A recent article in the Boston Globe, Easy=True, describes a hot topic in psychology circles called “cognitive fluency” that I feel also makes a great recovery tool.
Cognitive fluency is simply a measure of how easy it is to think about something, and it turns out that people prefer things that are easy to think about to those that are hard.
In a nutshell, the brain interprets easy things in a positive manner. People will gravitate to things that rhyme, simple fonts, and logical ordering while avoiding complex, disorderly, or just unfamiliar things because they seem difficult regardless of their real nature. I suggest reading the whole article, but the kicker that got me thinking about how cognitive fluency would relate to the struggles of early sobriety comes in the last few paragraphs.
“Having to come up with many good things about your spouse is terrible, because it becomes difficult and then you think she’s obviously not that wonderful,” Schwarz says. “Coming up with a few bad things about your spouse, that’s bad because it’s not that hard. Having to come up with a lot of bad things, since it’s hard, it means she’s not that bad at all. The difficulty that you have tells you that there are not many such things.”
In the same manner, obsessing over how hard it is to fight the cravings and how difficult a sober reality is to face can be overwhelming. Using cognitive fluency, it is easier to stay positive by making a short list of why sobriety is preferable and concentrating on the much easier list of why active addiction is bad.
Results like these suggest that feeling good about yourself may in part be a matter of having a hard time feeling bad, and that confidence and even success might be triggered by interventions that do nothing but make failure seem the more intimidating possibility. The human brain, for all its power, is suspicious of difficulty, but perhaps we can learn to use that.
In summary, early sobriety even though rewarding can be tough, but the alternative of active addiction is much worse. So if you’re going to worry about something, make it easy… and productive.
