#19: Learning, Not Looping

Transforming The Self Through Cyclic Change

Transforming The Self Through Cyclic Change

Welcome to Recalibrating! My name is Callum (@_wanderloots)

Join me each week as I learn to better life in every way possible, reflecting and recalibrating along the way to keep from getting too lost.

Thanks for sharing the journey with me ✨

This week we are going to talk about how learning can break the loops we get caught in.

You can read this entry online here.

Recap

Last week, we touched on the antithesis of the unknown: learning. Learning provides a path for us to reduce our fears of the unknown, by converting an unknown into a known.

The experiential learning cycle provides a model for transforming our experience into knowledge.

Learning is like a muscle, the more you exercise it, the stronger it becomes. With practice, you can learn to change, to grow, to transform.

This week, we are going to continue by diving deeper into why we struggle to change, living in loops that keep us stuck in cycles of stagnation.

Looping Is The Status Quo

What does it mean to transform our lives?

Transform = make a thorough or dramatic change in the form, appearance, or character of.

To transform, we must undergo a metamorphosis. We must change from who we were to who we can become.

It is important to recognize that on the journey of transforming from who we were to who we want to become, we pass through a critical stage in the transformation process: who we are now.

We are always becoming our future selves, with our current self becoming our past self. In between the tension of the past and the future, we have the present. Who we are now.

We are always becoming who we are. Time never stops, neither does our progression through it.

The future becomes the present, which becomes the past. All in the blink of an eye. A moment.

If change is the only constant, the only existence is the now. The present is all that really exists, and it is in a constant state of flux (change).

Many people find the concept of perpetual (constant) transformation scary. They have a fear of the unknown. The future is always unknown, therefore it is always scary.

Instead of recognizing that our current selves are left in the past as we move forward through time, people want to hold onto who they were.

Who they were is known, it has already happened. It feels safe.

Unfortunately, only living in the known with your past self, it becomes very difficult to look to the future and transform into who you were meant to be (self-actualize).

Instead of embracing change, many people prefer to hold onto the way things are now. The status quo.

Holding onto the status quo bends our concept of time into a loop, returning us to moments that we have already experienced.

Time is not a loop. Our perception of time is relatively linear, perpetually moving forward.

Panta Rhei - Everything Flows.

By forcing our experience into a loop, we are unable to grow, unable to change.

Unable to transform.

Short-Circuited Learning Cycles

Why do we loop? Why do we return back to the same thoughts and feelings?

The answer will vary according to each person. We all have different reasons for struggling to break the loop of our lives. We are our experiences, and our experiences are unique.

These past experiences dictate who we are, but they do not need to dictate who we become. We can break the loop and force it into an upwards spiral, growing and building with the passage of time.

Our perception of time is linear, moving forwards.

Or is it?

With post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), people often experience flashbacks. A flashback causes a person to feel or act as though the traumatic experience is happening again, right now. They may be partially or completely transported back to the traumatic event.

In this situation, the brain does not consider time as linear, but reacts as though the person has moved backwards in time to the moment the event occurred. More details on flashbacks can be found in this Verywell Mind article.

I am not trying to say that all experiences that cause us to loop (anxiety, depression, overthinking, burnout, stress cycles, etc.) are the same as having PTSD. PTSD is a very serious disorder that can have drastic consequences on your life if not treated properly. If you believe you may have PTSD, I highly encourage you to speak with a mental health professional.

That said, we all experience trauma to one degree or another.

We have negative experiences throughout our lives that eat away at our esteem like an acid, burning away our belief that we can change, that we can be better. These traumatic experiences destroy our confidence, our self-belief that we can act differently when presented with the same scenarios.

How can we change?

Returning to Kolb's Experiential Learning Cycle from last week, there are four stages to learning:

Feeling (experiencing)
Reflecting (observing)
Thinking (learning)
Doing (experimenting)

In order to grow, we must learn. In order to learn, we must observe and reflect on our feelings so that we can act differently than we did in the past.

In order to learn, we must complete the full cycle. We must feel our experience, reflect on what that experience means, learn (transform our reflections into knowledge), and experiment with our actions to test what we have learned, modifying our future actions based on the knowledge we have gained.

Going through all four stages allows us not only to increase the depth of our experience, but also to build upon our previous experience, rather than revisit it. Accumulating knowledge.

Learning adds a third dimension to the loop, turning it into an spiral, growing to new heights.

Transforming our self.

However, our past experiences can hijack our perception of time. A dysregulating (triggering) stimulus can cause us to time travel back to the last time (or the first time) we experienced that trigger. Kind of like a nervous system flashback.

The current stimulus instantly triggers the nervous system response of our past trigger, which cues our present response to be the same as before. We feel, then we do.

We loop from feeling (concrete experience) to doing, without taking the time to reflect or learn.

We loop instead of learn, repeating our past behaviours in response to the repeated cue without taking the time to consider the possibility of changing our behaviour.

Our learning cycle is short-circuited, jumping from feeling to doing without completing the full learning cycle.

Lack Of Attention And Stillness

I believe part of the reason for this short circuited learning cycle (for some people, a very large part), comes from an inability to sit still and pay attention to their current experience.

This lack of attention and ability to sit still prevents us from taking the time to process our experiences properly. We do not afford ourselves the luxury of processing the full learning cycle, taking time to reflect and learn from our experiences before taking action.

We feel and then we do.

In the past, the pre-digital entertainment era, when we became bored or uncomfortable in a given situation, we used those moments as opportunities to process our experiences.

We did not have a phone or computer or TV that we could turn to for work or distraction, to avoid processing our thoughts.

Instead, we often would enter what is called the Default Mode Network (DMN). The DMN is activated during passive rest (stillness) and mind-wandering. Daydreaming.

When in the DMN, our brains clean-up and organize our experiences thus far, cataloguing them for future reference. Note: when in a stressed state, letting our minds wander is not passive rest, but can actually increase our stress levels. I am referring to the positive benefits of allowing your mind to wander when you have dedicated the time to do so.

I like to think of the DMN operating like this:
Each time we receive information in a day, it is like picking up a book and holding it in our hands. Over the course of the day, the book pile becomes quite large and difficult to hold. We are unable to take in more information when the pile gets too high. If we try to take in more information, we cannot hold the books, and we either drop them (forget) or damage our muscles (burnout).

Taking time to passively rest and let our mind-wander (the DMN) is like taking the books and cataloguing them into our own internal library. Taking time to catalogue reduces the stack of books and opens our hands to receive new information. We can then locate the books more easily in the future (memory formation) and can make stronger connections to new information (knowledge generation).

Back in the day when humans were nomadic, we used to be in the DMN state for much of our lives as we moved from location to location, walking for hours every day. We used our travelling time to process our thoughts and emotions, to slow our thoughts and recharge.

Unfortunately, we no longer take this time to be still, to passively rest and allow our minds to wander.

What happened?

Toxic Productivity and Attention Economy

Modern society does not allow us this luxury of passive rest and mind-wandering. Instead, we live in the hyper-productivity era, where "busy" is a common answer to "how are you".

Constantly being busy is considered prestigious in toxic productivity culture. We burn ourselves out trying to meet the impossible expectations of others. We fear being considered lazy and under-productive. We strive for external esteem validation.

To make matters worse, with the advent of the Internet, we are always connected. There is no escape from the availability of work, so we have no excuse for not working.

I know many people struggled to separate work and life during the pandemic. Employers knew that employees were at home, so there was an expectation (either perceived or real) that employees were always available.

On a similar vein, even when not using our electronic devices for work, we often do not enter the DMN state because we are conditioned by the attention economy.

When presented with a problem (stimulus, trigger, dysregulation) that makes us uncomfortable, we can instantly dissociate from the situation by turning to our reality-escaping devices (phones, computers, TV).

We short-circuit the DMN by feeling and then doing. We feel uncomfortable or bored and our trained response (doing) is to reach for our phones. We become addicted to avoiding our problems. More on this topic was covered in Anti-Flow, how digital distraction becomes addicting, in entry #15.

In short, we do not take the time to be still and let our minds wander. We do not allow ourselves the opportunity to reflect on our experiences and learn from them. We cut out half of the learning cycle.

Our attentions are shortened, making it difficult for us to take the time to learn, to grow, to change. Learning is replaced with scrolling. Avoidance.

We short-circuit our learning, feeling and then doing.

We loop, and we do not change.

Change and Time

So, with all of these difficulties, how can we change?

The answer is deceptively simple: with intention.

We must be motivated to change our behaviour in order to actually change it. Acting with intention, not reacting based on past experiences.

Changing our behaviour goes against the ingrained habits and actions that we take on a day to day basis. These automated actions are not overcome easily. Stagnation is easy, change is hard.

There is a reason that many people stay in loops for their entire lives. There is a reason the status quo remains the status quo.

In order to change, YOU must want to.

A change in habitual behaviour does not happen instantaneously, but through cycles. Repeated actions that build over time. Cyclic transformation of experience. Learning to change and building on that learning. Spiralling upwards.

The learning cycle is a form of change. We have an experience (feel), identify knowledge gaps based on any inconsistencies with that experience and our understanding (reflect), analyze our reflections to identify new concepts and ideas (think), and apply the new concept or idea to our world (do).

By actively and intentionally looking for the knowledge gaps, we provide a dedicated period of reflection and observation to our days that we often miss in the rush of getting work done or the mindlessness of scrolling on our phones. A period of stillness.

Introducing reflection and observation into our lives provides opportunities to activate our DMN and catalogue our experiences, reducing our cognitive load. By cataloguing our experiences, we can also begin to notice gaps in the shelves of our mind. These gaps provide learning opportunities to solve our current problems.

Now let's look at how we can introduce reflection and learning to fix our short-circuited learning cycle attention spans and complete the cycle without looping.

Reflection and Thinking Tools

In order to solve our problems and break the loop of stagnation, we have to:

1. remember that we have the problem in the first place;

2. understand the problem so we can

3. learn how to solve it and

4. apply the solution to modify our behaviour.

Remember, remember… all of those times I've brought up mindfulness, metacognition, and journalling? These are some of the best tools we have available to provide time blocks in our days for reflection of our experiences so we can observe our behaviour.

Additionally, modern data processing tools can provide incredible insights on the patterns of our behaviour that we may have missed ourselves. For example, by including our mindful, metacognitive, and journaled experiences into our second brains, we can build a repository of our thoughts, feelings, and behaviours that can help us identify the loops and learn to break them. If you are interested in learning more about second brains and using artificial intelligence to help solve your problems, please consider upgrading your subscription to paid.

By practicing mindfulness and meditation, we can introduce the missing stillness to our hectic days. This stillness enables the activation of our DMN, allowing us to filter through the noise and identify the signal (i.e., the problem preventing change).

Note: depending on the goal of your mindfulness practice, you may not want your mind to wander. I am referring to meditation where you are allowing your mind to passively rest to help alleviate cognitive overload. This type of mind wandering can be extremely beneficial for working through problems that have you looping.

Additionally, mindfulness can provide grounding effects, helping to anchor you to the present when experiencing dissociative stressors (when you feel almost out of your body and fully in your head).

Once the signal has been identified, we can log the problem in a journal, fixing our experience in place so that we can revisit it in the future.

With practice, these tools allow us to identify patterns in our thinking through metacognition, building self-awareness of our problems. Identifying the pain points that are preventing change.

Once we remember the problem and recognize its patterns, we are well on our way to understanding the root of the problem and can move onto the the thinking phase: learning how to solve the problem. As a reminder, remembering and understanding are the first two levels of Bloom's Taxonomy for original creation, something to keep in mind as we move forward.

Based on the patterns identified with metacognitive thinking, we can ponder or conduct research to identify new ideas or concepts that may help us solve our problems. These proposed solutions are hypotheses, ideas that can be tested in the real world.

With these hypotheses, we can move to the experimentation phase of the learning cycle: doing. We can apply the new concepts and ideas to our lives and see what happens.

As we apply the new ideas, we will undergo new experiences, change. We can then reflect on the new experiences to see what worked and what didn't work. These observations will lead to new knowledge gaps, identifying new learning opportunities for new solutions that can then be experimented with, leading to new experiences. So on and so forth, the cycle repeats itself.

Congratulations, you have now learned how experiential learning occurs, how to introduce change that builds instead of looping. How to transform your own behaviour to become whomever you want to be.

Learning to Self-Esteem

Our issues with self-esteem often begin with a belief that we are unable to change, that we are stuck with who we are and who we've always been.

By learning to grow, learning how to transform your life based on new experiences or reframing how you act to old experiences, you can begin to believe that change is possible.

Instead of letting the fear of change perpetuate living life in a loop, we can revel in the change, excited at the fact that life is not the same all the time. The unknown becomes exciting instead of fearful.

This belief that you can change to be whomever you want to be can form the first seed of the new you. Growing through the learning cycle can nourish that seed and let it flourish with time.

You can use this newfound confidence to pursue other activities that you have always wanted to or that you "used" to do. Autotelic experiences that you partake in for the pure reason that you enjoy the experience itself.

Over time, these autotelic experiences compound, growing into self-confidence that form solid internal anchors for your self-esteem, helping to stabilize you against the societal pressures of external validation.

Next week

Now that we have a framework for learning how to grow and improve our self-esteem, we can move onto understanding the nature of behavioural change itself.

Next week, we'll continue with the concepts of learning and change and I will provide additional tools and frameworks for how to deal with those loops that we feel we will never break out of.

There is always hope.

Stay tuned ✨

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