The Power of Acting As If: Habits That Shape Us

Summary

Emma explores how habits, rituals, and acting 'as if' can influence our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. She shares personal stories, scientific insights, and practical tips on using actions to shape inner states and foster positive change.


 Key  topics

The role of rituals and habits in reinforcing love and emotional bonds
The concept of 'acting as if' and its scientific basis in neuroplasticity
How small actions and language shifts can lead to profound inner change
The importance of repetition and devotion in forming new neural pathways
Practical examples of rituals that promote calmness, confidence, and compassion
The influence of the reticular activating system on attention and awareness
The power of external cues and clothing in shaping internal states
Using language, especially replacing 'but' with 'and', to foster abundance mindset
The importance of practice and consistency in habit formation
Emma's personal stories and scientific insights on behavior change


Key Quote
"Change your words, change your thoughts"


 Resources

James Clear - Atomic Habits -https://bookshop.org/a/88238/9780735211292
Reticular Activating System - Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reticular_activating_system
Emma's Scripts for Communication with Confidence - Coming Soon!

Get in touch with Emma

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Website https://www.emmajonesmd.com/

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:18

Hi, everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. On today's episode, I am going to talk about the phenomenon of acting as if, or fake it till you make it, if you like that phrase. But anything that's in the realm of doing something before we feel like we mean it, going through the motions that then will become the belief or the feeling. So turning this thought loop kind of on its head is what I want to talk about today. So let me just tell you a little story that sparked the inspiration for bringing this topic today. My daughter, she's 17, she's starting her senior year of high school and preparing to go to college. So our lives are going to change. But we have had a habit and a ritual over the past many, many years, as long as I can remember, where every night before we go to bed and every day, however many times before we leave the house, we give each other a hug and we say, I love you. And the reason why we do that, we didn't really name this at first. Why did we start doing that? We just kind of got into the habit of doing it, but that as we thought about it, I first thought about it, and then I said it to her, and then she agreed. We don't know if we'll ever see each other again. And we acknowledge that. When we go to bed every night, we recognize that it's not a given that we're gonna wake up in the morning. And when we leave, particularly if we're getting in a car or walking in busy urban streets or going into unfamiliar environments, we don't know what's gonna happen. And so we want the last things that we said to each other to be, I love you, and a hug. And so we do that. And we do it every single time, and it's become quite automatic. And now is almost to the point where we will feel a little anxiety if we don't do it. Uh, she has chased me down the hallway before if I left the house with with forgetting to say it. Um, or she'll come and like wake me up if I went to bed without saying it. Now it's not every single night. Of course, I travel, she travels. Sometimes she's out late and she doesn't want to wake me up, or vice versa. But as much as we're able, that's become our habit. And it we do have the feeling, right? It is a ritual, it is a habit. And one could say, well, that's just sort of rote, you're just going through the motions. I don't really want my husband or my children to just say I love you out of pat habits and rituals. I want them to really love me. And of course, that's what we all want. And we really do love each other. And I what I'm the hypothesis that I'm putting forth in today's episode is that through the action and repetition of doing that habit or that ritual is part of how we built the love. It's not the only thing, but it's a daily or multiple times a day reinforcement. Uh, a husband and I have similar things. You know, we typically give each other a hug immediately when we both get home, whichever one is the second one to get home, um, try to do that pretty quickly. Also, you know, just little like saying, I love you when we hang up the phone. Those types of little rituals that are incredibly important to reinforcing the love that is truly present. It is not something that we're doing to act it and it's not real, but it reinforces it. So that was what happened that made me think about wanting to talk about this. But at deeper levels, all of the things that we do, as James Clear says, cast a vote for the person that we want to be. So I want to look at our words and our actions as the gateways into our thoughts and our feelings. If we think about what a thought loop is, this is kind of like cognitive behavioral theory 101. We have thought, feeling, action, thought, feeling, action, and they loop. Thought, feeling, action, thought, feeling, action. And that typically the way that we intuitively conceptualize that, because we are human thinking machines, is that the thought comes first, which then will generate a feeling, which then will generate an action. And then we have a thought about the action that we did, and that's why it continues to loop. Now, of course, if you hang around me long enough, I will say that my general opinion is that we all should be thinking a lot less, and I teach lots of techniques to decrease the just number of thoughts and the noisiness of the thoughts. So instead of thinking, we need to think differently, I want to suggest that you need to act differently. Say a different set of words or perform a different set of actions. And then new thoughts and new feelings will stem from that. That's the concept that we're talking about today. So this really are the things that feel fall into what typically is referred to as habits or rituals. Things that you do just because you do them. You don't wait to have motivation to do them. You don't wait until there's inspiration to do them, you just do them. We have lots of things that have become automatic in our lives, such as brushing our teeth or a certain way that we walk to work or drive to work, you know, all of these kind of automatic things. And that what else could become automatic that way? Now, there are some things that will always require some effort and devotion to the practice. Practice makes practice. So, for example, if you want to be a person who runs, if you want to be a runner, you need to run, right? You need to just do it. You need to stop waiting until you say, Well, when I feel like running, when I feel inspired to be running, well, that's when I'll run. We sort of all know that that's not how it works. But for some reason, when we start to think about uh certain things about ourselves, like our inner world, we do begin to think that that's how it works. So we're going to apply this to our language. If we want to be someone who communicates compassionately and well, then we need to say the words that people who are good communicators say. And we need to hold our body in a way that compassionate communicators say. Then it may become more natural. It will become more natural. But at first, you do have to kind of follow the script. That that's how it works. I definitely preach presence. I teach people to get in touch with themselves and trust themselves. And I want you to not have to rely on scripts forever. The last thing I want is for you to think that you have to memorize a million scripts in order to be a good communicator. But at first, you need to be able to say the words that people who communicate well say or not say the words. Maybe it's something that we have to remove. Which does bring me to a very good point. If you are someone who wants to feel calmer, if this would be a goal in your life, I want to feel calmer. I want to sort of quiet my mind. I wish that my thoughts didn't come so quickly or overwhelmingly. I wish I didn't have this constant mental churn of thoughts that's making me anxious all the time. Well, one thing is to move your body more slowly. Just walk more slowly. I started this experiment when I was working at the busy teaching hospital, and we would see many, many patients often spread over several different floors, and we had fallen into a habit as a team of walking very quickly between the patients and chitter chattering the entire time between patients. And I instituted a policy that we were going to walk more slowly, really uncomfortably slowly for the pace of clinical medicine, and we were not going to talk between the patients. When we arrived at the next room, we would begin the conversation about the next patient. And if we had anything left to say about the one we had just come out of, we would finish it before we walked. But the walking time was silent and slow. And the result of that action was that I felt more calm and more able to be present with what I was doing for the patient that was in front of me. I changed the action first, and then the thoughts and the feelings followed. One of the scientific principles behind this is the function of the reticular activating system. So a reticular activating system is a neural web in our brainstem that is primarily responsible for alertness. So it keeps us awake when we're supposed to be awake and it lets us go to sleep when we need to go to sleep. When this part is damaged or dysfunctioning, we may have a coma, we may have difficulty being awake, or we may be awake all of the time and have trouble going to sleep. But in normal functioning, the retictive activating system is responsible for that state of alertness or arousal and is doing something called selective attention. So it is basically telling us to which pieces of sensory information to pay attention to and which ones to ignore. On average, our brains are taking in probably thousands of pieces of sensory information from all our different sense organs, eyes, ears, nose, mouth, skin, at all times. We cannot attend to all of that. I mean, think about it. You don't really feel your clothes all of the time. You don't like taste your own teeth, you don't feel your own hair growing. You could, you could. Like that sensory information is there, but we have learned to filter it out because otherwise it would be way too noisy. So we know the reticular activating system is always doing some filtering. And part of what we can modulate when we do this outside in approach is tell it what to pay attention to. The other piece of this is that we know now fairly well from uh brain studies that the brain doesn't really know the difference between real and imagined. So if you're in something and experiencing something like in real life, your brains lighten up in certain areas. And then if you later just remember that or imagine yourself being there, your brain's going to light up in those same areas. So these two pieces of information tell us why taking certain actions, sort of pretending to be a thing, will make our brains more likely to actually be that thing. So, like, good example, the clothes we wear. You've heard the phrase, you know, kind of dress for the job that you want. Well, today I'm dressed quite casually. It's a nice warm day. I want to be relaxed and enjoying my time. It's the weekend. So I'm dressing the part. If I were to put on scrubs or if I were to put on kind of like a stiff, structured blazer, that would signal that we were doing something different, right? Um, the end of the day rituals kind of do the same thing. Do you have something that you do? Maybe you come home and like wash your face and put your hair up and change into some soft pants. That's kind of the ritual that says working Emma's over, resting Emma's on. Outside in. Outside in. That's the idea. We change the outside and it kind of changes the inside through something that's like a ritual or a routine. Our brain loves patterns and is constantly making predictions. So we're just harnessing that ability and learning how to use it to get the things that we want. And the other thing that you guys have probably heard me say lots of times is you get good at what you practice, and that we do actually sort of wear grooves into our brain. In yoga, we call these samskaras, but that they're the grooves that happen through practice. And through yoga practice, we may develop habits of non-attachment and non-grasping. But through life in the world, we may have developed habits of emotional eating or drinking or overthinking. And so we can change that. Because if you were to imagine, just you know, imagine a like muddy road that has like a deep groove, because that's where the wagon wheels have rolled every single time before now. If we started to intentionally roll our wagon or walk our feet down a different part of that path, and that every single day with devotion and attention said I'm going to walk on this other part of the path, doesn't matter if I don't want to or if I don't feel like walking on the other part of the path. I walk the other part of the path because that's what I'm doing. That's my practice. Over time, that new path would become where the deep groove is, and the other one would have kind of filled in or disappeared. That's what we're doing when we choose a practice, we repeat it over time with devotion, dedication. We're going from the outside in. Every time I say I love you to my daughter, I do feel a little more loving towards her. Now, love is infinite. That doesn't mean I had to be unloving towards her. I'm not trying to correct something. But the little bit more is built. An imperceptible amount. But that over time, if we stopped doing that and we started doing something else, could you imagine if we started saying something really nasty to each other? I don't want to do this experiment, but like let's just play it out just for the sake of this discussion. We started saying something really nasty to each other every time we left. It probably wouldn't take very long until we started to have kind of nasty feelings towards each other. The love would be eroded or replaced by some of these more negative or tumultuous feelings simply because we started doing an action or saying a phrase that acted as if that was how we felt. So we have to be very careful about how we speak and how we behave. Those are the truths of what we believe. What you think is mostly irrelevant. Most of our thoughts are fabricated. But how we speak and how we behave are the things that show who we really are. Piece of data that I came across that I thought was really intriguing as I was thinking about this concept is the neurological effects of acting on the brain. And so when we think about, you know, what is it that actors do when they're acting, when they're making a movie or TV show or acting in a play, they are having, this is kind of the phrase about acting, right? You're having real responses in fictional settings. So the fact that the setting is fictional doesn't matter. The response is still true, and the brain activity that those actors are having is the same as if those circumstances were quote unquote real. Um, they they sort of are. So this principle is how we can use the tactic of acting as if to change our minds. If you want to feel differently about something, if there's something that you've been struggling with and you want to think differently, the perhaps the first thing to do is to act differently. If you want to be more confident, how can you put on the coat of confidence, if you will, that may be physically, like literally a coat of confidence? Is there an outfit or lipstick or a pair of earrings that gives that persona of confidence? And then that will in turn make the thoughts and the feelings of confidence amplified. Same thing with calmness. Is there clothing, physical surroundings, words that you can say, mantras that you can use, music that you can listen to, things that signal calmness, which then in turn will cause calmness. Where can we use this principle of acting as if to have positive change in our lives? One of the things that I'm teaching about a lot right now is language and how the language we use shapes the way we think, shapes the way we feel, and shapes the way we behave. That's definitely one of the easiest ways to change. Can you change the way you talk about something? Which will then change the way you think and feel about it. One of my most, most, most favorite little language hacks is just to change but to and. Can we replace all our butts with ands? Let's do a butt cleanse and say and instead. That that's huge. It's the smallest shift. That language shift acts as if we believe in infinite possibility and in abundance, where two things can be true at once. Through the simple word choice, we communicate to ourselves that that's what we believe is possible. So that's like a very powerful one. Um, on Instagram, I'm giving lots of examples of other phrases that can be used, and I'm working on some scripts right now to give you those training wheels so that you can practice getting the words out of your mouth that signal I am a compassionate communicator. I am someone who seeks first to understand before seeking to be understood. I value connection over being right. All of those things are the things I value when I think about communication, but they can be a little bit nebulous or esoteric when you've never practiced them before. So it's okay. You know, you it would be natural to not be good at something that you've never done before. That's kind of how it works, right? We get good at what we practice. And through practicing them, using the scripts, using the phrases that I'm teaching, you can get better. I'll have a link in the show notes about how to get the first couple of scripts that I'm working on and where you can go for more on learning about how to change your language in order to change your thoughts and feelings. If you have any insights or ahas that came as you were listening to this, a time that you've tried acting as if and it worked, I'd love to hear about it. Leave me a comment or send me an email. And as always, let me know if there's certain topics that you'd like me to cover. I'll see you next week.