MindCraft Challenges

In 1928, Maria Ovsiankina reported that people tend to resume interrupted tasks as soon as they have the opportunity. More recent research has found that unfinished work tasks can lead to intrusive thoughts over the weekend and that people will persist in completing even boring tasks without rewards. Given that procrastination is a stress response that involves delaying the start of a task, we can harness the Ovsiankina effect to complete unpleasant tasks that we would otherwise put off.

Challenge: Choose a task that you don't want to do--it can be effortful, unpleasant, boring, or stressful. Ask someone that you can be accountable to watch you while you get started on the task for 10 minutes. After 10 minutes, they can leave you to complete the task on your own. Pay attention to your motivations. Once you have started the task, do you feel an urge to complete it?

Read More:
Many studies support the Ovsiankina effect
https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-025-05000-w
Unfinished tasks lead to intrusive thoughts
https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph14121606
People persist on even boring tasks
https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167214557008

In Self-Determination Theory, there are three basic psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. What should people do when their basic psychological needs are not met? One thing that people can do is to seek out supportive people and groups that would better meet their basic psychological needs. However, we can also choose to intentionally engage in activities that meet those basic psychological needs.

Challenge: take the challenge described in Behzadnia and FatahModares (2023) where you choose an activity that meets one of the basic needs each day for a week (see the instructions in Table 2 on page 70). This challenge will work best if you are in a situation where your basic psychological needs are not being met. Track whether your well-being, motivation, and need satisfaction improve by intentionally engaging in those activities.

Read More
A brief introduction to basic psychological needs
https://doi.org/10.1037/0708-5591.49.1.14
The Behzadnia and FatahModares task
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-022-09968-9
Basic psychological needs are motives
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6494.2009.00589.x

Actors involve their bodies and emotions in learning, with remarkable results. These results are part of a broader pattern in the study of memory known as the enactment effect: when people act out an instruction or a pattern, their memory is more effective than when they simply hear it.

Challenge: How can you use the enactment effect? If what you are learning has associated spatial information (a diagram, a process, or a sequence) or can be converted to that information, you can act out the layout or sequence of the information by talking while you move your hand or body through the space. For example, rather than just looking at a Krebs Cycle diagram, you might walk the cycle while gesturing to describe what is happening at each step. Think about how your movement can point to the next step or idea: goal-directed movement is the key, not just movement without any purpose!

Read More
Subject-performed tasks improve memory
https://doi.org/10.3758/PBR.16.3.524
https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03194399
Goal-directed movement is key for actors’ memory
https://doi.org/10.1080/01638530701498911

People can change their personality traits by choosing and completing actions that stretch them toward desired personality change. Nathan Hudson and his colleagues demonstrated this in a study where people could choose actions that shifted them toward extraversion (E), agreeableness (A), conscientiousness (C), emotional stability (S), or openness to experience (O).

Challenge: I've created a web app where you can randomly generate your next challenge. Try these challenges for a week and see if your personality starts to move in the direction of the tasks. Hudson’s original study took place over 15 weeks. We don't have 15 weeks, so you might have to engage in actions more frequently than the one Hudson asked of his students per week. (You can find a copy of the list of 250 tasks on LearningHub under today's class.)

https://www.cognopod.com/sketch/COFC/ 

Read More
250 tasks to change personality
https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000221
Personality changes according to desired change
https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000021
Therapy changes personality
https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000088

Today, we discussed how intentional activities contribute to happiness. The fit of those intentional activities with your identity is also important. Sonja Lyubomirsky has developed an instrument to help people identify which activities might be a good choice for a person based on their motivations for doing the activity.

Challenge: Take the Person-Activity Fit Diagnostic at https://pathtohappier.com/. The score for each type of activity will appear after you rate each of the five motivations for that activity. The activity or activities with the highest score are good fits for your current motivational profile. Try one of these activities for a week and monitor your happiness and sense of well-being. You can take a broad well-being inventory at https://psytests.org/life/ohien.html to track your well-being if you answer based on the last day or so each time.

Read More
Changing goals and activities promotes happiness
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2007.00002.x
Simple activities increase well-being.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721412469809