At some point in our lives, we've all tried to make a change. Maybe it was a new diet or exercise routine, or maybe we set a goal
to stop yelling at our kids or be kinder to our spouse. With some of these changes we've been successful, but often our attempts to
change our behavior don't work in the long run. We go back to eating impulsively or yelling at our kids. Why is that?
In this segment, we're going to explore how we can improve our chances of creating lasting change.
This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. BetterHelp is an online therapy provider. They match you to a licensed therapist in your
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I'm going to show a very short clip from Saturday Night Live. It's supposed to be a funny example of how not to do therapy.
This is it: stop it!" "So, I should just stop it." "There you go." Just stopping it often doesn't work, and it has negative side effects.
If "just stop it" worked for every problem, then you wouldn't be taking this course, and no one would ever come to therapy.
If we could just willpower our way to change, then none of us would feel stuck or need help to grow. So I want you to consider:
what is a problem that you've been having that just keeps coming back, a problem that you've made multiple attempts to change,
but so far, nothing has worked? What have you tried? Take a minute and write down, you know, what this problem was. Almost
everyone who comes to me for therapy has already tried "just stop it." And it's not working. Nothing they're trying is working.
So one of the ways of looking at that is thinking, "Oh, you know, they just haven't tried the right behavior yet." You know,
try a different diet, try a different way of forcing your kids to do stuff. But what if the solution is the problem? What if focusing on
behavior change is at best, a waste of energy, and at worst, it's making things worse. When working with addicts in residential
treatment, we have this term called switch addictions, which is basically used to describe the cycle of behaviors that occur when
we take away someone's drug of choice. So for example, when we take in a client who's addicted to alcohol and they no longer have
access to it, they'll often start demonstrating other addictive behaviors. Which, you know, depend on the circumstance, but it
might be disordered eating or overeating. And when we try to help them change those behaviors, then they might switch to
compulsive sex. And if we try to crack down on that, they might switch to creating drama in the community or obsessively reading
or obsessing over schoolwork or self-harm, and the list goes on and on. Right? So just forcing someone to not use drugs is like
chasing the behavior around the mulberry tree. For treatment to be effective, we have to create change on the deeper level. The goal of
this course is to help you change behaviors and change how you feel, but not by suppressing or white-knuckling or just switching out
behaviors. This course will help you be different by changing your approach to your underlying drives, needs, and emotions. But to do
this, you may need to shift your paradigm. One of the reasons that "just stop it" doesn't work is that it's based on the worldview that
we are, you know, bad people who do bad things. This allows very few options to create change - things like, you know, punish the
behavior, shut down the behavior, and suppress the behavior. Now, if instead we see people as inherently good, as people who are
generally doing the best they can with what they have, then there must be a reason they're doing what they're doing. This gives
us a lot more flexibility to help them - things like solving the underlying needs, trusting that our emotions have a purpose,
seeing an underlying function (even if it's dysfunctional) to the behavior. So when we see people as deeply good, we're more likely
to help create lasting and sustainable change in ourselves and others. So how do you see yourself? When you mess up, what do
you say to yourself? Do you punish or berate yourself? Do you beat yourself up? Do you try to cover up your mistakes or shut down?
What does that say about your worldview and your approach to change? Remember back when we talked about primary and
secondary emotions? There is an iceberg, and the part that pokes out of the water was the easily identifiable emotion, but underneath
it was so much more than that. So the same thing is true of behaviors, right? So we have behaviors. That's the thing we can
see. But underneath behaviors, we have emotions and thoughts and habits and paradigms. We have our way of being, and we have
our instinctual drives. We also have physiological needs and attachment needs. So a problem like an alcohol addiction is driven
by a need to escape emotions like anxiety or despair. Or it could be an attempt to escape a problem that someone just doesn't know
how to solve or how to deal with, you know, childhood abuse or poor life choices. So regardless of what the underlying problem is,
if we fail to treat and resolve the emotions beneath the alcoholism, then we're just going to play whack-a-mole with behaviors.
Behaviors come from underlying drives, functions, or rewards to those behaviors. So if we want to solve problems and create
lasting change, we really have to go back to the idea that every behavior serves some function. Even the most self-defeating
behaviors, like alcoholism, serve a function, like making the anxiety go away, even briefly. So check out the following example:
Micah was a smart fourth grader who was always getting into trouble. He was the class clown. He was frequently disrupting the
lesson with his antics, his jokes, and his outbursts, and the more his teacher worried about the impact this was having on the class
behavior, the harder she tried to shut it down. She started by asking him to stop, and then she moved on to reprimands,
and then she began taking away recess and began removing other rewards, and then eventually began punishing him with trips to the
principal's office and calls to his mother. But his behavior continued to get worse. It seemed like everything she tried to make
him behave just encouraged him. After consulting with some of the other teachers, Mrs. Kohler, that was his teacher, began to wonder
about why Micah seemed to want to get into trouble. One of the other teachers suggested that perhaps Micah just really wanted to
be noticed, to feel important, and that the only way he knew how to do that was through negative behavior. So his underlying need was
to feel like he mattered to someone. So Mrs. Kohler started to develop ways that Micah could get noticed every day. She put him
in charge of cleaning the whiteboard. She asked him to run errands for her. She invited him to teach small parts of the lessons.
And little by little, his disruptions decreased, and he began to be a more positive influence on his classmates. Our emotions and our
motivations run much deeper than our thoughts and our actions. If we want to create deep and lasting change, we need to take a look
beneath behaviors. Take a look at the problem you've been trying to solve without success. I'm going to ask you a series of questions
you might consider for different ways to approach your problem. And then I just want you to write down one to two of them that you
would be willing to try with your situation. What emotions are underneath this behavior? What are your underlying needs? These
include needs for physical survival, for attachment and connection, for safety, and for love. What resources can you reach out to?
So for example, who are some people you could talk with? Are there books on your problem? Do you know of anyone who's
overcome a similar difficulty? Uh, what community resources are available to you? And this one, you know, this question just
encourages you to do some research and find out what resources are out there. What are your internal reasons for why you want the
change? So, for example, with the desire to improve physical health, an external approach worries about numbers on the scale,
counting calories, mind over body, external pressure, like shame about fat and how people think about you and how people see you.
Right? Those are all externals, external sources of motivation, and about 95% of diets fail. Diets generally use this external approach
right? An internal approach would focus on how your mind and body feel each day when you work out, on listening to your body's
cues for hunger and fullness, on paying attention to your sensations when you overeat, etc. So behavioral change that
comes with these natural and intrinsic rewards is more sustainable. So the approach I just described is called intuitive
eating, and it's been shown to be a lot more effective at helping people maintain a healthy BMI than any kind of diet. Behavioral
change that suppresses emotions needs to be constantly sustained by external rewards or willpower, right? Just
white-knuckling it, and it, it basically - all change takes work, but deep change gets easier and more rewarding over time, whereas
behavior change based on suppression gets harder and harder over time. It becomes less rewarding and less motivating over
time. What do you do to keep trying to solve this problem? What are you doing over and over again? And then what have you never
tried to solve this problem? Look at your toolbox of skills from this course. Is there one new skill you'd like to apply to your problem?
What are your strengths? Use your strengths instead of your weaknesses to create change, What are you really good at?
How can you apply those strengths to your problem? Now, often we just don't know the answer to these questions, but asking the
question opens us up to look for more flexible solutions instead of just doing the same thing over and over again. If you really want to
create deep and lasting change in your life, you need to look underneath the behaviors and look into your thoughts, emotions,
beliefs, and feelings. By getting creative and trying new things, you really can create lasting change in your life.
This video is one skill from my 30-skill course, How to Process Your Emotions, where I teach 30 of the most essential skills for
resolving depression, anxiety, and improving mental health. Emotion processing is an essential skill for working through
intense emotions, but most people have never been taught how to do it. I'm putting every single main video lesson on YouTube for the
world to access for free. You watching these videos, sharing them, contributing to my Patreon, and my sponsors make this possible.
If you would like to access the entire course in one place, ad-free, with its workbook, exercises, downloads, extra videos, live
Q and A's, additional short readings, and links to extended resources, the link to buy the course is in the description below.