 This episode was prerecorded as part of a live continuing education webinar. On-demand CEUs are still available for this presentation through all CEUs. Register at allceus.com slash counselor toolbox. Welcome to happiness isn't brain surgery behavior modification basics part one. In this lecture we're going to define behavior modification, explore how it can be useful in practice, and explore some basic terms. I mean we're really going to hit the very high level basic basic terms in this presentation. What I want you to do is really get an idea of how behavior modification integrates with cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavior therapy, and how it can be useful in empowering your clients. So why do we care? Change means doing something different or modifying a response. So anytime we are working with someone or we're even trying to change our own behavior, we are trying to change a behavior, whether it's our reaction to something or our overt physical behaviors. We're trying to change something. So we need to understand what's causing it and what's reinforcing it or maintaining it, and what our motivations are. Most of those words would make a typical strict behaviorist cringe because they really focus on observable and measurable criteria and discount what they call the private experience. I'm a little more or a lot more loosey-goosey. I try to help you see where part of this is just semantics. What we call an emotion or label as happiness or fear is a label that we assign to an internal state. And we're going to talk about that some more. Don't let it get too confusing. The response can be a neurochemical one that we're trying to change. So we've talked before about how we can basically talk ourself into getting stressed out, talk to ourself and communicate that there is a threat even when none exists. We can get ourselves all worked up. Or we can try to be changing an overt behavior like smoking or exercising or banging your head. Behavior modification principles will help you understand some of the reasons people act or react the way they do. What we're really going to look at is what was the measurable reaction to a particular stimulus. You put your hand on a hot stove. The measurable reaction is you're going to pull it off. But between the time that you put your hand on the stove and your peripheral nervous system sent the message to your brain and your brain went, that's not good. Probably out of move the hand. There was lots of stuff going on. You see where I'm going with this? So we go back to the cognitive behavioral theory and the ABCs. Between the activating event and the consequence, there are all these automatic beliefs. Well, we're kind of working with the same thing here except for behavior modification. We're talking about the neurological reactions that occur. By understanding what rewards, that is what causes and motivates people's behavior, we can better address their issues. A reward, and this is kind of jumping ahead to next week. Anytime a behavior is rewarded, it will likely increase. That's kind of the definition of a reward. Anytime a behavior is punished, it will likely decrease. And what we're looking at is these behaviors that continue. What is causing them? And what is keeping them going? If it wasn't rewarding, the person wouldn't keep doing it. So we need to ask ourselves, even though it seems counterintuitive some of these behaviors, we have to ask ourselves, what is the potential reward the person's getting? And we want to understand that the focus on the observable, measurable conditions to the exclusion of cognitive interpretation underscores the mind-body connection. And what do I mean by that? I mean that you can say everything that's happening. We can talk about what's happening in terms of excretion of excitatory neurochemicals in response to a perceived threat. These are things that we can talk about and then relabel, you know, excitatory neurochemicals, either produces anxiety, anger, or happiness, elation, those excitement sort of things. As humans, we end up labeling those with emotional labels. But basically what we're talking about is a physiological reaction. The take-home, or what I want some patients to see, those who tend to be more problem-solving, logical, may wrap their brains around this in a different way, is the fact that stimuli produce neurochemical changes. Those neurochemical changes are what most of us call feelings. Behavior modification in its truest form is concerned only with observable, measurable behaviors, stimuli and reinforcement and punishment. Emotions are interpretations and mental processes which have no bearing in true behavior modification. I want you to think if you ever watched Star Trek Next Generation, think data. He was an artificial intelligence being, and he didn't have emotions. He had logical reactions to situations based on his programming. So how can all this be useful in practice? Strict behavior modification can be quite useful in simplifying a stimulus and reaction. You know, if you want to talk about why someone got upset, that can get mucky because upset may mean different things. They may put evaluations on terms like upset or angry or anxious. They may feel guilty about doing that. And all those feelings can get you stuck and get kind of mucked up. When we look at behavior modification, we can talk about a car pulled out in front of you and your body perceived a threat. There was no adrenaline rush, which was an excitatory response. You slammed on the brakes. That's what happened. And it makes it a lot more simple. And then you can start looking at, okay, you felt angry after this. Let's talk about why you labeled it as anger and how that was helpful to you. Integrating the cognitive interpretations or emotional labels can help people in identifying and addressing what's causing their distress. Like I said earlier, behaviorists would call this an excitatory response. If you've got mice in a maze and you drop them in there and they're really hungry and there's cheese at one end, they're not thinking, oh, I'm excited. I really want to eat. They have an excitatory response. They're actually kind of, again, to use another emotion word, stressed out. You put the mice in there. It's a novel situation, which is generally stressful to a variety of organisms. At the end, they can smell the cheese. So that is getting them all kind of worked up. And there's yet another reason for their excitatory neurochemicals to be excreted. They know there's something really good somewhere and they want to find it. We call this excitement, whereas really what we're referring to is the body's excretion of norepinephrine and dopamine and maybe glutamate. Understanding what causes feelings can also give people a greater sense of empowerment. If they understand that when they are in particular situations, their body is excreting a neurochemical, it's not quite as hazy as, you know, I just have these feelings. They don't know what they are or where they come from. So an example, and I always start when I talk about behavior modification with animals and then we work up to people. Because animals obviously aren't going to have the higher order cognitions that we do. We put a lot, well, I do at least, put a lot of emotional labels on things that animals do and looks that they give us. In reality, there's probably not the same interpretation in their mind, but I don't know that. So puppies learn appropriate behavior through reinforcement and correction. That's really kind of boring if you're looking at dogs playing and, you know, I want to see them wrestle and growl and I think that's cute. And, you know, I can ascribe all kinds of feelings to it. But in reality, puppy number one gets up and tackles puppy number two. That's a threat. In the animal kingdom, there is a hierarchy. So puppy number one is trying to figure out how to exert dominance, how to capture prey, whatever puppy number one is learning at that particular point. It's a basic skill. Puppy number two picks it up as a threat and it's not a threat like I'm going to have to kill my brother. It's a threat of, oh no, you are not going to be the top dog. So the two of them start wrestling. You have a threat and a counter threat. Both of them are trying to figure out who's going to be top dog. Both puppies get a surge of adrenaline. The puppy that dominates at the end receives a dopamine surge that reinforces those behaviors. He's like, yeah, I'm the top dog. So he's going to probably do that again and he may take on other puppies in the litter. He's learning. He's learning and every time he does something that is successful that helps him gain survival behaviors, there's going to be a dopamine surge with some norepinephrine. Puppying and norepinephrine are involved in learning, but they're also involved in pleasure and reward. So it says, not only are we going to remember that, we're going to try to do that again because that was pretty cool. Now, on the other hand, if puppy number one plays too rough, puppy number two will become aggressive or leave. So then puppy number two could beat puppy number one and puppy number one won't have that adrenaline surge. Or puppy number two will just leave and go, I don't want to play with you if you're going to be like that. Either way, puppy number one doesn't get the dopamine surge. So he's not likely to try that behavior again. Next time, I mean, you can even go and find videos on YouTube of puppies playing or if you go and find old videos of puppy bowl, which is the animal version of the Super Bowl that Animal Planet plays every year. You can see this behavior kind of playing out who wins, who loses, where the dopamine surges are that reinforce behavior. It's kind of cool, kind of amusing for 10 minutes. Anyway, so the example number two humans have learned to label certain internal experiences with feeling words like angry, scared or happy. So let's take Sally. Sally goes to a pet store and a puppy comes out sits in her lap and puts its head on her leg. We know that contact with animals or other people usually causes the release of dopamine and oxytocin, which are both reward chemicals. There are bonding chemicals. Sally calls this reaction, this feeling that she gets when the puppy sits down. She goes, oh, aren't you sweet? And she may label this as happy. Now, if Sally had previously had a threatening experience with the dog, it would be very different. When she saw it, her body would likely respond by secreting adrenaline, kicking off the fight or flight reaction, and she would say she was afraid. So we're talking again about neurochemical reactions that we've put labels on, happy, fear, anger. The brain receives signals and based upon prior learning, which behavior is called conditioning, responds with either fight or anger, flee or fear because of a surge of adrenaline and norepinephrine. Both fight and flee are brought on by a surge of adrenaline and norepinephrine. Prior learning tells us whether we can take whatever the threat it is and subdue it, which is the fight, or we need to get the heck out of there and that's the flee. Both are represented, basically, if you will, by the same neurochemical dump. There's also the possibility that there's no reaction. There are stimuli and you're all over the place in your environment right now, and you're not reacting to them. Your brain's receiving those signals and it's just taking them in and throwing them out, not important, not important, not important. And usually on the 157th one, it'll go, oh, maybe I need to pay attention. And obviously, I'm exaggerating, but it is possible for your brain to take in stimuli and go, you know, there's just no need to exert energy. This isn't a threat. It isn't necessarily something I need to remember. So we're just going to let it go. The third option is your brain receives a signal that something is pleasurable. It makes you happy. You want to do it again. It is self-sustaining. It's going to promote survival. So your brain will secrete dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, GABA, and maybe oxytocin. Not all of them necessarily, but basically you have an increase in your happy relaxation. I want to do that again, learning chemicals. Humans label these different chemical responses with different feeling words. Like I said earlier, anger and fear are both created when adrenaline is excreted into the body and the fight-or-flight reaction is kicked off. What you label it is based on your prior conditioning and your learning experiences. My point with this would become clear in a minute. The same responses can be labeled differently by two different people. Fear versus acceleration. Think about going in to a lecture hall. You have been hired to lecture to a crowd of 150 people. Now, two people are going in there and you're both excreting high levels of adrenaline, but the person who is labeling it as exhilarating is also excreting dopamine. It's like, I know this. I can do this and it's really fun and it's rewarding. So they're labeling it exhilaration. The other person has high levels of adrenaline, but they're labeling it as fear. So we need to look at what's going on, what neurochemicals theoretically are being secreted, and why. Why is this either perceived as a threat or something really exciting? People with anxiety, anger, or resultant depression, and what do I mean by that? We've talked before about how the body can only run on high gear. Just like if you remember the old stick shift cars, you can only drive a car in second gear at 50 miles an hour for so long before it kind of blows up. I never did it, but you see where I'm going. Our body adjusts so we don't basically overheat. After a while, if you can't escape the threat and you can't defeat the threat, there's a condition or situation we call learned helplessness, which is basically resultant depression. The person feels helpless and hopeless because they were anxious or angry and couldn't defeat or work with or whatever word you want to use, couldn't accommodate the threat. So people with dysphoria, I'm going to use that general term now, may need to recondition their labels. So something that was threatening in the past, let's take the puppy and Sally. When Sally was six, maybe the neighbor had a big old dog that used to chase her up and down the fence and bark at her and bear its teeth. So that was very threatening when she was six. But she can recondition. So not every dog is that same big old dog with the bearing teeth that would chase her when she goes into a pet store. And yeah, there are dogs barking, but she can recondition her perception of what's going on and ask herself, is this a threatening situation? And it comes down really to basic verbiage like that. Not getting overly complicated. Just saying, is this really a threat right now? When you were six and that big old dog came barreling down the fence line at you. Yeah, I can see where you'd be scared when you are walking into a pet store and there are 15 dogs and all of them are in cages. We're assuming it's pet adoption day at Petco or something. And they're barking because they're excited. Is this a threat? And that's where you can start reconditioning. Systematic desensitization is really based on this principle. Relabel things. If you're getting ready, let's take the example of going into a lecture hall. And somebody's terrified that they're going to go in and make a mistake. If you can help them change their perspective and look at it as this exciting opportunity to present and to work on their public presentation skills and whatever else you can find, cognitively restructure that situation to focus on the positive, then you may be able to relabel the reaction as excited instead of terrified. Now, some others that I worked with patients with eating disorders for many years that I want to bring up here. As a society, American society, we tend to mislabel being stressed, angry, anxious, depressed as hungry. Hungry is a junk label for a lot of things. You ask somebody how they feel and they're like, I feel hungry. Hungry is not a feeling and neither is fat. Both of those we really need to look and say, are you actually physiologically hungry? Is your body telling you you're hungry? Or are you having an emotion that you associate with comfort eating? When people a lot of times in who have eating disorders say that they feel fat, it may mean they feel unlovable, gross. It may mean they feel helpless and anxious. They don't feel like anybody will ever love them or appreciate them. And they associate that with being fat. So instead of being able to identify the feeling words, they talk about fat. Something we need to work on in treatment in order to switch from physiological states to emotional labeling. Another way you can relabel is basically using the act approach that we've talked about. Instead of saying I am stressed or I am excited, you can say, whatever it is is causing me to have the feeling that or I am having the feeling that I am scared or I am anxious. Put it out there, separate it from the I statement. So it's something you can sort of control a little bit more. You can imagine holding whatever that feeling or reaction is. If it's causing you to have a feeling that you can hold that in your hands. If it's causing you to be, you can't really hold that in your hands. Part of recovery is identifying the physiological response to the stimulus and labeling it with a feeling word. Start out with, is it excitatory? Which is, is it getting you all ramped up? Or is it pleasurable and relaxing? Now some of your excitatory reactions like exhilaration could be positive. So then once you identify whether you're getting ramped up or you're calming down, then you can identify whether it's a good ramped up or a bad ramped up. Either way, you're using a whole lot of energy. It's exciting. Basic terms, unconditioned stimulus response. Something that evokes an unconditioned or automatic response in an infant and an adult. So this is something that no matter how old you are, what experience you have with it, it evokes a similar response. Loud noises, evoke a startle response. The pain evokes a getaway from it response. If you're excessively cold, you shiver. If you're excessively hot, you sweat. Physical contact stimulates the release of oxytocin. This is not something that an infant goes, gee, I think I like this. This is pleasurable. You know, let's release oxytocin. Kangaroo care is so, so helpful because this is one of those unconditioned, unconditioned stimulus response things. When parent holds child, especially skin to skin, but when parent holds child, there is a bonding, calming reaction that happens. Why is this important? Well, it's important for us to understand that there are certain things that are unconditioned stimuli that we don't necessarily have as much control over, but these also form the basis of our future condition stimuli. So if something scared a child, a loud noise scared a child, and the child became afraid of loud noises like little Albert, does it mean the person has to always be startled and extremely distressed by loud noises? No, we can recondition that as they grow older, but it's important to understand, and we're going to talk about it in a minute, the survival benefit of some of these. A conditioned stimulus is something that in itself has no meaning to the person. Best example I can give you is a yellow light. Now when you see a yellow light, what do you do? Some of you slow down. Some of you floor it. So depending on what you've learned, your experiences in the past, you will either slow down or floor it. So the yellow light does not mean the same thing to everybody. It's a conditioned stimulus. Most of these responses can be traced back to fight, flee, forget, or repeat. And I tried as long as I could to think of another F and I couldn't. So is it something I can dominate or need to dominate for protection? Is it something I need to escape from in order to survive? Is it something that is irrelevant to my survival and I just need to not pay attention to it? Or is it something that could benefit my survival that I want to do again? Discriminative stimuli. All things being equal. This is the stimulus that triggers the reaction. So you get up in the morning and it's a sunny day. You get up on the normal time of day. No problems. You go in, have your coffee. You're getting ready to walk out the door. Great mood. You spill coffee on your shirt. And all of a sudden you are in a foul mood because now you're running late and it's just this cascade of events and you're focusing now on all of the negatives. So a discriminative stimulus sets the occasion for a behavior. You can be at work. You're exposed to most of the same stimuli every single day at work. But some days at work you have a bad day because something happens. That's a discriminative stimulus. Maybe it's that day every month where you have to go for your monthly team meetings that you just really hate going to. Or maybe it's the day of the month that you celebrate everybody's birthday. So the cafeteria is going to cater a birthday party and you're like score good food, not having to do work for an hour. I'm down for it. These are discriminative stimuli and they can be positive or negative. And learned helplessness, like I said before, occurs when there is a threat of some sort that the person tries to defeat, the person tries to escape from. But no matter how hard he or she tries, she can't seem to extricate from the threat. The threat seems to always dominate. So the person just quits trying. And we've seen learned helplessness in depression. We've seen learned helplessness in people with addictions who typically have concurrent depression. So it's important to understand where this comes from. Why would somebody just quit trying? Because they feel like they're out of options. They've tried everything that they know and it's been punished. So they're out of response options. So a measurable response to the basic feelings cheat sheet. Excitatory. You have adrenaline, norepinephrine and glutamate. These are the ones that give you your get up and go. Fight, anger, rage, resentment, jealousy, envy, regret and stress. Now the first couple you have and you're like sure, resentment. Resentment is a low level anger at someone for something. Jealousy can be perceived as being angry at yourself for not having something or being angry at someone else for having something that you want as is envy. Regret is an interesting one. Regret is often anger at self for doing or not doing something. But people who have regrets tend to lash themselves with 50 wet noodles and they won't stop. And instead of saying okay how can we use this energy to address whatever it is you did or didn't do. It is still an excitatory response to something that happened in the past and it just keeps on going and it drains their energy because they're not letting it go. Flee. Things that are associated with the flee response are fear, anxiety, feeling nervous, apprehensive or timid. The neutral responses where there's not a whole lot of push either way can come from something that's not a threat or can come from learned helplessness. The body's like I get y'all excited and you try to fight and try to flee and it doesn't work and if I keep you revved up like that you're just going to overheat. So I'm going to say that this isn't worth responding to right now because we can't fix it. And then inhibitory responses. When we're talking about neurotransmitters we call them excitatory or rev up and inhibitory or calm down. Inhibitory responses are your calming ones. Serotonin, GABA and dopamine. Dopamine is your main pleasure chemical. It tells you let's do that again. Now think of a little kid who goes on the elevator and they push the button and they get to ride down and they want to push the button and ride up and then they want to push the button and ride down. Is that survival? No, not necessarily. But it gives them a feeling of mastery over something which you can kind of trace back. People who experience feelings of happiness if they're elated, if they feel victorious, successful or competent. All of those feeling labels are associated with different levels of these calming chemicals and reinforcing chemicals being excreted. So fight or flee stimuli that present a threat of pain or death can trigger the excitatory fight or flight response. So through experiences or conditioning, people learn what threats they can defeat or what things will defeat them. And we file those away. This is where we start talking about conditioned stimuli. When you're a little baby, when you're a toddler, you know most toddlers don't have a whole lot of fear. They're just like, cool, let me try that. And if it has a good outcome, they do it again. If it has a bad outcome, they generally don't. But then as they get older, they may learn to differentiate. They may try and then figure out what things they need to be afraid of or what things they can't control and what things they can. Unfortunately, a lot of times as we grow up, we don't move on to learning that whole concept of acceptance. So anything we can't control becomes something that causes anxiety. Useful interventions for fight or flee. Identify the threat. What is it that was threatening your safety? And we're going to talk about threats in a minute. Why was it labeled as something to fight that was controllable or something to fear that was uncontrollable? What in your past, how did this become something to either fight or flee? Why are you even paying attention to it? And then break down the parts of the situation into those parts that are controllable and those parts that are uncontrollable. Once we start looking at things instead of a global, all dogs are aggressive or all meetings with my supervisor are going to turn out badly or every time I do this, I'm going to fail. And then we can start looking at exceptions. We can start looking at parts of the situation that are controllable like preparing ahead of time and then figuring out how to deal with the uncontrollable. So a note about threats. I keep saying this comes back down to basic survival. And in my mind, it really does. Your basic fears that we've talked about in other classes. Loss of control. This underscores most fears. If you're rejected, then you lost control. The person, someone else rejected you and you have no control over that. If you fail, you tried to do something. You were not successful. You did not control it. So you lost control. See where I'm going. Fighting or fleeing often provides control. So when you fear a loss of control, a lot of times people would become aggressive to either dominate or run away from it so they don't have to face it. Isolation and rejection. From its most primitive is the fear of death or inability to procreate. As living beings, we don't want to die. If we go back to way, way back when, it was definitely better to live in villages instead of live out by yourself. If you want to go even back further or down the food chain if you will and look at animals, for the most part, there are some exceptions, animals do better living in colonies so they can help each other out. And you can't perpetuate the species unless you can procreate. So if you're isolated and rejected all the time, then you're not able to perpetuate the species, which in theory causes a level of existential anxiety if you will. So on a higher order level of thinking, if someone is fearing rejection and isolation, we say, alright, if this person rejects you or if you are isolated for a little while, is it really going to kill you? Let's look at the exceptions. When have you been rejected before? How did you survive? How does everybody reject you all the time? Have you been isolated before? What was the outcome? Are you isolated right now? Likely the answer is no. So we can say, okay, so isolation doesn't last forever either. What is it about these that you perceive as threatening right now? And then we can work on that as a therapeutic issue. We can also examine alternate explanations for isolation and rejection. Why are you isolated right now? Well, you just moved 1,500 miles away from your family to start college, and you've met nobody yet. Yeah, you're isolated, no doubt, and it's a little freaky. So what do we do to deal with that? And who else is experiencing that? If somebody rejected you, whether it's for a job or for a relationship or whatever, are there other explanations? Is it all about you? Or maybe it's about the situation. You weren't a good fit for that particular company. Or maybe it had more to do with that person. Who knows? But these are all things that are not as behavioral in nature. They're more on the cognitive side. That we can pull in when we help people understand that there are certain things that everybody fears to a greater or lesser extent. The unknown. Well, when we don't know what's going to happen, we could get killed, or we could experience a lot of pain. Is that likely to happen? Probably not. So we want to say, what's the probability this will end in death, pain, or extreme misery? Probably very unlikely. And I've shared with you before that I really don't like driving in big cities. Freaks me out. Because it's the unknown. I do better now that we have GPS's. Because when I first started driving, there wasn't such a thing as a mobile phone, let alone a GPS. I know, I'm old. But with that, I feel a little bit more confident. But in reality, what is the probability that I was going to end up crashing my car into a building or something catastrophic when driving in a big city? Very, very unlikely. Worst case scenario, I would get lost. How many other times have you confronted an unknown and the outcome was positive or neutral? So how many other times, in my case, had I driven in a big city? I grew up in South Florida. So gone to Miami or Fort Lauderdale or Tampa. Driven around and not had a catastrophic experience. Yeah, most of them. So all of this angst and the unknown. Yeah, the unknown is a little weird. But looking at prior times when I've confronted a similar unknownness, it didn't end up so bad. These are ways we can help clients start challenging some of their basic fears. And failure. Again, death or pain. What's the probability that if I fail, it will result in death or pain? And sometimes I ask this question of a client and sometimes it seems like it's sarcastic, so I don't. And that's going to be something that you have to choose. But it also brings to a point that likely this isn't going to be catastrophic. If you fail, is the pain that you feel, and we're talking about emotional pain here, related to fear or rejection and or loss of control. If so, see the prior two slides. We want to help people again remember that rejection is also not going to be catastrophic and loss of control. They've handled situations like that before and done fine. How many other times have you tried and failed and the outcome was at least neutral? Most of us can cite a bunch of times. And how can you make failure into a positive or neutral experience? You know, maybe you want to say, yeah, this relationship failed. Now I know what I don't want to do again or I tried this and I failed. Now I know that this isn't my strong suit and I need to change gears. There are a lot of benefits to failure from teaching us perseverance to helping us learn what we don't want to do. To helping us basically build a better mousetrap for lack of a better word or phrase. Forget some stimuli illicit little or no response are often ignored. Now this is important to us because mindlessness can cause people to fail to identify positive stimuli, which produce dopamine and make us happy. I want you to think about for you just today, how many happy positive things did you notice between when you got up this morning and now? Okay, so my guess is a lot of you are going, you know, I don't really remember. When I was driving out of my subdivision this morning, there was a fawn on the side of the road. I saw three bunny rabbits. The cows across the street are still having calves. And you know, I got to work pretty well. It was a beautiful temperature outside. Trying to stay conscious of the positive stimuli kind of charges you up. So the negative stimuli don't throw you for as much of a loop. Negative stimuli. Now if we don't notice those, you may be going, well, if I don't notice the negative stimuli bonus, you know, I can just let some of that stuff go. Unfortunately, it builds up. So if you get up and maybe you get up 10 minutes late, you hit the snooze too many times. And then you start getting ready for work and you're having a bad hair day. And you walk out the door and you realize halfway to work that you forgot to eat breakfast. None of those are huge big threats and you may just kind of ignore all of them as you're going along. But then at 2.30 in the afternoon, something happens and you react overreact to the situation. You react with an 8 to something that deserved a 2. Not paying attention to stimuli, you know, little annoyances in the environment can really add up over time. One drop of water behind a dam, not going to do anything. 100 bazillion drops of water behind a dam. Probably not going to do anything. 100 bazillion drops of water plus one behind a dam can leave the dam to break. Everything has its limits. Negative stimuli can be reconditioned as neutral. So we want to find a positive. If it's a snowy day, you can get up and go, oh crap, we're going to, half the things aren't going to be open today, driving is going to be miserable. The kids don't have to go to school today, so I've got to find childcare. You know, you can really get yourself wound up in the negative. Or you can say, hey, the kids don't have to go to school today. I might have to take it slow getting into work, but think about being able to snowboard when I get home. I happen to love snow so I can find a lot of positives for snowy days. And it also makes it a whole lot more tolerable to be in the cold. If it's pretty and snowy outside than if it's gray and gloomy. Not worth the energy. On a rainy day, you might get up and some people can get in a really grumpy mood and be like, my hair is going to be a mess. People are going to be driving like crap. I'm going to get wet. I just washed the car. Or you can just figure it's not worth the energy to get upset about any of that because it's going to rain. And no matter how upset you get, it's not going to change anything. Pull your hair back into a ponytail. Put on a smile. Give yourself a little extra time to get to work. And just think that God washed the car for you again. And repeat, adding and noticing positive stimuli in the environment is vital. Think about when you've had a grouchy day. You know, you get up and you're on the wrong side of the bed. You wake up and the first thing you go is, oh, it's going to be a long day. Most of us, and we've talked about this with cognitive restructuring. Most of us, if we don't catch it, we'll notice the negative in just about everything most of the day because we get that mindset. If you get your mindset and you're in a happy mood or you try to focus on the happy positive things or every time something bad happens, you look for the silver lining, it actually does help with your mood. And it causes a lot less drain on your energy levels. Positive stimuli in the environment can include smells like pumpkin spice. And I'm kidding. This has been big on Facebook right now, so I had to put that one there. I mean, whatever smells that make you happy, put those in your environment. You know, get those little tart warmers that you can plug into the wall and create a smell that you like. Get some essential oils if you want to. Whatever it is that makes you happy, keep that going. Sights. For me, it's wildlife and my kids, so if I put pictures of those things up, it makes me smile. Sounds. I love the sound of a babbling brook. Most places that I've worked have had those white noise machines where you can set it so it sounds like ocean waves or babbling brooks or monkeys in the jungle, rainforest storms. If there's a sound that makes you feel calm, put that on. It's a positive stimuli that's going to increase your happy, calming chemicals and feel. We don't often think about feel, but when I walk outside and there's a crisp autumn breeze, my mood automatically goes up. Fall is my favorite time of year. That's me. Now, other people may love summer, spring, whatever it works for you, but a particular temperature, humidity level, a particular feel, or even the clothes that you wear. I have an affinity. I love angora fur and I raised angoras for a while, so I was able to harvest their fur and spin it into yarn, and it's probably the softest thing I've ever felt, and it didn't hurt the bunny at all, I promise, to harvest their fur. I would just brush to get the fur out to make the yarn. But that's a really soft feeling. Some people like cotton or bamboo consider even the smallest stimuli to help increase happy feelings. So putting it together, humans label physiological reactions with feeling words. What do you experience when you're scared? When I'm scared, I get flushed. My heart starts to beat. I breathe more rapidly but more shallowly. My hands start to shake. My palms start to sweat. When I get angry, believe it or not, I have the same physiological reaction. Now, how does that happen? Well, because it's the same neurochemical reaction. I've just learned to label them differently based on conditioning. So how do I differentiate? Prior experience. If it's a situation that I think there's more benefit to fight than to flee based on my prior learning experiences, then guess which way I'm going to go? We can help clients identify places where they're making some cognitive errors to decrease their anger and fear reactions. What do you experience when you're happy? Now, this is another one that a lot of times we don't ask clients. We ask them about all the negative stuff. But if you're not sweating and shaking and flushed and breathing rapidly, what are you doing? One of the most important takeaways from behavior modification is you can't eliminate a behavior without replacing it with something. If you eliminate, you know, every time little Johnny does something, you tell him, no, don't do that. Eventually little Johnny's just going to sit there and he's not going to do anything. Learned helplessness because he doesn't have any other behaviors to try. He's like, well, I'm not allowed to do anything. So what do you experience when you're happy? Slower breathing. Relaxed muscles. Take some time when you're having a particularly calm afternoon, maybe a Sunday afternoon or some time when you're calm and happy and content and really identify what you're experiencing and what happy and relaxed feels like to you. How can you use discriminative stimuli to increase happy responses? When I'm having a bad day and, you know, we all do, I have a screensaver on my phone and it's one of the foster kittens that we had and I opened it up and it always makes me smile because she has this little look on her face like she's just done something very mischievous. What else can you do to increase happy responses in your office, in your car, in your house, in yourself? I mean, sometimes it's just a matter of telling yourself a joke or getting a silly song in your head. When my kids were small, I would get songs like Goober Peas stuck in my head and I would be going down the hall at work singing Peas, Peas, Peas, Peas, something Goober Peas. Goodness, how delicious eating Goober Peas and people would look at me like I was crazy. I was like, what? I've got a six month old at home. Leave me alone. But I was okay with that and, you know, they started to learn to accept themselves for who they were. We want to increase the feeling of control and self-efficacy. Loss of control and the unknown or the two fears we're really addressing here. So any discriminative stimuli you can put in the environment that make people feel like, you know, they've got this. Awards, if you're working as a supervisor, just a post-it note on somebody's computer and that was a really awesome job. Might be enough to really make their day. It makes them feel like they are doing well and they're in control. What can we do to increase self-esteem so people don't fear rejection or isolation? Tell people what a good job they're doing. Involve them in things. Acknowledge them. Just make eye contact. That is a discriminative stimulus in and of itself. Smile. Oh my gosh. And increase feelings of competence to combat failure. Every time somebody doesn't do something, you know, when we talk about corrective feedback, we always talk about starting with the positive, providing the constructive feedback, and then summing up with the negative and the solution or summing up with the positive and the solution for whatever the problem was. That's why we're still ending on a positive and we're starting with a positive so people aren't feeling like they've failed at everything. And use a discriminative stimuli to decrease angry responses. So what can your clients do if they start getting angry? Can they count to 10? Can they call a friend? Can they sing a song? Can they go out and walk? Some people just need to get out and move for a few minutes. To decrease anxious or fearful responses. Maybe they do a worksheet or go to a happy place in their head or any kind of situation, any kind of intervention you can use to help people get out of their current stuckness. And how can you use discriminative stimuli to decrease learned helplessness? Now remember with learned helplessness people are saying, I've tried everything that I know how to try and I've failed. So decreasing learned helplessness means highlighting the exceptions when you've succeeded, you've done X, Y, and Z. So maybe keeping a gratitude journal, keeping a journal of effective coping tools. Brainstorm with your clients, what you can do in order to decrease some of their negative responses, but you also want to remember that as you're decreasing you're also increasing. So if you're decreasing learned helplessness by keeping a list of exceptions, that's also increasing their sense of self-efficacy. Behavior modification is concerned with the stimuli in the environment that evoke a response. Unconditioned stimuli evoke a response based upon survival needs. Conditioned stimuli have no meaning to the person, but through experience become associated with pleasure or pain and threat. The excitatory responses, especially anger and fear, serve to protect the person from what they have in the past experienced as producing pain or being threatening. Stimuli can be reconditioned in order to change the biochemical response or the feeling. So basically we can desensitize to things that cause a huge excitatory response. Think about spiders. If somebody's afraid of spiders, initially they're going to have a huge adrenaline rush, but we can recondition that so when they see a spider, it's at least neutral. People with logical experimental mindsets often respond well to behavior modification techniques because it's more like solving a mystery. It is imperative to include alternate responses, not just punish a behavior or try to eliminate something. We have to add something in its place. In the next segment, which will be on Thursday, we're going to discuss reinforcement, punishment, and kind of putting all of this together to shape behaviors into what we really want to help our clients achieve. If you enjoy this podcast, please like and subscribe either in your podcast player or on YouTube. You can attend and participate in our live webinars with Dr. Snipes by subscribing at allceus.com. This episode has been brought to you in part by Allceus.com, providing 24-7 multimedia continuing education and pre-certification training to counselors, therapists, and nurses since 2006. Use coupon code COUNCILORTOOLBOX to get a 20% discount off your order this month.