I want to do things that are meaningful, but I am tempted to watch Netflix. What's that about?

Yesterday I talked about how difficult it is to make time for values.  Time is certainly an important issue but not the only one.  We can also be pulled in different directions when we lose touch with the personal relevance of our value.  Consider this entirely imaginary scenario ;-)  A researcher and psychologist who is interested in values and who values helping others has committed to write a blog every day for month to help people find and act on their own values.  She finds herself at the end of the day not yet having written her post and feeling the pull of the sofa and Netflix.  What does she do?  

A recent study (Grund et al., 2015) investigated the conflict people experience between want and should after they have made a decision to do something.  The looked at two situations: how people react when they wanted to do something else or how they reacted when they thought they should be doing something else.  So if

our imaginary psychologist blogged, she would have a want conflict but if she watched Netflix, she would have should conflict.  Participants in the study provided information on their daily activities and well-being and life satisfaction over the course of 7 days whenever they received a signal to report on their phones.  They also reported on how often they were mindful (paying attention to the moment) in their lives and on their levels of self-control.  People who didn’t get to do what they wanted reported feeling worse at that moment but had no deterioration in life satisfaction.  People who didn’t act how they thought they should also felt badly (although less so) but reported lower life satisfaction.  Probably not surprisingly, doing want you want feels better for the moment but is less satisfying. 

Also interesting were the findings about how mindfulness and self-control played out with respect to life satisfaction which people thought they should be doing something different.  In these situations, people who were more aware (mindful) or those who had greater self-control both experienced fewer of these should conflicts which allowed them to experience more life satisfaction.   So if we go back to our blogging psychologist what advice can we give her?  This research suggests that our psychologist can get herself to blog by using self-control that is reminding herself of her commitment to a daily blog (more about values and willpower another day).  But she has another possible pathway and that is mindfulness.  Increasing her awareness in the moment- disengaging from the “I should” do this and connecting with the value of helping others - will increase her satisfaction and perhaps get her blogging.

Reference

Grund, A., Grunschel, C., Bruhn, D., & Fries, S. (2015). Torn between want and should: An experience-sampling study on motivational conflict, well-being, self-control, and mindfulness. Motivation and Emotion, 39, 506-520. DOI 10.1007/s11031-015-9476-z