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It's because of something called the Zeigarnik Effect! And it's one of my favorite things to talk about because of the implications it can have on your life!
This is the final thing we’ll be taking a look at in order to develop superhuman levels of mental clarity. First, the definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeigarnik_effect
Or in other words, you can think of this as the “Small Child Tugging On Your Arm” effect. And it’s also the reason that you tend to think of all the things you still have to do in your life right when you start to relax.
Your subconscious mind is an extremely powerful thing. However, it can’t do everything. One of the things that it has trouble doing is solving problems, planning and finishing tasks. It requires the power of our conscious mind for things like that, which it will repeatedly remind you about over and over until it gets done.
This is why you can picture it as a small child tugging on your arm.
What most children will do is ask their parents “Hey, can I have a candy bar?”
Simple enough so far, right? But now try to think about when a good time to ask for this candy bar is…
Do you ask when your parents are super busy and scrambling to get things done or do you wait until they're relaxed and have time to listen to you?
Obviously we wait until they’re relaxed so that it’s more likely they’ll say yes! And your subconscious mind is the exact same way.
If you’re drowning in work, scrambling to get everything done then your subconscious mind will wait. But then when you start to relax a little bit your subconscious mind sees this and says “Oh perfect! Now they can listen! So here are the things that you promised me that you would do, when would you like to get these done?”
And just like that, you’re suddenly remembering that you have to go pick up groceries, call your boss back and wish your mom a happy birthday when all you wanted to do was chill out for a measly little half-hour before going to bed.
That’s a promise!
We’re happy because we’re going to get a candy bar, woohoo! The only thing that we have to do to get our precious tooth-decaying, prepackaged and processed junk is to not annoy our parents. And then they’ll buy us that succulent sugar-filled marzipan that we love so much.
So we wait… and wait…
Until we’re just about ready to check out and we see our beloved, succulent sugar just sitting right there in front of us. We’ve been good, we haven’t annoyed our parents and It's. Right. There!
“Hey mom, can I have that candy bar that you promised?”
But then our mom does the unthinkable! She says no which is clearly in violation of our agreement! So what do you do?
Well if you’re like most children you flip out! How dare she go back on her word when we kept ours? We start crying in the checkout line and making a scene until we get what we want because we are justified! She promised!
Which is exactly what our subconscious mind does when it brings something to our attention that we ignore. It’s just going to keep coming back throwing tantrum after tantrum.
Children, like our subconscious mind, are a lot like a terrorist in a movie: they want what they want and anything less than what they want means disaster for everybody else.
You’re ignoring that small child and making fake promises until it gets to the point where they don’t believe you anymore and go on sugar-deprived tantrums making your life a living hell.
Meaning, that you have to follow through on your promises to your subconscious mind. If you do your part and follow through on what you say you’ll do, you’ll find that you have tons of mental energy and willpower that you didn’t have before (more on willpower in the next article). Part of the reason is a sense of accomplishment, but another reason is that you won’t have this rage-filled monster tugging on your arm every twenty seconds bugging you for a fix.
So analogies aside, make plans and stick to them.
Remember, the subconscious mind can’t make plans, so that’s your job. Once you make a plan (or a promise to a small child) it’s going to feel better in the short term, and it’s going to feel great once you follow through.
Let’s use exercise as an example because it’s an easy one:
Imagine that you pick going to the gym as part of your goal of losing weight. You’re telling your subconscious mind that going to the gym is essential so it’s going to start bugging you about it. Here’s how to use this to your advantage so that you don’t end up feeling guilty about it later on down the road:
Get everything prepared beforehand. If it’s going to the gym then pick a time that will work best for you to go to the gym. Then after you’ve picked a time (made a promise) then get everything ready to go to the gym so that you don’t end up with excuses later. Because once that time comes and we no longer have the willpower (another super cool topic I'll talk about soon) to want to get everything ready we’ll end up talking our way out of it.
Therefore, what you’ll want to do is get your gym bag with all of the clothes you’ll need and get it ready. That way, when the time comes to go to the gym all you have to do is pick up the bag and leave for the gym. Then you say at blank time I will pick up the gym bag and go to the gym.
There’s no additional work that you have to put into it. Instead, it’s just grab and go.
You decide to go to the gym after work. You get everything ready ahead of time and bring your gym bag with you and leave it in the car. That way, after work, it’s right there and you just drive straight to the gym after.
You can make plans like this all the time to take advantage of another concept called “The Mental Attic”.
Without getting too far sidetracked, what that looks like is that you can only hold so much stuff in your brain before you start to feel overloaded (working short-term memory for those psychology nerds like me). There’s only so much space for junk, just like the attic space in a house.
You can think of your brain like that.
You can also think about planning out your day as a way of organizing that attic so that you have room for other things to think about.
When you look at it, that’s a lot of stuff that could easily, quickly and honestly make you feel overwhelmed. And there are also a lot of possible steps that you could skip or even forget altogether that you would then feel guilty about missing later on.
But this way, you free yourself of the burden of remembering all of that by simply making a plan. This plan is like a promise to that small child in your brain, it keeps it happy. Then when you follow through on everything it doesn’t get on your nerves later. It’s happy.
It frees up mental space so that the small child in your brain can worry about other things.
In short, it frees up space and keeps your life a little more stress-free.
This is the final thing we’ll be taking a look at in order to develop superhuman levels of mental clarity. First, the definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeigarnik_effect
Named after Lithuanian-Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, in psychology the Zeigarnik effect occurs when an activity that has been interrupted may be more readily recalled. It postulates that people remember unfinished or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks
Or in other words, you can think of this as the “Small Child Tugging On Your Arm” effect. And it’s also the reason that you tend to think of all the things you still have to do in your life right when you start to relax.
Your subconscious mind is an extremely powerful thing. However, it can’t do everything. One of the things that it has trouble doing is solving problems, planning and finishing tasks. It requires the power of our conscious mind for things like that, which it will repeatedly remind you about over and over until it gets done.
This is why you can picture it as a small child tugging on your arm.
An Example
Think about something you wanted as a child, maybe it was a toy or a candy bar at the store. What is something that you might do to get what you want from your parents?What most children will do is ask their parents “Hey, can I have a candy bar?”
Simple enough so far, right? But now try to think about when a good time to ask for this candy bar is…
Do you ask when your parents are super busy and scrambling to get things done or do you wait until they're relaxed and have time to listen to you?
Obviously we wait until they’re relaxed so that it’s more likely they’ll say yes! And your subconscious mind is the exact same way.
If you’re drowning in work, scrambling to get everything done then your subconscious mind will wait. But then when you start to relax a little bit your subconscious mind sees this and says “Oh perfect! Now they can listen! So here are the things that you promised me that you would do, when would you like to get these done?”
And just like that, you’re suddenly remembering that you have to go pick up groceries, call your boss back and wish your mom a happy birthday when all you wanted to do was chill out for a measly little half-hour before going to bed.
How to Appease The Small Child In Your Brain
Let’s go back to the small child analogy and say that you want a candy bar. Then when you ask your mom or dad for a candy bar they say that they will get you one at the store if you’re good.That’s a promise!
We’re happy because we’re going to get a candy bar, woohoo! The only thing that we have to do to get our precious tooth-decaying, prepackaged and processed junk is to not annoy our parents. And then they’ll buy us that succulent sugar-filled marzipan that we love so much.
So we wait… and wait…
Until we’re just about ready to check out and we see our beloved, succulent sugar just sitting right there in front of us. We’ve been good, we haven’t annoyed our parents and It's. Right. There!
“Hey mom, can I have that candy bar that you promised?”
But then our mom does the unthinkable! She says no which is clearly in violation of our agreement! So what do you do?
Well if you’re like most children you flip out! How dare she go back on her word when we kept ours? We start crying in the checkout line and making a scene until we get what we want because we are justified! She promised!
Which is exactly what our subconscious mind does when it brings something to our attention that we ignore. It’s just going to keep coming back throwing tantrum after tantrum.
Children, like our subconscious mind, are a lot like a terrorist in a movie: they want what they want and anything less than what they want means disaster for everybody else.
What This Looks Like In Your Life
If you’re putting things off that you know you need to do then you’re only hurting yourself.You’re ignoring that small child and making fake promises until it gets to the point where they don’t believe you anymore and go on sugar-deprived tantrums making your life a living hell.
Meaning, that you have to follow through on your promises to your subconscious mind. If you do your part and follow through on what you say you’ll do, you’ll find that you have tons of mental energy and willpower that you didn’t have before (more on willpower in the next article). Part of the reason is a sense of accomplishment, but another reason is that you won’t have this rage-filled monster tugging on your arm every twenty seconds bugging you for a fix.
So analogies aside, make plans and stick to them.
Remember, the subconscious mind can’t make plans, so that’s your job. Once you make a plan (or a promise to a small child) it’s going to feel better in the short term, and it’s going to feel great once you follow through.
Let’s use exercise as an example because it’s an easy one:
Imagine that you pick going to the gym as part of your goal of losing weight. You’re telling your subconscious mind that going to the gym is essential so it’s going to start bugging you about it. Here’s how to use this to your advantage so that you don’t end up feeling guilty about it later on down the road:
Get everything prepared beforehand. If it’s going to the gym then pick a time that will work best for you to go to the gym. Then after you’ve picked a time (made a promise) then get everything ready to go to the gym so that you don’t end up with excuses later. Because once that time comes and we no longer have the willpower (another super cool topic I'll talk about soon) to want to get everything ready we’ll end up talking our way out of it.
Therefore, what you’ll want to do is get your gym bag with all of the clothes you’ll need and get it ready. That way, when the time comes to go to the gym all you have to do is pick up the bag and leave for the gym. Then you say at blank time I will pick up the gym bag and go to the gym.
There’s no additional work that you have to put into it. Instead, it’s just grab and go.
What The Plan Could Look Like
Here’s an example of what that would look like:You decide to go to the gym after work. You get everything ready ahead of time and bring your gym bag with you and leave it in the car. That way, after work, it’s right there and you just drive straight to the gym after.
You can make plans like this all the time to take advantage of another concept called “The Mental Attic”.
Without getting too far sidetracked, what that looks like is that you can only hold so much stuff in your brain before you start to feel overloaded (working short-term memory for those psychology nerds like me). There’s only so much space for junk, just like the attic space in a house.
You can think of your brain like that.
You can also think about planning out your day as a way of organizing that attic so that you have room for other things to think about.
Cleaning Your Mental Attic
What that looks like is this:- I’m going to wake up at 6:00 am
- Then I’m going to go to work
- I will take my gym bag with me and leave it in the car when I get to work
- I will do all of the work things that I need to do
- You can do this same planning method for work stuff, just like what you’re doing now but my personal recommendation is to keep those lists separate (lots of cool reasons why that are outside the scope of this article)
- After work, I’ll go straight to the gym
- When I’m done at the gym I’ll go get groceries, in fact, here’s my list that I have on my phone
- Then I’ll get home, shower and put two hours of work into my other goal
- The rest of my time is free time to do whatever I want
When you look at it, that’s a lot of stuff that could easily, quickly and honestly make you feel overwhelmed. And there are also a lot of possible steps that you could skip or even forget altogether that you would then feel guilty about missing later on.
But this way, you free yourself of the burden of remembering all of that by simply making a plan. This plan is like a promise to that small child in your brain, it keeps it happy. Then when you follow through on everything it doesn’t get on your nerves later. It’s happy.
It frees up mental space so that the small child in your brain can worry about other things.
In short, it frees up space and keeps your life a little more stress-free.
