EXPLORING HUMAN BEHAVIOR THROUGH SCUBA DIVING: LESSONS AND INSIGHTS – (CHAPTER 01)

Scuba Diving is one of those activities that changes us in many ways. Not just through the training, but also by what we see and experience underwater, has this lasting effect on how we experience the world above. A lot of sports and hobbies can reinforce our character and teach us valuable life lessons. Here are some ways in which we think, Scuba Diving has changed our lives. It might be a stretch, but some of those lessons apply to management and business as well.

01) -> Equalize Your Airspaces

During descent, the pressure changes, increasing with the weight of the water, pushing on places in our body with airspaces that are unaccustomed to it. The first things to complain are the ears. We can fix this discomfort, equalizing the pressure to match the change around by pinching our nose and lightly blowing. This adds air into the cavities and canals running through our head and the discomfort dissipates. Every dive is different. Sometimes the ears complain and sometimes the build-up is in the head: behind the eyes, stemming from the nose, centred in the forehead, wherever our congestion may be. Everyone descends at a different rate depending on how their body responds. Sometimes we feel stuck above everyone else, watching them continue to their depths, while we are left behind. Other times we watch others from below, kicking up slightly, wiggling their jaws, trying any and everything to get their sinuses to cooperate.

Lesson:……………. Equalization can be correlated to life; everyone is moving at different rates, allowing themselves to become accustomed to their surroundings at different times.

We need to be patient with our self and to not worry about the other people around us. Diving with pressure-induced pain is not fun, just as forcing yourself into certain situations can be uncomfortable. If we give ourselves time to adjust, time to equalize and overcome the surrounding pressure, we will get to the destination all the same. It does not matter how quickly or slowly we descend along our paths of life, as long as we keep trying and keep practicing different techniques until we find the one that works for us individually.

Trying to muscle through the pressure and stresses of our lives can end up hurting us. And with that comes the simple notion of listening to our body, heart, and mind. Sometimes it is okay to take a step back, kick ourselves up a bit where the pressure is not so strong, and give yourself some extra time. Sometimes it is okay to say, “it’s not happening today, I’m going to sit this one out and try again tomorrow”.

02) -> Breathe Continuously And Never Hold Your Breath

While underwater, it is essential to maintain a constant breathing rate, inhaling and exhaling, that raspy, rhythmic sound filling your ears. The reason for this is that when we are diving, we are breathing compressed air under pressure. If that pressure changes, so does the volume of air. As we descend underwater, the pressure increases, compressing the air, swelling its density, causing us to inhale a higher volume of air than we would take in with a breath at the surface. When we ascend, the pressure decreases, and that compressed air, in response to the drop in pressure, starts to expand.

When we breathe normally, the expanding air is vented out naturally when we exhale.

If we hold our breath, our lungs do not inflate and deflate like they are designed to.

Our lungs are a fixed airspace, a flexible organ that can only hold a finite amount of air.

That held breath of air grows upon ascent, enlarging inside the lungs, unable to find a way out, filling them up until they can swell no further and, like a balloon that cannot hold another breath, they can rupture, causing a lung over-expansion injury that can turn fatal.

Lesson:. . . . . . . We hold our breath in life, maintaining our rigidity, not allowing ourselves to inhale new air and exhale the old. We are steadfast in our habits. We liked things a certain way and don’t want change. We are not meant to be uncompromising, inflexible, and unchanging, like the lungs stretching and straining under the confines of a held breath. We should accept the new in all its forms, accepting novel ideas and cultures and ways of thinking about things, eliminating old habits and prejudices and things we thought we knew.

When we move through life, the pressures are either increasing or decreasing, stresses are either heightening or diminishing. We need to remember to breathe. To take in all the new and good and unfamiliar regardless of what our depth is, and to release all the old and bad and comfortable, thereby making room for the new. If we hold onto the old for too long, it continues to fill us up, expanding and growing and getting bigger until we, unaware of its cultivation, burst at the seams. We should strive to immerse ourselves in new environments, surround ourselves with new pressures, growing and changing and adapting, and all the while remembering to breathe.

03) ->  Adjust Your Buoyancy in Small, Frequent Amounts

Balanced buoyancy, horizontal trim, that perfect composure of rising slightly on the inhale and faintly falling on the exhale, is what separates the good divers from the bad.

Any diver will tell you that, in order to find that perfect positioning, you have to adjust your buoyancy in small, frequent amounts. We do not need to press the inflator button for too long, filling the BCD (Buoyancy Control Device) with air that wants to bring us back to the surface. Little bursts will do, and the same goes for releasing air as our tank empties and we become more buoyant throughout the dive.

Moving the weights around little by little, trying new positions on each dive, finding that ideal spot on your body to bring yourself into a sleek, straight line is something that divers do the more and more they submerge themselves. We learn to minimize your movements, quick flicks of the fin to change direction, mostly floating and flowing along with the current, frog kicking to propel yourself along a constant plane running parallel to the ocean’s bottom.

Being able to control the body and maintaining jurisdiction over its movements and manoeuvres in the water is key to be able to spot microorganisms by getting close to coral without touching it. During diving, adjustments made too quickly or drastically, can have chaotic results. Power inflating the BCD, causing us to balloon to the surface, can result in bubbles forming in the blood. Using big, clumsy kicks as we swim along can either damage coral or disturb the visibility.

Lesson:………………… Having good buoyancy carries over into our lives. Making small, intentional movements brings about a sort of self-awareness that you cannot achieve with those big, drastic changes. Think of it as biting off more than we can chew. If we make too many big changes all at once, how will we ever figure out which variables yield desired results? Making small adjustments: try this today, try something else tomorrow, find what works to bring myself out of that feeling that everything around me is crashing.

This is a secret to moving through life: small adjustments, acting with intention, understanding what actions and thoughts make you feel certain ways. It is all a process of trial and error, moving our weights, practicing as much as we can, getting better with each new discovery.

04) -> Communicate with Proper Hand Signals

We all learn the universal hand signals: thumbs up means “I want to go up”, thumbs down means “lets dive deeper”, two fingers to the other hand’s palm is asking “how much air do you have”, and the thumb and pointer making an O with the other three fingers released is a question and an answer: “Are you okay?” and “yes, I’m okay”. The main thing here is that communication is key. In an underwater world where the tongue is tied, we have to be able to say what we want with the tools we have. And, we sometimes have had to learn how to read and understand people, not with words, but by how their eyes look behind their masks, sometimes wide and fearful, other times crinkled with a smiling excitement.

Not everyone speaks the same language and not everyone communicates the same way, but, as soon as we descend, letting that water wash over our heads, our language becomes universal, and being able to understand one another can make or break the dive.

Lesson:………………………………… The same is true in our normal lives. Communication is key. Almost every major problem, whether that be on an individual, communal, or global scale, is rooted in a conflict of communication. Different words and phrases have different meanings around the globe.  Listening to each other, establishing a norm, understanding the root of what someone is saying and the reason why they would be saying it that way is something that has challenged us all. We are all brought up differently, raised to believe different things, but at the end of the day we are all trying to communicate the same thing: this is me and I just want to be accepted.

Being empathetic and understanding other aspects of communication are vital to finding and providing that acceptance: reading the look in someone’s eyes, interpreting body language, deciphering why someone may be acting a certain way. We are all floating along in a sort of shared solitude, alone with our thoughts and interacting with others when we get the chance. But understanding each other, using those agreed upon hand signals and being aware of other cues, makes or breaks our time with each other.

***To be continued in Chapter 02 (Points 05 to 10- Link Below)

LESSONS IN BEHAVIOUR FROM SCUBA DIVING – (CHAPTER 02)

Content Curated By: Dr Shoury Kuttappa

ILLUSORY CORRELATION: MISGUIDED THINKING

Human beings have been blaming strange behaviour on the full moon for centuries. In the Middle Ages, for example, people claimed that a full moon could turn humans into werewolves. In the 1700s, it was common to believe that a full moon could cause epilepsy or feverish temperatures. We even changed our language to match our beliefs. The word lunatic comes from the Latin root word ‘luna’, which means moon.

Today, we have (mostly) come to our sanities. While we no longer blame sickness and disease on the phases of the moon, we will hear people use it as a casual explanation for outlandish behaviour. For example, a common story in medical circles is that during a chaotic evening at the hospital one of the nurses will often say, “Must be a full moon tonight.”

There is little evidence that a full moon actually impacts our behaviours. A complete analysis of more than 30 peer-reviewed studies found no correlation between a full moon and hospital admissions, lottery ticket pay-outs, suicides, traffic accidents, crime rates, and many other common events. But here’s the interesting thing: even though the research says otherwise, a 2005 study revealed that 7 out of 10 nurses still believed that “a full moon led to more chaos and patients that night.”

How is that possible? The nurses who swear that a full moon causes strange behavior aren’t stupid. They are simply falling victim to a common mental error that plagues all of us. Psychologists refer to this little brain mistake as an “illusory correlation.”

How We Fool Ourselves Without Realizing It

An illusory correlation happens when we mistakenly over-emphasize one outcome and ignore the others. For example, let’s say we visit Mumbai City and someone cuts us off as we’re boarding the subway train. Then, we go to a restaurant and the waiter is rude to us. Finally, we ask someone on the street for directions and they blow us off. When we think back on our trip to Mumbai, it is easy to remember these experiences and conclude that “people from Mumbai are rude” or “people in big cities are rude.”

However, we are forgetting about all of the meals we ate when the waiter acted perfectly normal or the hundreds of people we passed on the Subway platform who didn’t cut us off. These were literally non-events because nothing notable happened. As a result, it is easier to remember the times someone acted rudely toward you than the times when you dined happily or took the subway in peace.

Here’s where the brain science comes into play: . . . . . Hundreds of psychology studies have proven that we tend to overestimate the importance of events we can easily recall and underestimate the importance of events we have trouble recalling. The easier it is to remember, the more likely we are to create a strong relationship between two things that are weakly related or not related at all.

The Genesis

Our ability to think about causes and associations is fundamentally important, and always has been for our evolutionary ancestors – we needed to know if a particular berry makes us sick, or if a particular cloud pattern predicts bad weather. So it is not surprising that we automatically make judgements of this kind. We don’t have to mentally count events, tally correlations and systematically discount alternative explanations. We have strong intuitions about what things go together, intuitions that just spring to mind, often after very little experience. This is good for making decisions in a world where you often don’t have enough time to think before you act, but with the side-effect that these intuitions contain some predictable errors. One such error is illusory correlation. Two things that are individually salient seem to be associated when they are not.

One explanation is that things that are relatively uncommon are more vivid (because of their rarity). This, and an effect of existing stereotypes, creates a mistaken impression that the two things are associated when they are not. This is a side effect of an intuitive mental machinery for reasoning about the world. Most of the time it is quick and delivers reliable answers – but it seems to be susceptible to error when dealing with rare but vivid events, particularly where preconceived biases operate. Associating bad traffic behaviour with ethnic minority drivers, or cyclists, is another case where people report correlations that just are not there. Both the minority (either an ethnic minority, or the cyclists) and bad behaviour stand out. Our quick-but-dirty inferential machinery leaps to the conclusion that the events are commonly associated, when they are not.

Self Perspective

Sometimes we feel like the whole world is against us. The other lanes of traffic always move faster than ours. Traffic signals are always red when we are in a hurry. The same goes for the supermarket queues. Why does it always rain on those occasions we do not carry an umbrella, and why do flies always want to eat our sandwiches at a picnic and not other people’s? It feels like there is only one reasonable explanations. The universe itself has a vendetta against us and  we get back to the universe-victim theory.

So here we have a mechanism which might explain our woes. The other lanes or queues moving faster is one salient event, and our intuition wrongly associates it with the most salient thing in our environment – us (Self). What, after all, is more important to us than ourselves. Which brings us back to the universe-victim theory. When our lane is moving along we are focusing on where we are going, ignoring the traffic we overtake. When our lane is stuck we think about us and our hard luck, looking at the other lane. No wonder the association between self and being overtaken sticks in memory more.

This distorting influence of memory on our judgement lies behind a good chunk of our feelings of victimization. In some situations there is a real bias. We really do spend more time being overtaken in traffic than we do overtaking. And the smoke really does tend follow us around the campfire, because wherever we sit creates a warm up-draught that the smoke fills. But on top of all of these is a mind that over-exaggerates our own importance, giving each of us the false impression that we are more important in how events work out than we really are.

Woman under a dark cloud as the rain drops turn to color

How to Spot an Illusory Correlation: . . . . . . . . . There is a simple strategy we can use to spot our hidden assumptions and prevent ourselves from making an illusory correlation. It’s called a contingency table and it forces you to recognize the non-events that are easy to ignore in daily life.

Let’s break down the possibilities for having a full moon and a crazy night of hospital admissions.

This contingency table helps reveal what is happening inside the minds of nurses during a full moon. The nurses quickly remember the one time when there was a full moon and the hospital was overflowing, but simply forget the many times there was a full moon and the patient load was normal. Because they can easily retrieve a memory about a full moon and a crazy night and so they incorrectly assume that the two events are related. Ideally, we would plug in a number into each cell so that we can compare the actually frequency of each event, which will often be much different than the frequency we easily remember for each event.

How to Fix Your Misguided Thinking

We make illusory correlations in many areas of life: . . .. . . . . . . We hear about Dirubhai Ambani or Bill Gates dropping out of college to start a billion-dollar business and we over-value that story in our head. Meanwhile, we never hear about all of the college dropouts that fail to start a successful company. We only hear about the hits and never hear about the misses even though the misses far outnumber the hits.

We see someone of a particular ethnic or racial background getting arrested and so you assume all people with that background are more likely to be involved in crime. We never hear about the 99 percent of people who don’t get arrested because it is a non-event.
We hear about a shark attack on the news and refuse to go into the ocean during our next beach vacation. The odds of a shark attack have not increased since we went in the ocean last time, but we never hear about the millions of people swimming safely each day. The news is never going to run a story titled, “Millions of Tourists Float in the Ocean Each Day.” We over-emphasize the story we hear on the news and make an illusory correlation.

Most of us are unaware of how our selective memory of events influences the beliefs we carry around with us on a daily basis. We are incredibly poor at remembering things that do not happen. If we don’t see it, we assume it has no impact or rarely happens. If we understand how an illusory correlation error occurs and use strategies like the Contingency Table Test mentioned above, we can reveal the hidden assumptions we didn’t even know we had and correct the misguided thinking that plagues our everyday lives.

Even Shakespeare blamed our occasional craziness on the moon. In his play Othello he wrote, “It is the very error of the moon. She comes more near the earth than she was wont. And makes men mad.”

For lovers of psychology, this phenomenon is often referred to as the Availability Heuristic.

The more easily we can retrieve a certain memory or thought – that is, the more available it is in our brains – the more likely we are to overestimate it’s frequency and importance. The Illusory Correlation is sort of a combination of the Availability Heuristic and Confirmation Bias.

You can easily recall the one instance when something happened (Availability Heuristic), which makes you think it happens often. Then, when it happens again – like the next full moon, for example – your Confirmation Bias kicks in and confirms your previous belief.

Content Curated By: Dr Shoury Kuttappa.

THOUGHTS AND ACTIONS: IMPACT OF ENVIRONMENT

A Short Story- Jonas Salk and the Polio Vaccine:

In 1952, polio killed more children than any other communicable disease. Nearly 58,000 people were infected. The situation was on the verge of becoming an epidemic and the country desperately needed a vaccine.

In a small laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh, a young researcher named Jonas Salk was working tirelessly to find a cure. (Years later, author Dennis Denenberg would write, “Salk worked sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, for years.”). Despite all his effort, Salk was stuck. His quest for a polio vaccine was meeting a dead end at every turn. Eventually, he decided that he needed a break. Salk left the laboratory and retreated to the quiet hills of central Italy where he stayed at a 13th-century Franciscan monastery known as the Basilica of San Francesco d’Assisi.

The basilica could not have been more different than the lab. The architecture was a beautiful combination of Romanesque and Gothic styles. White-washed brick covered the expansive exterior and dozens of semi-circular arches surrounded the plazas between buildings. Inside the church, the walls were covered with stunning fresco paintings from the 14th and 15th centuries and natural light poured in from tall windows. It was in this space that Jonas Salk would have the breakthrough discovery that led to the polio vaccine. Years later, he would say…

Today, the discovery that Salk made in that Italian monastery has impacted millions. Polio has been eradicated from nearly every nation in the world. Did inspiration just happen to strike Jonas Salk while he was at the monastery? Or was he right in assuming that the environment impacted his thinking? And perhaps more importantly, what does science say about the connection between our environment and our thoughts and actions? And how can we use this information to live better lives?

The Link Between Brains and Buildings

Researchers have discovered a variety of ways that the buildings we live, work, and play in drive our behavior and our actions. The way we react and respond is often tied to the environment that we find ourselves in. For example, it has long been known that schools with more natural light provide a better learning environment for students and test scores often go up as a result. (Natural light and natural air are known to stimulate productivity in the workplace as well.)

Additionally, buildings with natural elements built into them help reduce stress and calm us down (think of trees inside a mall or a garden in a lobby). Spaces with high ceilings and large rooms promote more expansive and creative thinking.

So what does this link between design and behaviour mean for us? Change Your Environment, Change Your Behaviour. Researchers have shown that any habit you have — good or bad — is often associated with some type of trigger or cue. Recent studies (like this one) have shown that these cues often come from your environment. This is important because most of us live in the same home, go to the same office, and eat in the same rooms day after day. And that means you are constantly surrounded by the same environmental triggers and cues.

If our behavior is often shaped by our environment and we keep working, playing, and living in the same environment, then it’s no wonder that it can be difficult to build new habits. Studies show that it is easier to change our behavior and build new habits when we change our environment.

We are more reliant on environmental triggers than we’d like to think. In one study conducted on “habits vs. intentions,” researchers found that students who transferred to another university were the most likely to change their daily habits. Those habits were easier to change than the control group because they weren’t exposed to familiar external cues.

The mirrors research on the stimulus control theory, or the effect of a stimulus on behaviour shows that techniques involving stimulus control have even been successfully used to help people with insomnia. In short, those who had trouble falling asleep were told to only go to their room and lie in their bed when they were tired. If they couldn’t fall asleep, they were told to get up and change rooms.

Strange advice, but over time, researchers found that by associating the bed with ‘It’s time to go to sleep’ and not with other activities (reading a book, just lying there, etc.), participants were eventually able to quickly fall asleep due to the repeated process: it became almost automatic to fall asleep in their bed because a successful trigger had been created. Perhaps we are more like Pavlov’s dogs than first imagined, it is interesting to see how small cues can greatly impact our behaviour.

If we are struggling to think creatively, then going to a wide open space or moving to a room with more natural light and fresh air might help us solve the problem. (Like it seemingly did for Jonas Salk). Meanwhile, if we need to focus and complete a task, research shows that it’s more beneficial to work in a smaller, more confined room with a lower ceiling (without making ourselves feel claustrophobic, of course).

And perhaps most important, simply moving to a new physical space — whether it’s a different room or halfway around the world — will change the cues that we encounter and thus our thoughts and behaviors. Quite literally, a new environment leads to new ideas.

Putting This Into Practice

In the future, we hope that architects and designers will use the connection between design and behavior to build hospitals where patients heal faster, schools where children learn better, and homes where people live happier. That said, we can start making changes right now. We do not have to be a victim of our environment. We can also be the architect of it. Here is one simple 2-step prescription for altering our environment so that we can stick with good habits and break bad habits:

Our environment can also be tweaked to make certain tasks more difficult or easier to do. Here are some examples…

These are just a few examples, but the point is that shifting our behaviour is much easier when we shift to the right environment. Stanford professor BJ Fogg refers to this approach as “designing for laziness.” In other words, change your environment so that your default or “lazy” decision is a better one.

By designing our environment to encourage the good behaviours and prevent the bad behaviours, we make it far more likely that we’ll stick to long-term change. Our actions today are often a response to the environmental cues that surround us. If we want to change our behaviour, then we have to change those cues.

Content Curated By: Dr Shoury Kuttappa.

WHY DO WE DO WHAT WE DO?

How do we differentiate between needs and motives or motivations.? How not to be ruled by feelings, habits, impulses, and thoughts.?

Varieties of Motivation

One of the fundamental premises of the practice of Nonviolent Communication is that everything we do is an attempt to meet core human needs. Much can be said about what exactly counts as a need, and the difference between needs and the many strategies we employ in our attempts to meet them. There is no claim within this practice that we are all the same; only that we share the same core needs, and they serve as the only reason for us to do anything.

If everything is motivated by one or more human needs, then why are we even talking about varieties of motivations? It’s because what varies is the degree of awareness we bring to the relationship between our needs and our actions. Our various cultures don’t generally cultivate in us the practice of knowing what we want.

On the contrary, much of socialization is focused on questioning what we want and telling us any number of reasons for acting other than because we want something. This is a tragedy of enormous proportions, because what then happens is that what we want goes underground. We continue to act based on our needs without knowing what they are, and therefore with far less choice than we might otherwise do.

When we are not aware of needs, we act based on our feelings, thoughts, habits, or impulse. In essence, each of these types of motivation can serve as a way to deny our responsibility for our choices. Although each of these is connected with our needs, unless we specifically engage with the underlying needs, we are likely to continue to act with less choice than we can cultivate and achieve through becoming need-literate.

Feelings and Thoughts

Unless we develop some kind of practice of conscious engagement with our feelings, most of us experience them and respond to them as internal demands for action or avoidance of action whether or not it’s what we want. Fear, shame, or guilt may lead us to avoidance, while anger or excitement leads us to move toward an action.

When we instantly translate feelings into actions, we sidestep any understanding of what we truly want. Because of the strength with which our feelings “command” action, we don’t have the opportunity to use feelings as what they are designed for, which is to be sources of information. Feelings serve a signal function. They arise from the constant stream of data about what is happening, and our ceaseless evaluation, under the radar of our awareness, as to whether or not our needs are met.

Listening to our feelings carefully allow us to trace them to the underlying needs that give rise to them. Choice lies in the capacity to understand, access, and embrace the underlying needs.

Thoughts mask our choice in a different way from how our feelings do. When we act based on what we should do, must do, or have to do, what we can’t do, what others will say, what is “rational and reasonable” or “appropriate,” we are linking our actions to something that is fundamentally external to us.

Feelings compel us from within, while thoughts compel us from without. The reason this is of such vital importance is that freedom is about choosing rather than being compelled. Choice is always internal: we may, and often will, take into consideration the effect of our actions and choices on others. Still, there is a world of difference between believing we have to do something and choosing it based on what’s important to us underneath the “have to.”

Indeed, our thoughts contain information about what is important to us, and in that way, they too are expressions of our needs. They usually lack the vibrancy of feelings, the sense of being alive, whether happily or not, in the experience of the feeling. They appear to be more “in control” and therefore give us a sense of being more at choice than when we act based on feelings.

The essence about connecting with ourselves at the level of needs rather than feelings or thoughts is that we then feel both the vibrancy of life that comes from being internally connected and the sense of clear choice that comes from knowing what’s important.

Habits

While feelings and thoughts give us the illusion of choice, habits are recognized by most of us as lacking choice. As a result, when people begin the practice of learning to connect with their needs, they easily fall into judging their habits (Self judgement).

Part of the difficulty with transforming habits into choice is that we often are not even aware of taking an action based on a habit. It’s only at other times, away from the action, that we may become aware that we acted based on a habit. Those are also the times we are most likely to judge ourselves for habitual behaviour. What makes it even more challenging is that finding the needs that give rise to the habit requires deep sleuthing/ reflections because the habits were formed in the past, when specific actions may have been powerful strategies to meet certain needs, and those very same strategies may no longer attend to those needs.

Habits, by their nature, are designed to relieve us from having to choose freshly each time, so it’s not likely to be easy to regain choice. This is where compassion for self is essential. It’s only when we have sufficient tenderness toward how hard changing habits can be that we can create a different motivation for the process of change itself: instead of being motivated by “should” thinking, we can find the needs that lead us to want to engage with the habit.

Freedom and authenticity are often powerful motivators. Embracing all our needs in relation to our habits may shift the emotional quality of trying to make a change, for example, from urgency to calm resolve. This grounding can help us mourn any unmet needs that the habits lead to, envision other strategies to meet as many needs as we can, and develop clear requests of ourselves to support the desired change.

It is critical to reach full connection with the needs that lead us to choose the habitual behaviour. This connection is essential for making change that is grounded in self-compassion. Without this quality, we cannot have sufficient internal cooperation, and the attempt to change is likely to be a self-demand that will recreate internal resistance to the change.

Impulse and Intuition

The final contender for being a primary motivator is impulse. Like habits, impulses are recognized as lacking choice and are therefore judged. Contrary to habits, though, impulses appear as “natural” and full of life. Sometimes, especially when we have been enslaved by habits and painful thought patterns, responding to our impulses and acting on them can seem like a welcome relief. They can give us the illusion of coming back to ourselves.

Clearly, impulses are completely spontaneous, and yet they may not necessarily be related to what we truly want. Our impulses can arise for so many reasons, and by themselves, we have no clear way to assess their capacity to realise needs.

Intuition seems to come from a different internal place, and doesn’t have the force of an impulse. An impulse, like a feeling, has a quality of propelling us to action. Intuition’s voice is soft and requires careful attention to discern what is being said. Some of us honor and cherish our intuition, recognizing it as a source of wisdom, directing access to what we want without the painstaking effort of discerning what our needs are.

**Source Credits: a) The book- Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman . . . . . . . . . . b) The book- Nudge by -Richard H. Thaler & Cass R. Sunstein . . . . . . . . . . . .c) The book- Predictably Irrational-by Dan Ariely . . . . . . . . . d) The book- Atomic Habitsby James Clear

Curated By: Dr Shoury Kuttappa