I was reading an article a while back about some of the science behind the formation and maintenance of habits: “A dopamine-rich part of the brain named the striatum memorizes rituals and routines that are linked to getting a particular reward, explains NIDA’s Volkow*. Eventually, those environmental cues trigger the striatum to make some behaviors almost automatic.”
That makes sense from a functional point of view. If routine behavior becomes automatic, that leaves more of the brain to deal with the non-automatic, the dangerous and threatening, the creative and new. When the habits and routines function in the service of productive living, they let you get more done with less effort.
But what about bad habits? They keep us from getting things done. Shouldn’t the reward system guarantee that behavior like that doesn’t become entrenched? If I’d write when I sit down to write, if I’d work when I need to work, if I’d exercise when I said I’d exercise, I’d get things done, and I’d still have time to rest, relax my brain, enjoy spousal time, and watch the Red Sox.
But I don’t have those good habits. Instead I surf the web, play video games, and whine about how I’m not getting any writing done. The bad habits seem to be stronger than any benefit I’m getting.
Except — those habits must be giving me some benefit. What positive benefit am I getting from NOT writing, NOT exercising, NOT getting things done around the house? What does it think it’s protecting me from? If I start to be an efficient, competent, productive writer, and think of myself as an efficient, competent, productive writer, isn’t that better?
Well, maybe not. If I’m efficient, competent, and productive, I’ll make my friends who are struggling feel bad because they’re stuck and I’m not. If I’m efficient, competent, and productive this week, people will expect me to be like that all the time, and then they’ll push all the work on me, and I’ll be the responsible one in the kitchen working while everybody else plays, and I’ll never have any fun ever again. (There are family reasons why I think this; it’s not just random fear.) And since writing is part of the fun — it’s a cycle. If I write, I jeopardize my ability to write in the future.
The kicker is that the situation that causes me to feel this way has long since ceased to exist. Looking back on it with the eyes of an adult, I’m not sure it ever existed the way I perceived it. The differences I attributed to power and control were probably personality and preference. So I’m stuck in a defense that doesn’t work against an enemy that never existed, and still acting like everything in my life depends on maintaining that defense.
I think it’s going to take a long time to unwind that negative cycle. I’m going to have to start with small steps. If I get a little more done, I’ll feel a little better about myself, and if I feel a little better about myself and my situation, that will mean a positive reinforcement that contributes to the new habits. And so on.
It’s not the only issue going on, but at least now that I’ve recognized it, I can start to work on it.
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* = Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and an authority on the brain’s pleasure pathway. Full article has aged out, but if you Google Volkow’s name you can find more of her research.
At the first part, I was saying to myself, “Because there’s a reward, no matter how bizarre, in the behavior that’s not productive.” I smiled when you got to that part of the post.
I will suggest that for most of us, there is that long-entrenched “benefit” for non-productive behavior. When analyzed, we can see the logic of the childlike part of our mind that convinces us, but we can also see how the “child” has exaggerated (I use quotations, because child is what I call it, but other people may have a different term, and it’s equally correct) reality just a bit.
That has worked for me with my weight loss efforts. Whenever that whiny voice chimes in with, “I’ll never get to eat the foods I want to eat. I’m going to staaaaarrrrrvvvvvve.” (I can’t be the only person with that voice in my head, can I?) To counter that, I promised myself two things. 1) I would never deprive myself, and 2) If I denied myself something I wanted, I would write it down on my daily to do list where I created a a task entitled, “What I didn’t eat today.” Do you know I’ve only put actual food I didn’t eat on that list twice? A couple other times, I made a notes about a few thoughts, but I haven’t deprived myself of anything I really wanted, and I’ve lost 36 pounds since the end of February. I’m eating what I want, I’m losing weight, and I haven’t bought anyone’s expensive appetite suppressants.
But, yeah, that inner voice or those long ago mechanisms we’ve established that reward us for behavior that isn’t helpful can be tough to track down. I think you’re on the right track. Small steps and the rewards you gain from making them will show big dividends.
I think referring to it as the “child” is not inappropriate, because the emotion and reactions are mostly left over from a time when I didn’t have the knowledge to understand the situation, the life skills to deal with it, or the emotional resiliency to respond differently. At the time when these reactions were forming, they dealt with situations where my core being felt like it was being threatened. The threat is gone but I still react like it’s a matter of survival.
The diet analogy is very apt. “I’m going to staaaaarve!!!” comes from fear, not from reality.
HUGS Bonnie. I know what you mean about those behaviors. For me, it allows me to be brainless and everything else takes thought. Used to be that was my most creative time since set free my brain offered me stories, which was the reward. However, life’s gotten a wee bit stressful over the last few years and so it just doesn’t work the way it used to :).
The post-menopausal brain just isn’t working quite the same way the old one used to. It’s hard getting used to it.
Exactly. I keep hoping it’ll change back, but I may have to adapt :).
Some things have come back. For instance, I can think again 😀 But others haven’t. My ADHD behaviors are much reduced. I have days or even weeks when the brain is not running nonstop, and this has hurt my writing. I used to be able to live and breathe the story while I was doing other things, so in a sense I was always writing. I can’t do that any more.
The dyslexia is worse, especially when I’m tired. I need more sleep and have more trouble functioning without it — and losing that hour or two has really cut into my productivity.
Ugh and hugs. Yeah, being hyper and menopausal don’t seem connected, but I’d love to get my memory back in order :).
“People will expect me to be like that all the time” — YES! even before I get tired from day after day of productivity, I’m exhausted from carrying around the weight of future expectation, which, to be fair, other people may not actually be harboring. But I grew up with parents who were very much of the “We know you can do better than this because you have in the past” school. (And I cringe when I hear something similar come out of my mouth toward my kids.) So I stop trying to be good because I’m afraid if I am, I have to be perfect.
Of course, this is all about why I start reading Webcomics first thing in the morning and putter around in the middle of the day. We already discussed the whole fear-of-success/fear-of-failure lack-of-writing can of worms. (Going back and hyphenating that sentence to add clarity!)
Calling on what has worked in the past is a double-edged sword, isn’t it? On the one hand, it’s evidence that the fears are wrong. On the other hand — yeah, what if I can’t do it again? What if I’m as big a fraud as I think I am?
There was also the whole report card thing and that item called “Not working up to capacity.” Some of the time it was true. It was, “I hate your class and the work is boring and if I can get a B without studying, tell me why should I study?” But more often, I had no clue what more they thought I could have done, or how I was supposed to do it.
Looking back, I can see that clearly there was an issue of undiagnosed learning disability going on, but we didn’t know that then.
The bad side of habits is that they can become cages. Patricia C. Wrede talked about this on her blog about where people write. I can’t write at home or anywhere else where I know there’s an internet connection because I let myself get distracted.
Also, where I do go write I have a habit of buying a snack as well as a coffee and if I don’t have the snack my muse refuses to function.
Heh, yeah, that’s so true — I do my best writing at Panera, which is the sandwich/coffee shop in the strip mall between my grocery store and my gym. It’s noisy and distracting, true, but it’s busy in a way that covers up the noise in my head and lets me focus. At least some of the time.
My biggest cage-habit is online video games, which not only consume time, they also put me in a sort of hypnotic state that it’s difficult to get out of.
Oops, meant to include the link: http://pcwrede.com/blog/where-one-writes/
Thanks for the link!