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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.

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.

M Is for Mental Model

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Your brain maintains a model of the world that represents what’s normal in it for you. The result is that you experience a stripped-down, customized version of the actual world. To a great extent, each of us really does inhabit our own world. But it would be incorrect to say that we create our reality; rather, our brain creates our reality for us.

Consciousness is a way of projecting all the activity in your nervous system into a simpler form. [It] gives you a summary that is useful for the larger picture, useful at the scale of apples and rivers and humans with whom you might be able to mate. —David Eagleman

Much, if not most, of what you do, think, and feel consists of automatically generated responses to internal or external stimuli. And it isn’t possible to consciously mediate all of your responses. It wouldn’t even be a good idea to try.

But how does your brain do it? How does it decide what to prune and what to allow into your consciousness? It would be highly inefficient if it had to process all of this data bit-by-bit. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to since it operates by association, which is much faster, and by filtering incoming data through the model of the world it constructs that represents what’s normal in it for you.

Built by Association

System 1, the unconscious part of your brain, uses associative thinking to develop and maintain your model of the world. However, there are some problems with associative thinking. For example:

  • It sacrifices accuracy for speed.
  • It doesn’t discriminate very well.
  • It takes cognitive shortcuts (aka cognitive biases).

Your mental model can—and sometimes does—lead to erroneous conclusions and inappropriate responses. It’s the job of consciousness to check the impulses and suggestions it receives from System 1, but consciousness is slow, lazy, and easily depleted. Most of the time, it’s content to go along with System 1, which means it’s susceptible to cognitive biases. By definition, cognitive biases are distortions or errors in thinking. They actually decrease your understanding while giving you a feel-good sense of cognitive ease.

Confirmation bias is the easy acceptance of information that validates what you already believe. It causes you to selectively notice and pay attention to what confirms your beliefs and to ignore what doesn’t. It underlies the discomfort you feel around people who disagree with you and the ease you feel around people who share your beliefs.

Information that confirms what you already believe to be true makes you feel right and certain, so you’re likely to accept it uncritically. On the other hand, you’re more likely to reject information that is inconsistent with what you already believe or at least you hold inconsistent information up to greater scrutiny. You have different standards for evaluating information depending on the level of cognitive ease it generates.

Evidence has precious little impact on any of us if it conflicts with what we believe simply because the cognitive strain of processing it is too great. To a very real extent, we don’t even “see” conflicting evidence. While total commitment to your particular worldview (mental model) makes you feel more confident, it narrows—rather than expands—your possibilities. That means it limits your powers of discernment, your ability to increase your understanding of the world around you, and your creative potential. It closes the world off instead of opening it up.

Your Particular Model of the World

In addition to helping you navigate the world, your mental model gives rise to your sense of the way things should be. It generates expectations that are either confirmed or denied, assumptions, biases, etc. that determine what you pay attention to, what you perceive (even what you are able to perceive), how you interpret and respond to what you perceive, and the meaning you make of it all. Your mental model is the result of your genes and your experiences, of both intention and accident. Your brain has been constructing your particular model of the world since your birth, and it is continually updating and modifying it—most of the time entirely outside your awareness.

But while the contents of your mental model determine what you think, feel, do, and say, you can’t search them—or follow a bread-crumb trail backward through them—to find out precisely which aspects (and when and how they came to be) give rise to any specific facet of who you are and how you react now.

The significance of your mental model in your life can’t be overstated. Although you aren’t consciously aware of it, your mental model circumscribes not only every aspect of your present experience but also what is possible for you to do and be. It determines what you see and how you see the world, both literally and figuratively, as well as how you see yourself.

So it stands to reason that you won’t be successful in making long-lasting changes to your behavior, beliefs, or attitude unless you are able to change your mental model.

Changing the Status Quo

The often-quoted statement is true: we don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are. If you want to live a fuller live, if you want to be more effective or useful or loving in the world, you first need to recognize that your greatest constraints are imposed by your own mental model.

You can’t do away with your mental model—or “think outside the box,” since the box is your mental model. But you can expand it through learning, through exposing yourself to new situations, people, and ideas, and through physical movement. You can grow new neurons and generate new neuronal connections and pathways. Those new neuronal pathways represent alterations to your mental model, a change in your status quo to a new normal for you.

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

K Is for Know-How

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Knowledge and know-how have a lot in common, but they’re not the same thing. You can read a book, watch a DVD, or listen to a lecture and gain knowledge—maybe even a lot—but that knowledge is theoretical until you actually apply it. Memorizing a camera’s instruction manual, for example, won’t give you the know-how to use your camera effectively, easily, or creatively in a wide range of situations. To be able to do that, you need hands-on experience and practice—the more practice, the better.

You probably know how to do a lot of things you didn’t always know how to do.

  • Drive a car
  • Operate a computer
  • Search the internet
  • Use a smartphone
  • Purchase airline reservations and board a plane
  • Order food in a restaurant
  • Speak in front of a group
  • Assemble furniture using an Allen wrench
  • Knit a scarf

Learning how to do all those things—at least to do them well, with confidence, or in some cases, safely—involves actually doing them, not just knowing what to do or how to do it. Drivers’ education, when I took it, included both classroom learning and operating a vehicle with an instructor in the passenger seat. A few of my classmates who demonstrated great proficiency in the classroom didn’t do so well on the road. I still remember one of a series of near-misses with Susan N. behind the wheel. Our instructor frantically gestured for her to pull the car over and park it, after which he got out and strode up and down the sidewalk for several minutes, repeatedly rubbing his hands over his face.

And if you think you can sit right down and knit a scarf using, say, the garter stitch (a relatively easy knitting project), after having watched someone else do it or reading the pattern instructions, you’re in for a surprise when you try manipulating the yarn and needles for the first time.

Getting to Carnegie Hall

We expect that in learning how to do something that involves a procedure, a sequence, or the use of tools or equipment we will need to practice doing it in order to master the activity. In fact, we expect to spend the majority of our learning time not on theory, but on practice.

But we don’t approach changing our behavior the same way. We seem to think that having knowledge or information is enough—or more accurately, should be enough. When it turns out not to be, we don’t rethink our approach or beliefs. We decide there’s something wrong, either with the knowledge and information or with us.

I think one of the reasons for this is that we don’t recognize that the same mechanism of action is involved in almost all behavior change. So putting the practice time in will eventually pay off not just in one area, but in many areas. It’s similar to learning how to play the piano. Mastering playing the piano doesn’t just give you the ability to play one song or one type of music. Yes, playing improvisational jazz is different from playing classical sonatas, but the underlying mechanism of action is the same. The piano skills you develop are transferable.

Theory and Practice

Mastering the art and science of change involves both theory and practice, too. In the realm of theory, you need to understand some things about the brain, including:

  • The difference between System 1 (the unconscious) and System 2 (consciousness)
  • Why your brain keeps “correcting” you back to your old way of doing things
  • How your brain creates habits, with or without your participation

You also need to know how to make use of the way your brain is wired or how to work around it when you need to. That involves developing various tools, including:

  • Setting goals and following through on them
  • Keeping your attention focused on your intentions
  • Making use of rewards to activate memory and learning circuits

That’s a lot of information to absorb. It’s a lot of knowledge to process. But it’s not enough.

Even if you know everything there is to know about how the brain works in regard to behavior, and even if you understand the reasons for and the absolute best ways to use goals, habits, intentions, and rewards, if you don’t engage in regular and deliberate practice, you won’t be able to master the art and science of change.

When clients begin my Goals, Habits & Intentions course, I always tell them the most valuable thing they’ll get from the course is coming face-to-face with how they get in their own way. If you really want to master behavior change, you need to develop the kind of self-awareness you can only get when you’re in the midst of trying to change something. For example:

  • How do you respond to feedback?
  • What do you do when faced with obstacles, delays, and distractions?
  • What beliefs and assumptions do you have about yourself and the way the world works that you don’t know you have?

Regular and deliberate practice is the only way to fully grasp the tools and make them your own. Regular and deliberate practice combined with knowledge and information helps you develop the know-how to master making the changes you want to make in your life and to help others do the same.

Change is not easy. It takes a lot longer than you think it will or than you want it to. It can be messy and discouraging, too. In his book Mastery, George Leonard says:

To take the master’s journey, you have to practice diligently, striving to hone your skills, to attain new levels of competence. But while doing so—and this is the inexorable fact of the journey—you also have to be willing to spend most of your time on a plateau, to keep practicing even when you seem to be getting nowhere.

That’s the challenge. But once you really get the hang of it—once you develop the know-how—you’ll have it for the rest of your life.

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

Contact Me

joycelyn@farthertogo.com
505-332-8677