When college students head to campus, be it for the first time or the last, a barrage of warnings about things like drinking and safe sex greets them. Yet amid the hullabaloo, many students struggle with a form of destructive thinking that no one talks about. They think themselves into a dither, affecting their lives, relationships, happiness and potentially their future.
In their new book, “Binge Thinking: A Different Kind of College Hangover,” Zachary M. White, Ph.D., and Gino D. Borges, Ph.D., offer their view of what happens at college between admission and graduation.
The duo met as Ph.D. candidates at Purdue University. They themselves struggled with obsessive thinking as undergraduates. Later as professors, they watched their students bog down in negative patterns, and eventually identified five forms of binge thinking, including being tortured by having too much or too little, or isolating themselves. (See the list below.)
Rather than write a boring academic tome, packed with arcane references, White, 31, and Borges, 33, conceived the book as a series of conversation-driven parables, where students spiral into various thinking binges only to be saved by a character named “DB,” who shows them the way out. White and Borges, who are on a national speaking tour, explained binge thinking in a recent interview:
Q: How is binge thinking different from the typical angst of youth?
Borges: It’s more a similarity than a difference. The angst-ridden feelings are a symptom. Binge thinking is the cause. What we have done is help students understand that the source of the angst is external. Once they realize the source is outside of them, they instantly feel better, and they realize they are not alone.
Q: How do colleges and universities engender, encourage or reward binge thinking?
White: The culture of college rewards people who go to the end of the line. They don’t encourage you to say, “no.” They encourage you to pursue all opportunities available to you. I had students in my office, in my classes, who were the most admired and respected. They had 4.0s and belonged to 20 clubs or were presidents of fraternities or sororities. They would tell me how they were publicly successful; everyone told them they had it made. But they still felt unsatisfied.
Borges: I think that college probably over-rewards individual conquest and under-rewards the sharing of experiences and the sharing of struggles.
White: Once you walk onto a college campus, you share a tremendous amount. Yet, I’ve never seen a community built around the college experience itself. They are usually divided into different segments and interests and hobbies, which is fine, but there is this universal experience you cannot forget.
Q: What should students and parents look for or listen for?
Borges: The first part of each chapter shows the symptoms of each binge, when DB meets them he exposes how those symptoms are a byproduct of the college culture. He shows them how to reinstall choice, where the student chooses how to live, instead of just following the machine of college culture
White: Take the moment-abuser “Maya” (referenced in the book). Students are trained and rewarded for talking about their future. What happens is you develop this habit of becoming much more comfortable talking about what you’re going to do next week or why today’s activities are important to getting into grad school or medical school or getting a good job. It’s resume thinking. You develop the mentality that says, “I don’t do anything that isn’t directly tied to my future.”
If you become a moment abuser in college, you will likely continue to be a moment abuser in your life.
Q: What are the solutions to binge thinking?
White: We want students and parents to have the ability to recognize how the binge affects who they are and how talking about it introduces choice into their everyday life and makes them realize that there is not something wrong with them that college isn’t turning out to the be the best time of their lives every day.
Borge: The book helps people capture the conversations that go on in their heads and bring it out, so that they can make sense of it. Until it’s out of our heads, it defaults into the oh-it’s-just-me scenario.
Five patterns
In their new book, “Binge Thinking: A Different Kind of College Hangover,” Zachary M. White and Gino D. Borges identify five forms of binge thinking:
1. Tortured by the “too,” where students obsess about having too much or too little of everything.
2. Moment abuser, where students do things only because of where they will lead in the future.
3. Addicted to aloneness, where students see only the differences between people and isolate themselves.
4. Belongaholic, where students overcommit to activities and leadership roles for validation.
5. Perfect potentializer, where students become instantly and overly enamored of a person, place or opportunity and project an idyllic future, often only to be profoundly disappointed.
FOR INFORMATION on binge thinking, visit borgesandwhite.com.
