Understanding your pattern is not the same as behaviour change

Understanding a pattern and changing it use different skills. Insight is knowledge and knowledge is learned by thinking. A new response is a behaviour and behaviour is learned by doing it, usually in the moment the old pattern shows up and most effectively when the old pattern feels the most alluring. Insight makes change possible but it rarely produces change by itself.

You can describe the pattern accurately. You know roughly when it started. You have said it out loud to someone and watched them nod, because it made sense to them too.

And then one Thursday evening it happens again, as it always does, and you notice it happening, and you do it anyway.

That last part is the bit people find hardest to forgive themselves for.

What insight actually does in changing behaviour

Insight changes what you see. On its own, it does not change what you do.

That sounds like a small distinction. It's not.

When you understand a pattern, you gain the ability to recognise it. You can name it while it is happening. You can explain it afterwards. That's significant - it's the first step that everything else depends on. Without it you are simply reacting - an unconscious reflex.

Recognition allows for a response, rather than a reaction. That's why it's crucial. Without recognition, no conscious change can come about.

Recognition and response are separate capacities, and they are built differently.

Recognition is something you know. Response is something you choose to do. Knowing arrives through thinking and talking. Doing arrives through conscious repetition in the situation itself, usually while feeling uncomfortable at first.

This is why falling back into old patterns is so common among people who have already done certain types of therapy. That experience is not evidence that the therapy failed. More often it means you completed one half of a two-part process and were never told there was a second half.

Why the moment the urge is strongest is the moment that counts

Old patterns are efficient. They run fast, and they run before you have decided anything.

That efficiency is the whole point of them. A response you have made ten thousand times is available instantly and costs you nothing. A response you have carefully thought through and practised twice is slow and easy to lose under pressure.

So the competition is unfair. At the moment it matters, the old response is already moving while the new one is still loading.

The only thing that changes that is running the new response in the moment. Afterwards, when you are calm and can see clearly, it's too late for that particular repetition. It has to happen in the actual situation, badly, while the old response is still winning.

It's a slow process and can be frustrating. A new response is built bit by bit, and most of the early attempts do not work. Here's why, plus a bit more:

• The old pattern can never be deleted.

When a learned response changes, the original is not erased. New learning is laid down alongside it and the two compete for which one runs. Mark Bouton's work shows this repeatedly: a response that looks gone comes back when the setting changes, when time passes or when the original trigger turns up again.

Key takeaway: there is no insight that dissolves a pattern. You have to build something capable of outcompeting it.

• A pattern has to be active before it can be changed.

In 1986 Foa and Kozak did some incredible work on how fear gets processed. They found that a structure that stays in storage and is not accessed is not available for modification.

What this means is that a pattern examined at a distance, calmly, on a Sunday afternoon or with your therapist, is a pattern in storage. The same pattern at nine o'clock on Thursday evening, with the pull to do the familiar thing at full strength, is a pattern that is open and now modifiable.

Key takeaway: the moment that feels like the worst possible time to work on something is actually the only moment it is fully available to you.

• What updates it is surprise, not endurance.

  
  

There's a lot of talk around sitting in discomfort until it fades. And whilst this is good practice for many reasons, Michelle Craske and colleagues have argued, and the evidence supports, that how much the distress drops during the attempt is not what predicts lasting change.

What predicts it is expectancy violation. This is the gap between what you expected to happen and what actually happened. The bigger the gap, the bigger the update.

Key takeaway: A useful question in the moment isn't: how long can I stand this urge to go back to the pattern?

It's two questions, at two different moments:

1. Before: what am I expecting to go wrong if I don't do this?

2. After: did that actually happen?

How accurate is any of this?

The three findings above are well established in learning research.

There is a fourth idea you may come across, called memory reconsolidation. It suggests that bringing a memory to mind makes it briefly changeable, a bit like taking a file out of a drawer, altering something, and putting it back. When researchers have tried to repeat those studies in people, though, the results have been mixed. Nobody yet agrees on when it works and when it does not. I'm mentioning it because you will see it stated online with far more certainty than it has earned.

What to do with an insight once you have one

Treat it as a starting instruction rather than a result.

An insight tells you where the pattern lives and roughly when it turns up. That is targeting information. The work is deciding what you will do differently at that specific point, and making it small enough that you can actually do it while the old response is already running.

Small matters more than impressive here. A better response you cannot perform under pressure is worth less than a slightly different one you can.

Try this

Next time the pattern starts, and the urge is strong, do two things before you act:

1. Name the pattern out loud in four words or fewer

2. Say what you expect will happen if you do not complete it.

Then do one small thing differently, and afterwards check the prediction against what actually happened.

The checking is the part almost everyone skips, and on the evidence above, it is the part doing the work.

What this does not mean

It does not mean insight is a waste of time. You cannot change a pattern you cannot see, and most people spend years unable to see theirs. What you have already done was necessary.

It also does not mean you should stop thinking about yourself. That framing gets used quite often, and it's not accurate. You're not overthinking but thinking was only ever going to get you to the halfway point.

And it does not mean the next part runs on willpower. It runs on repetition, in the right moment, at a size you can manage on a bad week.

Please note: if the pattern involves anything unsafe, or the urge is toward harming yourself, this is not a work-it-out-alone instruction. Please get professional help immediately.

Support for behaviour change

If you understand your pattern and still repeat it, nothing has gone wrong with you. You have finished the part that can be done by understanding, and arrived at the part that can only be done by doing.

If that is where you are, feel free to book a free 20-minute call with me, and we can work out what the doing part would look like for you in that time.

Common questions

Why do I keep repeating patterns I understand?

Because understanding and responding are different skills. Understanding is learned by thinking about the pattern. A new response is learned by performing it in the situation where the old one usually runs. Insight gives you the target. Repetition in the moment is what results in behaviour change.

Does this mean my therapy did not work?

Not necessarily. Building awareness of a pattern is a genuine result and a precondition for changing it. What it suggests is that the work is not finished, and that the remaining part is practical rather than explanatory.

How small should the new response be?

Small enough that you could do it on your worst day. If you can only manage it when you are rested and calm, it is still too large to compete with a pattern that runs automatically.

References

Foa, E. B. and Kozak, M. J. (1986). Emotional processing of fear: exposure to corrective information. Psychological Bulletin, 99(1), 20 to 35.

Bouton, M. E. (2002). Context, ambiguity and unlearning: sources of relapse after behavioural extinction. Biological Psychiatry, 52(10), 976 to 986.

Craske, M. G., Treanor, M., Conway, C. C., Zbozinek, T. and Vervliet, B. (2014). Maximizing exposure therapy: an inhibitory learning approach. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 58, 10 to 23.