[acb-hsp] The Extinction Burst

[peter altschul]

The Fascinating Reason It's So Hard to Quit Bad Habits Like 
Overeating or Smoking
  By David McRaney, Alterationet Posted on June 13, 2011, Printed 
on June 18, 2011
  This story is cross-posted from You Are Not So Smart.
  The Misconception: If you stop engaging in a bad habit, the 
habit will gradually diminish until it disappears from your life.
  The Truth: Any time you quit something cold turkey, your brain 
will make a last-ditch effort to return you to your habit.
  You've been there.  You get serious about losing weight and 
start to watch every calorie.  You read labels, stock up on fruit 
and vegetables, hit the gym.  Everything is going fine.  You feel 
great.  You feel like a champion.  You think, "This is easy."
  One day you give in to temptation and eat some candy, or a 
doughnut, or a cheeseburger.  Maybe, you buy a bag of chips.  You 
order the fettuccine alfredo.  That afternoon, you decide not 
only will you eat whatever you want, but to celebrate the 
occasion you will eat a pint of ice cream.  The diet ends in a 
catastrophic binge.
  What the hell? How did your smooth transition from comfort food 
to human Dumpster happen? You just experienced an "extinction 
burst."
  Once you become accustomed to reward, you get really upset when 
you can't have it.  Food, of course, is a powerful reward.  It 
keeps you alive.
  Your brain didn't evolve in an environment where there was an 
abundance of food, so whenever you find a high-calorie, high fat, 
high sodium source, your natural inclination is to eat a lot of 
it and then go back to it over and over again.  If you take away 
a reward like that, you throw an internal tantrum.
  Extinction bursts are a component of extinction, one of the 
principles of conditioning.  Much of your behavior is the result 
of conditioning.  It is among the most basic factors shaping the 
way any organism reacts to the world.  If you get rewarded by 
your actions, you are more likely to continue them.  If punished, 
you are more likely to stop.  Over time, you begin to predict 
reward and punishment by linking longer and longer series of 
events to their eventual outcomes.
  If you want some chicken nuggets, you know you can't just snap 
your fingers and wait for them to appear.  You must engage in a 
long sequence of actions -- acquire language, acquire money, 
acquire car, acquire clothes, acquire fuel, learn to drive, learn 
to use money, learn where nuggets are sold, drive to nuggets, use 
language, exchange money, etc..
  This string of behaviors could be sliced up into smaller and 
smaller components if we wanted to really dig down into the 
conditioning you have endured in order to be able to get nuggets 
in your mouth.  Just driving the car from point A to point B is a 
complex performance which becomes automatic after hundreds of 
hours of practice.  Millions of tiny behaviors, each one a single 
step in a process, add up to a single operation you have learned 
will payoff in reward.  Think of rats in a maze, learning a 
complicated series of steps -- turn left two times, turn right 
once, turn left, right, left, get cheese.  Even microorganisms 
can be conditioned to react to stimuli and predict outcomes.
  For a while in psychology, conditioning was the cat's pajamas.
  Source: Time Magazine
  In the 1960's and '70's, Burrhus Frederic Skinner became a 
scientist celebrity by scaring the shit out of America with an 
invention called the operant conditioning chamber -- the Skinner 
Box.  The box is an enclosure which can have any combination of 
levers, food dispensers, an electric floor, lights and 
loudspeakers.  Scientists place animals in the box and either 
reward them or punish them to either encourage or discourage 
their behavior.  Rats, for example, can be taught to push a lever 
when a green light appears to get a food pellet.
  Skinner demonstrated how he could teach a pigeon to spin in 
circles at his command by offering food only when it turned in 
one direction.  Gradually, he withheld the food until the pigeon 
had turned a little farther and farther until he had it going 
round and round.  He could even get the pigeon to distinguish 
between the word "peck" and "turn" and get them to perform the 
corresponding behavior just by showing them a sign.  Yes, in a 
sense, he taught a bird to read.
  Skinner discovered you could get pigeons and rats to do 
complicated tasks by slowly building up chains of behaviors 
through handing out pellets of food.  For example, if you want to 
teach a squirrel to water ski, you just need to start small and 
work your way up.  Other researchers added punishment to the 
routines and discovered it too could be used like the pellets to 
encourage and discourage behavior.
  Skinner became convinced conditioning was the root of all 
behavior and didn't believe rational thinking had anything to do 
with your personal life.  He considered introspection to be a 
"collateral product" of conditioning.
  Like Freud and Einstein, Skinner was a celebrity in his day, 
and his belief we were all robots was unsettling.  He made the 
cover of Time magazine in 1971.



"My book," says Skinner, "is an effort to demonstrate how things 
go bad when you make a fetish out of individual freedom and 
dignity.  If you insist that individual rights are the summum 
bonum, then the whole structure of society falls down." -- Time 
Magazine, 1971
  Some psychologists and philosophers still hold to the idea you 
are nothing but a sophisticated automaton, like a spider or a 
fish.  You have no freedom, no free will.  Your brain is made of 
atoms and molecules which must obey the laws of physics and 
chemistry, so some say your mind is locked into service of the 
rules of the universe like a clock.  Everything you have thought, 
felt and done in your life was the natural mathematical aftermath 
of the Big Bang.  To this wing of psychology, you are the same as 
an insect, just with a more complex nervous system responding to 
stimuli with a wider array of denser behavioral routines which 
only appear to give rise to consciousness.  You may take comfort 
knowing this is a hotly contested idea, one which is as old as 
the Greek philosophers who imagined the unconscious as wild 
horses pulling a chariot helmed by your upper-level reasoning.
  There are two kinds of conditioning -- classical and operant.  
Whether or not you have free will, conditioning is real, and the 
impact of conditioning can't be ignored.
  In classical conditioning, something which normally doesn't 
have any influence becomes a trigger for a response.  If you are 
taking a shower and someone flushes the toilet which then causes 
the water to become a scalding torrent, you become conditioned to 
recoil in terror the next time you hear the toilet flush while 
lathering up.
  That's classical conditioning.  Something neutral -- the toilet 
flushing b becomes charged with meaning and expectation.  You 
have no control over it.  You recoil from the water without ever 
thinking, "I should recoil from this water else I get scalded." 
If you have ever been sick after eating or drinking something you 
love, you will avoid it in the future.  The smell of it, or even 
the thought of it, can make you ill.  For me, it's tequila.  Ugh, 
gross.  Classical conditioning keeps you alive.  You learn 
quickly to avoid that which may harm you and seek out that which 
makes you happy, like an amoeba.
  The sort of complex behavior Skinner produced in animals was 
the result of operant conditioning.  Operant conditioning changes 
your desires.  Your inclinations becomes greater through 
reinforcement, or diminish through punishment.  You go to work, 
you get paid.  You turn on the air conditioning and stop 
sweating.  You don't run the red light, you don't get a ticket.  
You pay the rent, you don't get evicted.  It's all operant 
conditioning, punishment and reward.
  Which finally brings us back to the third factor -- extinction.  
When you expect a reward or a punishment and nothing happens, 
your conditioned response starts to fade away.  If you stop 
feeding your cat, he will stop hanging around the food bowl and 
meowing.  His behavior will go extinct.
  If you were to keep going to work and not get paid, eventually 
you would stop.  This is when the extinction burst happens, right 
as the behavior is breathing its final breath.  You wouldn't just 
not go to work anymore.  You would probably storm into the boss's 
office and demand an explanation.  If you got nowhere after 
gesticulating wildly and inventing new curse words out of your 
boss's last name, you might scoop your arm across his desk and 
leave in handcuffs.
  Just before you give up on a long-practiced routine, you freak 
out.  It's a final desperate attempt by the oldest parts of your 
brain to keep getting rewarded.  If you use the same elevator 
every day, and one day you press the button and nothing happens, 
you start jamming the button over and over again instead of just 
giving up.  You lock your keys in your apartment, but your 
roommate is asleep.  You ring the doorbell and knock, but they 
don't come.  You ring the doorbell over and over and over.  You 
start pounding on the door.
  If your computer freezes up you don't just walk away, you start 
clicking all over the place and maybe go so far as to bang your 
fists on the keyboard.  If a child doesn't get any candy at the 
checkout line, he or she may throw a giant spit-slinging tantrum.
  These are all extinction bursts.  A temporary increase in an 
old behavior, a plea from the recesses of your psyche.
  The worst thing you could ever do is give in to a temper 
tantrum.  This goes for adults too, because if you spend enough 
time observing other people you will notice that people who are 
used to getting their way will start a temper tantrum immediately 
after you have refused their request.  If you patiently restate 
your position and stay calm you will see the person eventually 
give up.  Depending upon how long he carries on will tell you how 
other people have responded to the person in the past.
  If he has been rewarded for having a fit often enough the 
extinction burst will be spectacular, enjoy! If it's short lived, 
it will be over as quick as it started and you can feel good that 
you haven't encouraged it.  The best way to eliminate a tantrum 
is to not give in, wait out the extinction burst (walking away 
works wonders) and reinforce the absence of the tantrum with your 
attention as soon as the person stops.  - From the Canine 
University's training statement
  So, back to that diet.  You eliminate a reward from your life: 
awesome and delicious high-calorie foods.  Right as you are ready 
to give it up forever, an extinction burst threatens to demolish 
your willpower.  You become like a two-year-old in a conniption 
fit, and like the child, if you give in to the demands, the 
behavior will be strengthened.  Compulsive overeating is a 
frenzied state of mind, food addiction under pressure until it 
bursts.
  Diets fail for many reasons, much of them associated with your 
body trying to survive in a situation where surviving starvation 
is much less of an issue.  To give up overeating, or smoking, or 
gambling, or "World of Warcraft," or any bad habit which was 
formed through conditioning, you must be prepared to weather the 
secret weapon of your unconscious -- the extinction burst.
  Become your own Supernanny, your own Dog Whisperer.  Look for 
alternative rewards and positive reinforcement.  Set goals, and 
when you achieve them, shower yourself with garlands of your 
choosing.
  Don't freak out when it turns out to be difficult.  Habits form 
because you are not so smart, and they cease under the same 
conditions.
  Check out a copy of the book "You Are Not So Smart."
  B) 2011 Independent Media Institute.  All rights reserved.