Brain Archives - Page 19 of 45

H Is for Habits

December 21, 2016 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Habits are recurring, generally unconscious patterns of behavior you acquire through frequent repetition or that are learned over time. Since they operate outside conscious awareness (and control), you may suddenly discover, as I have, some habits you didn’t know you had.

Your brain creates habits, with or without your conscious participation, in order to operate more efficiently. It chunks repetitive behaviors and turns the chunks over to the basal ganglia so you don’t have to waste your precious and limited System 2 attention on them. So the habit habit is actually a labor-saving device for your brain, which means your brain is primed for habits.

Since we tend to identify with our conscious brain rather than our unconscious, we’re under the illusion that most of what we do is the result of conscious choice (behaviors are preceded by conscious intentions). So you may not be aware of how pervasive habits are in your life.

When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. It stops working so hard, or diverts focus to other tasks. —Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit

Habits vs. Goals

Habits differ from goals in two significant ways:

Goals are temporary; whether it’s three weeks or three years, there’s always an end point. Habits, on the other hand, are ongoing.
Goals require conscious attention from beginning to completion. Habits, once in place, use System 1 attention. That’s why you may be unaware of some of your habits.

Creating a habit you want (or changing an existing habit) does require conscious attention initially, but only until System 1 takes it over, at which point it is initiated automatically as a result of something in the environment—a cue or a trigger.

Continual repetition of behaviors and thoughts results in highly reinforced neural connections, which are experienced as habits. …By adulthood, most emotional responses and behavioral impulses are conditioned: we think, feel, and behave more or less the same in the same states and social contexts over and over. Habits and the conditioned responses that compose them are processed in the brain in milliseconds, thousands of times faster than conscious decisions. —Steven Stosny, Ph.D.

According to Charles Duhigg, there are three parts to what he refers to as the habit loop: the cue, the routine, and the reward. The cue is what triggers the routine—the beginning of the habit loop—and the reward lets your brain know the loop is complete.

Habits: Good or Bad?

The word “habit” often conjures up the word “bad.” If you think of habits as bad—or as just something inconsequential that you do—you’ll have a harder time creating the habits you want to have.

Whether your habits are “good” or “bad,” they’re all the same to your brain. It doesn’t care what you think of your habits. All it cares about it is being efficient. Do anything often enough and it will become a habit. And habits, by their nature, are hard to change. Trying to exert willpower, using positive thinking, engaging in deep soul searching, or looking for the underlying cause of a habit are all fruitless endeavors. Unfortunately, you can’t have a heart-to-heart with your basal ganglia.

The main reason that conscious control of habits is limited is that it requires the most easily exhaustible and metabolically expensive of mental resources: focused attention. …When resources are limited, people are unable to deliberately choose or inhibit responses, and they become locked into repeating habits. …The autopilot, being virtually inexhaustible, wins the struggle more often. —Steven Stosny

The Value of Habits

It’s easy to see the positive, productive role of habits in the development of a skill or craft—that of a musician, an artist, a writer, a quilter, or a cook, for example. We generally expect that the more a musician practices her instrument, the more dishes a cook prepares, the better they will become at doing those things. A musician is unlikely to attain excellence if she only practices when she’s in the mood for it. Skillful musicians develop the habit of practicing regularly whether they’re in the mood for it or not. And they don’t have to be in the mood for it precisely because they’ve developed the habit. They don’t have to waste conscious attention or drain self-control resources by thinking about or deciding each time whether or not to practice.

Because habits don’t drain self-control resources to the same extent as non-habits, once a behavior becomes a habit, it frees up your conscious attention and makes achieving goals considerably easier. Habits and routines are actually essential to people who need to be creative on a regular basis.

Changing the status quo isn’t easy. The unconscious part of your brain, which might be said to be allergic to change, is way ahead of the conscious part, especially in familiar situations. It’s built to predict what’s likely to happen next, construct multiple response scenarios, and initiate the response it considers the most effective—not the response you consider most effective.

That’s why habits seem to have so much power. They are very familiar to your unconscious, which bases its predictions and responses on previous experience. You may want to go for a walk after dinner, but if you’ve been plopping down on the sofa every evening, your brain is going to “choose” the sofa over the walk. You may want to cut back on the donuts, but if you’re in the habit of grabbing one with your coffee at the office, that’s what your brain is programmed to “choose” to do.

You can make use of the power of habit by learning how to change the ones you don’t want and by creating habits you do want. In order to change an existing habit, you need to identify the cue and the reward and substitute a different behavior (routine) that gives you the same reward. To start a new habit, first decide what the behavior will be, and then choose a reward and a cue. It’s easier to start a new habit if you make the cue something you already do on a regular basis. Charles Duhigg explains the process in his Guide to Changing Habits.

One major caveat: There is no magic number of days that it takes to change or create a habit. But there is a highly effective type of magic you can apply; it’s called perseverance.

Part of the series A-Z: An Alphabet of Change.

C Is for Commitment

November 16, 2016 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

When you set out to accomplish something significant or change a longstanding habit, do you stop to consider how committed you really are to doing it? You may have plenty of good reasons for wanting to do it. You may be able to rattle off the positive consequences that are likely to result if you succeed or the negative consequences if you fail. But altering the status quo isn’t easy. Reasons and potential consequences hold no sway over the unconscious part of your brain, which strongly prefers that you continue doing exactly what you’ve been doing up till now.

Making a commitment means binding yourself—intellectually, emotionally, or both—to a course of action. Some commitments in life are implied or assumed. For example:

following the rules of the road when you get a driver’s license
performing your job to the best of your ability after you’re hired
treating your employees fairly after you hire them
being considerate and faithful to your partner or spouse
providing for your children

Clearly some people “bind themselves” to these commitments more than others do. If you feel bound by your commitment, you’re more likely to follow through even if it’s inconvenient or uncomfortable to do so. Otherwise, you’ll find it easier to slack off and easier to come up with explanations and excuses as to why you did. The exigencies of the moment will feel more compelling than the course of action you never fully committed to.

Reality Check

Before my clients begin filling out a Goal Action Plan, I ask them to complete a “Reality Check.” Part of the reality check includes rating themselves in the following three areas on a scale from 1-10, 10 being the highest:

certainty (how confident you are that you can achieve the goal)
passion (how much you want it)
commitment (how willing you are to bind yourself to the course of action)

Failure to Commit

People are unwilling to fully commit to a goal or a habit change for a variety of reasons.

Are you afraid of trying, failing, and disappointing yourself and/or others? The reality is that making a half-hearted commitment usually leads to half-hearted efforts which then lead to half-hearted results. This is a great example of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Are you trying to keep your options open? It’s true that committing to one course of action generally means not pursuing other courses of action. And it’s true that you might miss out on something. But the reality is that trying to keep all of your options open doesn’t enhance your life; it prevents you from fully living it.

You can have what really matters to you or you can have the freedom to NOT have it, but you can’t have both.

Are you waiting to see how things turn out before making a full commitment? (I’ll give myself three months and if things aren’t panning out by then, I’ll give up or switch to Plan B.) Although this sounds like a reasonable approach, it’s self-defeating. The reality is that we can’t single-handedly control the outcome, but we do have complete control over the extent of our commitment.

Going All-In

We often refuse to make a commitment, even to something we really want or that really matters to us.

Sometimes it’s hard to go “all in” when you don’t know how things are going to unfold. But fully committing yourself to a course of action actually has an effect on the outcome. When you’re fully committed to a course of action:

You don’t waste time rethinking your decision.
Instead of looking for ways to avoid taking action, you look for ways to take action—and by you, I mean your brain. Making a commitment alters your mental model and your perception. You literally see things differently—and see different things. Also your brain connects the dots in different ways.
You’re more likely to find your way around obstacles and to keep going even when you don’t feel like it.
You don’t have to rely as much on willpower and self-control in the face of temptation and the urge for immediate gratification.
You tend to view the results you get as feedback that you can use to adjust your course.

If you want to change your status quo, you need to take action, you need to be persistent, and you need to figure out how to overcome obstacles. But first you need to make the commitment to do those things. You won’t know ahead of time what your experience will be or how things will turn out. But making a commitment will increase your chances of success.

Are you holding back? Are you keeping something in reserve? For what?

If you’re not fully committed to a course of action, why are you taking it? If you set out to do something, be fully engaged in doing it instead of a sideline observer. Aim to get it done, not to wait and see how it all turns out.

This post is part of the series A-Z: An Alphabet of Change.

B is for Baby Steps

November 9, 2016 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

I’ve yet to meet anyone who’s excited about the idea of taking baby steps. Most of us want faster and bigger results. We want immediate gratification. We want to stop or start a habit in 21 days—preferably less. We want to overhaul entire areas of our lives by the end of the month. As soon as we think about something we want to accomplish—a project or a goal—we feel like we’re already behind schedule and disappointed it hasn’t yet come to fruition.

We’re impatient. And easily distracted. Not to mention overscheduled and stressed out.

Never mind that our unrealistic expectations keep producing the same unsatisfying results. Our inner voice insists we need to do—we should be able to do—so much more than take baby steps. Baby steps are just not enough.

Well, baby steps are more than enough. If you take them.

Go Back to Start. Do Not Pass Go.

Like most of us, you probably have a habit you’ve made more than a couple of unsuccessful attempts to change, maybe over a span of years or even decades. When you repeatedly try to change a habit (make a different choice) and fail, you don’t simply remain stuck in place. You actually end up worse off than you were before.

We tend to use our lack of success as evidence that there’s something wrong with us. Perhaps we have less willpower or self-control than other people. Or maybe we’re sabotaging ourselves. Or we don’t really want to change. We think the problem is us rather than the way we’re going about things.

The problem is that the more often you say you’re going to do something and don’t do it, the more you persuade your brain not to take you seriously when it comes to changing your behavior. Those multiple failed attempts reinforce the mental model your brain maintains. As a result, the status quo becomes even more entrenched, which makes it that much harder to change the next time you try.

Attempting to accomplish too much too soon is a recipe for failure because the chance of succeeding is miniscule at best. When you try to do too much or too many things at the same time, you’re giving yourself many opportunities to fail. Instead, you need to give yourself more opportunities to succeed.

Opportunities to Succeed

Taking baby steps puts you in a much better position to succeed. You can see your progress and build on your success. For one thing, it’s easier to take baby steps than it is to run sprints or leap tall buildings in a single bound. For another, it’s easier to add to the foundation you’ve built—no matter how close to the ground it may be—than it is to keep failing and having to start over again.

If you want to put a morning routine into place that includes a sequence of steps, pick one of them to start with. Don’t add anything else until the first one has become a habit. There’s no formula to determine how long it will take before a behavior becomes a habit. You’ll know when it happens because you’ll find yourself doing it automatically without having to remind yourself, and if you forget, a nagging inner voice will remind you to do it. Then you can add the second step. As you proceed building your routine, you’re likely to discover that it takes less and less time for the additional steps to fall into place.

If there’s a project you want to undertake that feels overwhelming, break it down into baby steps. When I was writing fiction many years ago, every time I sat down at my desk I felt like I was writing the entire novel. It was so daunting that I got very little writing done. So I decided I would fill two legal-pad pages every day, seven days a week. If I felt like writing more, I could, but two pages was something I could easily commit to.

Not only did those baby step lead to the accumulation of at least 14 pages each week, they also helped me turn writing every day into a habit.

If you want to develop a habit that involves doing something multiple times during the day, start out by creating an intention to do it once a day—or even every other day. Once you’ve succeeded with that, you can expand on it.

Dream Big. Take Baby Steps.

Lofty goals are great. But the way to achieve them is to break them down into manageable components and take one step at a time. The unconscious part of your brain resists change. When you attempt to make a big or an immediate change, it reacts by mobilizing forces to get things back on track. In fact, it responds the same way it does when your body experiences a sudden change, such as a drop in temperature, by trying to return it to homeostasis (the status quo).

If you want a new behavior to become status quo, you need to work up to it gradually without alarming your brain. Don’t give it anything to resist. The good news is that once your desired behavior does become status quo, your brain will work just as hard to maintain it as it did to maintain the previous status quo.

When you aim to do it all at once and miss the mark, you end up with nothing but a reinforced sense of ineffectiveness or inadequacy. But success breeds more success—and success is motivating. Learn to identify and take baby steps. It’s much easier than the alternatives—and it works.

Part of the series A-Z: An Alphabet of Change.

A Is for Autopilot

November 2, 2016 by Joycelyn Campbell 2 Comments

You can probably think of a few examples of operating on autopilot. An obvious one is driving a familiar route while you’re lost in thought and then being unable to recall the trip itself afterward. That can be a bit unsettling, but it happens all the time. It’s normal. Your brain knows how to operate your vehicle because operating your vehicle is a routine and your brain is wired to commit routines to memory. You can access them faster that way, and the conscious part of your brain is free to attend other things. Autopilot allows you to do one thing while you’re thinking about something entirely different.

Because your unconscious knows how to operate your vehicle, you don’t have to think about it while you’re doing it. It wasn’t that way when you were learning how to drive and you had to focus all your attention on it. And it isn’t that way now when you’re on a steep or dangerous road, trying to locate an unfamiliar address, or faced with a detour. But under ordinary circumstances, your unconscious can handle the task of driving, and many other tasks, just fine.

Estimates are that close to 80% or more of what we do every day we do on autopilot, which means without conscious intention or volition. It’s not just what we do, either. The majority of our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are the result of automatic brain processes.

Our brains run mostly on autopilot, and the conscious mind has little access to the giant and mysterious factory that runs below it. —David Eagleman

The conscious part of our brain, which thinks logically, sets long-term goals, and can imagine things being different—the source of our desire for change—processes only about 40 bits of information at a time. However, the part of our brain that usually runs us, which is completely uninterested in our long-term goals and is intent not on change but on maintaining the status quo, processes a whopping 11 million bits of information at a time. So it’s just easier for us to follow the path of least resistance, go with the flow, and think, feel, and do whatever we’ve always thought, felt, and done before.

Get Me to the Church on Time

When you get into your car to go to work—or to the supermarket or to your friend’s house—you don’t need to think about how to start the car or back out of your garage or get to your destination because you do it on autopilot. Autopilot is less effective when you want to take a different route or make an extra stop. It can also take you somewhere you don’t want to go; for example, if you head out in the direction of your workplace and forget you need to turn left instead of right because you’re meeting a friend at a restaurant instead of going to work.

Your brain’s autopilot thinks it knows where you want to go, and it’s going to do its best to get you to the correct destination.

It does the same thing with other routine behaviors, such as opening a bag of potato chips. If you usually eat the entire bag of chips, once you open the bag, autopilot will get you to your destination of eating everything in it. You don’t need to tell it to do that. But if that’s not what you want to do, you’re going to have to tell it over and over again until it rewrites the chip-eating program.

The conscious part of your brain may clearly see the benefit of change and may want to make a change, but it’s slow, lazy, and easily depleted. Much of the time, it’s offline. The unconscious part of your brain—your autopilot—actively resists change, and it is fast, vast, and always on. Unless you make a persistent effort to convince it otherwise, your brain’s autopilot won’t take your half-hearted attempts to chart a new course seriously. It will keep “correcting” you back to the same old well-worn path, taking you to work when you want to go to the restaurant and taking you through the entire bag of chips instead of stopping after a handful.

Repetition and Persistence

Just as an airplane’s autopilot is a sophisticated navigational system that makes flying safer and more efficient, our brain’s autopilot is a sophisticated navigational system that makes living safer and more efficient. We can’t disable it, and we wouldn’t want to. But we need to know its limitations and how to work with it if we don’t want to simply be at the effect of it.

Think about how much repetition and persistence it takes to learn to play a musical instrument well or ride a bicycle or ice skate or dunk a basketball. You can’t become a pianist after a few sessions with a piano or by willing yourself to get better. It takes hours of practice, playing the same exercises over and over until both your hands and your brain know how to play them without your having to consciously think about every little movement.

You can get autopilot to work for you rather than against you, but only if you recognize that repetition and persistence—not willpower—is the key to lasting change.

This is the first post in the series A-Z: An Alphabet of Change.

Answers to the Memory Quiz

September 15, 2016 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Here are the answers to yesterday’s Memory Quiz. It’s important to bear in mind that no one is immune from widespread memory distortions. We integrate things that really happened with things that are generally true. The only way you can confirm whether or not a memory is true is to obtain corroborating evidence. In many cases, that isn’t possible; so you can rarely have complete certainty.

The more confident you feel about a memory, the more likely it is to be factual.
False
Confidence is a feeling. Your level of confidence bears no direct relationship to the accuracy of your memory. You can feel as confident about a false memory as you do about a real one.
–
False memories are rare occurrences.
False
False memories are not uncommon. They can be induced intentionally or accidentally. We all have them, so when someone claims a false memory as a true one, we shouldn’t automatically assume that person is lying.
–
You remember the things that have a strong emotional component.
True
Strong emotion—positive or negative—is one of the criteria your brain uses to decide that something is worth storing in long-term memory.
–
The more details you recall, the more likely it is that a particular memory is accurate and/or true.
False
The amount of detail associated with a memory is unrelated to its accuracy. A false memory can have a great amount of detail associated with it. Your brain can’t tell the difference.
–
The more often you recall a memory, the more opportunities you have to alter it.
True
Every time you recall a memory, you put it into a “plastic” state, thereby exposing it to disruption and alteration. You reconstruct it when recalling it and again when storing it.
–
Something you’re really interested in is more likely to be stored in your long-term memory than something you’re not interested in.
True
You can remember all kinds of things that might be inconsequential to other people (sports statistics, song lyrics, movie plots, your grades) if those things are important to you.
–
You tend to recall so-called flashbulb memories—extremely vivid, powerful, and significant memories—with greater accuracy.
False
You may believe you have greater recall of flashbulb memories—that they’re somehow indelibly imprinted in your brain—but lots and lots of evidence indicates that the details you recall about such incidents are no more accurate than the details you recall about anything else.
–
The best way to get accurate information from people is to ask them open-ended questions.
True
If you ask people closed—or leading—questions (What color was her hair? or Wasn’t she a brunette?) you’re more likely to get incorrect answers. So it’s best to ask fewer questions and allow people to relate the story in their own way.
–
A confession is a reliable indication of culpability because people rarely confess to crimes they didn’t commit.
False
There are numerous examples demonstrating that the techniques used by law enforcement to induce confessions are very successful in getting people to not only confess to crimes they didn’t commit, but also to come to believe they did, in fact, commit them.
–
When you try to suppress a specific memory, you’re likely to develop other memory deficits that seem unrelated.
True
The system for targeting memory suppression has been described as “kind of dumb.” When you try to suppress a particular memory, you’re likely to end up suppressing associated memories, too.
–
Your recollection of a memory can be influenced and altered based on the circumstances you’re in when you recall it.
True
Where you are, who you’re with, how you feel, the state of your mood (and mind), how long ago the event occurred—all of those things and many more can affect your recollection of your memory. We also edit our memories, without being aware we’re doing so, to reflect our current beliefs and biases.
–
Eyewitness testimony is reliable.
False
Eyewitness testimony is reliably unreliable for many reasons. For one, if you’re the eyewitness, the memory of the event is part of your autobiographical memory and subject to all the same distortions. For another, what you recall will be, in part, determined by the questions you’re asked and the way they’re asked.
–
You don’t remember much from before the age of three because your brain hadn’t yet learned how to encode long-term memories.
True
It isn’t until around age seven that concepts critical to the storage of long-term memories (including using a calendar, understanding the days of the week and seasons, and developing a sense of self) have been learned.
–
You have equal recall of the beginnings, middles, and endings of what you remember.
False
You have better recall of beginnings and endings—especially of endings—than you do of what happened in the middle. You’re likely to base your feelings about an event on how it ended.
–
There is no evidence for repressed memory.
True
The idea behind the concept of repressed memory is that traumatic memories are automatically banished to the unconscious and “forgotten.” But the reality is that, with some exceptions, traumatic memories are more likely to be remembered than to be forgotten because remembering them is important to our survival.
–
Mindfulness meditation may make you more susceptible to developing false memories.
True
Mindfulness can lead to confusion about the source of a memory: did it actually happen to you or did you imagine it happening? Misattributing the source of a memory is the basis for the development of false memories.

How did you do?