Day 25

Learning Targets:

• Describe the continuum of consciousness
• Analyze the cultural perspective of drug use and consciousness

Opener:  Why do you think that Americans are so quick to seek medication to escape consciousness?

Activity #1 - Quick Read from a Canadian Textbook https://opentextbc.ca/introductiontopsychology

1.  Which of these escapes do you think holds the greatest potential for harm?  Why?

2.  What types of stressors do you think people are most frequently looking to escape?

3.  What might be some healthier ways for us to alter our consciousness to cope with stress/anxiety?

Psychology in Everyday Life: The Need to Escape Everyday Consciousness

We may use recreational drugs, drink alcohol, overeat, and gamble for fun, but in some cases these normally pleasurable behaviors are abused, leading to exceedingly negative consequences for us. We frequently refer to the abuse of any type of pleasurable behavior as an “addiction,” just as we refer to drug or alcohol addiction.

Roy Baumeister (Baumeister, 1991) has argued that the desire to avoid thinking about the self (what he calls the “escape from consciousness”) is an essential component of a variety of self-defeating behaviours. Their approach is based on the idea that consciousness involves self-awareness, the process of thinking about and examining the self. Normally we enjoy being self-aware, as we reflect on our relationships with others, our goals, and our achievements. But if we have a setback or a problem, or if we behave in a way that we determine is inappropriate or immoral, we may feel stupid, embarrassed, or unlovable. In these cases self-awareness may become burdensome. And even if nothing particularly bad is happening at the moment, self-awareness may still feel unpleasant because we have fears about what might happen to us or about mistakes that we might make in the future.

Baumeister argues that when self-awareness becomes unpleasant, the need to forget about the negative aspects of the self may become so strong that we turn to altered states of consciousness. Baumeister believes that in these cases we escape the self by narrowing our focus of attention to a particular action or activity, which prevents us from having to think about ourselves and the implications of various events for our self-concept.

Baumeister has analyzed a variety of self-defeating behaviours in terms of the desire to escape consciousness. Perhaps most obvious is suicide — the ultimate self-defeating behaviour and the ultimate solution for escaping the negative aspects of self-consciousness. People who commit suicide are normally depressed and isolated. They feel bad about themselves, and suicide is a relief from the negative aspects of self-reflection. Suicidal behaviour is often preceded by a period of narrow and rigid cognitive functioning that serves as an escape from the very negative view of the self brought on by recent setbacks or traumas (Baumeister, 1990).

Alcohol abuse may also accomplish an escape from self-awareness by physically interfering with cognitive functioning, making it more difficult to recall the aspects of our self-consciousness (Steele & Josephs, 1990). And cigarette smoking may appeal to people as a low-level distractor that helps them to escape self-awareness. Heatherton and Baumeister (1991) argued that binge eating is another way of escaping from consciousness. Binge eaters, including those who suffer from bulimia nervosa, have unusually high standards for the self, including success, achievement, popularity, and body thinness. As a result they find it difficult to live up to these standards. Because these individuals evaluate themselves according to demanding criteria, they will tend to fall short periodically. Becoming focused on eating, according to Heatherton and Baumeister, is a way to focus only on one particular activity and to forget the broader, negative aspects of the self.

Newman and Baumeister (1996) have argued that even the belief that one has been abducted by aliens may be driven by the need to escape everyday consciousness. Every day at least several hundred (and more likely several thousand) Americans claim that they are abducted by these aliens, although most of these stories occur after the individuals have consulted with a psychotherapist or someone else who believes in alien abduction. Again, Baumeister has found a number of indications that people who believe that they have been abducted may be using the belief as a way of escaping self-consciousness.

Activity #2 - Mini Lecture and Constructed Response - Psychoactive drugs and addictions

Close:  Student Questions and Psychology Today Presentation: