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The Craving Mind Why We Get Hooked and How We Can Break Bad Habits Chapter 6. Addicted to Thinking
Author: Judson Brewer Publisher: New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Publish Date: 2017 Review Date: 2022-11-13 Status:💥
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Jones’s experience is a great example of the difference between thinking and getting caught up in thinking. She had plenty of thoughts go through her head during the race. It was only when she started to get in her own way, telling herself to make sure her technique was correct, that she “overtried.” She literally tripped herself up.
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In sports, music, and business, where success can come down to a single race, performance, or moment, it is really helpful to prepare, to be coached, and to practice over and over until we have it down. Then, when the big moment comes, our coaches tell us to just get out there and do it. Perhaps they even smile and say, “Have fun” so that we will relax. Why? Because we can’t run our best race or nail a musical performance if we are tense. In overtrying, Jones “tightened up” and tripped.
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This type of contraction may give us a few clues about what happens when we get caught up in our own thought patterns. Experientially, this entanglement can literally be felt as a clenching, grasping, or tightening feeling, both mentally and physically. Try this as a thought experiment: imagine what would happen if we spent fifteen minutes excitedly detailing a new idea to a coworker, and then he dismissed it out of hand with the comment “Well, that’s a dumb idea!” Do we close down, walk away, and then ruminate on the encounter for the next several hours? Do we end up with stiffened shoulders at the end of the day because of the tension we carried around after the painful encounter? And what happens if we can’t shake it off?
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The late psychologist Susan Nolen-Hoeksema was very interested in what happens when people think “repetitively and passively about their negative emotions.”4 In other words, what happens when people get caught up in what she termed “ruminative response styles.” For example, if we responded ruminatively to our colleague in the above example telling us that our idea was stupid, we might get caught up in worrying that it was a dumb idea, and that might lead to us think that all our ideas were dumb, when normally we might have shrugged off the comment (or agreed that the idea was dumb and dropped it).
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- S. Nolen-Hoeksema, B. E. Wisco, and S. Lyubomirsky, “Rethinking Rumination,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 3, no. 5 (2008): 400–424.
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Not surprisingly, several studies have shown that people who respond this way when feeling sad demonstrate higher levels of depressive symptoms over time.5 Rumination—being caught up in repetitive thought loops—can even predict the chronicity, or persistence, of depression. To be fair, rumination has long been a topic of debate among clinicians and researchers. Several arguments have been put forth claiming that it confers some type of selective advantage, yet none has been satisfactory enough to bring the field into agreement. Might viewing it from an evolutionary vantage point of reward-based learning help fill in some gaps? Could rumination be another example of being “addicted” (continued use despite adverse consequence) to a certain way of thinking?
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In a recent study entitled “Sad as a Matter of Choice? Emotion-Regulation Goals in Depression,” Yael Millgram and colleagues showed depressed and nondepressed people happy, sad, or neutral pictures, then gave them a choice to see the same image again or a black screen, and finally asked them to rate their mood.6 Across both groups, looking at happy pictures evoked happiness, while sad images evoked sadness. Pretty straightforward. Now here is where it got interesting. Compared with the nondepressed, depressed people did not differ in how many times they chose to look
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These brain studies of the default mode network may reveal something important in our everyday lives that we can start to pay more attention to—namely, getting caught up in the push and pull of our experience. On my meditation retreat, I really bore down, fighting my addictive thinking and trying to push it away. If we become habituated or even addicted to a certain way of thinking, whether simple daydreaming or a more complex ruminative response style, it can be hard to keep from getting caught up in “stinkin’ thinkin,’” as my patients with alcohol use disorders like to say. Our brain data filled in a critical piece of the puzzle: how our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors relate to us. A thought is simply a word or an image in our mind until we think it is so great and so exciting that we can’t get it out of our heads. A craving is just a craving unless we get sucked into it.
How we relate to our thoughts and feelings makes all the difference.
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Meditators train themselves to notice these experiences and not get caught up in them—to simply see them for what they are and not take them personally. The PCC may be linking us to our experiences through reward-based learning. Through mental and physical contraction, we may be learning that “we” are thinking, “we” are craving. And through this connection, we form a strong relationship to our thoughts and feelings. We learn to see the world through a particular set of glasses over and over, to the point that we take the view they provide at face value as who we are. The self itself isn’t a problem, since remembering who we are when we wake up each morning is very helpful. Instead, the problem is the extent to which we get caught up in the drama of our lives and take it personally when something happens to us (good or bad). Whether we get lost in a daydream, a ruminative thought pattern, or a craving, we feel a bit of tightening, narrowing, shrinking, or closing down in our bodies and minds. Whether it is excitement or fear, that hook always gets us.
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The instruction was simple: pay attention to your breath, and when your mind wanders, bring it back. When the boat starts to drift, the anchor catches the ocean floor.
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Back to Barre, where I was sweating my butt off in the middle of winter on a meditation retreat. I thought I was supposed to stop thinking. I was trying to stop something that I had been rewarded for again and again. My mind was like a massive ship, cruising at speed. With all that inertia behind it, dropping an anchor wasn’t going to work.
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Why can I write this in such vivid detail? Because that is what dopamine does: it helps us develop context-dependent memories—especially in moments of uncertainty. Boom—fireworks for the brain. Most of us can recall those great moments in life. With amazing vividness and clarity,
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We also relive the feel of these experiences
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emotional thrills and chills that come with these events. And we can thank our brains for a job well done when we do.
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Obviously, the fact that we are set up to remember events isn’t a problem. That ability is a survival mechanism,
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Thinking is not the bad guy, either. Solving a math problem in school or coming up with a new deal at work helps us progress in life. Planning a vacation helps it happen—kind of hard to fly to Paris if we haven’t bought the plane tickets. Yet we can start to see how our little helper, dopamine, can get underfoot. When the subject is “me,” we spend too much time posting pictures on Instagram or checking Facebook. When we are blinded by subjective bias, our simulations can’t predict correctly and just take up time and mental energy. When we are restless or bored, we drop into a daydream about our wedding day or something exciting planned for the future. In other words, thinking and all that goes with it (simulating, planning, remembering) is not the problem. It is only a problem when we get caught up in it.
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The late psychologist Susan Nolen-Hoeksema was very interested in what happens when people think “repetitively and passively about their negative emotions.”4 In other words, what happens when people get caught up in what she termed “ruminative response styles.” For example, if we responded ruminatively to our colleague in the above example telling us that our idea was stupid, we might get caught up in worrying that it was a dumb idea, and that might lead to us think that all our ideas were dumb, when normally we might have shrugged off the comment (or agreed that the idea was dumb and dropped it). Not surprisingly, several studies have shown that people who respond this way when feeling sad demonstrate higher levels of depressive symptoms over time.5 Rumination—being caught up in repetitive thought loops—can even predict the chronicity, or persistence, of depression.
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To be fair, rumination has long been a topic of debate among clinicians and researchers. Several arguments have been put forth claiming that it confers some type of selective advantage, yet none has been satisfactory enough to bring the field into agreement. Might viewing it from an evolutionary vantage point of reward-based learning help fill in some gaps? Could rumination be another example of being “addicted” (continued use despite adverse consequence) to a certain way of thinking? In a recent study entitled “Sad as a Matter of Choice? Emotion-Regulation Goals in Depression,” Yael Millgram and colleagues showed depressed and nondepressed people happy, sad, or neutral pictures, then gave them a choice to see the same image again or a black screen, and finally asked them to rate their mood.6 Across both groups, looking at happy pictures evoked happiness, while sad images evoked sadness. Pretty straightforward. Now here is where it got interesting. Compared with the nondepressed, depressed people did not differ in how many times they chose to look at happy pictures, yet they chose to view significantly more sadness-inducing images. As good scientists, Millgram and his team repeated their experiment with a new set of participants in the same setup, but instead of showing happy and sadness-inducing pictures, they had them listen to happy and sad music clips. They found the same effect: depressed people were more likely to choose sad music. They then took it one step farther. They wondered what would happen if depressed people were given a cognitive strategy to make themselves feel either better or worse. Which would they choose? A final round of participants was trained in how to either increase or decrease their reactions to emotional stimuli. They were then shown the same types of happy, sad, and neutral images as in the first experiment and were asked to choose a strategy—make me happier or make me sadder. We can guess how this story ends. Indeed, depressed people chose not to make themselves feel better, but worse.
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This might sound strange to anyone who is not depressed. But to those with depression, it might sound or even feel familiar. They may simply be more accustomed to feeling this way. This is a sweater that fits, perhaps one that has become molded to their body because they have worn it so much. As part of this, rumination may be a mode of thinking that depressed people have reinforced to the point that it, in some way, authenticates who they are. Yes, this is me: I am that depressed guy. As Millgram and colleagues put it, “They may be motivated to experience sadness to verify their emotional selves.”
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Our Default Mode
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We now have some clues that may link the types of thinking in which we can get caught up with how our brains work. Let’s start with daydreaming. Malia Mason and colleagues set out to study what happens in the brain during mind wandering.7 They trained volunteers to proficiency in some tasks, specifically, ones so boring “that their minds could wander,” and compared brain activity during these tasks and novel tasks. They found that during the practiced tasks, the medial prefrontal cortex and the posterior cingulate cortex become relatively more activated that they did during performance of the novel ones. Recall that these are the midline brain structures involved in Kahneman’s System 1, which seems to be involved in self-reference—becoming activated when something relevant to us is happening, such as thinking about ourselves or craving a cigarette. In fact, Mason’s group found a direct correlation between the frequency of mind wandering and brain activity in these two regions. Around the same time, a research group led by Daniel Weissman likewise found that lapses in attention were linked to increased activity in these brain regions.8 Our attention lapses, we fall into a daydream, or we start thinking about something we need to do later in the day, and then these brain regions light up.
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The medial prefrontal cortex and the posterior cingulate cortex form the backbone of a network called the default mode network (DMN). The exact functions of the DMN are still debated, yet because of its prominence in self-referential processing, we can think of it functioning as the “me” network—linking ourselves to our inner and outer worlds. For example, recalling a memory about myself in a particular situation, choosing which of two cars to buy, or deciding whether an adjective describes me all activate the DMN, likely because these thoughts share the common feature of me: I’m remembering, I’m deciding.
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The DMN was serendipitously discovered by Marc Raichle and colleagues at Washington University in St. Louis around 2000. The serendipity comes in because he had been using a task that his research group called “resting state” as a baseline comparison task for his experiments. In fMRI research, relative changes in blood flow during two tasks are compared. We measure brain activity during state A and subtract the activity recorded during state B (the baseline) to get a relative measure. This process helps control for baseline differences in someone’s brain activity from day to day, and in activity from person to person. Raichle’s group used something so simple that anyone could do it without practice. The instruction was (and continues to be): “Lay still and don’t do anything in particular”—this was the resting state, the baseline. The mystery came when the scientists started looking at “network connectivity,” that is, the extent to which brain regions were activated or deactivated at the same time. It is assumed that if there is a tight synchrony in the timing of different regions’ firing, they are likely to be “functionally coupled,” as if they were communicating with one another more than with any of the other brain regions they were coupled with. Raichle’s group repeatedly found that the medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex (and other regions) seemed to be talking to each other during the resting-state task. But we aren’t supposed to be doing anything during rest, right? This was the big question. Raichle, a very careful scientist, repeated his experiments and analyses over and over. He sat on his data for several years and finally published his first report, entitled, “Medial Prefrontal Cortex and Self-Referential Mental Activity: Relation to a Default Mode of Brain Function,” in 2001.9
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Over the next few years, more and more published reports like those of Mason and Weissman showed correlations and suggested links between the DMN, self-referential processing, and mind wandering. Killingsworth’s study showing that we mind-wander half the day fit nicely here—perhaps the DMN was aptly named if we default to daydreaming. A decade after Raichle’s seminal paper was published, Sue Whitfield-Gabrieli, a neuroscientist at MIT, put the last nail in the coffin of uncertainty.10 She designed an elegantly simple experiment: she had people perform an explicitly self-referential task (looking at adjectives and deciding whether the words described them) and the resting-state task (don’t do anything in particular). Instead of using the resting state as a baseline, she directly compared the two and found that indeed they both activated the medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortices.
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While Whitfield-Gabrieli was linking self-referential thinking to DMN activity, my lab was investigating what happens in the brains of expert meditators. We started by comparing brain activity in novice and expert meditators. The experts came in with an average of more than ten thousand hours of practice, whereas we taught the novices three types of meditation on the morning of their fMRI scan. We analyzed our data, excitedly anticipating that we would find some type of increased activation in our expert meditators. They were doing something after all in meditating. Meditating is not resting—far from it, or so we thought. Yet when we looked across the entire brain, we couldn’t find a single region that showed more activity in experts than in novices. We scratched our heads. We looked again. We still didn’t find anything.
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Default mode network deactivation during meditation. A, During meditation, expert meditators show less activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (shown in the circled region, as viewed from the side of the head) and the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC). B, Alternate view of the PCC (shown in the circled region, as viewed from above the head). Reproduced with permission from J. A. Brewer et al., “Meditation Experience Is Associated with Differences in Default Mode Network Activity and Connectivity,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, no. 50 (2011): 20254–59.
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We then looked to see whether any brain regions showed decreased activity in experts relative to novices. Bingo! We found four, two of which were the medial prefrontal cortex and the posterior cingulate cortex, the central hubs of the DMN. Many peripheral brain regions connect to them.11 They are like hub cities that link flights from across the country for major airlines. The involvement of these brain areas in our results couldn’t be a coincidence. We set out to recruit additional experienced meditators, and at the same time I started talking to a colleague, Xenios Papademetris, about doing more than just a replication study. Xenios was now working with a tall, unassuming graduate student named Dustin Scheinost to speed up the process so that researchers and subjects could see fMRI results in real time. I would meditate on an object—for example, my breath—and after a short period of time, I would check the graph to see how it lined up with my experience, then return to meditation. Since brain activity is measured relative to a baseline condition, we set up a procedure in which I would see adjectives flash on a screen in the scanner for thirty seconds, much as Whitfield-Gabrieli had done for her task. After thirty seconds, the graph would start to appear, showing whether my PCC activity was increasing or decreasing. A new bar would fill in next to the previous one every two seconds as the scanner measured my brain activity and updated the results. Although fMRI measurement of brain activity leads to a slight delay in the signal, the procedure worked surprisingly well. I could link my subjective experience of meditation with my brain activity virtually in real time.
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Schematic of neurofeedback protocol. An active baseline task is followed by meditation with real-time feedback. During meditation, the percent signal change in the PCC (corrected for global brain activity) is calculated and plotted in real time. Reproduced with permission from J. A. Brewer and K. A. Garrison, “The Posterior Cingulate Cortex as a Plausible Mechanistic Target of Meditation: Findings from Neuroimaging,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1307, no. 1 (2014): 19–27.
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After numerous rounds of pilot testing our new contraption, we set up our second meditation study much like the first: participants were asked to pay attention to their breath as their primary object of meditation. But this time we had them meditate while receiving real-time fMRI neurofeedback: eyes open, being mindful of their breathing, and then checking in with the graph from time to time to see how well their brain activity lined up with awareness of their breath. We wanted to see whether we could home in with much greater precision on what was happening in any particular moment. How active was the brain at a given instant? We were moving into a field of study called neurophenomenology—exploring the conjunction between our momentary subjective experience and our brain activity. And we were in unchartered territory in the field of cognitive neuroscience.
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By focusing on giving feedback from the PCC (we were set up to give feedback from only one region at a time), we could see, virtually in real time, substantive differences between the brain activity of novice and experienced meditators. For example, we would see a lot of variability in PCC activity during a run with a novice, who immediately afterward would report, “Yep, my mind was all over the place, as you can see there and there and there [referring to specific points on the graph].” Other runs by experienced meditators would show a long period of decreased PCC activity and then a big spike followed by another drop. They would report that their meditation had been going well, but when they checked in with the graph or had a thought like “Look how well I’m doing!” the disruption would register as a big increase in brain activity.
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Graph showing an experienced meditator’s PCC brain activity while receiving neurofeedback. Black indicates increased brain activity and grey indicates decreased activity. Numbers correspond to his report of his subjective experience immediately after the run. Laboratory archives of Judson Brewer.
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Here is an example of an experienced meditator who did a short, one-minute meditation while watching his brain activity (posterior cingulate cortex). Immediately after the run was over, he reported on how his subjective experience lined up with the graph. 1.So at the beginning, I caught myself, that I was sort of trying to guess when the words were going to end [baseline task] and when the meditation was going to begin. So I was kind of trying to be like, “Okay, ready, set, go!” and then there was an additional word that popped up, and I was like, “Oh shit,” and so that’s the [black] spike you see there … 2… and then I sort of immediately settled in, and I was really getting into it … (first run of grey) 3… and then I thought, “Oh my gosh, this is amazing” (second black spike) 4… and I was like, “Okay, wait, don’t get distracted,” and then I got back into it, and then it got [grey] again … (second run of grey) 5.“Oh my gosh, this is unbelievable, it’s doing exactly what my mind is doing,” and so then it got [black] again … (last bit of black)
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We found novices whose brain activity looked more like that of experts. Like people who have a gift for being present and not getting caught up in their own stories, they could steadily decrease PCC activity. By the same token, we found experienced meditators whose brain patterns were more in line with what we saw with novices: their moment-to-moment brain activity was all over the place. And most interestingly, both novice and experienced meditators reported learning something about their experience, even though the experiment was not set up as a learning paradigm. It was intended only to confirm our previous results showing that decreased PCC activity correlated with meditation. For example, the brains of several novices showed a great deal of increased PCC activity in the first three runs (each lasting three minutes, so nine minutes total). Then suddenly, on the next run, their brains would show a huge drop in activity. One novice reported that he “focused more on the physical sensation instead of thinking ‘in’ and ‘out’ [of breathing].” Another reported that the drop correlated with feeling “a lot more relaxed, like it was less of a struggle to prevent my mind from wandering.” These folks were using their brain feedback as a way to correct their meditation. Similar to Lolo Jones tripping herself up by overtrying and tightening up, our participants were seeing in real time what it is like to get caught up trying to meditate.
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Novice meditators show decreased PCC activity as they learn the nuances of meditation through real-time fMRI neurofeedback. PCC activity was shown to participants for three-minute blocks while they meditated with their eyes open. Increases in PCC activity relative to baseline are shown in black; decreases are shown in grey. Participants reported on their experiences after each run. Reproduced with permission from J. A. Brewer and K. A. Garrison, “The Posterior Cingulate Cortex as a Plausible Mechanistic Target of Meditation: Findings from Neuroimaging,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1307, no. 1 (2014): 19–27.
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The results of this experiment showed two things. First, they confirmed what previous studies had found regarding PCC activity, averaged across a number of participants: it decreased when people concentrated (in this case during meditation) and increased when people were distracted or their minds wandered, as Mason’s and Weissman’s work showed. This “positive control” nicely linked our paradigm with previous studies. Yet it didn’t seem to tell us anything unique about meditation and PCC activity. Here is where the second, surprising result came in. One of the bins that Juan filled was called “controlling”—trying to control one’s experience. That activity lined up with increases in PCC activity. Another, labeled “effortless doing,” correlated with decreased PCC activity. Taken together, these data revealed the mode of subjective experience that lined up with PCC activity—not perception of an object, but how we relate to it. In a sense, if we try to control a situation (or our lives), we have to work hard at doing something to get the results we want. In contrast, we can relax into an attitude that is more like a dance with the object, simply being with it as the situation unfolds, no striving or struggling necessary, as we get out of our own way and rest in an awareness of what is happening moment to moment.
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We agreed to work together to look at all the published papers that we could find related to PCC activation.
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regardless of task or paradigm.
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We ended up with a long and seemingly hodgepodge list that included Raichle’s resting state, Mason’s mind wandering, and other papers related to self-reference. But we also saw studies showing increased PCC activity with, among other things, choice justification (liking a choice you made), obsessive-compulsive disorder, emotional processing (including ruminative thinking in depressed individuals), guilt, induced immoral behavior, and craving.
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we wondered whether there was some concept underlying all our data as well as the previously published research. Taking what we had learned from our neurophenomenological data set and applying it to the other studies, the most parsimonious explanation came down to the same reason why Lolo tripped. Our data were directly pointing to something experiential. These brain studies of the default mode network may reveal something important in our everyday lives that we can start to pay more attention to—namely, getting caught up in the push and pull of our experience.
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On my meditation retreat, I really bore down, fighting my addictive thinking and trying to push it away. If we become habituated or even addicted to a certain way of thinking, whether simple daydreaming or a more complex ruminative response style, it can be hard to keep from getting caught up in “stinkin’ thinkin,’” as my patients with alcohol use disorders like to say. Our brain data filled in a critical piece of the puzzle: how our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors relate to us. A thought is simply a word or an image in our mind until we think it is so great and so exciting that we can’t get it out of our heads. A craving is just a craving unless we get sucked into it. How we relate to our thoughts and feelings makes all the difference. Meditators train themselves to notice these experiences and not get caught up in them—to simply see them for what they are and not take them personally. The PCC may be linking us to our experiences through reward-based learning. Through mental and physical contraction, we may be learning that “we” are thinking, “we” are craving. And through this connection, we form a strong relationship to our thoughts and feelings. We learn to see the world through a particular set of glasses over and over, to the point that we take the view they provide at face value as who we are. The self itself isn’t a problem, since remembering who we are when we wake up each morning is very helpful. Instead, the problem is the extent to which we get caught up in the drama of our lives and take it personally when something happens to us (good or bad). Whether we get lost in a daydream, a ruminative thought pattern, or a craving, we feel a bit of tightening, narrowing, shrinking, or closing down in our bodies and minds. Whether it is excitement or fear, that hook always gets us.