For example, we brush our teeth every night, then go to bed with the intention to sleep. How does our brain not connect brush teeth -> go to bed -> close eyes with the intention of sleeping?
I’ve been struggling to fall asleep for almost a week now, and it takes me a good hour or so to actually fall asleep.
Is it impossible for our brain to pavlov itself, or is this just another question that I came up with while struggling to fall asleep?
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People do this all the time. To give a personal example, many years ago I made a decision to try to be a bit less negative since I tend to sometimes be depressed. One thing that occurred to me is that when someone asks “How are you?” they don’t really want you to tell them “Well, my lumbago’s acting up and the dog bit me this morning, and…” they just mean it as a greeting.
So I deliberately started answering that question with “I’m just peachy!”, a phrase that no one uses anymore. I had read that if you tell yourself you’re doing alright, it can sometimes help boost your mood a bit, plus since this is such an unusual phrase it tends to cause the other person to chuckle a bit.
As odd as it sounds, this actually worked. It does help, a tiny bit, to cheer me up. And I have said it so often over the years that I’ve pretty much conditioned myself to automatically respond that way. Of course I couldn’t leave well enough alone, so a little later on I started changing it up to sometimes say “I’m just ducky!” if it is raining outside. The problem is I have to remember what the weather is like to remind myself to say Ducky instead of Peachy since I automatically tend to say Peachy if I don’t really think about how I am responding.
You’d think no one would really care and just dismiss me as being a little eccentric (that was certainly what I expected) but the people in the office where I work have gotten so used to how I respond that I can’t really stop doing it now! If I slip up and say “I’m ok” they’ll often get concerned and ask me what’s wrong. If I accidently say “Peachy” when it is raining, they’ll point out to me that I made a mistake.
On one occasion one of the senior VPs actually called me from a staff meeting, put me on speaker, and said they “needed a ruling, was the day Peachy or Ducky?” because the weather outside was very overcast but it wasn’t actually raining. I told them I usually go with Ducky still, on the hope that the clouds will clear up.
So yeah, you can basically program yourself and even others to an extent. The downside is that if you do so you may find it leads to some unexpected results.
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