PERMA: A handy guide in financially uncertain times - Part 2
What pigeons know
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Today’s post is about the “E” and “R” in PERMA. If you have no idea what PERMA is, here’s the long version:
PERMA: A handy guide in financially uncertain times: Part 1
In short, it’s an acronym for the five elements that enable human flourishing, according to psychologist Martin Seligman:
Positive Emotion
Engagement
Relationships
Meaning
Accomplishment
As I noted in the first post, if we buy into PERMA it can help us identify which elements in our lives need more or less attention, either with our time or financial resources. It can also help us stay awake to times in which we’re throwing money at problems that aren’t really at the core of our dissatisfaction.
E is for Engagement
My financial counseling textbook equates engagement with “flow,” which Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi identified as “a state of mind where an individual is fully immersed and absorbed in a particular task or activity.”1 Flow is achieved “when one’s skills are just sufficient for a challenging activity, in the pursuit of a clear goal, with immediate feedback on progress toward the goal.”2
I think we all have a sense of this feeling. Have you been on a bike ride lately? Deep in a good book or video game? So engrossed in a project at work you lose track of time? It’s delicious.
On the other hand, I don’t think engagement is as simple as “more is good.” I’ll explain why and get into the “R” of PERMA.
The Pigeons
A few months ago I heard about these pigeons on a podcast.3
The guest, Michael Easter, was talking about an experiment by psychologist Thomas Zentall.
Zentall took a set of pigeons living in standard lab cages, put them in a box and presented them with a choice between two games:
“The first game they get a predictable amount of food by pecking a light. So every other time they peck the light they get, say, 20 units of food.”
“The other game is more like a slot machine. So, about every fifth peck of the light, but at totally random intervals they get food. It’s a little bit more food than they would get from the predictable game where it’s every other peck.”
The literature out there suggested that animals will do the least amount to get the most food. The first scenario, the predictable amount of food at regular intervals, would give these pigeons just that — more food, less effort.
Instead, Zentall found that 97 percent of the pigeons play the gambling game.
Why would the pigeons pick gambling over getting consistent rewards? Zentall found the answer when he changed something about the pigeon’s lives outside of the experiment.
Zentall took the pigeons out of the standard lab cage and put them in a larger, more enriching environment:
“He puts pigeons in this really giant cage that is designed to be a lot like their life in the wild — they interact with other pigeons, they have roosts they can go into, they can go up into cliffs, they’ve got some plants in there.”
After living in a stimulating environment, filled with pigeon friends and natural habitats, Zentall ran the experiment again. He put the pigeons into boxes and looked to see what game they chose. In the new scenario:
“Every single pigeon picks the game…where they get a predictable amount of food.”
So why’d they stop gambling? Zentall told Easter that there’s this idea called the “optimal stimulation theory.”
“It basically states that all animals, including humans, need a certain amount of stimulation in their life in order to thrive. And if we don’t get that stimulation we go searching for it elsewhere.”
The pigeons in this experiment needed stimulation. But when given the opportunity to get that from living in community with other pigeon folk, they took it, along with the “boring” option that offered consistent rewards. The pigeons didn’t need the thrill that gambling provided them anymore.
“All animals, including humans”
I don’t want to conflate stimulation with engagement, but they appear similar enough to ask: Where do we get our fixes and are we happy with the tradeoffs?
There was a time in my life where I had a job that didn’t require much of me and didn’t often get me into states of flow. During that time, I had the energy to work a second (very engaging) job for extra cash, go to the gym with friends and spend time with family on the weekends.
Later in my life I had a very engaging job that made the hours fly. A happy change at first. But over time I realized how hard it became to do anything else outside of work, including exercising and cooking dinner. Instead, I’d often pick up a sandwich on the way home, crash on the couch and eat it while watching TV alone. I’d watch absolutely nothing intense or violent (mostly Adventure Time). I just didn’t have much left in my tank, for myself or anyone else.
Reflecting on our sources of engagement, and how much they affect the other elements of PERMA, can give us valuable information about how to direct and redirect our energy.
R is for Relationships
This one is pretty straightforward, no? The idea that “positive, healthy and supportive relationships are a critical component to attaining well being”4?
After all, the U.S. surgeon general named loneliness an epidemic.
Something I came across last year though gave me extra pause, though. It’s the idea that ambivalent relationships can be more damaging to your health than purely negative ones:
“We often call them frenemies, supposed friends who sometimes help you and sometimes hurt you. But it’s not just friends. It’s the in-laws who volunteer to watch your kids but belittle your parenting. The roommate who gets you through a breakup and then starts dating your ex. The manager who praises your work but denies you a promotion.
Everyone knows how relationships like that can tie your stomach into a knot. But groundbreaking research spearheaded by the psychologists Bert Uchino and Julianne Holt-Lunstad shows that ambivalent relationships can be damaging to your health — even more than purely negative relationships. One study found that adults had higher blood pressure after interacting with people who evoked mixed feelings than after similar interactions with those who evoked negative feelings.
Making new friends, keeping old ones (shout out Girl Scouts), drawing boundaries and leaving harmful relationships, all of that takes time and resources and courage. And given how important healthy relationships are to our lives, I think that’s all energy well-spent. An investment like any other.
I’ll wrap up PERMA next time and leave you with this clip of Garry/Jerry Gergich, the universally mocked employee of Parks and Recreation who didn’t need his co-workers to give him his fix of R:
ETC.
Why people would rather clean the toilet than check their bank balance - The Conversation
Owning a home has rarely been this much more expensive than renting - Yahoo Finance
Durband, Dorothy B., et al. Financial Counseling Edited by Dorothy B. Durband, Ryan H. Law, Angela K. Mazzolini. DeGraff, Alycia N., and Daniel Dillon. “Chapter 7, Contemporary Theories and Frameworks for Use in Financial Counseling” p.101, A. Springer International Publishing : Imprint: Springer, 2019.
https://ppc.sas.upenn.edu/learn-more/perma-theory-well-being-and-perma-workshops#:~:text=There%20are%20five%20building%20blocks,routes%20to%20a%20flourishing%20life.
https://www.meditatehappier.com/podcast/tph/michael-easter
(Durband 102)