What You Need Is More Clickbait: how to use open loops to sustain motivation

I recently went to see Hayao Miyazaki’s “The Boy and The Heron.” The boy, Mahito, moves to a house in the countryside with his father, Shoichi, following the death of his mother, Hisako.

The sullen and grieving Mahito soon encounters the titular heron, a talking half-bird-half-man, who eventually leads Mahito into a parallel reality (or series of parallel realities) in search of Hisako.

Without spoiling the film (I recommend it), let me say that it shares some important qualities with another of Miyazaki’s films, Spirited Away: outlandish, unexplained occurrences.

The movie is filled with magical realism – fantastic creatures, sorcery, and supernatural forces that both operate within and govern from without the entire world-within-a-world that Mahito traverses.

Nothing is explained, and much of what is unexplained is not even named – you see things that defy the laws of our world that are not even acknowledged by the movie’s characters.

Even the ultimate resolution of the plot is shown in superficial glimpses, without the exhaustive summarizing clarity of, say, Hitchcock’s Psycho, where someone literally sits down to explain what you just witnessed. This is the opposite.

And, it worked. I enjoyed it, and, more importantly, many of its scenes and images still float through my mind.

What Miyazaki utilized here, something of which he is a master in general, is something called an open loop. Something introduced, perhaps even extensively developed, but not concluded. Click bait headlines and cliffhanger endings are both examples of open loops. The words “to be continued” create an open loop. The effect is perfectly familiar.

What you probably don’t know is that this phenomenon has a name: The Zeigarnik Effect, named after the Lithuanian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik who discovered it in 1927. To quickly summarize: recall of unfinished tasks is 90% greater than that of finished tasks. The famous example is of waiters who can remember complex orders right up until the moment the food is delivered. Once the food is delivered, the loop is closed, and information is almost entirely discarded from the memory.

As you’re about to learn, however, open loops are more than just an effective storytelling or marketing technique, more than a quaint finding to explain the behavior of restaurant workers.

An understanding of open loops can be nothing short of life changing. If you think I am exaggerating, read on.

Have you ever had a dating prospect ghost you? Have you ever felt uneasy as you waited for a reply to a text? Or while waiting to receive a letter of decision from a university admissions department? From an employer? The results of blood work? The results of a sporting event that you bet on?

Have you ever felt haunted by a conversation that you never had but needed to, and now the opportunity to do so seems lost forever? Have you ever abandoned a project, or given up on a hobby, or run away from a challenge, only to find yourself haunted by thoughts of what might have been?

These are also open loops. While they are a part of life, they can also build up to the point that they cause nontrivial emotional distress. Neuroses, anxiety, preoccupation – at the extreme end, these can cause workplace mishaps and car accidents.

More commonly, too many open loops cause people to procrastinate and feel defeated. The unresolved past is overcrowding your synaptic real estate, and there is little of you left to enjoy and contend with the present moment.

That’s life with too many open loops. Think of it like mental congestion. There is, however, an optimal amount of open loops to have in your life. The same way a good mystery keeps you engaged as the pieces gradually fall into place, you need unanswered questions driving you on. You need some unfinished business in your life to motivate you.

We are about to explore, then, the two ends of the open loop: how to open them, and how to close them.

How to create healthy levels of anticipation to keep you
motivated,
interested,
inspired,
focused,
and enthusiastic,

And how to clean up the past so that you can move through your days with a clear head and heart. Opening loops takes initiative, but closing loops takes emotional courage. We will discuss the cut and dry behaviors required for both.

PART ONE: OPENING LOOPS

How to open a loop: just start, don’t finish.

There’s no step too small for you to consider yourself to have started. The only step that doesn’t count is the one you don’t take. Do something. Do something, and leave it unfinished.

Here are some examples.

The bill arrives. You have to check your balances or possibly move funds around to pay it, but you also cannot procrastinate on it. Open the loop by writing out the check the second you open it, but don’t sign it or seal the envelope. Now you have something mid process nagging at you.

You receive a text you know you need to respond to, but can’t do so right now. Start typing a reply and abandon it mid sentence. It will be at the top of your messages.

You know you need to start prepping dinner? Open the refrigerator door. How long can you endure the fridge door left open?

If you’re a student, a writer, or someone trying to make more time for reading, use a pomodoro timer and stop mid sentence when your timer is up, for both reading and writing. It’s mildly annoying, and that’s the point.

I’ll bullet point some more ideas:

Put a plugged in vacuum cleaner in the middle of the room.

Put the book on the desk, opened to where you left off.

Turn the metronome on. That gets annoying fast.

Open the disorganized drawers. No longer “out of sight, out of mind.”

You’ll notice that this is a different approach from the “one and done” method of simply taking something all the way across the finish line in one sitting. Sometimes you can do that. Not every time. This method forces things into the front of your mind and raises the price of inaction. Open loops drive you nuts. Who was that man trapped inside the body of the heron?

PART TWO: CLOSING LOOPS

And that’s also why you have to close them. Having a small handful of open loops can make life interesting, challenging, and in a state of seemingly perpetual motion. There’s a fine line here, however. It’s really easy to fall behind. New things pile up quickly, but the unfinished business still sits there, eating up your mental energy.

Unfinished business from the past can weigh heavily on you. It can cause you to stagnate intellectually and emotionally, and make you unable to see the present for what it is – part of you really is trapped back there in an unfinished event from the past.

Here are just a handful of ways you might resolve some of them, freeing yourself to move on, removing the “bad debts” from your ledger.

Make a list.

This is simple enough. Spend a quiet afternoon writing down the various things you wish you had completed. Think of it as a brain dump: your job is to catalog as many unfinished things as possible, and nothing is too remote in time or too small. Dig it up, get it out, write it down.

That was probably exhausting, so take a walk to clear your head. Listen to some nice music. Smile at a dog. Remind yourself that there’s a whole world outside of your head waiting for you. We are clearing out the mental clutter, this time deep in the attic, for the sake of your participation in that world.

Come back to your list. Go through the items one by one and write down what a resolution for each of the items would look like. Only you know the answer. But write down the answer. And then assign a timeline to each of these items.

Put them into your calendar as tasks, and assign a reminder one week in advance, and then one day in advance, then the day of.

Spread these out so it doesn’t interrupt your life too much. Depending on what’s involved, give yourself a year.

Maybe you need to go through your closet and let go of a whole lot of things.
Maybe you need to repot plants,
clear out a drawer,
organize a garage,
repair or replace something,
address something from the past,
apologize to someone,
forgive someone,
pay someone back,
return something you borrowed,
or tell someone how you really feel.

In the words of therapist Adam Lane Smith, most people are just one serious conversation away from a better life. That conversation is probably long overdue, and you probably think about it often.

The subject of resolving what is unresolved from the past is a rather ambitious topic for the second half of a short newsletter. I barely scratched the surface here. Some people deal with this on an ongoing basis with the help of a therapist for years.

My attitude about it is simple: something is better than nothing, and you would be surprised by how capable you are once you get started. Over time, I’ve learned that things can be resolved. Sometimes that means formally declaring something to be finished. Nothing materially changes, and no conversation with another person takes place, but you say to yourself, this is where things are, and this is where I leave them. That is clarity. It defines the known unknowns, so to speak. It closes the loop: you are certain that no further action is called for.

In many cases, however, you can do something. You can fix things. You can go and do the thing left undone, in most cases, even if much time has gone by. And it feels good to do so. It lightens you, and reminds you that you are good, and effective, and that your actions have meaning. What you do matters, and it’s never too late to do the right thing and finish what you started.

If you were to tie up one loose end each month, for a year, how would you feel by this time next year?

There’s only one way to find out.

So to tie things up here, to close this loop, let’s review what we’ve discussed.

You need open ended questions driving you forward in your life. That is life. Life is about you moving forward through time in search of the thing that matters to you. You can systematically open these loops, these main quests and side quests, to direct the flow of your life.

You can also systematically go back and close the loops that were opened and abandoned for whatever reason. I dropped out of college in 2004. I went back and finished my degree years later. It felt wonderful, and I’m so glad that I did that for myself. Not just me, but for my parents as well.

I’ve repaid debts, apologized, forgave, and acknowledged the past to people who would never have brought these things up to me, but were very grateful that I took initiative.

What I gained from all that was peace of mind. And, in a very real way, permission to have a future. There was real energy and willpower of mine tied up in those unresolved events, and when I resolved them, I gained back that energy. Little by little, I was able to direct that energy toward future goals. I had the wherewithal, the credibility with myself, even a sense of moral worth, that had been lacking until the past was cleared up. I had no idea it was holding me back to the degree that it was.

I say this because while the past does not determine the future, your relationship to it does. As long as it matters to you, somewhere in your mind, then it’s real. You can’t talk yourself out of what your conscience tells you is important: you have to face it.

Do it, then, and watch the future open up to you. We only clean yesterday’s dishes to cook tonight’s dinner anyway. Get to it.

Thanks for reading, talk to you soon.

-Jas