Free Will, Part 5: Self-Improvement and Mental Health

Today’s discussion of determinism is about how it can help us make positive changes in our lives and be more mentally healthy. 

If you’re just coming to this series, you may want to read the other posts first:

• Part 1: Should You Deconstruct Free Will?
• Part 2: Contextualizing Agency in Mormonism
• Part 3: Fatalism in a World Without Magic
• Part 4: Moral Responsibility and Criminal Justice

If you’ve already read parts one through four, then full steam ahead!

A Background of Mixed Messages

In the church, you probably got mixed messages, philosophically speaking, about how to achieve positive behaviors and avoid doing forbidden things.

For example, you might have been told to be morally strong/virtuous and “just say no” to drugs or premarital sex. That’s a free will approach.

But you may have also gotten a more deterministic approach that focused on controlling the factors that can lead to one doing drugs or having extramarital sex.

For example, various young adult leaders gave my classes a million suggestions for how to not have sex outside of marriage. Don’t be alone in the dark; don’t go in their bedroom; don’t have a long engagement. We were told, “you can’t rely on your making the right choice in the moment. You need to decide in advance what you’re going to do.” 

Because Mormonism is compatibilist, it often offers a mixture of practical suggestions and straight shame in an attempt to produce certain outcomes. And while your goals for what outcomes you want now are likely different (for example, you likely believe that it’s fine to have sex outside of marriage as long as everyone’s consenting and no one is cheating), you might still unconsciously fall back on a free will approach that leaves you with shame.

Patterns of behavior die hard. So does shame.

Let’s talk about some common situations in which you may still be trying to willpower your way through with a free will approach.

Habits and Goals

First, you may be beating yourself up when you don’t reach goals and form positive habits rather than looking at why you haven’t been able to reach your goals and working with what you can. 

A common situation is with nutrition. Let’s say I have a tendency to binge on sugar, which I do, and that I want to eat less sugar in the form of ice cream, which I also do. Mostly.  

Shaming myself for not having enough willpower is unlikely to help, but it’s the nutrition solution I’m most familiar with. Determinism, however, would suggest that I look at my body chemistry and emotional needs. I already want to be healthy; that’s why I feel shame and avoid telling my husband when I eat more ice cream at once than is advisable at once.

When I look for reasons I’m eating too much sugar, I may determine that I have cravings that compel me to come back to the ice cream because of my insulin or glucose levels. If so, I could eat ice cream with fruit and nuts so that the protein and fiber slow the arrival of the sugar into my bloodstream. Or maybe I should buy ice cream in those overpriced pints so that if I do eat it all, I can’t eat that much at once. 

Another example is any habit you try to form if you have ADHD. People with ADHD often are told or feel that they are lazy, but in fact their brains just work in a different way and so need different solutions. If you have ADHD or a brain that acts similarly, you can look at tools and organizational ideas that other people with similar brains have created to be more successful. You can work with a psychologist who specializes in ADHD and can explain to you how your brain works. 

You don’t just need to work harder or care more. If you want to get something done, the secret is not just wanting it more. That’s just another form of insisting that if you have faith, miracles will happen.

Social Attitudes and Self-Esteem

Next, let’s talk social attitudes and how they affect self-esteem. 

Our society—and most societies, but I’m specifically referring to Western and American society here—tends to be misogynistic, white supremacist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, fatphobic, and more. 

And because you can’t just magically opt your brain out of social conditioning, you’ve inevitably internalized negative messages about yourself and others that make you feel shame and reduce your empathy for others. The way to counter that messaging is not just by being strong and ignoring it. Social conditioning is going to affect you. It’s in your head, affecting your biases already, and you don’t have to feel ashamed about that.

But you’re still in charge of what’s in your brain, influencing your decisions. To counter our negative conditioning, we need to seek out feminist, anti-racist, LGBTQ+-affirming, anti-ableist, and body positive messages so that we can slowly change our social conditioning to something more positive. We also need to set appropriate boundaries to protect our mental health from messages that could get us to view ourselves or others in prejudiced ways. 

Abuse

On a related note, you can’t willpower your way out of abuse affecting you emotionally.

This is why plenty of celebrities have had to go off social media when they’ve been harassed and subjected to verbal abuse online. They weren’t being cowardly, just realistic about how brains work. You’re likely to internalize messages you’re continually exposed to. 

If you’re being abused and can safely remove yourself from the situation, then doing so may be your best option. 

Mental Illness

My last topic for this post is mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety. The church has increasingly couched teachings about happiness among disclaimers that their advice does not apply to situations involving clinical depression, but you still may have been told that you should be able to just choose to be happy or use a positive attitude of gratitude to overcome depression. 

If you believe in free will, then you likely believe that you choose your emotions and have conscious control of them. Even after you stop believing in Mormonism, it’s very easy to keep this attitude because you may not realize you have it. It’s just the water you’re swimming in.

However, determinism affirms what you’d learn in therapy—that we don’t generate or control our emotions so much as we observe and manage them. 

There’s a lot we can quote and say about church teachings about happiness and how they affect people with mental illness, but for now, I’d encourage you to watch for ways in which you still may be expecting yourself to use free will to be happy. 

For example, you may think that you should be able to change your thinking patterns without a therapist’s help. Or you may think that maybe a therapist could help you with your thought patterns but that you shouldn’t need medication. 

One important moment for me was when my doctor very kindly explained to me that depression can be caused by a lack of necessary chemicals and that being opposed to taking antidepressants was similar to being opposed to putting a cast on a broken leg. I knew that and wasn’t opposed to antidepressants in general, but I still unconsciously had the attitude that I personally shouldn’t need medication. 

Sure, happiness can be influenced by our attitude. But the thing is, your brain wants to be happy. So if you’re not and haven’t been, there’s a reason, and it’s probably something someone can help you with. If you get help, you may be able to address that reason, whether you could benefit from cognitive behavioral therapy to help with thought patterns or need medication to help with your brain chemistry. 

Even if you technically have the things you need to help yourself be happy, you shouldn’t expect yourself to know what to do without guidance. For example, yes, changing your thought patterns can help with depression, and you can do that with your brain, which you already have, but without knowledge of cognitive behavioral therapy, you still can’t do it. 

In the Wizard of Oz, Dorothy had the ruby/silver slippers on her feet the whole time, but until Glinda told her how to use them, Dorothy had no way of knowing that she had the power to get back to Kansas. How was she supposed to guess that she could’ve just clicked her heels and talked about home?

Seriously, Glinda, you should have mentioned that back in Munchkin Land. Yes, Dorothy would’ve believed you. She believed you when you told her that she needed to walk down a yellow brick road until she got to a wizard, didn’t she? 

Like, Dorothy, you don’t need to feel ashamed that you didn’t magically figure out what the solution was on your own. And there’s no shame in having believed you can power your way through your problems with agency either. That’s what you were taught your whole life. Even if walking the yellow brick road to see the wizard isn’t what worked, you did it because it was your best option based on what you knew, and our brains respond to social conditioning.

You’re not weak for being human. 

And that’s a decent tagline for determinism.