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← The Craving Mind Why We Get Hooked and How We Can Break Bad Habits

The Craving Mind Why We Get Hooked and How We Can Break Bad Habits Chapter 4. Addicted to Ourselves

Author: Judson Brewer Publisher: Yale University Press. New Haven, CT. Publish Date: 2017 Review Date: 2022-1-30 Status:📚

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  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1029 Monte Carlo simulations run through numerous scenarios and, based on available information, suggest which ones would be most likely to happen if they were played out in real life.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1031 Consider this: we may be doing something like Prasanta’s simulations in our heads all the time. When we are driving on the highway and quickly approaching our exit, but are in the wrong lane, we start mentally simulating. We look at the distances between the cars, their relative speed, our speed, and how far it is to the exit, and we start mentally calculating whether we need to speed up to get in front of the car next to us or slow down to tuck in behind it.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1034 Another example: we receive an invitation to a party. We open it, scan to see who it is from and when the party will occur, and start imagining ourselves at the party to see who might be there, whether the food will be good, whether we will hurt the host’s feelings if we don’t attend, and what other things we could be doing instead (the bigger better offer). We might even do a verbal simulation with our spouse or partner as we talk over whether we should go or stay in and binge on Netflix movies.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1038 These simulations come in handy daily. It is much better to mentally test a few scenarios instead of pulling out into traffic and causing an accident. And it is better to mentally rehearse the party’s possibilities rather than to arrive at it and have that “oh crap” feeling wash over us as we walk through the door and see who is there.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1044 Though nobody knows for sure, humans’ capacity to mentally simulate probably evolved as agrarian societies emerged, increasing the need to plan for the future (for example, scheduling the planting of crops a certain amount of time before expecting to harvest them).

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1046 In his book The Curse of the Self, Mark Leary wrote that around fifty thousand years ago, both agriculture and representational art arose—and so did boat making. Leary points out that just as it is helpful to plan when to plant based on harvest times, boat making is “a task that requires mentally imaging one’s analogue—I will be using a boat at some later time.”2 Mental simulation is evolutionarily adaptive.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1050 While our Stone Age ancestors may have planned, their planning focused on that season’s harvest, the relatively short term. Fast-forward to the modern day. We live in a society that is much more sedentary—we are not hunting for food or living from one harvest to the next. We are also more long-term focused. Forget about the next harvest. We plan for college graduation, careers, and retirement—even colonizing Mars. And we have more time to sit around and think about ourselves, as if simulating the next chapter of our lives.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1054 Simulating something far in the future decreases our accuracy because the number of unknown variables is huge. For example, trying to predict, as a sixth grader, where I will go to college is pretty hard compared to doing the same simulation while a senior in high school, when I know my high school grades and SAT scores, the schools I have applied to, and other pertinent information. As a sixth grader, I don’t even know what type of college I may want to go to.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1058 Perhaps even more importantly, the quality of our data and how we interpret them can skew the predictions that come out of our mental simulations. Subjective bias comes into play here—our viewing the world through our own glasses, seeing it the way we want to rather than perhaps how it actually is.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1064 Our subjective bias isn’t going to make the world conform to our view of it—and can actually lead us down the wrong path when we act as if it will.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1067 Had I been so blinded by subjective bias that my off-kilter simulations were all ending in a bust? Had I become addicted to my view of the world?

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1078 Not wanting to see the truth, I kept doing simulation after simulation to come up with an answer that fit my worldview.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1082 Our minds frequently create simulations to help optimize outcomes. These simulations can easily become skewed by subjective bias—seeing the world the way we want it to be rather than as it is.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1083 And the more that an erroneous viewpoint gets locked down in our minds, like a chemical addiction, the harder it is to see that we might have a problem, let alone change our behavior.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1088 having a certain story in our heads can be pretty rewarding, perhaps to the point that we become addicted to our self-view. We lose flexibility in our thinking; we can no longer take in new information or adapt to our changing environment. We become the stars of our own movies, the center of the universe. This self-involvement often leads to negative outcomes down the road.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1098 We learn to view ourselves in a certain light over and over again until that image becomes a fixed view, a belief. This belief doesn’t magically appear out of thin air. It develops with repetition. It is reinforced over time.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1099 We might start forming our sense of who we are and who we want to be as an adult in, say, our twenties, and then surround ourselves with people and situations that are likely to support our view of ourselves.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1103 Here is a metaphor that might help explain how these beliefs get set up. Let’s say we go shopping for a new sweater or a winter coat. We bring a friend along for advice. We go to a boutique or a department store and start trying on clothes. How do we know what to buy? We look in the mirror to see what fits and also looks good. Then we ask our friend what she (or he) thinks. We might think a certain sweater is flattering, but aren’t quite sure whether its quality is right or its price is too high. We go back and forth for fifteen minutes, not being able to make a decision. We look to our friend for help, and she says, “Yes, that’s it. You’ve got to get that one!” So with this positive feedback, we head to the cash register.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1108 Is the way we view ourselves shaped through the same lens of reward-based learning?

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1109 For example, we might get an A on a test in sixth grade. We don’t think much of it, but then get home and show it to our parents, who exclaim, “Great job! Look how smart you are!” This parental praise is rewarding—it feels good. We ace another test, and having gotten a hint from what happened the last time, hand it to our parents, expecting more praise, and receive it accordingly. With this reinforcement as motivation, we might make sure we study extra hard for the rest of the semester, and we get straight As on our report card. Over time, with our grades, friends, and parents telling us over and over that we are smart, we might start to believe it. After all, there is nothing to suggest otherwise.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1115 So why not wear it? When we try the same sweater on again and again, our brains can run simulations and start to predict the outcome: We will be stylish. We will be intelligent. We will be praised.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1117 Over time, as the outcomes all come out the same, we get used to it. We become habituated to the reinforcement.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1118 In a series of experiments in the 1990s, Wolfram Schultz demonstrated how this type of reinforcement learning and habituation ties in with dopamine. When recording the reward centers of monkey brains, he discovered that when they received juice as a reward in a learning task, dopamine neurons increased their firing rate during the initial learning periods, but decreased progressively over time, switching to a more steady-state, habitual mode of firing.4

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1122 Yet when our parents say for the hundredth time, “Great job on getting straight As,” we roll our eyes because we have become habituated to it—we believe them when they say we are smart, but the reward has lost its juice.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1132 Let’s take the premise that a normal self-view lies somewhere in the middle of the personality spectrum. Development of such a self-view would suggest that our childhood progressed over a more or less stable trajectory. FroKm a reward-based-learning perspective, it would mean that our parents treated us somewhat predictably. If we got good grades, we were praised. If we lied or stole something, we were punished. And throughout our formative years, we received plenty of attention and love from our parents. They picked us up when we fell and hurt ourselves, reassuring us that we were smart (or as the teenage girls in chapter 2 put it, “relevant”) when our friends shunned us at school. Over time, we developed a stable sense of self.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1138 Consider someone who falls at one end of the spectrum, perhaps someone who has experienced too much ego boosting—someone who is arrogant or overly full of himself. For example, a former colleague of mine was seen as a “golden child” during residency training and early in his career. Whenever I ran into him, the topic of conversation was him.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1141 I would congratulate him on his success, which would then prompt him to repeat this process the next time we ran into each other. Trigger (seeing Jud), behavior (success update), reward (being congratulated).

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1143 At the extreme of this spectrum lies what is called narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). NPD is characterized by goal setting based on gaining approval from others, excessive attunement to others’ reactions (but only if they are perceived as relevant to self), excessive attempts to be the focus of attention, and admiration seeking.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1146 Seen from a simple (and probably simplistic) reward-based-learning perspective, we can imagine the “I’m smart” paradigm gone awry. Perhaps with the help of runaway parenting styles in which praise exceeds what is warranted (“Everyone gets a trophy, especially you!”) and corrective punishment is nonexistent (“My child is on her own journey”), the reward-based learning process gets overly stimulated and cemented to a degree exceeding societal norms. Like someone who is genetically predisposed to getting hooked on alcohol, the child now has a taste—no, a need—for praise that cannot easily be sated. Instead of spirits, he needs ongoing positive reinforcement: “Like me, tell me I’m great, do it again.”

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1152 Let’s move to the other end of the spectrum. What happens when we don’t develop a stable sense of self, whether normal or excessive? This deficiency may be the case with borderline personality disorder (BPD), which is characterized by the most recent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) by a range of symptoms including “poorly developed or unstable self-image,” “chronic feelings of emptiness,” “intense, unstable, and conflicted close relationships, marked by mistrust, neediness, and anxious preoccupation with real or imagined abandonment,” “fears of rejection by and/or separation from significant others,” and “feelings of inferior self-worth.”

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1175 I wondered: what happens if we don’t have a stable upbringing? I started to look at BPD through the lens of operant conditioning. What if, instead of the steady stream of predictable feedback, someone with BPD had a childhood more like a slot machine, receiving intermittent instead of stable reinforcement? I did some research. Some of the most consistent findings related to childhood upbringing in people with BPD include low maternal affection as well as sexual and physical abuse.6

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1179 My patients corroborated this. Plenty of neglect and abuse. What type of neglect? When I delved more deeply, they described their parents as being warm and loving sometimes. At other times they weren’t—quite the opposite. And they couldn’t predict when mom or dad would come home looking to hug or hit them.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1182 My patients’ symptoms and my mentors’ advice began to make sense. Someone with BPD may not have developed a stable sense of self, because there were no predictable rules of engagement.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1184 their brains were constantly in simulation overdrive, trying to figure out how to consistently feel loved, or at least alive. Like rats pressing levers or people posting on Facebook, they were unconsciously seeking ways to engineer that next dopamine hit. If my session went long, they felt special. Behavior. Reward. If I scheduled an extra session with them because they “really needed it,” they felt special. Behavior. Reward.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1188 In the most basic sense, they wanted someone (in this case, me) to love them, to provide a stable attachment, a predictable roadmap of their world. Subconsciously, they were trying to trigger any behavior of mine that would indicate this.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1190 And if any of my behaviors were inconsistent, they would get the stickiest type of reinforcement. Unknowingly, I was providing the glue.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1192 one of the hallmark (and formerly confusing) features of BPD is extreme idealization and devaluation of relationships. A paradox? One day they would talk about how great a new friendship or romantic relationship was, and then a few weeks later, that person would be on their “shit list.”

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1194 Looking for stability in their lives, they would throw everything they had into a blossoming relationship, which was likely rewarding for both sides—everyone likes attention. This positive feeling would wear off a bit for the other person as he (let’s say) became habituated. The excessive attention from the BPD partner would at some point wake him up to what was happening, and he would start feeling a bit smothered. Wondering whether this preoccupation was healthy, he would back off a bit. My patient, sensing some instability, would go into overdrive: oh no, you are about to lose another one, give it everything you have! Which would backfire because it was the opposite of what was called for, leading to a breakup and another call for a special session to deal with yet another crisis.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1199 Triggered by feeling abandoned by her father, one of my patients has cycled through close to a hundred jobs and relationships as she desperately seeks security.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1202 Instead of trying to read a cryptic and seemingly ever-changing treatment manual, I imagined myself in a patient’s shoes,

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1204 I stopped feeling conflicted and guilty about not giving my BPD patients “extra” time, because I could clearly see that it would be more harmful than helpful,

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1205 As I applied this framework and learned from it, treating patients with BPD became easier. I could help them learn to develop a more stable sense of themselves and their world, starting with the very simple guideline of always beginning and ending sessions on time—no more intermittent reinforcement—and with it would come stable learning and habituation.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1208 This technique seems ridiculously simple, yet it was surprisingly effective. I was no longer on the front lines fighting the “enemy.” My treatment and my patients’ outcomes both improved.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1217 an intrepid chief resident, a few research colleagues, and I published a peer-reviewed paper (the holy grail for getting ideas into the broader field) entitled “A Computational Account of Borderline Personality Disorder: Impaired Predictive Learning about Self and Others through Bodily Simulation.”7

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1222 altered reward-based learning could lead to significantly altered subjective bias in people with BPD… people with BPD, especially when emotionally dysregulated, may often incorrectly interpret actions and outcomes (theirs and others’). This bias results in a failure to accurately simulate mental states (both those of others and their own). This psychological barrier can, for instance, explain the lavish attention that they bestow on others when starting a relationship; the intense interest seems justified to them but completely blown out of proportion or even creepy to others. And then what happens when their partner in a romantic relationship starts pulling back? If my baseline framework is that I want love (attention), I assume that the other person wants this as well, and I give her more love instead of stepping back to see what is real and accurate from her perspective—namely, that she may be feeling smothered. In other words, people with BPD may have difficulty with reward-based learning, and therefore may likewise have trouble predicting outcomes of interpersonal interactions. As in addictions in which drug seeking occupies much of one’s time and mental space, people who carry a BPD diagnosis may be unknowingly angling for attention as a way to fill a deep feeling of emptiness, one short-acting dopamine hit at a time.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1238 Knowing that we mentally simulate (all the time) can be helpful. We can use this information to become aware of our simulations so that we don’t get lost or caught up in them as often, saving time and energy. An understanding of how subjective bias works can help us get simulations back on track when they go off course.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1242 Seeking attention, reinforcement, or any other type of adoration can get us sucked into this addictive spectrum, which is fueled by our subjective bias and then feeds back into it.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1243 Simply seeing where we might be biased can start the process of taking off the glasses distorting our worldviews. Grasping how and when our subjective biases are out of whack can be the first step in updating them.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1245 As mentioned earlier, being able to use information about subjective bias to improve our own lives starts with pulling out our stress compass so that we can clearly see the results of our actions.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1248 what does it feel like at the exact moment someone flatters us? Does that warm glow have elements of excitement? Do we lean in and look for more? And what happens when we continually stroke someone else’s ego, as I had unknowingly done with my colleague? What does he or she get, and what do we get out of it? I was certainly punished by having to listen to Mr. Wonderful over and over because of my ignorance.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1251 Seeing situations such as these more clearly can help us step back and check our compass—are we perpetuating dis-ease (our own and others’), either habitually or because it seems like the easiest thing to do in the moment? If we step back and look carefully to see whether we are failing to read the compass correctly because of our own assumptions and biases, does this realization help us find a better way to proceed, one that might stop fueling the ego fires?

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