by Mark Schiffman, M.S.
“I never get enough sleep. I stay up late at night, cause I’m Night Guy. Night Guy wants to stay up late. ‘What about getting up after five hours sleep?’ ‘Oh that’s Morning Guy’s problem. That’s not my problem, I’m Night Guy. I stay up as late as I want.’ So you get up in the morning, you’re exhausted, groggy… ‘oooh I hate that Night Guy!’ See, Night Guy always [messes up] Morning Guy. There’s nothing Morning Guy can do. The only thing Morning Guy can do is try and oversleep often enough so that Day Guy loses his job and Night Guy has no money to go out anymore.” –Jerry Seinfeld, Season 5: Glasses.
Dr. Howard Rachlin, Emeritus Research Professor at Stony Brook University, was interviewed in a CBT Radio Podcast a few years ago. Dr. Rachlin was talking about the science of self-control from a behavioral standpoint. In his research, he studies patterns of choice over time and how those patterns affect self-control. Toward the end of the podcast, while he was giving practical advice on how to increase self-control by changing patterns of behavior, he very cleverly referenced this Seinfeld monologue.
Often times we look at different aspects of ourselves as competing. Night Guy wants to party late, and this really makes things different for Morning Guy. Dr. Rachlin argues that we would be much more effective at creating more adaptive habits if we had these different parts of ourselves on the same team. If Morning Guy has a hard time getting up in the morning, what can Night Guy do differently to help Morning Guy succeed?
Dr. Rachlin self-disclosed that he had two different aspects of himself when it comes to writing. Part of him has a really difficult time getting started to write, so he procrastinates. However, once he starts writing he has no problem being productive. The key, is for the ‘Productive Writer’ to make it easier for the ‘Pre-Writing Procrastinator’ to get started writing. Dr. Rachlin’s ‘Productive Writer’ helps out his friend ‘Pre-Writing Procrastinator’ by making an outline or a plan of what he will start writing about the next time. This makes it much easier for him to get started writing the next day.
Dr. Rachlin’s ideas about having the different parts of our selves assist one another to be more productive are very relevant to REBT. We all have our ‘Rational Guy’ and our ‘Irrational Guy’. Sometimes they are not on the same team and that could lead to negative outcomes. We would do well to work on getting them to help each other out. In a future blog we will suggest strategies as to how ‘Rational Guy’ can help ‘Irrational Guy’ not get in to so much trouble.
