YouTube Challenge : Break Bad Habits : Live AMA

Foreign. Hello, everybody, and welcome to yet another Ask me Anything. I AM your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. And I need to close some of these other things that are going to be dinging. Let's see. There. I think we've taken care of that now. Hello, Adriana. I'm just tidying up a few things in my browsers while we're waiting to get started. I see we have 12 people here. Hey, Roller girl. Always good to see you. Same to you, Ty. Always good to see you as well. I am excited to talk about breaking bad habits today, but of course, we can talk about anything that y' all are interested in talking about. Oh, good to know your actual name, Roller girl. Nice to meet you, Crystal. Hello, Cindy. Always good to see you. What questions do you have or challenges do you face when you're trying to break bad habits or when you're just trying to form a new habit? Even when we break bad habits, what we are essentially doing is forming a new habit. From a coaching standpoint, we look at moving toward our goals, moving toward the behaviors that we want to embrace. So instead of getting rid of something like a bad choice or a bad behavior, we are going to focus on, how can I change so I'm making better choices? How can I start making better decisions? Good morning, Tom and Maria. Unfortunately, habits are things that we fall into. And remember, all behavior is supported by reinforcement. And we got into this habit, whatever this habit is, because it was in some way reinforced. And from a strict behavior modification perspective, we want to look back and say, okay, when did I start doing this? And in what ways is that behavior being reinforced? When. We'll just talk about smokers for a minute, because cigarettes can be very rewarding for some people. And looking back at when my mom started smoking, she started smoking because it was the cool thing to do, and there was a lot of social reinforcement. Then as soon as she started smoking, obviously the nicotine had its benefits and that was reinforcing. So there were two sources of reinforcement that encouraged her to. To continue smoking. When we look at other habits that we have, maybe you have a bad habit like biting your nails. Okay, I've gotten better about that over the years. I break mine a lot, but I don't bite them anymore. But why do people bite their nails? Most people bite their nails when they're either stressed or they're bored. And that is something that helps them divert some of that nervous energy to another behavior. So instead of sitting there and shaking their foot like crazy or getting up and walking around, they Bite their nails. It. How is it reinforced? Well, it helps the person, you know, feel a little bit better in some way. Now, one of the things that we do when we're trying to help people stop biting their nails is they have this distasteful polish or stuff that you can put on your nails. So when you start biting your nails, you taste that and it's nasty. Or what worked for me better was looking at a slide of all the germs and nasty things that are underneath our fingernails and on top of our hands that we're putting in our mouth every time we bite our nails. So whatever works for you to discourage that behavior. But then you've also got to figure out what you're going to replace lace it with. If you bit your nails because it was something you did when you were stressed, what can you do differently? My husband used to get on me a lot because another thing I did when I was stressed is I would grab at my neck and I would twist the skin. I wasn't picking hairs or anything. I was just, you know, pinching at myself or whatever. And he's like, why are you doing that? Stop doing that. And I wanted to stop doing that, but I found that I had a habit of doing it. So he got me this little worry stone. So when I'm feeling stressed, I pick up my worry stone and it gives me something to do with my hands. Okay. So talking about habits and behaviors, what habits do you have that you want to break or do you not have that you want to form? You know, that's either way. Cindy identifies eating junk food when feeling stressed, their short term relief, but long term regret. Why? Because of the short term relief. When you eat junk food, it's highly processed, likely high in sugar, not always, which causes your brain to release serotonin and dopamine, which helps you feel better in the short term. And a lot of that, you know, you're self medicating in a way. Yes, there's longer term regret. So one of the things we need to do is evaluate what could you do instead when you start feeling that craving. And the same thing is true for people who drink alcohol, use drugs. They are often responding to low dopamine, low serotonin, high stress, and they're self medicating. So what do we do when you start feeling that? Developing distress tolerance skills. So you can urge surf, as they call it. And urge surfing means recognizing, I really want to do this right now, but I don't have to. I'm having the urge to eat I'm having the urge to drink alcohol or smoke a cigarette, whatever. I'm having this urge now. I don't have to nurture this urge. I can just let it ride out on a wave. It's easier said than done. I encourage people sitting there just thinking, okay, I'm just going to let this go is a lot easier said than done. Because a lot of times we tend to start focusing on that urge. It's like, okay, I really, really want to get up and order a pizza or, or whatever it is. Okay, that's fine. So develop distress tolerance skills. Develop activities that can distract you for 10 to 15 minutes. Most urges will pass in 10 to 15 minutes, and that can be really helpful, whether it's drinking water or taking a bath or listening to music, writing in a journal, going on a walk outside, playing with your dog. I don't know anything that you can do. So you're not just sitting there going, okay, when is this urge gonna pass? That's the first thing. Another thing you can do is make it more difficult to access those things. If it's junk food, don't keep it in the house. You, if you have to get up, get dressed, get in the car, drive down to the grocery store to get it. You're less likely to eat it impulsively if you need to have it around the house because there are other people in the house who want it. Maybe find a different place, place to keep the junk food, like in a cabinet in the garage. So when every time you walk into the kitchen, you're not tempted. And if you really need the help, you can put a lock on it. So you don't have access to it. You don't have the, the combination for that lock. That is a personal choice, how much control you want to have over the situation. It's important to recognize and acknowledge and reward yourself or compliment yourself. At least when you surf that urge, you wake up the next morning and you're like, hey, I really wanted to binge on junk food last night. And I didn't, I didn't. I made it through the evening. Good for me. I can do this. Acknowledging your power, acknowledging that you can do it, is also important. If there's something you're craving, and let's just stay with junk food, whether it's pizza or Oreos, I don't care. Thinking to yourself, yes, I want it. I want it now. Probably not the best time to have it because it's too close to bed or whatever. I will allow myself to have it for lunch. Tomorrow so you have something to look forward to. That's another way you can do it. Now those are all avoiding eating. Now we not need to look at. Why do you want to binge on that junk food? Because you're stressed? Because your stress hormones and neurotransmitters are high and your relaxation ones are low. What can you do instead to increase dopamine, increase serotonin, increase gaba, Any of those activities we've talked about that help strengthen your vagus nerve? Whether it's square breathing or, or massaging the vagus nerve or going on a walk, there are a lot of things that you can do to help yourself downregulate when you're stressed. Journaling works for some people. Get it out of your head and on paper. So I'm stressed about this. I'm going to write it down and I am going to leave it in my notebook and then I can come back to it tomorrow when the workday starts. So I'm not carrying around with me having it bop around in my head all night long while I'm trying to focus on my kids and my family and stuff like that. Identify other things. If you're regularly getting, we'll call it dopamine deficient, why is that? And what needs to change to reduce your overall general stress level and increase those positive neurochemicals and hormones in your body? But that's a great point or a great thing that we need to talk about because a lot of us, a lot of us gravitate towards comfort foods when we're feeling stressed. And they're called comfort foods for a reason. Not only do they does the sugar and the high processed nature cause the release of dopamine and serotonin, but a lot of times they're associated with happy thoughts. Let's see. Oversharing when stressed and regret it later. That's another one that people may tend to do. When you start feeling stressed, you want somebody to help it help you. When you start feeling stressed, you may start feeling out of control and you're like, let me share this so maybe other people can help me. Taking a minute when you start feeling stressed, being mindful of that and possibly writing it down instead of sharing it with anybody and everybody. If you just feel like you're going to erupt or write it down, write down what you're stressed about and give yourself time to get into your wise mind before you start going and sharing with people. It can be really enticing to share with others in order to get people on Your side to get support, to get validation and all that can be wonderful. But how much do they really need to know and what's appropriate to share with different people? And looking at the long term consequences of how does sharing oversharing impact all of your relationships? And I'm not exactly sure what you're oversharing, but some people can overshare how they feel about what others did or who others are and that can create a lot of tension in, in relationships. Recognizing short term oversharing is often a way of trying to get support and comfort and feel less out of control. Determining what is it that I can do when I'm starting to feel out of control besides over sharing to help me feel more empowered and help me collect my thoughts. Developing those distress tolerance skills and becoming mindful of your distress so you are not running to other people immediately as soon as you start getting stressed. Recognizing that that's not a choice you want to make anymore and falling back on these new choices of as I mentioned, journaling is, is a great one. Even just distracting yourself for 10 to 15 minutes. So, so you, your brain can settle down. Practice some grounding exercises so your brain can settle down and you can get into your wise mind and determine, I feel out of control. I feel overwhelmed. But when you get into your wise mind, you can look at it, look at it objectively and decide, am I out of control? Am I really? Are things really as bad as I feel they are? Because remember, feelings are not facts. Feelings give us the energy to determine what facts are real in the current context. Why aren't pictures of tar or cancerous lungs persuasive enough to get smokers to quit? Nicotine is one of the most addictive drugs on the planet. It works on so many different neurotransmitter systems. That's one of the reasons, number two, a lot of people, there's a threshold where they show you something and you're like, oh, that could be me. And it scares people. And they're like, okay, I don't want to do that. But if you go too far and which a lot of times they do on the stop smoking commercials, they show people who've lost, you know, entire parts of their jaw or lost the ability to talk, lost their l, their larynx, or they have these tarred up lungs, people think to themselves, that's not me. That person must have been smoking three packs a day. Or that person must have been doing something different. That's not me. That's not my problem. Or they feel Notice, I'm saying feel, not necessarily reality, but they feel like, like they need that in order to handle the stress. They when you look at two bad choices, you're going to choose the one that's less painful. And for people who are dealing with a lot of stress and the way they deal with it is through smoking. The idea of stopping smoking means I don't know how I'm going to deal with my stress, plus I'm going to have all the withdrawals from the nicotine. That's painful, that's overwhelming, that is a deal breaker for a lot of people. We need to be able to help them understand, number one, why do you smoke and what can you do instead? But also how can we minimize the pain of stopping? Because stopping is psychologically and physically stressful for, for people and for a long time. It's not just one of those things that, you know, a two week detox and you're feeling better. It takes a long time. And just a lot of people minimize it because nicotine's legal. So they don't assume, they don't recognize that there is a post acute withdrawal syndrome that goes along with smoking as well. And it can be a year or two years before the person's hormones and neurotransmitters, neurotransmitter systems rebalance themselves. Great question. Remember when we have blood tests that shows the levels of the neurotransmitters and the hormones in our entire body, it doesn't necessarily mean that the transmitters are too high or too low in our brain. The other thing we have to remember is that you can have inadequate activation of the GABAergic system. We'll say, since that's the one you brought up for a variety of reasons. Even if you have plenty of gaba, if the GABA receptors are on the fritz, then no matter how much GABA you have, it ain't going to do anything. If your GABA is low, then you probably are developing more GABA receptors and there are things that you may be able to do to increase the secretion of gaba. GABA is secreted when we trigger the rest and digest. It's secreted in our brain when we trigger the rest and digest or the parasympathetic nervous system, also what we commonly call the vagus nerve. I mean, there's more to the parasympathetic nervous system than the vagus nerve. But most people, when they think of the PNs, they think vagus nerve. So start developing tools to activate that vagus nerve. Look at your diet because there are certain nutrients that you need in order to be able to, for your body to be able to make gas gaba. So if your GABA is low, looking at your nutrition, if you've got bowel disturbances, celiac Crohn's, gastric bypass, or a history of alcoholism that keeps you from being able to break down or absorb nutrients as effectively, then you may also need to adjust your diet. And that would be something I would talk with a nutritionist about because you don't need to go overboard, you don't need too much, but making sure that the body has all of the building blocks it needs to make gaba. And I do have a video on nutrition. I actually have a couple videos on nutrition and mental health that might be helpful for taking a look at that. And, and again, increasing anything that increases relaxation is going to help increase GABA levels and activation of that GABAergic system. If the GABAergic system, if the receptors are on the fritz, then there may be a period where your brain has to undergo neurogenesis and rebuild. So as you introduce GABA to your system and you're like, hey, you know, knock, knock, knock at the door, somebody's got to answer. Getting new receptors to build your brain will do that to help balance the system. We also would be, or I would be curious to look at when GABA started going down. What changed in your life? What's your stress like? What medications are you're on, are you on? What's your sleep and your circadian rhythms like? And to see if there's something in one of the various pieces of your life that is correlating with, with the reduction in gaba. Low GABA is going to cause stress. The other thing that's interesting with gaba, and I know you're like, probably going to be like, interesting, I don't know about that. Glutamate, our main stress hormone, is broken down to make gaba. So if you don't have enough glutamate, if you're in burnout and your body just says, I ain't got nothing left to give, then it doesn't have the glutamate to break down to make the gaba. And people who are chronically stressed may get to that point and that's really where we start seeing that burnout, where the person just, they don't have any get up and go. And all of the precursors done got up and went. Hello, Chris. Easy, fun, shine. I've heard that from a lot of ex smokers unfortunately, ex smokers and ex drinkers are bombarded with triggers for smoking and drinking pretty much anywhere they go. Television shows, they still smoke a lot, especially if you watch the older television shows, and they still drink a lot, even on the newer television shows. And it can be very triggering for people. When you go into stores and people are outside smoking or vaping, it's triggering when you walk next to somebody and you can smell the nicotine on them, it's triggering. So people who are, have stopped smoking, who are ex smokers often have to deal with a lot of triggers. Also, a lot of people who are ex smokers did a great job of getting the nicotine out of their system and using the Nicorette or whatever they did. So they aren't physiologically addicted to it anymore. However, they didn't develop, and I don't, I'm not saying this is necessarily you, but it's true for a lot of ex smokers, they didn't develop new tools to help them deal with stress. So when they are faced with stress, the craving to smoke comes back because they don't have other effective tools to use that to use to help them cope with stress. Another thing some people have to do is to uncouple certain things. My, I've shared this before. My mother, three pack a day smoker, used to get up in the morning before she could get her feet on the ground. She had a cigarette in her mouth. She'd get up, she'd make her coffee, she'd drink her coffee, smoke her second cigarette. So getting up, drinking coffee, getting in the car to go to work. This was back when you still smoked in buildings at work. She smoked all day long with all of her colleagues. So there were a lot of places and activities that were tied to smoking and she had to start altering what she did during those periods. So when she got up, instead of putting a cigarette in her mouth, the first thing she started doing was popping a Nicorette gum in her mouth. And yes, you know, that still has nicotine in it, but we're talking harm reduction. Let's get you through. So you start, start breaking this habit. Some people will pair their cigarettes with something nasty. And I'm not recommending doing this, I am not recommending doing this. But they will get a pack of cigarettes and they will put something that is distasteful, like syrup, a little bit of syrup of ipecac on the end of it. So then when they put it in their mouth, it's like, oh my God, this tastes awful. I'm not recommending that. Okay. Absolutely not. But I have talked to some people who've done it. Some people have used hypnotherapy to help them uncouple their. The pairings they've made between different times of day, different activities, and smoking. So there are a lot of different things that you can do to learn alternate skills as well as decouple the pleasure of smoking or the habit of smoking with certain times and places. All right, one more question. I have a bad habit of trying to rescue someone's difficult situation by offering advice instead of just listening. I probably give too much unsolicited advice and like to stop doing this. It's an easy habit to get into, and you don't have to be, quote, codependent to offer unsolicited advice. Many times we want to help. We see a friend struggling or in an uncomfortable place, and we're like, let me help you. Let me tell you what to do. And it comes from a place of caring, it comes from a place of love. It comes from our selfish need to feel better and not see them suffer. Recognizing and. And stopping when we see somebody in pain and we really want to help, being mindful of that, acknowledging to ourself, I see that this person's in pain, and I really want to help and I need to try to give them their space. I need to let them know I'm here for them. But help them try to solve the problem or tell them if they want advice, you know, I've got plenty to give. However you want to phrase that with the different person, with the different people can be really helpful. But the first step is acknowledging, which you're aware of now, the fact that you don't like seeing people in pain, who does? And you desperately want to help. When you start feeling that urge, becoming mindful of it, checking yourself and saying, okay, this is what I'm going to do instead, I am going to validate how this person feels. I am going to ask, what is it that I can do to help. I am going to ask what strategies have worked for you before in a similar situation or do you think might work? So you're asking them questions, you're not giving advice, you're not telling them what to do. If there's a situation where you just, yeah, just feel like you gotta say something, own it. When I went through something similar, this is what I did instead of, you should do this when I went through something similar, because my life is objectively different than your life. So what worked for me may not work for you, but let me tell you what I did in a similar situation. Take what's useful, leave the rest. And that can be really helpful. And that's something that beginning counselors struggle with a lot. Not giving advice, not being too intrusive, not being too directive, but instead helping people figure out how to come to their own answers and recognize their own strength and their own power. Thank you so much, Roller Girl, for your support. It really helps in keeping the channel going. Alrighty, everybody. Unfortunately, I have got a packed day today and it seems like we have gotten to the end of our initial set of questions, which is wonderful. I will see you next week. We are going to change the time of this. I'm going to start doing lives on Saturday instead of on Monday. So my live time will change to or day will change to Saturday. Beginning a week from this coming Saturday. Everybody have an amazing two weeks, something like that. 12 days and I will see you. What will that date be? I will see you on Saturday, June 21.