What do you think is the connection between a pigeon's ability to count and human mental health? The answer has to do with learned behaviors.
When I was on the path to becoming a clinical psychologist, my career veered in the direction of animal cognition and neuroscience. I found myself teaching pigeons to count using a process called shaping. You start by giving it some food every time it looks at a touchscreen. This creates connections in its brain that become stronger over time, even as rules become more complex. So just like teaching a dog to stay, I eventually trained the pigeon to peck at a red square when it saw two flashes of light and a green square when it saw three. I now had a pigeon that could count.
(Cheers and laughter)
This process happens gradually, day after day, until that learned behavior becomes a habit.
I've worked in mental health over 25 years, and I've learned that just like the pigeon, our brains reinforce certain habits or coping mechanisms that help us feel better in the moment. I’ve seen thousands of educators, health care workers and first responders rely on coping mechanisms like procrastination, overusing their smartphones or working harder through a tough time. This can backfire and train them to become anxious and depressed.
For example, do you scroll endlessly on social media instead of getting to that task that fills you with anxiety or dread? Or late at night, do you get a dopamine hit when you click on the next episode button? Procrastination can feel good at the time, but oh, the next day is going to be a real grind.
(Laughter)
These coping mechanisms help us feel better in the moment, so it is not crazy that we do them. But if we kept repeating them and wonder why we're still stressed or anxious or burnt out, then what we're doing might be insane. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different response. Now we might not be aware of our own insane patterns, but chances are we all have them, myself included. The good news is that if we understand our unhelpful coping mechanisms, we can all unlearn them to improve our mental health.
Now I’d like to share with you what I’ve learned from being a father. My awesome daughter Natalia is now a teenager, but luckily for her, having a psychologist as a father means that I've worked hard to shape the connections in her brain.
(Laughter)
So she understands that the '90s grunge music is the absolute peak of all music ever.
(Laughter)
My goal is for Natalia to be self-confident, because I’ve never had a patient with clinical anxiety or depression also have high self-confidence at the same time. Anxiety erodes confidence. We tend to overestimate the amount of danger that we're in and underestimate our ability to cope. With depression, we end up beating ourselves up to the point that we feel worthless and hopeless. But as people overcome depression and anxiety, their self-confidence grows. They begin to talk to themselves like a coach instead of a critic to see how threats can become opportunities.
About five years ago, Natalia desperately wanted a smartphone, but I saw this as a threat to her self-confidence. While she would plead her case over dinner, I'd lean over to her and say, "Hey, do you generally feel pretty good about yourself?"
And she'd say, "Yeah."
"Are you anxious?"
"No, not compared to some of the people I know."
"Well, all of the research shows that the more kids are on a smartphone, the more anxious and depressed they become. So do you want to be less confident and more anxious?" Then I'd watch her face change from that youthful optimism to the cold reality that it just wasn't going to happen.
(Laughter)
Once Natalia finally got her smartphone, I could see how she was becoming like many of us, who use it as a coping mechanism to seek reassurance.
For example, imagine you’re meeting a friend for dinner at 7pm and they haven't arrived. You start to worry. Am I in the right place? Did they forget? Are they OK? As the uncertainty increases, you start to feel anxious. You fidget, you feel butterflies, maybe a little uncomfortable. Eventually, you pull out your phone to get reassurance by texting your friend "Where are you?" When they respond "Just parked," your worry and anxiety is washed away and you feel better.
Now if you sat with that discomfort and uncertainty, you'd strengthen your resilience to anxiety. There's a network in our brains that's like a muscle. It gets a workout every time we sit with anxious sensations and worrisome thoughts. But most of us don't sit with it. Instead, we look for reassurance and instant relief by texting.
So just like the pigeon that learned to count, our smartphones can train us to become more anxious every time we use them to seek reassurance. The danger of our coping mechanisms is that they make sense at the time, but they go undetected until we hit a perfect storm, a time in our lives when it seems like everything is going wrong and the energy in our internal batteries becomes depleted.
For example, let's say over the past six months Natalia's friends have treated her horribly. She got cut from her soccer team, and our family dog died. This perfect storm depletes her internal battery to 40 percent, and she no longer feels like herself. When she gets a bad report card, Natalia will revert to another coping mechanism: to work harder through a tough time. This has helped her succeed in the past, but with a depleted battery, she just can't get things back on track. This reinforces negative thoughts. "What's wrong with me?" "Oh, nothing is working." "I'm such a loser." Every time Natalia has these thoughts, the self-critical muscles in her brain become stronger, her self confidence crashes and her depression grows.
If Natalia is like most of us, what can we do to break these patterns and improve our self confidence? Well, if it was physical fitness, we'd all have to start moving more. The mental fitness equivalent is to talk more. The issue is that there's still a lot of stigma attached to mental health. We tend to keep our struggles to ourselves because we're afraid that we'll be seen as weak or incapable. We need to change this narrative by talking more about the issues in our lives. By talking, we uncover our unhelpful coping mechanisms, and that awareness is the first step to unlearning them.
Now here’s the sobering truth: mental health is complicated and nuanced. You are all unique, and your behaviors have been shaped over a long time, so I can't tell you what's best for you in your situation without knowing more about you. Instead, I hope to inspire you to take the time right now to learn more about yourself. And you can start by asking yourself these two questions. First, what do you do when you feel stressed, anxious or sad? And second, have these feelings gotten better or worse over time? If the answer is worse, then you're relying on an unhelpful coping mechanism.
Just like the pigeon that learned to count, our brains have an amazing capacity to build new connections and unlearn unhelpful habits by trying something new. It could be learning new strategies, like sitting with your anxiety. Breathe to take the edge off. Or my favorite, balance your thoughts to become more self-confident. It all starts with us talking more about our own patterns of insanity and admitting that we all have them. Even as '90s grunge psychologists.
(Laughter)
Thank you.
(Applause)
