Choices and Mandates

Minds like rules.

Minds like to organize the world using rules they find in biology and experience. Biology, through instinct, teaches us that we cannot breath under water. Experience teaches us to take care when licking envelopes because paper cuts hurt. Minds keep track of rules and try their darnedest to keep us from violating them. Rules are the mind’s way of keeping us safe.

Minds can put rules around anything. Over the past few decades, my mind has constructed rigid rules around the topic of lima beans. I was probably five years old the first time I ate one. My father, who usually enforced the “eat what’s on your plate” rule issued a coveted lifetime pass on lima beans when I gagged and nearly vomited at the kitchen table. My mind learned a powerful lesson that day:

Lima Bean Rule #1: Any food that can make me gag and create fear in my father must be dangerous and is to be strictly avoided.

Rule number one led me avoid lima beans for three decades. This led to two more rules:

Lima Bean Rule #2: Avoidance means I get to eat lots of other tasty things.

Lima Bean Rule #3: Avoidance means I can prevent lima bean gagging.

	Figure 1. Enemy stronghold. Be careful, there may be one in your neighborhood.

Rules #2 and #3 are two sides of the same coin. Minds often derive two rules from a single avoidance behavior: one involving reward, and the other involving the avoidance of pain. Combining two rules in that manner strengthens avoidance.

For most of my life, lima bean avoidance worked out fairly well, which encouraged me to keep avoiding them. Along the way, my mind adopted other, more trivial rules. For example, when I noticed that friends and relatives (starting with my father) went out of their way to arrange lima bean-free meals (probably due to my childish whining about them) my mind adopted this one:

Lima Bean Rule #4: Avoiding lima beans, and being vocal about it, draws special attention.

Avoidance has its limitations. Sadly for me, the world contains many lima beans (see figure 1). A person is bound to encounter them, and over the years I’ve had my run-ins. Once, when opening a can of soup, I caught the distinct scent of lima bean even before I had completely removed the lid. Sure enough, the soup contained a single lima bean and the entire can went down the drain. You can bet that my friends heard about that near-miss for years to come.

Each time I dodged a lima bean bullet, my mind strengthened all four of the Lima Bean Rules. From the mind’s perspective, it works like this:

Lima beans are bad.
I successfully avoided lima beans and nothing bad happened.
Therefore, avoidance works.

Eventually, I was left with an emotional reaction to lima beans that transcended all rationality. In the grand scheme of things, it is no big deal. I could probably avoid lima beans for the rest of my life – but not without small costs.

Avoiding lima beans means being ever-vigilant for them, especially at restaurants and friends’ houses. Avoiding them means I missed out on delicious dishes. And frankly, it’s a bit embarrassing to be a grown man who is afraid of a bean.

Enough was enough. The Lima Bean Rules were making my world smaller – if only by a little bit – and I was tired of being governed by them. So I ate lima beans last night. And you know what? They weren’t that bad. They were not as horrible as my mind, in its effort to protect me from them, had built them up to be.

Some rules were made to be broken

For more than 30 years, my mind did a bang-up job of protecting me from lima beans. I couldn’t ask for a better bodyguard. But here’s the thing about minds: we don’t always have to listen to them. Their rules, however well-intentioned, sometimes get in the way.

The Lima Bean Rules are still with me. History doesn’t go away, and whenever I see a lima bean in the future I will be reminded of my first encounter. I gagged, as you’ll recall, and minds have particularly good memories about things that make us ill.

On the other hand, from now on I will also know that I can disobey my mind’s rules about lima beans. Experience taught me that.

The process by which my mind arrived at the Lima Bean Rules is similar to the processes by which minds react to larger problems like depression and anxiety.

I am not comparing food avoidance with depression or anxiety. If tackling those problems were simple, people could simply choose to stop being depressed or anxious. On occasion, that works. More often, those problems are much more difficult to manage than an irrational avoidance of a small thing.

My point with the lima bean exercise is this: our minds construct inflexible rules around trivial problems. Those same minds, using the same methods, construct rules around more serious problems, such as how we view ourselves after being mistreated or how we view the world after traumatic experiences.

When we know how minds work, we can find ways to listen when they are helpful and ignore them when they are making our worlds unnecessarily smaller. In life, it is better to have choices than mandates. There is much more to come on that topic.

Now, where did I leave those Brussels sprouts?