Our brains are simply not set up to produce rational behavior. But there's a way to change that.
February 27, 2014
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At
the tail end of a sweltering, humid Chicago day in 1993, I took my
family to the community pool for a dip. As the children splashed
gleefully, I sat nearby reading Robert Ornstein’s new book, The Evolution of Consciousness, unaware that my life was about to change.
Seven
years earlier, I’d emerged from my doctoral studies utterly
dissatisfied with existing answers to the question of why people
continue to behave in self-defeating, irrational ways despite clear
evidence that their methods aren’t working. Few questions were more
important to the enterprise of psychotherapy, yet the answers at that
time were highly speculative—running the gamut from unresolved childhood
issues to low ego strength to family homeostasis to secondary payoffs,
with little scientific evidence to support any of them. Deeply
discouraged, I wondered if I’d chosen the wrong career.
From
the first page of Ornstein’s book, it was clear to me that he was on to
something new. Using hard neuroscience data, he proposed that we behave
irrationally because our brains are simply not set up to produce
rational behavior. Throughout history, he argued, we’ve been operating
under a great deception—we tend to believe that our thoughts and actions
result largely from our conscious intentions. In fact, while our
rational mind has a degree of veto power, the inclinations that fuel our
perceptions, interpretations, and actions primarily come from neural
processes that operate beneath the level of awareness. The fact that
most of us have fallen for the great deception isn’t our fault. Because
we’re aware only of our conscious thoughts, we readily assume that
they’re the prime movers in our brains. We’re a bit like the men in the
movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding, who think that because they
consider themselves the “head of the house,” they’re in charge. But
remember Maria’s famous quote? “The man is the head, but the woman is
the neck. And she can turn the head any way she wants.” In the brain,
nonconscious urges and impulses are the neck, and conscious thought is
merely the head.
To
support this idea, Ornstein cited the work of Benjamin Libet, the
University of California San Francisco researcher who found that by
monitoring brain activity, he could tell when subjects were going to
initiate simple wrist-flicking movements before the subjects
were aware of deciding to flick their wrists. Libet’s findings ran
contrary to the way most of us experience ourselves. Most of us think,
“When I move, it’s because I decided that I was going to move.” But
Libet’s studies showed that impulse and inclination preceded conscious
intention. It was as though somebody else in the subject’s brain
decided when he or she would flick his or her wrist. Initially, Libet’s
study stirred a storm of controversy, but over the next few decades, his
findings would be replicated time and time again, with more and more
sophisticated technologies, leading to him winning a Nobel Prize for his
contributions.
The sun was setting by the time I reached the end of The Evolution of Consciousness.
I hauled the kids out of the pool and herded them into the car. On the
drive home, I remember thinking that if Ornstein were right, I’d need to
rethink my assumptions about nearly everything concerning human
behavior, including psychotherapy. For me, reading his work was a
genuine eureka moment. But figuring out a way to actually use this new
brain knowledge with my clients would turn out to be tough, painstaking
work. Still, I decided that I was up for the challenge—if my clients
were.
The Knee-Jerk Brain
Investigating
the studies cited in Ornstein’s book soon plunged me into the work of
other pioneering researchers in the as-yet-unnamed field of affective
neuroscience. Researcher Antonio Damasio’s work played a key role in
furthering my understanding of the power of automatic processes in the
brain. Damasio studied the brains of people who’d suffered a unique kind
of brain damage that had left their cognitive abilities intact,
impeding only their ability to experience emotions normally. Despite
testing that confirmed that all the building blocks of rationality were
in place, these people couldn’t make effective real-life decisions. At
first, Damasio was puzzled. Why would impairment in the emotional brain
interfere with practical decision-making? He eventually realized that
the emotional brain plays a crucial role in the machinery of
rationality: the brain generates quick, gut-level emotional reactions
that collectively serve as a guidance system for reasoning.
Until
reading Damasio’s studies, I’d assumed that successful people were
effective because they resisted the pull of their emotions of the moment
and used reasoning to guide their actions. Damasio’s studies powerfully
challenged this notion, suggesting that disciplined people are every
bit as much influenced by emotional impulse and inclination as
undisciplined people are. The difference is that their impulses are more
balanced.
This
was a revolutionary concept for me. I’d never considered the
possibility that disciplined people took too much credit for their
efforts. According to Damasio, a disciplined person was simply someone
whose nervous system naturally generated a wider range of gut-level
emotion reactions than an undisciplined person. Whereas undisciplined
people are influenced primarily by the gut feelings they experience in
the present moment (e.g., wanting to blow off a homework assignment and
watch a movie), disciplined people are equally influenced by good and
bad feelings generated while remembering the past (e.g., feeling bad
remembering the grade reduction resulting from missing an assignment) or
envisioning the future (e.g., feeling good in anticipation of a job
completed).
Gradually,
I began to accept the concept that conscious understanding and effort
weren’t the mighty forces that I’d assumed they were and that automatic
urges and inclinations were much stronger than I’d ever imagined. In
fact, confirming evidence seemed to pop up everywhere. In my therapy
practice, I began to notice the wide range of my clients’ natural
inclinations. I saw some people naturally plunge into rumination
whenever they got upset, while others let go and refocused with relative
ease. Some naturally experienced an abundance of feelings of warmth,
tenderness, and playfulness, while others rarely had these feelings—even
when life was going pretty well. Some intensely felt a measure of what
others were feeling, while others could only infer what people were
feeling from their words and actions. The list went on.
Just
as the Cookie Monster couldn’t decide one day that he liked broccoli
more than Oreos, the apparently automatic reactions that determined how
people behaved in these areas seemingly couldn’t be changed at will.
Such behaviors appear so deeply ingrained that they seem to be part of
our second nature. Nevertheless, they wield tremendous influence on the
quality of our lives. People who tend toward knee-jerk defensiveness
don’t function as well as those who respond less defensively: they’re
impervious to corrective feedback, and their partners regularly feel
dismissed. Likewise, people who don’t feel much affection toward others
seem to have more trouble forming close relationships than people who
experience loving feelings freely.
Up
to this point, most of my therapeutic efforts had been focused on
helping clients develop better understandings of their lives and, as a
result, make better choices. I’d wanted to help them live more
consciously, but my confidence in the effectiveness of awareness and
effort was waning. With my new understanding of the brain, I knew
gut-level inclinations were more likely to sit in the driver’s seat, and
the most that our conscious, willful selves could do was to try to
influence these inclinations from the back seat, unless—and this was a
big unless—there was a way to retrain the emotional brain.
Focused Practice
One
of my first experiments in trying to help a client engage in emotional
reconditioning involved Steve, whose wife, Debra, had attended a few
sessions and then dropped out of therapy. Steve continued on his own,
recognizing that many of his relationship habits were dysfunctional.
During previous conjoint sessions, I’d noticed that whenever Debra had
voiced a complaint, Steve had predictably become upset and defensive. I
knew that Steve would need some way to practice thinking differently at
the moments when he was actually upset. So I suggested that he ask Debra
if she’d record complaints on a cassette tape, which he could then use
to practice being nondefensive. Surprised and intrigued, Debra agreed.
I
sent Debra a message asking her to make short 15- to 45-second
recordings whenever she felt upset with Steve—the more recordings, the
better. After she’d made a week’s worth of recordings, she was to give
the tape to Steve to bring to our next therapy session. During our next
several sessions, Steve and I listened to Debra’s recordings together,
and I helped Steve pay attention to his automatic reactions when
listening to her critical tone. Without feeling the immediate pressure
to respond to Debra, he came to recognize that when he felt criticized,
his face typically flushed, his features scrunched into a scowl, and his
hands tingled slightly. He also noticed that predictable thoughts
popped up—such as She’s so controlling!—and that he always felt an immediate urge to dispute every possible detail of her complaint.
Together,
Steve and I developed a practice plan that involved relaxing physically
as he listened to her complaints, slowing his breathing down, reminding
himself that he could afford to take his time and hear her out,
maintaining eye contact without scowling, and then searching for and
commenting on understandable aspects of her complaint. For several weeks
in our therapy sessions, Steve practiced this sequence while listening
to complaint after complaint. Then one day, he came to our session with a
grin on his face, exclaiming, “I think this is beginning to work!”
A
few days before, Debra had become upset with him when she’d learned
that he’d forgotten to tell his parents that they needed to cancel their
plans to get together. “You know what?” Steve said excitedly. “When she
was yelling at me, I actually noticed that my breathing was slowing
down, and I was really listening to her. I had the urge to justify why I
didn’t make the call, but I remembered that I could do that later if I
needed to and that I could take my time and hear her out.” Instead of
offering an excuse, Steve told her that he should have made calling his
mother a higher priority. “You should have seen the look on her face!”
Steve beamed. The fact that Steve’s automatic reactions had begun to
change after only a few weeks of focused practice made me believe that I
was on the right track.
The Wages of Blame
Soon
enough, however, I realized that the reconditioning exercises worked so
well for Steve because he was highly self-responsible and motivated to
change, while most of the people I saw in therapy didn’t think they
needed to change—at least not nearly as much as they thought their
partners needed to. Motivating partners to take personal responsibility
was the most frustrating part of being a couple’s therapist for me.
Every time I challenged partners to behave differently, they’d counter
with some version of “Well, I wouldn’t be acting this way if my partner
wasn’t so selfish (or insensitive, irresponsible, inattentive, immature,
misguided, unrealistic, irrational, short-sighted, or biased.)”
They
usually had a point. Their partners often behaved just as badly as they
themselves did, but to them, it seemed that their partners’ actions
were far more egregious. Before I could do anything even approaching
“brain retraining” with such clients, I needed a way to help them see
their negative habits and understand the role that these habits were
playing in the deterioration of their relationships.
I
honestly don’t know if I’d have succeeded in motivating these clients
had it not been for the fact that I’d already read John Gottman’s book Why Do Marriages Succeed or Fail?,
in which he reports on his research finding that the most effective
partners in intimate relationships were able to avoid “negative affect
reciprocity” (the tendency to respond to negativity with more
negativity) and the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” (criticism,
contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling) when they felt provoked.
Additionally, Gottman found that it was especially when
partners were behaving badly that the differences between couples who
were destined for satisfying relationships could be most clearly
distinguished from couples who were destined for serious trouble.
Gottman’s
research enabled me to cut through the blame game that so often plagues
ailing partners and help them—at least some of them—understand that the
ability to respond effectively when they didn’t like their partner’s
actions was a nonnegotiable requirement if they wanted their
relationships to thrive. Gottman’s research was also valuable because of
its precision. He’d zeroed in on the specific habits that were required
for relationships to succeed, which helped clients identify exactly
where they tended to get off track in their relationships. However,
while most Gottman-influenced therapists I talked to were trying to
teach clients these skills, I knew that clients wouldn’t be able to
conjure these skills at a moment’s notice as long as their automatic
emotional reactions kept getting in the way. To successfully implement
these skills, clients would first need to rewire some of their automatic
reactions.
The Brain on Mindfulness
For
almost 20 years now, I’ve been exploring methods for helping clients
develop new, automatic inclinations that allow better self-regulation,
self-attunement, perspective-taking, and empathy, especially in their
intimate relationships. But one of the studies with the biggest impact
on my approach was published in NeuroReport by a team of
researchers from Harvard and Yale who’d found that mindfulness
meditation may produce growth in brain areas known to be involved in
mood regulation, attentiveness, and empathy.
As
it turned out, this study was just the first of its kind. Since then,
18 additional studies have been published finding that meditators have
significantly greater volume in areas of the brain that produce
automatic tendencies relevant to social functioning, including several
that found that periods as short as eight weeks of regular mindfulness
created predictable changes in the brain. In fact, in 2013, a team of
researchers from Brazil and the United Kingdom found that they could
distinguish the brains of experienced meditators from those of
non-meditators with 94.9 percent accuracy. The evidence is
clear—meditation conditions the brain to produce automatic inclinations
that help people be more attentive and optimistic and less affected by
stressful circumstances and anxiety. In other words, the nervous system
changes promoted by mindfulness can serve as a stable platform that
enables people to act more skillfully in all areas of their lives.
Using Brain Science for Behavioral Change
Over
the years, I’ve come to recognize that there’s no one-shot,
magic-bullet approach to retraining the human brain. Instead, I’ve
developed a process that systematically combines what we know about the
power of the emotional brain, the particular strengths of the rational
mind, the mechanics of mindfulness meditation, and the brain’s
impressive flexibility to help clients learn to calm their nervous
systems and navigate their lives more effectively. This process
includes:
- Conscious pursuit of understanding and change. We
need to use our conscious minds to understand our lives, develop ideas
about what’s healthy and unhealthy, and pursue concrete changes that
move us toward health and well-being.
- Stress reduction and rejuvenation. We need to develop nervous system inclinations that reduce stress, relax the mind, and rejuvenate the body.
- Distress tolerance and self-regulation. We
need to develop nervous system inclinations that help us tolerate the
inevitable stress that accompanies making difficult changes and
self-regulate in emotionally charged situations.
- Emotional accessibility. We need to develop nervous system inclinations that produce feelings that connect us to others.
At our treatment center for couples, my colleagues and I begin stress reduction and rejuvenation in
the first week of therapy, asking partners to start mindfulness classes
in conjunction with therapy. While mindfulness training alone won’t
heal broken relationships, we consider it an indispensable part of the
relationship improvement process. Years of experience have taught us
that there’s only so much that we can do with clients whose default
nervous system impulses and inclinations keep them perpetually stressed,
edgy, and preoccupied.
While
partners engage in their first eight weeks of mindfulness classes, we
use therapy sessions to engage them in the conscious pursuit of
understanding and change. Specifically, we help them (1) become aware of
studies suggesting that people who believe their partners are “the main
problem” are usually mistaken, (2) consider evidence suggesting that
this mistake is of no small consequence to relationships, (3) become
receptive to our opinion that their habits have been as damaging to the
relationship as their partner’s habits, (4) listen with an open mind as
we paint a clear picture of their problematic habits, (5) understand why
it’s in their own best interest to explicitly acknowledge and accept
responsibility for their roles in the deterioration of their
relationships, and (6) become determined to develop the full set of
habits that are characteristic of people who know how to get their
partners to treat them well. We also help partners accept mutual
responsibility while in the presence of each other. Then we move on to
identify the underlying needs, worries, fears, and insecurities that are
beneath their previous blaming and defensive postures, and we help them
talk about these vulnerable feelings without accusation or blame.
The combination of stress reduction and rejuvenation (facilitated through mindfulness classes) andconscious pursuit of understanding and change (during
therapy sessions) is powerful, and couples often make significant
strides in the first two months of therapy. But in my experience, that’s
rarely enough. Up to this point, the shifts that clients make during
sessions are heavily therapist dependent.We help partners self-regulate during sessions. We create
the conditions that enable them to connect with vulnerable feelings.
The biggest challenge for them is still ahead: learning to rewire their
brains to produce automatic inclinations that enable them to do these
things on their own. This is hard, gutsy work, but it can produce
substantial change, so we help clients walk the arduous path toward
self-regulation through exercises in distress tolerance and self-soothing and in emotional accessibility.
Developing Calm in the Storm
Neuroscientist
and psychiatrist Daniel Siegel notes that the process of turning toward
and soothing upset feelings (rather than focusing exclusively on the
external threats) is what good parents do in responding to feelings of
distress in their children. Before helping children solve their
problems, skillful parents relax, turn toward and welcome their
children’s feelings while providing direct physical soothing—often
through hugging, holding, and other forms of nurturing contact.
Similarly, distress tolerance and self-soothing exercises help
clients turn toward their own upset feelings and engage directly in
physiological soothing, temporarily postponing thoughts about problems.
This process of self-accompaniment elicits a sense of calm in the storm,
allowing clients to avoid alarm or panic when things aren’t going well.
We
begin by asking clients to notice when small annoyances or
disappointments occur in the course of each day. When they notice these
frustrations, clients stop what they’re doing and spend one to three
minutes resisting the urge to analyze their upsetting circumstances.
Instead, they’re encouraged to slow down their breathing and focus
attention on their physical sensations.
We’ve found that the key to reconditioning automatic reactions involves frequent reconditioning exercises that are practiced in close proximity to
each other. The brain will acquire a new habit more quickly if a person
practices the new habit once a day for 14 days than if a person
practices it one time per week for 14 weeks. I learned this concept
decades ago from Albert, the white lab rat I worked with in my college
experimental psychology class. Albert learned new behaviors, like
running to a specific area of his cage, with fewer conditioning trials
when he was rewarded for desired behavior once per hour than when he was
rewarded for it once per week. This is why we ask partners to practice
with every upset feeling—no matter how small—that they experience on a
daily basis. We emphasize that most of the work involves simply
remembering to do the exercises and being willing to interrupt whatever
they’re doing for a couple of minutes. If practiced faithfully, these
small moments will change their brains within weeks. We want clients to
understand that each day that goes by without practicing distress tolerance and self-soothing decreases the likelihood that their brains will begin to produce calming instincts and inclinations automatically.
Clients
begin by practicing with mild upset feelings. Once they’ve worked with
mild upset feelings every day for at least a week, they move on to more
intense feelings. For this level of practice, we want the upset feelings
to be stronger, but not so difficult that clients get hijacked by them
and are unable to practice. One method involves having clients listen to
complaints that their partners have prerecorded, as I had Steve do with
Debra’s complaints in the days of tape recorders. (Now we have the
added convenience of making recordings on our smartphones.) Some clients
don’t need to listen to recordings to activate upset feelings. They can
feel upset just by setting aside times to regularly remember recent
upsetting events. To many people this sounds crazy. “Why would I want to
deliberately make myself upset?” they balk. The answer is so they can
practice calming themselves frequently enough to wire their brains with
an instinct to remain calm during upsetting situations.
Although
the point of triggering is to learn how to calm oneself and eventually
not get triggered in the first place, it’s undeniably painful work. When
clients lose their nerve I empathize with them, readily acknowledging
that there have been weeks, months, and even whole phases in my life
when I just haven’t had the energy or motivation to engage in practices
that would’ve been good for me. Sometimes life is like that; you just
can’t sustain the courage or motivation to press on, and it’s wise to
cut yourself some slack. I support clients who need to back off, but I
don’t want them to delude themselves. Even as they’re backing off, I
encourage them to consider that at some point, they’ll probably need to
find the motivation to engage in difficult practices such as these if
they want their habitual reactions to change.
Intense
upset feelings during actual arguments are the most difficult for
clients to practice with; however, clients who have practiced diligently
with mild and moderate feelings can usually soothe intense feelings as
well. First, we familiarize them with the process of working with
intense feelings in advance, when they’re calm and can fully take in
each element of practice. Then during conjoint sessions, we ask them to
discuss hot issues, the ones that trigger strong feelings. Ahead of
time, clients agree that when they’re triggered, they’ll take session
breaks for the purpose of practicingdistress tolerance and self-soothing, and I give them the set of instructions in the box on the next page to help them through each of the steps.
Once
partners have gone through the steps described in the box to the right,
they resume the session and continue discussing the troubling issue.
Sometimes another break is needed, and often there isn’t time for issues
to get resolved by the end of sessions. To feel okay about this lack of
resolution, clients must care more about acquiring the ability to
self-soothe and tolerate distress than they do about resolving issues
quickly. They must believe that ultimately, the ability to react less
intensely and operate with less desperation will lead to easier
resolution of differences—and this benefit will extend over time
throughout their relationship. They must be willing to exchange the
value of quick resolution for the long-term benefits that will come from
investing time in reconditioning their brains for calmer reactions in
upsetting situations.
After
they’ve had success on their own during session breaks, we ask clients
to begin practicing at home by taking breaks during real-time arguments.
When people have difficulty engaging in distress tolerance and self-soothing exercises
at home during arguments, it’s usually because they’re not fully
committed to getting better at them. Deep down, they may not believe
that calming themselves will matter much. They may feel that they’ve
been calm during arguments in the past and it hasn’t made any
difference; their partners were still unresponsive. I agree with such
clients, acknowledging that staying calm by itself won’t be enough—they
may also need to stand up for themselves. To heighten motivation for
these clients, we spend quite a bit of time discussing studies showing
that the ability to calm oneself in the face of conflict is highly
correlated with getting satisfying responses from one’s partner. We then
ask clients to complete logs in which they record each upsetting
incident, how much time they spent trying to shut down mental chatter
and focus on physical self-soothing, and how much calmer they felt after
practicing. The good news is that for clients who practice diligently
with the full range of mild, moderate, and intense feelings, changes
take place in their nervous systems within a period of weeks.
The Power of Mental Rehearsal
As
partners become better able to self-regulate and resolve differences
respectfully, feelings of warmth, interest, fondness, playfulness,
sexual interest, and other forms of loving attention often increase
spontaneously. However, this doesn’t always happen. Years of animosity
and indifference often shut down the neural systems that generate such
feelings. In his 30 years of studying the neural systems that create
social bonds, neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp identified four special
operating systems in the brain, which, when active, automatically
produce feelings that bring people closer together. One creates a
longing for emotional closeness and contact, a second produces feelings
of tenderness and the urge to care for others, a third produces the
urges for spontaneous and playful social contact, and a fourth activates
sexual desire. Any of these systems can go dormant when stressful life
circumstances occur. But some individuals, even before experiencing the
relationship distress that drove them into therapy, never had an
abundance of easy access to some or all of these intimacy-generating
neural systems. Is this emotional coolness a fixed state, or can it
change? A number of studies in the past decade suggest that, just as our
nervous systems can be groomed for better self-regulation, these neural
systems can be primed to enable a natural emergence of feelings of
connection. We help clients do this through specific, focused mental
practices that we callemotional accessibility exercises.
Coaches
and trainers have long utilized focused mental exercises to help
athletes enhance performance by visualizing goals and concentrating on
steps toward goals, but only recently have we discovered just how
powerfully mental exercises can change the brain. In a Harvard study
conducted by neurologist Alvaro Pascual-Leone, subjects who’d never
played the piano before were given instructions and asked to practice a
piece for five days, two hours per day, for a total of 10 hours. Before
and after these practice stints, their brains were scanned. As
anticipated, subjects showed brain changes in the areas of the motor
cortex that corresponded to the physical movements that they’d
practiced.
Another
group of subjects randomly assigned to a second practice condition did
the same thing as the first group, with one crucial exception: they
never pressed the keys of the piano. Instead, they mentally focused on
each of the practice movements. Researchers were amazed to find that
these mental-rehearsal-only subjects evidenced almost the same changes
in their brains as the subjects who’d practiced using their hands. In
other words, mental practice produced changes in the motor cortex even
though subjects hadn’t moved their fingers—they just visualized moving
their fingers.
But how did the purely mental rehearsal, with its accompanying brain changes, affect the subjects’ ability to play the
piece? Here, the results were stunning. Although the people in the
mental-rehearsal-only group had never practiced physically, they could
play the rehearsed piano piece almost as well as the group who’d
practiced physically for five days. And after only one day of physical
practice, they could play just as well as them.
The
Harvard piano studies aren’t the only ones that show brain and
performance-level changes in response to mental rehearsal. A study at
the Cleveland Clinic found that subjects could increase their finger
strength 53 percent through physical exercises over a 12-week period,
but amazingly, a second group showed a 35 percent strength increase
through mental visualization only. In a 2007 study conducted at Bishop’s
University in Quebec, college athletes who engaged in hip flexor
exercises increased their muscle strength 28 percent, while a
mental-rehearsal-only group strengthened the same hip flexor muscles by
24 percent.
Can
feelings, too, be changed through mental exercise? The answer appears
to be yes. Over the past decade, dozens of studies have been published
on a particular form of mental rehearsal known as compassion meditation.
The exercise involves spending extended periods of time focusing on the
intent and desire to develop feelings of compassion and loving-kindness
for others. Just as mental rehearsal promoted changes in the motor
cortex of Pascual-Leone’s piano players, brain scans have revealed that
brain circuits involved in empathy, positive emotion, and emotional
regulation are dramatically changed in subjects who’d extensively
practiced compassion meditation.
A 2013 study from a University of Wisconsin research team, published in Psychological Science,
showed that focusing daily on the intention to be loving and
compassionate not only strengthened feelings of compassion and related
neural underpinnings, but also increased the concrete altruistic
behavior of subjects. A 2013 study from Emory University published in Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience found
that compassion meditation boosted something called “empathic
accuracy,” a person’s ability to read the facial expressions of others.
In this study, the meditators, in comparison to those in the control
group, showed significant increases in neural activity in areas of the
brain important for empathy, and these brain changes accounted for
changes in the participants’ empathic accuracy scores.
These
studies suggest that simply dwelling on the intention to develop a
specific feeling activates the neural circuits responsible for producing
that feeling. In focusing on the intention to be compassionate,
meditators primed their brains for compassion. It’s reasonable to assume
that the same principle applies to other feelings. Thus, if you spend
five minutes a day thinking about things you’re grateful for, you’re
likely to energize and create more connection with brain circuits that
produce feelings of gratitude. If you spend five minutes a day
remembering vividly times when you felt happy (or playful, affectionate,
sexual, and so forth), you’ll energize and strengthen brain circuits
that can produce these feelings. As neuroscientists explain, anything
you consistently give attention to teaches the brain to produce more of
it, and this is true with negative thoughts.
At
our clinic, we ask partners to spend five minutes each day doing
nothing but thinking about things they like about their mates and about
good moments that they’ve spent together. The primary value of this emotional accessibility exercise
is that each time partners dwell on the good feelings they have toward
each other, the neural circuits that generate feelings of
connection—such as the middle insula, superior parietal lobule, right
periaqueductal gray, left ventral tegmental area, and left rostro-dorsal
anterior cingulate cortex—may be strengthened.
However,
studies on mental rehearsal and compassion meditation suggest that it’s
not just any kind of attention that produces these significant changes.
Once again, regular, sustained work is essential. The subjects in
Pascual-Leone’s piano study didn’t just wish occasionally for increased
piano skills; they spent hours per day specifically imagining the piano
moves necessary to develop the skills. Similarly, those involved in the
compassion meditation studies didn’t just entertain fleeting thoughts
about wanting to feel more compassion and loving-kindness; they
regularly spent time dwelling on the desire to have more compassion—in
some studies up to 40 minutes per day over the course of eight weeks.
Reflecting on his experience, one of my clients said, “I can’t make a
good feeling walk through the door on command, but if I keep holding the
door open, sooner or later it’ll walk through.”
Many
people live out their lives without holding this door open. Generally,
people fail to do this because they believe it’s useless. Early in our
lives, most of us are told, “Wishful thinking won’t get you anywhere!
You need to get off of your butt and make things happen!” While wishful
thinking alone won’t get people where they want to go, people who
bolster their concrete efforts with focused, sustained intentions are
likelier to make desired changes than those who use behavioral efforts
alone. Numerous studies over the past decade have shown that surgeons
who engage in mental and physical practice together are more skillful
than those who engage in physical practice only. Similarly, stroke
victims who engage in mental visualization in addition to physical
therapy recover functioning faster, and athletes and musicians who
combine mental and physical practice perform better.
Doing the Work
When
I think back on that afternoon years ago when Robert Ornstein was first
blowing my mind, I realize that since then almost everything about the
way I conduct therapy has changed. I still help clients develop insight
and make concrete plans for operating more effectively in their daily
lives, but truthfully, this part of my work is more of a sideline. These
days, my central concern is reconditioning the brain. Modern
neuroscientific discoveries suggest that William James was right in 1890
when he proposed that the basic organizer of the human mind is habit,
not rational thought or understanding. Thus, I believe that in the
coming years, the most important developments in mental health will
involve refining technologies for isolating and intervening in automatic
nervous system habits.
Reconditioning
the brain isn’t the stuff of brief therapy. I ask a lot of my clients,
and some weeks I’m better at motivating them than others. Over the
years, I’ve noticed that their willingness to do the work seems to
correlate with what’s going on within me. The calmer my own nervous
system is, the easier it is for me to connect with feelings of love,
nonjudgment, empathy, acceptance, and excitement about the possibilities
that lie ahead for my clients. When clients sense qualities in me that
they’d like to develop in themselves, they’re sold. I can talk about the
scientifically proven benefits of mental practice until I’m blue in the
face, but unless they sense that I know what I’m talking about through
their felt experience of me, they don’t buy in. Good for them. In this
business, there’s no substitute for the real thing.
Distress Tolerance & Self-Soothing: Guidelines for Clients
- Stop what you’re doing and say to yourself:
- I can afford to slow down and try to relax.
- I’ve got some time to figure out how to handle this situation.
- I’m not going to just let it go without saying something.
- If I can get calmer, I’ll be more powerful.
- Now identify the behind-the-scenes facts that are making you feel upset. Write your answers to these questions:
- What seems to be the sad or disturbing truth about why this person is acting this way?
- What
bad thing is happening here that seems similar to a bad situation
that’s happened before? Is the same bad thing happening now?
- What will happen if I can’t get this sort of thing to stop happening?
- Propose
to yourself that the answers to these questions may not be as clearcut
as they seem. One by one, go back through each question and say to
yourself: “Maybe things are as they seem, and maybe they aren’t.”
- Set
your thinking about these questions and about the upsetting situation
aside for now. Assume a first-things-first attitude: “First I’m going to
get myself into a state of mind where I feel less upset; then I’ll
think things through and figure out what to do.”
- Pay attention
exclusively to the physical sensations that go along with your feelings.
Welcome these sensations. Avoid trying to change them. Just accompany
them while “giving them air” through slow breathing. Think of slow
breathing as like putting an oxygen mask on the part of you that feels
upset. Take big inhales and then long, slow exhales.
- If thoughts
pop up, acknowledge them. Then without judging yourself, gently bring
your attention back to the physical sensations. Do this as many times as
needed.
- Alternate between paying attention to physical
sensations that go along with the feeling and giving mindful attention
to your breath, other body sensations, and your immediate surroundings.
Use any mental images that help you feel more at ease.
- If you
can’t seem to stop ruminating about the upsetting circumstances, engage
in an activity that requires your full attention. Later, when you’re
feeling better, go back and give some thought to how you can best
respond to the upsetting circumstances. If you begin feeling upset
again, start at #1 and follow these guidelines one more time.
Brent
Atkinson, PhD, is director of postgraduate training at the Couples
Research Institute in Geneva, Illinois, and Professor Emeritus at
Northern Illinois University. He’s the author of Emotional Intelligence in Couples Therapy: Advances from Neurobiology and the Science of Intimate Relationships and Developing Habits for Relationship Success. Contact: atkinson.bja@gmail.com.
Jan 24, 2013
