I'm a dilettante in psychology and I want to propose a concept that I haven't found much prior research on. This may be due to my insufficient research or a genuine gap in the field.

I'm interested in the psychology of self-improvement, and in particular a process that I call "method." Method is when you use a mantra to change your state of mind to achieve a goal. A common example is when athletes use method to clinch games. They repeat a phrase quietly to themselves, "come on, you got this, you're the best, win this, come on, you got this," and that spurs them on to victory. It motivates them, focuses their energy, and otherwise makes them play better. Why does this happen? It seems like magic. These are positive, encouraging thoughts, and much has been written about the power of positive thinking, but how come you can't use method all the time? Why can't you "pump yourself up" throughout the entire game? My experience with method is that it operates almost like a turbo, wherein you can activate it for a few minutes, then it runs out, and it takes some time to recharge.

Method is the cornerstone of the experience of self-improvement, and usually it springs forth from an epiphany that the user experiences.

For example, take a segment from Tony Robbins' Awaken the Giant: "My answer is simple: I learned to harness the principle I now call concentration of power. Most people have no idea of the giant capacity we can immediately command when we focus all of our resources on mastering a single area of our lives. Controlled focus is like a laser beam that can cut through anything that seems to be stopping you. When we focus consistently on improvement in any area, we develop unique distinctions on how to make that area better."

Or look at this segment from Rick Warren's Purpose-Driven Life: "The power of focusing can be seen in light. Diffused light has little power or impact, but you can concentrate its energy by focusing it. With a magnifying glass, the rays of the sun can be focused to set grass or paper on fire. When light is focused even more as a laser beam, it can cut through steel. There is nothing quite as potent as a focused life, one lived on purpose."

When the typical reader reads those passages, he or she is immediately is struck with an epiphany. He thinks to himself, "this is it, this is how I will conquer X" where X is some problem or barrier he thinks he's holding him back. He will form a vision of himself behaving like a laser beam, as if he were moving faster than normal and conquering his destiny. This positive visualization gives him energy and enthusiasm, and very likely he may immediately make some significant steps toward his goal after setting aside the book. If, for example, his goal was to lose weight, he may go to his fridge and throw out all of his ice cream. He may go online and sign up for a membership at the gym. He may even go out for a run right then and there.

That initial burst will further reinforce the method in a positive feedback loop such that he may be charged for an entire day, maybe an entire week, fixating his attention on the idea that he is a personified laser beam. Every time he thinks about the beam, it spurs him into positive action toward his goal.

This is great until the strength of the method fades away. He reaches a point where mentioning the laser beam creates no emotional reaction in him.

The implications of method, in my opinion, are vast. I believe that the popularity of self-improvement and religion is based on principles of method. There may also be an art to delivering method such that you can sidestep the come-down. Or maybe there's something to be learned from looking at its darkside, in the case of false epiphanies, or people who are addicted to self-empowerment seminars.

I believe that if we study and understand method, we will understand a lot about discipline, motivation, self-improvement, and the nature of personal change.

A thought struck me when I was at the grocery store spending more time than I should have spent choosing between a healthier, more expensive cereal vs. a cheaper, sugarey cereal. I thought to myself that if a simple decision like this gives me pause, how would I ever survive if my life truly gets complicated. And for that matter, how in the world does someone like the President avoid paralysis at every decision point? Every 10 minutes of his life he faces choices that affect at minimum, thousands of people. Does he eventually get used to the enormity of the implications and just deal with it?

More recently, my life was in flux as I unexpectedly had to move twice in one week. There were many moments of neurotic paralysis, where it seemed like I had to make quick decisions with large financial implications. And yet, somehow, with all that stress, I was able to forge an important lesson about life; in order to help me sort through everything, I came up with this principle:

Wants are many, needs are few. Needs are simple, wants are complex.
During the most stressful periods of that week, I asked myself, "okay what do you need?" Usually there'd only be one thing on my mind. Most often, it'd be something mundane like, "I need to eat." Othertimes it would pertain to the main things causing me stress, like, "I need to get Internet set up so I can start working," or "I need to meet with my landlord." The point is, there'd be generally only one thing in my mind that I truly needed, and if I just followed a critical path from need to need, ultimately the broad strokes of my life would form a good picture.

Have you ever stuck out your hands and tried to visualize the actual weight of decisions? If you're dealing with just your needs this is easy, and you usually only need two hands. But when it comes to your wants, there are too many if-then statements and complicated contigencies that you ultimately get lost in your head.

One psychologist (can't find the link) was talking about how Americans have so many consumer choices that they face small moments of choice anxiety everyday. Anxious parents, for example, are faced with choosing between an ordinary stroller and a $1,200 Orbit Infant System (You want the best for your baby right??). The psychologist mentioned that one way to get over the paralysis is to figure out what is "good enough" and get anything above that line. By that line of thinking, the baby stroller decision would flow as follows: "If you need a stroller, then any will do. If you have the money, throw it at the Orbit, sure. Otherwise, don't sweat it."

Okay, so I've been a "self-programmer" since, oh, say 1996, when I first read Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends And Influence People.

Recently, the question has been posed to me, "has all this self-programming stuff worked for you?"

So, well, it's time to be honest and get full disclosure out there.

How much have I improved over the past five years? Below are areas that I've been interested in improving with self-programming. For each area, I describe how things were in the summer of 2004. And in the bullet points, I describe what were the primary contributing factors to the change (whether or not they came from self-programming or other sources):

Work: I was three times as confused about what to do workwise. I had between 2-3 times as much fear about my prospects. I had one-fourth of the stability that I have now.

• Good old-fashioned "experience." i.e. getting burned by a lot of crappy jobs and learning why I hated them.
• Books like Pathfinder and What Color Is Your Parachute.

Social: A third as many meaningful and fulfilling social encounters per week. Five times as much social anxiety as I have now. I don't want to get into too many details, but socializing for me back then was not necessarily a chore, and I wasn't averse to it, but small social activities and encounters caused many many more problems for me, which limited how much I could socialize.

• Giving up on trying too hard to improve my social skills, including giving up on social self-improvement programs.
• Creating principles about "being natural" and some on the mechanics of socialization, like pinning down how to apply empathy.

Mental: Four times the number of obsessive, neurotic, over-thinking episodes. About a third as much peace-of-mind as I have now.

• Learning about OCD and how that relates to negative feedback loop thought patterns
• Creating principles about peace-of-mind and over-thinking.

Happiness: About two-thirds as much happiness as I have now. About one-and-a-half as much really negative or dysphoric thoughts as I have now.

• Improvements from these other domains of my life.

Personal: Sick more than three times as often as now. However, I was also about as physically fit as I am now. At the same time, back then, I enjoyed exercise about half as much as I do now (since now I play tennis and do other enjoyable, physically engaging activities).

• Improvements from these other domains of my life have reduced stress and improved my immune system.

Change itself: Only about 5% of my self-improvement attempts fulfilled their promise back then, while as about 25% of my attempts now have lasting sustainable impact. Also, back then, self-improvement caused a lot of problems in my life, like over-thinking and addiction to self-improvement. I'd say the negative consequences of self-improvement have been reduced by 80%.

• Principle-centered thinking
• Understanding OCD thought patterns

Principle-centered thinking figures a lot in the above, which I got into about 15 months ago. This practice is generally associated with Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, but if you saw my version, you may not even recognize it. For me, principle-centered thinking manifests in a series of one-line slogans that have meaning for me. I have generally posted these on my twitter account. For example, here's one, "how can you be happy if you don't proceed in the direction of your most important desires, values, interests?" That principle really got me to think about having goals and looking at where I was spending my attention. Otherwise, I'd hear about at least one time a year from various self-help sources on the "importance of goals" and I'd maybe play with that for a while, but never really stick to the practice. Likewise, principle-centered thinking helps me lay down concepts that will still retain meaning 5 years from now, and therefore become the building blocks of sustainable self-improvement. Next time you read a self-help book, try to codify it into a few meaningful principles.

Understanding OCD thought patterns figures prominently as well. Here is how an OCD works in general: there's a trigger that makes you anxious (e.g. dirty hands). Then there is a compulsive activity that provides relief for that anxiety (e.g. washing hands). In neurotypical people, washing their hands relieves their anxiety and they move on. In OCD people, the relief is temporary and their anxiety about dirty hands comes back even stronger, which requires more hand-washing, and so on, in a feedback spiral. In my case, I don't have a hand-washing problem, but my thinking was very often an addiction to anxiety-relief. I'd have an anxious thought, like, "what am I going to do about work?" and then my anxiety-relief mechanism would be to introspect. This would lead me to some sort of epiphany which could drive relief for a day. But then when the epiphany ceased to have any hold over me, the anxious thoughts would return back, and I'd then double-down on another some temporary relief thought pattern. These patterns are the reason that most self-help seems farcical. Most programs will temporarily relieve your anxiety by giving you hope that you've "got it all figured out now." Steve Pavalina has more things to say about self-help junkies.

Just saw this provocative title and article on BBC. There's got to be an evolutionary basis for everything. One of the purposes of happiness has got to be approach. Happy people approach others and share their happiness. Sad people withdraw. At least one purpose of depression is to slow down, stop what you're doing, and reassess.

But often these systems go out of whack, and you can drive yourself crazy wondering whether there's a reason for you to be depressed right now. In fact, that's a distortion mentioned in cognitive-behavioral therapy, where the patient is constantly finding reasons and circumstances that are making her depressed.

Aristotle said something like: "It is easy to fly into a passion--anybody can do that--but to be angry with the right person to the right extent and at the right time with the right object and in the right way--that is not easy, and it is not everyone who can do it."

Likewise, there's times when being depressed is probably very useful. The most obvious one that comes to mind is when you're in an abusive relationship. Being depressed may force you to reflect and reassess yourself, giving you the necessary gumption to get out.

What is the ideal way to solve a problem in your life? Should you sit down, introspect, and think about it? Or should you read Tarot cards?

I have an idea that relates to the clinical definition of "Pure obsession" (or "Pure O" as its called), which is a type of OCD where you just can't stop thinking.

The clearest symptom to ask the patient about is: "do you have loud, repetitive thoughts?" That is pretty much the hallmark of a neurotic, obsessive mind.

What is the opposite of that? To me it's "quiet, organic thoughts." This is the kind of thinking that neurotypicals do when they go on a long drive. The flow of scenery stimulates their mind, but the focus on the task of driving keeps them from collapsing inward, allowing new ideas to just emerge and pop into their heads without much stress or agony.

I call this process "indirect thinking." And I believe this is the primary benefit from reading Tarot cards, I-Ching, augury, astrology, etc. When you interpret Tarot cards, there's an infinite number of ways to read it, but a handful seem to emerge, and the same cards and combinations will read differently each time you go through them. As a result, your Tarot interpretation gives you a chance to access the issues in your life without obsessing over them. It's like using the cards as sunscreen lotion, so that your issues don't damage you, while allowing salient and useful aspects to be revealed.

I've been trying a technique recently to shift me away from "loud, repetitive" direct thinking into more "quiet, organic" indirect thinking. Instead of using Tarot cards, I just look at my surroundings, and I try to read them like I would Tarot cards. If I see the tiles on my floor, maybe that makes me think of a grid, or a prison fence, and that maybe the decisions I've been making lately are chaining me. Or if I see a small insect crawling across the floor, I might think of humility, and the difficulty of trying to be a single person traversing a vast expanse of life's choices.

I find this to be a good compromise between thought-cessation and over-thinking. Whenever people and books have urged me to stop thinking so much, I have trouble obeying because thinking works. If I think through something, I find answers. Does my old ways of thinking hurt my brain and agitate me? Absolutely.

Indirect thinking allows me to spread my attention outwards while still making progress on internal struggles. Watching movies, listening to music, these too also allow your mind to stretch and re-form without too much work on your part.

If anything contributes to this being an Age of Anxiety, it would have to be the decision anxiety we face at every turn. Nowhere is this more poignant than the ubiquitous "career choice." When in former times you normally took on the career of your parents (when Millers milled and Smiths smithed), nowadays Americans will change careers at least three times in their lives. But perhaps we're doing it all wrong, and need to take a page from those who do less-than-glamorous work but have managed to find passion and purpose in their jobs.

Here are two stories from which we can draw lessons on how to achieve meaningful work:

Treating yourself like an athlete

Probably the best treatment on this subject is found in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. In addition to being a seminal work of accessible psychology, his book is a treasure trove of stories about people engaged in perfect activity fulfillment. This one in particular has lingered in my mind for years as it deals with a factory worker who turned a mundane career into something he relishes with enthusiasm:

The task he has to perform on each unit that passes in front of his station should take forty-three seconds to perform—the same exact operation almost six hundred times in a working day. Most people would grow tired of such work very soon. But Rico has been at his job for over five years, and he still enjoys it. The reason is that he approaches his task in the same way an Olympic athlete approaches his event: How can I beat my record? Like the runner who trains for years to shave a few seconds off his best performance on the track, Rico has trained himself to better his time on the assembly line. With the painstaking care of a surgeon, he has worked out a private routine for how to use his tools, how to do his moves. After five years, his best average for a day has been twenty-eight seconds per unit. In part he tries to improve his performance to earn a bonus and the respect of his supervisors. But most often he does not even let on to others that he is ahead and lets his success pass unnoticed. It is enough to know that he can do it, because when he is working at top performance the experience is so enthralling that it is almost painful for him to slow down. "It's better than anything else," Rico says. "It's a whole lot better than watching TV." Rico knows that very soon he will reach the limit beyond which he will no longer be able to improve his performance at his job. So twice a week he takes evening courses in electronics. When he has his diploma he will seek a more complex job, one that presumably he will confront with the same enthusiasm he has shown so far.

This story became the inspiration for how I handled my first job after graduating from college. After college, I took up an entry-level job at Google in the AdSense department, approving and rejecting sites into their program. While initially the job was inherently repetitive and boring, I found two ways of making the work enjoyable. The first was opening up a stop-watch app on my computer, and having it hover over my work the whole time. I jotted down times and set goals for myself, and the hours did indeed fly by. The second way was engaging in side social banter with my co-workers. We'd tell each other jokes and chit-chat, and after awhile, the computerwork faded into the background of my consciousness. It's like how you would imagine two friends spending hours working on a crafting project together, blissfully engaged. Often these tasks are repetitive, like gluing 100 jewels onto the edge of a Homecoming float. But in the context of hanging-out with your friends, it isn't so bad. Actually, it's a lot of fun!

Be mindful of the work process

Here is a video David Ullin, who in his old age shines a youthful joy when talking about the passion and purpose he finds in tree-cutting. What's even more interesting is how he articulates the larger life-philosophy implications of his attitude toward work. It's compelling to watch and I'll let it speak for itself:

I believe there are parallels between his process and that of mindfulness (for a good introduction to mindfulness read Mindfulness in Plain English). Mindfulness, as I've understood it, is usually taught in relationship to meditation, wherein the practitioner becomes keenly in touch with his senses. By focusing on your breathing, for example, you can "become one" with your body, and in some cases, feel every single muscle movement as your lungs expand and contract. Under the right conditions, this state can be called samadhi which I find very similar to Mihaly's concept of flow. To apply this concept to your job, you have to deconstruct the work activities into sub-processes and focus on how all the little things add up to achieve the desired results.

These two stories remind me that while we often naively believe that changing our surroundings will quell our anxieties, probably the most important change needs to occur within.

Do you ever notice how when you're in a multi-hour stretch of positive feelings, there is this faint tug of negativity?

Whenever I'm boosted up by some new self-help book I'm reading or having just a general enthusiasm for life, I get this weird negative side effect. It seems to happen when I have long-stretches of positive experiences. For example, my friend and I had this one day that we called "Epic Sunday," where over an eight-hour stretch of time we jumped from one interesting place to the other in the city. It was a pure heroin-like spontaneity feeling like an ascending line of peak experiences. The next day, when I was alone, I felt really tired and down. Another example is when I'm in a coding fury late into the night, if someone were observing me they'd say I looked actually sickly and weak. And they'd be right: while I'd feel this internal gushing positive sensation, I also wouldn't be smiling.

In these cases, there's a negative undercurrent to the positive experiences. It's much like Newton's Third Law: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. I believe that the same happens with feeling good. For any boost we get, I think there's a natural tendency within us to pull back toward a set point of happiness. (Also, when we feel down, there's a tendency to pull ourselves back up).

I've re-purposed the term "undertow" to refer to that vague negative sensation you get when you are going through high positive experiences. It helps to remind me that the goal is not only to increase positive experiences, but to also decrease negative experiences. As a result, no matter how great my day is going, the "undertow" is still something I want to avoid.

I believe that this probably has to do with the fact that almost anything your body "does" takes energy, and your energy sources need replenishing. Or maybe it has to do with neurotransmitters in our brains: any time you go through a positive experience, you're a little less receptive to positivity immediately thereafter. Maybe that's why these "epic days" crop up from time-to-time. In order to keep getting high after the initial boost, you have to seek ever more amazing things.

Have you ever tried a happiness-boosting program (like meditation or positive thinking) only to find yourself faltering within a month? In my case, I've done this so many times that I've become cynical about the whole field.

Sonja Lyubomirsky unravels all this in The How of Happiness. Everything she says is backed by research into positive psychology. And here is the best answer I've heard to "What is the secret to happiness?"

Yet fit is absolutely critical. So much so that I'll go out on a limb here and say that if there's any "secret" to becoming happier, the secret is in establishing which happiness strategies suit you best.

I know it sounds too simple to be true, but since reading this book, I've become a believer.

Sonja then proceeds to describe 12 happiness activities that have been proven to increase happiness. She suggests you pick four that serve as a best fit (she has a worksheet to help figure this out) and then follow those. Here's the list:

1. Gratitude
2. Optimism
3. Not thinking too much
4. Kindness
5. Socialization
6. Coping
7. Forgiveness
8. Flow
9. Savoring
10. Goals
11. Spirituality
12. Medidation, Exercise, and Smile/Laugh therapy

Most of these you may have already heard before, and maybe have even tried, but Sonja goes into the nitty-gritty about what makes each of those happiness activites tick, and how to fulfill their purpose.

For example, I've heard about "positive thinking" since I was little, but I've always been weary of the idea. "How can you think your way to happiness?" I even tried it a couple times and it just scrambled my head. Or I tried meditation for a month and after awhile I just get too fidgety to continue with the program.

With Sonja's "secret" in mind, maybe I just need to focus on goal-setting and flow-activities as my happiness program. Those are much more suited to my personality. Or maybe instead of trying to meditate, I can work on my "stillness" practice, whereby I just close my eyes, turn off all distractions, and just sit still for a while.

In other words, if you've given up on happiness strategies before, perhaps "you've been doing it all wrong" and need to be reminded of what works and what doesn't work.

This excerpt from the "Goals" chapter of The How of Happiness is great:

In 1932, weighed down by the sorrows and agonies of his self-absorbed and aimless clients, an Australian psychiatrist named W. Béran Wolfe summed up his philosophy like this: "If you observe a really happy man you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing double dahlias in his garden, or looking for dinosaur eggs in the Gobi Desert."

There's other choice quotes in that chapter. G.K. Chesterson said, "There is one thing which gives radiance to everything. It is the idea of something around the corner." And Robert Louis Stevenson said, "An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding." I agree with this philosophy. My version:

Happiness is about constantly being on-the-way to what you really want in life.

Another controversial and headline-grabbing conclusion from happiness research in psychology is how little circumstances matter. The savvy research scientist, Sonja Lyubomirsky, makes an analysis in The How of Happiness that circumstances only affect our happiness 10%. There's study after study showing how more money buys little happiness, and that after a certain point (like around $30,000K/year), more money doesn't matter, maybe even has negative consequences. While it's hard to dispute these studies, I have a different take.

Do these studies mean we shouldn't make more money? And by extension, does that mean success itself doesn't matter?

According self-actualization theory, No. Maslow suggested we have a "will to self-actualization" or an innate desire to manifest our potentials into reality. So if you're outperforming your co-workers because you're more talented, but you get passed up for promotions because you don't "step up to the plate" enough, are you going to be happy being the underpaid but overtalented tool for the company?

While there are studies showing that more money doesn't buy happiness, there are also studies that show that having meaningful goals makes people happy. I'd argue that the hungry pursuit of money and achievement creates more happiness than having no ambition whatsoever. Sure, when the ambitious actually get money they won't be any happier, but that's just because they're finished, and they're in the same spot as the people who have no money but also no ambition.

When immigrants come to the US, I guarantee you that their pursuit of riches and the process of moving up social classes makes them happy. Once they've obtained those goals, though, if they don't have other meaningful goals to latch onto, then yes, they'll be like the bored rich.

There are many studies that also show that people who suffer significant debilitating injuries don't have their happiness change that much from their set point. Often these people get a renewed sense of purpose in life.

So does that mean we should injure ourselves willy-nilly? No, of course not. The process of being a reckless individual when in fact you care about safety will make you feel tons of self-doubt and self-loathing. When you actually do break your leg, you'll feel enormous guilt and regret for your very bad behavior.

Behaving in harmony with our values and beliefs makes us happy. For some kinds of people, that means getting a big house with a white picket fence. For others that means working minimum wage but pursuing their artistic talents. And for others, this is a vague, "behaving in harmony with God's path for me."