The marshmallow test and mental illness
“The Circles of Your Mind” - in the middle of four concentric circles of green, blue, yellow and red watercolor and ink is a fifth circle made up of one ring of each color. The other circles are inscribed with a selection of emotions from the feeling wheel like joy, hurt, lonely and guilty.
Warning: contains discussion of suicide
Quick show of hands, who knows what I mean by “the marshmallow test”? Why is it that a 1972 study based on 32 children choosing between eating one marshmallow now or two marshmallows in fifteen minutes became educational policy? In the late 1980s a few follow up studies were done that purported to show that “children who were able to wait longer at age 4 or 5 became adolescents whose parents rated them as more academically and socially competent, verbally fluent, rational, attentive, planful, and able to deal well with frustration and stress.” (Mischel, Shoda and Peake, 1988) Well who wouldn’t want that?
The predictive power of the marshmallow test supposedly functions because the test measures the ability to delay gratification, and that ability is associated with being able to work harder. Turns out the test mostly just shows if the child’s recent experiences have been reliable or unreliable. A 2018 replication study concluded that once you account for the above and the difference in socioeconomic stability, “associations between delay time and measures of behavioral outcomes at age 15 were much smaller [than originally reported] and rarely statistically significant.” (Watts, Duncan and Quan, 2018) In the meantime it seems no one stopped to think about what happens to children that you train to choose pain over pleasure with the promise of future reward.
All of us who did what we were told - behaved at school, got good grades, did extracurricular activities so we could get into a good university, and then worked hard at university so we could get a good job that we also work hard at - got the short end of the stick. Pain is there to tell us not to do something, pleasure is there to tell us to do it. Teaching kids that they should seek discomfort on the basis that “it is the right thing to do” or “it will be worth it later” rewrites the wiring.
I didn’t understand why after I had completed all the steps, I was miserable in my “good job”. My mother said that jobs aren’t meant to be fun, and that finance pays the most relative to the hours and educational experience required. The irony is my mother loves her job, but belittles the idea of someone “pursuing their passion”.
I was miserable because I wasn’t doing what I wanted. I didn’t even know what that was. I was spending 60 hours working, 56 sleeping, and at least 20 handling life admin (commuting, chores, appointments), leaving approximately 32 hours of freedom. I partook in all the hedonistic pursuits culture told me make life worth living - food, sex, travel, shopping, live music, art. No matter how good I made those 38 hours, they didn’t make the other 130 feel worth living. I could max them out with pleasure, but then Sunday evening would roll around and I’d be confronted with the fact that I’d rather have 0 good hours and 0 bad ones.
I thought I’d sorted it when I switched careers. I was working fewer hours and the work was more pleasant. I did feel better for a little while, but when I settled into my new life as a tree officer in south London I found the discontent waiting for me. I hated having to be capable of working every Monday to Friday 9 to 5. I hated feeling like everything I was doing was being judged, like I had to be sacrificing myself for some greater good. My mother thinks I would have been better off if I hadn’t been given enough money not to need employment; I think I’d be dead. In the depths of my most recent depressive episode my mind told me that if I didn’t quit my job I wouldn’t survive it.
So I quit. Even with the money there’s no guarantee I’ll make it, though I’m feeling much better now that I do things I want to do and don’t do the things I don’t want to do. Seems like a simple course of action, but it’s the opposite of the way I’ve been conditioned.
