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brinazzle · 4 years ago

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We always have a choice. That’s not so clear-cut when the subject is triggers and our response to them. The terms trigger and response suggest an uninterrupted A-to-B sequence with no breathing room for hesitation, reflection, and choice. Is that true? Are we so easily triggered? How does a trigger actually work within us? Are there moving parts between the trigger and the behavior. If so, what are they? When I was getting my doctorate at UCLA, the classic sequencing template for analyzing problem behavior in children was known as ABC, for antecedent, behavior, and consequence. The antecedent is the event that prompts the behavior. The behavior creates a consequence. A common classroom example: a student is drawing pictures instead of working on the class assignment. The teacher asks the child to finish the task (the request is the antecedent). The child reacts by throwing a tantrum (behavior). The teacher responds by sending the student to the principal’s office (consequence). That’s the ABC sequence: teacher request to child’s tantrum to hello principal. Armed with this insight, after several repeat episodes the teacher concludes that the child’s behavior is a ploy to avoid class assignments. In his engaging book, The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg applied this ABC template to breaking and forming habits. Instead of antecedent, behavior, and consequence, he used the terms cue, routine, and reward to describe the three part sequence known as a habit loop. Smoking cigarettes is a habit loop consisting of stress (cue), nicotine stimulation (routine), leading to temporary psychic well-being (reward). People often gain weight when they try to quit smoking because they substitute food for nicotine as their routine. In doing so, they are obeying Duhigg’s Golden Rule of Habit Change—keep the cue and reward, change the routine—but they are doing it poorly. Doing thirty push-ups (or anything physically challenging) might be more effective than eating more. Duhigg provides a terse, vivid example of the cue-routine-reward loop in action—and how we can use it to break a bad habit. A graduate student named Mandy bites her nails, habitually and incessantly until they bleed. She wants to stop. A therapist elicits from Mandy that she brings her fingers to her mouth whenever she feels a little bit of tension in her fingers. The tension appears when she’s bored. That’s the cue: tension in her fingers brought on by boredom. Biting her nails is the routine that fights her boredom. The physical stimulation, especially the sense of completeness when she nibbles all ten nails down to the quick, is Mandy’s reward. She craves it, which makes it habitual. The therapist instructs Mandy to carry an index card and make a check mark on the card each time she feels the finger tension. A week later she returns to the therapist with twenty-eight check marks on the card, but she is now enlightened about the cues that send her fingers to her mouth. She’s ready to replace her routine. The therapist teaches her a “competing response”—in this case, putting her hands in her pocket or gripping a pencil, anything that prevents her fingers from going to her mouth. Eventually Mandy learns to rub her arms or rap her knuckles on a desk as a substitute for the physical gratification that nail biting provides. The cue and reward stay the same. The routine has changed. A month later, Mandy has stopped biting her nails completely. She’s replaced a harmful habit with a harmless one. I don’t take issue with the first and third segments of Duhigg’s habit loop, whatever terms we use—antecedent andconsequence, cue and reward, stimulus and response, cause and effect, trigger and outcome. I want to modify the middle part—the routine. The habit loop makes it sound as if all we need is an awareness of our cues so we can automatically respond with an appropriate behavior. That’s fine with habits. But when we’re changing interpersonal behavior, we’re adding a layer of complexity in the form of other people. Our triggered response can’t always be automatic and unthinking and habitual—because as caring human beings we have to consider how people will respond to our actions. The fingernail doesn’t care if we bite it or leave it alone. The glass of wine doesn’t care if we drink it or spurn it. The cigarette is indifferent to our craving for it. But the people in our lives care enormously whether we yield to our first unwelcome impulse (for example, rudeness, cruelty, rage) or we stifle the impulse and come up with a better choice. With people in the mix, mere habit can’t guide our behavior. We must be adaptable, not habitual—because the stakes are so much higher. If I surrender to my nicotine craving and smoke a cigarette, I hurt myself. If I lose my temper with my child, I hurt my child. In the matter of adult behavioral change, I’d like to propose a modification to the sequence of antecedent, behavior, and consequence—by interrupting it with a sense of awareness and an infinitesimal stoppage of time. My modified sequence looks like this: I’ve isolated three eye-blink moments—first the impulse, then the awareness, then a choice—that comprise the crucial intervals between the trigger and our eventual behavior. These intervals are so brief we sometimes fail to segregate them from what we regard as our “behavior.” But experience and common sense tell us they’re real. When a trigger is pulled we have an impulse to behave a certain way. That’s why some of us hear a loud crash behind us and immediately duck our heads to protect ourselves. The more shrewd and alert among us aren’t as quick to run for cover. We hear the sound and look around to see what’s behind it—in case there’s even more to worry about. Same trigger, different responses, one of them automatic and hasty (in a word, impulsive, as in yielding to the first impulse), the other intermediated by pausing, reflecting, and sifting among better options. We are not primitive sea slugs responding with twitchy movement whenever we’re poked with a needle. We have brain cells. We can think. We can make any impulse run in place for a brief moment while we choose to obey or ignore it. We make a choice not out of unthinking habit but as evidence of our intelligence and engagement. In other words, we are paying attention. For example, in 2007 I was a guest on the Today show’s weekend edition, interviewed by Lester Holt. Guests are warned that the time on camera goes by very fast—a six-minute segment feels like sixty seconds. It’s true. My interview went well. I enjoyed myself so much, in fact, that I was stunned when I heard Lester thanking me for being on the program—the customary cue that the segment is over. I couldn’t believe it. We’d just started. I had a half dozen additional points to make. Lester’s words triggered an impulse in me to say, “No, let’s keep going.” And in fact, the words were on the tip of my tongue. But this was national television, with four million people watching. I was keyed up, mindful of every word and gesture. In that nanosecond before the foolish words could pass my lips, I paused to reflect on the consequences of doing so. Was I really considering telling the Today host that I didn’t want the interview to end? Did I want to be the guest who overstayed his welcome? In the end, I took Lester’s cue and responded with the customary, “Thank you for having me.” I’m sure anyone watching the segment’s final seconds saw a guest behaving on autopilot. That’s what most exchanges of gratitude are—formulaic gestures, neither distinctive nor attention-grabbing. A viewer wouldn’t have an inkling of the split second drama in my head during the interval between Lester Holt’s triggering words and the response I finally chose. Though it looked like rote behavior, it was anything but casual or automatic. Even with a trigger as minor as being thanked for showing up, I was weighing my options. I had a choice. If we’re paying attention (and being on national TV will increase anyone’s level of awareness), this is how triggers work. The more aware we are, the less likely any trigger, even in the most mundane circumstances, will prompt hasty unthinking behavior that leads to undesirable consequences. Rather than operate on autopilot, we’ll slow down time to think it over and make a more considered choice. We already do this in the big moments. When we go into our first meeting with the company’s CEO, we are mindful that every word, every gesture, every question is a trigger. When we’re asked for our opinion, we don’t say the first thing that comes to mind. We know we’ve entered a field of land mines where any misstep may have unappealing consequences. We measure our words like a diplomat facing an adversary. Perhaps we’ve even prepared our answers ahead of time. Either way, we don’t yield to impulse. We reflect, choose, then respond.Paradoxically, the big moments—packed with triggers, stress, raw emotions, high stakes, and thus high potential for disaster—are easy to handle. When successful people know it’s showtime, they prepare to put on a show. It’s the little moments that trigger some of our most outsized and unproductive responses: The slow line at the coffee shop, the second cousin who asks why you’re still single, the neighbor who doesn’t pick up after his dog, the colleague who doesn’t remove his sunglasses indoors to talk to you, the guests who show up too early, the passenger in the next seat wearing super-loud headphones, the screaming baby on the plane, the friend who always one-ups your anecdotes, the person standing on the left side of the escalator, and so on. These are life’s paper cuts. They happen every day, and they’re not going away. They often involve people we’ll never see again. Yet they can trigger some of our basest impulses. Some of us suppress the impulse. Whatever the reason—common sense, fear of confrontation, more urgent things to do we opt to ignore the triggering annoyance. We disarm the moment. If there are no bullets in the gun, the trigger doesn’t matter. On the other hand, some of us are easily triggered—and can’t resist our first impulse. We have to speak up. This is how ugly public scenes begin. These tiny annoyances should trigger bemusement over life’s rich tapestry instead of turning us into umbrage-taking characters from a Seinfeld episode. Even more perilous are the small triggering moments with our families and best friends. We feel we can say or do anything with these folks. They know us. They’ll forgive us. We don’t have to edit ourselves. We can be true to our impulses. That’s how our closest relationships often become trigger festivals with consequences that we rarely see in any other part of our lives—the fuming and shouting, the fights and slammed doors, the angry departures and refusals to talk to each other for months, years, decades. For example, your teenage daughter borrows the car and two hours later calls to say it’s been stolen. She left the keys in the car while she ran into a convenience store for a snack. A low-probability event (the theft) made more probable by a silly mistake (forgetting the keys). As a parent, how do you respond? Your daughter wasn’t harmed. She’s not in danger or legal peril. She’s a victim. At worst, you’ve lost property. What’s your first impulse? You can get angry. You can do a variation on “I told you so” or “You always do this,” reinforcing the message that 1) parent knows best or 2) your daughter is not as smart as she thinks she is. You can be consoling. You can ask, “Do you need a ride home?” You have options. I don’t have the perfect answer. I do know that this phone call is a supercharged triggering moment, even though it is brief and unexpected and in the grand scheme of things, small. The damage is done. It’s not a tall tale to entertain your grandkids years from now. But how you respond is important and consequential. Will this unfortunate event trigger more damage in the relationship between parent and child, or will something good come out of it? Will you give in to the perfectly natural impulse to express your scorn, or will you take a breath and make a smarter choice?

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