Imagine if you were in a plane, sitting next to me, and I introduced myself as a behaviorally oriented psychologist/therapist/coach, what comes to your mind? When you hear the word “behaviorism” what pops up in your mind?

Here are some hints: mechanistic, robotic, worksheets, rubber bands, and basically, reductionists of human behavior;  maybe even names like Skinner, Pavlov, or Watson pop up for you.

You see, behaviorism and therefore behaviorists, have historically a bad rap. But, to make sense of this bad rap, let’s step back for a moment, and let’s consider how behaviorism was born.

A little bit of history

The history of behaviorism is full of experiments, research, and studies to understand why we do what we do, as it names indicates, with a strong emphasis on human behavior. This strong focus on behaviors was also happening at a time – around 1950’s-  in which people dealing with worries, fears, anxieties, panic, and obsessions were seeing for years in therapy, their struggles were considered as signs of something wrong with them or with their parents, and spent years in therapy, with some relief or other times perpetuating their suffering. Behaviorism was born in the midst of all that, as the new kid on the block, and applying findings from behavioral science to understand what drives problematic behaviors and how a person can get unstuck.

Despite its success in treating phobias, anxieties, panic, and so on, and in response to all criticisms about being too mechanistic and reductionist – there was a radical shift from focusing on behaviors to focusing on cognitions. Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) was born from that shift; we went from focusing on behavior to prioritizing thoughts and understood every human struggle under the lenses that thinking defines what we think, what we feel, and what we do. It’s like thoughts became the gems of behavioral science. 

As CBT needed to be disseminated, many protocols were developed for the treatment of all types of psychological problems; as effective as those protocols were, the field got wild and we ended up with many manualized treatments for a particular struggle (e.g. 5-7 treatment manuals for social anxiety). As time passed by, there was an underground group of thinkers questioning what was established – in their own way, sometimes in public, sometimes in their books – but little by little, all those manualized treatments were questioned because the field realized that we got fundamental aspects wrong:

1. We don’t have control of our thoughts, feelings, or sensations
2. Attempts to control thoughts make things worse in the long-run
3. Behaviorism is more robust when adding findings of the science of compassion
4. Behaviors are not just things we do that are observable and actionable, but everything an organism does
5. The content of our thoughts is not as relevant as the impact of them to understand our struggles
6. Acceptance-based skills to all the thoughts, feelings, sensations, and any internal experience we have is required to have amazing lives
7. Responding flexibly to the yucky stuff that comes under our skin is key to doing what we want to do with our lives
8. Workability trumps accuracy of thinking
9. Our context matters
10. Language represents the good, the bad, and the ugly
11. Learning by experience is key.

I could write a book for each one of these points. But, here is what I want to tell you right away: behaviorism  – behavioral science – has changed.

Heads up: please grab yourself a cup of coffee, your favorite blanket, and enjoy the reading!

Hope you do the exercises below 🙂

(1) We Don’t Have Control Of Our Thoughts, Feelings, Or Sensations

Did you know that we have over 6000 thoughts a day? And just to clarify, when referring to thoughts, I’m also referring to images. 

As much as we hope, we do experience all types of internal noise – mind-noise, feeling-noise, and body-noise. Have you noticed how you can be walking on the street and without any intention, your mind wonders about the person walking by you, the smell of the streets, a task from your to-do list? Have you noticed how sometimes you may experience a sense of sadness without anything necessarily bad happening? Have you realized how sometimes you may be watching a movie and, out of the blue, random those thoughts may surprise you and even scare you?  We can choose to intentionally think about something, but that doesn’t diminish our mind’s capacity to naturally come up with all types of content. 

Experiment

Close your eyes for 1-minute and watch what your mind does.

(2) Attempts To Control Thoughts, Feelings, And Sensations Make Things Worse In The Long-run

Think about it, what happens if I tell you not to think of one of your favorite books? Or your favorite dessert? Or your best friend? What does your mind do? Quite likely, your mind came up with thoughts about each one of them right?

Now, let’s take a look at this idea of controlling your feelings. For a moment, I want you to do your best to feel angry; do the best you can to get cranky. What happened? Were you able to do it or were you mimicking facial expression as if when you’re angry?

We cannot control what we feel and sense, it just happens. When you try to distract from a feeling, avoid a feeling, and use any other strategy with the intention of not feeling, all those attempts actually make the emotion last longer. The same happens with thoughts; even when you try to respond to uncomfortable thoughts with all types of thinking strategies – worrying, dwelling on the past, anticipating the future, doubting – you just prolong the struggle that comes with them if you rely on those thinking strategies as a way to manage the distress that comes with some thoughts.

Experiment

When having a negative thought about yourself, try to replace it with a positive one. See how long it lasts until the same negative thought – or a variation of it – shows up again.

(3) Behaviorism Is More Robust When Adding Findings Of The Science Of Compassion

Evolutionary science and decades of research have taught us that our deeper desire for connection and compassion are defining aspects of humanity that have contributed to the survival of our species; when the science of compassion is blended with behavioral science,  we learn to face our pain with gentleness, caring, and tenderness and with it, we also learn to get unstuck for longer periods of time, get unstuck faster, and get better at facing our stuckness.

Experiment

For 1 day, when things don’t go as you were hoping and wanted them to go, see what happens if you go into massive amounts of criticism and negative judgment. How do you feel about yourself?

The next day, when anything you are working on goes wrong, see what happens if you respond to those harsh thoughts with gentleness and talk to yourself as you would talk to your best friend that is struggling.

(4) Behaviors Are Not Just Things We Do That Are Observable And Actionable, But Everything An Organism Does

Behaviorism has been often criticized for being mechanistic, insensitive, cold, and linear; however, as Ramnerö and Törneke (2008) point out if all we do is list behaviors, then it will certainly be superficial, cold, and mechanistic. Within radical behaviorism, we’re understanding human behavior as it happens, with all its complexity and it’s actually a very dynamic process.

We’re constantly behaving – non-stop. Everything you do – whether it’s inside or outside your head, public or private – is a behavior.  So, thinking, dreaming, worrying, mentally rehearsing, are all forms of private behaviors; writing, talking, running, are examples of public behaviors.

Experiment

Notice throughout the day, the public behaviors and private behaviors you’re engaging in. 

(5) The Content Of Our Thoughts Is Not As Relevant As The Impact Of Them To Understand Our Struggles

Your mind will never stop telling you “blah blah blah” or, as my aunt says in Spanish, “cha cha cha.” Our mind has a life of its own and it doesn’t stop relating and relating, connecting and connecting, and generating thousands and thousands of bits of content, anytime, anywhere. Whether you live in Europe, Asia, South America, Oceania, or Central America, our minds do it all the time.

Instead of checking the meaning of every single thought that pops up in your head – especially if you’re dealing with worries, fears, anxieties, obsessions – check the impact that getting hooked on them has in your life. Very different, right? For example, when working on this document, my mind has a thought of “did I turn off the stove? Would I be able to travel to Bolivia?”If I go along with the thoughts and get hooked on them, I’ll be searching stuff up on the internet, calling my family in Bolivia, and so on; there is nothing wrong with taking those actions, but I wouldn’t finish this write up and you wouldn’t get to hear about what it really means to be a behaviorist. 

Experiment:

Imagine for a moment that your brain is broadcasting news, then check two things:

(a)  If the radio is broadcasting something useful, tune into it!

(b) If the radio is broadcasting something unhelpful, tune your attention to what you’re doing at the moment.

(6) Acceptance-based Skills To All The Thoughts, Feelings, Sensations And Any Internal Experience We Have Is Required To Have Amazing Lives

Years of research showed us that fighting, arguing back, disputing our thoughts or any other internal experience we have, just makes things worse for us; so, we have learned that acceptance-based responses can actually take us further in our day-to-day life as we continue to experience all types of internal discomfort. Practicing acceptance skills doesn’t mean that our struggle goes away, it just means that we learn to keep moving while having it.

Acceptance is allowing, acknowledging, or making room for experiencing things as they are, whether they are happening outside of you or within you and whether they’re comfortable or not. And just to clarify a popular misconception: acceptance is not giving up, resigning, losing hope that things could be different, or being a doormat. It’s actually opening the door to experiences as they come.

Experiment:

Throughout a day, when having an uncomfortable thought, make the choice to have it and tell yourself “I’m having the thought of  … [ describe your thought]. Watch the thought as it is, as it’s happening.

(7) Responding Flexibly To The Yucky Stuff That Comes Under Our Skin Is Key To Do What We Want To Do With Our Lives

Psychological flexibility “is the ability to stay in contact with the present moment regardless of unpleasant thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations, while choosing one’s behaviors based on the situation and personal values (Hayes, Luoma, Bond, Masuda, & Lillis, 2006; Wicksell, Olsson, & Hayes, 2011).  

Now, in plain terms, psychological flexibility is the ability to experience all the stuff – thoughts, feelings, sensations – that show up under your skin – comfortable and uncomfortable – and choose a response that’s effective in those moments and consistent with your personal values.

Many studies have identified psychological flexibility as a key variable associated with quality of life, well-being, reduction of mental health symptoms and how it determines when an internal struggle becomes a disorder (e.g. social anxiety disorder, specific phobias, obsessive-compulsive disorder, so on). Keep in mind that when thinking about well-being, based on current findings, I’m not referring to reduction or elimination of negative feelings but to the ability to navigate through the different demands of life when internal uncomfortable experiences arrive.

Experiment:

Think about a challenging situation that is repetitive, keeps coming back, and keeps showing up your way; when thinking about it, see if you can recall how you felt about it, the distress that came along, and name three old strategies you have been using over and over to handle those feelings. Now, for a couple of moments, what it would be like to simply acknowledge that discomfort that came along with those situations, do nothing about them, and instead, ask yourself, what’s the one thing you could do that will take you closer to be the person you want to be?

(8) Workability Trumps Accuracy Of Thinking

Workability, as a skill, means checking if the way you’re responding to your thoughts, feelings, and sensations, is workable towards building the life you want to have or taking you away from it. Notice here that I’m not saying that you should check whether your thoughts are accurate or not, true or not, false or not. So, let’s delve deeper into this idea. What does it mean to check whether the way you’re handling your thoughts is workable or not?

Let’s have a look at two scenarios, to make sense of this concept.

Scenario 1: When writing, my mind comes up with thoughts along the lines of “You don’t know what you’re doing, your writing is not good enough, no one is going to read your book.” If I get hooked on those thoughts and do what they tell me to do, I’ll stop writing right away, come up with excuses to not write, or distract myself with fun stuff. But any of those behaviors – in that situation – will take me far away from living according to my value of sharing and spreading the word about research-based skills that can be impactful in a person’s life.

Scenario 2: When my partner is getting ready to travel and asks me to spend time with him before his trip, I pause my writing. I do stop writing because, in that moment, I put my value of connecting with the people I love first. Here, not writing is a behavior that takes me towards my relationship value.

Do you see the difference? The same behavior, “ to stop writing,” can be a move towards or away from the stuff that we care about, based on the situation, the context, or the setting you’re in. 

Checking the workability of your behaviors is best thought of as checking if you’re living your life with direction, meaning, and vitality and focusing on the results of your behaviors (not the content of your mind).

Experiment

When having a strong urge to do something, to say something, ask yourself this:
If I go along with this thought, emotion or sensation, does it help me to be the person I want to be or does it take me further away?

(9) Our Context Matters

Context is a buzz word for modern behaviorists and many other disciplines. Within behavioral approaches, context has been understood as the setting in which a behavior happens: what precedes a behavior (antecedents) and what happens afterward (consequences). However, these days, we think of context in a much broader way because there are other variables that shape us such as our past history, family upbringing, socio-cultural context, historical struggles, and so on.

For instance, let’s imagine that on a super-hot day, after running for hours sweating in the car, I go to a restaurant, and to my surprise, the air conditioner is almost not working. I feel quite cranky and do something that is not so nice: I scream at the waitress. So applying a contemporary, contextual frame will mean looking at:

Larger context: a history of seeing family members fighting, people screaming at each other, not sleeping well the night before.
What happened before I screamed at the waitress?
What happened after I screamed at the waitress?

You see, the idea that behaviorists don’t address larger issues, or are doing superficial things, is quite far from the truth because we actually acknowledge and take into consideration the many variables that can influence our behavior.

This is why among radical behaviorists, you will often hear the expression “context matters” We’re shaped by all types of historical contexts – cultural, political, social, family, spiritual,- all types of physiological vulnerabilities – diet, medical conditions, genetical makeup – and yet, being shaped by our context, doesn’t mean being defined by any of those variables. 

Experiment:

For this experiment, think about a difficult situation you recently encountered, and the particular way in which you handle it – your behavior .- Next, consider different contextual variables that made this situation challenging for you.

You can use the questions below to guide this process.  

What was the challenging situation?

How did you behave?

What happened before you took action?

What happened after you took action?

What other factors may have made that situation challenging?

(10) Language Represents The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

From the time we’re born until we die, language mediates all types of associations across symbolic stimuli; symbolic stimuli represent all types of private events (memories, feelings, thoughts, and experiences, such as flavors and smells) that we have throughout our lives and that are part of our learning history. 

Relational Frame Theory of language (RFT) has shown us over and over that our capacity to behave is shaped by language and cognition. What do I mean by that? Have you noticed the hundreds of connections that our brain is making at all times? For instance, think of an apple and recall all memories associated with it? Is it only one? Quite likely many! For instance, for me, the images that pop up were of a gathering I attended years ago, the grocery store I go to, a big round apple, apple pie, and somehow, the image of an apple in the middle of a river came up as well. That’s just one example of the hundreds of associations and thinking networks we carry in our minds.

Reality is that our brain is constantly relating one thing with another one based on our experiences; and on top of that, it also has the ability to relate to even unrelated words and ideas and without having the experience of them. For example, if I hear the word sadness – without having experienced it at that particular moment – but based on the messages I have heard, I may quickly associate it with something bad, something to get rid of. Here is another example of a derived relationship: if I have a panic attack in the elevator of my apartment and the next day I avoid the elevator not only in my apartment building but also in my friend’s building, a derived relationship has been established.

Experiment:

Look at the list of words below and see if you can put together two nouns with one adverb in a story format.

Pen More than
Chair Equals to
Thief Better than
Chocolate Looks like
Ocean Feels like
Kitty Less than

Next, see if those associations come up the rest of your day, and be ready, because you just created a new thinking network!

(11) Learning By Experience Is Key

Given that our mind has a life of its own, relates everything with everything, and is a natural, content-generating and pattern-making machine, every time we take our thoughts as the absolute truth or respond to thinking with more thinking we may end up having the opposite of what we want: becoming prisoners of our mind. But learning to take our thoughts lightly, gently, and focusing on what we experience – not what our mind says – can be liberating.

Experiment:

See if you can plan a mini trip to another city, country, or a place you haven’t been to. Next, before going on your trip, make sure you read at least 30-minutes about that place – weather, historical sites, fun things to do, architecture, shopping, and so on. Lastly, make your trip and focus on what it feels like, how it smells, the sounds of the streets, the flavors of the food you try, and so on.

At the end of your trip notice the difference between “learning about a place by reading” versus “learning about that place by having an experience of that place.”