W
aking up in the morning a definite challenge for me. I hit the snooze button more often than I should. At least three times, I have to say to myself, “OK, time to get up.” I need some real motivation to get out of my comfortable bed.
So that’s why I could really use a product known as “Clocky.”
According to its description, “Clocky is the alarm clock on wheels that runs away beeping! You can snooze one time, but if you don’t get up, Clocky will jump off of your nightstand up to 3 feet high, and run around your room as if looking for a place to hide. You’ll have to get out of bed to silence Clocky’s alarm.”
Clocky is so valuable because very often, what we plan to do is not always what we actually do.
When we go to bed and set our alarm the night before, we’re expecting that when we wake up, we’ll leap out of bed instantly, ready to go. But when that alarm actually goes off in the morning, our best intentions often manage to fall by the wayside.
Understanding how we stumble and miss the mark is all the more important when we think about our choices that can lead us to become better people as we start the High Holy Day season. It is fairly easy to sit in the sanctuary on the High Holy Days and resolve that we will, say, “be more patient” in 5775. It is a lot harder to actually be more patient when we feel like it’s the twentieth time we’ve had to tell our child to clean up their room.
The resolutions about ourselves that we make can be very hard to hold onto when the moment of choice arrives. Indeed, that’s really what we reflect about on the High Holy Days each year—the times when we “missed the mark,” when we aimed to do one thing, but ultimately did another.
So how can we do better?
Recently, psychologist David DeSteno wrote an article entitled “A Feeling of Control: How America Can Finally Learn to Deal With Its Impulses.” He notes that Americans struggle with self-control. We eat too much, we spend too much, we give into our baser impulses too much. And we tend to think that employing cognitive strategies (“you’ve just got to handle your anger better”) is the way to go.
But as DeSteno argues, rather employing cognitive strategies to overcome our urges. we should use emotional strategies. He gives several reasons and suggestions, but perhaps most importantly, he reminds us that
[w]e often make the mistake of assuming that cognition and reasoning will always favor the most objectively rational, long-term outcome. But in reality, reasoning is tainted by bias; we can rationalize pretty much anything if it suits our immediate needs…I deserve an extra drink, a smoke, a sweet, a break, or a luxury today. Why? It’s been a long week. I had an argument with my spouse. Fill in the blank.
So instead, DeSteno suggests, we should cultivate using emotional strategies:
These emotions—gratitude, compassion, authentic pride, and even guilt—work from the bottom up, without requiring cognitive effort on our part, to shape decisions that favor the long-term. If we focus on instilling the capacity to experience these emotional states regularly, we’ll build resources that will automatically spring forth in reflexive and productive ways. In essence, we’ll be giving ourselves inoculations against temptation that, like antibodies in our bloodstream, will be ready and waiting to combat possible threats to our well-being.
In the end, our goal on the High Holy Days is help us become better people, to use both our heads and our hearts to improve who we are as we start 5775. But as humans, our natural tendency is to be drawn towards the path of least resistance. So we need any and all strategies we can use to make sure our choices help us—and not harm us—on our journey.
And that brings me back to Clocky.
One wonderful metaphor for the shofar blast on Rosh Hashanah is that of an alarm clock, waking us up to the ways we have acted, and helping us to become the people we wish to be. But all too often, we are likely to hit the snooze button.
So for this year’s attempt to become better people, maybe willpower isn’t the best strategy. Instead, let’s not be afraid to use any tools, tips, or even tricks we can find to help us grow.
And if we do that, perhaps we’ll have just a little less trouble waking up.
Rosh Hashanah
Pronounced: roshe hah-SHAH-nah, also roshe ha-shah-NAH, Origin: Hebrew, the Jewish new year.
shofar
Pronounced: sho-FAR or SHO-far, Origin: Hebrew, a ram’s horn that is sounded during the month of Elul, on Rosh Hashanah, and on Yom Kippur. It is mentioned numerous times in the Bible, in reference to its ceremonial use in the Temple and to its function as a signal-horn of war.
