Unfinished Business, or the Zeigarnik Effect
In which we consider the compulsion to close loops
I.
Scene: your favorite restaurant. You’re sitting at a table of ten people - friends, family, colleagues, whatever - and you’re giving your order to the waiter. He nods, notes it, and takes the order of the person next to you.
He heads to the kitchen and passes along the order.
Thirty minutes pass. Food’s ready.
The waiter returns and, from memory, puts the right dish in front of the right person. Pretty impressive given that he’s probably done dozens more tables in the meantime.
Five minutes later someone asks the waiter about your table and who ordered what. He doesn’t remember.
It’s not amnesia.
It’s called the Zeigarnik effect and was first described by Lithuanian-Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik around 1927 (following, indeed, a restaurant visit). In short, the Zeigarnik effect suggests that we tend to remember unfinished or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks. Zeigarnik attributed it to unresolved subconscious tensions that keep the brain clicking on all its squishy cylinders. Since then, the effect has been used to (try to) explain things like the importance of taking breaks during studying, cliffhangers, customer attention, and so on.
Today, the status of the Zeigarnik effect (as with many things in psychology, if we’re being honest) is not one of unanimous acceptance. Context, it seems, matters. For example, unplanned interruptions tend to have a more significant Zeigarnik effect.
After that long intro, I think that the strength of the effect depends on the person. Let me rephrase that, I think that some people have brains that get caught easier on open loops.
II.
In this context, a loop is: think about action - act - get result.
If that process is interrupted, it haunts us. Thinking of it like this allows us to reconsider the Zeigarnik effect as the basic human need for closure. Our brains don’t like unfinished business.
These thought-action-result loops can break at different points. If they break early, it’s often because we sabotage ourselves. Impostor syndrome, anyone? Those breaks are also the ones we, on average, regret more. This study, for example, finds that the Zeigarnik effect could play a role in why:
… people think about their biggest regrets of inaction more frequently than their biggest regrets of action.
We lament the road(s) not taken more than breaking down on the road we ended up on. It has become well-known that, when you ask around in a nursing home, the most significant regret the people there express is not being their true selves, not living life on their terms. The roads not taken, in other words.
Those are all normal, human thoughts, but what happens when they’re out of control? Many affective disorders (think depression, anxiety, etc.) are characterized by, among other things, intrusions or intrusive thoughts. One of the factors that contribute to the persistence of these intrusions is… yep, the Zeigarnik effect.
Brain, meet broken loop.
Upon introspection, my loops usually break early. So many ideas, so little actual action. Impostor syndrome meets paralysis by (over)analysis, methinks.
But loops can break later in the process as well, between action and result. in this case, external influences tend to play a (relatively) larger role. Consider a broken heart. You’ve had the thought (they are interesting/attractive), and you’ve taken action '(asked them out and together developed a relationship aimed at a long-term partnership). Then, the breakup. Your intended loop, aka a (life?)long partnership, is broken. When loops between different people mismatch, perhaps one has to break… (Which is not to say that breakups can’t sometimes be the best way forward for the people involved.)
Heart, meet broken loop.
The challenge then is to find closure in another way - accept that you weren’t as compatible as you thought, meet someone new, etc. Close the loop.
III.
Not all open loops are broken, though.
Under the right conditions, a purposefully open loop can be helpful for motivation. This is another eponymous effect, the Hemingway effect. When asked how much one should write every day, author Ernest Hemingway answered:
The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck.
Leave the loop open. In writers’ terms, this is often phrased as ‘leaving breadcrumbs’. Don’t finish writing at the end of a chapter or scene. Write the first sentence of the following chapter/scene and the next day you’ll be (more) motivated to get going.
But for this to work, there are two important conditions:
You have to purposefully choose to leave the loop open.
You have to have a structure or a plan. (This might be why, even though they can sometimes be intimidating, to-do lists work for a lot of people.)
Broken loops, closed loops…
Let’s briefly introduce a bit more complexity, most of which is complete speculation on my part. I like to complicate things in case you hadn’t noticed yet. *evil laugh*
I think loops are rarely independent. Consider:
Loop chains. One loop closing opens another one, like unlocking new levels or achievements in a game. With some imagination, we might consider gamification and progress trackers as including the Zeigarnik effect. Practice and progressive overload could be good examples here as well. Work toward a goal and when you reach it, set another one. (Here’s more on practice, training, and visualization.)
Epiloops. Where loop chains are sequential, epiloops (yes, I made that up to resemble epicycles) are parallel. Think of having an overarching goal with many subgoals you can work on quasi-simultaneously. High-level athletes in specific sports, for example, might have strength, agility, and sport-specific goals they train on. Or building a business requires you (and your colleagues, if applicable) to simultaneously work on the product/service, marketing, relationship management, and so on.
Each of the loops in an epiloop can also spin off a loop chain, but I’m already getting a bit seasick with all this looping.
Back to the topic at hand to close the loop. Do you feel ‘stuck’? Perhaps it’s worthwhile to do some introspection and find the broken loop that keeps your mind circling back to the same intrusive thoughts over and over.
I know, easier said than done. I’m very much poking my own broken loops and those bastards aren’t very cooperative. Whatever it is, I hope you find closure or motivation and can start a new loop.
The heart of Thinking Ahead keeps thumping because of you. Thanks for that!