The Washington Post - USA (2022-02-22)

E4 EZ EE THE WASHINGTON POST.TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 22 , 2022

and make [things] a little easier in your life. And then they’ll be more likely to become a habit.

Q: Anything else? A: The third thing is to forgive yourself if you don’t do it every day. If people go off a diet or eat something they shouldn’t, they figure, “I’ve already ruined everything. I’m just going to eat everything I want anyway.” Habit memories form slowly. If you don’t do something for a couple of days, the habit memory will still be there.

Q: I was going to have an alcohol detox in January, and I didn’t get very far. I felt that it was my willpower that was at fault. A: Denying ourselves things is hard. There was a very clever study that was done several decades ago by [social psychologist] Daniel Wegner where he showed that when people tried not to think of a white bear, they could do it. I mean, no one ever tries to think of a white bear anyway, so it shouldn’t be a hard task. But once they’d been asked not to people started thinking about white bears all the time. They couldn’t stop. That’s what happens when we deny ourselves things. We start thinking about them a lot, and obsessing about them, and they sort of take over. I understand your challenge because I love a good glass of wine or two at dinner, and I’m trying to cut down because it disrupts my sleep. I add friction to drinking wine by not having it in the house. There is a liquor store two blocks away, and I

could walk there if I wanted to. But most of the time, I’m just not motivated enough to do that. Adding friction to behaviors that you don’t want to perform makes it easier to control them.

Q: Let’s talk more about friction since you say it’s key to changing bad habits. A: I find that if I buy lots of fresh vegetables, they tend to sit in my fridge and I don’t use them, and I end up throwing them away. But if I go and buy vegetables that are already somewhat prepared, then it’s much easier to get myself to eat them. And even though I hate spending the extra money for prepared vegetables, in the end it saves me money because I’m much more likely to eat them. So understanding what’s going to remove the friction for you is important.

Q: You’ve written a good bit about executive control. Can you define that, and explain its role in behavior change? I understand it’s not nearly as important as understanding our habits. A: That’s a term psychologists use to describe our decision- making selves. The parts of our neural and mental processes that control behavior thoughtfully. It takes effort, and it takes a little bit of time to exert that kind of control. We only rely on executive control once in a while. [For instance,] you could have a New Year’s resolution to sign up for a retirement program at work, or to switch to a new health insurance. Those are one-

off decisions and you just have to muster your effort and energy and make the right decision. Do a little background research, figure out how to do the behavior, and then proceed from there. That’s executive control: Thinking, rational selves is how we experience it.

Q: When I’m stressed, sometimes I will fall back on my bad habits. But sometimes I assert my better habits. What did you learn about stress and habits? A: We tend to fall back on both good and bad habits when we’re stressed. And that’s simply because we don’t have as much energy. Our cognitive resources are taken up by dealing with the stress. We’re thinking about whatever the thing is that’s worrying us. We don’t have as much energy, resources, ability to be making decisions about our behavior. So we fall back on old habits. And that’s true for both good and bad habits.

Q: In the last line of your book you write, “That is the promise of a habit life well lived.” What is the promise you’re talking about? A: That your goals and your habits are in line. So you’re not struggling with yourself in the way that so many of us do. That you’re living a life simply, straightforwardly, easily, automatically that is healthy and productive, and that allows you to have meaningful relationships with other people. That’s what understanding habits can do.

Until we realize that habit memories don’t fade easily, we’re going to be constantly challenged with New Year’s resolutions.

Q: You say most of our resolutions die. Why? A: We start off being really motivated, and then we find that it’s not all that easy. And so we get a little less motivated but the [bad] habit memory is still there. Ultimately, three weeks later or whenever we quit. At that point, our habit is still there, but our motivation has decreased to the point where we just sort of give in and do the old habit anyway.

Q: What can we do to be more successful? A: Find some way to make the behavior enjoyable. If you hate going to the gym, you’re probably not going to go on a regular basis unless you can figure out some way to make it more fun — like listening to podcasts, going with a gym buddy or finding a different activity. Any of those could be more fun. And that’s going to help you keep your resolution.

Q: What else can we do to have a greater success rate? A: Change your environment, to make the behavior easier to repeat so it can become a habit. People are more likely to walk if they live in a pedestrian environment. If they live close to parks, they’re more likely to get exercise. If you take mass transit, you’re more Likely to get exercise than if you drive a car. All of these are things you can change

“It’s very hard to alter our
habits once we formed them. In
fact, many of us think that we
should be able to make a decision,
right? I am going to lose weight
this year. I’m going to make more
friends this year. I’m going to be
nicer to my family, my partner,
this year, I’m going to save more
money,” says Wood, who wrote
“Good Habits/Bad Habits: The
Science of Making Positive
Changes that Stick.” “But the
problem is that so many of those
behaviors are habits and that
memory sticks,” making change
frustratingly difficult.
The Washington Post spoke to
Wood recently from her home in
D.C. about the mental health
challenges of changing our habits
and why we shouldn’t get dis-
couraged by the New Year’s reso-
lutions we may have already
abandoned, as well as new ap-
proaches to making lasting posi-
tive changes in how we live. This
interview has been edited for
length and clarity.

Q: Why is it so hard to keep
resolutions about changing
behavior?
A: We form habits when we
repeat a behavior over and over
in the same context, and we start
to connect the context with that
response. Once habits are
formed, when you’re in that
context again, the habit
automatically springs to mind.
It’s like standing in front of your
sink in the morning, you just
automatically pick up the
toothbrush. You don’t ask
yourself if you want to do it.

RESOLUTIONS FROM E1

Overcoming mental health challenges so we can really change our bad habits

BY JONATHAN S. COMER AND ANTHONY STEVEN DICK

When disasters strike, the
flood of images on TV and social
media can have a powerful psy-
chological effect on children —
whether they are physically in the
line of danger or watching from
thousands of miles away.
Our latest research uses brain
scans to show how simply watch-
ing news coverage of disasters
can raise children’s anxiety and
trigger responses in their brains
that put them at risk of post-trau-
matic stress symptoms. It also
explores why some children are
more vulnerable to those effects
than others.
This risk is important for par-
ents and media to understand. In
just the past few months, news
coverage has been saturated with
images of wildfires burning
through neighborhoods in Colo-
rado, tornado damage across the
Midwest, a school shooting in
Michigan and news of rising ill-
nesses from the pandemic.
With climate change, research-
ers estimate that today’s children
will face three times as many
climate-related disasters as their
grandparents. And the pervasive-
ness of social media and 24-hour
news make exposure to images of
disasters more probable.
As a neuroscientist and a psy-
chologist who study youth anxi-
ety and the adolescent brain, we
have been exploring ways to iden-
tify children who are most at risk.

Harm for some kids

The Academy of Pediatrics de-
clared a national emergency in
child and adolescent mental
health in 2021 as professionals
saw rising rates.
Exposure to disasters in partic-
ular can trigger post-traumatic
stress symptoms, such as loss of
sleep, intrusive thoughts about
the experience, memory impair-
ments or severe emotional dis-
tress. But while around 10 per-
cent of people who are directly
exposed to traumatic events de-
velop symptoms that are severe
enough to meet diagnostic cri-
teria for post-traumatic stress
disorder, or PTSD, a majority do
not.
Understanding which factors
help determine whether disaster
exposure will lead to serious
mental health problems may help
identify children at greatest risk
for PTSD, facilitate early inter-
vention and help develop target-
ed mental health outreach in the
aftermath of disasters.
This also applies to children
exposed to disasters and other
traumatic events through media.
A once-dominant theory of dis-
aster mental health, sometimes
called the “bull’s eye model,” pro-
posed that the negative mental
health effects of a disaster were
directly related to how close the
person was to the center of the

event — the bull’s eye. But more and more studies are finding that the negative mental health effects of disasters extend far be- yond the immediate disaster area. Sensationalized 24-hour news cycles on television and online are part of the reason, studies suggest. These media are de- signed to attract viewers and keep them engaged. This is especially true for content on social media, which often contains more graphic images and scenes than typically broadcast by more traditional news sources. So, why are some children vulnerable to these media influ- ences, whereas others are not? Our research points to preexisting and identifiable neurobio- logical profiles that can make young people especially suscepti- ble to the harmful mental health effects of disaster-related news coverage.

Hurricane Irma’s impact When Hurricane Irma struck in 2017, we were able to use a national long-term research proj-

ect that was already underway to study how children were coping both before and after the disaster. We could look at the types of disaster exposure, and whether any preexisting characteristics could distinguish those children who went on to develop post- traumatic stress symptoms from those who did not. We were able to more firmly establish whether changes were due to disaster and media exposure, and not something else. The Adolescent Brain Cogni- tive Development study followed 11,800 children across the United States over a 10-year period using a variety of brain imaging and mental health assessments. Three of the study sites — two in Florida and one in South Caro- lina — were hit by Hurricane Irma, one of the most powerful Atlantic hurricanes on record. In the week before Irma made landfall, national media coverage provided highly dramatic, around-the-clock forecasting of the impending “catastrophic” storm and its threat of destruc- tion of “epic proportions.” Irma

led to the largest human evacua- tion in U.S. history, about 7 mil- lion people. After the storm, we collected additional data from about 400 of the project’s participants at the three sites affected by Irma and a demographically similar site on the other side of the country, in San Diego. We assessed their exposure to the hurricane and to media coverage ahead of the storm, and the extent to which the child exhibited post-traumatic stress symptoms six to eight months after the storm, when the children were 11 to 13 years old. We found that greater media exposure was associated with higher reporting of post-traumatic stress symptoms — and the link was just as strong in San Diego youth as it was in Florida youth. The association between media exposure and post-traumatic stress symptoms was strongest for those with a particular brain response in the amygdala, a brain area involved in processing fear and detecting potential threats. Earlier in the study, many of the same children had been par-

ticularly reactive when viewing fearful facial expressions. At the same time, their brain scans showed reduced activity in an- other region of the brain, the orbitofrontal cortex, thought to be involved in reducing emotional arousal. That brain activation profile marked vulnerability for developing post-traumatic stress symptoms after viewing disaster-related media coverage.

What can parents do? These findings highlight how children do not need to be in harm’s way or even close to a disaster to be affected by it — exposure to media coverage of a disaster can have a substantial impact as well. They also suggest that there are identifiable vulnerabilities that might make some children more likely to be emotionally affected by media. Scientists are increasingly in- terested in understanding what exposure to traumatic news coverage is doing to younger viewers who are still developing a sense

of security. Recent research has suggested that parents should also be concerned about children’s exposure to social media apps such as Instagram and Tik- Tok. So what can parents do? For starters, parents can monitor and limit access to some Internet content for young viewers. While it is important for parents to get periodic updates about impending storms or fires, extended exposure to such content rarely provides additional actionable information. Intermit- tent check-ins of breaking news may be appropriate, but the TV and social media do not have to be on constantly. It’s easy to routinely unplug, and it’s good for the mental health of children.

Jonathan S. Comer is professor of psychology and psychiatry at Florida International University. Anthony Steven Dick is professor of psychology at Florida International University.

This article was originally published on theconversation.com.

Disaster news can spark post-traumatic stress in children in faraway places

JACK DEMPSEY/ASSOCIATED PRESS Snow covers a charred vehicle after wildfires ravaged the area in Superior, Colo., on Jan. 2. The blaze near Denver destroyed nearly 1,000 homes and other buildings.

“Find some way to

make the behavior

enjoyable. If you

hate going to the

gym, you’re

probably not going

to go on a regular

basis unless you

can figure out

some way to make

it more fun — like

listening to

podcasts, going

with a gym buddy

or finding a

different activity.” Wendy Wood, provost professor of psychology and business at the University of Southern California

S0137-6x1

He beat leukemia.

But then things got really bad... wapo.st/medicalmysteries

Read “Medical Mysteries,” Tuesdays in Health & Science.

The Washington Post - USA (2022-02-22)

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