CHAPTER 3

Zone Out to Make Big Decisions

Worry compounds the futility of being trapped on a dead-end street. Thinking opens new avenues.

—Cullen Hightower

After six years as a struggling startup, Laura’s small business was finally taking off. In fact, she was doing so well her largest competitor made an offer to buy her out. “Take the money and run,” her accountant told her, but her best friend said, “You’ve come so far! How can you abandon your brain child?” It was a huge decision with potential for significant rewards—or regrets— on both sides. Laura felt paralyzed, and worrying about the pros and cons of her options was sucking the joy out of what should have been a great moment in her life.

When Laura came to us, she said she needed to feel confident in order to make her important decision. We told her what we told you in Chapter 2, that our brains remember where we experience our emotions, so in order to regain her confidence she’d need to retrieve a memory about a time when she felt good about herself and a decision she had made. Remembering the experience in sensory detail would bring back the confident feeling she needed now. Ironically, the way to figure out a solution to her problem would be to take a break from trying to figure out a solution to her problem. We wanted her to try using a short-term tool that would activate her unconscious, where we knew lay all her forgotten confidence. This brief tool only takes five minutes, but can have extraordinary results.

The tool is called Mind Wandering. You might call it zoning out. To benefit from it, all you have to do is relax and allow your mind to visit pleasant scenes and landscapes either you have visited in person or seen in photographs. The reasons it works is that the best solutions come from a relaxed mind producing Alpha brain waves, not from a worried brain stressed with lots of high Beta. Too high Beta stimulates our limbic system, which triggers our protective flight-fight-freeze response. Alpha, however, allows the prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain responsible for executive function, to have clear thinking, impulse control, and the ability to delay gratification. When those systems are in play, we don’t feel worried. We wanted Laura to use Mind Wandering to calm her limbic system and allow her prefrontal cortex to function well.

Beta is great for helping you make quick decisions, but Alpha is what you need to make the kind of important decisions that often require more thought. When you allow your mind to wander to positive images and memories, your slower frequencies of Alpha rise, the mind calms down, and you open the door to your unconscious. This is the part of the mind where we make new connections, find novel ideas, and develop our intuitions. A calm mind has the ability to evaluate options, see the bigger picture, and identify what we want and need. Trying to do that process in high Beta elevates our stress. Mind Wandering in Alpha, however, will actually trigger your creative mind to help you develop many solutions. The process takes you out of a dualistic category of a yes-no decision and into a world of other possibilities. Often, Alpha bursts just before you have an insight that gives you new direction and perspective. This burst, called an Alpha blink, temporarily shuts off the visual input to the brain so your creativity rises. The best entrepreneurs have been found to live in more Alpha. It’s the juice that produces novel thinking.

Focusing away from a problem and shifting into Alpha gives you access to your unconscious, in which many worry-reducing resources reside. One of these resources is something we call a mosaic decision-constructing process, where you look at a situation from many different perspectives. If you can get your conscious mind to linger in a pleasant state, you’ll give your unconscious mind a chance to actively try to answer your question about which path is the best. When you’re worried, your unconscious mind works more effectively than your conscious mind. That’s why so often we have our eureka moments in the shower or while going for a run; we’re relaxed, which allows our conscious mind to back away from the thing that’s stressing us out, giving our unconscious—where everything we have learned and every experience we’ve had has been recorded to become a potential source of help—a chance to look through the mosaic of possible solutions and find the best one.

Per our instructions, Laura went home that day and sat down on her bed. She allowed her mind to wander to the day she graduated from college. She had been so proud of herself. Then she remembered the time she was accepted by two MBA programs, and how she had struggled over which would be the best fit for her. One was more prestigious, and one offered a scholarship. She remembered that once she had realized there was no wrong choice, she had been able to quickly make up her mind. There had been power in making that decision, dealing with the consequences, moving forward, and not looking back with regret.

And there was more. After completing her MBA she could have followed her friends into a big job with a management firm, but after a great deal of deliberation she had decided to take a different path and strike out as an entrepreneur. As she sat on her bed, she remembered how empowered she had felt when starting her business and how prepared she was to deal with the unique set of problems she knew would accompany this endeavor. Once she started, she never looked back. Suddenly, her current dilemma looked much more manageable. When she gathered all the data, she realized there was no wrong choice. Either decision would take her on a slightly different trajectory, but the upsides were all in her favor. She could live with the consequences, whatever they were. In that frame of mind, she lost all her fear, and happily called her competitor to reject the offer.

The Importance of Daydreams

Psychiatrist Milton Erickson liked to tell a story about the disappearing manuscript. He was struggling to finish a book. His publisher was pressuring him to turn in the manuscript, but he didn’t feel it was finished. The pressure was stressing him out. One day he took the manuscript with him to his desk and sat down to work. But after trying to write for about an hour, he felt himself getting tired, and allowed himself to slip into a daydream. Some time later, he came to, but when he looked back down at his desk, he couldn’t find the manuscript. (Remember: This was during a time when you couldn’t just open your computer and print out a new copy, so losing a manuscript was problematic.) He didn’t panic, though. Instead he tried to put the manuscript, and the stress it was causing him, out of his mind. A couple of weeks later, he came back to his desk chair, relaxed, and found the manuscript under some papers that he must have absent mindedly placed over it.

Lots of people find lost objects sitting in plain sight, but Milton Erickson had a reason to believe that his unconscious mind might have deliberately led him to daydream and cover the manuscript. Erickson overcame numerous handicaps, including paralysis from polio, which almost killed him. He learned to walk again by watching his baby sister learn to walk. He observed her minute muscle movements and used mental rehearsal while in trance states to stimulate his own neural muscular pathways. Erickson learned that the memory of how to walk resided in his unconscious, and after this amazing achievement, he always trusted that his unconscious mind would hold any solution or wisdom he needed.

Once Erickson became a professional psychiatrist, he’d use the story about his manuscript to illustrate that we often don’t know what we know. His unconscious mind knew he wasn’t ready to turn the book in, so it had given him the time to mentally work out the parts with which he was struggling. That’s why he didn’t panic: He was sure that once he’d shifted his attention so he could get into a more relaxed state, he would figure out what he wanted to say, and his mind would allow him to find the pages. And it did.¹

Our attention is affected by the ultradian rhythm that alters our attention span every 90 to 120 minutes throughout the day. Mind Wandering naturally occurs at the end of this cycle, as well as after any intense cognitive task. Introducing the slower Alpha brain waves that allow Mind Wandering is our mind’s way of forcing us to give it a rest. Sometimes we can get so lost in our Mind Wandering that we go into a trance, otherwise known as a daydream, a more intense version of Mind Wandering.

Daydreams are wonderful for spurring problem-solving: When you’re daydreaming, you’re in a trance state that combines internally focused attention with memory and imagination. It’s a state of mind that gives you permission to connect to your own creativity free from self-criticism. At times you may even wander into “Walter Mitty” daydreams that feel extraordinarily real and allow you to enjoy experiences that your conscious mind would normally censor or dismiss as impossible. In your daydreams, you might be visiting a foreign land when you meet your soul mate. The connection is so strong it makes you feel more alive than you have in a long time. A daydream this powerful could compel you to think hard about your inner yearnings and wonder if all of your needs are being met in your current relationship.

If worry and anxiety are blocking you from solving a problem, you could try a method suggested in 1911 by William James, known as the father of American psychology. He called it “non-thinking.” You do it like this: Set a goal and “unclamp” from the outcome—just allow any ideas about how you might achieve the goal to surface and write them down without analyzing them, even if they seem preposterous. Then you let them simmer in the back of your mind to see if they would be the best problem-solving approaches. The point of the exercise is not actually to achieve the goal, but to stimulate creative thought. Without knowing James, several important thought leaders throughout history have used a similar process to open up their minds. Einstein performed thought experiments where he daydreamed running beside a light beam to the edge of the universe. He credited this creative endeavor for helping him develop the theory of relativity. Another thinker, Isaac Newton, found that allowing his mind to wander resulted in clear thinking and problem-solving, and ultimately led him to develop the theory of gravity. Even Thomas Edison, who developed more than 1,000 patents for inventions, would sit in his chair holding steel balls. He relaxed deeply and when his hands dropped the balls, he woke up and wrote down his ideas.

A study done at the University of California, Santa Barbara, found that when people took a break from worrying about a problem and focused on something less taxing, their performance increased by 40 percent.² In fact, when you are feeling stressed about an issue, stop thinking about it and do something relaxing. There comes a time of diminishing returns to continue to try to come up with solutions. When the mind fatigues, it’s time to make a change. Take your mind completely away from a problem or take a nap. Though you change your mental state and focus of attention, your unconscious mind continues to work on the problem. This approach often triggers a eureka moment.

You can use Mind Wandering to help you solve long-term bigpicture projects, but you can also use it strategically to keep you performing your best at work every day. Give your cognitive process a five-minute break every 45 minutes by focusing on a lovely vacation or experience from your past. Inspired by how well she had used attention shifting to regain her confident mindset, Laura began to take five minutes here and there and let her mind wander to her favorite place, Maui. She loved the gentle breeze, the beauty of the islands, the blue water, and especially how relaxed she felt when she was there. After about a week of this positive Mind Wandering, she found that she was getting better at solving problems at work. It was as though the pressure and speed of her daily existence just couldn’t rattle her anymore.

Divergent Thinking

Mind Wandering is linked to what is called “divergent thinking,” a thought process that generates many solutions to a problem. Divergent thinking allows you to see beyond self-imposed limitations and keeps you open to experience. It often occurs after a period of Mind Wandering on unrelated things or pleasant past experiences. Divergent thinkers often see connections where others cannot, and this difference in perception leads toward novel ideas.

You may feel at your most creative after a period of positive Mind Wandering. It is often at this point when we say our muse has touched us, when our inspiration and creative output accelerates. We could “muse” that highly focused attention doesn’t accomplish everything for us. Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, discovered that our natural state might be a combination of external focus followed by inward exploration. They said, “Consciousness is continuously moving with ever-changing content, but also ebbs like a breaking wave, outwardly expanding and then inwardly retreating.”³ Positive and constructive Mind Wandering can have many positive returns. In particular, it can teach you how to think outside your own box.

Caution: Don’t Get Lost

It’s easy to get lost in our daydreams, and zoning out too often is not productive. If you’ve got a day left to complete a statistical report for work and you’re taking five-minute daydream breaks every half hour, you’re going to run into trouble. And if you zone out while driving, you may cut your future short. Time and place matter.

Mind Wanderings to avoid:

1. Distracted Mind Wandering. It is possible to allow your mind to wander too much. Recently society has started labeling individuals with chronically wandering minds as Attention Deficit Disorder. In the past, having ADD was an asset. Early hunters would have benefited from the ability to notice multiple small disturbances in a field or forest. Their hyper-alert brains would have made it easier for them to react quickly and find their prey than their more methodical, single-track kin. Unfortunately, that kind of mind isn’t so well suited for today’s school settings, and it can be disastrous in the workplace; there are so many digital distractions to keep you from completing simple tasks.

If you have trouble focusing and are Mind Wandering too much, try the following exercise.

Look out your window at the houses or apartment buildings across from yours and count the panes of glass you see in the windows. Notice their pattern and symmetry. How many windows do you see? As you count, stay aware of how your focus becomes heightened and clear when you do this. How long can you keep this up before boredom becomes a daydream? Practice a bit and each time see how much longer you can stay with it. What else could you count? Counting makes the brain focus on one thing that isn’t difficult to accomplish. Performing the exercise regularly builds connections to the prefrontal cortex, which will increase your ability to stay with a task.

2. Revenge Mind Wandering. Sometimes when we’re frustrated or angry we get stuck imagining the way a conversation should have gone, or we plot out every word of the conversation we will have one day if we ever get the chance. Spending time in mental fights temporarily relieves tension but is ultimately unproductive. For example, it would be normal to feel angry, upset, powerless, and sad after a layoff. You might really relish imagining a version of your final meeting with HR where instead of silently leaving the office to pack your stuff, you interrupt that smug HR manager with a screed against corporate tyranny. But unless you can shift out of your sense of outrage and do what it takes to get another job and regain your security and safety, you can get stuck in a limbic system freeze. If you do it too much you can put yourself in a defensive and adversarial mindset. The conversations can feel so real they can make your pulse race faster or your stomach churn as you hurl a perfect zinger that puts your adversaries in their place. Your brain might go offline for a while and you may spend an inordinate amount of time ruminating over everything you wish you had said or done to those who wronged you. But that kind of Mind Wandering wastes your energy. You have to shift your perspective and allow the mind to wander into different viewpoints.

To shift perspective you must shift into Alpha and calm your limbic system. Get your feelings off your chest by expressing your agitation over being laid off to trusted friends. Go to the gym and exercise so you feel better physically. Then call your network and set up lunch dates for help in transitioning to some new job. Once you start to feel a little less emotional and angry, try this exercise to help you look at your changed circumstances from a different perspective.

Take three different chairs and position them in a triangle. Take a fourth chair and place it outside the triangle. Every chair represents a different perspective through which you can look at your situation. These are called perceptual positions.⁴ In this exercise, the first position is your own perspective. If you sit here, you will see through your own eyes. Sit in the second position, and you’ll take on the role of a colleague who listens and gives feedback and suggestions. The third perceptual position is that of an interested but distant observer like the company board member; from this position you can observe the dynamics occurring between the first two positions. Finally, the fourth position sits away from the other three, and notices how the entire system is operating and whether it’s working or not.

By placing yourself in all four positions, you can glean different understandings of your circumstances from four different perspectives. Perspective-taking gives you a sense of how others perceive things and can help you get the distance you need to go forward.

Let’s continue with the example that you’ve been laid off. To start gaining a new perspective, you’d sit in the first chair and verbalize your understanding of what has happened to you. Go ahead and vent. Self-pity is okay here. You might say, “I worked so hard to develop that program and this is how they repay me? Let’s see how far they get without me. They don’t know what they’re losing. I thought I would stay in this position for 20 years. I am angry and sad and deeply disappointed. I believe my career is over.” This is the “I” position.

Now, move to position two, and have a conversation with yourself over in first position. Remember: You’re a colleague now, so your job is to be empathic, but offer a different perspective. You might say, “I see you’re struggling and upset. This is a career you thought was your life’s purpose. I understand it is really difficult to imagine doing anything else. It may be that you are better suited in a different role and you would be happier doing something else.” This is the “you” position.

Now move back to the first chair and respond to the second position. You may want to go back and forth in conversation for a while until you feel a bit more settled and relieved of the internal tension around your upset feelings. Eventually, you will feel calmer.

Once you feel calm, move to the third chair and imagine you are an external consultant with no knowledge about what has happened. In this third position you make no judgments but are curious about the dilemma. For example, you might say from the third position, “I can see that You 1 (you in first position) are really unhappy and You 2 (you in second position) are wondering what could help.” Then you might ask yourself (You 3), “Do you have an idea of what you are passionate about, what your dream job might be?” Once you are honest with yourself you can move into creating a new future.

Finally, go sit in the fourth chair outside of the triangle. This is the “we” position. From this perspective of being able to see the whole context and entire system, say aloud the most positive future you can imagine. You might say, “As we look together toward our best future and acknowledge what is really true, we can decide if our strengths and potentials work together toward creating success for everyone.” Use this fourth perspective to develop a plan of action. Use your imagination to try to see other options and new directions that might be even better and more fun than the situation you just left. By the time you see your situation from the fourth position, your worry and upset will have dissipated, and you will know yourself better.

In doing this exercise, you calm the limbic system and begin to operate from the prefrontal cortex. By trying to see a situation from a different perspective, you free yourself from the prison of your own limiting ideas and feelings. After this exercise, take a rest and let your mind wander and imagine different futures. Avoid coming up with potential obstacles and just wander around in reverie. Think about your passions and hobbies. Would you be happy if you just did those all day, every day? Imagine that you can. Don’t stop yourself with “That’s silly.” Just imagine it. Once you overcome the negative Mind Wandering, your mind is free to develop innovative and practical strategies to accomplish these dreams.

Mindfulness Meditation

You can overdo Mind Wandering, in which case you become so removed from life you get stuck by inertia. But Mind Wandering that never brings you new solutions is useless. Practicing mindfulness meditation, however, can interrupt the stressful loop that swings you from hyperfocus to unproductive mind wanderings and calms rumination.

Richard Davidson at University of Wisconsin Medical School in Madison, Wisconsin, discovered that meditation leads to a reduction of electrical and metabolic activity in the amygdala, which when overactivated is associated with worry. The most recent research found that meditation creates self-regulation in 11 hours of training.⁵ The practice of meditation helps people appropriately regulate their emotions. As a result, they are less emotionally reactive and less emotionally constricted. They are better able to handle stressful situations. Mindfulness meditation begins with the simple task of sitting and focusing on your breath or walking and being aware of your body’s movement. Another way to meditate is through walking meditation. Pay close attention to the movement of your body as you walk slowly and let go of thoughts. This is different from bilateral stimulation in that the focus of meditation is to just notice where and how you take steps and be present in the moment rather than trying to move your eyes back and forth. The process of meditation allows you to let go of judgment and grasping after things, and to be fully aware in the here and now. In both instances, the discipline of mindfulness begins with the calming of the mind. These exercises help you become better at controlling when you want your mind to drift and when you want it to pay attention. Narrowly focusing on a problem or letting the mind wander becomes a choice rather than obsessive thinking, worry, or distraction. Mindfulness meditation can be a tool that actually puts you in charge of your life, so you decide when to focus your attention on a problem and when you allow yourself to go into creative Mind Wandering.

To Dream Is to Build a Future

Harvard psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Matthew Killingsworth discovered that generally people’s minds wander 46.9 percent of the time except during sex (well, unless you’re bored with the activity).⁶ This means that nearly half of your life is spent daydreaming.

Daydreaming builds strength in the prefrontal cortex by stimulating more neural connections. The more you visit potential positive futures, the more opportunities you have to evaluate whether they will get you there.

Mental Time Travel

Haven’t you ever wished you could go back in time and tell your younger self what you know now? The following exercise lets you do the next best thing.

Neuroscience studies show that each time we review the past, we rework the memory so it is reconsolidated differently, and the brain stores it as a slightly changed memory. When you decharge a negative memory, you dissolve the trauma and are able to see the experience from a larger perspective. You can be aware that you survived even though there was loss and there is a reason to go forward. Free from the grasp that the trauma holds, often you can become aware of external and internal resources of which you might have been unaware. When you review positive memories, you can use those resourceful states accompanying them in the present for problem resolution. Each memory also serves as a blueprint for future actions. So occasionally reviewing the past helps us construct the future we want to walk into. When the memory is pleasant and focused on past successes, the experiences create a good internal resource upon which to build your best future.

Can You Pick Up Other People’s Worry?

Whenever you feel empathy, you in fact are imagining another person’s emotional state. You are, metaphorically, in another person’s mind, and it is possible to feel their worry. In fact, your brain is picking up their brain waves. Do you ever cry at movies? It’s an example of visiting that character’s mind. Emotions can be contagious. When you are around someone who worries a lot, it is easy to get caught up in their worry and limited thinking, and begin to believe that there are no solutions to their problems or even your own. You can protect yourself from getting caught up in their emotional turmoil by noticing your own thinking and assumptions. But you can engage in intentional Group Mind Wandering when everyone is on the same page.

Group Zone Out

Positive zoning out is a great thing to do. Do it in a group, and it can be even greater. This activity is different from brainstorming in that the entire group goes into a trance state for 10 to 20 minutes before offering any new ideas. Most people find that Mind Wandering together stimulates more creative ideas more frequently than if you are alone. As long as your motivation is to work together, this group mind emerges with a work team, a family, a couple, or even a singing organization.

A group of paper clips that are close to a magnet will jump a gap and connect to the magnet through the magnetic field produced between them. In a similar fashion, a group of human minds interacts to create new associations that might not otherwise occur.

Through asking positive questions about what is possible for the future and how best to get there, no person in the group falls into worry. The shared positive mental state allows group members to blend as if they were a flock of birds flying in formation, silently communicating and moving together to get to their intended destination.

Moments After Mind Wandering

We often feel clear, calm, and connected after a round of positive Mind Wandering because it clears us for a while of our habitual attention style, mental models, and old patterns, and allows us to see things from a more expanded view that perceives our infinite potential and our connection to the rest of the world. When you move out of conditioned thinking and into the realm of possibility, it’s harder to return to a state of worry.

In this almost sacred and brief time right after Mind Wandering, ask yourself, “What do I want? What matters to me? What lights up my life?” Rather than focusing as usual on what others want or expect from you, focus on your deep yearnings. Is there something you really want to do? Try to hold yourself in a place of openness for a while and don’t allow your mind to start telling you why you can’t do things.

If you have difficulty doing this, sit in front of a tree for 20 minutes and allow your mind to wander around the details of the tree. Notice the amazing symmetry of the leaves and the patterns of the veins in the leaves. Observe the wind blowing through the tree and the pleasant sound the tree makes in response. You’ll find yourself in a relaxed state. Then ask the previous questions and see what answers you find.

Decision by Mind Wandering

Even though it seems contradictory, decisions made by Mind Wandering are often just as effective as those made through deliberate consideration. Colleen Giblin of the Tepper School of Business, Carey Morewedge, and Michael Norton of Carnegie Mellon University conducted experiments in which participants judged the value of a randomly chosen art poster through conscious deliberation, Mind Wandering, or random assignment. The researchers predicted that participants would like the art poster they deliberately chose the most and the one their minds settled on from Mind Wandering the least. The researchers discovered, however, that the opposite was true.⁷ The results mean that our unconscious mind is so smart, it can make a decision better if you allow the mind to move into Alpha relaxation rather than struggling consciously.

Yawning Regulates Your Attention

One more wonderful activity that can enhance Mind Wandering is yawning. Most of the time we try to stifle our yawns (go ahead and try it now). Yet yawning dissolves worry, turns down cortisol, and activates a neural pathway to empathy. When you yawn, your frontal lobe quiets, which lets your mind wander and calm down, decreasing your feelings of worry. So go ahead—yawn, relax, and yawn again.

Power Thought: When you put worry on hold and let your mind wander, you can solve any problem, break persistent habits, develop your intuition, and devise better plans for the future.

You are becoming aware of how important it is to Mind Wander strategically to restore your energy and reset your mind. Turn to daydreams to help you rest, receive creative ideas, and enhance your intuition. In the next chapter we will explore a powerful tool that settles the mind for several days at a time.