I’m going to be using the word instinct wrong throughout this post. But I’m doing this because I can’t find a word that actually means what I’m trying to convey. Apparently, I’ve come up with a novel concept. Go me. For my next trick, I’ll bury it in minutia and verbosity such that no one ever hears about it.
What am I trying to convey? How we react to stimuli is often a trained, subconscious response. Unfortunately, the training of these subconscious responses is often subconscious as well, which can lead to the belief that we don’t have control over how we behave. However, we actually have the potential for the training to be conscious and purposeful, and we can retrain our subconscious responses to be what we want so that we can react and behave the way we want rather than being held hostage to our whims.
How arrogant am I to say the way we think about thinking is incomplete and I have the missing piece?
Very. But at least play along a while before deciding I’m wrong.
The Terms We Have Aren’t Quite Right…
Habit isn’t right because a habit is a behavior that is repeated so often it becomes subconscious. As I will explain, we don’t need to ever experience the behavior that provokes the response in order to have been trained to respond the way we do. Because we learn about things without experiencing the thing. People often fall down after being shot, but why this happens isn’t known. The force of impact isn’t likely the cause.
Habit-based decision-making is doing what has always been done previously regardless of whether the previous outcomes were ideal. We decide to buy groceries at a certain grocery store because that’s where we go to shop for groceries even though there is a cheaper place equidistant away. That’s not what I’m talking about.
Nor is instinct accurate because that’s a behavior we are born with. By definition, instincts aren’t trained. Neither conditioned responses nor learned behaviors fit either.
So I’m left either using a word incorrectly or making up a new word. I’ve decided to go with the former because I think the concept is more graspable when using established words and instinct is almost the right word. And in part because I think that definition of instinct is incorrect and that few, in any, behaviors aren’t learned by us or trained into us.
Because the Entire Field of Behavioral Science Is Wrong!
I don’t think we are born with an innate set of responses to stimuli. I think behavioral science isn’t considering all the ways that we are implicitly trained to behave a certain and instead say those things are innate, not learned.
For example, humans tend to pull our hands back before touching something hot. Is this something we are born with or something we learn because we’ve touched something hot before?
Here are other examples of things often considered an instinct but I believe to be learned by or trained into us:
Pain. It’s a learned behavior.
Phobias. My dad and brother are terrified of snakes. I am afraid of heights. I think my dad learned to fear snakes because he was bitten as a child. My brother learned this fear from Dad and Indian Jones. I fear heights because I got stuck in a tree as a child for what I perceived as a long time.
Procreation. I’d say this behavior isn’t so much an instinct as it is so ingrained by society that it is often claimed to be the whole point of living. How many humans had children without ever considering if they wanted to raise children?
Me? I internalized my childhood differently. By 7th or 8th grade, I had decided existence sucked, and perpetuating it was a terrible idea. Obviously my thinking has changed since then. By the end of high school I understood that existence itself wasn’t the issue.
Existing as me was. This resulted in an active desire for my particular genetic sludge to never replicate itself into the body of another human. The buck stops here! I refused to inflict me-ness on another human. That would be cruel!
Yes, I still believe this to be true.
Instincts Are Trained Behaviors
According to me, instinct-based decision-making starts with the same principle as habit-based decision-making. However, there are more ways to experience something than repetitively doing the thing ourselves, such as having an activity modeled for us. Our brains are very good at taking in the information we see and replicating modeled behavior, even if we don’t want it to. This is why destructive behavior perpetuates from one generation to the next. We learn what we see.
We can also reject learning what we see. How much effort it takes to reject learning things we see modeled depends upon the individual and their relationship to the molder. Actions and beliefs modeled by respected or loved authority figures are difficult to avoid.
The good news is that we aren’t beholden to what we’ve learned in this way. We can introspectively analyze an instinct, deem it inappropriate or unnecessary, and then intentionally replace it with the instinct we want, usually by being mindful to respond the way we want to whenever the stimuli arise.
Eventually, the new pattern will take hold and mindfulness is no longer necessary.
“Reasonable Idea. How Did You Come Up With It?”
Great question (and thanks for thinking this was reasonable, too). I became aware of this idea of retraining your reactions when I started training a martial arts in my mid-thirties. I learned very quickly that I had programmed responses to certain stimuli like being punched, grappled, and stabbed at with a knife, and that these responses were counter to the teachings of the combat style and to my survival.
Every person in my class has felt this too. A continued theme of our training is working to retrain our reactions and setting viable, mindful instincts in place of illogical, harmful ones.
Appendix B explains instinct and being punched in the face more thoroughly. Which means that Appendix is all about me being punched in the face. That’s a trigger warning if talk of violence is a trigger for you. Or something to keep in mind for when you get to a point where the image of me being punched in the face feels cathartic (you might be here already at this point).
Now my blog will forever have a place you can go that is all about that. Enjoy!
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