Forests and trees

Almost 2 years since my last post? Unbelievable. Unimaginable. Unamerican? Inspired by a number of consistently excellent bloggers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) providing peeks into their lives, I'm back on the wagon. I've been thinking about the format that might best suit going forward. In the past, blogging has been an opportunity reflect on my life and where I want it to go. That perspective-taking is incredibly helpful to avoid me getting consumed by the day-to-day. Going forward, I plan to continue with a bit of personal reflection and stock-taking, to help define where I, and we, go next. With under four months to go until I get married, it seems opportune to start thinking about where Leigh and I go next in our life together. I would warmly receive any comments on such reflections.

I also want to introduce a new component to my blog - something that I feel there is not necessarily enough of: a digest of what my research field does and can offer as insight into everyday life. Our society invests a lot into higher education and in return provides education and training, and conducts research which makes our world a better place. But what do we actually do? I work as behavioural scientist and academic at a great university in the field of health psychology. What is health psychology? It's an applied branch of psychology that deals with promoting health and reducing illness by using psychology as a basis for understanding and changing the behaviours that people do which affect their health. The key questions we focus on are: why do people do what they do and how can we help them to change what they do to promote their health? What motivates people? How do people's attitude, confidence, habits, beliefs, knowledge affect what they do? How do the people around socially influence them? How does the environment and resources affect what they do? Psychology is the science of behaviour, and health psychology is the science of behaviour applied to health. The work we do can and does make a difference to people's lives - and some of those findings might have implications for what you personally do in your life to better your health and well-being. I plan to use this new section to provide quick snippets of recent work in my field and how it might have implications for you and your health. The aim is not to be preachy and certainly not boring - my aim will be to be at least informative and hopefully potentially inspire you. And for anyone reading the blog thinking about a career in this field, I hope this will provide a bit of insight into what you can contribute if you choose to follow a similar path.

I'm fascinated by people, what they do, what they think, and why they do what they do, and I am committed to finding effective ways of helping people do what they want to do. I hope to use this as a vehicle to take you along for the ride and maybe offer a few tips along the way. We have 80-odd years on this planet if we're lucky and what we do plays an important role in our capacity to make the most of those years.

So that's the new format I propose. What do you think? Please leave me notes in the comments about what you like or don't like and if the new format works for you. ∆

House

I really want to own a house. Strangely, I think about it all the time. On the surface, it's mundane. A house. Yay. How exciting. But it's not the house per se, it's the life that goes with the house that I want. I guess what I'm yearning for is stability.

Don't get me wrong - I wouldn't trade my life so far for anything. I love that I travelled and lived in different countries and met awesome people that I wouldn't have otherwise met. I feel more 'myself' than I ever have in my life. I'm doing exactly the sort of work that I think I'm on this planet to do. I'm with a woman who absolutely completes my life perfectly, who challenges my mind, who listens to my heart, who inspires my creativity and who touches my soul. I'm happy.

I want a house because I want to be able to own something tangible, to sit in a room with four walls and know that it is mine. I want to build a deck, to learn about electrical and plumbing. I want to be that guy. Living in a flat, besides lining someone else's pocket, makes me feel restless. The best I can do is keep it clean and possibly paint or buy furniture. But owning a house offers weekends and years of possibilities. It's looking into an empty room with Leigh and planning out what we can do with it, what sorts of happiness we can create and share, with whom. It's about putting some roots down and having an open door policy where friends can pop by for a coffee and a chat. It's simple, but I want simple.

The catharsis and tyranny of completion

It’s done. Now what?

Evidence-based living

I've had this idea bubbling in my brain for a few years now. It's more of a concept really. Part of my work is about using psychological concepts to understand why health professionals do and do not follow best evidence in their everyday practice. It takes a psychological approach to evidence-based medicine. And in doing so, I've been introduced to the wide and fascinating world of evidence-based medicine (EBM). EBM is the idea that the care that is being provided should rely on the best available evidence from the research literature, rather than on experience and intuition. That is not to say that experience and intuition are necessarily wrong, or that the evidence base is always perfect, but the latter should always inform and guide decision making.

And so back to my concept. EBM is great, but its niche. It applies to health professionals and clearly has implications for my and your health and well-being, but it's still only a specific aspect of life. And so why not expand the idea? Why not move from evidence-based medicine to evidence-based living? I'm not the first person with this idea (cf http://evidence-basedlife.blogspot.com/). But rather than focusing solely on health, I think the concept can be broadened to be as inclusive as possible.

To an extent, there are hints of this already. Newspapers are replete with headlines summarising (usually poorly) some interesting research about some social issue. Newspapers have the capacity to reach a wide audience, but as a medium, they lack the depth and capacity to truly be a credible, non-biased source and curator of evidence. Furthermore, journalists are trained to investigate and report, not to critically examine and summarise research and make recommendations. The latter is a job for a trained researcher. But the point is that there is a 'pull' already... I think people want to know what the 'best' way to do particular things is.

There is a movement afoot to move towards evidence-based policy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence-based_policy), which is sorely needed. There is no reason why politicians largely trained in law should be entrusted with making far reaching decisions for which they have little understanding. I would love to see policy be created and enacted on basis of best available evidence, and more importantly, that if no evidence exists for deciding about a particular policy, research should be commissioned rather than taking a 'lets give it a go and hope for the best'. Rather than endless armchair debate about the value of a particular economic decision, lets run a randomised controlled trial of different options compared to control, which can definitively tell us what works and what doesn't. At the moment, everything is tried, without any control. For instance, Rudy Gulliani is credited with cleaning up New York crime. But the policies he put in place were rolled out across the city, so there is no way to know whether it is the policy itself or some other factor that affected the reduction in crime.

But again, while evidence-based policy is a great step forward, it's still niche. What I'm proposing is a central repository of the best available research on how to live a happy life. Clearly, happiness is subjective, and the repository could cater to various incarnations of happiness. But the bigger point is that there are thousands upon thousands of research papers examining every facet of human life. Most of that research exists in an academic vaccuum. Lets put our knowledge to work to inform our lives. Lets stop relying on only experience and intuition to make the decisions that affect our lives. Lets empower ourselves to make the best decisions we can based on the best available research. Lets live evidence-based lives.

Positively newsworthy

I have a need to know what's going on in the world. It keeps me feeling connected and part of a bigger whole than the bubble of my life. Is it possible to know what's going on in the world without wanting to cry out of powerless empathy or without becoming completely blasé? I'm not sure. The main source of knowledge for me is the news, that fuzzy concept that used to mean hard-hitting well-investigated journalism but now largely seems to be corporate-owned scaremongering, ad-revenue driven lunacy.

BBC, CNN, Al-Jazeera, Globe and Mail, New York Times... all the big news agencies that I bookmark all tend to paint a pretty nasty, negative picture of the world. I don't for a second pretend that we live in a perfect world. But surely there is more to what's going on than the bad stuff? I feel as if I'm hypersensitised to expect a negative headline at the top of the page everyday, and thinking about it, that's actually really sad.

I know the world is full of horrific things. Terrible floods, wars, death, despair, poverty and hunger. But surely that is not all that is going on in this world. I need a bit of balance, I need some optimistic and positive news. Maybe that's why I've embraced human interest stories like the ones so well presented on the This American Life podcast, and why I tend to watch presentations of successful inspirational people (e.g. TED talks). It's probably also why I tend to prefer to read blogs. And maybe it explains why lately I've been trawling the techie/geeky websites like CNET, BoingBoing, and Gizmodo... they are all about new exiting announcements and quirky links to interesting facts and people. They aren't really 'news' in the real sense of the word, but these media highlight that there is a flipside to the news coin. It's not to negate or to cast a blind eye on the negative news... but I feel like the "real" news is unfairly biased towards the negative sensationalistic stories. In doing so, the real news cannot by definition allow me to 'stay connected' with the world, because I'm missing out on all the good that is going on.

I'm on the lookout for alternative, more positive news source. If you have any suggestions, please leave a comment to this post.

Imperfectionist

One of my biggest faults is that I'm a perfectionist. I know that sounds like a cheesy answer to a classic interview question. I know that to qualify myself as a perfectionist is pretentious. But I'm not always a perfectionist. I'm only a perfectionist when a) I'm not feeling confident and b) when I feel like I need to impress someone. When I'm being myself, I'm confident and I don't care what others think if I make a mistake. The day I stop being a perfectionist will be the day I can truly be myself.

Perfectionism in my work: I've had the good fortune of working with some great researchers. A common thread amongst them all is that they are not perfectionists. Or at least not all the time - they time their perfection to perfection. They are not afraid to be wrong in front of other people when discussing ideas. They aren't afraid to be corrected. They trust in what they know, and realise that they won't ever have the answers for everything. They don't need to say the perfect word or give the perfect answer. They send hasty one line emails. They've figured out that time is precious, and they put their real efforts into what's really important, when it is important. And then there's me, sometimes spending a ridiculous amount of time agonising over the wording of a simple email. Who. Cares. Perfectionism cramps my capacity to be productive. In my line of work, there will ALWAYS be people that will poke holes in what I do. That criticism will make me and my work better. And while I'm getting better at realising it, why do I sit in an ugly office on a Saturday afternoon wondering about which words I should use in an outline of a thesis chapter which will no doubt be shredded to pieces by my advisers anyway, and ultimately will bear little resemblance to the actual finished chapter? It is a waste of my time to overly analyse everything I do. I tell myself that I can't help it, but I need to help it. The rest of my life is too valuable. The time I waste trying to make something sound clever or 'just right', could actually be spent dreaming big with Leigh, or walking Ollie on the beach, or crying like a baby at some cheesy movie, or making new friends, or relaxing with a video game, or reading something inspirational.

Perfectionism outside of work: I've conditioned myself into a perfectionism role. There's a saying in French: "tourne ta langue sept fois avant de parler", which translates to 'spin your tongue seven times before speaking'. And that's what I constantly do. And it can hamper my capacity to actively engage with people, to have a proper conversation. Until I met Leigh, the concept of a 'come-back' was foreign to me. I didn't do comebacks. 'Quick-witted' isn't something I would write on my CV. When I spend so much time thinking about the perfect response, the conversation moves at a pace that my 'turning my tongue seven times' can't ever expect to keep up with. And it's ridiculous, because the best conversations are the ones that involve saying something stupid and funny.

I'm not perfect. What I do isn't perfect. Life isn't perfect. And it doesn't need to be. Justin, stop clutching for coherence; just be yourself and live your fucking life.

Moral career

What are the moral implications of my career choice? It's a big question, but as I'm typing up my doctoral thesis, (nervously) hoping to be able to sufficiently defend it in a few months' time, and subsequently dive head-first into whatever and wherever my chosen career path leads me, the question needs to be asked. It needs to be asked because for better or worse, part of how I define myself is in my work. I don't work for the weekend, I work on the weekend, and for the most part I love it. It's fulfilling, challenging, and gives me the scope and opportunity to read, write, and study aspects of life that I would be reading, writing, and thinking about if I hadn't had the good fortune of actually being able to make a living doing what I do. From a personal - read: selfish - perspective, I'm very happy and I feel like I can make a contribution to my field, however incrementally small it might be, that will hopefully help in progressing the knowledge base forward. But that all feels terribly insular. And that's the crux of my concern regarding the moral aspects of my career: in the grand scheme of things, how useful is what I do?

Admittedly, there are worse things. I'm not on Wall Street buying hedge funds for sub-prime mortgages. I'm not trying to get elected on promises I know I won't keep. I'm not sending kids off to a dubiously-motivated war. Certain things are bad, and the jobs associated with that list are bad (I'm clearly not a moral relativist). I also realise that not everyone has to, needs to, or will, make massive transformational Obama-esque changes. And I'm not looking to do that. Small effects by many people makes big effects overall, and we can all make that small contribution. But I don't really know whether the insular path of my career will make a sufficient contribution to aspects of life that really matter and that could slot into one of those small contributions.

It pains me to core, to the point of tears, that there are people in this world that die because of the circumstances in which they were born. I've worked hard to achieve what I have, but much of that was facilitated by the circumstances I've found myself in by the luck of draw. The unfair reality of the coin toss of being born in a middle class Canadian suburb or a poverty and disaster-striken farm in Haiti literally haunts me. What right do I have to sit and ponder the hair-splitting theories of human behaviour while people are literally dying? I could easily slot into the academic machine, and continue to live the insular lifestyle I've grown comfortably accustomed to over the past few years. I could convince myself that I'm contributing to the advancement of human knowledge and that I should take advantage of the opportunities that I have in order to do that. I could convince myself that my brand of applied psychology is designed to make a difference in people's actual lives. Indeed, that's what got me into health psych in the first place. But SO much of my time is NOT spent making a difference in anyone's life expect mine. And I can't justify that.

I'm painting a bleak picture, but I do so with a purpose. In this final stage of my doctorate, embarking on my career, having a PhD, I'm recognising that I have a moral responsibility to emerge from the bubble of my academic existence. There are moral implications to my career choice, and I owe it to myself to figure out how to maximise the time I spend applying the skills I've had the good fortune to develop in order to contribute to making the world a place where more people can be given the opportunity to discover their passion and to flourish in its pursuit. I don't know how to do that. But I must.