Daniel Wegner's White Bear Study
The law of reverse effect is a fundamental human behavioural trait. Not a great deal of work has gone into studying it, but there's one particular study by Daniel Wegner [1]. He sat the study subjects in an empty room with just a chair, a table, and a buzzer in the middle of the table; nothing else to do, nothing to distract themselves with and said, "Sit here and don't think about white polar bears. But each time you do, press this buzzer."
This resulted in the study subjects pressing the buzzer every 60 to 90 seconds as polar bears popped into their mind. The interpretation by the researchers was that this process was triggered by short-term memory. Short-term memory only lasts 60 to 90 seconds. If you give yourself something important to do, when it moves from short-term memory, there's a chance you won't be able to recall it.
I remember when I was a little boy, my mum would send me to the Co-op to buy supplies, and I'd either get there and forget what I went there for, or bring back something different. So to counter my easy distraction, as I walked along the road, I would repeat to myself the shopping list: "sugar, tea and eggs, sugar, tea and eggs" like a mantra. By doing that I was keeping the items in my short-term memory.
It is far easier to recall something from your short-term memory rather than something that you heard more than 90 seconds ago.
Ironic Process Theory and Resistance
Daniel Wegner created an entire theory based on this study called Ironic process theory. It's a smart study, and it is a useful insight, as this has all sorts of consequences in the mind.
There's something in the mind known as resistance. Resistance is the stickiness of something we want to release from our mind, or the inability of the mind to bend to our will (as if that were even possible). Resistance is something we find ourselves working with as meditators. The term is used a lot in the process of people releasing past trauma. It is not unusual for the mind to resist letting go of past trauma and also seeing ourselves as a traumatised victim. People will hang on to unhelpful self-images and unhelpful beliefs, despite the fact that they know, "I'm not a bad person, I'm not inadequate, I'm not incapable", there's still this sense that you're somehow not good enough.
The Enangled Mind
The name of this belief of inadequacy is 'imposter syndrome'. Imposter syndrome is when somebody is competent, but they act as though they're not competent, and their lack of a sense of competency limits their potential. And then this all becomes entangled in the mind.
That sort of entanglement is very common. As a matter of fact, I think it's inevitable in our mixed-messaging modern world. Your progress as an individual relies on a stable model of yourself, but it can become a cultural characterisation of who you are, which you then try to impose on yourself.
If you look like a salesperson, everybody treats you like a salesperson. If you look like an admin clerk, everybody treats you like an admin clerk, and so it goes on.
Many of us have a lot of work to do to map out our tangled web of beliefs and the way the mind appears to work. against us.
Sleep and the Effort Paradox
This law of reverse effect affects us in all sorts of ways. For example, most people can get to sleep reasonably easily, but when they need to get up early in the morning to take a flight, they will go to bed early, hoping to get a good night's sleep, and their mind will then keep them awake. The more important it is that we sleep, for many of us, the more difficult it is to sleep. We all recognise that willpower is not an option here. Nobody's ever going to tell you to try harder to get to sleep, but this is how the brain believes our reality is: that the effect is equivalent to the force we apply to it. But this just isn't how the mind works.
We have to work with the quirkiness of the modern mind. We have to accept it as what it is and find a way to make progress without being bogged down by the law of reverse effect.
Change Through Environment, Not Willpower
To make changes, create an environment for change and create new habits that align with it by making small incremental changes. And if those new habits are difficult, split them up into smaller habits.
We don't create change by applying ever more willpower to achieve it.
Kaizen and Light-Touch Focus
A little while back, I did some training on Kaizen. Kaizen means "better process". It consists of looking at all the things we do, finding some things we can change for the better, building a habit around changing those things, and repeating. That incremental process of micro-changes, based on micro goals, will bring us to the end goal.
In meditation, the most destructive resistance is the resistance that comes about from us trying as hard as we can in our meditations. The realisation of this and the attempt of meditators to avoid being stuck in this trap is captured in the concept of 'trying not to try'. The mind can't get any more entangled than that!
I have developed a micro-response to the tendency of the mind to try. We want to try to get to sleep. We want to try to focus on the breath. We want to try to not be drawn into the narrative of the mind. We want to try to not to repeat unhelpful thought patterns. We want to try to not be stressed. We want to try not to feel bad, etc., etc., etc.
The answer is light-touch focus. Let's say my mind is unruly and I want to stay focused on the breath. Trying hard, I get the opposite effect. If my goal is to stay focused on the breath in as light a way as possible, so there's hardly any force, determination, or willpower to stay with the breath, one of the things that will happen is I'll fall asleep because that awareness of the breath is a wonderful way of letting go of a lot of the baggage and resistance that gridlocks the mind. And when that happens, the mind and body relax, our sleep deprivation catches up with us, and we drift away.
References
Wegner DM. Ironic processes of mental control. Psychol Rev. 1994 Jan;101(1):34-52. doi: 10.1037/0033-295x.101.1.34. PMID: 8121959. - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8121959/
