Scott H Young

Have you ever gotten mad over nothing? Often when you look back at that time from a more resourceful state your past anger may have seemed silly or even confusing. You may have struggled to understand what had kept you from escaping it, what was fueling this negative emotion. Yet while you were annoyed, the emotion often seemed as permanent to your mindset as your arm is to your body.

Does this just happen when you get angry? No. In almost every emotional state you can perceive, good or bad, it seems to grip you, impossible to remove and even more difficult to understand once it has passed. It is easy to get frustrated or depressed by a single event and let it consume your entire worldview. One person cuts you off in traffic and suddenly the entirety of humanity is filled with heartless jerks. Why does this happen?

Your mental patterns and emotions follow a path of least resistance. Like a river flowing, your state flows down the path that is carved into the landscape of your mind. Just as the water has no choice to go over the waterfall, your emotional states will slide down whatever pattern has been left for them to travel without conscious intervention.

A river is guided by the lowest point in the terrain. As the river flows, it erodes the ground, reinforcing it’s own path. Similarly, your mental patterns are reinforced with repetition. Controlling your emotions comes largely from conditioning a new pattern for your mind to follow. By carving out an alternative route in advance, you gain the ability to shift the flow of your emotions when you need it.

To guide your emotional river, you can use a visualization technique borrowed from NLP. Start by visualizing yourself when you are in a negative state. Take a look at what you see, hear and feel. Try to be as detailed as possible with this visualization, otherwise you may condition a new pattern but you won’t be able to find it when you need it.

From this visualization, imagine what you want to experience instead. If you are working on a fear, that might be a feeling of confidence and strength. If the feeling is depression, imagine enthusiasm and motivation.

Take an experience where you felt the emotion you want to condition. Once again, gather as many details for how you see, hear and feel this emotional state. The more details you capture correctly the better the likelihood that you will be able to fully capture that emotion when you need it.

From these two visualizations, create a little internal movie where you go from the negative state to the positive one. When you imagine yourself feeling nervous, blur that image towards your positive one until the feeling of strength and confidence overwhelms the first image. It may not even be an image, it could be something you hear or feel. Rehearse this transition repeatedly so that you can’t help but imagine the more powerful emotion when you try to visualize the first. The next time you are in an unresourceful state, you will remember your visualization and regain the ability to transition into a more powerful state.

Let’s say that you wanted to use this technique to make it waking up easier each morning. The first step would be to imagine what it is like to wake up when you feel lousy. Feel the way your body is sluggish and drained of energy. Feel the extra comfort the bed is providing you that leashes you to it’s surface. See the blurry vision of your room outside of eyes that haven’t adjusted to the light. Hear the painful blaring of your alarm clock.

With that visualization, the next step is to visualize what you would like to experience instead. Feel the urge to bounce out of your bed with motivation and enthusiasm. See what your room looks like when you are standing tall, prepared to start your day. Make your image vivid and get as many details as possible.

The final step is to rehearse the first image transforming into the second one. Imagine your groggy, tired self transforming into someone who is jumping out of bed, ready to start his or her day.

Take some time to try this with any particular times you are having difficulty with guiding your emotions. Clear out a new path for the river in your mind to flow and lead it to the motivation, enthusiasm and confidence you deserve.

Changing a habit isn’t that difficult, it’s making that change last where things get tricky. Many people have started diets and held them up for a few months only to break their commitment and have to start from scratch. Building enthusiasm for a new goal or project can get you a few days, maybe even a week. But what is going to keep you going when that emotion fades?

Most people incorrectly assume that the approach to making long-term change is just a longer version of the process to making short-term change. But willpower and enthusiasm aren’t permanent. Your emotional state and environment are constantly in flux. Relying on your environment or emotional state to keep a commitment is a risky gambit.

It has been almost a year since I wrote my Habitual Mastery series about changing habits. Since that time I’ve begun to decode the mystery of why some habits became heavily engrained in my personality and others easily fell apart when put up to pressure.

Looking back, I can see I neglected a very important factor necessary to making long-term change. This is the balance between reward and punishment. Behaviors that reward are easy to maintain and difficult to remove, while habits that punish require only a small push before they topple over.

Neutral Habits

The best way to change a habit is just to consciously focus on forming it for a period of about a month. Focus on upholding your diet for a month. Work on your goal for a month. Follow a new organizing system for a month.

This process exposes you to the new habit for a long enough period of time that your brain is conditioned to doing it. Doing something repeatedly engrains the neural pathways strong enough that it happens on autopilot. When you go to the gym each day at noon, then when 11:45 begins to roll around you automatically start running the pattern to get ready to go to the gym.

This process of habituation works. I’ve used it successfully to build many habits. So long as you can build up the willpower to last a full month, this process will build a habit just like constructing a new bridge inside your brain.

The problem with this process is that it doesn’t say anything to how strong your bridge is going to be. You may have built a habit, but it may shatter at the first sign of temptation. Unexpected obstacles may make it impossible for you to go to the gym for a week. Will you immediately resume your schedule after this period? That depends on how strong your habitual “bridge” was.

What determines the strength of this bridge? That is your reward and punishment balance. If your habit is extremely rewarding then it can withstand a lot of pressure and won’t be difficult to maintain. If your habit is extremely punishing, then even a tiny obstacle might cause it to collapse.

Carrot and Stick

Reward and punishment isn’t rational. Knowing that you should go to the gym, doesn’t make it a rewarding an activity. Knowing that you shouldn’t smoke cigarettes doesn’t mean that activity is punishing to you. The kind of reward and punishment I am talking about are at a deep emotional level. If it feels bad to go to the gym, it is punishing you. If it feels good to smoke, then it is rewarding you.

In order to strengthen your neural bridge, you need to ensure that the habit makes you feel good and the alternative behaviors you want to avoid make you feel bad. This gut-level emotional feedback will heavily reinforce any behaviors. This means that when temptation and obstacles conflict with your habit it is more likely to resume.

A Balancing Act

Changing this balance of reward and punishment, starts from looking closely and understanding why it exists. Understanding is the key to effectiveness. Without knowing why you find your new habit punishing or your old habit rewarding, you have little hope in changing it.

Deconstruct your old habit or your new habit and pick out the rewards and punishment involved. The taste of the food you know is bad for you. The pain of dragging yourself out of a comfortable bed early in the morning. The extra adrenaline that courses through your blood when running that last mile. Take out a piece of paper and make a list of all the different factors that make you feel good and bad.

Once you’ve deconstructed your habit, you are going to rebuild it. Reinforce incredible reward within the habit and enhance the punishment from the habits you are trying to avoid.

When I switched to a vegetarian diet over a year ago, I built up a lot more rewards to sticking with the habit (more energy, better health, better for the environment). Even more importantly I built up internal punishment to the thought of switching back to a carnivorous diet. During my initial conditioning phase I read tons of research reports and books emphasizing the benefits of this switch.

It would be hard for me to switch back today even if they later found out it was far healthier, better for the environment and more ethically sound to eat meat just because of the gut-level feelings I created. The idea of eating meat is far from appetizing.

I continue to go to the gym regularly because I thoroughly enjoy being at the gym. I like listening to the music, the satisfying feeling after I finish a set and the social aspect of going with someone else. By reinforcing the positive aspects, it means that even if I were forced to take a month off, it would be easy to get back to going.

Changing the balance of reward and punishment isn’t necessary to create a habit, just like having an extremely strong bridge isn’t necessary to have it stand. But because the conditions you will face in life aren’t fixed, changing this balance is critical to making long term change.