Fear and learning
July 24th 2011 13:50
Habitual thinking patterns that cause intense feelings of fear, anger, shame or guilt are not only toxic, but also addictive in nature.
Why? They stimulate pleasure and learning centers of the brain similar to addictive substances.
How can pain stimulate pleasure?
Toxic thoughts are characteristically ones that cause intense fear-based feelings, and that overwhelm or zap our body’s energy supply as they are compulsive in nature. Typically, they are thoughts that forecast disaster, perpetuate worry, instill doubt, obsess on perfection, describe self (or another) as a victim, point fingers at others, or in some way paint images of self, life or others with colors of lack, gloom or failure.
Toxic thinking is also associated with “feel good” feelings as they are protective strategies that get automatically activated in our defense when something triggers us.
In recent decades, neuroscience research has increased our understanding of the processes that lead to the formation of healthy and unhealthy habits, to include addictions.
Pleasure – and fear – as stimulants?
We now have a better understanding of how intoxicating highs stimulate the “reward” centers of the brain, and the role mixed emotions of — pleasure and fear — play in stimulating these centers to establish an addiction, addictive relating patterns, or emotional reactivity in general.
The high is produced by neurochemicals that induce pleasure, dopamine in particular.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, a chemical messenger of the brain that plays a major role in forming addictions, and habits in general, healthy or otherwise. It transmits “teaching” signals to the reward centers of the brain responsible for acquiring new habits.
The other, less known, catalyst that stimulates the reward centers for the release of hormones is: fear.
Whether related to risk taking, taboo or past trauma, fear is a chief chemical-stimulant that works together with pleasure to enhance and intensify the highs in the brain’s reward centers. In fact, the brain is in its most alert state of receptivity to learning in the presence of danger.
This makes sense, considering that survival is the primary directive of the part of the mind, the subconscious, that runs the body and is in charge of all the processes involved in forming or breaking habits.
Thus, fear not only reinforces learning, it also increases the chances that a particular memory will receive preferential attention from the subconscious mind.
This means the subconscious mind will record the “experience” in a special place in memory, an “intelligence report” of sorts, which the subconscious mind turns to whenever we get triggered or feel threatened in some way.
(The use of “fear” to condition behaviors also explains why commercial and political advertisements use fear to condition us to behave in certain ways.)
Toxic-thinking patterns act as “drugs of choice”?
Certain thinking patterns, in particular ones that subconsciously activate the body’s fear response, or “fight or flight” system, are powerful.
How?
They activate powerful inner processes that produce dynamic physiological changes in the body. They prepare us to run away or confront a perceived threat. When fear is the basis for behaviors, it is connected to the part of the brain that is responsible for ensuring survival — the fight or flight stress response.
They are automatic.
They cause the subconscious mind to automatically perform an instant coup d’état of the body’s normal processes. Unfortunately, this disengages the higher thinking processes of the brain by cutting off much of the oxygen flow.
They are limiting in varying degrees.
And herein lies the problem. The brain is always in either “protective mode” or “learning mode.” When it’s in “protective mode,” its otherwise amazing capacity to make informed choices, decisions is not fully functioning. It is no longer be in “learning mode.”
They are toxic-thinking patterns.
The subconscious mind has a seemingly limitless capacity for memory and multitasking, processing millions, and some say billions, of bits of information per second. It does no original thinking, however. It relies on our thoughts and feeling states to form the “perceptions” that let it know whether or not to activate the body’s fear response.
They are not “real” thoughts.
Our thoughts or “self-talk” are an inner running commentary, a stream of about 60,000 thoughts a day. A good portion of this habituated thinking consists of limiting, rigid, black-and-white thinking patterns, such as blame, fault-finding, self-pity, etc. These negatively charged patterns of thought that are not real thinking at all. For example:
If I say no, I will be rejected or abandoned.
If someone says no to my request, it means they don’t love or appreciate me.
It’s wrong to put “demands” or need something from others.
It’s not love if you have to ask; he/she should know what I want/need.
Anger means you are not loved, accepted by or adequate enough to another.
Psychological or physical violence is OK when it is “deserved.”
They are based on early childhood beliefs imprinted in survival-love maps.
Where do these thoughts come from? Beliefs. In this case, certain core beliefs regarding our self-concept, what it means to love and be loved, what we “have to” do to “matter” or feel value in relation to self and others. They are thoughts that the subconscious has accrued in a special record it keeps of all past threatening moments, along with other data, such as feelings, images, beliefs, and so on. I refer to as our early survival-love maps.
Many of them spawn unhelpful and limiting views of anger, which is designed to be a healthy, and essential emotion, once we accept and respect its value, and know how to express it assertively – and not defensively. Some examples of damaging beliefs about anger include:
Never be angry.
Never talk about your anger.
Men can be angry, women cannot.
Anger leads to abuse and pain.
They cause intense feelings inside us — unnecessarily.
They offer quick-fix relief that lowers anxiety and restores body’s equilibrium in varying degrees.
The instant relief we get by activating our protective strategies, such as blasting someone with our anger or stewing on how we “always” get the short end of the stick, is what makes toxic-thinking addictive.
Old comfortable ways of protecting ourselves?
The subconscious does no original thinking. it’s completely dependent on the conscious mind to wisely discern between “feel goods” that are healthful and those that are harmful.
Whenever something “works” to lower anxiety and restore our body to natural state, the subconscious mind automatically puts it on the “list of things that work to ensure survival.” Hence the “feel-good” feelings.
With repeated stimulation, old reward centers form new neuropathways that demand more of the same, thus, producing cravings. As the body habituates to the highs that repeated stimulation produces, other processes that seek to restore equilibrium then form new neuropathways, which demand greater intensity and frequency to achieve the same stimulation.
An addiction is formed, not without cost.
This combination of love- and fear-based emotions program the brain to live life at odds with self, a life of contradictory desires and passions that, if not stopped, has power to take away what is of lasting and real value to a person, gradually taking control of a person’s life.
Change your toxic pseudo feel-goods, change your life!
“Genuine” feel-goods can be distinguished from “pseudo” feel-goods. The former, in contrast to the latter, seeks to delight us yet also enhance our health, growth, transformation, or at minimum, cause no harm.
A most brilliant think in the modern era, Carl Jung, was first among other theorists and psychologists to point out that the human mind, or psyche, continuously strives toward a feeling state of wholeness, in search of meaning and purpose.
We are wired to seek purpose, meaningfully connect and contribute. We are also wired for a life time of learning, healing and change.
Change processes invite us to participate actively and consciously in making new sense of our lives and experiences in ways that produce optimal emotional states within us. To realize a mature and wise self that is authentically connected to life, this can mean integrating the old with the new or exploring parts of self we disowned in childhood.
At root, like addiction, toxic “feel good” thinking patterns are an escape, a desperate attempt to get control over life that relinquishes control to acts and thoughts of desperation.
At root all addiction is a fear of intimacy, in particular, an intimate knowing of self.
It is this topsy-turvy system of beliefs that imprisons the mind with lies that lead us to block, run and defend ourselves against what we most need and yearn for in life—to feel alive in meaningful relationships with self and other—to feel safe enough to give and receive, meaning “good enough” to love and be loved, as whole and complete beings—who do not need approval or anything external to ourselves to complete us.
The solution is simple, though not easy, it’s achievable with determination: Change toxic “feel goods” and transform your life.
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