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February 28, 2018
The staffers helped them quit smoking and switch to an extreme vegetarian diet that derived fewer than 10 percent of its calories from fat. In places like Omaha, they shifted from steaks and fries to brown rice and greens. The patients got together for group conversations twice a week, and
they also took classes in meditation, relaxation, yoga, and aerobic exercise, which became parts of their daily routines. The program lasted for only a year. After that, they were on their own. But three years from the start, the study found, 77 percent of the patients had stuck with these lifestyle changes—and safely avoided the need for heart surgery. They had halted—or, in many cases, reversed—the progress of their disease.
My mission is to replace those three misconceptions about change—our trust in facts, fear, and force
(the three Fs)—with what I call “the three keys to change.” In
“adapt, improvise, and overcome,” and that’s what the rest of us do in real
the three keys to change, which I call the three Rs: relate, repeat, and reframe.
You form a new, emotional relationship with a person or community that inspires and sustains hope. If
1)
The leader or community has to sell you on yourself and make you believe you have the ability to change. They have to sell you on themselves as your partners, mentors, role models, or sources of new knowledge. And they have to sell you on the specific methods or strategies that they employ.
THE SECOND KEY TO CHANGE Repeat
THE THIRD KEY TO CHANGE Reframe
These are the three keys to change: relate, repeat, and reframe. New hope, new skills, and new thinking.
professional. The third method was an even more experimental idea of “minimal” therapy with the patient meeting with a doctor for sessions that were unusually short (only half an hour) and infrequent (once every two weeks).
The common denominator, it turned out, was that going to therapy inspired a new sense of hope for the patients—the belief and expectation that they would overcome their troubles. The key factor was the chemistry of the emotionally charged relationship formed by the patient and the therapist or the group, not the specific theories or techniques that differentiated
Psych Concept #1 Frames
“ideology” you can refer to it as a “belief system” or a “conceptual framework” (“frames,”
We take the facts and fit them into the frames we already have. If the facts don’t fit, we’re likely to challenge whether they’re really facts or to dismiss the information and persist somehow in believing what we want to believe.
“Concepts are not things that can be changed just by someone telling us a fact,” says Lakoff, who’s a professor of cognitive science and linguistics. “We may be presented with facts, but for us to make
sense of them, they have to fit what is already in the synapses of the brain. Otherwise, facts go in and then they go right back out. They are not heard, or they are not accepted as facts, or they mystify us: Why would anyone have said that? Then we label the fact as irrational, crazy, or stupid.”
Denial is one of the biggest reasons it’s so difficult to motivate other people to change. We think we can enlighten them by telling them the facts, but they’re in denial because they’ve already confronted the facts and they can’t handle the facts. We try to use fear to motivate them
If you’re hopeless, then what you need is someone to inspire a new sense of hope—the belief and expectation that you can change your situation and overcome the difficulties you’ve struggled with. And that’s exactly what happens in the first key to change.
Show Jeff
KEY #1 Relate Ornish became a follower of the swami, who inspired in him a new sense of hope—the belief and expectation that he could change. KEY #2 Repeat
The swami helped him learn and practice vegetarianism, yoga, and meditation. These new habits and skills made him feel healthier and more relaxed and psychologically balanced on a daily basis. Ornish gave up his meaty “Texas diet of chili, cheeseburgers, and chalupas.” KEY #3 Reframe The swami helped him learn about Eastern philosophy, a new way of thinking about his situation and his life. This gave Ornish a sense of purpose and perspective and relieved his depression.
Hebenstreit said. “I had been a typical loner and kept a tight lid on my emotions.” He was angry about his illness. As a Jewish native of Germany, he felt guilty for surviving the Holocaust while millions perished. Four decades after the end of World War II, he still felt rage at the Nazis.
His daily routine was vigorous: He would wake up at 6:00 A.M. to do push-ups, yoga, and meditation before breakfast. He and his wife walked together for half an hour every day, and once a week he went out on a hike for more than four hours.
Self Care Routine
KEY #1 Relate
KEY #2 Repeat
The second key to change is all about teaching, training, and learning.
And teaching is an art of its own that doesn’t come naturally to most people.
While the typical cardiologist doesn’t believe patients can change their lifestyles, the yoga teacher believes patients can and will learn how to stretch and breath and meditate, the personal trainer is confident about getting them to walk for half an hour every day, and the chef knows
The underlying problems are psychological, emotional, and spiritual. Smoking, drinking, and overeating are “solutions” to these problems. Bad solutions, since they ultimately cause heart disease, but solutions nonetheless: They’re effective ways of helping people get through the day. And when you’re depressed or unhappy, that’s a noble goal. “When you’re depressed,” Ornish says, “getting through the day is more important than living to eighty-six instead of eighty-five—even if you’re eighty-five.”
That’s where the third key to change comes in. You need a relationship that helps you “reframe” and learn new ways of thinking. Ornish, like other proponents of preventative medicine, such as Dr. Andrew Weil, promotes a new system of beliefs—a new ideology about health and healing. He thinks patients should be active, not passive. Patients can be heroic, not helpless. Patients can take responsibility for their health rather than living irresponsibly. They can save themselves rather than counting on physicians to save them. Their physical health depends on their psychological, emotional, and
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It helps if you start out by speaking their language and by working within their existing beliefs.
He talks about the importance of “interconnectedness” instead of using Eastern healing terminology such as Chi, Prana, or Shakti.
Psych Concept #3 “Short-term Wins”
“victories that nourish faith in the change effort, emotionally reward the hard workers, keep the critics at bay, and build momentum,”
The “short-term wins” inspire hope for Ornish’s patients, encouraging the belief that they can change and the expectation that they will change. When they see the results from their new habits and skills, then they start to change how they think. That’s how belief systems ultimately shift.
They realized that the brain’s ability to change—its so-called plasticity—is lifelong. We can learn complex new things in our thirties or even our eighties. So why don’t we?
Similarly, people have thousands of habits—such as how to use a pen—that we perform automatically because we’ve created lasting changes in our brains through repetition. For highly trained specialists, such as professional musicians, the changes show up conspicuously on brain scans. If you’ve practiced an instrument several hours a day for a couple of decades, it makes a big difference. Flute players, for instance, have especially large physical representations in their brains in the areas that control the fingers, tongue, and lips. “They’ve distorted their brains,” Merzenich explains.
“What happens that becomes stultifying is you stop learning and you stop using the machinery, so it starts dying.” Unless you work on it, brain fitness begins declining at around age thirty for men and a little later for women. “People mistake ‘being active’ for continuous learning,” Merzenich says. “The machinery is only activated by learning.
The idea is to escape from your expertise and become a novice in an entirely different pursuit.
