A 10 point guide to your unconscious mind

We think of work as the domain of rationality, but our unconscious, irrational minds are dominant there just as in our private lives. Our unconscious assumptions, intuitions and emotions determine our thoughts, feelings and behaviours, both as individuals and, through the culture, as a group.

These are the underlying themes of all my articles, and I thought it worthwhile briefly to revisit the concept at the core of them – the unconscious mind.

Introducing the elephant: your unconscious mind

1. You have two different intelligences. You inhabit your conscious mind - it’s what you think of as ‘me’. But your unconscious mind – the seat of your instincts, gut feelings, passions and fears - is much more powerful. The psychologist Jonathan Haidt uses the metaphor of an elephant and a rider to describe the relationship. We believe that our conscious mind, the rider, is in charge. But the elephant is much stronger, and is really in control.

 

2. The psychologist Louis Cozolino uses a different comparison. He says that your unconscious mind is your operating system, like Windows or IOS. When you use your phone, the code scrolling behind the scenes is invisible to you, though it’s determining the functionality – what you can do and see. In the same way, your unconscious mind is always ‘on’, interpreting your experience and controlling how you think and act, instantly, without your awareness. You take it for granted; you can’t imagine what the world would be like without it. And it’s the result of your personal history, particular to you.

 

3. Its job is to predict what’s coming next. The unconscious mind came first in our evolution, before we developed the capacity to reason. It works in a very different way from your conscious mind – holistically, by distilling your experience into simple models of the world, looking for similar patterns in your current experience and cueing you to respond appropriately, in a way that worked before, when it finds a match. It communicates with you by visceral feelings: if something unexpected happens it jolts you so you engage your conscious mind.

 

4. It’s your emotions that make you act: they tell you what to approach and avoid. When you see a bus bearing down on you as you cross the road, your unconscious mind recognises a pattern that means danger and triggers a cascade of physical changes. You focus on the bus, your heart beats faster and you run for the pavement, half a second before you’ve consciously registered what’s happening.

Your unconscious mind can do magical things your conscious mind just can’t do

5. Intuition helps you make the right decision though you don’t have the facts or the capacity to analyse them. Your unconscious mind applies all your knowledge and experience simultaneously, recognises similarities in the current problem to ones you’ve solved before and guides you by a positive gut feeling to a solution. This is how the pilot Sully Sullenberger was able to land that plane on the Hudson river minutes after it lost all power on its take-off from La Guardia. It’s how all professionals make decisions, whether under time pressure or not: they draw on their expertise, the distillation of all their knowledge and experience – and it seems quite magical to the novice (Articles 3, 4 and 5).

 

6. Your unconscious mind is always sorting and reorganising your models of the world, particularly when your conscious mind is at rest, when you’re daydreaming or sleeping. New insights and creative ideas are generated when it identifies new correspondences and links and recombines the elements available to it into new, more illuminating models of the world (Articles 6 and 10). It can even tune in to the thoughts and feelings of other people, find common ground and inspire them to collaborate. Our powers of empathy are intuitive: we pick up small cues that enable us to simulate the emotional state of others.

But it can also seriously misdirect you

7. But it also infiltrates and biases your thinking. Some examples: we are over-optimistic – we suffer from wishful thinking – both about ourselves and our prospects and influence and in our projects, where we fail to anticipate difficulties. Do you know of any large infrastructure project that has come in to time and cost? We discount facts that contradict our settled opinion. We jump to conclusions on the basis of incomplete evidence: stereotyping is an example. These biases are very difficult to counter because many of them are evolutionary in origin or simply the product of the way our powerful unconscious minds work. The authority on these is the late Daniel Kahneman who sets them out in his book, ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’.

 

8. And many of us are subject to emotional distortions. We may have unexamined values and assumptions acquired from people influential in our earlier years that may be preventing us from being happy or realising our potential. Imperfect parenting may have seriously distorted the way we see ourselves and hence relate to other people and the world in general. If, for example, our parents’ love for us was contingent on our achieving, we may believe we are ‘worthy’ only if we succeed or everything we do is perfect. If they were critical, we may find even constructive feedback at work threatening to our self esteem and become defensive or depressed (Articles 10, 11, and 12.) President Trump’s father convinced him that he was worthy only if he was a ‘winner’, not a loser.

What can we do to maximise the magic and minimise the misdirection?

9. Enter the Engineer. Your unconscious mind is a Visionary, and may be subject to wild imaginings about the future; but your conscious mind is an Engineer. Engineers take things apart and reassemble them so that they work, and that’s what your conscious mind does – it comes to its conclusions by analysing the evidence, and applying words and numbers and logic. Fortunately, the Visionary and the Engineer have complementary skills (see Articles 3, 4, 5 and 6). Your Engineer can help you get the best from your Visionary, but also curb it when it’s on the wrong track.

 

10. Using your Engineer you can rigorously evaluate your intuitive hypotheses about solutions or new ideas, find the gaps and flaws and reject them if they don’t work. You can also set about training your intuition by systematic reflection of when it was right or wrong and why (see articles 5, 6 and 10). Prof Eugene Sadler-Smith explains more in his book, ‘Trust Your Gut’. You can apply a similar discipline to your emotional reactions by questioning them when they seem out of proportion to the events that triggered them (Article 11) or seeking the help of a coach or therapist to help you identify and emerge from the distortions you’ve brought with you from your earlier life.

 

 

 

1. Prepare. New ideas are the result of recombining our existing knowledge in novel ways. You can’t do this unless your mind is stocked with the components you need. You need to be steeped in your subject and the vocabulary of your trade; you need to do background research. Your team aren’t wasting the time they spend absorbing the work of others even if there’s no immediate tangible result. Bill Gates took ‘reading vacations’, where he read books on a variety of topics in quick succession, to nudge his unconscious mind into seeing new links between disparate ideas. Einstein: ‘If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants’.

2. Observe. Ideas are often triggered by noticing something you hadn’t seen before, and thinking about its implications. Highly creative people are intrigued by things the rest of us write off as irrelevant (one of the reasons they are bad at tuning out distractions in busy offices). They also see links between things which seem quite different to the rest of us. Richard Osman talks about observing things – ‘something you’ve just heard, someone you’ve met, an unexpected view from a window – that form little bubbles of thought in my head. And then suddenly two of those little bubbles burst into each other and that’s a creative idea’.

3. Spend time on your passions. As far as you can, pursue the things that interest you, and allow your team to do the same. If something matters to you, you will keep returning to it, and each time you do, you will launch your unconscious mind on a new quest to find a solution. Google requires its staff to spend 20% of their time on a pet project guided entirely by their own interests and preferences. Over 50% of Google’s new products arise from ideas under this scheme.

4. Protect your space and time for creative incubation. The real work of creativity takes place at unconscious level. Only your unconscious mind can step outside the tramlines of your normal ways of thinking. But it can’t happen if you’re focusing on something else, like answering your emails; that switches on the wrong brain network. JK Rowling says, ‘Be ruthless about protecting writing days. Do not cave in to have ‘essential’ meetings’

5. Free your mind for incubation by disengaging from the project and doing something totally different that relaxes you: go for a walk, have a bath, doze. When Mark Gatiss is stuck on a project he goes for a run or has a bath – he calls them ‘think baths’. Douglas Adams sometimes had 6 baths a day, when he was really stuck. The gold standard for incubation is of course sleep, as we know from many accounts. Paul McCartney said that the melody for ‘Yesterday’ was fully formed in his mind when he woke up one morning – he just walked over to the piano and played it. (See Article 6, and Broadcast Comment Piece 2 for a fuller account of the creative process.)

6. Find the time when you work best to capture your ideas – maybe early in the morning or late at night when there are no interruptions. Allow your team this space and don’t require their digital or actual presence all the time. Alexander McCall Smith gets up at 4am when it’s completely quiet, to write for three hours, then goes back to bed for a second sleep before meeting the demands of the day. He produces 1000 words an hour and attributes this to an ability to write in a trance-like dissociated state, accessing otherwise locked off parts of his unconscious mind.

7. Relax: don’t short-circuit the process and try to capture your thoughts too soon (and don’t keep asking for progress reports from your team): if you intervene before your unconscious mind has finished its work, your nascent insight will disappear. You need to be relaxed for broad associative thinking to take place at unconscious level. You will even think better if you’re in a large, comfortable space. Stress – like an artificial deadline or a cramped environment - narrows your focus to the stressor. Encourage new ideas into the light and don’t frighten them off by ruthless evaluation. The artist Sir Grayson Perry compares new ideas to small furry animals who will disappear back into the wood if you frighten them.

8. Nurture your ‘slow hunches’: some ideas develop very slowly indeed. It can be uncomfortable living with ambiguity and some of us are better at that than others. Try to trust and embrace the creative process. Record your progress as the idea develops and come back to it from time to time. It took 10 years for Einstein to develop the special theory of relativity, during which time he was ‘visited by all sorts of nervous conflicts’.

9. Evaluate your ideas rigorously. You will feel the same burst of elation about a bad idea as a good one - don’t be what the early psychologist Alfred Wallas called an ‘idle genius’ whose ‘brilliant’ solutions don’t work in practice. Ideas emerge from the unconscious mind in abstract, even visual, form. Shakespeare calls them ‘airy nothings’. It’s only when you consciously evaluate them and set them out as logical propositions, that the gaps appear. Expose them to other people who will bring different perspectives. Recognise that many of them won’t fly and you must be willing to jettison them. JK Rowling – ‘You have to resign yourself to the fact that you waste a lot of trees before you write anything you really like. It’s like learning an instrument.’

10. Know yourself and your team. Some people are more intuitive and hence more creative than others: they store away knowledge at unconscious level and are better at seeing links; others prefer to solve problems consciously and analytically. Neuroscientific investigations have found differences in the brain activity of the two groups. Creative people are also frequently introverts and, in artistic spheres, may also be less emotionally stable: see Articles 7 and 8, and Broadcast Comment Piece 3. But others are more analytical and better at evaluating, planning and putting ideas into practice. I call them Visionaries and Engineers, and you need both in the team.

‘Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle … Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.

Steve Jobs: Commencement Speech at Stanford on June 12, 2005

 ‘You have an argument with your boss and decide you need to leave, or someone you know offers you a job and you talk to your mates about it in the pub, and they advise you to take it. It’s all short term and tactical and incremental, but it shouldn’t be like that; it’s too important a part of your life.’

Jon, a TV producer

 

Do you know what you want to do with your life? Where do your particular talents lie? What are your deepest-held values? How would you like to be remembered? If you were asked to put into words your purpose in life, would you have a reply?

Most of us are too preoccupied with our busy lives ever to have thought about these simple but profound questions. Aren’t the answers obvious, we wonder? And surely brooding on these questions is a luxury, since we’re hemmed in by obligations and wouldn’t be able to act on our conclusions anyway? And, of course, for many people personal relationships and caring for family will always take precedence over work. What they want from a job is an income and security, if possible some congenial colleagues, so they can to get on with those life tasks.

But my professional clients are often very much exercised by sensing a mismatch between who they are, what they want to achieve, and the opportunities provided by their current job.  Those at the beginning of their working lives don’t understand why the career they’ve aspired to since childhood just isn’t as satisfying as they thought it would be. People In mid-career who’ve achieved - or maybe not achieved - their youthful ambitions realise they want to do something different for the remainder of their working lives. Or they have that decision forced upon them by redundancy. Those nearing retirement age see an opportunity to do what really matters to them rather than serve the objectives of others. And the Covid epidemic prompted many people to make a major re-evaluation of how they were spending their time.

Most of these clients are convinced that they need to make a change, but don’t know what direction they should take.  The first task for the coaching sessions is to help them understand themselves better: to find their authentic selves by introspecting about what matters to them most, where they can make a contribution meaningful to them that fits their personality and uses their particular skills. Then they can formulate an authentic purpose in life, and overarching aim that provides a compass direction for navigating the choices before them. The second stage is to help them investigate the options realistically available to them and formulate a plan.

As well as helping us find our way, a sense of purpose is good for our psychological wellbeing per se. In this article I’ll look at why that is and how you can zero in on yours.

In the subsequent articles I’ll consider why it’s particularly important to have a clear sense of purpose as a leader; and at what you can do practically to find a better fit between what’s meaningful to you and your work.

It’s good for us psychologically to have a sense of purpose

Studies have found that having something to strive for improves our mood: the more effort we put in, the stronger the positive emotions: provided that what we’re seeking to achieve is intrinsically meaningful, like mastering a skill or making a contribution to society, and not driven by the insecurities I’ve discussed in previous articles, or by extrinsic factors like money or status – an important point I discuss further below. Research also shows that people with a purpose in life experience less stress, anxiety and depression. They also recover more quickly from setbacks – their gaze is fixed on the longer-term aim.

A study asked a sample of doctors and nurses, teachers and librarians, engineers and analysts, managers and secretaries how they saw their jobs. The categorisations suggested by the researchers were: ‘just a job’ (‘a necessity that’s not a major positive in their lives’); ‘a career’ (‘something to ‘win’ or ‘advance’) or ‘a calling’ (‘a source of enjoyment and fulfilment where you’re actually doing socially useful work’). Roughly one third of the research subjects viewed their work as a calling. And they were not just happier than the other groups, but reported being healthier as well.

Being purposeful helps you to feel whole and authentic – that your actions flow naturally and directly from your values and beliefs about what’s important. It’s an antidote to the sort of psychological ‘noise’, the preoccupation with self that I’ve been looking at. It also helps you make sense of your all-too-finite life. We love stories and crave narratives that impose coherence on the random chaos of the world. It’s both comforting and inspiring if we can think of our own lives as a journey towards a useful goal during which we made the best use of our talents and, even, maybe, grew to our full potential

Meaningful work can be the source of our peak experiences

The seminal study on this was done by the psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who coined the term ‘flow’^. Csikszentmihalyi asked his research subjects to note down what they were doing and how they felt when prompted by a random signal from a pager. He found that the times when people felt happiest correlated with states of ‘flow’, or what sportsmen call being in ‘the zone’.

Flow occurs when you are so involved in what you’re doing and concentrating so hard that everything else falls away. You lose your consciousness of self and time seems to be compressed:  the parts of your brain concerned with ‘self-referential’ thinking – eg brooding on the past or worrying about the future - are less active.  Your mind or body is stretched to the limit in an effort to accomplish something which you find meaningful and which challenges you; and you’re in control, adjusting to the feedback about success or failure you’re getting as you go along. People in flow report that they have the sensation of being transported into a different state of consciousness; they feel strong, active, creative, motivated, and have a sense of discovery.  The individual’s physical and psychological energy is all directed towards a clear goal; everything is aligned. They experience a sense of mastery and self-determination.

The study also found that these states were much more common at work than at leisure (unless the individual’s choice of recreational activities, such as rock climbing or sailing, involved a similar degree of skill and challenge). As one might expect, they occurred more often in higher level jobs - surgeons, for example, reported particularly high levels of flow - but even those in more routine roles were in flow at work more than twice as often than at leisure. Despite this, the research came up with a paradoxical finding. When asked whether they would prefer to be doing something else, people said they would prefer not to be at work. At work, they felt skilful and challenged, happy, strong and creative. At leisure they often felt apathetic and dissatisfied. Yet they would rather be at leisure.

He suggests two reasons for this: first that his subjects had embraced the stereotypical belief that leisure must be more enjoyable than work (of course, work is hard – it involves effort).  And secondly, that, though they may experience moments of flow, many people consider their jobs a burden imposed from outside. When we feel that we are investing our efforts in someone else’s goals, not our own, we feel that our energy is wasted. We need to find work which is meaningful to us and which accords with our view of our own purpose in life.

Meaningfulness arises from intrinsic factors

Early every morning my two male cats – they’re big, rugged Maine Coons - eat their cat food breakfast, and then set out, apparently purposefully, across the garden to explore the fields beyond. Their brains have been programmed by evolution to be inquisitive, to explore and add to their knowledge of the surrounding terrain, because, in the wild their ancestors inhabited, this would help them to find and memorise sources of prey, and hence survive.

Neuroscientists call the brain circuits responsible for this behaviour the ‘mammalian seeking system’. It’s driven by the reward chemical dopamine, which is responsible for the drive to eat and reproduce. We humans get similar pleasure from food and sex and a compulsion to seek them out. But we have a bigger, more sophisticated pre-frontal cortex so we engage with our worlds in more complex ways. In us the seeking system is at the heart of intrinsic motivation which drives us to pursue activities and goals we each individually find worthwhile and satisfying in themselves.

The psychologist, Scott Barry Kaufman refers to a recently discovered dopamine pathway (he calls it the ‘Nerdy pathway’) linked to the reward value of information. People with this pathway are strongly energised by the prospect of learning something new and complex, and reflecting on ideas and meanings like the creative people referred to in previous articles. If you are taking the trouble to read this piece, it’s likely that you have this pathway!

We experience a dopamine rush when we succeed; but dopamine is readily metabolised so, to continue the good feelings, we need to engage in things which provide continuing interest and challenge.  Extrinsic rewards, like pay and status, give us a dopamine rush when we get them, but it’s short-lived: we get used to our new situation. They work better if they are synergistic with our inner motivation, encouraging us to work even harder at what we do because we already enjoy it.

We can be wrong about what’s important to us

A number of my clients have sensed that their current job isn’t right for them but don’t know what would be. They may not know themselves very well and they may also be in thrall to beliefs they’ve brought from the past but which no longer hold good. As we saw in previous articles, we all internalise assumptions about what’s worthwhile and who we are or should be from the people who are important influences when we’re growing up: parents, teachers, peers, society at large. We reach adulthood with a system of values in place, a view of how we ought to spend our lives. Some of these may be at odds with our experience as adults and that generates a feeling of unease, but we may live with this for years without attempting to get to the bottom of it. To do that we need to make the unconscious conscious.

In her biography, ‘Becoming’, Michelle Obama, describes just this experience of becoming gradually aware of a disconnect between her true self and her career choice. Michelle came from a modest background, and worked very hard to get into Harvard Law School (where she met Barack) and become a lawyer in a top Chicago firm. She became one of the purposeful coffee-carrying corporate figures she used to see and admire from the window of the bus which took her across the city to school.

But after a while, she began to feel that all was not well, despite achieving her childhood ambition, but she couldn’t pin down why. She gradually had to acknowledge that she wasn’t happy. She found her job as a junior associate reviewing documents lonely. She didn’t meet the clients, and she ‘craved interaction’.

Encouraged by Barack, she thought about what she had found most satisfying in the past, made a list of her skills, and explored what was available to her. And, after considerable agonising, she left her glitzy law firm, took a large pay cut, and embarked on a series of jobs in the public and non-profit sectors with an emphasis on community relations, social problems and helping under-privileged people. She realised in retrospect that she had been responding to the values of those round her who wanted to see her succeed in the conventional way.

‘I can admit now that I was driven …by some reflexive wish for other people’s approval too….and when I mentioned I was bound for law school – Harvard Law School as it turned out – the affirmation was overwhelming’

Clearly Michelle Obama had more room for manoeuvre than many of us do; her husband was a high-earning lawyer too. But there are things we can do to achieve a better match between who we are and what we do short of the complete ‘swerve’ she makes. I will come onto these in subsequent articles.

Finding your purpose: exercises

Here are some practical suggestions on the first part of the equation – recognising that there’s a mismatch between you and your job, and crystallising what matters to you.

 

• If you’ve been feeling discontented in your current job, recognise that there’s a problem. We are experts at denying uncomfortable truths that we might need to act on. You should take notice if you’re feeling uneasy and dissatisfied at work, even if you’re in the job you always wanted, or which has suited you up to now. Your unconscious mind may be trying to alert you to a disconnect between your current reality and your deeper needs and motivations.

 

• Do a personality psychometric, like the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) which is easily accessed. It will give you valuable objective information about your characteristics. The first time I did one, I found it revelatory – and reassuring that I was not weird, or at least here were others like me around. If Michelle Obama had known that she was an extravert and highly empathetic - as I’m sure she would’ve discovered - she would have known that she would not be happy in the rarefied intellectual world of corporate law. The MBTI provides guidance on personality and career choice.

 

• Introspect in a systematic way, if possible with the help of a coach. To do this you need to think about your past, present and future. You may have  unquestioned assumptions from the past, but equally there may be important values you acquired when you were young that have become diluted or forgotten among other pressures. The focus is on work, but of course your purpose will have important personal dimensions too; and the balance is likely to change according to your life stage.

Here are some questions to ask yourself to start the process:

What is your life purpose?

Who were the dominant influences in your early life and what did they teach you?

What motivates you? Why did you choose your current job?

What are your most deeply held values or guiding principles?

What is the particular contribution you make at work?

What do you do most easily and naturally at work, without needing to think about it?

What would your colleagues say is your most important skill?

What do you most enjoy and find most satisfying about your current job?

What do you enjoy least?

What do you enjoy most about your non-work life?

What unfulfilled dreams do you have?

What would you like to leave behind you as a legacy?

How would you like to be remembered?

How would you describe your purpose in life?

 

Who are your heroes?

Name five people you really admire (they can be people you know personally, or prominent people, living or dead)

What are their particular qualities or contribution that you find admirable?

How could you seek to emulate their qualities or contribution?

 

Sources

Daniel Goleman and Cary Cherniss, ‘Optimal – How to Sustain Excellence Every Day’, Penguin Business, 2023

Scott Barry Kaufman, ‘Transcend – the New Science of Self-Actualisation’, Sheldon Press 2022

KM Sheldon, Becoming Oneself: the central role of self-concordant goal selection, Personality and Social Psychology Review 18(4), 349-365

Boreham , ID, Schutte, NS 2023. The relationship between purpose in life and depression and anxiety: a meta analysis, Journal of Clinical Psychology, volume 79, issue 12.

Schaefer, SM, et al 2013, Purpose in life predicts better emotional recovery from negative stimuli

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, ‘Flow – The Classic Work on How to Achieve Happiness’, Rider, 2002.

Beth Hennessy et al, Extrinsic and Intrinsic Motivation, in Wiley Encyclopaedia of Management, 2014

Jenny Rogers, Coaching Skills: the Definitive Guide to Being a Coach, Open University Press, fifth edition, 2024

 

 

In my last two articles I looked at why some of us are more anxious and emotionally vulnerable than others, how these characteristics result from a combination of our genes and upbringing, and how they play out in the workplace.  In this piece I want to consider some practical measures you can take to mitigate these issues in yourself and deal with them more intelligently in your colleagues.

I can only give you pointers in a short article. I’m hoping that by providing a high-level route map, I can help you navigate to the sources which will be of most use to you. At the end I’ve provided some basic practical exercises to give you a flavour of some of the relevant techniques.

The emotional glitches from which many of us suffer

As I said in my last article, many of us have emotional ‘buttons’ left over from our childhood. Our parents may, for example, have discounted our feelings, so that we react particularly strongly if we feel we’ve been ignored, or convinced us that we were only worthy of their love if we were unquestioningly obedient, so that we become over-compliant ‘people pleasers’.

In my coaching practice I’ve come across one group in particular - insecure high achievers, people whose parents instilled in them the belief that they were worthy of parental notice and love only if they excelled. These people are skilful and driven and excellent at their jobs. But self-esteem – the confidence that you are worthy and loveable – doesn’t come from the mastery of your profession. People with this pattern can never do enough to assuage that parental voice within.

If you have this makeup, you take any setback– a critique of your work, a failure to get a commission or a promotion – very personally. It awakens echoes of your childhood fear of rejection by your all-powerful parent – genuinely life-threatening for a small child - and your conviction that you must be seriously at fault for failing to live up to the blueprint.

But you’re the victim of imperfect pattern recognition. Your unconscious mind is telling you that you face an existential threat when in fact you’re  just dealing with the normal vicissitudes of working life. This distorted lens may drive you to achieve, but it also makes you unhappy, prevents you from being your true self and from fulfilling your potential. If the distortion is serious, it will damage your relationships and undermine your performance and that of the group.

Using your mind to change your brain

The principle underlying the techniques I will describe – drawn from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) - is that we can change our emotional reactions by applying our conscious minds to them. They rely on the role that our prefrontal cortex – the rational part of our brains - plays in regulating the behaviour of our emotional limbic systems, including the amygdala which governs our fight and flight reactions.

We’re all familiar with the symptoms of an emotional hijack. We feel a physical shock and our hearts race – they’re preparing our bodies for fight or flight. But the effect of the adrenaline rush is also to narrow our mental focus to dealing with the immediate threat, blocking out all other thoughts. We know that if we press pause, stop and breathe (count to 10 as our parents tell us when we’re children), it allows our rational minds back in, and we can reflect on whether, for example, an angry riposte is the best response to a colleague with whom we will have to work in future.

In the longer term, we may be able to loosen the hold of the distorted model which is triggering our emotional reaction, and correct the faulty pattern recognition. We may, by a process of conscious reflection and practice be able actually to change our neural circuits so that we recognise that things previously perceived as threats are not as dangerous as we thought.

The first stage in this process of re-education is to make the issue conscious: recognise it’s there and try and understand  its roots. If your childhood has left you with a conviction that you are in some way inadequate, you are likely to be very highly defended against confronting it. My client Zac (Article 10), was unusual in being so clear that his sensitivity to criticism could be traced back to his critical father. More often we have no, or only a glimmer of, awareness that our reactions are disproportionate to events, but are adept at rationalising them and convincing ourselves they’re perfectly appropriate. The first of the exercises below focuses on this diagnostic stage

Understanding the origins of your emotional models is not enough in itself to shift them. But it gives you a certain objectivity and distance from them, which helps you not to become the unwitting victim of your emotions. You develop an ability to predict when they will occur and to ‘press pause’, to stand back a bit from them when they do – to think about them rather than think with them – which enables you to choose not to act on them, even though they may still be very powerful.

The next stage is to challenge the distortion, by trying to describe consciously in words the bad feelings about yourself that certain situations arouse, and evaluating them rationally to see whether they are true or reasonable; then to try and formulate a more accurate and realistic description of what’s going on. In the second exercise I work through some questions to help you do this, using an example which I come across a lot – taking criticism of one’s work personally and finding it very difficult to deal with emotionally. I also suggest a quick self-mocking hack which can be very useful when you know you’ve over-reacted and need to recover quickly.

Both of these exercises focus on specific vulnerabilities, but we’re emotionally complex creatures and if we have a negative view of ourselves it’s likely to apply in a number of areas. These localised issues distort large parts of the lens through which we see ourselves, and the accompanying anxiety leads us to focus on the negative and discount the positive.

When I meet people in my work who are psychologically solid I recognise them immediately. They are realistic about their own abilities – and weaknesses -  and don’t feel a need to prove anything. They are straightforward; there is an almost palpable lack of vulnerability, defensiveness or emotional complexity about them. We all  need to create a similarly authentic sense of ourselves: one which recognises and appreciates our true worthiness, but is also realistic, and acknowledges our deficiencies rather than attempting to deny or conceal them in the interests of self-protection. The third exercise suggests some ways in which you might start to build such a sense of self.

The role of coaches and therapists

You can do some of this work yourself using exercises such as those I propose below. But the process is much easier in a relationship with a professional – a coach if they have the right training or a therapist who uses Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) as part of their armoury. A series of 1:1 conversations with the right person (the personal relationship is the key determinant of success) can be enormously powerful in achieving change.

Coaches and therapists are trained to be fully present - really to listen to the client and to tune in to the underlying emotions –and to provide unconditional positive regard. This support creates an environment in which the therapist can challenge the client’s current way of seeing things without arousing their defences. Indeed the literature suggests that the therapy relationship mimics the relationship between a young child and its mother or carer, as the mother encourages the child to learn and explore the world.  The mother’s emotional attunement stimulates the child’s brain to produce the ‘reward chemical’, dopamine and other endogenous endorphins, which provide the right environment for maximum neural growth and plasticity. Once a new insight has been sealed in place with dopamine, we can’t go back to our previous way of seeing things.

Dealing with these issues in your colleagues

Understanding your own psychological makeup is the first step to understanding that of your colleagues. This is particularly useful for people who work with creative colleagues who are especially likely to suffer from emotional complexities. In my piece for Broadcast magazine I described how a producer succeeded in establishing harmonious relations and getting the best from a notoriously ‘difficult’ presenter by tuning into and soothing his insecurities and avoiding arousing his defences.

The effect of this was not just to create a more congenial working environment -  though it did so.  The presenter had a reputation for tantrums, even disappearing off set for days at a time. Handling him sensibly meant that he did his best work and the production was delivered to time and budget. The strategy saved the production company hundreds of thousand of pounds. A bit of psychological awareness and emotional intelligence are not just ‘nice to have’. They make commercial sense.

And they’re relevant to all our workplace interactions, not just those involving particularly high stakes relationships. We all encounter unexpectedly strong emotional reactions in our colleagues from time to time. And we’re often bad at dealing with them.

Be alert to colleagues’ vulnerabilities: does someone lack confidence, need affirmation, find criticism difficult to handle? Are they reluctant to say what they think? If you lead a team, you’re in a uniquely strong position to help them because you represent the parent or authority figure. Try to give them what they need, avoid unnecessarily arousing their defences and protect them from other people who may do so. The behaviour of a leader has a very powerful effect on the psychological well-being of the team and that feeds into their performance.

Work by two McKinsey partners, Katzenbach and Smith, on teams, found that this sort of mutual concern and care, described by one team leader as ‘a form of love’, was a characteristic of high performing teams. Another leader said ‘Not only did we trust each other, not only did we respect each other, but we gave a damn about the rest of the people on this team. If we saw somebody vulnerable, we were there to help’. The best teams are also characterised by their ability to discuss issues frankly, and indeed have fun together.  If everyone in a team feels understood and valued, then, whatever their individual issues, they’re less likely to take disagreement and constructive criticism personally but see them as a means of getting to the best outcome. The team will be a high dopamine, neurally plastic environment open to creativity and change.

A leader’s ability to lead will be seriously compromised if their energy is focused on protecting a fragile self from threat rather than getting on with the job and nurturing their team. I mentioned in this context Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, and one of my readers, a historian, delicately pointed out that Hitler and Stalin might have been even better examples. Fortunately, few of us have to work for people quite this flawed, but if you do have an insecure boss, you still need to manage those vulnerabilities as you would in another colleague; we find this more difficult to accept because at some level we believe our bosses – parent figures - should be psychologically solid.

You may have to go out of your way to show that you respect them, that you recognise their authority, and that you are not seeking to undermine them. This is a very difficult balancing act when you don’t in fact believe your boss to be completely competent. But it is a fact of working life that if you arouse their defences and polarise them against you, it may compromise the effectiveness of the team, permanently damage your relationship with them, and in the worst case, could have a negative impact on your career.

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 Exercises

 

1. Diagnosing the root of the problem

Here are some questions to ask yourself if you think you may be finding things more upsetting than is reasonable:

• Do I react very emotionally to some things that happen at work, which other people would deal with better?
• Is there a pattern? What are the things which really get to me?
• When I think about how my parents treated me, or events more generally in my childhood and adolescence, can I see any reason why I should be emotionally sensitive to this sort of event?

 

2. Challenging your distorted beliefs

 The next stage is to try to reprogramme yourself by thinking rationally about the situations which provoke your reaction. Key questions here are:

• Can I put my emotional reaction into words? What is the script that runs in my head when (to use the same example) someone criticises my work.  It can be very difficult to put the feeling into words; after all we acquire many of these patterns before we have language. You might find that criticism makes you feel useless or incompetent or unappreciated or not valued. At the deepest level, you may also fear that there will be catastrophic consequences – eg that you will lose your job

 

• What is the reality of the situation? Is my evaluation of it accurate and reasonable? (Is there any evidence that I am useless? What good things have I achieved recently? Do people generally appreciate my work etc?)

 

• How might I evaluate it differently? How would I like to react? How would I counsel a friend who came to me with the same problem? (Is any of the criticism justified? Could I act on this and improve my work, while rejecting the parts which are not merited? How important is this criticism within the general scheme of things? Was the critic having a bad day? Is it really worth getting upset about?)

 

• Write down a more realistic description of the problem and how you will react to it in future in a more appropriate way. Imagine yourself doing so; next time something similar arises, practise being the new you. (There was some substance in the criticism, and I will act on that, so it has been a useful learning exercise. The critic was just doing their job, and this sort of thing is a normal part of working life, and not a personal threat.}

 

• Some people find it helpful to mock the undermining thought which comes to them when something difficult happens. In my first career my particular version of this is to say ‘nobody appreciates me, nobody listens to my opinions’ in a high-pitched, Monty Python voice. (My mother had a habit of saying, ‘don’t be so ridiculous, Janet’ when I was trying to tell her something I thought was important.) The ridicule definitely takes the sting out: it’s hard to feel upset and aggrieved when you’re mimicking your own inner voice. (I had to give up this useful crutch when we were all forcibly removed to open plan.)

3. Self affirmation

Here are some questions to help you create an authentic sense of yourself. Notice that the more you value your strengths the easier it is to own up to your weaknesses.

 

• What are your most deeply held values?

 

• What is most important to you in life?

 

• What do you do really well without thinking about it?

 

• What do you do less well?

 

• Suppose you identified that your relationships with your family and friends are the most important part of your life and that your most deeply held values relate to caring for and supporting them. Visualise in detail a recent situation that captured why these things are so important to you and how you embodied your values – eg listening to and comforting friend in need of support. Try and remember how you felt – the empathy and maybe a sense that you had provided some much-needed help. Think about how much you enjoy time with your friends and family and how you might show your appreciation for them, or them for you, in future.

 

If you’re insecure or anxious then you’re on the look out for threats and programmed to focus on the negative things which happen to you. You tend to discount achievements and successes.

 

• Keep a diary of the good things that happen at work, and what you’ve achieved: new ideas you’ve had, people you’ve persuaded, projects which have come to fruition, positive feedback you’ve received, team members you’ve developed, obstacles you’ve navigated.

 

 

Sources

 

Jon R Katzenbach and Douglas K Smith, The Wisdom of Teams – Creating the High-Performance Organisation, Harvard Business School Press.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A man’s subconscious self is not the ideal companion. It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour.

PG Wodehouse, The Adventures of Sally

Tell me what you fear and I will tell you what has happened to you

The psychiatrist and paediatrician, Donald Woods Winnicott

 

A client, Zac, an actor and comedian, found it very hard to deal with criticism. He said that he would always try to ‘get in first’ to protect himself from adverse comments. If someone started talking about one of his performances, he would critique it himself, before they could do so, which somehow seemed to take the sting out of anything negative they were going to say. Telling himself ‘it’s OK that they didn’t think I was any good because I knew that anyway’ protected him against hearing and confronting the full force of the criticism and the bad feelings it would engender.

If he got a bad notice in the press, he would find it difficult to work for several days. And a series of such setbacks might precipitate a depression and stop him working for weeks.

I asked Zac where he thought these powerful reactions came from. He said immediately that he’d had a very difficult relationship with his father who was ambitious and highly critical of his children. He had wanted Zac to become a lawyer, and was very angry and disappointed when he chose a different career path. It was his father’s voice he heard when he got a bad review.

In my last article I looked at how, like Zac, we can acquire distorted models of ourselves in our childhood from parents whose love and care is not unconditional but contingent on our behaving in certain ways. We grow up with the conviction that we are lacking  – what the psychotherapist and neuroscientist Louis Cozolino calls ‘core shame’ and others insecurity or poor self-esteem - and that to be worthy of love and respect we must fulfil our parents’ blueprint for the perfect child.

In this article I will consider some of the most common ways in which the legacy of these early experiences may manifest in our working lives as adults and interfere with our performance, relationships and happiness. In the next article I will consider what we can do to loosen their grip on ourselves, and negotiate them more intelligently when we recognise them in our colleagues.

 

Many of us have these vulnerabilities

On the far left of the bell curve for psychological health are those lucky people who have the psychological solidity that good genes and very good parenting provide. On the far right are those whose genetic inheritance and/or disordered childhoods have left them with lifelong psychological damage that may take the form of clinical depression, impulsive anger, or a personality disorder, such as psychopathy. But most of us occupy the middle. We are functioning – indeed we may be very successful indeed - but we also suffer from varying degrees of insecurity.

If you have these emotional vulnerabilities, adverse events at work can trigger your childhood emotions of fear and shame. Your unconscious mind tells you, for example, that when someone critiques your work, it’s the same as when your parent criticised you as a child, and that the appropriate reaction is to feel deeply ashamed and afraid that the parent may reject or even abandon you. In the language of psychotherapy, you are ‘transferring’ an emotional reaction you had to someone crucial to your very survival in your childhood to a relationship which is completely different.

Zac is experiencing an extreme form of this transference. He tries at first to rationalise by telling himself he already knew his performance was flawed.  Rationalisation – seeking to convince ourselves that things are other than they are - is often our first form of defence against the emotionally unpalatable. But when the bad notices arrive, they evoke his flight reaction - he abandons the struggle - and eventually he withdraws into depression.

These deep emotional models of ourselves are very powerful: remember how much stronger Haidt’s elephant (your unconscious mind) is than the tiny mahout (your rational mind) perched on top (see Article 1). You’re largely unaware of them: you can’t really imagine any other way of understanding yourself or your world. But, like Picasso’s girl in the painting above, you’re seeing things in a distorting mirror. Your negative self-image has nothing to do with your professional competence – as we’ve seen, many of the most creative and high-achieving among us suffer from these deep insecurities. But it gets in the way: it’s a barrier that stops you applying your talents to your job. It makes you doubt your abilities, warps your relationships, and diverts your energy to self-protection.

 

 Fear of making mistakes, sensitivity to criticism and perfectionism

 Negative parental blueprints come in many forms. If you have one, it will be unique, the product of your particular nature and nurture. So this account is bound to be a generalisation. I hope, nevertheless, that it may alert you to the possibility that things may not be as they seem and that something malign may be going on under the surface - in you or a colleague – and that you should reflect further and proceed with caution.

I want to focus in particular on the adverse consequences, for the individual and the team, of some of the most common emotional imperatives among the high achievers I’ve worked with: the deep conviction that they must do everything perfectly, work as hard as is humanly possible, that it is vital that they succeed or ‘win’. Of course they find that, however well they do, the deep emotional void inside them is still there.

This cluster of issues stems from the unconscious fear that if your work is less than immaculate you will be exposed in your full unworthiness, and you will have to confront the pain of recognising it.

We met it in the last article in my insomniac client Louise, who was perpetually convinced that she had made a catastrophic error and that the sky would fall in if she didn’t correct it. Neither was true: her ‘errors’ turned out to be imaginary or trivial and easily corrected. And even if they had been more serious, it would have been possible to put things right. After all, people make mistakes all the time in their working lives.  But for Louise, a mistake would have unleashed unbearable negative feelings about herself.

Perfectionists are trying to eliminate the risk that they may make a mistake or be criticised. Like all anxious people they are trying to exert control over events. They believe that everything they do must be completely faultless, not just fit for purpose. They take enormous pains to ensure it is perfect, and suffer great mental anguish if something goes awry. They’re also prone to assuming responsibility for everything and believe at some level that they are to blame for anything that goes wrong. They are often micro-managers (‘control freaks’, if you like): they can’t trust their perfectly competent team members to do the job to their unnecessarily high specification, and take away their subordinates’ autonomy and motivation as a result.

Zac’s sensitivity to criticism is part of the same family of vulnerabilities. If you have this makeup, you may perceive any negative feedback, setback or rejection – even when it’s out of your control - as an indicator of your personal inadequacy. Like him, you may resort to denial as a first defence. You will tell yourself that the remit wasn’t clear, the interview panel biased, you didn’t have the resources to do a good job. Or you may adopt elaborate protective mechanisms, avoiding new challenges or even self-sabotaging: temporising about a piece of work until you have too little time to do it properly and using this as an excuse.

These are flight/freeze reactions. But some people carry with them a lot of buried anger about their childhood treatment, and criticism may trigger fight rather than flight reactions. You may become defensive and angry; refusing to acknowledge that there is anything wrong with what you’ve done, or blaming others. Anger is of course the most damaging response, since it destroys your relationships with your colleagues. But all these reactions are ‘maladaptive’; they’re not appropriate to this current reality. Apart from making you unhappy, they limit your capacity for growth and fulfilment, and that of your team. They mean that you’re unwilling to try new things which may be risky; you don’t learn from adverse feedback where it’s justified; and you don’t acquire the resilience which comes with understanding that chance plays a part in life and some things are beyond your control.

 

The need to achieve, workaholism and ‘winning’

Many people are dedicated to their jobs and we rely utterly on that dedication. I want my surgeon to have trained for years and to work very hard to the highest possible standard.  But if you feel that you must prove yourself by achievement you may be in thrall to a blueprint from your childhood.  It is of course also possible, and probably quite common, to be both dedicated to what you do and in thrall to a parental blueprint.

The compulsion to work hard may be directly traceable back to parental pressure, but it’s also a common response among able children whose emotional background was lacking in other ways. If we achieve a lot, others admire and respect us, soothing our worries about acceptance. And work  is intrinsically very absorbing; it stills our worrying and ruminating.

People who work compulsively may become addicted to the good feelings – the dopamine spike – which hard work gives them. But because the emotional insecurities are still there, they’re able to take very limited pleasure in any achievement before they feel impelled to take on the next challenge and prove themselves again.  So, they work more and more, rationalising this by convincing themselves that they are very important, as is the job, and have no choice but to fill every hour with work.  They risk burnout and their relationships suffer. As the saying goes, no-one ever said on their death bed, ‘I wish I’d spent more time in the office’. And, if they are a leader, they’re almost bound to pass on the bad effects to their team, who will have to work equally hard to keep up with them and sacrifice their health and private lives

The compulsion to ‘win’ is an altogether more damaging manifestation of emotional insecurity than those we’ve considered so far. Sufferers from it are fiercely competitive because they can't safely countenance the thought that they may be out-competed.  They may brood obsessively about their status, how they compare with their peers in ability and performance, or how they are rated by their seniors or powerful outsiders. They may routinely denigrate others to reassure themselves about their own position and they may adopt devious means to maintain it. When someone they see as a competitor wins out against them, they may find this so painful that they have to rationalise and persuade themselves that it was unfair or indeed didn’t really happen.  They then focus their negative energies on ‘getting even’.

This of course is the profile of Donald Trump, whose father’s regard was explicitly contingent on his being a ‘winner’, not a ‘loser’, as we saw in Article 2. Trump’s parental blueprint has engulfed him completely. He is widely believed to suffer from Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD): to have buried his negative image of himself deep in his unconscious by inventing the myth that he is uniquely talented and entitled. People with NPD devote enormous psychological energy to maintaining this myth because it defends them against emotions they can’t bear – the sense of their imperfection and fragility – and we see this in Trump’s grandiosity (apparently he is a ‘very stable genius’), continual lying and refusal to accept that he lost the last US Election.

Trump has created what the psychotherapist and paediatrician Donald Winnicott, working in the 1950s and 60s, describes as a ‘false’ or ‘adapted’ self. This false self is always in the way, preventing you from engaging fully with life, which only your true self can do – which brings me to some final reflections on how serious emotional vulnerabilities can interfere with the capacity to lead effectively.

 

False selves and leadership

 In his study of the best performing companies of the late twentieth century, the management theorist, Jim Collins, observes that the exceptional CEOs running them were known not for their charisma but for their personal humility combined with their exceptional determination. They are ambitious but their ambition is for the enterprise they lead, not for themselves. In other words, the defining characteristic of such leaders is their passion for what they do. They know what’s important to them and are highly motivated to pursue it. Collins calls this, ‘professional will’.

The former British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, has been described by his biographer, Anthony Seldon, as ‘the worst Prime Minister Britain ever had’. He fell spectacularly from grace after his mismanagement of the Covid epidemic and lies to Parliament came to light. He was exposed as leading a chaotic organisation at No 10, and described as a ‘shopping trolley’ by one of his closest advisers because of his lack of direction and inability to make consistent decisions.  Indeed, he is arguably largely responsible for the virtual wipeout of the Conservative party in the recent General Election.

Johnson had a very disordered childhood, with a largely absent father who was a serial adulterer, and a mother who admitted herself to a mental hospital for a prolonged stay when he was 10. His childhood fantasy, no doubt springing from the need to try and exert some control over his life, and which drove him to succeed in politics, was to be ‘world king’. People who know him well are clear that the extravert, jovial, even buffoonish, personality he presents to the world is a defensive shield. He desperately wants to be liked and respected.  His interest was in soothing his insecurities by holding the office of Prime Minister, rather than what he could achieve as PM. He lacked professional will.

In this piece I have considered how the anxiety and shame we bring from our childhood can manifest in dysfunctional behaviours in our working lives many years later. In the next one, I will look at what we can do to soothe our insecurities and escape from the imprint of our early life, and how we can best handle these issues when we encounter them in our colleagues.

 

Sources

Pablo Picasso, Girl Before a Mirror

PG Wodehouse, The Adventures of Sally 1922

Louis Cozolino, Why Therapy Works, WW Norton and Company Inc, 2016

Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, William Heinemann, 2006

Jim Collins, Good to Great, Random House Business Books, 2001

Donald Winnicott, ‘Ego distortion in terms of true and false self’, The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development, International Universities Press, 1960

 

‘My mind is always at the highest DEF-CON level possible, but the truth is that I can’t control everything. I wish I could. Instead, I meticulously plan and worry, and imagine the worst case scenarios for everything …’

The comedian, Susan Calman in her autobiography, Cheer Up, Love: Adventures in Depression with the Crab of Hate

My client Louise, an MD, slept badly. She said that she frequently woke in the middle of the night with her heart pounding because she was convinced she’d made a potentially catastrophic mistake in the work she’d done that day. She would get up and go to her laptop, and spend the small hours sitting in her pyjamas retracing her steps and checking her calculations and emails. Once, in a complete panic, she couldn’t find a document she needed and went into the office, banging on the door demanding that the security guard let her in at 5 am.

She said that these abrupt awakenings had happened four times in the last year. But they had all been false alarms. On three occasions there was no mistake. On the fourth she found a trivial and easily-rectifiable error which could easily have been put right during the normal working day.

I said I was very concerned about her high levels of anxiety and we should try to address them. She thought about it for a bit and then said, “the thing is, it’s part of why I get so much done. I don’t want to lose my edge.”

I came to this topic via my consideration of creativity and the creative personality (Articles 6,7 and 8) and I’ll return to these subjects in due course. But in the next couple of articles I want to look in more depth at why some of us, not only the highly creative among us, worry more and find work more stressful than our more robust colleagues.

The elephant in the office

Susan Calman says that, as a depressed teenager, she found it impossible to talk to anybody about how awful she felt. It just wasn’t the sort of thing she could broach in her family. As a society we have a tendency (though it seems to be reducing as time passes, I’m glad to say) to recoil from strong negative emotions and a preference for ignoring them if at all possible. They frighten and baffle us, particularly in the work context, where we like to pretend perfect rationality rules.

But we don’t leave our emotional selves at home when we go to work. We know that we and our colleagues sometimes overreact to the normal setbacks of working life and become disproportionately angry or upset by what is really a relatively minor issue. The problem, when this happens, is that we don’t understand what’s going on. We don’t feel qualified, and it seems intrusive, to try to psychoanalyse our colleagues.

Yet, strong negative emotions are powerful and destructive forces, and the source of much friction and unhappiness at work just as they are at home. They’re also the cause of organisational underperformance and dysfunction. As a coach, I probably spent more time talking to my clients about these rampaging elephants in the office than any other topic. And, once again, a little psychological insight can be invaluable in dealing with these difficult issues

The wolf in the bushes

In our ancient ancestors, negative emotions - fear, anxiety, disgust, guilt, shame - evolved to protect us from harms – attack by predators, aggression from other groups, eating something toxic, offending the group and losing its protection. They trigger avoidance behaviours: fight, flight, freeze or, in the worst case, depression, the extreme version of freeze – disengaging with life and going to the back of the cave.

We tend to refer to ‘emotions’ and ‘feelings’ interchangeably in normal conversations. The neuroscientist, Professor Antonio Damasio, distinguishes them:  an emotion is a physical process, a cascade of physiological changes triggered by our brains in response to a stimulus, whereas a feeling is our conscious awareness of the stimulus and those changes. The emotion - the physiological effect - happens first. The feeling – the fear or anger or joy we consciously experience - happens half a second later. Your emotions tell you – ‘look, pay attention. This is important: it’s good/bad for you’.  If you see a bus bearing down on you as you’re crossing the road, your unconscious mind recognises danger and triggers a shot of adrenaline. Your heart rate increases, your blood vessels dilate to bring blood to your muscles, your mental focus narrows to assess the speed and trajectory of the bus, and you start to run a split second before you consciously register the bus or feel fear. Meanwhile your rational mind has gone offline.

Our negative emotion systems operate on a ‘fail safe’ principle; that is, they produce a lot of ‘false positive’ warnings, but few ‘false negatives’. The evolutionary reasons for this are obvious: the complacent ancestor who saw a shadow in the bushes but decided to ignore the possibility that it was a wolf, was much less likely to survive to reproduce than the one who erred on the side of caution. As the personality psychologist Daniel Nettle says, the uncomfortable consequence for us now, when the constant danger of being eaten on any given day has fortunately receded, is that most of us worry groundlessly much of the time.

Why some of us worry more than others

The Big 5 psychometric measures individual differences in our propensity to worry, feel fear and anxiety and adopt defensive behaviours. In effect it’s measuring the sensitivity of our negative emotion systems, the degree of emotional upset we experience per unit of stress. The Big 5 calls this trait, ‘Neuroticism/Emotional Instability’, and it is normally distributed in the population, ie most of us are somewhere in the middle of the bell curve.  Low Neuroticism scorers are calm, stable and secure and take setbacks in their stride.  But high Neuroticism scorers find both the big challenges and the small hassles of life very upsetting. The personality psychologist, Daniel Nettle, suggests that if the person at the centre of the normal distribution 'is worrying groundlessly 80% of the time that they worry, then the poor old high Neuroticism scorer is probably worrying needlessly 99% of the time that they worry’.

Our personalities are the product of the interaction between the physiology of our brains, which we’re born with, and our early experience. Studies of twins suggest the contribution of nature and nurture to an individual’s Neuroticism score is around 50:50.

There is an organ in the brain called the amygdala, which is thought to be crucial in emotional memory and in triggering our fight/flight reaction, and this is more active in high Neuroticism scorers; indeed, it may even be physically bigger and denser in such people. Nettle suggests that the neurotransmitter serotonin may be important to the functioning of the amygdala and the regulation of negative emotions.  Modern antidepressants, such as Prozac, (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs)) work  by regulating levels of serotonin in the brain. Studies have shown that people with a particular form of the serotonin transporter gene are more susceptible to depression than others after experiencing stress.

The time when you are most vulnerable to such stresses is early childhood. That is when your emotional brain is growing much faster than your cognitive brain, and your amygdala is storing the emotional models which will determine how you relate to other people and how you see and feel about yourself in later life.

How you develop your sense of self

‘If I was to ask myself the standard happiness question – ‘is this glass half full or half empty?’ I’d say ‘there is no glass, I don’t deserve a glass…’

Susan Calman, ‘Cheer Up, Love: Adventures in Depression with the Crab of Hate’

The therapist and neuroscientist, Louis Cozolino, describes the effect of childhood experiences on our personalities in a particularly arresting way. He uses the term, ‘core shame’.

When we are young children the adults caring for us are the dominant influence on us. We need the person caring for us to provide unconditional love, to respect us as a separate person with our own emotional life, be attuned to our needs, and to soothe us when we are upset. In many cases this works well: the parenting is ‘good enough’ for the child to be confident that it will be looked after, to grow up calm and secure. But it can go wrong. If the child doesn’t get what it needs from its caregivers, it internalises distorted emotional models of itself and its relationships with others.

A baby is the centre of its own universe, and is very sensitive to the thoughts and emotions of its carer. If its parent is absent, ill, depressed (maybe she has, and has passed on, that gene), absorbed in their own problems, or simply not psychologically attuned to it, the baby  may assume at a deep emotional level that this is its own fault. It imagines what its mother is thinking and feeling about it, and concludes (though of course not in words, as it has none) ‘If I were loveable, my parent would love me/ would not have gone away/ would not ignore me/ would not criticise me/would understand my needs. I am therefore not loveable.’ The child who does not get the love and attention it needs develops a deep conviction that there is something wrong with it. This is what Cozolino means by ‘core shame’; others call it a conviction that one is ‘unworthy’, insecurity, or lack of self-esteem.

In extreme cases, this sort of deprivation in childhood can lead to serious lifelong psychological problems that prevent the individual from functioning, such as clinical depression, or a personality disorder such as psychopathy. More often a parent’s love for a child may be sufficient to avoid these crippling levels of core shame, but nevertheless be conditional. They may be loving if the child is quiet and obedient but angry if it cries, or proud of a child if it does well at school, but critical if its performance is mediocre; or if the parent has unmet emotional needs themselves, because of their own background, they may expect the child to soothe and care for them. These flawed ways of parenting are frequently passed down the generations, each generation internalising them as the only/normal way to be.

In these cases, the child will adopt the model that gets them the approval they need: they will become compliant, or work very hard at school, or assume it is up to them to care for everyone, or sort out family problems. And it is these models which many anxious people carry into their working lives. The desire to ‘atone’ for their deficiencies makes them strive to do things perfectly, to believe that they must work as hard as is humanly possible, to be hypervigilant about risks and mistakes (because it’s their responsibility to make sure nothing goes wrong), because at a very deep, emotional level, hidden from them and those round them, they believe they will only be ‘worthy’ people if they do all these things.

The downside can have an upside

‘Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.’ 

Variously attributed

Having this sort of emotional makeup – a sense of unworthiness driven by anxiety - is extremely uncomfortable for the person involved. They worry, mostly unnecessarily, all the time, and catastrophise – assume the worst possible outcome in any scenario-  which is psychologically and physically very draining.  They are susceptible to low mood, anxiety disorders, panic attacks, clinical depression, and even suicide. They suffer from insomnia, digestive problems and low immune response because of the suppressant effect of the stress hormone, cortisol on the immune system. They may even be more at risk of serious illness.  It makes you wonder why evolution should have selected for this characteristic.

The answer is, of course, that just as it was of benefit to our early ancestors to have some conscientious, hardworking people around who were vigilant and responsible, and they were highly values, and so it has continued to the present day. Provided they are able to function, and haven’t sunk into chaos or depression, Neurotic people have a more realistic view of the world than their more cheerful counterparts who are captured by the optimism bias. They are good at identifying risks and obstacles. Because they have a tendency to catastrophise, they take great care to plan to avoid problems. They try desperately to control the level of risk. Susan Calman has described how if she has to go to a meeting which involves an unfamiliar journey, she does a dry run the day before to make sure she can avoid possible transport pitfalls.

Many high functioning Neurotics have absorbed the message that they will only be worthy people if they work as hard as is humanly possible. They also find work soothing; they can lose themselves in it; it stills the rumination about their deficiencies; it gives them a sense of achievement and self-worth.  So, they’re driven to succeed and are often workaholics and perfectionists; they get a lot done.  Indeed, there is a weak positive correlation between Neuroticism and success in professional occupations, where these traits have clear benefits. They are discontented with themselves and world as it is, and feel a responsibility, a compulsion, to make both better – the root of creativity. And as we’ve seen, if they are artistically creative, their emotional depth, the fact that they have survived mental suffering, enables them to communicate meaning and enlightenment to the rest of us.

So, if you are one of us (yes, reader, I’m definitely on the right of the bell curve) try to take a bit of comfort in the upside of your (challenging) personality trait.

In my next articles I will look at some of the less benign effects of Neuroticism on its more extreme sufferers and in the workplace, and consider ways in which we can mitigate its effects in ourselves and other people.

Sources

Albrecht Durer Melencholia 1514

Daniel Nettle: Personality – What makes you the way you are, OUP, 2007

Louis Cozolino: Why Therapy Works – Using our minds to change our brains, WW Norton & Company, 2016