How That Urge to Eat All the Crap Means You're Winning at Losing: Behavior and Mindset Changes Lead to Extinction Bursts, Patience and Persistence Leads to Victory

At the park, the pigeon pecks a pushbutton for pellets. Pellets appear.

Pushbutton for pellets. Pellets appear.

Pushbutton, pellets. For days, weeks, and months.

Pushbutton, pellets; until one day it stops. The machine is turned off. The pellets have been moved to another machine which dispenses them regularly on the other side of the park. Our pigeon has found that machine -- he's fine. But he hasn't abandoned the original machine. Still, that pigeon is going to be futilely pecking that old pushbutton for days.

Some days, it'll push that pushbutton even more often than it used to. It stubbornly refuses to give up, as if it defiantly refuses to give in to the new reality. And this burst of attention and behavior toward the pushbutton is called an extinction burst.

Beyond that peak is a reduction of the behavior, and the expectations around the pushbutton begins to fade.

Formally, an extinction burst is "a temporary increase in the frequency, duration, or magnitude of the target response" (Lerman, Iwata, & Wallace, 1999)

You've probably seen one in action -- watch a parent in a grocery store who is trying to wean the toddler off of the candy in the aisle. That child is going to progressively whine, scream, and then have a breakdown: seemingly upping the stakes until the parent folds. The experienced parent will endure and outlast it. Everyone else in the store wants to buy the kid some candy. The child is not that intelligent or conniving; the root of that burst of activity is more primal: persistence pays off!

Our habits become encoded in our more-automated basal ganglia after several repetitions of cue+behavior+reward reinforcement. Our higher-functioning pre-frontal cortex is barely involved at all. Our established habits not only can outweigh and frustrate our intelligent intentions, they will fight to reassert themselves and bypass the interference by our decisions!

For this reason, you might find your emotional-childlike brain in a race to eat the snacks quickly, before your intelligent-parentlike brain can notice and stop it. The result is that you're very frustrated that you're, "sabotaging yourself". You feel like you can't win because something inside you refuses to give up.

And now you know, it is something inside you refusing to give up.

And the burst is the last gasp -- right before it gives up.

You will win this. Endure and outlast it if you can. And if you can't, try again. Try longer. Try something else. But the extinction burst is a normal part of the process. If it helps: don't think of it as irritating and upsetting, think of it as a calm rational parent would think of it -- necessary and a little amusing that humans are wired like pigeons.

^{♂55 5'11/179㎝ SW:298℔/135㎏ CW:183℔/83㎏ [3Y AMA], [1Y recap] MyFitnessPal+Walks🚶Hikes+TOPS}

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