for us.

Do something different.

Different opportunities originate from different places.

Drive down a different street on the way home. Go to a different grocery store. Any activity that varies from our routine increases probability. The new is uncomfortable but being uncomfortable makes us more aware. That heightened awareness leads to the recognizing opportunities that we otherwise would have missed.

Also, opportunities are not infinite from a single source. Your friends will run out of potential relationship material to introduce you to. After time, your current activities will give you fewer chances to grow.

Be ready.

Imagine you’ve met someone who could be the one. If you’re thirty, living in your parent’s basement without a job, that’s a huge turn off to overcome. How would afford to go on dates? You’re not ready to date even though you may want to.

Everyone has that vision of their perfect job. All jobs have minimum qualifications to even be considered. If a friend says, hey I have a job that fits everything you ever wanted, would you even qualify? What good is an opportunity if you aren’t ready to do anything about it?

Being ready means focusing on personal growth. To have more, we first have to be more. To have a perfect job, we need to be someone that qualifies for that perfect job. To have good relationships, we ned to become someone worth knowing.

Act immediately.

Opportunities have a short window in which to act. The world is full of people that could use that opportunity also. Even though we see it first doesn’t mean someone else won’t see it moments later.

What if we’re wrong and that opportunity turns out badly? Then we’re wrong. Admit we made a mistake and do something else instead of continuing to do the wrong thing. Find the good from the bad and move on.

I never wait for parking space because I park at the first one I see even if it’s a farther walk. People spend two years of their lives waiting in line which includes parking. If parking can’t be found and I don’t have to be there, I’ll leave. It’s the glass-half-full mentality. I believe the universe is telling me that I have better things to do.

The most interesting thing that came from Wiseman’s study is the results from the standardized “life satisfaction” scale. Participants ranked themselves on how satisfied they felt with family and personal life, finances, health and career. The people who believed themselves lucky rated themselves far happier then those who felt unlucky.

Maybe the universe doesn’t say anything and I’m only fooling myself. Does it matter if I’m fooling myself into being happier?

I took a two month blog hiatus to turn 40 which I did exactly one week ago. Over the years, I found that many INFPs I’ve met in their 40′s and 50′s are some of the happiest people I know. So am I happier now than I was last week?

Happiness and Control

Happiness is directly proportional to the control we feel we have in fulfilling our needs.

For example, I know a few INFPs wanting new jobs. Their current one is terrible and getting worse by the hour. They’ve had good jobs turn bad before. What they did before was quit, take some time off, then sent out a zillion resumes and got rehired quickly after. They have great qualifications, but in this economy they feel stuck.

They’re more unhappy because they feel stuck. They’d be less unhappy with a bad job situation if they felt they could quit at any time and get another job immediately. If we feel we have no control in getting a job, a relationship, a fulfilling life and that something external like the economy or fate controls our ability to meet our needs, then we are unhappy.

Quick Overview of our six Critical needs: Certainty, Uncertainty, Love/Connection, Critical Significance, Growth, and Contribution.

In my early 20′s, my biggest need was Love and Connection. All I wanted was a girlfriend. I also felt I had no control over that. It seemed the only way I would ever find a significant other would be for the universe would send someone my way who would recognize something special in me. I wasn’t good at dating or meeting girls. It was up to fate. All my other accomplishments didn’t make me happier because the one thing in my life that I needed at that time, I felt I had no control over.

Happiness is about the feeling of control not the feeling of accomplishment. A few years later, I met someone. It wasn’t officially becoming boyfriend and girlfriend that made me happy. I was happy long before she became my girlfriend. It was meeting her and both of us knowing we had potential together. Having a girlfriend was no longer in control of the whims of the universe. The beyond-my-control part of the equation was out of the way because “fate” brought someone my way. Having a potential girlfriend wasn’t what made me happy. Knowing that I was the only one who could screw up from there on made me happy.

Happiness Isn’t Satisfaction

Satisfaction comes from accomplishment, from getting what we want. We work hard for a promotion or save for a vacation. We get the promotion. We go on vacation. At first we feel happy, but the promotion came with more responsibility that took more time and the vacation didn’t turn out as perfect as we has hoped. We’re happy but also unhappy at the same time.

The reason for this happy/unhappy pull comes from confusing satisfaction with happiness. Fulfilling a desire makes us feel satisfied whether it’s buying something we wanted or achieving a goal. Growth is all about understanding and meeting needs. When we accomplish something we have proof that we are in control of our Growth need. This is where happiness from satisfaction stems.

Since we feel satisfaction and happiness when we accomplish something, we think they’re the same. However, we’re only happy if we accomplish something that makes us grow from where we were before. That’s why we may get a sense of satisfaction doing a big house cleaning, but it doesn’t make us that much happier because we know we’ll be doing it again in a few months.

Completing regular chores doesn’t help us grow because we’ve done it before. That’s why doing the same things day after day brings unhappiness for many INFPs. There’s no feeling of growth. There’s no sense of control over our growth unless we allow ourselves to do things that challenge us.

That’s why INFP quickly grow dissatisfied with jobs after the learning process. As soon as the job becomes the same variation of tasks, it no longer meets our Growth need. Unless that job also meets a Contribution need (helping others) or a Critical Significance need (makes you feel special) then job satisfaction diminishes.

Happiness and Dissatisfaction

Since happiness and satisfaction are separate things, we can be happy and dissatisfied. It’s called the comfort zone. Eventually, INFPs shift their locus of control internally. We focus on the things that we can do to affect change which gives us a sense of control over our path in life.

However, having a sense of control and doing something with it are two different things. My 30′s was a period of great happiness and great dissatisfaction. The happiness came from feeling I could control my own destiny. The dissatisfaction came from not doing anything about it.

I have a wonderful family, a good job and for the most part I’m free from major worries. Basically, I felt only I could screw up my life. However, not screwing up my life isn’t the same as making my life better. Dissatisfaction came from resting on my laurels. I could have been more but didn’t do anything because I was happy with what I had.

INFPs start unhappy and satisfied. In our 20′s, we get a job. We get a significant other. But it seemed by chance because if we lost the job or the significant other, we aren’t sure how we got them in the first place. Eventually we grow into ourselves. If we lose the job, we’ll find another one. If we our hearts get broken, we realize that we can cope and find love again. We become more happy as we feel more sure about getting things we need.

However, INFPs move to happiness and dissatisfaction because as we become more sure in our ability to meet our needs, we recognize more potential in ourselves then we thought. That recognition of greater potential in turn grows our vision of our Ideal Self. We create the Ideal Self that matches our potential. As our potential grows, our Ideal Self grows making it seem harder to reach. I call it the Paradox of INFP Growth: dissatisfaction grows as we become increasingly better at making ourselves happier.

Happiness is a Moving Target

I’ve never understood being generally happy. It’s like breaking your leg and saying I’m generally healthy.

Unmet needs are like injuries. In a car accident, we don’t notice contusions on our face if we have a broken femur. At 20, I never thought about my lack of Certainty (no job stability) because of my lack of Love and Connection. When I finally did get a girlfriend, I started noticing all the other unmet needs. I realized how little control I had over meeting those other needs. So at 22, I was happy about the girlfriend and unhappy about everything else.

We are happy about some things and unhappy about others. This is a constant condition and it’s okay. In daily life, we only have so much time to divide among our 6 critical needs. Maybe we focus on work (Certainty) because we’ve been slacking lately, but that takes time from family (Love/Connection). Maybe our job doesn’t make us feel important (Critical Significance) so we volunteer (Contribution) or take up a hobby that challenges us (Growth).

Striving for balance doesn’t work well because if something hurts more, it’s hard to concentrate on what hurts less. If we accidentally trip and skin our knee and break our arm, we’re not going to find balance and treat them equally. We fix what hurts the most. If we don’t have a job, we focus on paying food and rent (Certainty) before we worry about moving to a job that makes us feel fulfilled (Critical Significance). It’s rare that we’ll ever be able to meet all 6 of our needs equally. We concentrate on what’s urgent now and then move on to the next one.

It’s possible to be happy with everything, just not all at the same time.

Happiness Now and Then

Happiness is a journey not a destination. You don’t become happy. You’re happy becoming. I think about happiness much less at 40 than I did at 20.

At 20, I was obsessed with figuring out what I could do to make myself happy. If I learned some esoteric skill (fencing, Tarot, martial arts, etc.), I’d have Critical Significance in knowing something most other people didn’t. If I limited my friendship to a select group of people, then of course I’d naturally build stronger Love and Connection bonds. This is what I thought at 20. But friends came and went and no one really cares what I knew unless it helped them. Everyone is trying to meet their needs too.

At 40, I think about happiness occasionally. Being happy isn’t something that I have control over. Controlling your happiness is forcing yourself to remember something that’s right at the tip of your brain. The harder you try to remember, the more elusive it becomes. The harder I try doing things that I think will make me happy, the more disappointed I become when the results are less ideal than I imagined.

Since I have no control over making myself happy then focusing on it only makes me unhappy. Instead as I’ve gotten older I focus on the one thing I can control: me—my thoughts, my beliefs, my attitude and my actions.

I wait less. I value my time more so I’m less prone to lose it in the randomness that seeps into INFP life. I find myself saying “Where did my day go” less often. Even if I fritter away my hours, I stay present in my less than productive activities instead of “comfort-zoning” on auto because misplacing days is always much worse than losing them on purpose.

When I don’t think about happiness, being happy is simpler.

At 20, I created monumental goals. Accomplishing these goals would make me happy. The more I thought about those goals, the more stuck I became at the scope of what I wanted to do. Today, I still have those exact same goals.

The difference is that I don’t focus on accomplishing those goals. I focus on becoming the person who can accomplish those goals. I just do one thing that makes be better than I was the day before. Sometimes that one thing is so small I don’t feel a sense of accomplishment doing it. I only know that I’m better off than yesterday. Then on those occasions where I do think about happiness like when I’m writing about it for this blog, I realize that I’m happier than I’ve been before.

Then I stop thinking about it. Not thinking about happiness makes me better off than I was the day before, better off than last week when I was in my 30s.

Being an INFP can make life easier not harder.

No matter what MBTI type, people want to be happy and to feel fulfilled. Fulfillment comes from meeting our Six Needs. Happiness derives from feeling we have a control over the direction of our lives. INFPs have natural qualities that make both easier.

Some of those qualities are Authenticity, Adaptability, Intuition. This post focuses on authenticity.

How Authenticity Improves Our Lives

Being authentic means being genuine with yourself and with others. Authenticity requires that a person be honest about themselves and their motivations.

How many times in our lives have we gone after a goal and realized that goal wasn’t what we wanted? It was what our parents wanted or what society expected or what we thought would make us look cool. Being more honest doesn’t mean that we would change our actions, but it would make us more aware of our values.

Maybe we did go into a profession because of our parents. That only means that we valued our parent’s concern for us more than taking a risk into desired career. Maybe we take up activities to make us look better in the eyes of our peers but our heart isn’t in it. That only means we value the good opinion of our peers.

Understanding our values helps us understand which needs are most important to us. Doing as your parents wanted means that Love and Connection Needs (getting parents approval) are more important than Growth Needs (taking a risk towards non-parent approved career). If we are unhappy, perhaps those needs are in the wrong order or we need to meet our Love and Connection needs in other ways.

Clear values helps us evaluate which goals are more important than others because those are the goals that meet our most important needs. Knowing that our goals are meeting our needs gives us a sense of control in our lives and instead of feeling like we’re blindly groping forward. That sense of control in feeling that we are directing our lives makes us happier.

All of this happens if we strive to be honest is ourselves. We are more authentic, more genuine when we stop trying to fool ourselves.

Authenticity in INFPs

“To thine own self be true.” – Shakespeare

Authentic INFPs have learned to align our two worlds. Our external world is our presentation. It’s who we present to get along. Our internal world is our Identity. It’s who we are when we feel safe from judgment.

When Presentation and Identity become too disconnected, INFPs feel they’ve lost touch with themselves.

If our Presentation is employee but our Identity is artist, artistic INFPs don’t feel they’re lost if they continue practicing their art even though it’s not what they’re paid to do. It’s the artistic INFPs that put aside their art that feel hopeless and lost because they’ve put aside their Identity.

INFPs value authenticity because our auxiliary cognitive function of External Intuition is always searching for the hidden meanings and separating the true from the false. What INFPs value externally, we bring internally. INFPs want feel more authentic more genuine in how we live our lives. It’s our path to our Ideal Self.

Getting In Touch With the Authentic Us

In order to take advantage of our authenticity, we first have to find it.

1. Seek Solitude

INFPs want to be liked. That needs for Love & Connection and Critical Significance require other people’s acknowledgment. INFPs become less true to ourselves seeking that acknowledgment.

We need distance from others in order to separate our wants from what others want us to be. Solitude lets us strip off all the layers of protection built up against the real world. We can’t find our personal honesty until we remove those layers.

2. Understand our motivations

Our reasons are our why’s. Why do we do what we do? Thomas Payne said that people have two reasons to do something: a good reason and the real reason.

A good reason is what we tell others and convince ourselves is the noble cause of our actions. The real reason is what actually motivates our actions. That real reason is usually to fill an unmet need.

For example, when we get a job that we don’t feel is right, are we getting it for stability (Certainty needs), because we think people will think better of us (Critical Importance needs) or because it we think it will help us later (Growth needs)?

Once if figure out which need is being filled, it gives us the opportunity fill that need with something that does feel right. We can take different actions that align with our values.

3. Accept our flaws

Sometimes our reasons aren’t unique or enlightening or particularly noble. Sometimes our reasons don’t make us look very good. Those petty reasons for our actions make us feel flawed. INFPs want perfection especially in ourselves.

However, perfection makes everyone the same. The difference between a hand woven rug and a machine made rug is the handwoven rug will have imperfection. A human made it with the human possibility of making an error. Those imperfections make a hand woven rug unique.

It’s the same with people. It’s our flaws and the lives create despite them that gives us our individuality.

Using our Advantage

The next step to all knowledge is action. Knowledge without action is just potential. INFPs have been starving on the steady diet of our potential all our lives.

The object is to use our natural inclination to be authentic to meet needs and to regain a sense of control in our lives. Take the small step of goal setting because it will do both.

The First Small Step

1. Write down your goals.
2. For each goal, write down all the reasons you want to achieve that goal

Without step two, step one is worthless. Figuring our reasons aligns values with goals.

Being authentic means being honest. Those reasons don’t to have to be noble. Goal setting is being selfish because it’s all about what brings us happiness.

INFPs get enamored by something we think should make us happy only to find out later that it wasn’t what we really wanted. Being honest with ourselves minimizes these false starts because our goals will be meeting our real needs.

When climbing the ladder of success, make sure it’s leaning against the right wall. The right wall for an INFP is the one the takes us closer to our Ideal. The wrong wall is the one takes us closer to who we think our Ideal should be. Authenticity lets us differentiate the two.

How I Make This Work For Me

I’m in the process of goal setting this week. It’s taken about three months of almost completely eliminating my social schedule and changing my routines in order to find the distance I need.

Goal setting is time consuming. Writing the reasons takes longer than writing the goal. As I’m writing those reasons, I let the dominant INFP Intuitive Feeling kick into high gear. That cognitive function runs wild if I let it and I’m letting it determine if those reasons I write ring true or if I’m just convincing myself because I want them to be true.

My goals are all brainstormed in one sitting. I’m taking several days to figure out my reasons. Additionally, I’m writing which of the Six Needs each goal is trying to fulfill.

For example, one of my goals is to climb Kilimanjaro which fills my Growth need and my Critical Importance need. It fills my Growth need because at this time I’m nowhere where near the shape physically or financially to complete the goal. It fills my Critical Importance needs because I get to tell people I did it.

Yes, filling that Critical Importance needs seems self-indulgent. But in meeting our needs, we have to accept that we can’t be who we think other people think will like.

Our authenticity and our happiness depends on it.

I love TED videos because they make me rethink my view of the world. In the video, Harvard psychologist and happiness expert Dan Gilbert explains why we make bad decisions.

I’m going to explain how I think it applies to INFPs.

Since the video is long, here are the important parts:

1. Expected Value of Anything = (Odds of Gain) x (Value of Gain)
2. People make poor decisions because we make errors in estimating Odds of Gain and errors in estimating Value of Gain.
3. Using memory makes us prone to errors in Odds.
4. Shifting comparisons make us prone to errors in Value

In the video, Dan gives specific examples about how people commonly make mistakes estimating Odds of Gain and Value of Gain.

How an INFP Values Anything

INFPs value things ideally in order to get our ideal outcome.

The basic formula of Expected Value of Anything = (Odds of Gain) x (Value of Gain) becomes:

Ideal Expected Value of Anything = (Maximum Odds of Gain) x (Maximum Value of Gain).

In other words:

Perfection = (Being Almost Positive We’ll Get What We Want) x (What We Get Is Everything We Wanted)

What This Means In Real Life

When INFPs approach life in terms of the ideal, we expect that any endeavor we embark upon will give us the possibility of the best probable outcome.

Ideal New Friendship = (Best chances of becoming friends) x (Becoming best friends)

Ideal Career Path = (Best chance of getting that career) x (Complete career fulfillment)

If we can’t get something perfect, INFPs feel less motivated to do it. However, that Ideal isn’t a fixed point but a range. For example:

Maximum Odds of Gain – Best chances of becoming friends

• Best Case: everything clicks and we can talk easily with this new person like we’ve known them all our lives
• Worst Case We’ll Accept: It could be a challenge, as long as this new person doesn’t do this, this and this and we’ll be okay with it.

Maximum Value of Gain – Becoming best friends

• Best Case: They value us as much as we value them and they’ll do as we would do for them
• Worse Case We’ll Accept: They don’t have to drop everything every time I call just as long as I know that I’m at least in their top 5 or 10 or whatever.

The Worst Case We’ll Accept is different among INFPs. We know everything isn’t going to be absolutely Perfect and that nothing turns out as flawlessly as we imagine in our head. That range from Best Case to Worse Case We’ll Accept is our buffer zone. The closer the Odds of Gain or Value of Gain moves toward the Worse Case We’ll Accept, the less ideal that new friendship becomes.

Maybe that new person says they’ll call back but doesn’t or maybe we find it more difficult to talk to that person. Every time an incident occurs that doesn’t fit our preconceived image of the ideal, the Odds or Value starts dropping towards the Worse Case We’ll Accept. If this happens often enough, we discover that the Expected Value of Friendship was much less than we imagined. We get bored. It’s too difficult. It’s less than our range for perfect. So we stop trying to become friends with this person.

The Dunning–Kruger effect

When it comes to estimating our Odds of Gain, INFPs overestimate our ability to achieve that goal. For me, this was especially true when it came to college and career. At 20, I wanted to be a best selling author. I had wrote in high school and won a couple of contests. Since we estimate Odds of Gain from our past, I estimated that if I worked really hard in college, got enough critique to improve my writing, I was assured a spot on the Times Bestsellers List.

Also, all the comparison to past successes in my head made me extremely susceptible to a cognitive bias called the Dunning-Kruger effect. Basically, this effect occurs when people reach bad conclusions and make bad decisions but are unskilled to recognize they’ve made a bad decision. In other words, people who really don’t know what they’re doing assume that they’re doing it better than average and people who are really good at what they do think they’re worse at it than they actually are.

I estimated my writing ability to my subjective past successes and not to anything objective. I overestimated by Odds of Gain. The only way to become better at estimating your own ability and your Odds of Gain is to become better at what you’re doing. I joined small critique groups which made me a better writer and as I got better at writing, I realized that I wasn’t as good as I thought which dropped my estimate of Odds of Gain down to the point where it was below my Worse Case We’ll Accept.

I see that happening when INFPs changing careers in college. They attend university thinking that they’ll be really in good in one career until long hours and grades sub par to their ideal make them realize that getting to their chosen career is taking much more effort than they thought. More effort means that they might never be as good as someone who’s in the same class and whizzing by with little effort. So to the INFP, their Odds of Gain diminishes with every mediocre outcome and their Ideal Expected Value of the career diminishes to the point where they switch majors to something more ideally suited for them.

For me, I dropped out of school instead of switching majors.

Why INFPs Drop Projects

INFPs drop projects because the Expected Value falls out of our ideal range. We discovered that our estimates were off so why do something if we know it’s not going to turn out within our range of perfect?

I think this is the biggest reason why INFPs get good at things but not great at things. We start a hobby, a sport, an activity. We work at it and improve our skills over the years until we get good enough to estimate that we’ll probably never be great (Value of Gain). Sometimes knowing that more time and effort won’t make us great at something drops our Value of Gain to below our Worse Case We’ll Accept. It’s at this point, we find a new interest and go to the next thing.

Estimating Better

It’s not as if as INFPs, we are blindly deluding ourselves when it comes to estimating Odds of Gain. However, we estimate our odds of getting something as if we were our Ideal Self and not as our current Becoming Self. If we were already our ideal, getting what we want (Odds of Gain) would be as we imagined it would be.

To become better, we need to estimate Odds of Gain based on the person we are now. This drops the Expected Value from that absolute Ideal to a more subjective “ideal for who we are”. Also, finding more about our Value of Gain by asking and researching those who have gotten what we wanted gives a us a more accurate estimate of Value of Gain instead of using our imagination to gives us our imagined Best Scenario. Doing these two things, gives an INFP a more realistic Expected Value in order to base our decision on whether to take on an endeavor.

Yes, we are lowering our expectations. However, doing this gives us something more valuable in return–the possibility of more. If we base our decisions on Ideal Expected Value then in the best possible scenario, we will only get what we expect. If we base our decisions on a more realistic Expected Value, we open the possibility of doing better than we expected.

I’ve never been a fan of Mazlow’s hierarchy of needs because I never saw people moving from Physiological needs to Self-Actualization in any type of linear progression. We jump around. Sometimes love is more important than eating. Sometimes people forgo love completely for esteem through achievement.

Instead, I prefer Tony Robbins definition of the six basic human needs.

Certainty – This is our need to be free from constant worry. In order to achieve this we develop a certain amount of consistency like getting a job or buying a house. We don’t want to worry everyday about how we’re going to eat or where we can sleep safely.

Uncertainty – This is our need for variety. If we knew everything that was ever going to happen in our lives then our lives would be boring.

Critical Significance – This is our need to feel special. Some people make a lot of money to feel significant. Other people get a lot of tattoos. It’s different for everyone.

Love and Connection – This is our need for belonging. We don’t want to feel like we’re all alone inside our heads and our lives.

Growth – This is our need to avoid stagnation. Our lives never reach equilibrium. We are either growing or dying. If we stay at the same point in our lives for long enough, our level of happiness declines.

Contribution – This is our need to feel our lives are more than just ourselves. We don’t want to die feeling like our lives made no difference to anyone.

Achievement vs Fulfillment

Achievement comes from being successful in one or more of these areas. Fulfillment comes from not feeling lack in every area.

Achievement gives us short term happiness. We get a really good job and make a lot of money or we build the largest ball of twine and we meet our need of critical significance. It gives us self-confidence in that area. However, if the other areas are lacking we feel unhappy.

No matter how much success we have, if love is lacking and we feel disconnected from others, we’re unhappy. If we have a great family and friends and we feel totally connected, but we feel that we haven’t done much else to reach our dreams then our Growth need hasn’t been met and we feel like were in a rut.

Lasting happiness doesn’t mean great achievement in all these areas. To feel fulfilled, we only have to meet our basic needs in each area so we don’t feel like we are missing something from our lives.

Meeting Multiple Needs

Everything we do meets multiple needs. We don’t do one thing just to meet one need. I write this blog to meet my need for Critical Significance and Contribution. When my wife and I adopted, that decision lead to meeting our needs for Love and Connection, Contribution, Growth and Uncertainty.

I’ve found that certain Need combinations are healthier than others. The big combination I avoid is trying to mix Love and Connection with Critical Significance. This is the combination that gives you helicopter parents with a control issues. I think it also leads to deciding to have kids to save failing marriages and staying with people that treat you poorly.

When we combine needs we can focus on a fewer actions to meet those needs. Focusing on fewer things let’s us be better at those things. That’s how you a person gets both achievement and fulfillment.

Good vs Bad Need Combinations for INFPs

Good: Love and Connection with Growth – This keeps us focused on letting people into our lives that make us a better person.

Bad: Love and Connection with Critical Significance – This leads to neediness and unbalanced relationships because all relationship have a degree of Uncertainty and we get desperate if we see that relationship ending.

Good: Critical Significance and Contribution – This combination lets us do great things to help other people. It makes us have lives that isn’t just about us.

Bad: Critical Significance and Uncertainty – We get bored as INFPs. This leads us to taking stupid risks in order to feel more alive. This could be moving across the country or leave jobs and people. This is why we fall into intense relationships and start getting restless when we are finally confronted with the day-to-day realities of a relationship.

Good: Growth with anything except Certainty – Growth means having goals and getting to somewhere we aren’t yet. It means taking calculated risk. You can’t grow by doing more of staying where you are.

Bad: Critical Significance and Certainty – This is our desire to be right overcoming our desire to be effective. Thinking and being different than everyone else makes us feel special. However, we hold onto beliefs to feel special even though we realize that those beliefs haven’t made us happy.

Our Order of Needs

The order of importance of our needs is different from person to person. The order of importance is based on values. Some value Love and Connection over Critical Significance. Some value Contribution over Certainty.

Each unmet Need is a hurt. We hurt in that area. However, like our physical bodies we usually focus on our greatest hurt. If we’re in a car crash and we break our femur, we’re not going to feel the contusions our face. It’s the same with Needs. If Love and Connection is our highest Need, we’re not going to feel unmet Certainty Needs. After a breakup with someone we love, we don’t care about our job or if we eat.

Single people spend a lot of time being single. Broke people spend a lot of time being broke. Unhappy people spend a lot of time being unhappy. We focus on and talk about the things that are causing hurt in our lives. Unfortunately what we focus on becomes more real.

You know why people get into accidents by hitting the only tree in the middle of nowhere. They lose control of the wheel for a second and the first thing they do is focus on the thing they don’t want. Don’t hit that tree. Don’t hit that tree. And they end up hitting that tree because by focusing on the tree, their hands are unconsciously turning the wheel towards the tree.

It’s the same with all areas of our life. The more we focus on our lack, the more we turn the wheel of our lives towards that lack. Haven’t you ever heard people say, I found the husband/wife shortly after I decided to stop looking? It’s not that they stopped looking. It’s because they focused on something else other than being lonely.

Growth is the easiest Need to meet

Even though we may value other needs more intensely, Growth is the easiest to meet because it doesn’t require anyone else.

Certainty requires that someone else give us a job or that the grocery store doesn’t close early or the tax law doesn’t change or a variety of things beyond our control. Uncertainty requires outside situations because we only do things that surprise us when we are forced to. Critical Significance requires other people to recognize we did something significant. Love and Connection requires someone else for us to love. Contribution requires someone to reap the fruits of our efforts.

Growth is the only need that doesn’t require someone else. Growth is decision and action. We grow every time we make a decision and commit to it by taking action towards that decision. We grow by taking small actions each day to become our Ideal Self. If our Ideal Self is someone who is self-confident. We set a small goal each day and accomplish that small to build our confidence. If our Ideal Self is loving, we learn to consistently do thing to show that love for the people we care about. Growing is doing.

It’s from focusing on Growth that gives INFPs the self-confidence to attract those things and people into our lives that let us meet our other needs.

Watch the video.

If you don’t have the 21 minutes to watch the video, here’s the important parts:

Two kinds of happiness – There are two kinds of happiness: natural happiness and synthetic happiness. Natural happiness is happiness we get when get what we want. Synthetic happiness is synthesized happiness. It’s happiness we make when we don’t get what we want.

Natural happiness is not better – Synthetic happiness produces a measurable, testable change. People are not just making it up when they say they’re happy despite not getting what they want. The video talks about an experiment that was done to prove this.

Before choosing, choices promote natural happiness – When you don’t have to choose, having a lot of choices makes you naturally happy.

After choosing, choices inhibit the creation of synthetic happiness – When we have the ability to change our minds, we become less happy because we aren’t sure if we made the right decision. The video talks about a Harvard psychological experiment that demonstrates this.

How this applies to INFPs

INFPs have problems making decisions for two reasons:

1. We want to make the right choice, the perfect choice. We end up wasting a lot of time trying to gather up enough data for us to choose. This could be anything from which career to pursue to where to eat today.
2. After we make the choice and as soon as the first sign of adversity hits us, we start thinking that if we had made the perfect choice then we wouldn’t have all these problems. So we start second guessing that choice. Should we have chosen something else?

It’s this second guessing that inhibits our ability to find happiness in the choice we made. This is synthetic happiness and I believe synthetic happiness is real. I believe it’s real because INFPs create synthetic happiness all the time.

Every time on a forum thread where I see an INFP saying that the world wasn’t created for INFPs to successful that’s an INFP creating synthetic happiness. I see the creation of synthetic happiness in every excuse INFPs use to blame our unhappiness on things we believe are outside their control (I’m shy and can’t meet people, the world doesn’t understand me). We make ourselves better by saying that our lot in life isn’t really our choice.

Second guessing kills happiness and success

Could we have made a better choice? Maybe. Here’s the real question. How much time are we going to waste wondering if we made the right decision instead of fully committing to the decision we did make?

Success and self-esteem go hand-in-hand. When we succeed at something we feel better about ourselves. Success and happiness aren’t directly related because we can succeed at something unimportant which won’t make us happy. There’s a saying. When climbing the ladder of success, make sure it’s leaning against the right wall.

I’m talking about all types of success. Success at making friends. Success at becoming financially stable. Success at becoming our Ideal Self. However, success requires dedication and full commitment. INFPs never make that full commitment because think we can go back and make a better choice.

Success doesn’t lead to happiness, but the self-confidence we gain will keep us going until we finally succeed at something that does bring natural happiness. So if natural happiness comes from getting what we want? Does this mean we’re unhappy getting to what we want? Of course, people can be happy in the journey, but it’s the happiness we find in the journey. It’s the happiness we make. It’s synthetic happiness.

Burning bridges leads to happiness

When we have no choice but to succeed, we will do everything we can possibly do not to fail. We will work our asses off to not fail because failing means dire consequences.

When I was 19, I moved out my parent’s house. I just couldn’t live with them and their rules any longer. So with no job, one month’s rent and telling my parents I’m never speaking to them again, I moved in with some friends. I had to find a job fast, anything. I couldn’t fail because I had nowhere else to go. I ended up finding a job serving popcorn at a movie theater.

I didn’t waste anytime second-guessing my decision because I couldn’t unmake my decision. It was do or die. So instead of that energy focused behind me. All my energy was focused on succeeding. I was never happier.

Committing to choices means risk especially if we can’t go back. INFPs rarely regret the choices we made that didn’t turn out well because it makes us into the people we are. INFPs regret the choices we didn’t make because it’s another lost opportunity to discover more about ourselves. It’s another chance to become our Ideal Self that we didn’t take.

The best thing about making choices we can’t back out of, we are happier. As that Harvard experiment in the video demonstrates, we come to decide that we like the decision we made because we don’t have a choice.

]]> http://www.infpblog.com/happiness/happiness-means-burning-bridges/feed/ 14 http://www.infpblog.com/happiness/happiness-means-burning-bridges/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/infpBlog/~3/SmmYgAgdGZM/ http://www.infpblog.com/day-to-day/healthy-procrastination/#comments Mon, 12 Apr 2010 20:48:50 +0000 Corin http://www.infpblog.com/?p=680 I like junk food. I love Kit Kat bars and triple chocolate cheesecake. I like soda. About a month a go, I stopped drinking two sodas each day. I use to get to work in the morning and drink a Mountain Dew for the caffeine. Then I'd have a Coke with lunch. If I was going out that night to eat with friends then it would be another Coke plus at least 1 or 2 refills. Then I stopped. It was easy because I knew that I wasn't going to stop completely. I've had three sodas in the last month. I don't think I'll ever stop completely because I like soda. I like a lot of things that have no nutritional value, but I don't eat Kit Kat bars and triple chocolate cheesecake with dinner every night. That's why I'm don't think I will ever stop procrastination. Although junk foods have little nutritional value, they taste really good filling up my stomach. I enjoy junk food. Like junk food, I have junk activities. These are activities I enjoy immensely but add very little to advance my quality of life. Television is enjoyable but it's just junk food for my life. It fills up my time, but has very low life value. If you eat enough junk food on a regular basis, you get fat and unhealthy. If you do enough junk activities on a regular basis, you get low self-esteem. We can feel our life congealing all around us like extra pounds added to our body. It's a slow process. We don't wake up one day and we're fat much like we don't wake up one day and have low-self esteem.]]>

I like junk food. I love Kit Kat bars and triple chocolate cheesecake. I like soda.

About a month a go, I stopped drinking two sodas each day. I use to get to work in the morning and drink a Mountain Dew for the caffeine. Then I’d have a Coke with lunch. If I was going out that night to eat with friends then it would be another Coke plus at least 1 or 2 refills.

Then I stopped, but not completely. I’ve had three sodas in the last month. I don’t think I’ll ever stop completely because I like soda. I like a lot of things that have no nutritional value, but I don’t eat Kit Kat bars and triple chocolate cheesecake with dinner every night.

That’s why I’m don’t think I will ever stop procrastination. Although junk foods have little nutritional value, they taste really good filling up my stomach. Like junk food, I have junk activities. I enjoy these activities immensely but they do little to advance my quality of life. Television is enjoyable but it’s just junk food for my life. It fills up my time but has very low life value.

Eating enough junk food on a regular basis makes us unhealthy. If we do enough junk activities consistently, we develop low self-esteem. We can feel our life congealing around us like extra pounds added to our body. It’s a slow process. We don’t wake up one day and we’re fat much like we don’t wake up one day and have low-self esteem.

Procrastination isn’t the real issue

When we procrastinate, we avoid doing something we feel is unpleasant. However, everything I’ve ever procrastinated on I’ve completed on time. I make my deadlines. I get the results I need. It may be stressful for a short period, but short bursts of stress is healthy if spread out of over time.

The real issue is what we do when we procrastinate. For example, let’s say we have four hours to clean the house before guests come over. We know it will take 30 minutes. It’s our activities during those 3.5 hours before we clean that causes problems.

We start filling that time with fillers. Time fillers are like white bread. White bread is all calories and no nutritional value. Time filler activities suck up time without adding life value. Doing them doesn’t feel like a junk activity until we ask how has that activity improved our lives while we were procrastinating.

How procrastination really harms you

All activities fall into four categories.

Urgent/Important – Things we’ve been procrastinating that we’ve almost run out of time to do.

Not-Urgent/Important – Quality of life activities. Critical activities that have high consequences that we still have of time to get done. Stuff that gets procrastinated.

Urgent/Not-Important – Phone calls from people. Life drama that diverts our attention.

Not-Urgent/Not-Important – Time fillers. Taste great but life-fattening activities.

When the deadline for the activity we avoided doing comes close, we work hard in short bursts to achieve the results required or face consequences. This doesn’t cause issues unless we need do it again right away.

When INFPs procrastinate, we go into avoidance mode. We seek comfort in the Not-Important activities. It’s our reward first for our short burst of frenzied work later. Meanwhile the Not-Urgent/Important stuff that’s time sensitive starts creeping into the Urgent/Important category. So it feels like were always stressed from going from one crisis to another. Those repeated short bursts of stress-filled activity starts wearing us down day after day until we shut down.

Procrastination seeps the self-esteem. Self-esteem comes from how we feel about what we do. INFPs do realize that even though we may enjoy video games, playing World of Warcraft 12 hours a day doesn’t improve the quality of our lives, it only alleviates the current quality of life. Mass consumption of time with Not-Important activities is like eating cheesecake all the time. Eventually, we stop feeling well.

Procrastinate with high quality of life activities

When we’re not doing something that has a deadline, we’re doing something else. Improving our lives comes from doing something else with a high quality of life value instead of time fillers that are all empty life calories.

Anything that falls into the Not-Urgent/Important category is something we don’t have to do later. Doing those items keeps us from procrastinating on those items later. If we fill up all our procrastination time with high quality of life activities, our self-esteem will never feel starved from lack of psychological nutrition.

Doing what’s left isn’t healthy

If you enjoy cheesecake and ice cream as much as I do, stopping makes no sense. Why stop doing something you like?

The question is how much and how often?

How much cheesecake do I really want to eat? How much television do I really want to watch? Often times, we eat what we have left in the kitchen. Sometimes, what’s left may only be condiments.

We do activities that we have left. Filling the pantry of our time means having goals we feel are worth accomplishing. It means having goals we can act upon now. Without these goals, what’s left is television and Googling things we wish we could have one day.

Rewarding doesn’t work for INFPs

Conventional wisdom tells us to reward ourselves after we’ve accomplished something or have cheat days where one day a week, we can eat whatever we like.

For INFPs, this doesn’t work. INFPs are defined by doing what we feel. If something feels good, not doing it feels like lack. It feels like denial of who we are.

This means that anything in the Not-Urgent/Important category must make us as feel as good as our time fillers. This takes reframing. Shakespeare in Hamlet said, “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” Everything is about how we interpret it.

For me, eating vegetables doesn’t taste as good as eating cheesecake. However, the feeling I get from knowing that every day my health is improving, that I’ll be able to do more and keep up with my kids as they get older, feels just as good as the sense of decadence I get from a really good triple chocolate cheesecake.

For an INFP, anything we do that’s Not-Urgent/Important has to make as feel as good as watching television or whichever junk activity we like best. If we cannot reframe how we feel about these high quality of life activities, then we’ll always feel like we’re not being ourselves when we do these activities.

Why not stop altogether

Because it feels good. Junk activities feel good as they should. However, they shouldn’t feel better than the high quality of life activities.

This way when we choose an activity to feel time, we aren’t choosing between what feels good and what doesn’t. We are choosing between what moves us forward and what doesn’t.

]]> http://www.infpblog.com/day-to-day/healthy-procrastination/feed/ 11 http://www.infpblog.com/day-to-day/healthy-procrastination/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/infpBlog/~3/C2dQP_sxIIs/ http://www.infpblog.com/outer-world/what-does-it-mean/#comments Thu, 01 Apr 2010 17:58:18 +0000 Corin http://www.infpblog.com/?p=675 It's officially been one year since I launched my blog. I'd like to thank all my readers for reading my very long posts and for commenting. I appreciate it so much. My favorite card in the Tarot major arcana is the Fool. I think The Fool is the INFP card. He represents wisdom without reason. He represents the beginning of a journey and journey's end. Like INFPs, we are always starting our journey to our Ideal Self and that the same time, we are who we are. In one hand, the Fool holds a flower that represents the appreciation for beauty. Over his shoulder is a stick representing wisdom which dangles a small bag with the few belongings he actually needs. At his foot, there's a dog which represents reality or the real world always nipping at his heels. The Fool seems oblivious to the precipice that he's about to step over. INFPs, like the Fool, live on the edge of reality always moments from falling over and being lost forever in our dream world. The Fool is the card of infinite possibilities. It's also the card of blind faith. When it appears in the spread, it can signal a restarting of your life and that great change is coming. I like the Fool card because it reminds me of my favorite quote by T.S. Eliot: "We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started... and know the place for the first time." ]]>

It’s officially been one year since I launched my blog. I’d like to thank all my readers for reading my very long posts and for commenting. I appreciate it so much.

My favorite card in the Tarot major arcana is the Fool. I think The Fool is the INFP card. He represents wisdom without reason. He represents the beginning of a journey and journey’s end. Like INFPs, we are always starting our journey to our Ideal Self and that the same time, we are who we are.

In one hand, the Fool holds a flower that represents the appreciation for beauty. Over his shoulder is a stick representing wisdom which dangles a small bag with the few belongings he actually needs. At his foot, there’s a dog which represents reality or the real world always nipping at his heels. The Fool seems oblivious to the precipice that he’s about to step over. INFPs, like the Fool, live on the edge of reality always moments from falling over and being lost forever in our dream world.

The Fool is the card of infinite possibilities. It’s also the card of blind faith. When it appears in the spread, it can signal a restarting of your life and that great change is coming. I like the Fool card because it reminds me of my favorite quote by T.S. Eliot: “We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started… and know the place for the first time.”

That exploration is the INFP journey to find our Ideal Self. We will find it where we started but only have our travels are done. The Fool has always held special meaning for me.

However, that isn’t why I started my blog on April 1st. I just thought it was cute and ironic that I start on a day that people associate with joking. Attaching meaning to my blog with how the start date relates to the Fool and April first being the start of the 2nd quarter was something I did later. For me, meaning comes later. It works better that way.

As INFPs, we continually search for meaning. What does it all mean? What’s a meaningful job that I would like? We want meaning in our lives to find some order in a seemingly random and uncaring world. We imagine what we think would be the perfect job for us then we pursue it. We create this image of the perfect girl or guy for us and then we look to the outside to find someone to match that image. We start with a belief in an ideal and look outside to find that ideal.

The problem is that the world outside our head isn’t perfect. It’s messy and complicated and a Fool’s blind faith has never gotten us to the perfect picture we imagined. Trying to figure out meaning first and then trying to make the world prove that such meaning can exist is backwards. It’s like the scientist that has theory and then tries to find facts to prove that theory. The apple dropped on Newton’s head first and then he came up with his Laws of Motion, not the other way around.

Meaning is theory. Theory exists to explain facts. That’s how it’s always been done. Our ancestors looked into the sky and saw stars and the darkness between and then created their mythology to impose meaning onto the emptiness. INFPs want meaning to come first and wonder why re-inventing the wheel isn’t getting us as far in life as we had dreamed. Of course when things don’t work out, INFPs have no problem attaching meaning second.

If we never got the awesome job and we have debt, that must mean that money is evil. If we were never surrounded by the crowd of adoring friends, that must mean that we’re so special that only a few people will ever truly understand us. If all the relationships we’ve had ended badly, that much mean all women/men are generally jerks and we just have to be more careful the next time. INFPs attach meaning after the facts all the time, but usually only when bad things happen.

It’s more fun to attach meaning after good things happen. Whenever I go somewhere, if I find a convenient parking space right away then I know I was meant to be there. I always seem to find great parking so I’m always meant to be wherever I am.

INFPs think that finding meaning first will make things better. If we can figure out what would be a meaningful job then we’ll be happy when we finally get that job. What INFPs don’t seem to grasp is that meaning makes things bearable, it doesn’t make things better. Unless we love our job, a crappy job is still a crappy job even if it means something to us. Unless someone enjoys being in a war zone being shot at daily, the meaning that person finds in patriotism makes the job worthwhile, but it doesn’t make the job better. Unless someone enjoy the endless parade of other people’s problems, then any meaning they find in helping people isn’t going to make them like their psychiatry job more.

INFPs can have jobs we like and have those jobs be meaningful. However, we have to find something we like first and then figure out why it’s worthwhile to be doing the job later. It’s easy and natural for INFPs to do what we like. We act immediately to do the things we like. However when we try to find meaning first, we are always wondering if we can live with it if we find out we don’t like it later. Meaning is complicated. Attaching meaning first leaves us with this nagging feeling, as we pursue our wants, about whether or not we’re going to like what we wanted when we get it. That nagging feeling holds us back from fully committing to our endeavors which is why INFPs never succeed as well as we hoped.

So what does this blog mean to me in the long term? I don’t know yet. What I know now is that, I like writing it. That’s why I’m writing. Isn’t doing something because we like it worthwhile in itself?

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