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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 5. Addicted to Distraction

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

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  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1274 Using X for longer than you meant to Wanting to cut down or stop using X but not managing to Spending a lot of time using, or recovering from using, X Cravings and urges to use X Not managing to do what you should at work, home, or school because of X Continuing to use X even when it causes problems in relationships Giving up important social, occupational, or recreational activities because of X Using X again and again, even when it puts you in danger Continuing to use X even when you know you have a physical or psychological problem that could have been caused or made worse by it Needing more of X to get the effect you want (tolerance) Developing withdrawal symptoms that can be relieved by using X more.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1290 The above quiz is actually a diagnostic checklist in the DSM that my colleagues and I use to determine whether someone has substance use disorder, and if so, how strong his or her addiction is.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1320 Wolfram Schultz led a series of groundbreaking experiments showing that when monkeys get a reward (a bit of juice) for a behavior, their nucleus accumbens gets a spritz of dopamine. The reaction of neurons to this spritz of dopamine is termed “phasic firing” because it doesn’t happen continuously.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1322 Over time, dopamine-activated neurons stop this type of firing, returning to a low level of continuous (in the lingo: tonic) activation when a reward is received. As currently understood in neuroscience, phasic firing helps us learn to pair a behavior with a reward.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1325 This is where the magic happens. Once behavior and reward are paired, the dopamine neurons change their phasic firing pattern to respond to stimuli that predict rewards. Enter the trigger into the scene of reward-based learning. We see someone smoking a cigarette, and we suddenly get a craving. We smell fresh-baked cookies, and our mouths start watering in anticipation. We see someone who yelled at us recently approaching us, and we immediately start looking for an escape route. These are simply environmental cues that we have learned to pair with rewarding behavior. After all, we haven’t eaten the cookie or engaged the enemy. Our brains are predicting what will happen next.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1333 Interestingly, these dopamine neurons not only go into prediction mode when we are triggered, but also fire when an unpredicted reward is received.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1335 If we come home from school for the first time with an A on an exam, we don’t know how our parents will respond, because we have never been in that scenario before. We carefully hand our paper to our parents, wondering what is going to happen next. Our brains don’t know what to predict, because this is new territory. The first time our parents praise us, we get a big phasic release of dopamine in our brain, which subsequently sets off the whole reward-based learning and habituation process discussed earlier. The same thing happens the first time we bring home a C (what will they think!?), and so on until we map out much of our everyday world.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1339 If my best friend, Suzy, knocks on the door for a playdate, I anticipate good times ahead. If she comes in the house and suddenly unleashes a tirade about what a terrible friend I am, my dopamine system, not having seen that one coming, goes berserk. The next time I see Suzy, I might be a little more guarded or on the lookout, since I am less certain about what our interaction will be.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1342 We can see how this might confer a survival advantage: it is helpful to be able to predict whom we can and can’t trust. Broadly speaking, it is important that we have the neural tools to build a reservoir of trust.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1344 What we know about reward-based learning begins to explain how we get sucked into abnormal—or dare I say, addictive—technology use. Knowing that anticipation gets our dopamine flowing, businesses use this to get us to click on their ads or apps. For a nice example of anticipation, here are three consecutive headlines from the front page of CNN’s website: “Star Wars Stormtroopers: What’s Their Message?,” “Affluenza Teen: The Damage He Caused,” and “Why Putin Praised Trump.” These are written not as fact-based messages, such as Putin praises Trump for being “lively” and “talented,” but instead as teasers to get our anticipation juices flowing—to get us fired up, and our dopamine neurons firing, so that we will click the link to read the article. No wonder they call such attention grabbers “clickbait.”

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1350 Our computers and phones offer services so that we can get alerts each time we get an e-mail—push notifications. How nice! We certainly don’t want to miss that “important” e-mail from the boss do we? Instant message? Even better. Now I don’t even have to spend any extra time opening the e-mail—the message is right there. Twitter? A tweet’s 140-character limit is not magic. That length was specifically chosen because we will automatically read a message that size.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1354 And this is where unpredictability comes in: each time we unexpectedly hear the bell, beep, or chirp, our brains fire off a shot of dopamine. As mentioned in earlier chapters, intermittent reinforcement leads to the strongest, stickiest type of learning. By turning on our e-mail and text alerts in order to be more available and responsive, we have set ourselves up much like Pavlov’s dogs, which were trained to salivate in anticipation of receiving food when they heard him ring the bell.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1361 Let’s now tie that information together with what we know about mental simulations.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1362 the evolution of mental simulations as ways to anticipate potential outcomes so that we can make better decisions when there are multiple variables at play. If we are subjectively biased—seeing the world as we want or expect it to be—these simulations don’t work so well. They keep trying to come up with “the right” solution, or at least ones that fit somewhere within our worldview. in some instances these same types of simulations get hijacked by our reward system, leading us to spend time “elsewhere” when we should be watching our children or doing the work that will get us that raise. Yes, I am talking about daydreaming. Daydreaming is a great example of our attention being diverted from the task at hand. Let’s say we are sitting on the sidelines at our child’s soccer practice. All the kids are down at the other end of the field; nothing particularly exciting is happening. A thought pops up about the family vacation scheduled for next month, and suddenly we are planning for the trip or imagining ourselves sitting in the warm sand, ocean breezes blowing, decked out with our favorite book and a refreshing drink while the kids play in the water (yes, we are watching them!). One moment we are at soccer practice, and the next we are a thousand miles away. Let’s unpack the example of making that mental “to do” list as we plan for a vacation or some other future event. We make the list in our head. Doing so might lead to another thought such as “Gosh, I’ve got a lot to do to plan for this trip!” or “I hope I didn’t forget anything.” We eventually wake up from the daydream and return to soccer practice. We didn’t actually make the list, because the trip is far off, so we repeat the process the next week.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1378 From the perspective of orienting to stress, does this mental simulation move us away from our dis-ease? On average, no. It can actually make things worse. In 2010, Matt Killingsworth and Dan Gilbert investigated what happens when our minds wander or daydream (in the lingo: stimulus-independent thought).5 Using iPhones, they randomly prompted over 2,200 people to answer a few questions as they went about their day. They asked, “What are you doing right now?” “Are you thinking about something other than what you are currently doing,” and “How are you feeling right now?” (response choices ranged from “very bad” to “very good”). How much do you think people reported daydreaming? Ready for this? They found that almost 50 percent of the time, people reported that they were off task. That is half of waking life! Here is a key, counterintuitive finding: when the researchers correlated happiness with being on or off task, people reported being less happy, on average, when their minds were wandering. The study concluded, “A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.” on average, daydreaming about pleasant events was rated at the same level of happiness as being on task in the moment—no matter what the task was. But taken together with all the neutral and unpleasant mind wandering, which, not surprisingly, was reported as being correlated with lower happiness scores, we get the “unhappy mind” conclusion that Killingsworth and Gilbert put forth. So it seems that our brains are wired to form associations between feelings and events—for example, Hawaii is nice. We get “rewarded” in a dopamine sense, too, for anticipating future events. Trouble arises when these come together: not having much (if any) control over what type of thoughts we have—pleasant or unpleasant—we end up getting swept away in daydreams of delight and disaster, distracted from what is right in front of our face, whether it is a car bearing down on us or our child’s first goal.

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Each of us has a guilty pleasure—an excess, a vice—that we manage to control on our best days. If we have an urge to pull out our smartphone to check e-mail at our kid’s soccer practice, that pious angel voice in our head chimes in, “Oh, you know you should be watching your child.” Or if we are driving, hear the beep of a new text message, and get antsy to see who it’s from, she reminds us, “Remember what you heard on the radio: texting behind the wheel is more dangerous than drunk driving!” We thank our better angels for helping us to stay involved in our children’s lives, and to not be the cause of an accident on the highway. You are already familiar with what we are doing when we listen to the angel—practicing good old-fashioned self-control. Scientists call this cognitive control: we use cognition to control our behavior. Treatments such as cognitive behavioral therapy apply this kind of control to a range of disorders, including depression and addiction.

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Some people, like my good friend Emily, are natural models of cognitive control. After the birth of her first child, she was thirty pounds heavier than her pre-pregnancy weight. To get back to her previous weight, she calculated the number of calories she would have to restrict each day to lose those pounds in five months. She simply rationed her calorie allowance over the course of each day (including adjustments for exercise) to stay within her daily limit. Bada bing, bada boom: back to her pre-pregnancy weight as planned. For those of us who are screaming, “That’s not fair!” or “I tried that and failed,” Emily, besides being wonderful in many ways, has the mind of Mr. Spock from Star Trek when it comes to self-control. By this, I mean that she has a very logical mind, reasons things out, and executes without getting caught up in the emotion-laden stories that often plague us: that’s too hard, I can’t do that. Emily would simply cool her “but I’m hungry” jets and wait until the next day, when her daily calorie allowance would be up again.

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Neuroscientists are beginning to uncover the brain correlates that represent the balance between Mr. Spock, our rational mind, and Captain Kirk, our passionate and sometimes irrational mind. In fact, Daniel Kahneman (author of Thinking, Fast and Slow) won a 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in this area. Kahneman and others describe these two ways of thinking as System 1 and System 2.

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System 1 represents the more primitive, emotional system. Like Captain Kirk, it reacts quickly, based on impulse and emotion. Brain regions associated with this system include midline structures such as the medial (meaning: situated in the middle) prefrontal cortex and the posterior cingulate cortex. These areas are consistently activated when something related to us happens, such as thinking about ourselves, daydreaming, or craving something.6 System 1 represents the “I want” urges and impulses as well as gut instincts (instant impressions). Kahneman calls this “fast” thinking.

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System 1: the medial prefrontal cortex (left) and posterior cingulate cortex (right), midline brain structures that are part of a system of brain regions involved in self-referential, impulsive reaction. System 2, which is the part of the brain that most recently evolved, represents our higher capacities, those that make us uniquely human. These functions include planning, logical reasoning, and self-control. Brain regions in this system include the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.7

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If the Vulcan brain is comparable to its human counterpart, Mr. Spock’s dorsolateral prefrontal cortex functions like a freight train—slow and steady, keeping him on track. We can think of “slow” System 2 as representing “it’s not about me—do what needs to be done” types of thoughts.

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System 2: the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a lateral brain structure involved in cognitive control. System 2 is just like any new member of a group or organization—it has the weakest voice. So when we get stressed or run out of gas, guess which part of the brain is the first to bail? System 2. Amy Arnsten, a neuroscientist at Yale, put it this way: “Even quite mild acute uncontrollable stress can cause a rapid and dramatic loss of prefrontal cognitive abilities.”8 In other words, it doesn’t take much in our everyday lives to send us off the rails.

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The psychologist Roy Baumeister refers to this stress reaction, perhaps ironically, as “ego depletion.” Recent work has supported the idea that just like a car with only enough gas in the tank to keep going, we may have only enough gas in our self-control tank for any one day. Specifically, his group has found that across a number of different types of behavior, “resource depletion” (that is, running out of gas in the tank) directly affected the likelihood of someone being able to resist a desire. In one study, Baumeister’s research team used smartphones to track people’s behavior and their degree of desire for a number of temptations, including social contact and sex.9 The phone would randomly ask them whether they were currently having a desire, or had had one in the past thirty minutes. Participants then rated the desire’s strength, whether it interfered with other goals, and whether they were able to resist it. The researchers found that “the more frequently and recently participants had resisted any earlier desire, the less successful they were at resisting any other subsequent desire.”

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Is there hope for the majority of us who don’t have a well-developed System 2? As Arnsten hinted, it can be helpful to keep our System 2 gas tank full. Simple things like making sure we get enough sleep, stay fed, and so forth can be helpful. Keeping our stress levels low may be another story.

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Since we can’t think our way to well-being, and getting caught up in planning or other types of daydreaming might increase our stress levels and the sense of disconnection in our lives, seeing how these processes work, ideally and in real life, can be a first step forward. Seeing what it is like when we aren’t paying attention to our significant others or kids can help clarify the actual rewards that we get from our distractions. Pulling out our stress compass and paying attention to the pull of the beep or blip can help us step back, right in the moment, rather than becoming glued to our phones yet again.

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