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Channel / Source:
TEDx Talks
Published: 2014-12-22
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTb3d5cjSFI
let me tell you about my mom my mom was forty two years old when I was born and she started exercising for the first time in her life she started by running around the block and then she started doing five K. races and then she started doing ten K. races and after that she ran a marathon and after that my mom did a triathlon by the
time she was fifty seven years old my mom was trekking up hill to the base camp of Mount Everest and let me tell you about my dad when I was a kid my dad used to take me to science classes he was also my Tucker was teacher in high school I wanted to crawl under the desk I learned something important from my mom the value of
health and I learned something important for my dad the value of science and these two values have guided me on my trek through life and they help me appreciate an epidemic that we are all facing and it's not Ebola instead it is the epidemic of unhealthy living I half billion people worldwide are obese and you would think that fifty years after the first U. S. surgeon
general's report on the dangers of tobacco was published that we'd be beyond the problem of smoking today a billion people worldwide use tobacco tobacco and obesity are two of the most preventable causes a premature death solving these problems is like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle we engage in unhealthy behaviors because of our genetics because of brain neuro transmitters because of environmental influences such as peers
in the media each of those pieces of a puzzle are not things that you and I can solve on her own but there is one piece of this puzzle it may hold the key our choices about what we do with our cravings to engage in addictive behaviors like smoking or in over eating our choices there is a new science of self control that may hold the
key to reversing these epidemics it's called willingness willingness means allowing your cravings to calm and to go while not acting on them by smoking or eating unhealthy but actually I'm not talking about will power and I'm not talking about power through your cravings stead I'm talking about a different notion of cravings it looks like this dropping the struggle with your cravings opening up to them letting
them be there and making peace with them now at this point you may be very skeptical why what has when I first heard about it years ago a friend of mine came to me with the book unwillingness said Jonasson this book will change your life forever and I said home okay yeah %HESITATION yell all check it out so I I went through it that the budget
psychobabble toss it aside until some years later when my wife brought me to workshop unwillingness at the university of Washington and I blown away so then I read the book and then I read a lot of books and willingness and I got trained in it what I learned was that willingness is part of acceptance in the acceptance and commitment therapy approach to behavior change the broader
approach to behavior changes being used to help people with anxiety disorders with addictions even some innovative companies are now using it to help improve their employees performance and reduce their stress now to understand why I was blown away you have to understand the world that I live in in my research world a common way you help people quit smoking and lose weight is you teach them
to avoid their cravings avoid thinking about smoking stretch yourself from food cravings there's a song from a Broadway show captures a spur it goes like this when you start to get confused because of thoughts in your head don't feel those feelings hold them news and here and still a turn it off like a lie switch just go click we do it all the time when you're
feeling certain feelings such as don't seem right tweet those pesky feelings like a reading light and turn them off we all live in this world where the song we keep hearing is turned off the now let's take a look these cookies they just came out of the oven all they are so good hi there so delicious name just feel that craving to eat those cookies all
their lovely they're so good now turn it off turned off you want those cookies even more now right you see the futility of trying to turn it off you can't turn it off and maybe you don't have to maybe you can leave the light on here is how my research lab at the Fred Hutchinson cancer research center here in Seattle is conducting randomized clinical trials see
if showing people how to be willing to have their cravings is effective for quitting smoking we are conducting trials in face to face interventions in a telephone quit smoking hotline in a website called web quit dot org hands and in and out called smart quit these technologies have the potential to reach millions of people with interventions that could save their lives that's pretty amazing and to
me tell you about the data when you pull together the results from six clinical trials all six that have been published to date including trials conducted by our colleagues what we see is that for the people who were assigned to the avoidance approach voiding your cravings some of them quit smoking and it varied depending on the study however for the people who were randomly assigned to
the willingness can twice as many quit smoking very very encouraging now of course the data only tell us one small part of the story so help me see willingness in action I'm gonna look weave together experiences I've had in counseling people for quitting smoking and altogether refer to them as one person will just called change so as is typical of people who come in to want
help for quitting smoking Jane was a forty five year old person who started smoking when she was a teenager she tried to quit smoking several times was not successful so she was very skeptical that anything new was going to be helpful for for her for quitting and yet she was really hopeful that this time would be different so the first thing that I show Jane was
to be willing that is to be aware of her cravings in her body so to notice where she fell cravings in her body and when I did this I asked her to journal that and just to track the intensity over time and see if she'd smoke afterwards so the middle of explaining that she stops me and she says what are you talking about I don't have
cravings I just smoke so I said well when she try it and we'll see what happens and if it doesn't work we'll try something so she came back a week later he said you know I've been tracking my cravings I've been tracking them all the time and now I can't stop thinking about smoking well I suppose to do well before I tell you my answer let's
look behind the scenes now what was probably going on here was that gene was having cravings all along and like a lot of us she was living on auto pilot you wake up in the morning you smoke a cigarette you have a cuppa coffee a smoke a cigarette and get my car you smoke a cigarette were often just not aware of what we think and what
we feel before we act so my answer to Jane was to be willing and one of the ways the show to do that was with an exercise called I am having the thought so one of Jay's thoughts before she had a cigarette was I'm doing a lot of stress right now I really use cigarettes so I asked her to add the phrase I'm having the thought
like this I'm having the thought then feeling a lot of stress right now I really need a cigarette then I asked her to add the phrase I'm noticing I'm having the thought so I'm noticing that I'm having the thought them feeling a lot of stress right now I really need a cigarette now we can all do an exercise like this when we have any kind of
negative thoughts like for my thought that I'm boring all of you would buy talk and I'm I'm having the thought that imploring all of you with my talk so what this exercise did is it gave me a little bit of space between me and my thoughts and it's in that space that I can choose not to run off the stage in front of fifteen hundred people
and the fact is we don't act on every thought we had because if we did we'd all be in a whole lot of trouble so this was helpful to Jane but there was something else that was really difficult for Jane nightfall a lot of compassion for her about it and that was the judgment that she felt from people when she would be outside smoking a cigarette
their criticism from her husband for being a smoker and the self loathing that she developed %HESITATION about smoking and she dealt with the shame by having a cigarette which gave her relief temporarily until the shame came back so I said to Jane who would it be like if we try to honor this feeling of shame part of the human experience if you had a close friend
who was feeling shame about smoking I said to Jane what would you offer a friend as words of caring and kindness and could you then offer those words to yourself Jane and she looked up and she had this look of this temporary respite from the shame which made it just a little bit easier next time not to act on the creating so here's the secret self
control the secret to self control is to give up control because otherwise we get into a tug of war with the monster a craving monster and the craving monster says come on smoke cigarettes your mind that that cookie come on and you err on the other side saying no critic monster I'm going to distract myself from you I'm gonna glory of no no no no equity
must assist now now come on you know you want it and you're just back here and you're going back and forth and back and forth and pretty soon the craving monster overpowers you you have the cookie you have that cigarette and so the paving monster comes back and then you're in the tug of war again doing what we've learned how to do and less unless you
dropped the rope and what you discover is if you just allow the monster to be to occupy a space in your body you discover in a few minutes at the craving monster is not as threatening as he appears sometimes he even goes away as we break for lunch we're going to have choices of what to eat when you see them trying to be aware of the
