Many of us don’t realize how many of our behaviors are automated.

Automated behaviors are not 'wrong' and something we need to complete avoid. We need a certain amount of this automation to free up cognitive processing energy to learn new things, try new behaviors and deal adaptively with new situations.

So habits and automations are not bad.

The question is, are they aligning with our most desired way of experiencing life?

To find out, we need to bring these unconscious patterns into our awareness.

From that vantage point we can take a more honest inventory of whether these habits enhance our life or deplete it.

A helpful way to gain conscious access to unconscious patterns is to become a witness to them.

This is where meditation can be helpful...

but another step that can also be helpful in this process is to be a witness to our own bodies.

If we can watch how our own body moves, we are accessing neural circuits involved in ‘conscious access’ or observation. This helps us make the unconscious conscious.

One particular part of the body you can start to witness is your hands.

Observe what your hands do throughout the day.

Our hands are one of the first tools we use in self-soothing. We use our hands generally to help us consume/ingest something (including information), or to be in contact with another organism.

This is for three reasons:

From the time we are born (and even in the womb in terms of sucking thumbs and amniotic fluid), ingesting an external substance or sucking on an object activates the swallow reflects which engages the parasympathetic nervous system and thus helps soothe us;
Consuming information is a strategy to help us navigate and solve problems;
Seeking contact - the pressure and heat from another organism - is an infants main tool for knowing that it is not alone : this proximity to safe attachment figures helps regulate the nervous system. We carry that need for proximity throughout our life.

You’ll notice that much of your CURRENT hand activity involves the above mentioned things:

grasping for a substance, object or information (including scrolling for information that you believe will help you solve a problem);
or seeking contact (including from a distance via technology) with another organism. This can be cuddling with a pet, gesturing for someone to interact with you or using technology to ‘ping’ a signal to someone so that they notice you and ping you back. All of these behaviors are ways we seek to know we are not alone, thus soothing our nervous system. (Ep 11 goes into this depth)

To assess whether these habits are healthy, it’s important to look at Before, During and After effects.

These are part of your 'temporal repertoire' of self-regulating strategies.

Reflecting on your experiences at different time stamps can help you get better at recognizing patterns of what really works for you, and what doesn't.

what is happening in your external and internal environment right BEFORE you are about to grasp whatever the object is. What do you believe that activity/information/gesture/thing/person will give you or do for you in terms of a desired experience? (this takes a lot of practice, because we often have a lot of automated behaviors that we do without this type of reflection)
how present you are DURING whatever this activity is. Can you notice your breath and how your body feels?
how you feel at different stages AFTER this activity.

The POST-activity reflection is important because it helps us activate awareness of the longer-term effects of what we are doing:

it helps us separate what feels good in the moment compared with what is actually good for us in the longer trajectory of our life.

Future projection and extrapolation involves the executive control networks

-areas of the brain that also helps with impulse control and inhibitory signaling - both of which will help you pause before you do some thing that may not actually be in your best interest.

Let’s say you want to assess if eating donuts is a habit that you want to stop. (in this example, it may already be really obvious that this is something you want to stop doing, but it’s helpful to go through this assessment process to illustrate).

Instead of putting all of your attention on how good the donut tastes as you’re eating it, you’ll need to also use your attention to notice the before-and-after-events of eating it.

Enjoying something in the moment is great! (and can be very healthy!)...

the question is how much of that SAME kind of attention are you putting on the moments BEFORE and AFTER that experience?

It will likely be hard to focus attention before and after we do many of our automated behaviors.

This is partly due to how many automated behaviors we have. And it can also be challenging because of all of the clever technologies manufactured by humans to trigger enormous amounts of dopamine from various products, substances and activities.

All of this will make it hard to not notice the sensory pleasure of many of your habits and the craving you have moments before you engage with it (the donut in this case, but think devices, cigarettes, pills, entertainment, etc etc. (Read Dr. Anna Lemke‘s book Dopamine Nation to find out more about pleasure and pain circuits related to addictions).

It can therefore be helpful to focus on only ONE behavior at a time.

For example, reflect on one particular habit you'd like to try updating, modifying or stopping. Choose that as your first experiment for Before-During-After Reflections.

To engage your long-term pattern recognition circuitry, you’ll need to guide your attention to how you feel a few minutes before and around 30 and 60 minutes, and even for the rest of the day after the activity. Notice the cascading effects of that habit (such as eating the donut) after you’ve consumed or engaged in it.

You can assist your brain in pattern recognition even further by journaling using 4 columns:

far left column: for the habit you are focusing on
second column: for what was happening (in terms of in your environment and also your mood/emotions/thoughts) right before
third column: for how present you were during the activity
fourth column: for how you felt shortly afterwards, as well as throughout the day after the activity. You can use trial and error to see what your energy levels are like in the periods of time after consumption. This is very important because our circuitry will often be dominated by the sensory stimulus of a behavior during the behavior.

I did this activity with students as a school counselor, as well as with adult clients as a family and community counselor. They often had many aha moments about their behaviors and were able to make changes over time with these reflections.

As many of us might know by now...

Just because the reward circuits fire doesn’t mean it’s in our long-term best interest to continue to do that activity without any type of control or intention.

Dr Anna Lambke asserts in her book Dopamine Nation , that stopping many of our habits will result in withdrawal, pain and discomfort,

and that only after about 30 days without it in our system will we truly be able to sense how our life changes or benefits without it.

She suggests less time is needed for less severe addictions. For many of our habits, we are likely to notice something different after just one or two days of not doing it. In any event, The first step is to just start using your brain's energy to notice how you feel before and after the activity.

The main theme here is to notice yourself more often.

As you've heard me say before...

We are Pattern-Recognition-Creatures.

Recognizing patterns is in itself rewarding due its connection with dopamine release. Dopamine is tied to pattern recognition because of its link to increasing the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) by enhancing the ability of neurons to transmit signals and reduce distortion by noise (Seamans & Yang, 2004; Spitzer & Walter, 2003).

It can help to start by seeing them as mechanical movements of your body, almost always involving upper limb movement of some sort. Even sleeping habits… If you keep pushing the snooze button, notice that this is once again related to an upper limb movement.

Becoming a witness of the movements of your limbs and body help you create conscious access points to your habits and automated behaviors.

This is a first step in discovering how your brain body is using its energy.

From there you can begin observing patterns of what depletes and what enhances your life.

And from there, make better choices of which habits you truly want to create and which ones are worth letting go.

Seamans, J. K., & Yang, C. R. (2004). The principal features and mechanisms of dopamine modulation in the prefrontal cortex. Progress in Neurobiology,

74, 1–58.

Spitzer, M., & Walter, H. (2003). In A. David & T. T. Kircher (Eds.), The self in neuroscience and psychiatry (pp. 436–444). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

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