This book began as a way of answering three questions that have nagged at me throughout my thirty-plus years of clinical practice:
Neurological discoveries in recent years have helped answer the first two questions, as we’ll see in the body of the book. But the third question goes beyond science to the very nature of what it means to be human.
We’re Animals, After All, But Much More
The brains of all animals readily form conditioned responses to better negotiate the world around them. A rabbit nibbling on grass automatically runs when shadows move on the ground, even if it never witnessed a hawk swoop down on a littermate. The shadows are associated with an impulse to run, not necessarily with danger, when the moving shadows in its life experience were from branches of trees swaying in the breeze. Most of us will turn on an electrical device—TV, radio, smartphone—when coming home to an empty house or apartment, but not necessarily because we’re lonely. Our brains have associated quiet in the home with an impulse to seek passive stimulation, lest we fall into stupor. We’re less likely to reach for the electrical device when we come home engrossed in thought. The brain tends to associate interest with depth of learning or experience, rather than distraction, and with proactive, not passive, stimulation.
The human brain forms conditioned responses not merely to environmental cues, such as moving shadows, brewing storms, and quiet houses. Our brains build conditioned responses to physiological and emotional states, our own as well as those of others. A slight drop in blood sugar causes many people to fantasize about candy or ice cream. Many folks grow sad when tired. Many more look for someone to blame when they feel distressed for any reason. Almost everyone reacts automatically to the physiological signs and emotional displays of others. It feels as if they bring us down or rev us up, attract or repulse us, without a word being said.
The rabbit is probably better off running when shadows move on the ground. But the world we live in is much more complex than a backyard of thick grass, shady trees, and, on very rare occasions, shadows from a soaring hawk. The world we live in is fraught with nuance and ambiguity.
The Great Limitation
The brain strings together a series of conditioned responses to forge habits, which are behaviors that run on autopilot—things we do without thinking. As we’ll see later in the book, much of what we do, we do by habit. More pointedly, habits rule under stress, when the mental resources required for intentional behavior are taxed. The extensive training for stressful jobs—from military service to air traffic control—is necessary to overcome the formidable limitations of conditioned responses and habits.
Habits limit growth and well-being because the two major regions of the human brain mature nearly a quarter century apart. Most of our conditioned emotional responses had been shaped into habits before the profound part of the brain—the upper prefrontal cortex—was fully online. We make the same mistakes again and again, even though we know better, because under stress the less sophisticated part of the brain overrides the ability to invoke most of what we’ve learned.
Many of the habits activated under stress violate our deeper values—for example, blaming, yelling, stonewalling, or devaluing loved ones. To escape the guilt, shame, and anxiety that are unavoidable in violating deeper values, we employ the prefrontal cortex, not to correct and regulate our toddler-like responses, but to justify them. Justifying behaviors that violate deeper values not only makes things worse, it greatly increases the likelihood of repeating the behavior. That’s why we distrust people when they’re defensive—they seem to be justifying violations of deeper values. Our experience tells us that justified behavior is likely to be repeated.
The great limitation of the human brain is its tendency under stress to engage complex social interactions—not to mention the complicated and nuanced emotional terrain of close relationships—with feelings and behaviors conditioned in the part of the brain dominated by “Mine” and “No.” It’s a tendency that we must rise above to reduce emotional pain and that we must soar above to achieve a life of meaning and purpose.
Soar Above
To soar above is to go beyond limits, to become greater, to become the most empowered and humane persons we can be. The ability to soar above the limitations of habits and conditioned responses is a large part of what it means to be human.
The goal of this book is to use habits to overcome the limitations of habits, that is, to forge habits of invoking the most profound part of the brain under stress. These new habits will transform us into the kind of persons, parents, and partners that, deep in our hearts, we most want to be.