Plant Yourself - Embracing a Plant-based Lifestyle

Should You Sanitize Your Environment?: PYP 363

01.31.2020 - By Howie Jacobson, PhDPlay

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Download on the App StoreGet it on Google Play

Today's the last day for early bird pricing for the New Orleans Sick to Fit Retreat. Go here to find out more.

The public health crisis was going to be unprecedented, and catastrophic.

As the Americans clumsily extricated themselves from the Vietnam War in the early 1970s, tens of thousands of US troops would be returning home. And by some estimates, 90% of them had become addicted to heroin during their tour of duty.

How in the world was American society going to absorb all these broken souls, these addicts? What kind of law enforcement push was needed to contain the crime wave that would inevitably crash down on our cities and towns? Where were we going to find and pay for all the mental health professionals and detox facilities that would be required? And when would the troops be ready to assimilate back into their communities, into society, into the job market?

Pentagon officials, politicians, and civil servants braced themselves for a long, hard battle, a different kind of war.

And it simply didn’t happen.

Only about 5% of the addicted soldiers maintained their dependence on heroin after they returned home. Most simply dropped the habit as soon as the conditions under which they had adopted it were gone.

Their heroin use, far from an uncontrollable pathology, was simply self-medication in the face of the horrific experience of war in Southeast Asia. They sought a way out of the stress and danger, and the drug was cheap, plentiful, and easily obtainable. Once they left the jungles and ambushes, the rice paddies and snipers, the alienation and confusion, their need disappeared. So when their supply dried up, they moved on.

Lessons from the Epidemic That Wasn't

Behavioral scientists love this story, because it supports the prevailing narrative about habit formation and disruption: people form habits as remembered solutions to recurring problems, and drop those habits when the environmental cues that trigger them are removed.

That’s not the whole story, and you can argue (correctly) that I’ve oversimplified, but it’s accurate enough.

Here’s the crux of the argument, well-presented in Wendy Wood, PhD’s new book, Good Habits, Bad Habits: Habits are the brain’s way of not having to think so hard. Make the behavior automatic, and create an unconscious link between a trigger and the behavior, and you’ve got a habit. If you want to disrupt the habit, disrupt the trigger.

Get the soldiers out of Vietnam, and all the cues (stress and drug) disappear. Habit extinguished. Remove the cookies from the kitchen, and you won’t run the circuitry that creates a craving. Take a different route home, and the golden arches won’t entice you to swing by the drive-through for a large fries. Turn off the phone, and you won’t constantly check Instagram and Twitter.

As far as you can clean up your environment, removing those triggers for unwanted behaviors, do it. The research is clear and unequivocal.

But is that always the best solution? Yes and no…

The Fragility of A Perfect Environment

There are a couple of downsides to sanitizing your environment to making “sin” impossible, or at least extremely difficult. First, you can't always control your environment.

There's a saying: “You can carpet the world, or you can just wear shoes.”

One of those options is a lot more manageable than the other. One requires a gargantuan degree of control over your surroundings. The other requires only that you control your own footwear.

When you rely on environmental “purity” to maintain good behavior, you're fragile. Because you can't control your environment. Not all the time, and not to the extent that you'd need to.

And even when you can, part of your mind is going to be freaking out,

More episodes from Plant Yourself - Embracing a Plant-based Lifestyle