Rewiring Yourself

Recently, I was thinking about the process of rewiring myself to stop certain thought patterns from continuing to run roughshod over my emotions. This is the sort of thing that you do if you happen to be me. It's something I've done four times, but never really stopped to categorize and think about the stages. I don't know if it will be helpful to anyone else to talk about it broken into parts, but I'm going to do it anyway, because that is also the sort of thing one does if one lives with my particular brain.

The whole point of this process is to slowly change your response to a particular stimulus. Most people have an experience or thought and an automatic reaction. For example, you may hear a piece of news about the cost of oil possibly going up by 25% over the winter and immediately start to stress out and worry about affording to warm your home during the cold months. Worrying accomplishes nothing so you may want to have a response which is more level emotionally. This process would be one through which you eventually stopped having the unwanted reaction.

For me, the first time I did this was for temper. I was prone to immediate and intense anger. The second was about materialism. I wasn't especially into "stuff", but I did keep too many things around (though not like a hoarder). I had the idea that I couldn't "waste" things by throwing them away as long as they were theoretically useful. The third time was related to anxiety and spinning elaborate worst case scenarios over an isolated incident. I'd hear that my company was doing more poorly this year than last and would start to fret about my job security even though there was nothing I could do about it nor was there any direct or immediate threat to my employment status. Finally, I've been dealing with the biggest deal of all, my relationship with food.

The process is not easy and takes years for the changes to kick into "automatic". You have to work at it, but it is effective. Through time, what feels like you are playing the role of Sisyphus in your life starts to feel like you're pushing that boulder up the hill and it's not rolling back all of the time. Eventually, it feels lighter and easier. Finally, you're rolling along with only minor little pushes of a rock that is manageable in size. I won't say that tendencies and reactions vanish entirely, as we all have core character tendencies and they will never go away entirely, but "talking yourself down" from a response you don't want becomes much easier and much less frequent. It is worth the considerable effort.

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Stage 1: Reflection
Reflection is when you experience something, have a reaction in the manner which is typical for you, and then think back on what happened after the fact. Most people reflect with a heavy emphasis on regret and self-punishment, especially if they are dealing with food and eating something they think they should not. It is imperative that reflection be productive and supportive talk, not destructive self-punishing words. If you use reflection as a platform for self-flagellation rather than positive thinking, you will not be able to change effectively as the focus will be emotional, not rational. Also, you will be undermining your sense of capability by giving yourself negative messages instead of positive encouragement.

The purpose of reflection is to increase awareness of the effect a stimulus has on you. For example, if I look at cooking web sites or pictures of food late at night, I become incredibly hungry. If I don't look at the pictures, I may feel slightly hungry before bed, but I tend to be able to decide not to eat anyway. Clearly, I respond to food cues with less control than would be optimal for someone who is trying to lose weight. While there is an easy solution in this particular case (stop looking at cooking or food blogs late at night), the larger issue is the response to food cues. I do not endeavor to avoid such things as there will always be the potential for food cuing. My aim is to temper my reactions to all food cues.

When you reflect, it's important to consider what elicited the behavior, how strongly the behavior occurred (in this case, how much and what it causes one to eat), and what you may be able to do in the future to alter your response. Reflection improves recognition of stimulus and response which will in turn improve your ability to move on to the next stage. Note that it is perfectly natural to have the same reaction many, many times and reflect on it dozens, possibly hundreds of times, before being able to incorporate the next step.

The purpose of reflection is to go from this:
Stimulus ----> (unaware, spontaneous, undesirable) Response

to this:
Stimulus---> (aware, expected, undesirable) Response

At this point, you only need to understand your reactions, not change them.

Stage 2: Delay
Once you become aware that a given stimulus is going to elicit a certain response, you have the capacity to start controlling your reactions. The first step in that control is not to stop or alter the responses, but to simply delay having them. This is the mental equivalent of counting to 10 before having a reaction in order to form a cooler response.

When I was trying to control my temper, I knew I was getting incredibly angry and was about to have my usual hostile response. I would try to hold it at bay for a time. When it came to eating, things were a lot more concrete. When I craved a food and wanted to eat it, I resisted the urge in planned increments of time. At first, I would try to wait 5 minutes and then I would have it. If possible, I'd extend that wait another 5 minutes. When I "gave in", I didn't view it as failure, but rather felt that accomplishing the delay was a success. Extending the delays over time is an exercise in finding more control.

the move is from this:
Stimulus---> (aware, expected, undesirable) Response

to this:
Stimulus---> (aware, expected, delayed undesirable) Response


Stage 3: Recognize
Delaying is essentially having the same reaction, but having it occur later. It is far easier to put aside an immediate response to a stimulus than it is to change it. Concurrent with delaying is starting to work on recognition that a response is coming and what it means. If the stimulus is a food cue (such as a pizza commercial) and my response is to want to eat the food, I need to work on recognizing that I am not really hungry, but rather being cued. I can start a process of being mentally engaged with the stimuli rather than simply reacting to it. Emotional responses are a chemical rush which tends to take control of you and just happen. At this stage, you want to insert some mental processing of the experience.

People believe they are more cognizant of what is happening to them than they really are. In a discussion of food cuing and the effect of commercials, many people would recognize that they can have an influence, but they don't necessarily see their responses to it. Humans are not designed to attend actively to every single experience with great attention and consciousness. We tend to sleepwalk through a lot of our lives because we are over-stimulated and can't tune into each experience fully.

At the recognition stage, you will try to pay full attention to your mental responses to particular experiences and try to explore why they occur and consider how to minimize them. For my anger issues, I recognized that my raging responses were role modeling my mother's behavior toward me. I was automatically doing what she did when she was frustrated. I tried to understand that the response was not only unproductive, but destructive as it brought on a loss of control and responses which often exacerbated rather than solved problems. Inserting a dialog into my response which guided me to a calmer, more measured response tempered the anger through time.

When I was trying to stop being so anxious, I focussed on a variety of thoughts. I recognized that I was feeling stress about things that no one could control and it served no productive purpose. I also figured out that my free-floating anxiety was habitual. I was so accustomed to worrying about things that my mind would drift around to find things to grab onto and fret about. I recognized that this was a pattern which I needed to try and stop.

the move is from this:
Stimulus---> (aware, expected, delayed undesirable) Response

to this:
Stimulus---> (aware, expected, managed or mitigated, less undesirable) Response


Stage 4: Interrupt
Delaying a response means that you try to control when it starts. Interrupting it means that you try to stop it in its tracks. With food, that means stopping a binge before it reaches its ultimate conclusion. For me, this started with not "finishing the bag", even if that meant leaving just one piece of food in there. As time went by, I could interrupt earlier and delay longer. This squeezes the undesirable response at both ends.

Interrupting is a powerful stage at which you really start to feel in control. When I was dealing with anger, an interrupt would mean that I could silence my loud voice and come to my senses rather than vent and rant. When I was dealing with food, it meant I could stop eating compulsively at some point and therefore mitigate some of the damage I was doing to myself.

For anxiety, I tried to catch myself when ruminating and think about more positive things. In the simplest sense, I tried to distract myself because anxiety for me was like a runaway train that needed to be derailed. Interrupts were very hard at first as my mind would fall back into the groove it was comfortable with, but the more often I practiced them, the harder it was for them to get back on track. As time goes by, you can also find yourself capable of multiple interrupts. For food, this might mean eating something, stopping, and then eating it again, then stopping again. This is good progress in interrupting, even if you eat everything in the bag. The important point is practice stopping yourself.

the move is from this:
Stimulus---> (aware, expected, managed or mitigated, less undesirable) Response

to this:
Stimulus---> (aware, expected, managed or mitigated, truncated, less undesirable) Response


Stage 5: Minimize/Reshape
Depending on what sort of thinking you are trying to change, the next step is to minimize responses or reshape them. Minimizing means making them smaller. For food, this means eating less in response to stimuli. For anxiety for me, it meant spending less time ruminating about things I couldn't control. With the ability to interrupt in hand, I could start to break apart the patterns in multiple ways. That is, I could both shorten them further and alter them more often.

For this part, you can consider a visual in which you have a well-worn road that your mind has traveled down that you don't want it to go down any longer so you are smashing up sections of it here and there to make it increasingly impassible. "Reshaping" is setting a new path by finding a way to respond differently.

When I was dealing with anger, my way of reshaping was to stop and consider a calmer and more productive way of expressing my feelings. At first, pieces of my frustration would come out more calmly and I would lose control and get aggressive again. Later, I would move in and out of a calm and aggressive state. Finally, I could remain calm most of the time and express my feelings in a constructive and passionate, but not angry way.

the move is from this:
Stimulus---> (aware, expected, managed or mitigated, truncated, less undesirable) Response

 
to this:
Stimulus---> (aware, expected, mixture of  less undesirable and desirable) Response

Stage 6: Effective Elimination
It's important to understand that true elimination of a particular response to a stimuli is virtually impossible. Even a calm person will occasionally have an angry outburst. Even someone who generally does not overeat will pig-out at times. Even a mellow person will feel anxiety from time to time over things they shouldn't worry about. We are complex beings and you will never banish certain thoughts entirely because the variety of stimuli and conditions under which they can occur is too vast to completely eliminate unwanted reactions.

The purpose of "rewiring yourself" is to change your destructive mental patterns such that they no longer control your life to such a great extent that they cause you difficulty or misery. "Effective" means "enough" for a balanced life, not "perfection". If you think you can be "forever" about anything, then you are missing the point. Be happy with what you can achieve and focus on gradual movement toward a better place, not on being a robot that is programmed to do the same thing every time a particular input is received.

At the end of this, you are looking to be here:
Stimulus---> (aware, expected, desirable) Response
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It's important to keep in mind that these "stages" blend into one another. You will find that you may be working on them simultaneously, but generally you will want to begin with trying them in sequence in order to ease yourself into each idea. It's also important not to "rush" the process. Trying to do it all at once is only going to make you feel like a failure when it doesn't work. "Cold turkey" isn't something that works with trying to remap the electrical and chemical responses in your brain. The goal isn't to make behavioral changes, but altering your thoughts so that it is easier to change your behavior.