Sorry About That
This one is rough. I'm posting it unfinished and I'll come back tomorrow to fix the typos and tighten the wording.
So, apologies in advance. Lately I've been writing a lot of posts telling people to settle down before they act on anger or start planning payback. Then I went back through one of my psychology textbooks and got reminded of something I'd glossed over: sensation comes first, then perception, and perception can feed straight into emotion. The brain knots all of it together in the same loop of taking something in and reacting to it. And it moves fast. Sometimes there's no gap at all, and we blurt out what we feel, good or bad, even when we'd rather keep it in.
I keep preaching, if that's the word, that getting a handle on your emotions and what you do next will make your life better. Easier said than built. Changing how you react is genuine work. For years in my practice I've handed patients the same three-step method, and here it is.
Step one: after the fact, you catch that you've just done the thing you want to quit doing. Step two: you start catching it while it's happening. You know that feeling, the little voice going "here I go again"? That's step two. None of this works without the want to change sitting underneath it. Maybe it's reaching for candy in the middle of a strict diet. Maybe it's the line people love, "I can't help it when somebody makes me mad." Somewhere in the brain there's a wire connecting the trigger and the reaction, and the wire has to be cut. Step three: you see it coming before you do it, and you don't do it. Done. Which sounds tidy and isn't, because step one, the wanting, has to be there first.
You might figure you can't steer any of this, that a lot of it runs on autopilot. True enough. Plenty of our reactions harden into habit, things we do with no time to think them through. That's learning at work, both operant and classical, the same machinery that lets you ride a bike or laugh at a joke without deciding to. Classical conditioning is a slippery idea, and maybe you've never run into the term. It's from psychology. Picture a dog that drools when it sees food in its bowl, a response that's just built in. Ring a bell every time you set the food down, and before long the bell alone makes the dog drool, no food in sight. That first reaction is hardwired. Other behaviors turn into habits a different way, through learning that doing something gets you a reward or a punishment. That's operant conditioning, and it gets burned into the brain too. The good news on both counts: stop reinforcing the behavior, or break the link to the classical trigger, and the conditioning can come undone.