The simplest the easiest and the most effective thing that you can do
to help yourself or a loved one conquer an addiction is to change your expectations
now you might be thinking whatever Amber that's some woo woo stuff but in this video I'm going
to explain to you exactly why and how that works and how you can use these scientific
evidence-based findings to help yourself or a loved one overcome addiction for good
okay
for those of you who are new here welcome to put the shovel down I'm Amber Hollingsworth
and this YouTube channel is all about helping you understand the science and psychology of addiction
so you can get your life and your family back on track and get back
out there and live the life that you want to live
now as always we like to talk about addiction from the individual point of view and the
family point of view which is exactly what we're going to do today in our video about expectations
now I am a big believer in the idea of what you expect to happen is probably going to
happen but I don't believe it because it's some kind of magic wish for and get what you want
kind of thinking there's actual science behind this allow me to explain
I think to understand this concept we need to go all the way back to
1968 when two researchers Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson
ran some studies about expectations let me tell you how their little scientific experiment worked
they wanted to find out if the expectations a teacher has about her students will
actually impact or affect the student's learning ability so they set up this study
and they pulled these kids randomly out of a hat and assigned them to different groups and
they told the teachers that these kids that they were working with were late bloomers
and that they were expected to make a ton of progress this academic year
now the kids had no idea that they were in this study
and they definitely didn't know anything about the expectations but these teachers
it was put in their head that these students were smarter and we're going to do better
this year And guess what happened the students did better when there was no actual difference
in the learning levels and the academic abilities of these students compared to any other students
the only difference was that the teacher expected them to do better
now the teachers were instructed not to communicate that to the students so it's not like
these kids were told they were gonna do this literally came because of what the
teacher thought would happen and this is what's known as the Pygmalion effect
and guess what if positive expectations can change an outcome for the positive negative expectations
do the same thing and this is called the Gollum effect now when I first heard this term I was
thinking like Gollum from Lord of the Rings Isn't that that things named that crazy creepy thing
apparently the Gollum effect was actually named out of clay creature in Jewish mythology who
knew anyways research does show that if you have negative expectations if someone in authority or
a position above has negative expectations about their workers or their students or their children
that they will get a more negative outcome and it's probably not all that hard for us to believe
but it is kind of cool to know why or how that actually happens and hang in there cause I am
going to connect the dots for you about how all this connects to addiction and how you
can use this information to help yourself or a loved one overcome addiction for good
there are four things that happen differently probably even like on a subconscious level
when someone expects something either positively or negatively of someone else
dr rosenthal called them the four factors now factor number one is what he calls
climate and what he meant when he said that was the general climate of the classroom
of the students in the study was warmer teachers verbal and nonverbal responses to the children
warmer more positive more comforting so essentially they're subconsciously creating
a better learning environment now the second factor at play was something Dr rosenthal called
input and what he meant by that was teachers that had the positive expectation of their students
actually taught more stuff and they taught it more in depth and they did a better job of it
because they expected that these kids could follow along
learn and understand and that they actually were going to absorb this material quite well
so they quite naturally gave more more material
now the third factor at play here is something called the response factor and what that means
is that when a teacher has a low expectation of a student they're more likely to ask
less questions of that student and they're more likely to accept less than superior answers
to their questions because they think that's all that student is capable of
conversely if the teacher has high expectations of the student they'll ask them more questions
and provide them more opportunity to explore answers which actually leads us to the fourth
factor which is something Rosenthal called feedback so not only did the teachers ask
more questions and it would allow the kids more time to explore the answers they would actually
help the kids along to find the correct answer whereas when you think they're
going to do bad you just kind of move on it's almost like you're trying to
spare them the embarrassment but when you think the kid has it in them then
you're naturally going to spend more time pulling the correct answer out
and along with that feedback loop you're a lot more likely to positively reinforce
those positive answers so you can see this expectation thing it's not just
who wee woo wee stuff there's actual science behind it and when you think about it
I think you're going to find that it makes common good sense
now let's talk about how we can apply the Pygmalion effect
instead of the Gollum effect to help yourself or a loved one conquer addiction
if you're following along with what I'm saying about this whole expectations thing
then I think it's not going to be really hard for you to take the leap and understand that
if someone else's subconscious expectation of you can impact your outcome
guess what the impact of your own expectations of yourself are
massively humongous if you think a teacher can impact the situation your own mind which
you're with 24 7 and your own expectations have a much larger impact on your success
rate you know what the biggest problems when it comes to addictions is everybody expects
that people just can't overcome them and that they're just never going to get better
and that it's just always going to come back so in general we have sort of a cultural belief that
people can't overcome addictions I would like to challenge that I see people be addiction
every single day and not only do they beat it but they become better than they ever would have been
addiction is probably the most curable fixable mental illness that there is
out there there are actually many pathways to get there there are lots of solutions to explore
the biggest problem as to why it doesn't work is because people don't expect it to work and
you see this in the way that people talk to themselves what we call self-talk and you
definitely see this in the way that family members friends or loved ones
talk to people who are struggling with this problem how many times have you
as a family member or a loved one caught yourself thinking or maybe even saying things like
you always screw up you're never going to get this what's going to be different this time
you're causing all these problems for the family
you're a screw up you can't figure this out you're not willing to do what it takes
we have these thoughts and worse we say these statements all the time what do you
think that does it sets the expectation that the other person isn't going to figure it out
and not only that because we expect it we don't even give them a chance to figure it out
We just assume and we already know that it's going to end badly and we already know
they went to rehab eight times before and this time isn't going to be any different
so we don't even leave room for it now when we do that we try to tell ourselves
that we're just trying not to get our hopes up because we don't want to be disappointed
I think there is a major flaw in that kind of philosophy because I really truly believe that
you find what you're looking for some of the reasons that we just talked about so if you are
looking for a bad outcome you're going to find it it's called the Gollum effect
if you're looking for a good outcome you're going to find it because you're filtering
you're going to be filtering for the positive or filtering for the negative which is gonna make
a huge difference in what information that you take in from the environment
if you just know it's going to work out in the end you're looking for the evidence that's going
to work out in the end you're positively reinforcing that in yourself and you're
positively reinforcing that in your loved one if you just know this is going to end
badly and they're never going to figure it out and they're going to ruin their life and yours
Guess what's going to happen you're going to look for all the evidence and proof
that it's never going to work it's going to ruin their life and yours
you're going to be responding to them that way thereby greatly increasing the chances
of getting a negative outcome now that goes to the same for you as an addicted person
you have to change your own thinking about whether or not you can get better
and honestly The evidence is probably already right in front of you you're just not looking
at it because you expect a bad outcome for example I can't tell you how many times
people come into my office and they say rehab just doesn't work for me
I've been through it four times and I'll say what usually happens
why doesn't it work and they'll say I'll get three or four months sober
and then I'll fall off the cliff and I'm like dude if you could give three or four
months sober completely and before you couldn't get three or four hours sober
sounds to me like rehab worked for you what didn't work is that you expected for it not to work
and therefore set yourself up with a self fulfilling prophecy
and that is probably a lot more likely what led to the bad outcome versus it didn't work because it
was working quite well wasn't it and the person's like yeah I guess it was working for three months
so then I asked them a lot of questions about what was working well I was doing this
and I was doing that and I was doing what they told me and it was actually working
so seriously the simplest easiest most effective thing you can do to help yourself or a loved one
overcome addiction is to change your expectations
change what you allow yourself to think when you hear those negative thoughts popping into
your head I want you to confront them push them away find the evidence as to how that's not true
and look for the positive if you have a hard time doing that then surround yourself with
people who've done it or families whose loved one have gotten better because
just hearing this actually changes your expectations through something called
modeling if you're going to meetings and you're going to therapy groups and all you're hearing is
that people never get better and this person was destroyed and that person was destroyed
guess what it's going to make your expectations all jacked up
but if you're going to places where people are getting better
and they're talking about what works guess what that's going to help change your
expectations and now that you've changed your expectations and life is going to get better
the next step is to take the action steps now you can find the lots of addiction recovery resources
on our website I'll put the link for that in the description and up next I want you to watch this
video about the simplest easiest action steps you can take now that you got your mindset