Mindfulness Skill 9: Response Freshness

TRANSCRIPT

Interviewer:

You're listening to the Morning Show on Youth Jam and as it's a Thursday, I am joined on the other end of the line by Dr. Patrick Jones. Patrick comes on air each Thursday to discuss a different facet of our mental health each week. And over the last few weeks, we've been looking at mindfulness techniques. Patrick, the technique that we're looking at this week is known as response flexibility. So can you just begin by explaining what exactly response flexibility is? 

Patrick:

Well, it's essentially to respond uniquely or freshly to new events. So typically we would have a habitual response to things and it's quite sort of almost from an adaptation point of view, it makes sense that once we've learned something, we don't need to keep relearning it and sort of behaving in a completely novel or new way each time. So it's kind of a clever part of our processing. But where we get stuck with it is that we can't always tell what's automatic and then over time, we can then get an automatic way of doing all kinds of stuff and all kinds of ways of thinking. So response freshness is connected to present moment awareness, where we try and have a new or fresh response to each moment. 

It doesn't mean we can't access the information we've got about that moment, but we do it in a way that also connects, as we spoke in the past, about the other attributes of mindfulness. It connects to being open and being present. But this one highlights the flexibility or the freshness of being able to have a really clean new response to the moment, which then opens out the moment to all its potential. That's why we focus on the flexibility aspect of this one. 

Interviewer:

You highlighted there that some of those thought patterns can be things that we've learned or been conditioned or simply developed through our growing up. And they lead to these automatic responses that we can't quite gauge as to whether they're based out of conscious thought or if they're just like you say, almost second nature. What exactly is, therefore, the danger of being inflexible with our responses to things that come up in our day-to-day lives? 

Patrick:

Yeah, well, I think essentially what the main danger is that we miss out on the opportunity that the new moment is presenting because we are relating to it as if it's a previous moment that we've had and therefore we know what it's like and how to act. So people in a sense say that they're like, I'm bored. It's a stale response to a fresh moment. The fresh moment, the new moment can be all kinds of things, but in a way why we're bored is we're bored because our response is the same to a new moment. That's the crazy thing. It's that we are boring ourselves. The moment itself is new, but our response is not. So that's why it's really important to sort of kick a handle on this. 

Essentially I see it as the foundation of our prejudices and I think that the issue is that we might have a certain preference but if we in a sense can't see that because we're just treating these moments as predictable or familiar then we maintain like a prejudicial way of actually operating with people and situations. It's like, yeah, I know that. I've seen that. The main, in a sense, pain connected to this is it keeps our world small. Because it's like, well, okay, I know what this is. Yeah, I know what that is. And so we don't see what's new at the moment. 

And because there's so much potential in new moments, if we can have that response freshness, then we can be open to what life's trying to give us or the opportunities that can be revealed sort of in this actual moment right now. 

Interviewer:

And it sounds though that it's almost like the stimulus and information that presents itself to us outside of our body is constantly in flux and changing. Ultimately the way that we view that can be quite stagnant when we talk about being in a particular mode of thought response essentially what needs to happen is a re-approach to that response. In other words, we're a response flexibility which is of course the nature of what we're talking about. So then how can our thoughts and behaviors also come to determine how we view ourselves and not just what's external to our mindset? 

Patrick:

Yeah well, I think we don't just have a stable view of the world we also have a stable view of ourselves. The adaptation reflex is one of the things that the research has found that people have a great event or a terrible event, and within eight to twelve weeks their baseline gets affected. They either go high or low if it's a very high, very disturbing, or very amazing event. But then they return to baseline no matter what the event is virtually within eight to twelve weeks. I mean there are exceptions where you don't recalibrate but the reason why you recalibrate is because our belief sets are very sort of stable and so they're just returning us to how we see ourselves and how we see the world. 

Now, of course, that's adaptive, if it's quite a worrying thing, you could say, and we kind of figure out what to do about it and then we kind of get back to who we are. But of course, we don't want to remain static. And that's the danger of having that stability versus that flexibility is that our sense of ourselves can't expand what it can, but it's generally slow. And often the beauty about a child, or a puppy, if you like, there's just this freshness in the moment, and there's that chance for growth.

And I think the older we get, we lose some of that innocence. And that way of being so responsive is about, in a sense, retaining the beauty of that innocence while still having the wisdom of what we've learned. 

And then it means our sense of self can continue to expand way beyond our current understanding of ourselves and therefore our potential. The feeling that we put on our life can continue to heighten and ultimately be lovely, just be able to sort of blow off that ceiling altogether and just have a completely open ticket about how our life can be. And I think response flexibility in terms of mindfulness is about giving us that access to human potential. 

Interviewer:

Yeah. Patrick, we've been talking about what some of the dangers are in remaining inflexible to your responses and also the way that our thoughts and behaviors can come to determine how we view ourselves. With all of that in mind, what is your technique for achieving response flexibility? 

Patrick:

Yes, first I have to quote the magnificent Bruce Lee who says, be like water, my friend. It's one of his great little videos on YouTube. Just be like water, my friend. Brisley, it's foundational to martial arts and having mastery, that sense of being able to flow. So it's not just limited to mindfulness at all. Also perhaps in acting and that spontaneous creative expression, being able to access more than just the logical steps of what I've got to say next. There's got to be a lot more art than just science to life and I think response flexibility highlights that. 

So in terms of techniques, a very simple thing is just literally before any event, if I'm going somewhere or doing something just to sort of check in, what beliefs might I be carrying with me through the door that might shape my experience to be what it has been in the past and can I play with that? Essentially, it's to sort of experiment with new or different or fresh responses and you can do that in any way. I mean just to almost practice with any topic. Even just like for example, walking people. I've sort of done workshops in this with the mindfulness-based qualified stuff and get people to wander around outside their normal default walk. 

And then the exercise for this particular one was just literally to walk differently, walk at a different pace, and just see what it's like to not be the default you and realize how much room we have to be able to kind of be more than just a default. So you can even look at speaking more slowly and seeing how that rolls or a lot more quickly and seeing what happens there. So you could just play.

Generally, the idea is to be light with it. If you don't perhaps say hello to a stranger when you're going past doing your walk or something, you're playing with those options as you walk past or take me in a different position in a debate. 

The idea is just to notice what my sort of default style is and just see if I can stretch a little bit, but only within what you consider to be the comfortable stretching to uncomfortable range. We don't have to stay uncomfortable or have to move all the way out to uncomfortable. Can I just go a little further and see what room I have in terms of my normal style of life? And I think it just can open things out, essentially. 

Interviewer:

And as with all of these techniques, we've sort of looked at their practice in our day-to-day lives. And we mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I can't remember the exact technique, but it was the idea that all of these techniques come to inform one another and it's not a matter of simply doing one and thinking, okay, that's me done with mindfulness, but it's a thing of actually taking aspects of each and incorporating them. So why might our experience of this technique in particular benefit from ongoing practice? 

Patrick:

Yeah, well, I think patterns of thinking essentially are entrenched and the neural pathways are there for a reason, so we don't have to rethink every time we do the kettle, how to boil water. But I think the disadvantage is essentially that we can do a lot of stuff without thinking on autopilot and response. Flexibility is simply a challenge thrown at the autopilot and going, well, am I awake in this moment in my life or am I just in a sense going through the motions? So the practice is necessary because that default occurs. And I think I've heard it takes like you have to repeat something or do something 10,000 times to be able to achieve mastery in it. Like there has to be this repetition. 

So just think about how many times we may have thought or acted or behaved in a certain way and that's an entrenched behavior. It does take practice to counter that. Also, people throw around it takes 21 days to create a new habit. You have to start something that then begins to challenge the default. So that's sort of why doing these little techniques or methods is necessary on an ongoing basis. But again, it's more of a game or play. This is my life. Would I like some room to move around how I normally operate? Perhaps just the motivation to finish with that is the goal is for our world to grow, not shrink. And response flexibility enables that possibility. And it reminds me of there's a couple of interesting quotes that represent this.

For example, say, C. S. Lewis, who is a great author, wrote several books. He said the Devil's crowning glory is a bitter old man. And it's a poetic way of putting it. I think by contrast, there was a mystic or a saint called Saint Irenaeus. And his version, the opposite was the glory of god is a person fully alive. So when I look at those two phrases or quotes, the first, you know, the bitter old man just over time and over his life just increasingly just said, shrinks the devil's crowning glory is a bitter old man. He's just shrunk. I'm just one big no. Whilst the other St Irenaeus quote, the glory of God is a person fully alive.

You could almost say that person has said yes and expanded. So I think response flexibility is about that yes, and giving our life a chance to expand. 

Interviewer:

Yeah, well, it's almost like an articulation of the adage that old habits die hard, isn't it? It's an extension of that. And when you mentioned that in your response, there is the idea of certain behaviors coming about as though acting on autopilot instantly, I was thinking about certain even down to my new shy of behavior, like, say, certain words that I use in discussion. And then I, like, say, if I with what I do here at the station, I do a lot of relistening to my speech and I notice that I say things that are probably not necessarily cognitive decisions. And I think to myself, look, you could have used that word or that word, but that's the word that you went to because it's a word that you use repeatedly. And that's gotten me in trouble in totally different situations. 

And there's a story in which I was hanging out with a friend and we encountered he was my school friend and we encountered our old school chaplain out in the street and this guy was like a fairly open and easy-going person. But in my discussion with him, alongside my friend, I swore like I just dropped it in and it wasn't a bad swear and he didn't bat an eyelid. But I walked away thinking you were just so used to that behavior in a social situation that the fact that you haven't rethought it sort of opened you up to the possibility of saying it to someone who mightn't like it. 

Patrick:

Yeah, and that, I think, links up to the present moment awareness stuff that we've spoken about, where I'm just treating the new moment sort of freshly, and in that way, it's a lot more alive. That's a wonderful thing about this is that the event opens out. And I guess if you also look at something like anxiety where people have a preceding sense or concern about the present moment or coming up, which you could say is the future moment, but if it was just allowed to roll without that preceding concern and treated freshly, there's a very different experience of it. So I think it has a lot of, you could almost say clinically positive or healthy implications. But yeah, it's a happy life, just being able to experience its potential as it's rolling in front of us. That's why it makes sense. 

Interviewer:

And one of the things, I suppose, that sort of feels as though it's a slight contention when I consider how I would enact these techniques in my day-to-day life, for example, is how we necessarily divide or whether it should even be divided and dichotomized the focus that we put on our behavior and that which is happening externally. What do we have to respond to? Is there a clear-cut way necessarily to say like okay, my current fixation is on what I'm doing, but then now I'm going to fixate on the other because it seems like that is a balancing act that is essentially going to ensure that we're behaving one acceptably but to the best that we possibly can. 

Patrick:

Yeah, it's just a nice distinction, I think that can come from that question. And that is going back to that notion of flow where the two people disappear in the conversation. And so now there's not this preoccupation with me and mine and my thoughts. I think when certain developmental stages when children are playing, they're young and they have what they call in a parallel play where they're playing two independent games and they're almost like taking it in turns and it looks like they're playing together, which they're interacting at one nominal level, but they're playing their own game almost next to each other. Two separate games, you could say two separate conversations whilst what you've just sort of highlighted away opens out the possibility where we let go of us and them and perhaps being preoccupied with my story and my experience. 

And then we get inside, you could almost say their world, and potentially they can get inside our world and then our attachment to our story or our position can fall away. And then there's this. This and I think that's that lovely line Erickson said in the space of rapport, anything is possible. And I think what know often talk about can fall away, which we have in lovely moments and you're just left having the experience of station. And that's where creativity can come in. You can just start riffing all kinds of great ideas and tunes and anything, but that cannot occur without that sense of flexibility. It's like we now need to get back onto this topic and I'm right for these reasons, definitely kills it. 

But if we can let go of that as I said, we're now more in the art of life than the science of it. We're more in the actual flow and the beauty of it. And there's a nice quote, I think. UWA, they have somewhere it's engraved Verily. It is by beauty that we come to truth. It's a lovely experience, it senses something that's wonderful and important. And yeah, I think responsive flexibility is one of those doorways to that experience. 

Interviewer:

Excellent. Well, Patrick, as always, we massively appreciate you coming on Ed to chat with us. You'll be back next week. So in the meantime, thanks for getting in touch with us this week, Patrick. Look forward to speaking to you again soon. 

Patrick:

All right. Cheers. Excellent.