Reprogram Your Addictive Thinking

The simplest, the easiest, and the most effective thing that you can do to help yourself or a loved one conquer an addiction is to change your expectations. Now you might be thinking, whatever, Amber, that's some woo woo stuff. But in this video, I'm going to explain to you exactly why and how that works and how you can use these scientific evidence based findings to help yourself or loved one overcome addiction for good. For those of you who are new here, welcome to Put the Shovel Down. I'm Amber Hollingsworth and this YouTube channel is all about helping you understand the science and psychology of addiction so you can get your life and your family back on track and get back out there and live the life that you want to live. Now, as always, we like to talk about addiction from the individual point of view and the family point of view, which is exactly what we're going to do today in our video about expectations. Now, I am a big believer in the idea of what you expect to happen is probably going to happen. But I don't believe it because it's some kind of magic wish for and get what you want kind of thinking there's actual science behind this. Allow me to explain. I think to understand this concept, we need to go all the way back to 1968 when two researchers, Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson, ran some studies about expectations. Let me tell you how their little scientific experiment worked. They wanted to find out if the expectations a teacher has about her students will actually impact or affect the students learning ability. So they set up this study and they pulled these kids randomly out of a hat and assigned them to different groups. And they told the teachers that these kids that they were working with were late bloomers and that they were expected to make a ton of progress this academic year. Now the kids had no idea that they were in this study and they definitely didn't know anything about the expectations. But these teachers, it was put in their head that these students were smarter and were gonna do better this year. And guess what happened? The students did better when there was no actual difference in the learning levels and the academic abilities of these students compared to any other students. The only difference was was that the teacher expected them to do better. Now the teachers were instructed not to communicate that to the students. So it's not like these kids were told they were going to do better. This literally came because of what the teacher thought would happen. And this is what's known as the Pygmalion effect. And guess what? If positive expectations can change an outcome for the positive, negative Expectations do the same thing. And this is called the Gollum effect. Now when I first heard this term, I was thinking like Gollum from Lord of the Rings. Isn't that that thing's name, that crazy creepy thing? Apparently the Gollum effect was actually named out of clay creature in Jewish mythology. Who knew? Anyways, research does show that if you have negative expectations, if someone in authority or a position above has negative expectations about their workers or their students or their children, that they will get a more negative outcome. And it's probably not all that hard for us to believe, right? But it is kind of cool to know why or how that actually happens. And hang in there, because I am going to connect the dots for you about how all this connects to addiction and how you can use this information to help yourself or a loved one overcome addiction for good. There are four things that happen differently, probably even like on a subconscious level, when someone expects something either positively or negatively of someone else. Dr. Rosenthal called them the four factors. Now, factor number one is what he called climate. And what he meant when he said that was the general climate of the classroom of the students in the study was warmer. Teachers verbal and nonverbal responses to the children was just warmer, more positive, more comforting. So essentially they're subconsciously creating a better learning environment. Now, the second factor at play was something Dr. Rosenthal called input. And what he meant by that was teachers that had the positive expectation of their students actually taught more stuff and they taught it more in depth than they did a better job of it because they expected that these kids could follow along, learn and understand, and that they actually were going to absorb this material quite well. So they quite naturally gave more material. Now, the third factor at play here is something called the response factor. And what that means is, is that when a teacher low expectation of a student, they're more likely to ask less questions of that student and they're more likely to accept less than superior answers to their questions because they think that's all that student is capable of. Conversely, if the teacher has high expectations of the student, they'll ask them more questions and provide them more opportunity to explore answers. Which actually leads us to the fourth factor, which, which is something Rosenthal called feedback. So not only did the teachers ask more questions, it would allow the kids more time to explore the answers. It would actually help the kids along to find the correct answer. Whereas when you think they're going to do bad, you just kind of move on. It's almost like you're trying to spare them the embarrassment. But when you think the kid has it in them, then you're naturally going to spend more time pulling the correct answer out. And along with that feedback loop, you're a lot more likely to positively reinforce those positive answers. So you can see this expectation thing is not just hooey wooey stuff. There's actual science behind it. And when you think about it, I think you're gonna find that it makes common good sense. Now let's talk about how we can apply the Pygmalion effect instead of the Gollum effect to help yourself or a loved one conquer addiction. If you're following along with what I'm saying about this whole expectations thing, then I think it's not going to be really hard for you to take the leap and understand that if someone else's subconscious expectation of you can impact your outcome, guess what? The impact of your own expectations of yourself are massively humongous. Right. If you think a teacher can impact the situation, your own mind, which you're with 24 7, and your own expectations have a much larger impact on your success rate. So you know what one of the biggest problems when it comes to addictions is? Everybody expects that people just can't overcome them and that they're just never gonna get better and that it's just always gonna come back. So in general, we have sort of a cultural belief that people can't overcome addictions. Well, I would like to challenge that. I see people beat addiction every single day. And not only do they beat it, but they become better than they would have been. Addiction is probably the most curable, fixable mental illness that there is out there. There are actually many pathways to get there. There are lots of solutions to explore. The biggest problem as to why it doesn't work is because people don't expect it to work. And you see this in the way that people talk to themselves, what we call self talk. And you definitely see this in the way that family members, friends or loved ones talk to people who struggle with this problem. How many times have you, as a family member or a loved one, caught yourself saying, thinking, or maybe even saying things like, you always screw up. You're never gonna get this. What's gonna be different this time? You're causing all these problems for the family. You're a screw up. You can't figure this out. You're not willing to do what it takes. We have these thoughts, and worse, we say these statements all the time. What do you think that does? It sets the expectation that the other person isn't figure it out. And not only that, because we expect it. We don't even give them a chance to figure it out. Right? We just assume, and we already know that it's going to end badly. And we already know they went to rehab eight times before, and this time, is it going to be any different? So we don't even leave room for it. Now, when we do that, we try to tell ourselves that we're just trying not to get our hopes up because we don't want to be disappointed. I think there is a major flaw in that kind of philosophy, because I really, truly believe that you find what you're looking for for some of the reasons that we just talked about. So if you are looking for a bad outcome, you're going to find it. It's called the Gollum effect. If you're looking for a good outcome, you're going to find it because you're filtering. You're going to be filtering for the positive or filtering for the negative, which is going to make a huge difference in what information that you take in from the environment. If you just know it's gonna work out in the end. You're looking for the evidence, it's gonna work out in the end. You're positively reinforcing that in yourself, and you're positively reinforcing that in your loved one. If you just know this is gonna end badly and they're never gonna figure it out and they're gonna ruin their life and yours. Guess what's gonna happen? You're gonna look for all the evidence and proof that it's never gonna work. It's gonna ruin their life and yours. You're gonna be responding to them that way, thereby greatly increasing the chances of getting a negative outcome. Now, as an addicted person, you have to change your own thinking about whether or not you can get better. And honestly, the evidence is probably already right in front of you. You're just not looking at it because you expect a bad outcome. For example, I can't tell you how many times people come into my office and they say, rehab just doesn't work for me. I've been three or four times. And I'll say, well, what usually happens? Why doesn't work? And they'll say, well, I'll get three or four months sober, and then I'll fall off the cliff. And I'm like, dude, if you could get three or four months so completely, and before you couldn't get three or four hours sober, sounds to me like rehab worked for you. What didn't work is that you expected for it not to work and therefore set yourself up with a self fulfilling prophecy. And that is probably a lot more likely what led to the bad outcome. Versus it didn't work because it was working quite well, wasn't it? And the person's like, yeah, I guess it was working for three months. So then I asked them a lot of questions about, well, what was working? Well, I was doing this and I was doing that, and I was doing what they told me and it was actually working. So seriously, the simplest, easiest, most effective thing you can do to help yourself or loved one overcome addiction is to change your expectations, change what you allow yourself to think. When you hear those negative thoughts popping into your head, I want you to confront them, push them away. Find the evidence as to how that's not true and look for the positive. If you have a hard time doing that, then surround yourself with people who've done it or families whose loved one have gotten better. Because just hearing this is actually changes your expectations through something called modeling. If you're going to meetings and you're going to therapy groups and all you're hearing is that people never get better and this person was destroyed and that person was destroyed, guess what? It's gonna make your expectations all jacked up. But if you're going to places where people are getting better and they're talking about what works, guess what? That's gonna help change your expectations. And now that you've changed your expectations and you know life is going to get better, the next step is to take the action steps. Now, you can find lots of addiction recovery resources on our website. I'll put the link for that in the description. And up next, I want you to watch this video about the simplest, easiest action steps you can take. Now that you got your mindset right.