Incentives

By Fabio Zucchelli

The word ‘incentive’ always sounded dull to me. If a word could wear clothes, I would have imagined it dressed in a Next suit and Clarks shoes, holding a hard briefcase containing auditing papers and a cucumber sandwich. Its business-speak verb sibling, ‘incentivise’, would be the cockier, more ambitious brother. Sharper of tongue and dress, it would sport those annoyingly shiny, pointy loafers and one of those shirts with collar and sleeves a separate colour to the rest of the shirt.

Incentive has actually turned out to be one of my favourite words. Being a natural people observer, I have come to see its significance in shaping the way we all behave. As Nobel winning behavioural economist Steve Levitt surmised in his book, Freakonmics, ‘People respond to incentives’. These incentives don’t have to be solely financial either; they could be the expectation of physical or mental pleasure, status, or anything else we might value. Some incentives are explicit, such as a promotion at work and the income and status boost that provides, while others are less obvious to us, like the avoidance of negative mental states.

Why am I going on about incentives? Well, I read a blog by @Fostress last week and it got me thinking. In looking at the mental trickery of depression, she talked about something I think often gets overlooked in relation to depression. In her blog, Fostress looked at the bias towards rewards in the present over the future, or ‘discounting’, in the context of how those of us who experience bouts of depression look after ourselves when feeling well.

Forgetting the incentive

In doing so, she made an important point: a problem central to depression is that we struggle to remember, or imagine, what it is like to feel any brightness, any hope or happiness while in the grips of depression. And equally, while we feel ok (in ‘remission’, as old school psychiatrists will tell us), it’s very difficult to remember the hopelessness, misery and numbness of depression. We can remember it in the intellectual sense, but it’s much harder to actually feel it. As a result, it’s easy to lose the incentive to look after ourselves.

We forget partly because the two states of mind are completely different, with entirely separate neural pathways at work – a disparity Fostress illustrates as two separate, disconnected islands: ‘sunny island’ and ‘depression island’. The second reason we don’t tend to really remember what it’s like to be depressed is because of the totally understandable inclination to avoid dredging up horrible feelings. After all, why the hell would we want to remind ourselves of the torture of depression when there’s an option not to?!

What happens when we forget the incentive

What this has meant in my case is that in the past I have actually become overly optimistic about my future. When I have periodically emerged from the storm of depression, at the time it felt like I did so totally unscathed. As a result I completely neglected to address the psychological reasons that led me to get depressed in the first place. Triggers would inevitably come about, as they do in life- in my case change and stress- and boom… depression set in again. I had very little incentive when feeling well to commit much, if any energy to trying to keep myself from dipping into severe depression, because I was blinded by the brightness of life.

I’m finally learning…

It’s taken me years of self-reflection to figure out that looking after myself is definitely a worthwhile investment. The results of the cost-benefit analysis are in, and they’re overwhelming, it turns out. It’s probably taken around four or five significant episodes to come to this conclusion. And who says I’m a slow learner?

I know now that unless I work on my thinking patterns that get me into trouble, I’m just going to keep falling back down- and I also know that the best time to do this is when the sun is shining. I’ll most probably keep getting up, but perhaps by walking rather than running once I’m up again, I’ll become less prone to tripping up again.

Investment: A boring but apt metaphor

So, the metaphor I’m bringing to the table is investment. Very sexy isn’t it. It has all the glamour of financial prudence and all the vivid imagery of a non-material concept. Fostress, I see your island metaphor and raise you investment.

I originally thought about insurance as a good metaphor, but decided it didn’t quite fit. ‘Insuring your mind against loss’ was a good headline, but I realised the analogy broke down because it doesn’t normally take your house being burgled four or five times to get contents insurance. So I’m sticking with the broader ‘Investment’ tag.

By talking of investment in ourselves in this way, I guess it could be argued it’s not even a metaphor, but simply a direct description. After all, looking after your mental health involves an investment of time and energy, as well as money a lot of the time too.

So, how does one invest?

Well, one form of investment I’ve found to be incredibly helpful is mindfulness practice. I totally buy into the concept; I love the whole philosophy of acceptance and living in the moment. One of the two main challenges, though, has been the fact that it’s bloody hard work. The second issue has been that I have often only felt compelled, ‘incentivised’, enough to practice mindfulness once I’ve already felt myself slipping dangerously into depression.

I’ve also discovered that mindfulness practice, which is normally a pretty challenging endeavour, becomes harder than explaining depression to a mountain goat when you’re feeling really low. And when life is going ok- by which I mean not permanently great, but ok in the sense of having normal good days and bad days- it’s very rare I feel like carving out fifteen minutes of my day to sit down and ostensibly do nothing. Clearly it isn’t nothing, but when the reminder of the incentive- namely depression- isn’t visible at the time, that’s what it seems like.

I have also continued to see a psychotherapist fortnightly despite having come out of an episode of depression a while back. These sessions often bring up hard truths and can open up some pretty sore scars. I know it’s a process though, and I’ve already felt benefits. As well as time, energy and money, I have also committed to investing a small amount of emotional pain for my future self.

I’m sure I’m not the only one…

It’s been a very slow evolution in getting to the point where I can think this reflectively and pragmatically about what’s best for me, but I think my experience might hold a few interesting lessons for people recognising a similar process in themselves. Maybe you’re at the end, but maybe you’re at the beginning; and if you are, I’d urge you to remember, both in the bad times and the good times, that you’re worth the investment.

Find Fabio on Twitter:@Fabzucci