Pain and Personality Change

Timmer, an old friend, commented twice about “Can We Change Our Personalities.” You can read his entire comments below that blog. Now I’ll edit his comments slightly and reply to them.

He wrote, ""Making these changes will cause some real agony. They happen uneasily and excruciatingly slowly, kind of like having your cuticles slowly rolled back. Day to day progress is almost undetectable, but in a few years you can look back and see what a far way you have come along…

“Reward yourself every time you resist your desire to play cards you should fold.

“I go beyond psychological reward and punishment. I will snap a rubber band on my wrist for doing bad or simply stroke that same wrist for doing good at what I call breakover moments. Sometimes just looking at that band will put me back in the right track…”

“Al, if you see me going astray, you have my permission to give that rubber band a snap. However, you must explain why.

“Also I found that it helps to verbalize before, during, and after the reward/punishment act. I’m a good player or that was dumb snap. I won’t do that again.”

I’ll amplify three of his points:

1. Change in really painful. In fact, physical therapists and personal exercise coaches have a simple expression, “No pain, no gain.” If it doesn’t hurt you, it probably won’t help you. So don’t naively expect that you will make significant changes in anything without pain, perhaps a lot of it.

2. He uses physical pain and pleasure to reinforce the psychological rewards I discussed. Snapping a rubber band or stroking his wrist may seem trivial to you, but – as I said in the blog – immediate rewards and punishments have immeasurably greater impact on behavior than larger, delayed ones. Since he is delivering those rewards and punishment almost immediately, and they are very clearly linked to specific actions, they can have very substantial effects.

3. He verbalizes his reasons for rewarding and punishing himself to emphasize and clarify the lessons. I wrote about verrbalizing in The Psychology of Poker. I used it there as a tool to help you while playing, but it works almost everywhere. The more clearly you can state the reasons for your actions, the more intelligently you will act.

Thanks, Timmer, and I hope others add their suggestions (both here and to my other blogs).

That is, what works for you?