Conditioning and the Genesis of Habits
Please and Thank You
Most of us are unaware of how conditioned our behavior, thoughts, and feelings are. We are creatures of habit, whether it’s what we eat for breakfast each day, the need to have a pastry and newspaper with our coffee, driving the same route to work, or even waking up at the same time in the middle of the night. We take all this for granted, or at least we don’t stop to think about how ingrained these behaviors are, many of which contribute to our health and wellness. But we should consider how this very same conditioning affects so many other aspects of our lives, such as when we catch a cold, gain weight, or develop a headache. Some of these we can live with and others are not only invasive but can be seriously detrimental to our well-being.
It should come as no surprise that over time, our maladaptive habits become less and less effective. They can feel like they are warding off the awakening of the survival instinct, but they are incredibly deceptive. We may think we are controlling the threat, but in reality we are giving up more and more ground to it as it spreads like wildfire within us, usurping the control and resources we have left. In more extreme cases, we are fleeced of our inner resources, and catapulted into a state of feeling out of control. We are left face-to-face with the survival instinct, with little at our disposal to manage it. It is at this point we have hit bottom and have fallen into a state of what I call Conditioned Powerlessness. We become virtually immobilized by the survival instinct, which can become the genesis of major mental and physical illness.
First, let’s get this definition straight. By “conditioning,” I’m referring to the act of becoming trained or accustomed to something such that it’s automatic or effortless. In a purely physical sense, for instance, we can condition our bodies to lift twenty-pound weights easily or run a mile in under ten minutes. But conditioning goes much further than that. Much in the way we can condition the body physically, we can also condition ourselves to think, behave, or feel a certain way. We can condition our bodies down to the cellular level, where we can have an impact on how our bodies respond to stress or even handle a germy invader. And it’s these types of conditioning that we are concerned with. As this chapter is about to reveal, conditioning strongly influences the types of habits we form as a result of agitance and discomfort. When we fall prey to our survival instinct, we can develop habits to cope with that uncomfortable feeling of having the inner survivalist on alert. In this cascade of events, the body’s natural conditioning processes then shape those habits and dictate how influential and powerful they become in our lives—for better or worse.
Although there may be times when we are mindful of our conditioning, in most cases it generally escapes our awareness. For example, many of us have been well trained to say “thank you” after someone does us a favor or “excuse me” if we need someone to get out of our way. Over time, and with experience, we become conditioned to operate a car without needing to think through every step. For another example, consider what happens when you see another person yawning. You might find yourself yawning in response and even feel sleepy. In this case, a mere visual cue has the ability to elicit a physical reaction within us. In all of these commonplace examples, we have no conscious awareness of our thoughts the moment we say “pardon me,” press the brake pedal, or yawn.
Many people mistakenly assume that awareness precedes most thoughts that govern behavior. But it’s actually quite the reverse—most of our reactions to the world are automatic reflexes. Perhaps the most striking and ultimately significant form of conditioning relates to our health, which is dramatically affected by the profound conditioning that typically occurs when we are unaware of it. I’ll be getting to the details of this phenomenon shortly. For now, let’s turn our attention to the broader concept of conditioning.
Types of Conditioning
Technically speaking, conditioning occurs when there is a pairing of two different things that have no relationship per se, but by virtue of their pairing come to have a relationship and meaning. Let’s consider a classic example: learning not to touch a hot stove. Before you experienced the burn of touching a hot stove or oven, you didn’t know about the relationship between a hot stove and a bad burn. But in one trial of learning, you no doubt learned this relationship rather quickly (and painfully!). In the future you knew to keep your hands away from all things that are hot. The moment we first burn ourselves, we become conditioned to associate the sensation of pain with a hot stove. We also learn this in the realm of food. If we find that spicy food such as curry or jalapenos makes us sick, from that point on we avoid dishes with those ingredients.
There are actually two types of conditioning. One you probably heard about in high school biology class when your teacher talked about Pavlov’s dogs. Ivan Pavlov, a Russian physiologist, was the first to experiment with and document conditioning, more than a century ago. His work has led to a rich body of research attesting to the power of conditioning and its scientific validity. In the late nineteenth century, Pavlov noticed that before he gave his dogs red meat, they began to salivate. Probing deeper into this “psychic secretion,” as he called it, he then began to ring a bell prior to bringing out the red meat. Soon the mere ringing of the bell triggered the dogs’ salivation. This salivation in response to the bell was a passive reflex, or an autonomic response by the dogs’ bodies; today we call this the conditioned response or conditional reflex. Pavlov would spend the majority of his life committed to the study of physiology and neurology, especially as these areas pertained to the digestive system.
The second type of conditioning, called operant or instrumental conditioning, was made famous by Burrhus Frederic (B. F.) Skinner in the twentieth century. This type of conditioning is related to learning a certain behavior by creating an association to affect that behavior. The best way to understand this is to consider a common scenario: If you’re trying to get a child to make her bed more often, you reward her every time she does it, such as by giving her money or points toward a toy she wants. Reinforcing the behavior with a reward every time the child makes the bed typically translates to her making her bed more frequently. She is becoming instrumentally conditioned to make the bed routinely.
Although Pavlovian and Skinnerian conditioning reflect the chief types of conditioning, from these we get numerous subtypes that can influence us in profound ways, and that may seem more relevant to our everyday lives. Let’s take a quick tour.
Pairing is the first subtype of conditioning that can influence maladaptive habits. Pairing occurs when two unrelated activities, experiences, situations, or internal events form a causal relationship. Let me give you a personal example. My first job out of graduate school was running an alcohol treatment program for the Veterans Administration in Los Angeles. On a daily basis, I would hear alcoholic patients lament that a drink would help them deal with their stress and frustrations in life. Then one day when I was driving home through the thick and unrelenting Southern California traffic (all commuters know how uncomfortable this can feel), a thought crept into my mind that went like this: “Man, I can’t wait to get home and grab a beer out of the refrigerator.” The absurdity of this thought was that I don’t even like beer and never have it in my kitchen. Plus, I didn’t come from an alcoholic home, so I didn’t grow up with these types of messages. But after hearing statements like this over and over, the compulsion and the idea that the way to manage my discomfort was to reach for alcohol had now sunk in and had become part of me. If I hadn’t been someone who was tuned in to mind traps, I might have looked for a liquor store on the way home, and this would have surely sealed within me the pairing of alcohol with the release of stress or fatigue.
Advertising companies are very successful at using this type of conditioning to shape our maladaptive habits. Commercials similarly show people drinking alcohol and engaging in fun activities. In your mind, you start to create a link between two otherwise separate events. The cigarette industry has been very clever in this regard, for the Marlboro Man embodies so many attributes people admire. The link that many of us have ingrained in our heads from all those advertisements is that if you smoke Marlboro cigarettes, then you’ll feel rugged, sexy, attractive, and in control. And for those individuals who are developing maladaptive habits, smoking can become a way of managing their discomfort and survival instinct. Even though smoking is a maladaptive means of coping, the cigarette industry has given it a positive spin in which smokers unconsciously feel resilient and in control.
In an earlier chapter I described how Andrea was attending a work function back east and suddenly felt fearful while in a hot and stuffy room. From that moment on, there was a relationship for her between hot and stuffy settings and feelings of fear. In actuality, though, her fear was a function of uncontrolled agitance building up and a subsequent growing discomfort, which culminated in a survivalist response coinciding with being in a hot and stuffy room. This firmly rooted her maladaptive habit of avoidance that revolved around the issue of heat, stuffiness, and lack of adequate air-conditioning—another classic case of pairing.
GENERALIZATION
The second subtype of conditioning is called generalization, and it’s very similar to pairing. In generalization, the habit begins to spread, or generalize, to other conditions or situations that had no previous relationship with it. The advertising companies may take a maladaptive habit such as overeating and then expand it to another maladaptive habit, such as the consumption of alcohol. Because maladaptive habits are built on fear, they are highly susceptible to conditioning, so they are an easy target for generalization. And since food and alcohol influence the pleasure center of the limbic system, the connection between them becomes even more cemented and dangerous. Again, the clinical case of Andrea also reflects this type of conditioning, as she began associating a hot and stuffy room with fearfulness and feelings of being trapped or suffocated. It wasn’t long before she developed extreme claustrophobia in crowded places, which gave her the feeling that she could not escape quickly enough if the suffocating feeling struck. Over time, she began to avoid congested places altogether because she had generalized her one-time experience in that hot and stuffy room to virtually all settings that had an inkling of similar characteristics.
Another example of generalization comes from my own life again, but from long ago. In 1977, as a second-year graduate student, I noticed that my hands and fingers were developing sores and cuts on them that wouldn’t heal quickly. Initially, I attributed the condition to playing tennis five times a week, as well as playing guitar in clubs several nights a week to pay my rent and food bills. But then I noticed that my fingers were aggravated just by washing my hands with soap and water. My skin condition continued to deteriorate, and it wasn’t long before my fingerprints were barely detectable. (I knew this because I was fingerprinted at the DMV and the clerk kept asking me to push harder on the pad because there were only traces of fingerprints left on my hands.) Not only did this condition begin to hamper my tennis and music, but it was like I was carrying a sign over my head letting others know that I was defective. It gave me a great appreciation for others who suffer from visible conditions.
Naturally, I sought out dermatologists in my university’s medical school, and I learned that I had eczema, and that it had many causes. The only cure was to continue with the customary steroid salves, which were temporary fixes. Later, I started to wonder if an allergy could be to blame, because I noticed that when I visited a girlfriend in another city, miraculously my skin would get better. Then when I was reading a textbook on psychopathology I came across an article about eczema being psychosomatic. Was I doing this to myself? As a graduate student studying to be an expert in this area, I thought I was above this type of thing, but clearly I wasn’t. A condition is called psychosomatic when there is a real physical problem that is influenced by nonphysical elements, such as emotions or stress. Now things began to make sense: I felt better when I was away because it was associated with pleasure and fun; on the other hand, home was associated with work and school.
Conditions such as eczema and psoriasis can arise due to a genetic predisposition. But they can also be triggered by certain physical situations, such as, in my case, too much wear and tear on my skin, or in other cases, chemicals that come in contact with the skin. It is not, however, uncommon for these conditions to be precipitated initially by periods of great stress or emotion.
Initially, the affliction is triggered by the same situation—a specific allergy, a particular stressor, etc. But after a while, generalization can begin to set in, whereby other triggers that are not part of the initial cause of the skin’s reactions begin to set it off. So in my case, it began with wearing down my hands with tennis and guitar playing. Eventually, stress became capable of causing the symptoms, and eventually nonstressful situations, such as waiting to catch the bus or the prospect of asking a girl out for a date, could cause them as well.
SUBLIMINAL CONDITIONING
The third subtype, subliminal conditioning, is one of the more interesting, but perhaps most scary, means of influencing maladaptive habits. In subliminal conditioning, we can be influenced without our conscious awareness. In other words, we can find ourselves acting in certain ways without knowing why we are responding in this manner.
Subliminal refers to a stimulus that occurs outside our conscious awareness. It does not mean that we don’t actually hear or see the stimulus. Rather, it implies that although it may be discernible, we just overlook it. There are different types of subliminal conditioning, the most common of which are visual and auditory forms. Auditory subliminal conditioning and visual subliminal conditioning can have a profound effect on the brain and behavior.
One of my first experiences of visual subliminal conditioning was in high school, when I learned that if I nodded my head consistently while my teacher was talking (and while fellow students sat passively), I could condition her to direct her attention primarily to me.
Later, as a grad student, I used a form of tactile subliminal conditioning. At the time, I was dating a girl who liked to drive too fast for my comfort level. My verbal pleas to her to drive slower only led to endless arguments. But I learned that if I massaged her neck when she drove too quickly, she’d lighten up on the accelerator. I ultimately found that this was a much better way to encourage safer driving and avoid arguments.
Much later in my life, I had to use subliminal conditioning again to shape my kids’ sleeping behavior. As many parents know, it can be quite a challenge to get kids ready for sleep and to accept bedtime. For many parents, the long, drawn-out process is rife with unnecessary conflict and stress—certainly the last thing we want to associate with sleep. So what I did to solve this problem was every time I saw my kids starting to get sleepy, for example, falling asleep in the car, I would begin to sing a certain song. Later, whenever I wanted my kids to begin shifting to a slower rhythm that would make it easier for them to sleep, I would sing the song. Sometimes I would hum the song while they were doing other things, helping them slow down even when they were involved in something more active. Once the subliminal conditioning was established, I would sing this song at bedtime to help them let go and give in to the sleepy feeling. For years my kids would ask me to sing the song so they could fall sleep more easily.
One of the first studies to analyze subliminal conditioning in a scientific setting was conducted by Duke University’s Grainne M. Fitzsimons, Tanya L. Chartrand, and Gavan J. Fitzsimons in 2008. These researchers performed a most interesting experiment in which they subliminally showed the Apple logo to a group of people and the IBM logo to another group. When both groups were then asked to complete a standard laboratory task, those who had seen the Apple logo were more creative than those who took in the IBM logo. Did exposure to the Apple logo, which implies the company’s “think different” brand and image, cause this difference? That’s what these researchers concluded. They also played with the Disney Channel logo versus the E! Channel logo, finding that people who were exposed to the iconic symbol of Mickey Mouse were the more honest and sincere of the two groups. In 2010, University of Toronto researchers Chen-Bo Zhong and Nina Mazar took this kind of experiment further when they showed that exposure to products branded as “green” led people to act more altruistically than those who just viewed regular products. (However, they also found that people act less charitable and are more likely to cheat and steal after purchasing green products than after buying conventional ones! A possible explanation for this is that buying green products makes people feel like they’ve done enough good and can now act less moral.)
Perhaps some of the most striking examples of how subliminal stimulation influences health is in the area of eating. A number of interesting studies published in the past few years have uncovered fascinating relationships between fast food symbols and decision making. One set of studies, performed by Chen-Bo Zhong and Sanford E. DeVoe, involved the subliminal flashing of six well-known fast food logos to a group of people. Another group, which served as the control, was shown neutral images. The result? Our behaviors can indeed change when we’re exposed to symbols of fast food, particularly behaviors involving speed, efficiency, and impulsivity. Zhong and DeVoe discovered that the subliminal logo group showed a strong preference for time-saving products, as they rated items such as two-in-one shampoo, three-in-one skin care solution, and high-efficiency detergent more positively than the control group. They also showed a preference for these quick-and-easy products over their original, “regular” versions. Then the researchers took this experiment further, delving into the topic of money. They asked both groups to choose between a small amount of money now or a larger amount of money in a week—a classic way to test the need for instant gratification. As you might have guessed by now, the subliminal fast food logo subjects were more likely to prefer the smaller payment now rather than wait for the larger payoff. Interestingly enough, the researchers also determined that the subliminal fast food logo group could read much faster on average. Zhong and DeVoe’s paper, published in Psychological Science, is just one example among many studies that highlight the various ways in which everyday encounters with different brands and products can subtly and somewhat unconsciously influence our behavior.
Clearly, in addition to the emergence of fast food leading to a great need for instant gratification, it’s also caused people to change certain aspects of their behavior that make them more impulsive. This makes sense when you think about it. Unlike traditional dining, fast food allows us to obtain our meals relatively quickly. The entire experience is one of speed, so anything associated with speed, such as impulsiveness and impatience, becomes part of the picture. The effect of this is that the mere symbols of fast food—whether it’s the golden arches of McDonald’s or the image of Colonel Sanders of KFC—can result in impatient, impulsive behavior, which can then trigger behaviors like overeating. This partly explains why these researchers also noted a strong relationship between fast food symbols and people’s ability to feel happiness. Not only did the subjects choose short-term goals over long-term goals, but they also found it more difficult to experience joy. Once food becomes associated with speed, we can become conditioned to eat faster and consume more than we really need.
Research has also demonstrated that overeating can be strongly influenced by subliminal messages of fear of abandonment; if you have unresolved issues from abandonment or are highly sensitive to rejection (and thus fear of abandonment), you could use food to create the comfort you crave to stave off those fears. In studies in which this fear can be controlled, the overeating can also be brought under control. Other research has revealed how background music influences food and alcohol consumption as well: Music makes us eat quickly, and fast music causes fast drinking. What’s more, research has shown how thirst-related words or smiling faces can subliminally increase viewers’ thirst and subsequently how much they drink (just think of the latest soda pop commercial).
Subliminal conditioning isn’t just about the outside world influencing us; we are also constantly influencing how other people feel and react. As parents, for instance, we can predispose children with our messages and conditioning to get sick, stay sick, or develop fearful reactions to the world. One of the most notable examples of this is how parents who suffer from sleeping problems may inadvertently condition their children to have fears and anxiety about sleep. In another example, it’s been shown that what we see in other people’s behavior involving food, such as what they choose to eat and how much they consume, can have profound subliminal effects on our own choices.
All of this research goes to show just how influential subliminal messaging can be on our behaviors—despite the notion of free will. No doubt this form of conditioning can strongly influence the magnitude and crystallization of our maladaptive habits. As we just saw, this is particularly true with respect to overeating and excessive drinking. These two behaviors are powerfully influenced by the limbic brain’s pleasure center. And we can see how, as long as this subliminal conditioning can directly act on the limbic brain, it could influence our fear reactions and levels of discomfort, ultimately causing us to make choices that are harmful as these maladaptive habits form.
STATE-DEPENDENT LEARNING
The fourth subtype of conditioning is called state-dependent learning, which can be best understood in this way: The state in which we learn something is the state in which we are best able to recall it. This type of conditioning can often fuel habits that are sustained by circumstances we think are out of our control. Experiencing “white coat phenomenon” is a classic example of this kind of conditioning. This isn’t really a phenomenon at all—it’s a bona fide syndrome in which patients show elevated blood pressure due to their anxiety about being in a doctor’s office, where there’s a chance the doctor will find something wrong with them. Their anxiety crystallizes as high blood pressure, which then becomes associated with the doctor and this particular setting. People who experience this “phenomenon” have become conditioned to respond this way every time they enter their physician’s office.
Several years ago a professional football player was sent to me after finishing rehab for a back injury he received when he was struck by a defensive player while making an airborne catch. Long after his physical injury had healed, he was still experiencing pain each time he went out for a pass during a game, despite feeling no pain during practice and off the field. It was as if his body was anticipating being hit and getting injured again; his pain experience was now associated with playing football. Nothing was physically wrong with him, but his body learned—and remembered—the symptom even though there was no longer an underlying physical problem.
State-dependent learning primarily has been applied to basic learning. For example, in one study, those people who memorized words after an alcoholic drink could best recall the words several weeks later when they were given a drink again, versus those who were not served a drink.
I have found that state-dependent learning is a major player with respect to health and habits. Early in my career, I worked with a business executive who smoked exclusively in hotel rooms while traveling on business. Because his wife disapproved of his smoking, he had convinced her that he’d quit. But when he was away from home, he acted out his hidden desire to smoke, like a child getting away with something when his parents were gone. Over time, hotel rooms independently became associated with smoking so that the moment he stepped into a hotel room on a business trip, he’d light up—a clear case of state-dependent conditioning. It became evident from meetings with him that his smoking reflected an old rebelliousness forged in his youth, related to his Mennonite upbringing. Now both hotel rooms and his rebelliousness became triggers for smoking. I didn’t have time to resolve his repressed anger and rebelliousness and his unhealthy state-dependent learning before he was set to go on another business trip, and he asked me if I could find a short-term solution for this behavior in the meantime. With hypnosis, I decided to supplant his desire to smoke in a hotel room by conditioning the hotel room and his rebelliousness to a different outcome. I suggested to him that when he was struck with the desire to rebel by smoking, he would feel distracted by a sudden urge to stuff a hotel towel in his suitcase. And it worked. The next time I saw him, he reported that he didn’t smoke while away, but that he arrived home with a suitcase filled with hotel towels. He stated to me, “I think you may have something to do with this!” After removing this suggestion, I was able to finish working with him to recondition his maladaptive habit and change his harmful state-dependent learning.
State-dependent learning can influence health in other ways, too. One particular example that I have seen relates to those who have experienced seasonal affective disorder, sometimes called SAD. These individuals experience depression during the fall and winter months, when there is less daylight and exposure to the sun. Part of the physiological explanation for this is the light’s influence on neurotransmitters in the brain—the lack of light during the fall and winter causes changes in the brain’s chemistry to bring on feelings of depression. What makes this condition most interesting, however, is that when these individuals move to southern states where sunlight is plentiful throughout the year, many of them still experience this SAD response. This is a good demonstration of how certain times of the year have now become associated with precipitating an emotional response even when there is no physical basis for it.
It’s well documented that acute episodes of stress can lead to illness. But if stress leads to illness, then you would expect that people would always become sick during the stressful period. Yet, many people become sick or develop physical symptoms, which can include panic attacks, after the stressful period is over (when they least expect it)—at a point when they are actually beginning to relax. This explains why some people get sick on vacation or following events that are stressful, or develop serious, sometimes fatal illnesses soon after retiring. Ironically, the biochemistry of de-stressing can play a role in becoming ill. Part of my life’s work has been the investigation of what I call the Let Down Effect, which was chronicled in 2001 in my first book, When Relaxation Is Hazardous to Your Health, and proposes the idea that, as the book’s title suggests, sudden relaxation can actually be unhealthy at times. I coined the term the Let Down Effect to describe the condition that occurs when a person develops an illness or symptoms following stressful events, such as a conflict, a time-pressured work project, or school exams. It can even occur after positive events, such as a wedding or a sports event, and frequently happens during or after weekends, holidays, vacations, or retirement. It’s important to note that these illnesses are not imagined but are actually very real.
There is one particular type of let down, in which people who don’t manage their agitance, discomfort, and stress levels effectively eventually develop the maladaptive habit of becoming sick after certain extended periods of agitance and discomfort. And with each let down in this situation, shorter periods and lower amounts of agitance, discomfort, and stress become capable of creating a Let Down Effect. After a period of time in which this pattern has occurred, situations of even moderate agitance, discomfort, or stress become the state-dependent condition to elicit the Let Down Effect. Further, eventually certain times of the year or events also become encoded within the state-dependent learning. One of the most common that I’ve seen is what I call the “postholiday blues” or “postholiday illnesses.” These individuals become habituated to getting sick after Christmas or New Year’s.
So we can see that state-dependent learning can affect us all the way down to our biochemistry and cell response. Put simply, our immune system can learn to “let us down” during certain circumstances because in the past those situations have been associated with a compromised immune response. And once we become consciously aware of our body developing this kind of symptom (“I always get sick while on vacation!”), the brain develops a neural network to precipitate the sickness as well. This means that our thoughts become capable of influencing illnesses or symptoms by triggering the series of biochemical events that lead to illness.
The Let Down Effect has far-reaching implications. It can influence a medley of health challenges, including the common cold, influenza (seasonal and H1N1), depression and anxiety, headaches, stomach pain, panic attacks, binge eating, skin outbreaks, allergic reactions, and exhaustion.
Another example of state-dependent learning is something I have seen in migraine patients, for whom certain conditions, such as work, weekends, certain smells, air-conditioning, or family dynamics, become associated with getting migraines. Over time, just the anticipation of these situations can precipitate a migraine. I’ve also watched this state-dependent learning take hold of people who condition themselves to wake up in the morning with physical symptoms, such as a stomachache, jaw pain, and headaches. For these people, state-dependent learning has created an association between waking up in the morning and annoying and disabling symptoms.
I’ll give one more example of state-dependent learning, this one from my experience at the Veterans Administration’s alcohol treatment program during my first job. Many of the alcoholics I treated were from skid row or had otherwise fallen through the different layers of society to find themselves stripped of virtually everything. A large subset of these veterans would sustain a level of sobriety for three months, only to have a desperate need to go on a drinking spree, before getting sober again. As I began to identify this three-month pattern of sobriety followed by bingeing, I wondered if it was a form of state-dependent learning whereby three months of sobriety became associated with having a binge. To test out my theory, I decided to use hypnosis on these individuals just prior to their reaching a three-month period of sobriety, and under hypnosis suggest to them that they were going through a binge. I would bring them through all the agonizing parts of the binge, the physical and emotional discomfort, and then to the eventual desire to become sober again. This ultimately allowed these veterans to circumvent having a binge just so they could return to sobriety. The three-month period became reconditioned with sobriety rather than with another binge.
ASSOCIATION
Association is the final form of conditioning. This type of conditioning, which is particularly influenced by film and TV, occurs when a certain emotional or physical state becomes associated with a course of action. One of the best examples of this can be found in television programs or movies in which a conflict between two or more people is portrayed and one person is obviously agitated or upset. The camera then shows that this individual has to leave the room or reach for a glass of alcohol or light up a cigarette. Hence, the message in the film or TV show is that it’s unsafe to feel this type of agitation or conflict, and the only way to manage it is to drink alcohol, light up a cigarette, or flee the situation. It’s no surprise that we as a culture come to fear discomfort, let alone situations in which the survival instinct becomes triggered.
Conditioning at the Cellular Level: The Inflammatory Link
The conditioning of maladaptive habits isn’t just relegated to thoughts, behaviors, and symptoms. It can actually occur at a more primary level—at the cellular and biochemical level. This may be the most insidious form of conditioning of all, because most of it may go unnoticed for years, and won’t surface until it erupts and morphs into something substantial or catastrophic.
Most types of cellular conditioning serve a valuable purpose; specific cells of the body are conditioned and trained to attack and neutralize bacteria and pathogens that the body considers a threat. These cells are called antibodies, which are programmed to multiply and then attack very specific threats. Antibodies are very clever in that they are specifically designed to target a very small invader, such as a single cell or one bacterium. In other words, they can condition themselves to deal with a particular antagonist invading the body, and in doing so, eradicate the threat. It’s adaptation in action. In most cases, this process is a lifesaver and survivalism at its best. But over time, these conditioned cells can become a little too zealous in their goals, and when there is no actual threat and no battle to fight, they create one—instead of attacking pesky invaders, they begin attacking organs of the body. This is the cause of autoimmune disorders, such as type 1 diabetes, hyperthyroidism, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, and ulcerative colitis. These autoimmune soldiers become what is known as “inflammatory.” There are far more soldiers than what is truly needed in one place, and they create an inflammatory condition, just as if you had too many drunken sports fanatics congregated in one place who are all rooting for their own team to win. It’s tumultuous and potentially flammable.
The concept of inflammation, which is becoming a household word for many Americans, currently dominates the field of aging and disease. When we think of inflammation, we may picture a swollen, sprained ankle or an itchy mosquito bite that is visibly inflamed and irritated from scratching. Yet inflammation is actually a ubiquitous process within the body. It’s a mechanism the body depends on to facilitate healing.
In a nutshell, inflammation is a means of shoring up the body’s defenses against attack—whether it’s an infection, a cut finger, or a sore throat. The body creates inflammation to boost its cells and ward off illness or infection. So the intentions of inflammation are salubrious. But as we age or are confronted with chronic stress and the resulting agitance and discomfort, the amount of inflammation produced in the body exceeds our actual demands. In a sense, our body loses its natural checks and balances, and as a result, we find that the inflammatory response, like our antibodies, begins to run amok without any true enemy to target. Now, rather than finding invading viruses or physical assaults, it tenaciously begins to weaken the very cells and tissues it was meant to protect. This internal civil war wears down our natural defenses, predisposing us to disease and accelerating the aging process. The end result of chronic inflammation is well documented, and is associated with nearly every major illness, from heart disease and some forms of cancer to Alzheimer’s, arthritis, autoimmune disorders, chronic pain, and allergies.
One of the earliest studies demonstrating how the inflammatory process can be conditioned was published in the journal Science in 1982, when scientists discovered that they could condition the inflammatory response in rats in such a way as to automatically change their immune system. Rats were first given a medication that suppressed their immune system’s inflammatory response, paired with sugar-flavored water. The rats kept drinking the sugary water, which continued to suppress their immune system and inflammatory response. Eventually, the scientists removed the actual suppressor but allowed the rats to continue drinking sweet water. What happened? The rats still showed a dampened immune system and reduced inflammatory response. Bear in mind that this change occurred at the cellular level without requiring some form of complex reasoning like that found in our human cerebral cortex. Since that study, others have emerged to suggest a remarkable conclusion: If our cells—the very building blocks of our body—can be trained outside of the reach of our cerebral awareness, then virtually any process in the body can be trained to operate a certain way.
Prior to beginning a study on stress and inflammation years ago, I wanted to see if I could influence the inflammation in my body through my own mind-body techniques. With the help of a local biomedical laboratory, I took a series of blood tests under different conditions—during a typical workday, following exercise, prior to eating a meal, and so on—and charted my varying levels of cytokines. Briefly, cytokines are proteins that are the antecedent of the inflammatory response. They can be an excellent barometer of the negative effects stress has on the body. Cytokines act as chemical messengers, telling other cells to activate, grow, or even die. Although they regulate the immune system responses and can drive the inflammatory process for positive outcomes, they can also perpetuate a chronic inflammatory process that goes unchecked. Put simply, high levels of inflammatory cytokines when you’re not sick or enduring life-threatening stress reflect an unhealthy level of chronic inflammation, which is correlated with a number of conditions and diseases.
My cytokine numbers were generally squeaky clean, with the exception of one morning after a night of sleep interrupted by my barking dog, howling coyotes, and my young son, who was sick and needing attention. At breakfast, I was exhausted and irritable, and dreading the rigors of my upcoming day, which included two hours of teaching, eight hours of patients, and a two-hour presentation to give that night. To say I was cranky before the day even began and that my agitance levels were up is an understatement. And the effects of this on my body were clearly evident in the blood I drew that morning: My cytokine levels had shot well outside the “normal” range, indicating that my body was besieged by inflammation that I couldn’t necessarily feel but that was festering deep within. My immune system had been needlessly put on alert, as if geared for battle (which you could argue I was, given my busy agenda for the day).
My personal experiment demonstrates how seemingly normal, everyday events can lead to insidious inflammatory changes in the body. When days like the one I had are few and far between, then it’s hardly consequential—no more than eating a bacon cheeseburger once in a while is harmful to our waistlines. But if we become accustomed to a pattern of habits that mismanage our survival instinct, then what we find is that we are programming our bodies to sustain massively destructive levels of inflammation. And this is arguably one of the most detrimental ramifications of a survival instinct run amok, as it ultimately changes how fast we age.
Rethink, Retrain
Clearly, our conditioning strongly predisposes us to different moods, various health conditions, certain behaviors, and much more. I noticed that when I turned fifty, all of a sudden I became much more prone to colds and flu, finding myself sick multiple times during the year. When I stopped to think about why this was happening, I realized that I believed such an age represented a turning point in my life. Somewhere in my mind I thought that turning fifty would entail more illness, more degenerative conditions as I continued to age. And lo and behold, that toxic belief made me much more vulnerable to illness—illness that I would typically be able to resist. This may sound absurd on some level, for certain illnesses are caused by germs and uncontrollable pathogens. But take a moment just to think about friends and family members in your own life who, once they were diagnosed with an illness, seemed to surrender to it quickly, dying much sooner than they would have if they had not known they were sick. It’s as if they became resigned to the ultimate totality—and fatality—of their diagnosis, ultimately giving up the fight. Anyone who has ever witnessed a loved one dying knows the power of thoughts in those final days and hours. Indeed, the power of conditioning is so great that we cannot overlook it, for it can factor into how fast we age and when we die.
In this chapter I have reviewed how different forms of conditioning have a strong impact on our maladaptive habits. Although they may not be the cause of a habit, they certainly do affect its magnitude and shape. Perhaps the most frightening part of how this conditioning influences our habits is the fact that it can often happen unconsciously, and we have very little control over it. Even more disconcerting is that this effect can occur at the cellular and biochemical level, predisposing our present and our future to formidable disruption. And since these conditioned responses can develop unconsciously, it’s not a surprise that at times we feel out of control or unable to have any effect on our health and habits, much less our reactions to the world. Much of this conditioning, as I’ve discussed, operates at the limbic level.
Given the fact that conditioning lies at the heart of our habits, being able to recondition ourselves to react more favorably and healthfully to discomfort is essential. This will be a pivotal component in the retraining of your limbic brain.