Feel like something’s dragging you down? Holding you back?
Chances are it’s what cognitive scientists describe as an anchor. Not a literal anchor. A mental one. “Anchoring” is a mental bias that, if set wrong, wreaks all sorts of havoc in our attitudes, emotions, and behaviors:
- Anchoring causes social media depression.
- Anchoring is the reason we spend too much at the mall.
- Anchoring is the reason we’re a third as positive as we should be.
Imagine we’re rowing a boat across a shallow lake, unaware that we’d dropped anchor. It’s a struggle. We can’t get anywhere. Life is heavy. The first order of business is to identify the anchor and pull it up. Then row.
Same with mental anchors. It’s vital we understand what anchors are and how they work, so we can manage the anchors and boost our optimism.
Anchoring and the $300,000 Home
Imagine we just moved into a $300,000 home. Is that move a good thing or a bad thing?
It depends on the starting point for our evaluation.
- If we moved from a trailer park to this home, we see the move as a good thing. Compared to our old neighborhood, this place is the street of dreams.
- If we moved from a rich neighborhood to this home, we see the move as a bad thing. Compared to our old neighborhood, this place is a dump.
Same home, different starting point in the comparison, which creates a different view of the move and different feelings about it.
The anchor is the starting point we unconsciously use in our comparisons. In the good move example, the anchor was a trailer park. We started with a memory of the bad neighborhood, which made the new house look good by comparison. In the bad move example, the anchor was a rich neighborhood, which made the new neighborhood look bad by comparison.
One starting point inspired positive emotion, while the other incited negative emotion.
Which means we weren’t affected emotionally by the situation, but by the anchor and the comparison that followed it.
Is comparison the thief of joy? No, anchors are.
Motivators and thinkers often play down comparison with ideas like these:
- “Comparison is the thief of joy,” said American president Theodore Roosevelt.
- “Happiness is found when you stop comparing yourself to other people.”
But this is only half the story of comparison, because there’s a lot of situations where comparison creates joy and happiness. The real issue is the anchor, not the comparison. When the anchor changes, comparison becomes extremely helpful.
Here’s how I might change each quote to reveal constructive comparisons:
- “Comparison is the companion of joy.” When we set low anchors and are happily surprised, comparison creates joy. I had low expectations of what we’d get when we went house shopping, and wow, this $300,000 house is a great find! Compared to what we thought we’d get, we got something better, and found joy in the process. Far from being the thief of joy, certain comparisons create joy.
- “Happiness is found when you compare yourself to other people.” Not when we stop comparing to other people. When we start comparing. If we’re comparing in a constructive way. When we look at people who are worse off than us, and compare, we instantly feel grateful. There’s an old proverb that reads, “I felt sorry for myself because I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet.” When the reference point (the anchor) changes, comparison can create happiness.
The point is, comparisons create positives as well as negatives, when we set the anchors right. Comparisons can be constructive as well as destructive, and the crazy thing is, it’s about the anchors, not the comparisons itself. Our unconscious starting points make all the difference in the way we feel.
Here’s where the positivity ratios come in. Is it possible we’re below the healthy ratios because of the way we choose our anchors? Is it possible that by playing the comparison game in a constructive way, we can start boosting our positivity immediately?
The answer is, absolutely yes.
Tomorrow I’ll dig in deeper to the way anchors work and how to work them.
Also, I’ll show how retailers use the anchoring to get you to part with your money, and how you can switch up the game to start saving money right away.