“If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
This phrase is known as Maslow’s Hammer, and is his rather famous quote about the mental bias we have for something that is well known to us. Abraham Maslow was an influential psychologist, most memorable to me in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which essentially stated that people need basic physiological needs met to be able to move into higher level psychological development and self fulfillment.
In medicine we are constantly discussing cognitive bias, because it’s a hazard of the job. It’s important to use your training and judgement to diagnose, but it’s also important to notice when you’re trying to make a diagnosis fit a constellation of symptoms that doesn’t quite make sense. Most of us are susceptible to this in our daily lives.
Say you gained some weight, fallen off your exercise routine, have found yourself more anxious or depressed. Our cognitive bias in these situations is to return to the tool we know, that we’ve used before to try and solve the problem it had solved in the past. Sometimes this works! But then sometimes it doesn’t and many times we respond to this failure as though it were a personal failure in character, “What’s wrong with me?”
More often than not, we are just different people that we were when we used this tool last. So, we may have the right tool, but it’s the wrong time. Or, we may have the wrong tool for this time. It’s important in the face of a setback like this to look for new ways to support yourself in your goals. Just because the first thing you tried didn’t work, when it had in the past, doesn’t mean that there isn’t a new tool that you can learn that will help you now. Getting curious about why this particular tool didn’t work, asking yourself what about it isn’t working, and being open to trying new things is a very important part of having long term success with your health and wellness.
Journaling about your feelings around your goals and the failure of the initial tool can help you identify what about that tool is not working for you. Jumping in and trying new things, even if you’re skeptical, helps you get exposure to more types of tools that can be of use to you. Reading about different methodologies, hiring a coach are all ways to expose yourself to new information and tools to reach your goals. The only thing I strongly encourage you to do, is to not get stuck thinking the hammer is your only option. If you’re open to learning and trying out new things, you’ll soon find yourself equipped with a shop full of tools, which helps you be nimble in the face of all the obstacles that life throws at you.
Coach Sarah, FNP-BC, MSN