The Birth of a Bad Habit
Obsessions, Compulsions, and Addictions
We are all acquainted with habits. Most of us think of them in an innocuous way, such as washing your hands before eating or brushing your teeth at bedtime. Habits such as these are adaptive and serve a larger purpose. They can be daily rituals that simplify your life and free up other parts of the mind so you can focus and attend to other activities. Habits also have a survival value, as they can help us react in instantaneous ways. Quickly swerving your car to avoid a large object in the street and depressing the brake pedal when you need to stop suddenly are prime examples of this. Tasks such as these are automated, making it possible to handle these basic road functions as you contemplate more complex matters and thoughts.
There is a second class of habits, however, that are maladaptive and therefore “bad.” These habits reflect a maladjustment in the world—a way of coping with the certain demands or stresses in ways that may not have positive, healthful outcomes. (For an outline of the most common types of bad habits, see the box on page 74.) Maladaptive habits and routines are formed when the limbic response becomes mismanaged, or, in more scientific terms, “dysregulated.” They are emblematic of our attempt to manage those fearful feelings that emerge from the spiraling discomfort generated from deflated dopamine levels. The goal of these habits is a very primitive means of managing and distracting us from the fears stirred up by our internal instinct. Unfortunately, these types of habits do nothing to rid us of these fears. Instead they are merely short-term ploys to help us momentarily quell the fear. And as our dopamine reserves plummet, we are more likely to become ensnared within these patterns. In most cases, they accomplish this result by avoidance or distraction. Let me explain.
The Five Basic Types of Bad Habits
Maladaptive, “bad” habits are symptomatic of a hair-trigger survival instinct. They are essentially a way of creating makeshift safety, control, and comfort, but they can turn against us in health-depleting ways. The five most common types of maladaptive habits:
Addiction habits: overeating; abusing substances such as alcohol and drugs; excessive caffeine consumption (including energy drinks); overexercising; and sex addiction.
Compulsive habits: checking habits, compulsive organization and cleanliness (such as hand washing), hair pulling, and skin picking.
Sick habits: frequent colds and flu, headaches, chronic pain, stomachaches; a subset of this habit, which I’ll explore later in the book, is the aforementioned Let Down Effect, whereby a person develops an illness or symptoms following a stressful event, such as a personal conflict, a time-pressured work project, or an exam.
Insomnia habit: inability to go to sleep and stay asleep.
Protective and avoidance habits: phobias designed to keep a person “safe” and free from harm; classic examples include fear of flying or enclosed spaces, leading a person to avoid airplanes or elevators. Pain can also be a protective habit whereby physical pain serves a purpose such as giving permission to escape or withdraw from normal responsibilities.
For starters, we’ll take the example of Bethany, a high-level Hollywood agent. Over the past year and half, Bethany found herself becoming increasingly more keyed up due to a chronic state of agitance. Although work demands added to this feeling of being sped up all the time, she also felt it outside of work, in settings where it wasn’t warranted. Eventually, Bethany’s agitance levels crossed her discomfort threshold, and she began to notice signs of discomfort in the form of feeling abnormally anxious and temperamental. At first, she managed this discomfort with the use of herbal and vitamin supplements, such as valerian and GABA, which were intended to help calm her growing inner turmoil. But like the experience of so many other people, chronic states of discomfort create a growing vulnerability. It wasn’t until she was returning home to California from the East Coast on a turbulent flight that her discomfort culminated in a maladaptive habit. Even though Bethany had experienced turbulence many times before in her travels, this time it was different. The combination of her underlying discomfort and the turbulence made for a Molotov cocktail. Her survival instinct awakened and caused her to feel like she was going to die in a plane crash. She knew it wasn’t logical and even told herself that she’d been in situations like this before with no problem. But her logical mind wasn’t listening as her limbic brain took control. She ordered several drinks in order to calm herself. Although this did help her make it through the flight, it did nothing to vanquish the fear that had established itself with regard to flying.
Bethany’s job required frequent flying to meet clients around the country, so this responsibility began to pose a problem for her. Initially, she tried to overlook it, but her anxiety continued to progress with each anticipated trip. On some occasions, the anxiety was mild, but in others it was quite pronounced. Naturally this led to extraordinary distress at times, and it wasn’t long before she began to seek a solution to cope with her fear of flying. First, she resorted to having a couple of drinks prior to boarding the plane, which provided some relief, but soon enough she was needing more drinks to assuage her dread. On one particular trip, while she was flying with a coworker, she felt embarrassed, particularly when her colleague mentioned to her that she appeared compromised by her dependence on alcohol.
After this incident, Bethany spoke with her family doctor, who prescribed antianxiety medication. This did indeed prove helpful and mitigated much of her anxiety on future flights. But as with alcohol, she came to rely on this medication, even taking it days in advance of a trip just so she could cope with thinking about the upcoming flight. She also began noticing that she would need higher and higher doses of medication just to get through flights. And to make matters worse, Bethany eventually tried to avoid plane trips altogether, canceling them at the last moment and making excuses to clients that she had become suddenly sick.
As you can see, Bethany’s fear of flying led her to more than one maladaptive habit. In addition to her use of alcohol and then medications to contain her fear, she eventually avoided flying completely. While on the surface avoiding flying may not seem to be problematic or maladaptive, it is indeed maladaptive, because it reflects a growing defensiveness or guardedness in being in the world. The maladaptive habit, such as a reliance on medication, may have some success in curbing the fear at first, but it’s not uncommon for it to lose its effective punch over time. At some point, total avoidance of a certain act or normal behavior becomes the only way to deal with the fear in an absolute, surefire way.
Once we begin to develop such habits to avoid fear, it begins to send shock waves into other aspects of our lives. This is what makes maladaptive habits so stealthy and far-reaching in their effects, as they can generalize or spread to other facets of an otherwise healthy life. Before long, Bethany was using her medication, which was originally prescribed for her just to be able to fly with ease, for all sorts of situations—from dealing with work stress to driving, riding on elevators, and relaxing before bedtime. This is also what makes maladaptive habits and chronic activation of the survival instinct so terribly problematic. They are like a flimsy veneer that is put up to serve as a shield against the fear—but it’s made of straw and not steel, and is merely a false form of protection. Yet the more we resist confronting the fear and instead put up these defenses—the more we feed these unhealthy habits and routines—the greater the fear and the higher the level of discomfort. The bad habits themselves are enough to keep the discomfort button pressed, resulting in a permanent reliance on short-term solutions that act as loose bandages rather than real cures.
It’s human nature to become fearful when we sense discomfort. But what tends to happen is that our fear can trigger our survival instinct, which then motivates us to take some form of action to feel safe again. That action can be a routine or habit that creates a faulty form of safety. But in reality it’s a form of resistance against confronting the fear. And the more we resist, the greater our fear and discomfort become.
The maladaptive habits seemingly conceal the discomfort and the underlying survival instinct. But it grows like a cancer as it smolders within. In a sense, the bad habit is nothing more than a temporary distraction for our conscious mind. And at the same time, our cerebral mind finds ways to justify, rationalize, and overlook these habits while they are busy pilfering from and compromising our foundation of safety.
From Innocuous to Insidious
The example of Bethany is typical of so many different types of maladaptive habits, which tend to start in a fairly innocuous way but result in a full-blown encounter with the survival instinct. Initially, those rising levels of agitance go undetected until they exceed our threshold for discomfort, at which point we experience fear. The maladaptive habit is merely our human attempt to manage the pressing fear we feel in the moment. But the fear is so frightening and overwhelming to the survival instinct that it compels us to accept and try short-term solutions. In most cases these solutions are externally driven. In other words, we are turning to medication, alcohol, or avoidant behaviors to deal with the fear. So rather than learning to rely on or develop our own internal resources to manage the fear, we come to depend on these external forms of creating safety. Internal resources for managing fear include an inner strength and confidence, a hardiness, or a resilience. (We’ll be exploring all the ways to build and harness these inner resources in part 2 of this book.)
As I’ve been describing, once the logical brain is at the mercy of our irrational, limbic brain, we’re no longer effective in handling a situation that conjures our survival instinct and leads to unhealthy behaviors. Our cerebral brain cannot control or balance out the limbic response. No sooner do we become reliant on external forms of safety than we compromise our confidence even further. Rather than instilling safety, our fears rob us of our internal resources that would provide a permanent solution.
Put another way, our inner forms of managing fear begin to atrophy, and further erode the longer we continue to rely on external forms of safety. This is an important point, for even if we can mask our fear, it continues to reside within us, strengthening each time we engage in external solutions. It might help to think of all this in terms of a muscle. Once the limbic brain overtakes the cerebral brain thanks to our growing fears, our overly reactive survival instinct, and our dependence on external solutions, we’re left with a weak, atrophied, and enfeebled cerebral brain that’s chronically overpowered by its illogical counterpart.
In an earlier chapter I talked about Kate, who fell into the habit of overeating, relying on food as a way of managing her agitance and subsequent discomfort. Her story offered the perfect example of maladaptive habits arising with respect to overeating. Kate had a long history of overeating, starting somewhat harmlessly in college as she shouldered the demands of university life and increasing levels of discomfort related to class assignments, finals, and dating. Up until college, she had been a normal weight, but once she moved away and lived in the dorms, she became subject to dorm food and succumbed to the “freshman twenty.” Within several years, food became her drug of choice to manage her agitance and discomfort. When she would feel uncomfortable, she found herself gravitating more and more toward food. Soon enough, a great discomfort emerged at the prospect of not being able to eat, and she found herself fearing getting hungry and not having any food available to quell her hunger.
For Kate, this was an incredibly powerful fear—a deep dread that something bad would happen if she couldn’t eat at exactly the time she needed it. And once her survival instinct became involved in her eating response, even small amounts of discomfort were enough to trigger her eating addiction. Eventually, she found herself eating in anticipation of being hungry and uncomfortable. In other words, most of Kate’s eating had nothing to do with being hungry—it was now a way to fend off the survival instinct. What makes this particularly challenging is that eating is how we are wired to survive. So when the survival instinct is triggered, we are drawn to food to ensure our survival. As long as Kate related the sensation of hunger to survival, she would be driven to eat. The act of eating may not seem like a bad or maladaptive habit, but in Kate’s case it certainly was; clearly, using food in this manner was a short-term solution with a long-term destructive result: morbid obesity.
Kate gained control over her overeating by learning to detach the sensation and perception of hunger from the survival instinct. This opened the door for her to establish a more healthy relationship with food and see it for what it really is—fuel to live rather than a desperate attempt or a maladaptive habit to cope with an exaggerated or overly sensitized fear of discomfort.
Another example of how maladaptive habits can form from a relatively harmless experience is to consider the area of sleep once more. Or, more specifically, the task of falling asleep. More than fifty million prescriptions are filled annually for sleep medications. Clearly, the inability to fall sleep (and stay asleep) has become a large problem for millions of people. A small subset of these people have struggled with sleep their whole lives, but the vast majority of pill poppers today who struggle with insomnia developed this problem in their adulthood.
Will is a good example of this situation. He was a physician who had become accustomed to working long hours and getting home late. He frequently found himself doing computer work and returning e-mails right up to his late bedtime. As a result of this grueling schedule, habitual states of agitance pretty much came to define his workdays. While his work demands exacerbated his agitance, he felt perpetually activated, frustrated, and unable to complete his workload. He was, in a word, overwhelmed. Not surprisingly, Will would try to go to bed while in this state of mind, but be unable to switch his brain over to a relaxed, sleepy mode. Over time, it began to take hours for him to fall sleep, and the vicious cycle would commence: He’d go to bed late, fall asleep late, and wake up tired and fatigued, starting his day in an irritated state that further aggravated his agitance level all day long.
It wasn’t long before Will’s agitance levels became more and more piqued, leading to a growing discomfort and a concomitant fear that would greet him as he popped into bed each night. Eventually, he experienced the same domino effect we saw in Bethany—the chain of events that turned a relatively innocuous experience into an insidious habit. He began to fear the process of going to sleep, consumed by racing thoughts of not only his workload but also the torture of trying to fall asleep. This fear was the beginning of the survival instinct kicking in and being pressed into action. At first, Will turned to watching TV as a way to relax, and to distract himself from the going-to-bed thoughts, and even avoid the inevitable act of having to get into bed. But this in itself began to take its toll, as Will needed to keep the TV turned on for longer and longer periods so he could effectively downshift enough to go to sleep. And even though he would eventually fall sleep, he still would end up sacrificing quite a few hours and suffer exhaustion the next day. Just because he fell asleep didn’t negate the fact he wasn’t truly relaxed. In other words, the sleepy feeling overtook his feelings of discomfort enough to put him to bed but not enough to keep that discomfort from coming back the next day.
Will’s futile means of coping—using the TV—and avoiding the process of going to bed was the genesis of his maladaptive habit. And like so many maladaptive habits, this one is generally ineffective in the long run. So it wasn’t long before Will turned to sleep medications, which worked initially but ultimately pushed him down the slippery slope of needing heavier doses. In due course he found himself taking them on a regular basis, whether he truly needed them or not. The mere fear of insomnia, and the fear of not being able to perform the next day at work due to fatigue, was enough to keep his prescription filled and utilized. Because of this maladaptive habit, Will ultimately lost all faith in his own ability to fall sleep naturally. It was at this point that the limbic brain had fully taken control.
Before we look at one more example, let’s review the sequence of events that I’ve outlined, starting with the initial agitating factor. Over time, this provides the fuel for discomfort and for establishing a maladaptive habit in hopes of extinguishing the fear. But, unfortunately, as we’ll continue to see throughout this book, maladaptive habits have a way of compounding the problem and feeding a vicious cycle. The fear is never obliterated. The discomfort is never managed. And the original agitance still provides a sneaky source of endless fuel to the proverbial fire.
Lastly, let’s consider Melissa, who suffers from irritable bowel. Melissa is someone whose agitance rose to a level at which it had an effect on her digestion. Specifically, her agitance interfered with and impaired her parasympathetic nervous system, which needs to operate well in order to digest food properly. The parasympathetic system is the body’s counterbalance to the sympathetic system; while the sympathetic system is responsible for stimulating activities associated with the flight-or-fight response (i.e., ramping up the body’s stress response), the parasympathetic nervous system controls activities when the body is at rest, including salivation, digestion, and defecation. The two systems aren’t so much antagonistic as they are complementary—the sympathetic system is all about quick responses whereas the parasympathetic system commands actions that don’t require such immediate reactions. In Melissa’s case, over time her eating and digestion became associated with a sympathetic response instead of a parasympathetic response. It wasn’t long before this disruption in her parasympathetic system led to intestinal cramping, bloating, and frequent trips to the bathroom even when she hadn’t eaten. Eventually Melissa found herself feeling more and more discomfort with lower and lower levels of agitance. Additionally, even low-level stressful moments such as rushing to an appointment, being caught in traffic, or encountering an unexpected frustration would trigger her intestinal discomfort. Soon enough, Melissa came to fear her GI disturbances, especially worrying that they’d arise during inopportune times, such as while driving, flying, in meetings, or in other public places. As expected, her survival instinct awakened to this rising discomfort. When she felt there was no available bathroom or that she’d begin to feel stomach pain when there was “no way out,” Melissa’s survival instinct would foment a massive panic reaction, fanning the flames of her stomach pain and symptoms of IBS. This cycle of fear and symptoms would only grow bigger and more ferocious, creating the foundation for maladaptive habits to form. For Melissa, this meant avoiding places that lacked readily accessible bathrooms, taking routes to work where there were bathrooms along the way, refusing to schedule meetings in the morning, and shunning certain foods or stressful situations.
While all of these examples showcase different problems and very distinct consequences to each individual, they all share one common and powerful feature: a pathway from an initial, seemingly harmless state of agitance to the establishment of a bad habit sprung from a well-defined interplay of discomfort, fear, survivalist reactions, and physical symptoms. Each of these people may have had wildly different agitance to start, but for all of them it ultimately culminated in maxing out their individual tolerance for discomfort, setting in motion a cascade of events.
The development of bad habits as I have described can occur in very blatant ways. But at other times they can arise much more subtly, through a very powerful but stealthy form of conditioning. In the following chapter I will give an overview of how conditioning can contribute to the cementing and shaping of our habits, allowing them to take an increasingly larger role in our lives.