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March 22 - March 30, 2021
Building awareness through mindfulness helps you “pop the hood” on what’s going on in your old brain. You can learn to recognize your habit loops while they’re happening, rather than “waking up” at the end of them when you’ve almost crashed the car. Once you’re aware of your habit loops—when you’re on autopilot—you can then get curious about what is happening. Why am I doing this? What triggered the behavior? What reward am I really getting from this? Do I want to keep doing this?
Dr. Carol Dweck, a researcher at Stanford University, talked about this years ago when she contrasted fixed and growth mindsets. When you’re stuck in old habit loops (including judging yourself), you’re not open to growth. (My lab has even mapped out a part of the brain associated with this.)
Studies from multiple labs have found that mindfulness specifically targets the key links of reward-based learning.
In other words, patients could notice a craving, get curious about what it felt like in their bodies (and minds), and ride it out, instead of habitually smoking.
The adage “don’t just do something, sit there” also serves as a powerful reminder that being is the doing. In other words, by being there, deeply listening to my patients, I am often doing the best thing I can do for them in that moment: empathizing, understanding, and connecting.
Ready for another question to reflect on in your anxiety (and other) habit-mapping? If this isn’t your first attempt to change a habit, go back and review all of the different anti-habit strategies that you have tried over the years. Which ones worked? Which ones failed? Did your successes and failures fit with what you now know about how your brain (and specifically reward-based learning) works? If you are new to the game of habit change, you’re in a good place because you haven’t set up “bad” habits around trying to change bad habits (that is to say, strategies that failed, yet you repeat
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Here again is Jon Kabat-Zinn’s definition of mindfulness: [Mindfulness is] the awareness that arises through paying attention in the present moment, on purpose, nonjudgmentally.
But we can become more aware of these habit patterns in action. That’s what mindfulness helps us do: build awareness so that we can observe our caveman brains in action.
In other words, meditation falls within the category of ways to train mindfulness. You don’t need to meditate to be mindful, yet meditation helps you become more and more aware of what’s happening right now.
Awareness also helps you pay attention to triggers and automatic reactions. This goes for much more than anxiety and worry habit loops; in fact, it applies to anything that we’re reacting to.
see this in my clinic patients a lot: the more they try to clear their mind of anxious thoughts or think their way out of anxiety, the more anxious they become. The most common misperception is summed up by a question I often get asked when I am teaching at retreats or when I’m introducing my patients to the idea of mindfulness: “How do I rid my mind of my thoughts?”
Mindfulness is not about stopping, emptying, or ridding ourselves of anything.
But this isn’t an easy thing to do. In fact, a 2010 Harvard study showed that we get caught up in thinking (mind-wandering, to be exact) for about 50 percent of our waking lives. That’s a lot of time running on autopilot.
The DMN gets activated when our mind is wandering, thinking about things in the past or future, caught in repetitive thought patterns such as rumination, anxiety, or in other strong emotional states, and when we’re craving various substances.
A hub of the DMN called the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) connects a bunch of other brain regions together. The PCC is interesting because it gets activated when people are shown pictures that are reminders of or triggers for their addictions.
Basically, the PCC gets all fired up when we get caught up in craving and other types of perseverative thinking habit loops like rumination (focusing on one’s distress and repeatedly thinking about it over and over), which is a hallmark of depression and anxious worry. Perseveration simply means thinking the same thing over and over; worry is the poster child for this.
Rumination Habit Loop Trigger: Feel low in energy Behavior: Think about how down you feel, how you will never get anything done, etc. Result: Feel (more) depressed
Anxious Worry Habit Loop Trigger: Look at unfinished to-do list Behavior: Worry about not getting it done Result: Feel anxious
As a side note, depressed individuals seem to be so good at perseverative thinking habit loops that two-thirds of them also meet the psychiatric diagnostic criteria for anxiety disorders. This commonality between depression and anxiety is an example of perseverative thinking habit loops that are basically out of control—they feed on themselves.
As a clinician, I see perseverative thinking as possibly the top issue tripping up my patients. And more often than not, this type of thinking has grooved a deep pattern in their brains to the point that they have identified with their habits: “I am a smoker.” “I am anxious.” Because perseverative thinking habit loops seem to be a clear and present danger for my patients and mindfulness might help, as a researcher, I was motivated to science the shit out of it.
In our first study, we used an MRI scanner to compare the brain activity of people who had never meditated to that of experienced meditators.
Lo and behold, only four brain regions showed different activity between the meditators and the non-meditators—two of those being the main hubs of the DMN. And yes, the DMN was much quieter in experienced meditators.
We found that our theory—that mindfulness would change brain activity and correlate with clinical outcomes—was true.
Already this understanding might explain why mindfulness training works best with depression and anxiety: it targets that shared element of perseverative thinking. People who are depressed perseverate about the past. People who are anxious perseverate about the future.
Once you’ve mapped out your main habit loops, see how much you can zoom in throughout the day and count the number of times that they make it to the top of your brain’s “playlist.” Are there specific perseverative loops that you can map out? Can you count how many times they get played? Which ones make it to the top of the charts?
In the face of danger or threat, for example, you might turn toward the danger and fight, turn from it and run, or freeze in your tracks, with the hope that whatever threatens you doesn’t see (or smell) you. That is your fight/flight/freeze reaction, the automatic response that we all have in the face of danger.
Thinking is way too slow a process when danger is near—your response has to be at the reflex level. Could these instincts explain some habitual elements of our personalities?
His observations broke behavioral tendencies into three general categories or buckets that line up surprisingly well with modern-day science: Bucket 1: Approach/fight Bucket 2: Avoid/flight Bucket 3: Neither approach nor avoid (freeze)
People who are in the approach bucket (1) may have a tendency to be more motivated by behaviors that are positively reinforcing. People who are in the avoid bucket (2) may have a tendency to be more motivated by behaviors that are negatively reinforcing. People who are in neither bucket (3) may be more in the middle—not pulled or pushed into a positively or negatively reinforcing pathway/tendency by pleasant and unpleasant situations as much as the others.
❑I would want it to be high-energy, with lots of people.
❑I would want only certain people there.
❑quickly notice problems, imperfections, or untidiness.
❑don’t tend to notice or get bothered by clutter.
❑organized.
❑creatively chaotic.
❑be passionate and energetic.
❑make sure everything is accurate.
❑consider future possibilities/wonder about the best way forward. When talking to people, I might come across as . . . ❑affectionate. ❑realistic. ❑philosophical. The disadvantage of my clothing style is that it may be . . . ❑decadent. ❑unimaginative. ❑mismatched or uncoordinated. In general, I carry myself . . . ❑buoyantly. ❑briskly. ❑aimlessly. My room is . . . ❑richly decorated. ❑neatly arranged. ❑messy. Generally, I tend to . . . ❑have a strong desire for things. ❑be critical but clear-thinking. ❑be in my own world. At school, I was known for . . . ❑having lots of friends.
❑being intellectual.
Middle = avoid type;
One might give an avoid type an assignment requiring a high level of precision and attention to detail because such a person loves to focus in on figuring things out and thrives in those situations.
If you are the avoid type, you can pay attention to related behaviors such as being overly judgmental (of yourself and others) or overly focusing on accuracy to the detriment of the bigger picture.
heavily into one tendency or another. For example, my wife and I both fall heavily into the avoid bucket. This may explain why we are both academics: we love to spend our time questioning premises and theories, researching and figuring things out.
Avoid: You tend to be clear-thinking and discerning. Your intellect allows you to see things logically and identify flaws in things. You are quick to understand concepts and tend to keep things organized and tidy while getting things done quickly. You pay attention to detail. You might even have a stiff posture (that is to say, you walk stiffly and hurriedly). At times you might notice that you are overly judgmental and critical. You may come across as a perfectionist.
Oh, that’s just my brain, which helped her not take things so personally.
You must let the pain visit. You must allow it to teach you. You must not allow it overstay. —IJEOMA UMEBINYUO
you really pay careful and close attention—without making any assumptions or relying on past experience to guide you—and you see that a behavior is not rewarding right now, I promise you that you will start to get less excited about doing it again.
If you notice that potato chips make you feel crappy when you eat too many, you get less excited about eating the whole bag next time. Not because you have to force yourself to not eat them, but simply because you remember what happened last time (and the time before that, and the time before that, and the time before that). This also holds true for worry, procrastination, or any other anxiety habit loop that you’ve learned over the years.
When you have identified and mapped out your habit loops (first gear) and are ready to practice driving in second gear, ask yourself this simple question: What do I get from this behavior? Answering this question will require you to pay careful attention to the actual, visceral, embodied sensations, emotions, and thoughts that come as a result of the behavior in question.
mentioned in the last chapter: you can know that something is bad for you, but thinking doesn’t change behaviors on its own. It isn’t strong enough. Changing a reward value is what gets the heavy lifters on board to do the lifting for you. And the reward value doesn’t change without its coach (awareness) helping it see clearly what isn’t worth picking up and what is.
