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Brain-Based Transformational Solutions

S Is for Self-Talk

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Buddha is supposed to have described the mind as resembling a drunken monkey that’s been stung by a bee. The monkey mind is a restless mind. It chatters incessantly, jumps from thought to thought the way a monkey jumps from tree limb to tree limb, is easily distracted, undisciplined, unquiet, and often confused.

If you’re like the rest of us, you probably have many conflicting wants, needs, and goals but little available mental space in which to sort them out. Most of your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are not even consciously generated. They’re the result of what neuroscientist David Eagleman calls zombie systems.

Your unconscious (System 1) passes along suggestions to consciousness (System 2) that you experience as impressions, intuitions, intentions, and feelings. If System 2 endorses them—which is most of the time—those impressions and feelings turn into beliefs. If System 2 doesn’t veto or modify the impulses generated by System 1, they turn into actions.

Monkey mind is a result of your brain’s wiring. You can’t eliminate the monkeys, but neither do you have to let them run amok. The best way to get them under some degree of control is to start tuning in to your self-talk.

You’re engaging in some variation of self-talk whenever you:

  • Explain yourself to yourself
  • Explain external events and other people to yourself
  • Assign blame
  • Rationalize
  • Justify
  • Judge
  • React to events and other people
  • Rehash events
  • Mentally argue with yourself or others
  • Come to conclusions
  • Try to make decisions
  • Recall past events
  • Berate yourself
  • Make comparisons
  • Make predictions about the future
  • Encourage yourself
  • Give yourself directions
  • Remind yourself or keep a mental to-do list
  • Rehearse for the future

Much self-talk is not very productive or what you would call positive. But self-talk can have a very powerful effect on you.

Anyone listening in on your internal monologue, particularly in times of nerves, anxiety, or fear, might hear a verbal rabbit hole of unreasonable negativity and self-berating. —Janet Choi

Self-Talk Helps Maintain the Status Quo

The incessant jabbering in your brain is one way System 1 keeps you from veering off course. If you’re satisfied with the course you’re on, thank System 1 for helping you stay on it. If you’re trying to change some aspect of your behavior, however, listening unquestioningly to your self-talk is problematic. It’s part of the ongoing narrative your inner interpreter spins to make sense of your life. It may not seem like a big a deal, but it is. It’s as if you’re being blasted incessantly with so much propaganda from a dictatorial regime that you eventually come to believe it.

Believing your own self-talk can lead to a whole host of additional problems.

Negative Self-Talk Keeps You Down

When your monkeys are in charge, it’s harder to:

  • Remember
  • Concentrate
  • “Do the right thing”
  • Relax
  • Learn
  • Maintain your equanimity
  • Respond to life’s challenges
  • Experience joy
  • Follow through on your intentions
  • Be present

It’s also easier to:

  • Make mistakes
  • Stress out
  • Get depressed
  • Make snap judgments
  • Blow things out of proportion
  • Lose sight of the bigger picture
  • Get into arguments
  • Miss what’s right in front of you
  • Get hijacked by external (often fleeting) events
  • Continue unproductive habits
Frequent Negative Self-Talk Can Lead to Rumination

According to Susan Nolen-Hoeksema of Yale University, the definition of rumination is: a tendency to passively think about the meaning, origins, and consequences of your negative emotions.

Rumination isn’t the same as worry. Worry tends to be focused on the future (an anticipated threat), while rumination tends to be focused on the past or present (some form of loss). Almost everyone ruminates from time to time, but rumination has the potential to become a mental habit you can fall into automatically without thinking about it. And habits are notoriously difficult to break.

Rumination feels like problem-solving but it actually prevents you from solving problems because it keeps you focused on negative events and emotions.

Frequent rumination leaves individuals highly vulnerable to several problematic outcomes, particularly future episodes of depression. —Michael Anestis

You can ruminate about external situations and events and about relationships or you can ruminate over your own perceived mistakes and shortcomings (self-rumination).

Addressing Negative Self-Talk

If your self-talk has a tendency to accentuate the negative, you can help yourself avoid getting sucked into the vortex by practicing self-distancing. All that means is getting a little space between you and your self-talk so you are not stuck inside your own head.

Two ways to do that are:

  1. Avoid Talking to Yourself in the First Person
    If you use the first person when you talk to yourself, switch to the second- or third-person or address yourself by name. This allows you to gain some perspective regarding the situation. Getting into the habit of using second-person, for example, or addressing yourself directly diminishes the voice of your inner critic.
    .
  2. Have a Dialogue with the Wiser You
    Assemble paper, pen, and a timer. Begin by asking your Wiser Self a question about the situation (or feelings) at hand. Allow a written dialogue to evolve between you and your Wiser Self. Ask for suggestions and encouragement. Then use your self-talk to give yourself instructions and support.

Some of the bonuses of practicing self-distancing are:

  • A decrease in rumination
  • An increase in problem-solving ability
  • Disruption of the status quo
  • More self-awareness
  • Greater confidence
Self-Observation

Tuning in to your self-talk is a good way to find out what’s going on in there (inside your head). The problem is that once you start paying attention to your self-talk, you’ll likely feel an overpowering urge to change it. It’s difficult for us to observe anything without having a judgment about it, so observing your self-talk will take practice.

You can develop the habit of paying attention to your self-talk if you get a pocket-sized notebook to carry with you. When you notice your self-talk, jot down the date, time, and a brief summary of (or comment on) your self-talk. The more often you write in it, the more aware you will become of the way you talk to yourself, what you talk to yourself about, and what effect it has on you.

Remember that Self-Talk Radio is always on the air—so you can tune in any time.

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

R Is for Rewards

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Your brain enjoys rewards so much that it actually has a whole system devoted to them. The neurotransmitter dopamine—sometimes referred to as the pleasure chemical—is part of the reward system. It’s released both when you experience a reward and when you expect to experience one. As the release of dopamine fills you with feelings of pleasure, your brain associates those feelings with whatever you just did or ingested. It’s called associative conditioning.

That association is the basis of the brain’s reward system, the purpose of which is to ensure your survival by helping you learn and remember the behaviors and substances that are good for you. Many different substances, activities, and behaviors trigger the release of dopamine. Some of them, in addition to food and sex, are:

  • social interactions
  • music
  • generosity
  • scary movies, scary situations, or scary thoughts
  • psychoactive drugs (alcohol, cocaine, heroin, nicotine, etc.)
  • gambling
  • sugar
Your Brain Runs on Rewards

For the most part, your brain’s reward system functions automatically without your conscious intervention. You probably don’t pay a lot of attention to it other than being aware that some things are a lot more pleasurable than others, and of course you want to engage in the behaviors or ingest the substances that are pleasurable.

While you may have no problem thinking of some experiences as rewarding, you might be ambivalent—or worse—about using rewards intentionally to help you modify your own behavior. As a being with a prefrontal cortex, you may think you aren’t susceptible to rewards the way your puppy is. Or you might be under the impression you shouldn’t need to use rewards. You should just be able to make up your mind to do something and then do it.

Maybe you think you don’t—or shouldn’t—need to reward yourself for doing what you want to do or what’s in your own best interest. Maybe you believe knowing what you want to do, why you want to do it, and how to do it is sufficient. You’re an adult. You have self-discipline and self-control. Or you can develop it. Rewards might be OK for young children. Or pets. But you don’t need them.

If that’s where you’re coming from, well, science does not support your position. It turns out all of us are hardwired to be “insatiable wanting machines.” If you don’t learn how to use the brain’s reward system, it will continue having its way with you.

Let’s say you want to begin a new habit. If there are no rewards, or weak rewards, habits are much less likely to take hold. That’s because the basal ganglia, which is the part of the brain that turns repetitive behaviors into habits, depends on having enough dopamine to operate efficiently.

I hand out pages of stickers to the clients in my Goals, Habits & Intentions course. Some people love them and immediately figure out how to use them as rewards. Others hold onto them for weeks, wondering what to do with them. (“Why do I have these?”) Some have no problem connecting awarding themselves a sticker with getting a reward. Others go through the motions without making that connection.

A reward is positive reinforcement. It motivates you to repeat the behavior. In the case of long-term goals, small hits of dopamine encourage you to keep moving forward, so it pays to know where you are headed. And it works better to acknowledge and celebrate each small accomplishment along the way (often a sticker will do) than to wait for one big jolt of dopamine at the end (an entire spa day).

Benefits Are Not Rewards

If there were no benefit to you for embarking on a particular course of action, there would be no point in doing it. Benefits answer the question of why you want to do something. So it’s useful to clearly identify all the benefits that would—or could—accrue if you accomplish what you set out to do. But you identify benefits via the conscious part of your brain, and rewards are processed by the unconscious.

Celebrations Are Not Rewards

In behavior-change terms, a celebration is an impromptu acknowledgement of something you’ve accomplished. The difference between a reward and a celebration is in how you use it, not what it is. In order for something to be effective as a reward, you need to crave it. That’s because dopamine is triggered by the expectation of a reward. So in order for you—and your brain—to crave a reward:

  1. The reward needs to be something you really want (enjoy).
  2. The reward needs to be identified ahead of time: what exactly will you get when you complete or accomplish the thing you set out to do?
  3. You also need to follow through and actually give yourself the reward. (You might not think this needs to be stated, but it does.)
Using Rewards = Using Your Brain

You may believe that accomplishment should be its own reward, but your brain doesn’t see it that way—and it’s the way your brain sees it, not the way you do, that matters. Sure some activities and accomplishments are intrinsically rewarding, but that’s not the case for all activities. Rewards help your brain help you accomplish the things you set out to do and turn desirable behaviors into habits.

Because your brain’s reward system operates with or without your participation, you can develop habits you don’t want to have that may be extremely difficult to change or stop. And while the conscious part of the brain is certainly better at many things than the unconscious part of the brain is, the reverse is also true. When it comes to modifying behavior, the smartest thing the conscious part of the brain can do is recognize the value of the reward system—and learn how to use it effectively.

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

P Is for Perseverance

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A common explanation for the failure to accomplish something, reach a goal, or change a habit is a lack of willpower (or self-control). If only you had more willpower you could resist temptation, whatever form it might take: a piece of chocolate cake, binge-watching a favorite TV show, surfing the internet, adding unnecessary items to your wardrobe, or even just staying up late when you have an important meeting in the morning.

Willpower is trying very hard not to do something you want to do very much. —John Ortberg

It seems like common sense that if you had the ability to say no in the face of temptation, you wouldn’t be in whatever pickle you might be in.

And there’s a bit of truth underlying that belief. Willpower can be both useful and powerful. And yes, some people appear to have more willpower, at least in some situations, than other people. But willpower is an unreliable resource that can be easily exhausted. You can benefit from developing more of it, but it’s not the most effective tool in the behavior-change box.

Don’t Crash and Burn

When you’re bursting with willpower, you feel like you’re faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. It feels great in the moment, but the moment doesn’t last. You may find yourself burning out before you get very far and end up abandoning your entire project. If at first you don’t succeed, you might decide it’s not meant to be or not worth the effort. Why bother? Just go with the flow. Or you might chalk it up to being weak, not wanting it enough, or lacking discipline.

It’s important to remember that the unconscious part of your brain has a bias for immediate gratification, which means you do, too. So after the initial burst of energy is gone it’s natural to find yourself distracted, derailed, or maybe even down for the count.

Worse, you may think what happened means something about you or your ability to follow through, which is kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy because multiple failed attempts actually train your brain to not take you seriously. That means your next attempt will be even harder to follow through with than the last one was.

If  you recall the story of The Tortoise and the Hare from Aesop’s Fables, you’ll remember the moral of that adventure was slow and steady wins the race.

You could compare the unconscious part of your brain, which is extremely fast and processes 11 million bits of information at a time, to the hare. The conscious part of your brain, which is responsible for exerting willpower and self-control among other things, is like the tortoise. It’s much slower and more deliberate, and it processes only 40 bits of information at a time.

Change the Default

Repetition and perseverance, not willpower and self-control, are the keys to changing your behavior and accomplishing your goals. Repetition means doing the same thing over and over again until it becomes your brain’s default response. Perseverance means steadily moving toward your desired outcome regardless of setbacks or obstacles, adjusting course as you go, and taking in at least some of the scenery. Just keep moving at a steady pace until you get where you want to go.

You don’t need to chastise yourself if you get off track. You don’t need to make up excuses. All you have to do is pick up where you left off and keep going.

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again. —William E. Hickson

It’s amazing how much time and mental effort we put into berating ourselves or trying to figure out what’s wrong with us when we don’t behave according to our own expectations when, much of the time, it’s simply due to the way we’re wired. It would be far more effective to recognize that until we convince it otherwise, our brain is going to keep on correcting us back to our previous path. So falling off the horse is just part of the process. The important thing is to get back up there.

Perseverance isn’t the same as dogged persistence. Sometimes there’s a good reason to stop attempting to do something or at least reassess. On the one hand, you’re more likely to persevere if you’re committed to what you’re trying to accomplish and clear about your desired outcome. On the other hand, that commitment and clarity can help you recognize you aren’t really headed where you want to go—or maybe that you’ve bitten off too big a chunk and need to scale back.

If you want to make any change to your status quo, you have to convince your brain to go along with the plan, and that won’t happen overnight. Getting your brain to accept a change in the status quo as the new normal, for example, requires changing your mental model. That’s probably going to take a lot more perseverance than you’d like or that you expect. You might be tempted to give up when the results don’t come quickly, but that would be a mistake.

Perseverance isn’t flashy or sexy or stylish. It’s often linked with discipline and endurance and sounds like something that’s good for you or that builds character. But it’s the key to creating sustained change. And if you develop the habit of perseverance, you can still use willpower but you won’t need to rely on it to power yourself through. That means your brain will be working for you, rather than against you.

In the realm of ideas everything depends on enthusiasm… in the real world all rests on perseverance. —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

That’s why I call perseverance magic!

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

N Is for Narration

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The unconscious part of your brain processes far more data, moment-to-moment, than the conscious part of your brain is aware of. Since you’re missing more than you’re consciously taking in, how can you have the seamless experience of reality you have? You should be a lot more confused than you actually are.

The reason you aren’t more confused is that you have an inner narrator or inner interpreter who makes sense of your experiences and observations, decides which are important and what they mean, and weaves everything together into a unified whole. The inner narrator gives your life a sense of continuity, the result of which is that your experiences feel sequential and (usually) logical rather than segmented and random.

If you tune in to your inner narrator, you may be able to catch it in the act of putting the pieces together for you, but that takes a little practice.

Filling in the Blanks

Michael Gazzaniga, one of the founders of cognitive neuroscience, discovered “the left-brain narrating system,” which he dubbed “the interpreter” in the late 70s when he and Joseph LeDoux were conducting research with split-brain patients (individuals whose corpus callosum had been severed in an attempt to alleviate epilepsy symptoms).

In the most well-known experiment, Gazzaniga and LeDoux flashed pictures in front of a patient, one to the right hemisphere (which is nonverbal) and another to the left hemisphere (which controls language). The patient was then shown several additional pictures—to both hemispheres—and asked to select one that went with the first (right-hemisphere) picture and another that went with the second (left-hemisphere) picture. The patient was able to point to appropriate matches for each of the two pictures and to explain the relationship between the two left-hemisphere pictures. That result was expected.

The surprise was that he also had a ready explanation for why he had chosen the right-hemisphere picture. Given that his left-hemisphere had not seen the first right-hemisphere picture—and there was no communication between the two hemispheres of the subject’s brain—he should have been confused about why he chose that picture. Not only wasn’t he confused, he was completely confident in his answer.

As it turns out, when faced with incomplete information, the left brain quite convincingly fills in the blanks. Essentially it spins a story by making things up that you believe to be true.

The left-brain interpreter, Gazzaniga says, is what everyone uses to seek explanations for events, triage the barrage of incoming information and construct narratives that help to make sense of the world.

Your inner narrator views your inner and outer world through the lens of your mental model of the world, which largely determines what you pay attention to, how you interpret events, and the meaning you assign to them. This inner narration doesn’t just weave your world together; it also keeps change at bay by reinforcing the status quo (what is normal for you). If you want to alter your behavior—change the status quo—you have to loosen the grip on your belief in the story you currently have about yourself. This is hard to do because, like everyone else, you probably believe most, if not all, of what your inner narrator tells you. It seems as though it’s just reporting on reality, not creating it.

The Story of You

We spend our lives crafting stories that make us the noble—if flawed—protagonists of first-person dramas. A life story is a “personal myth” about who we are deep down—where we come from, how we got this way, and what it all means. Our life stories are who we are. They are our identity. A life story is not, however, an objective account. A life story is a carefully shaped narrative that is replete with strategic forgetting and skillfully spun meaning. —Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal

Your inner narrator helps sustain the illusion that there’s a single you—a single self that’s at the center, having all these thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Not so, says neuropsychologist Paul Broks. He says neuroscience shows there is no center in the brain where things do all come together.

Julian Baggini, author of The Ego Trick, expands on the idea:

When you look at the brain, and you look at how the brain makes possible a sense of self, you find that there isn’t a central control spot in the brain. There is no kind of center where everything happens. There are lots of different processes in the brain, all of which operate, in a way, quite independently. But it’s because of the way that they all relate that we get this sense of self.

This is what Roger Sperry, Michael Gazzaniga, Joseph LeDoux, and many other researchers have discovered. The difference in function between the left-brain and right-brain is only one division of labor.

In fact, the brain contains a swarm of specialized modules, each performing a special skill—calculating a distance, parsing a voice tone—and all of them running at the same time, communicating in widely distributed networks, often across hemispheres….The brain sustains a sense of unity…amid a cacophony of competing voices, the neural equivalent of open outcry at the Chicago Board of Trade. —Benedict Carey, New York Times

If you believe you have a fixed self, a permanent essence, which is always the same, throughout your life, no matter what, as Julian Baggini says, then you’re kind of trapped. If you want to change something about the way you think or the way you respond to things, you have to believe that the way you think and the way you respond can be changed. Of course, you can’t change everything about yourself, but the more you believe in a fixed, essential self, the more difficult it will be for you to make significant positive attitude or behavior changes to that self.

Note: The image is Emma Thompson as author Karen Eiffel in the movie Stranger than Fiction, in which she narrates the life of her character, Harold Crick, played by Will Ferrell. It’s one of my favorite movies.

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

J Is for Juicy

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orange-juicy

You probably know that juicy means full of juice or succulent. But it’s the second meaning of the word, richly interesting, that I want to focus on. Synonyms for interesting include: engrossing, fascinating, riveting, gripping, compelling, captivating, engaging, and enthralling. Synonyms for richly include: vividly, deeply, intensely, vibrantly, elaborately, lavishly, elegantly, splendidly, and exquisitely. You can put together your own combination of words to define juicy for yourself.

I’m hungry for a juicy life. I lean out my window at night and I can taste it out there, just waiting for me. ―Brigid Lowry, Guitar Highway Rose

What are the things that make your life richly interesting or deeply engrossing or intensely engaging? Maybe you can recite a list off the top of your head. But maybe you haven’t really given much thought to it. There are so many things you’re required to do, so many things you should do, and so many things you just do automatically that asking yourself how juicy any of them are might seem sort of silly or indulgent.

Here’s the thing, though: if you want to change any aspect of your status quo, you’ll have to contend with the unconscious part of your brain which wants no part of change. Change is potentially dangerous and definitely disruptive. So the unconscious part of your brain (System 1) prefers to play it safe by keeping everything just as it is right now. Because System 1 is much faster than the conscious part of your brain (System 2), it wins most contests that involve change.

So when you set out to change an existing habit or start a new one, or to pursue a goal, the habit or goal—or at least your desired outcome—needs to be more compelling to you than System 1’s agenda of maintaining the status quo is to it. Juiciness is highly motivating. If what you want is juicy enough, you’ll continue pursuing it in spite of both the obstacles you may encounter and the resistance your brain will put up.

Passion is one great force that unleashes creativity, because if you’re passionate about something, then you’re more willing to take risks. —Yo-Yo Ma

Get to Why

You may have a strong desire to do something without being clear about why you want to do it or what outcome you’re hoping for. This isn’t an uncommon situation. It seemed like a good idea at the time. If that’s the case, however, before you start trying to make the change, ask yourself why you want to do it. It’s worth expending some effort evaluating what you’re really up to: creating a juicier life or heading down a dead-end road.

alphabet-changeThe trick is to ask why forward rather than backward. Usually we ask why in an effort to come up with an explanation about something that already happened or to discover the past source of a current problem. Since we’ll never have access to all the information we need to get an accurate answer, asking why backward generally amounts to a lot of wheel spinning.

But asking why forward is actually useful and can even be revelatory.

  • Is there something you want to do or someplace you want to go? Why?
  • Is there a decision you’re trying to make? Why are you considering it?
  • Is there a goal you’re working toward? Why?
  • Is there a habit you’re trying to start? Why?
  • Is there a change you’re thinking about making? Why?
  • Is there something you want to get or have? Why?

Don’t stop with asking why once. If you keep asking the question, you’ll eventually get to the bedrock answer, at least for now. You’ll get closer to the heart of what’s at stake. You’ll be in a better position to decide what to do. If your why is juicy enough, you’ll be more motivated to go after it. If you can’t find the juiciness, you’re better off letting it go rather than setting yourself up for a slog you probably won’t make it through.

Juicy and Passionate

If your why is juicy enough, you’ll be passionate about doing whatever it takes to get there: the doing, the learning, the creating, and the problem-solving. Working toward your goal won’t feel like work no matter how effortful it might be. Passion keeps you engaged and helps you through the rough or confusing spots, so you’re more likely to keep going instead of getting bored or giving up. Obsession isn’t always a bad thing.

So why aren’t we all engaged in living, or aiming to live, the juiciest life possible? Why aren’t we going all in with passion and intensity? Since passion and juiciness are so important, essential even, when it comes to changing our behavior, why haven’t we fully embraced them? I suspect what gets in the way is us, specifically the things we tell ourselves, our considerations, our expectations, the preconditions we demand of life, or fear of feeling fear. Or maybe it’s embarrassment. It’s not cool to be too excited about something.

I like to just think of myself as a normal person who just has a passion, has a goal and a dream and goes out and does it. And that’s really how I’ve always lived my life. —Michael Phelps

We’re afraid of stepping up, taking a risk, facing uncertainty, getting hurt or burned, failing, caring too much, or exceeding our reach. The unconscious part of our brain is wired for survival, not for juiciness and passion.

What gets in the way of living passionately isn’t our circumstances; it’s our own self-talk that keeps passion at arm’s length. If we want to live a juicy life, we can start doing it any time. There’s nothing to search for or to find, either within or without. There’s nothing stopping us from going after what’s succulent, what richly interests us, but ourselves.

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

Contact Me

joycelyn@farthertogo.com
505-332-8677