Getting Out of a Rut

Why is it so hard to change behavior, or attitudes, or personality? I’ll tell you why. These things are habits. Habits are well learned and they persist from mindlessness.

Our behavior, attitudes, and personality are predisposed by genetics but also ingrained by repeating and reinforcing them over long periods. Thus, the older you get the more inflexible you get. But I see teenagers stuck in ruts too, and they are less likely to have the fronto-parietal cortex executive control to impose changes on themselves.

Regardless of age, being in a rut comes from learning to the point of creating a habit. Habits are really hard to change. Wendy Wood, in her review of the recent book, The Power of Habit, points out that contextual cues trigger habitual behavior. In other words, when you are in a rut, you have mindlessly outsourced your brain’s executive control to these cues. You run on auto-pilot. It is easier to respond to such cues reflexively than think about it and do something else.

Cures for reforming habits require attention to the triggering cues as the core of self-control strategies. When an unwanted response is activated from memory, it needs to be inhibited. Bad habits, unlike responses to temptations, are controlled most effectively through spontaneous introspective awareness and executive control (“Why am I doing this?”…“I don’t want to be doing this”… “don’t do it”… “am I backsliding?”) Vigilant self-awareness and monitoring apparently do not change the strength of the habit memory but are effective because they enhance executive control processes. Wood suggests that the most promising way to break a habit is to “disrupting habit cues so that the old response is not brought to mind and new habits can be learned.”

Some examples of cue awareness and disruption include:

1.    If you over-eat, use smaller plates or put smaller helpings on the plate.

2.    If you can’t focus and your mind wanders, notice distractions for what they are. Practice meditation.

3.    If you are hyper-critical or argumentative, recognize the instant you disagree.

4.    If you are lazy, be aware of your environment when you aren’t doing anything.

5.    If you are boastful, notice the situation that makes you want to boast.

If you want to get out of a rut, another important aid is to substitute a new and more desirable habit. I learned this years ago when I tried to quit smoking. I succeeded many times—in other words, I failed to really quit. Only when I decided to take up jogging and forced myself to do it persistently, was I able to substitute the positive reinforcement of nicotine with the positive reinforcement of the endorphins that are released during jogging.

To substitute a better habit, you must pick something that is likewise reinforcing and repeat it enough for it to become a habit. It also helps to simultaneously remove the cues that trigger the old bad habit. For example, when I finally quit smoking, I made myself go jog when I had a strong urge to smoke. Even though I had an urge to smoke many times a day yet only jogged once daily, this single substitution act seemed sufficiently helpful.

Some examples of habit substitution include:

1.    If you eat more meat than you want, find tasty vegetarian menus.

2.    If you gossip, restrict all gossip to praise talk.

3.    If you procrastinate, create a habit of doing the hard things first.

4.    If you whine, make yourself provide positive interpretations.

5.    If you associate with people who are dragging you down, spend more time with new associates who can lift you up.

Finally, we have to stop making excuses. Our usual attempts to blame things on “bad genes,” are misleading. In recent years, scientists have discovered that most of our DNA does not have a coding function. They used to call it “junk” DNA, presumably just carried along as useless sludge in the stream of evolution. Now they discover that “junk DNA” actually controls the expression of the coding genes. New discoveries in the field of “epigenetics” are showing that what we think and do influence if and when many of our coding genes are expressed.

Sources:

Klemm, W. R. (2008) Blame Game. How to Win It. Bryan, Tx: Benecton Press.

Quinn, J. M., Pascoe, A., Wood, Wendy, and Neal, D. T. (2010) Can’t control yourself? Monitor those bad habits. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. 36(4); 499-511 doi: 10.1177/0146167209360665

Wood, Wendy (2013) On ruts and getting out of them. Science. 336: 980-981

Just Do It

If you can do it, should do it, and want to do it, what are you waiting for? Many things in life that we excuse or misplace blame for are not created by what we do but by what we fail to do. Maybe we just procrastinate and just don’t get around to action. Or maybe it’s just a thought, something that we think would be nice to do, but we just aren’t serious about it.

What keeps us from action? Can, should, and want ought to be pretty compelling. I was recently asked by a group of editors to write a chapter on the “Neurobiology of Agency,” for a scholarly book. Don’t worry. I won’t burden you here with what I am writing for the book chapter. But that task has caused me to reflect on agency from the perspective of  the everyday issues of what we do and fail to do.

Some possible answers come from my own experience. One excuse is that we just can’t seem to find the time. That won’t wash. Whatever we do in life, we have found or made time for. Final choices are matters of priority, and sometimes we don’t prioritize well.

Fear is an obvious cause. There are many kinds of fear that cause inaction. There is:

•        Fear of failure.
•        Fear of being different or out-of-step.
•        Fear of rejection.
•        Even fear of success.  

Fear of failure arises from self-doubt. We may think we don’t know enough, don’t have enough time or energy, or lack ability, resources, and help. The cure for such fear is to learn what is needed, make the time, pump ourselves up emotionally so we will have the energy, hone our relevant skill set, and hustle for resources and help. These things can be demanding. It is no wonder there are so many things we can, should, and want to do but don’t do.

All our life, beginning with school, we are conditioned to consider failure as a bad thing. But failure is often a good, even necessary, thing. The ratio between failures and successes for any given person is rather stable. Thus, if you want more successes, you need to make more failures. Even the corporate world recognizes this principle, and the most innovative companies practice it. Jeff Dyer, in his book The Innovator’s DNA, says the key to business success is to “fail often, fail fast, fail cheap.” It’s o.k. to fail, as long as you learn from it. Our mantra should be: “Keep tweaking until it works.” This is exactly how Edison invented the light bulb. Most other inventors and creative people in general have operated with the same mantra.

Fear of being different leads to social pathology. It can cause people to join groups, causes, and lifestyles that are not be good for them or even harmful. The corollary is that bad social commitments make it harder to experience better alternatives. Not everyone can be a leader, who by definition is different from the crowd. But all of us are better off when we are our own person, march to our own drummer, become “captain of our own soul.”

Fear of being different often arises from personal insecurity and lack of confidence. These are crippling emotions and one’s life can never be fully actualized until they are overcome. This comes to the matter of self-esteem. One thing many people don’t realize is that self-esteem has two quite distinct components: self-worth and self-confidence. Self-worth is given (by being valued and loved by others, by God). Self-confidence cannot be given−it has to be earned. People who lack the confidence to “put themselves on the line” deny themselves opportunities to enjoy the fruits of success. Their life becomes a vicious cycle that begins with lack of confidence, lack of agency, lack of success, and increased justification not to be confident.

If we are different, the in-crowd may reject us. Rejection is certainly depressing. Nobody in his right mind wants to be depressed. But no life can be fulfilling when it is lived to satisfy the opinions others may have of us. We need to be true to ourselves, to trust in our values and standards. If who we are is not worthy of such trust, we can certainly fix that. This dictum lies at the heart of Socrates’ great admonition: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

Fear of success is often learned by watching how others have failed to adjust to success. Witness the entertainment celebrities who end up committing suicide. Most of us probably know personally some people who have become conceited, aloof, condescending, arrogant, or otherwise unlikable as a result of their success. We don’t want that to happen to us. When we surrender to our fear of success, we affirm our lack of trust in ourselves. Do we really need to reinforce such lack of self-trust?

So, when life offers you the chance to do something you can, should, and want to do, just DO IT!

More on the matter of excuses and blame can be found in Dr. Klemm’s book, Blame Game. How To Win It, available at Amazon and bookstores.

Learning to Make Bad Choices

Every day, people make choices among options they may have never experienced. Yet, they can make such choices rapidly, even confidently—yet unwisely. Whether good or bad, the choices are likely to be biased from past learning conditions,

Research is now clarifying how biased choices are made. All choices, biased or not, are influenced by the values we place on alternative choice options. If a past choice led to a good outcome, people are biased to make that choice again because a positive value has been attached to it.

If in a current situation where there is no past relevant experience, we can still make a choice easily. To do that, we must be able to assign positive value to the choice made. But how can that be done in the absence of past experience? It now appears from recent experiments that such decisions can guided by past memory associations.

Memories certainly modulate value assignment and thus decision-making. In one recent study, brain-scan imaging of humans has revealed that giving people monetary rewards activates a pre-established network of memories that spread the positive value of reward to non-rewarded items stored in memory. This creates a bias for later decisions to choose non-rewarded items.

As an aside, the study revealed that a key structure involved in memory formation, the hippocampus, predicts choice bias. It appears that activity in the hippocampus, as revealed in brain scans, helps to spread the reward value among memories of items that had never been rewarded, and thus bias future choices for these non-rewarded items.

The rationale for the study began with the authors’ realization of how the hippocampus helps to form memories. It encodes relationships between items and events to form a remembered association. Later, when an item is recalled, the hippocampus can automatically reactive the neural representation of the associated item. Here then might be a way that the hippocampus could re-allocate reward value when a past situation is recalled.

The choice task had three stages. First, the subjects had to learn association between paired items. They were shown a series of pairs of images, first one and then the other. Next was a reward phase, in which half of the second stimuli were rewarded with money. Thus, subjects  unconsciously learned a response to value those stimuli that were directly rewarded.  The researchers expected that the non-rewarded member of the pair might pick up some value by virtue of being associated with the rewarded member of the pair. If so, a bias might have been created for these non-rewarded items in future choice situations. Indeed, that is what they found in a later test in which only the first member of each pair was presented and subjects were asked to pick the preferred items. If no transfer of value had occurred in the prior learning, the choices would have been evenly divided. But that is not what was found. Subjects more often than chance preferred the stimuli that had previously been paired with a rewarded second stimulus.

Why is this important to the issue of blame? This issue was never considered by the authors. But to extrapolate from the experiment, we could conclude that sometimes we may blame a bad choice on the wrong cause. The real cause may have been our own bias for making a bad choice, in which we had erroneously assigned value on the basis of some past associations with experiences that were rewarded. That bias may have been created by some past experiences in which we had inappropriately assigned a high value to certain choice options that did not deserve such value.

So, for example, we might have had a past experience in which a good thing happened at the same time as other events which had no learned value or even negative value. But the value of the good thing spreads to bias attitudes toward the other events. In the future, in a different circumstance, we might unwisely choose the previously low-value option.

Here is a common example. Suppose we have a dear friend who we have found to offer a valuable relationship. We meet the dear friend’s associates, who may be unseemly characters that would make poor choices for us to value as friends. Yet, the value we attached to the dear friend spills over to the others and makes us less likely to be critical of them. Thus, we might start running with a bad crowd of people that get us into trouble. When we get into trouble, we likely will place the blame in the wrong place, without realizing it all started with the bias created in us by the value we had placed in our dear friend.

You can probably conjure your own examples. This whole process of learned bias can affect every aspect of our life. It is important for us to be more aware of our biases and the true value of our choice options.

Source:

Wimmer, G. E. and Shohamy, D. (2012). Preference by association: how memory mechanisms in the hippocampus bias decisions. Science. 338: 270-273.