The Craving Mind Why We Get Hooked and How We Can Break Bad Habits Chapter 7. Why Is It So Hard to Concentrate—or Is It?
Author: Judson Brewer Publisher: New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Publish Date: 2017 Review Date: Status:📚
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- Highlight(pink) - Location 2037 I was sitting in the meditation hall at a self-retreat center, watching different thoughts arise (cause), and noticing their effects in my body. The pleasant fantasies led to an urge that I felt as a tightening and restlessness in my gut, or solar plexus area. I suddenly realized that the unpleasant worries did the same thing. For the first time in my life, I really saw how I was being sucked into my thoughts. And it didn’t matter whether they were good or bad. Both kinds of thought streams ended with the same result: a restless craving that needed satisfying.
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The ability to pay attention without becoming distracted is a core skill,
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Meditation is often touted as a straightforward way to develop this “mental muscle.”
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Yet many of us who wade into these waters quickly return to shore, saying to ourselves, “This is too hard” or “I can’t concentrate” or “How can this possibly be working? I feel worse.”
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In the early stages of meditation instruction, the emphasis is on paying attention to the breath, and returning one’s attention to the breath when the mind has wandered. This practice is straightforward enough, but it runs counter to our natural reward-based mechanisms of learning. As discussed throughout this book, we learn best in some circumstances by pairing action with outcome. The Buddha taught this principle as well; he repeatedly admonished his followers to notice cause and effect, to see clearly what they were getting from their actions. In our lives today, what types of behaviors do we reinforce? It is likely that the majority of us do not reinforce ones that lead away from stress. As our stress compass may in fact be telling us (once we learn how to use it), we are actually looking for happiness in all the wrong places. As I read, I began to see that the Buddha was pointing out how we tend to lose our way while seeking happiness. Perhaps that observation was the basis for his radical statement on suffering and happiness: “What others call happiness, that the Noble Ones declare to be suffering. What others call suffering, that the Noble Ones have found to be happiness.”1 This same thought is likely what the Burmese teacher Sayadaw U Pandita was talking about when he said that we mistake excitement for happiness, even though the former disorients us and moves us toward suffering instead of away from it.
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How did the Buddha know the difference between authentic happiness and suffering? First, he looked closely and observed basic reinforcement learning processes at work: “The more [people] indulge in sensual pleasures, the more their craving for sensual pleasures increases and the more they are burned by the fever of sensual pleasures, yet they find a certain measure of satisfaction and enjoyment in dependence on … sensual pleasure.”2 Behavior (indulgence in sensual pleasures) leads to reward (enjoyment), which sets up the process for its repetition (craving). Interestingly, the Buddha followed this process of indulgence and intoxication to its end: “I set out seeking the gratification in the world. Whatever gratification there is in the world, that I have found. I have clearly seen with wisdom just how far the gratification in the world extends.”3
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Historically, the Buddha was a prince. According to the story, when his mother became pregnant with him, many holy men gathered at the royal palace and prophesied that he would grow to be either a powerful monarch or a great spiritual leader. After hearing the prophesy, his father, the king, did everything in his power to ensure the former. He reasoned that if his son “was spared from all difficulty and heartache, the call to a spiritual destiny might remain dormant in him.”4 The king spoiled the young prince rotten, indulging his every desire and burying him in luxury. Ironically, this sensible-seeming strategy may have backfired on the king. It wasn’t until the Buddha had explored gratification to its end that he realized it didn’t bring him lasting satisfaction—it simply left him wanting more. Contemplating this never-ending cycle, he woke up. He realized how the process worked and thus how to step out of it: “So long, monks, as I did not directly know, as they really are, the gratification in the world as gratification … I did not claim to have awakened to the unsurpassed perfect enlightenment in this world … But when I directly knew all this, then I claimed to have awakened. The knowledge and vision arose in me: ‘Unshakeable is the liberation of my mind.’”5 In other words, it wasn’t until he had seen clearly what he was actually getting from his actions—which actions led to happiness and which one perpetuated stress and suffering—that he could see how to change them. He learned how to read his stress compass.
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Once that happened, the way to reorient and move in a different direction was remarkably simple. It followed the basic principles of habit formation: if you drop the action that is causing stress, you will feel better immediately; in other words, pair behavior with reward, cause with effect. Importantly and perhaps paradoxically, dropping the action that causes stress comes about by simply being aware of what we are doing rather than by doing something to try to change or fix the situation. Instead of trying to get in there and untangle the snarled mess of our lives (and making it more tangled in the process), we step back and let it untangle itself. We move from doing into being. When I read these passages in the Pali Canon, I had an “aha!” moment. These insights were important. Why? Because I had seen this cycle over and over again in my own experience—mistaking stress-inducing actions for ones that might give me (some) happiness, and repeating them anyway. I had seen it with my patients. And it lined up with modern theories of how we learn. I (finally) started watching what happened in my mind and body when I let my thought streams play themselves out instead of fighting or trying to control them. I started paying attention to cause and effect. I began to get a taste for disenchantment. The “seeing excitement as happiness” spell had been lifted. I started to understand how my stress compass worked. And that I had been mistakenly moving in the wrong direction, creating more suffering in the process.
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Just as I had been doing by indulging in thought fantasies, most of us mistake suffering for happiness as we live our lives. How do we know? Because we haven’t stopped perpetuating our suffering. Notice the number of times a day that we lash out at other people, eat comfort food, or buy something when stressed. Look at the ubiquitous advertisements promoting happiness through consumerism, feeding the concept that if we buy X, then we will be happy. These inducements work quite well because they take advantage of our innate reward-based learning processes: behavior leads to reward, which shapes and reinforces future behavior. We have conditioned ourselves to deal with stress in ways that ultimately perpetuate it rather than release us from it.
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The Buddha highlighted the misperception of stress for happiness: “In the same way … sensual pleasures in the past were painful to the touch, very hot & scorching; sensual pleasures in the future will be painful to the touch, very hot & scorching; sensual pleasures at present are painful to the touch, very hot & scorching; but when beings are not free from passion for sensual pleasures—devoured by sensual craving, burning with sensual fever—their faculties are impaired, which is why, even though sensual pleasures are actually painful to the touch, they have the skewed perception of ‘pleasant.’”6 This false identification is what my patients deal with daily. They don’t know how to use their stress compass. The short-term rewards from smoking or doing drugs lead them in the wrong direction.
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If reward-based learning is our natural tendency, why not co-opt it to learn how to move from temporary “happiness” to lasting states of peace, contentment, and joy? In fact, why aren’t we doing this already? B. F. Skinner argued that reward is critical for changing behavior: “Behavior could be changed by changing its consequences—that was operant conditioning—but it could be changed because other kinds of consequences would then follow.”7 Is it possible that we don’t even need to change the consequences (rewards), as Skinner suggested? If we simply see what we are getting from our actions more clearly, the cost of current consequences becomes more apparent. In other words, rewards may not be as juicy as we think they are when we stop long enough to actually taste them. Until we define happiness for ourselves, clearly seeing the difference between excitement and joy, for example, our habits will likely not change. We will keep returning to the fruits of our desires.
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Later in the same sutta is a list of the “seven factors of awakening.” They are as follows: mindfulness (Pali: sati), interest/investigation (dhamma vicaya), courageous energy (viriya), joy/rapture (piti), tranquility/relaxation (passaddhi), concentration (samadhi), and equanimity (upekkha).10 Returning to cause-and-effect models, the Buddha argued that as we try to move away from suffering and become mindful of present-moment experience, an interest in seeing cause and effect naturally arises. If the goal is to reduce or end our stress, we need simply to direct our attention to our experience, and the interest in seeing whether we are increasing or decreasing stress in that moment naturally arises as a result. We do not have to do anything but look.
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we have to truly and wholeheartedly want to stop suffering. Otherwise, we will not look at our actions carefully enough to see what we are actually getting from them.
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As we start to get into the book, the energy to keep reading naturally arises. So too with mindfulness practice—we become more interested in investigating more and more what we are doing. We can ask ourselves, “What am I getting from this? Is it leading me toward or away from suffering?” When the book gets really good, we become enraptured, perhaps finding ourselves reading until three in the morning. Once enraptured, we can tranquilly sit and read for hours. At this point, we really start to concentrate. With the previous factors in place, concentration naturally arises—we don’t have to force it or keep returning to the object of focus from daydreams or other distractions.
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This was not how I first learned to concentrate. Pay attention, and when the mind wanders, bring it back. Repeat. Here the sutta specifically emphasizes the use of cause and effect. Create the conditions for X, and X will naturally arise.
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Forcing concentration is really difficult, as anyone knows from experience,
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We know all too well how hard it is to concentrate when we are restless. Once we learn to concentrate, the conditions for equanimity naturally arise. Reading a good book on the subway is not a problem when we achieve equanimity; no matter the commotion around us, we are unflappable.
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When trying to concentrate on an object, whether it is our breath, a conversation, or something else, how do we make that state our new default way of being? How do we clearly see what we are getting—what reward—from our behavior in any moment? Perhaps we start at the beginning by simply noticing what it feels like when something interests us or draws our curiosity—or even fascinates us. For me, there is an open, energized, joyful quality in being really curious. That feeling clearly defines the reward that results from bringing the first two factors of awakening together: mindfulness and interest. We can contrast that experience with moments when we felt some type of brief, excited “happiness” that came from getting something that we wanted. When I set up my engagement scavenger hunt for Mary, I mistook the resulting excitement for happiness. Only years later did the difference become clear to me. Excitement brings with it restlessness and a contracted urge for more. Joy that results from curiosity is smoother, and open rather than contracted. The critical distinction between these types of rewards is that joy arises from being attentive and curious. That type of consciousness is possible virtually at any waking moment. It doesn’t take any work—since awareness is always available, we can simply rest in being aware. Excitement, on the other hand, requires something to happen to us or requires us to procure something that we want—we have to do something to get what we want. To start switching from excitement to joyful engagement, we can notice triggers (stress), perform a behavior (drop into an open, curious awareness), and notice the rewards (joy, tranquility, equanimity). And by using our own reward-based learning processes, the more we take these steps, the more we set up a habit pattern to concentrate more deeply and be happier (in a nonexcited way). In fact, we might discover that that this mode of being is always available, given the right conditions, such as getting out of our own way. The short answer here is that it can be tricky to tell the difference between joy (selfless) and excitement (selfish), especially early in mindfulness training, when we may not have had experience with selfless modes of being. And of course, we move ourselves away from these the more we try to achieve them.
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Interestingly, when another experienced meditator practiced “focusing on his breath and in particular the feeling of interest, wonder, and joy that arose in conjunction with subtle, mindful breathing,” he showed a large drop in the relative activation of the PCC, which correlated with his experience of “feeling interested and joy,” even when “being curious about the draft on [his] hands and feet” (figure, part c).
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Examples of fMRI brain activity change in the PCC. A, a novice meditator who was instructed to pay attention to the breath; B, an experienced meditator who was instructed to pay attention to the breath; C, an experienced meditator who was instructed to pay attention to the breath, and in particular to any related feeling of interest, wonder, and joy. Increases in brain activity relative to baseline are indicated by increases in the graph above the horizontal bar (black), and decreases are below the bar (grey). Each meditation period lasted three minutes. Reproduced from J. A. Brewer, J. H. Davis, and J. Goldstein, “Why Is It So Hard to Pay Attention, or Is It? Mindfulness, the Factors of Awakening, and Reward-Based Learning,” Mindfulness 4, no. 1 (2013): 75–80. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, New York, 2012. Used with permission.
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Though these are examples of a single brain region that is likely part of a larger network contributing to these experiences, they suggest that creating the right conditions for concentration, including curiosity, may be helpful in “not feeding” self-referential processes. In the future, giving this type of neurofeedback to people while they are practicing may be helpful in differentiating practice that is selfish from that which is selfless, excited from joyful, and contracted from open,
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When it comes to staying focused, we may be able to treat mind states or attitudes such as curiosity as conditions that can naturally lead to concentration. If so, we could abandon brute force methods that may not be as clearly linked with our natural reward-based learning processes. These tools and skills may be inherent in reward-based learning. If so, we can leverage them to change our lives without the usual roll-up-your-sleeves, no-pain-no-gain, effortful methodology that seems baked into our Western psyche. Before I came to this realization, I was using the techniques that I knew best, which, ironically, were moving me in the wrong direction. Instead, we can notice the trigger (stress), perform the behavior (become interested and curious), and reward ourselves in a way that is aligned with our stress compass (notice joy, tranquility, concentration, and equanimity). Repeat.