Avoidance vs. Approach - Whats your style?

0:02 A Listener production. Hello, and welcome to another solo episode of Crappy to HAVEY. Today, I want to share with you an idea that has been around in psychology for a really long time, and this is the idea of whether you are approach or avoidance motivated. Maybe you've heard of this before, maybe you haven't. I'll share with you what this means, how it applies to you, and what you can do to kind of shift the direction of your motivation if you feel like maybe that would be a useful thing to do. So Essentially, when we talk about being approach motivated or avoidance motivated, what we're talking about is whether you are motivated to do something, whether to achieve a goal or just to take an action.

0:50 Whether you are energized to do anything day to day by the pursuit of something desirable or pleasurable, attractive, or beneficial. So that would be approach motivated. You are motivated to do something because you are approaching something positive, or whether you are fundamentally motivated to take an action or to achieve a goal because you are trying to avoid something difficult or painful or not beneficial. So this idea that we are motivated to pursue pleasure or to avoid pain has been around for thousands and thousands of years. The ancient Greek philosophers talked about this, so this is not new, and certainly even in the field of psychology all the way back to the eighteen hundreds, the earliest psychologists talked about this same idea, that humans are naturally motivated to either pursue something pleasurable or to avoid something painful. Now, the thing is that we can be fundamentally kind of predisposed in a particular direction one or the other. So it's part of your disposition, it's part of your temperament to either be more approach motivated or avoidance motivated, so basically energized or inspired to take action or to pursue a goal because you are excited by the idea, the possibility of the outcome that you're looking to achieve, or fundamentally seeking to avoid discomfort or negative consequence, negative repercussions.

2:23 So you might have a sense yourself of which one you are. And it's not all just about personality and disposition. Obviously, certain situations will evoke one or the other. When I turned seventeen and I suddenly got my driver's license and wanted to buy a car. I was suddenly very motivated to save money because I wanted to buy a car and have my independence. There are plenty of examples like that. You know something is in front of you that you really want, you highly desire it, and therefore you are highly motivated to gain something positive or beneficial. If your company is downsizing and suddenly you think your job might be on the line, then in that situa suation, even if you're naturally an approach motivated person, you might suddenly be very motivated to avoid losing your job. So it can be situational, absolutely, and certainly there can be some crossover.

3:11 You can be pursuing a goal partly because you want the outcome and also partly because you don't want the negative consequence of not achieving it. But generally speaking, we will be kind of wired more so in one direction or the other. I always use the example that if I've got a deadline, the thing that generally gets me over the line, the thing that generally propels me into action, is the looming deadline. I will often say that I do my best work under pressure, and that's a pretty classic example of avoidance. Motivation. I'm not necessarily motivated to make a start on that project or that work three months in advance, purely by the idea that it will feel good to have it done. There are definitely people who are like that. I'm not one of them, so I will normally tend to take action when it's the fear of missing the deadline. The fear of the negative consequence of not getting it in on time is what gets me over the line. Similarly, many of us don't really take action to make better choices for our health until potentially there's a health crisis, so you get the idea.

4:20 The idea that there is something negative is often like a negative consequence. It's often the thing that propels people into action. So what does all this mean? What are the implications for this? Avoidance motivation tends to make you more careful, more accurate. It means you have more attention to detail. It's essentially that you are wired to be looking for errors, looking for possible mistakes, looking for possible negative repercussions. It inspires more kind of systematic thinking, more black and white thinking, deductive reasoning. What it also does is it actually can lead to a lower moved mood, it can lead to more anxiety. It actually affects your mood.

5:04 If you tend to be more avoidance motivated, and you tend to be more extrinsically motivated, like you tend to be more looking at external consequences rather than being intrinsically motivated, like inspired by something that is exciting to you, there is a place for avoidance motivation. If you're an air traffic controller, then being avoidance motivated is a pretty good thing. You want to be really focused on what could potentially go wrong. But the thing about avoidance motivation is that the best possible outcome is relief. If you successfully avoid a negative consequence, then kind of the best you can hope for is to feel great like avoided a negative consequence.

5:47 It's not necessarily inspiring joy and excitement and positive emotions. Approach motivation, on the other hand, tends to be more associated with positive mood, more creative thinking, more lateral problem solving thinking, better mood, and like I said, more intrinsically motivated, more compelled by something that is meaningful to you personally. So there's quite a lot of positive benefits to being approach motivated as opposed to being avoidance motivated. I want to share with you some really interesting studies that they have done about this, particularly when it comes to creative thinking.

6:30 So if you think about if you are in a job, or if you're a student, for example, but if you are in any kind of a position that requires creativity, holistic thinking, problem solving skills, creating something from nothing, brainstorming, even just being successful in the world today, there's a lot to be said for being creative and innovative, and being creative and innovative much more likely when you are an approach motivated kind of person and you are compelled to move towards something positive or beneficial, as opposed to being looking for mistakes or errors or avoiding risk, or avoiding being found out, or avoiding making a fool of yourself, or avoiding losing your job, all of those things, and there are plenty of people day to day who are very focused on I don't want to make a mistake.

7:17 I don't want to put myself out there. I don't want to take a risk. I don't want to lose my job. I don't want people to think I'm an idiot. If that is fundamentally what's driving you every day. There are some really negative consequences to that, not just for creativity, but like I said, for your mood. There was a study done once where they asked people to solve a simple maze puzzle, like a kid's maze. On one maze puzzle, they put a picture of a mouse, just a little cartoon drawing of a mouse, and a block of cheese at the other end. On the other maze puzzle, identical maze puzzle, they put the same image of a mouse or image of a mouse, and they also put an owl hovering nearby. So there were no words, There were no instructions. This was just a picture of a mouse either going to war cheese or potentially escaping the owl, not that that was explicit in the instructions. Like I said, this was just a visual image on the mouse puzzle.

8:12 People all solved the mouse puzzle in the same amount of time. They solved it just as successfully. It was a fairly simple exercise, no problem. Afterwards, they asked those people to do a creative problem solving exercise, and the people who had done the maze puzzle with the mouse and the cheese performed much better than the people who had done the maze puzzle with the mouse and the owl. So something about just the visual representation that implied being avoidance motivated avoiding a danger put those people affected their brain, affected their cognitive capacity in some way that it limited their creative thinking. There have been similar studies done where they've asked people to do creative problem solving exercises and for example, like hold a series of numbers in their heads.

9:00 So it's really kind of maxing out your cognitive capacity. You know what you can hold in your brain. Similarly, when people are presented with a mouse and the cheese or a mouse and an owl, the people presented with the mouse and the cheese image tend to do better. Even if you're not consciously aware of it, there is something that happens in your brain that seems to inspire more creative thinking or more limited, inflexible, rigid thinking if you are presented with avoidance motivation. Interestingly enough, I read about another study where they actually had people do arm movements.

9:41 So they asked one group of people to perform like an arm flexion. So if you imagine that's like moving your arm towards you. It's the gesture of bringing something towards you, even though again that's not what they were told they were doing. It was simply an arm flexion exercise. Another group of people were asked to make an arm extension exercise, so that's more like pushing something away from you Again. They then ask those people to come up with, for example, as many different possible uses they could think of for a brick, which is just one example of a creative thinking exercise that we often use in psychological experiments. How many possible uses for this random object? The people who had done the arm flexion the moving towards action came up with way more answers than the people who had done the extension exercise. I personally find that so fascinating.

10:32 There is no words, There is no instruction that says that there is any risk involved, there's some prize to be had by coming up with the most answers. There is nothing to indicate that this is an approach or an avoidance task. It is simply a physical movement that sends some sort of message to your brain about a moving towards or a pushing away affects your ability to come up with creative solutions to a problem. So how interesting is that? What are the implications for you then, and what can you do If you know that you tend to be more of an avoidance motivated person, if you are the person who tends to be always on the lookout for the risks or the problems, or you know that what drives you is minimizing possible negative consequences as opposed to being motivated to pursue something really desirable and attractive, well, first of all, whatever you can do to take that goal and to turn it into something positive and attractive that you are seeking to achieve, or something beneficial, however, you can generate some sense of excitement and some sense of moving towards a positive outcome as opposed to thinking of this goal in terms of just the avoidance of the negative consequence. If you are looking to lose weight, if you've joined the gym and you're looking to get fit, and your constant self talk is about I don't want to be fat and I don't want to look terrible. You've seen a picture of self that you don't like that you've gained weight, or you

12:03 don't want to be unfit and puffing and puffing as you walk up the stairs, and you're thinking about all of the things that you don't want, and that is what is propelling you to take action towards this goal. You are not only less likely to achieve your goal, but it's having a really negative impact on your mood. It's having a negative impact on your ability to achieve your goal also, so your performance over all will be affected, and also your overall well being, your general happiness is being affected negatively. So any way that you can turn that goal around and make it something attractive and inspiring to you, it's going to make a huge difference to your performance and your wellbeing. If you are in a creative problem solving job, if you know that you are required to come up with solutions, and I mean most of us could benefit from being able to be creative and innovative and come up with loads of possibilities. To think broadly, then anything that you can do to switch around your focus to something that is positive and inspiring rather than being concerned all the time with minimizing risk or minimizing potential negative consequence is again going to obviously improve your performance and also improve your mood, improve your overall health and wellbeing. Practicing optimism is a really good way to mitigate the downsides of avoidance motivation. So when we talk about optimism in psychology, obviously optimism is this idea of assuming a successful outcome, assuming that something will

13:35 go well. But it's not just about always being a glass half full type of person in psychology. Marty Seligmann, who's considered to be the father of positive psychology, he came up with this idea of learned optimism, and the way he defined optimism was that it is the attribution an attributional style or an explanatory style that you use to explain negative consequences. So people who tend to be more of a pessimistic kind of mindset, if something bad happens, if there's a setback, or something just doesn't go to plan, people with a more pessimistic mindset tend to personalize that it's all my fault. They tend to consider that to be permanent. Things are terrible, they'll always be terrible, and they tend to think in terms of this problem being quite pervasive. They generalize it, so, this is my fault.

14:27 Things are terrible and they'll always be terrible. I'll never be any good at this, and I'm generally a loser. So personalized, permanent, pervasive, the three p's. People with a more optimistic mindset tend to be able to attribute a failure or a setback to something outside of them. It's not that they don't take responsibility, but they consider that the circumstances might not have been right, that other factors might have contributed to things not going well. They recognize that this setback is just confined to this area of life. This particular thing didn't go well, but it doesn't mean that everything's terrible, and it's temporary. This can be turned around. Even though this didn't go well right now, this is just a short term setback and we can turn this around and things will be okay. So that is the difference between a pessimistic and an optimistic explanatory style. And if you can start to think about negative events or things that don't go well using a more optimistic explanatory style, it's not all your fault, it's not forever, it's not your whole life that's amass, and start using those more optimistic explanations. It's temporary, other factors contributed, just didn't go well on the day, and we can turn this around and it's not the end of the world, it's just this one situation that didn't go well. Then that kind of optimistic framework, that kind of optimistic mindset can go a really long way to mitigating the potential consequences of an avoidance motivation. So they're two different ideas, but there's

15:59 been that is that have shown that optimism can really help to shift things around for you if you tend to be kind of an avoidance focused person, constantly worried about the negative consequences, and obviously, as I said, anything you can do to turn your goal around, whatever your goal is, pitchupepole can have the exact same goal, but one is inspired towards a positive outcome and the other person is really motivated by the avoidance of a negative outcome. You can think of examples of that for sure. So the more that you can just shift your focus to the positive, shift your focus to the thing that you desire to achieve the beneficial outcome, then the more you're likely to perform well. And obviously the better your mood will be, the better your health and happiness will be overall.

16:43 So I really hope that's helpful to you. I personally find it really interesting and it's something It's really kind of a simple idea that we can all just think about and apply to ourselves. When you notice that what you're doing is being very avoidance focused, very focused on the negative the potential sequences. Just catching yourself and seeing if you can switch that around and shift your focus to something positive could make a huge, huge difference to your success and to your happiness. I hope you found that as interesting as I do, and I will catch you on the next episode of Crabby to Happy. Listener