Farther to Go!

Brain-Based Transformational Solutions

Procrastination Is NOT a Thing

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I just read another article about self-sabotage—which is also not a thing. Your brain does not have ill intentions toward you; believing that it does is irrational. This particular article used procrastination as evidence of the brain’s self-sabotaging tendencies.

The word procrastinate is meant to describe delaying or postponing taking a particular action: the emphasis is on not doing something. But when we’re awake we’re always doing something. Procrastinating doesn’t mean you’re sitting vacantly in a chair staring off into space or out a window not doing instead of cleaning the house or finishing a report or making that one phone call. No, it means you’re doing something else instead of the thing you think you should be doing. That seems obvious, right?

So why isn’t there a word for eating a cheeseburger for lunch when you planned to eat a salad? Why isn’t there a word for staying up late at night when you meant to get to bed before midnight? Why isn’t there a word for binge-watching a TV show when you intended to go to the gym? There’s only a word for doing one thing when you strongly believe you should be doing something else if it’s based on a real or self-imposed deadline.

There is no substantive difference between doing something other than the thing you think you should be doing, whether that involves what you eat, when you got to bed, how much exercise you do or don’t get, and say, when you complete a report or project.

All these incidences of doing something other than what you think you should be doing have a couple of things in common. One is the false belief that understanding the benefit of a particular behavior ought to automatically cause us to “do the right thing.” But understanding has no direct impact on behavior. So it’s completely unsurprising that we’re likely to do whatever we’ve been doing rather than do something different based on information or vague desires to shape up or be better.

Rewards ARE a Thing

Another is the fact that the brain moves toward what it believes will provide a reward and away from things it considers a threat. That means we’re inclined to do things that give us pleasure and avoid things that provide less pleasure or may even amp up stress neurochemicals.

If you like cleaning the house or writing reports or eating cheeseburgers or watching You Tube videos, you’re likely to do more of those things and less of other things. This is why we use rewards to motivate us to do things we don’t otherwise get pleasure from when we’re doing them but nevertheless want to have done. This is called using your brain. If you decide your problem is procrastination, however, you have diagnosed yourself with an imaginary condition that you have to explain (why do I sabotage myself?) and treat. Or you may simply use this imaginary condition to explain yourself to yourself and others. Neither approach will generate any change in behavior. There’s no solution to the problem of procrastination because procrastination is not a thing.

There is one difference between the behaviors that fall under the category of procrastination and other behaviors like the ones I used as examples. That difference is time. You can convince yourself you’ll choose the salad tomorrow or the next day; you can get to bed on time…eventually; you can start going to the gym next month. But if something has a deadline, you don’t have more time than that.

Nevertheless, moment-to-moment, the brain still moves toward what it thinks it will like and away from what it thinks it will dislike. A deadline in the future, with potential negative or positive consequences, is not compelling to the brain until the task becomes an emergency. Failure to eat a healthy diet or get enough sleep or enough exercise are not, moment-to-moment, perceived as emergencies by the brain because we believe that we have more time to get them right.

If you look at all these behaviors through the same lens, though, you can see that they all involve doing something in the present that we understand would be a good idea (good for us in one way or another) but that we don’t particularly want to do right now. We may believe that we should want to do them right now, but the fact is that we don’t.

The belief that we should want to do things that we don’t want to do because we know they’re good for us is one of the most counterproductive beliefs we can have. It’s an enormous obstacle on the path of creating any level of behavior change, let alone transformational change.

What would it look like if you gave this belief up? What might then be possible?

Although I haven’t mentioned specific neurotransmitters in this post, it is part of the series on neurotransmitters that both affect our behavior and are affected by our behavior.

Which Path Are You On?*

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As we know, dopamine is involved in many different aspects of our lives, including sleep, memory, mood, learning, and movement. Dopamine is also a significant component of the brain’s reward system and, as such, it’s the source of motivation. That’s why it’s so important in regard to behavior and behavior change.

There are four major dopamine pathways in the brain. The two that matter most to us here are the mesolimbic pathway and the mesocortical pathway. While both pathways motivate us, they motivate us in different ways and in different directions, indicated by the nicknames given to them: desire dopamine and control dopamine.

While dopamine is distributed throughout everyone’s brain, the amount and pattern of distribution is not the same for everyone. As a result, some of us have more dopamine in the control pathway and some of us have more dopamine in the desire pathway. And of course not everyone who has more dopamine in the control pathway has the same amount, which is also the case for dopamine in the desire pathway. Still others may have similar amounts of dopamine in both pathways.

Here’s a comparison of what a predominance of dopamine in one pathway compared to the other pathway looks like:

Desire dopamine generates craving for things, substances, people, situations—whatever is salient (important) to you. You desire (want) what you like and what matters to you.

Control dopamine generates a craving for achievement or accomplishment, which can range from completing multiple years of education in order to attain a degree or checking off boxes on a to-do list.

Having more desire dopamine doesn’t automatically cause you to have unrestrained appetites or develop addictions. And having more control dopamine doesn’t automatically cause you to make better judgements or be a better critical thinker.

Our genetics play a role in our neurochemistry, including dopamine distribution, as does our experience. We all have dopamine in both pathways. One of the things about neurochemicals is that while they affect us, we can also affect them. So if we have lots of dopamine in the desire pathway but not enough in the control pathway to actually get what we want, we can use contrivances to take actions that alter our neurochemistry. Likewise, if we have lots of dopamine in the control pathway but not enough in the desire pathway to identify what we really want, we can use contrivances to help us increase desire dopamine.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
—Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken

As with the Meta Mindsets, in which Production mindset is most effective in the service of Experiment mindset, control dopamine is most effective in the service of desire dopamine. Otherwise the functions and processes of the mesocortical pathway have to operate without salience, meaning without your direction. You have nothing to process but the exteroceptive or interoceptive situations or stimuli you happen to encounter and no context within which to process it.

One of my favorite quotes from neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett is: You tweak the world, and the world tweaks you back. With too much control dopamine and not enough desire dopamine, it’s more like: The world tweaks you, and you attempt to manage the effects.

We happen to live in a world where control dopamine is held up as the gold standard, whether it’s labeled as such or not. People are very busy pursuing completion for its own sake without having determined whether or not there is anything meaningful to them in the pursuit. This has negative implications for individuals, societies, and the world. In The Molecule of More, Daniel Z. Lieberman, MD and Michael E. Long write:

Some people have so much control dopamine that they become addicted to achievement but are unable to experience H&N [Here and Now] fulfillment. They achieve something, then move on to the next thing.

Next time, we’ll take a closer look at the relationship between dopamine, the wanting neurochemical, and the liking (aka Here and Now) neurochemicals.

*Hat tip to Pete Seeger

This post is part of a series on neurotransmitters that both affect our behavior and are affected by our behavior.

Everything Everywhere
Is in Motion All the Time

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What would we do without dopamine? The answer is: nothing. We can’t do anything without dopamine, which is the literal source of all motivation—all movement—whether physical or psychological. Why then are so many people going on and on about how we all need a dopamine detox? Why are we advised to be wary of substances or activities that provide us with “hits” of dopamine, as if dopamine were a drug?

Considering popular, and even some scientific, perspectives on dopamine tends to put me in mind of the lyrics of a song by the Animals straight out of the wayback machine:

I’m just a soul whose intentions are good.
Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.

While dopamine’s functions* are wide and varied, its role in regard to the brain’s reward system has been clarified. Dopamine is not the source of pleasure in the brain. That role is played by the liking neurochemicals, such as serotonin, oxytocin, endorphins, endocannabinoids, and endogenous opioids. Dopamine is called the “wanting” neurochemical because it is the source of…wanting, which is really just another word for motivation.

Dopamine is released when the brain expects to experience a reward, meaning it expects to experience something it likes. It causes us to take action by moving toward the reward.

Let’s say you notice you’re thirsty and you consider getting up from your desk to get a glass or bottle of water. Do you want the water enough to stop what you’re doing and take an action to get it? In other words, how motivated are you? How enticing is the water? How rewarding do you think it will be? How much pleasure do you think you’ll get from it? (Of course, it’s your brain that makes the choice, but you get to experience both the wanting and the liking.)

Although dopamine is not one of the liking neurochemicals, the brain “likes” to want. It likes to be motivated, to get us to move. So liking neurochemicals are released along with dopamine, to a greater or lesser extent depending on how rewarding the brain expects the experience or substance to be. The so-called wanting system in the brain is considered to be robust, while the liking system is fragile. That’s because the liking neurochemicals don’t stick around for long, so the brain moves on to wanting something else. Liking comes and goes but wanting persists.

Those who believe we should not want simply don’t understand how the brain works. Wanting is essential for being awake and for living an awake life, as was illustrated in the 1990 movie Awakenings. Robin Williams played neurologist Oliver Sacks, who in the early stage of his career dosed catatonic patients with levodopa, the precursor to dopamine in an attempt to literally wake them from their unresponsive states.

Going on a dopamine detox (conceptually, anyway, since the idea is nonsensical), would be like deciding to stop eating altogether in order to avoid sugar. It would be like advising someone not to pursue something they’re passionate about because that would generate “too much” dopamine.

Although dopamine plays a role in compulsive or addictive behavior, it is neither a drug, nor does it function like a drug. Instead of trying to manage dopamine—which is not a game for amateurs—we ought to focus on identifying better targets. We could learn how to use the wanting system to pursue the things we think would provide us with a more satisfying and meaningful life.

Next time I’ll talk about two important dopamine pathways in the brain and how they affect our ability to create change.

*Dopamine plays a role in your brain’s reward system, which includes feeling pleasure, achieving heightened arousal, and learning. Dopamine also helps with focus, concentration, attention, memory, sleep, mood, and motivation. And it is involved with decision-making, movement, working memory, and learning. It is one of the most extensively studied neurochemicals, mainly because it plays such diverse roles in human behavior and cognition. Dopamine is also a factor in Parkinson’s disease, addiction, schizophrenia, and other neuropsychiatric disorders.

This post is part of a series on neurotransmitters that both affect our behavior and are affected by our behavior.

Neuroplasticity: Changing Your Neurochemistry

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No matter the type or the scope involved, all transformational change requires changing brains. Personal transformational change requires changing your brain or my brain. Transformational change in an interpersonal relationship requires changing both parties’ brains. And social or global transformational change requires changing many brains. There is no way around it.

The primary driver of change in your brain is your behavior. —Lara Boyd, neuroscientist, physical therapist

Fortunately, brains have what is called neuroplasticity, so they CAN be changed. On the other hand, changing brains is difficult. It requires a great deal of repetition and perseverance—aka action—often over an extended period of time. It also requires commitment and a strong—or juicy—desired outcome. This is why although transformational change is possible, it isn’t probable.

The fact that transformational change is difficult isn’t a design flaw. But whether you consider the difficulty to be bad news or simply a challenge, it’s what’s so. There’s no way around that, either.

There are different kinds of neuroplasticity and different aspects to communication within the brain, such as the size and excitability or responsiveness of various parts of the brain, the connectivity between different parts of the brain, and the extent to which we use various networks, like the functional brain networks, within the brain.

You can’t change connectivity or the size or excitability of a particular part of the brain immediately. Other than in cases of injury, that requires time and repetition. You can’t permanently alter your neurochemistry immediately, either, but you can and do affect your neurochemistry in the here and now—and your neurochemistry can and does affect you—all the time.

In the video below, Lara Boyd does a great job of explaining the three kinds of neuroplasticity and how they relate to memory and learning. What do memory and learning have to do with creating transformational change? Everything! Creating transformational change requires training your brain just as learning does. There’s very little difference between the two processes.

As Boyd points out, chemical changes—which involve neurotransmitters (neurochemicals)—can take place immediately, but those changes are not long-lasting. You have to repeat the behavior if you want to make the changes more permanent. Here’s an example of how that works.

Endorphins* are neurotransmitters that, among other things, improve mood and wellbeing. One of the activities that can generate the release of endorphins is physical exercise, which is something I include every day. I generally experience a noticeable burst of endorphins after I’ve engaged in intense or moderately intense physical activity. If this level of intensity is infrequent, then I only get the short-term effect of endorphins. But if I engage in it frequently—and regularly—the experience of improved mood and sense of wellbeing remains pretty consistent, by which I mean it doesn’t diminish in between periods of exercise.

My brain has learned that exercise results in a better mood and greater wellbeing, which it interprets as a reward, and I remember the great feeling I get after finishing a workout. Both of those factors—learning and memory—increase the likelihood that I will keep engaging in the activity.

Since my brain likes the experience of exercise that’s intense enough to release endorphins, it wants that experience. Endorphins are one of the so-called liking neurochemicals. Dopamine is the wanting neurochemical, and it’s what I’ll talk about in the next post. As we go along, we’ll be looking at how liking and wanting neurochemicals help us either maintain the status quo or create transformational change.

Don’t forget to watch the video!

*Endorphins are your body’s natural pain relievers, moderating your perception of pain and also helping to reduce stress and improve mood and wellbeing. They are released when your body feels pain or stress and essentially block nerve cells that receive pain signals. Beta-endorphins have a stronger effect than morphine on your body. In addition, they’re released during pleasurable activities such as exercise, massage, eating and sex too.

This post is part of a series on neurotransmitters that both affect our behavior and are affected by our behavior.

 

12 Years After

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Twelve years ago this month, I headed off on the path I came to call Farther to Go! I was on a path of sorts at the time—well, on a sidewalk, anyway, heading west on Academy, into what I tend to refer to as the (expletive deleted) New Mexico wind—when I experienced a profound moment of ferocious dissatisfaction. It’s true that the wind had something to do with it, but the wind was also emblematic of my then current state of affairs and my feeling about it.

I wasn’t entirely sure where the new path would lead, I had no idea what I would find out along the way or who I would encounter, and there was certainly no inkling of Farther to Go! on the horizon.

During the past 12 years, I’ve read an insane amount of information about the brain and behavior. Many, but not all, of the books are identified on the Reading List page on my website. That list doesn’t include all the articles and other materials I’ve accessed. All my bookshelves and file drawers are maxed out. There’s been a lot of input into the system (me, that is; into my system).

In addition to applying what I learned to my own life, I’ve written hundreds of blog posts, articles, and newsletters, produced countless handouts and exercises, and created workshop and course materials galore. The 36 3-ring binders lined up on the desk behind me can attest to my output.

I was armed with a small amount of knowledge about the brain and behavior when I managed to look up at exactly the right moment to take advantage of the explosion of research in this arena. It was serendipitous to a great extent.

What kind of surprises me now is how well what I’ve learned has held up. Over the course of these 12 years, I have significantly revised my perception of only the four key elements outlined below.

Dopamine

Dopamine was long considered to be the pleasure neurochemical. A “hit” of dopamine was thought to be like a hit of a drug such as cocaine or heroin (more metaphorically than factually). This was still the prevailing view when I first learned about the brain’s reward system. Many people haven’t yet let go of this mistaken idea, which has led to some really silly concepts like dopamine detoxing.

Fortunately, I encountered the work of Kent Berridge early in my exploration and research. He’s an expert on dopamine and rewards and his work set me straight and helped me understand how essential rewards are in regard to behavior, whether we’re aware of them or not.

Dopamine is the wanting neurochemical. It’s associated with anticipation or craving or desire. When we attain what we anticipate, crave, or desire, other neurochemicals referred to as liking neurochemicals are released. Liking neurochemicals such as serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphin generate feelings of pleasure.

Dopamine motivates us to move (physically as well as psychologically), to pursue what we want, to take action. This wanting system is considered to be robust, while the liking system is considered fragile. Our experience of pleasure waxes and wanes, but wanting is always with us. This isn’t a personal problem or a design flaw; wanting is absolutely essential for both surviving and thriving.

Rewards

In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg described what he calls the habit loop, which consists of a cue, a behavior, and a reward. This was a bit of a revolutionary idea because we tend to think of a habit strictly in terms of behavior. Duhigg’s research led him to see that all three parts of the habit loop had to be in place in order for the brain to initiate, run, and end the habit.

That means that if we want to create a new habit, we need to determine what the cue will be, what the behavior will be, and how we will reward ourselves. I think this is accurate.

But Duhigg says that if we want to change a habit, we have to identify the reward we’re getting from the current behavior and substitute a new behavior that will give us the same reward. He makes a compelling case in his book. The problem, though, is that as far as the brain is concerned, liking neurochemicals are the reward, while to us a reward is something tangible or meaningful or perhaps symbolic.

Trying to identify a reward we’re getting for an existing behavior is like trying to figure out why we have a tendency to react the way we do to rain or a particular type of music or stray dogs or umbrella thorn trees. We can’t possibly figure that out with any degree of certainty—and even if we could, it wouldn’t make any difference.

In the case of changing a habit, what’s important is to be consistent about providing a reward for the new behavior until the brain takes over the job of releasing liking neurochemicals without the added stimulus.

Berridge is helpful here, too. He points out that our conscious perception of the reward we’re getting is essentially a story that may or may not have anything to do with what’s going on in the brain. The purpose of a reward is to get the brain to pay attention to a desirable behavior we just engaged in to increase the likelihood we will do it again. It’s positive reinforcement, plain and simple. It doesn’t matter if the reward we supply is related in any way to the behavior. It just has to be something we like so the brain will release liking neurochemicals. (I’ve done two consecutive 30-Day Challenges based on the same behavior, each with a different reward. Neither reward has anything to do with the behavior; both rewards have been extremely motivating.)

System 2

Although he didn’t come up with the terms—and dual-process theory was not a new idea—Daniel Kahneman did popularize the concepts of “System 1” and “System 2” in his best-seller, Thinking, Fast and Slow.

According to dual process theory, the unconscious part of the brain, System 1, is “fast,” meaning it processes 11 million bits of information at a time, while consciousness, System 2, is “slow” by contrast, as it can only process 40 bits of information at a time. There are many other significant differences between conscious and unconscious processing.

Kahneman, who died recently, won a Nobel Prize. He was considered a genius. I think that’s why it didn’t initially occur to me to question this binary division of thinking processes. But doubts started creeping in quite a few years ago. The characteristics attributed to System 2 thinking simply cannot be applied across the board to conscious thought. (There are even some researchers who question whether or not there is such a thing as “conscious thought.”)

After grappling with the problem for a while, I concluded that System 2 is a part of consciousness—a very, very small part of it, one that we access quite infrequently, possibly never. If we use Freud’s iceberg to represent consciousness and the unconscious, with consciousness being the tip of the iceberg, then System 2 is the tip of the tip. I’ve come to refer to the rest of conscious thought as ordinary consciousness. It has some attributes in common with System 1 and some attributes in common with System 2. Most of the time the stream of consciousness just flows through our minds, carrying us along with it.

Ordinary consciousness can be extremely useful and it has a role in creating transformational change, but accessing System 2 is essential for it. If we believe we’re accessing System 2 thinking just by being awake, we’re missing the boat entirely.

Autopilot

It seems hard to believe that the scientific estimate for how much of our behavior is outside conscious control was once a mere 40%—and that 40% was hard for a lot of people to swallow. Neuroscience has now concluded, logically, that 100% of our behavior is generated by our unconscious.

“Autopilot” is the short-hand term for this. It’s somewhat of a misnomer, though, because it was intended to contrast with the supposedly conscious “pilot” that makes intentional rather than automatic choices. But consciousness can’t and doesn’t make moment-to-moment choices.

Accessing System 2 can provide us with some ability to steer our personal ship in terms of determining direction and affecting future outcomes. But it can’t affect the choices we’re making now or the outcomes we’re getting as a result.

Duhigg’s conception of what happens at the end of a habit loop is that the brain is returned to conscious control. This is a perspective from the point of view of ordinary consciousness. It implies, first, that the brain is normally under conscious control, which it isn’t. Second, it fails to take into consideration that the unconscious is attending to multiple things at the same time, which means it is generating multiple action sequences, not just one. So the idea that the brain is “on autopilot” for the duration of a habit and then returned to the control of the pilot is both inaccurate and simplistic.

Habits are a bit different than the rest of our so-called autopilot behavior, but the fact remains that all of our behavior is initiated by the unconscious. If that weren’t the case, we wouldn’t survive long enough to get to the point of contemplating thriving.

Provisional Assessments

There are bound to be other conclusions that will be overturned by the ongoing research into how the brain works. So it’s useful to consider the conclusions we’ve arrived at thus far as provisional assessments. Provisional assessments are essential because they give us something to work with and to test, and they indicate new directions for further examination.

I’m excited to keep learning in this area. I don’t think there is any other exploration as challenging and potentially rewarding as this: humans investigating our own internal operational systems from the perspectives of our internal operational systems. Some contortionism required!

Here’s to many more years of learning—and of overturning.

Contact Me

joycelyn@farthertogo.com
505-332-8677