When you start out training to become a psychologist, you take many courses focused on theories about behavior. One of the first lessons is that behavior that is reinforced will be strengthened and continued, while behavior that isn’t reinforced or that is negatively reinforced will be extinguished. In other words, it will be less and less likely to occur. What this means is that we repeat behaviors that yield the goodies. And we stop engaging in behaviors that either don’t give us rewards or that give us pain.
This simple yet elegant concept is what’s behind the process of adaptation, making the necessary adjustments in life based on our interaction with our environment. This ability to learn from life’s lessons and to continually learn and improve based on experience, can be referred to as adaptability. And we can say that the better we are at this process, the more resilient we are. Adaptation is the hallmark of resilience and optimal performance.
When you recognize the consequences of your behavior, and those consequences are negative, you expect to no longer exhibit that behavior. But Noooo. Despite our good intentions and the continual opportunities to learn from our mistakes and life lessons, we find ourselves making the same mistakes over and over again. This, in fact, might be one of the most frustrating experiences in life. Whether it’s the obvious issues of not getting enough sleep, exercise and other self-care behavior, or it’s keeping your guard up and staying tense when it’s safe to let go, you engage in all sorts of behaviors that do not serve your best interests and, in fact, cause harm.
In my work with thousands of clients and workshop participants, I consistently encounter people who, despite experiencing the negative consequences of excessive stress, continue to engage in behaviors that trigger the stress response. It is almost as if we “crave” stress even when it’s destroying us, as if it were a drug.
And in fact, it does trigger a drug—a natural drug response: adrenaline, to be exact. As strange as it may seem, we can actually become addicted to the release of our own naturally produced chemical. If, for example, you are a person who tends to push down your feelings, you will notice feeling somewhat depressed. I believe that much of depression is simply this pushing down of feelings. Similarly, we might get into a pattern of shallow breathing (reducing oxygen intake, and thus becoming less awake) as another way of not noticing feelings. The consequence of these behaviors, the feeling of depression, is sometimes countered by the need for an adrenaline rush. The release of adrenaline, giving us a sense of waking up, simply feels good. This is only the beginning of a long list of reasons we crave stress and thus have an automatic reluctance to manage it in any way. In addition to being dangerous, it also interferes with the process of adaptation and healthy learning.
Dr. Stephen Sideroff is an internationally recognized expert in resilience, optimal performance, addiction, neurofeedback and alternative approaches to stress and mental health. He is Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA’s School of Medicine, as well as the Director of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Ethics. www.drstephensideroff.com
