Been thinking about the trandformation of habit into compulsion today.

As patient readers know. I have recently noticed that I have a lot of small compulsions and that this surprised me because I am like, the OPPOSITE of OCD.

So…. DCO, I guess.

Since I last spoke on the topic, I have been wondering how the heck these things come about in a non-OCD person like myself.

I have a few threads that might contribute to a theory.

One is that part of the mind I have referred to as the “superstition center”, but which should be called something less prejorative, like the Patterned Behaviour Center.

PBC, for short.

This part of our minds is extremely important. Without it, every single thing we did would take all the concentration and effort that the first time we did it took. That would be a massive cognitive load to try to handle. We’d likely be unable to do much else.

But no, we have the PBC. It lets us do routine things with the minimum possible strain on our brains by storing and executing previously learned patterns. It go straight from stimulus to action while barely setting foot in consciousness.

This runs the gamut from simple things. like the proper way to grasp certain objects, all the way up to something as complex as knowing how to drive.

And in a healthy person, that is more or less where it ends most of the time.

But the thing is, this part of the brain can do its job because it acts without thought.  That means that it bypasses our usual bounds of logic and sensibility and makes it hard to consciously access or alter bad patterns in order to change them,

Instead of operating on decisions, it operates on a very deep kind of feeling that you must do something or must not do something.

And that’s all well and good if we are talking about walking or driving or being a surgeon. But when neurosis corrupts the process. bad patterns get recorded right along with the good and useful ones, and the powerful emotions of the PBC get triggered by the wrong things.

This covers a lot of the sub-psychotic mental illnesses. PTSD is a prime example. Someone experiences something truly horrific, something with such a high emotional magnitude that the memory it creates is far too powerful for the psyche to handle.

But the mind also continues trying to process the experience so it can be put into long term memory, so the mind comes into conflict with itself and this comes out as flashbacks. One part of the mind tries to finish processing the memory while another balks at the strength of emotion involved, and this tension builds until the memory processing part forces the memory back into consciousness in order to try to get the job done once and for all.

A similar thing happens with phobias. The PBC of the brain forms a strong fear response to some given stimuli. A response so strong, in fact, that the conscious mind treats it as emotional trauma and triggers panic.

This is a negative reaction, and so when presented with the associated stimulus, the original scare gets replayed in the mind by its PBC and becomes a fresh trauma, which then heightens the fear even further.

And because all this comes from the PBC, rationality doesn’t help most people. Even with someone like me, who conquered his childhood fears via logic, can only hold off the phobic reaction via logic for so long.

Once my claustrophobia has been triggered, I can tell myself that the room has not gotten smaller and that there is plenty of air for everyone and everyone around me is just fine, and that hold off the full blown panic for a while.

Bu only for a while.

One key feature of the PBC is its emotional enforcement mechanism, which is an emotioin I will call compulsive dread.

It’s that feeling I have spoken of before that something terrible is going to happen if do not obey the compulsion. It’s a highly potent emotion that can be overwhelming in force, and the only way to relieve it is to obey the compulsion to do or not do it.

This compulsive dread is especially effective because it emanates from the PBC and is thus impossible for the conscious mind to regulate. The feeling is triggered without the conscious mind’s involvement and then the conscious mind has to deal with this feeling that is far stronger than most of what we feel on a day to day basis.

So to answer the question posed way back at the beginning of this post, these compulsions come from emotional impressions the mind cannot handle consciously.

But there is more to it than that. There is another emotion that acts as positive reinforcement of the compulsion, and that is what I will compulsive relief.

It feels very good to give in to the compulsion because the mind goes from a tense and conflicted state to a smoothly operating relaxed state in the blink of an eye.

Thsi good feeling is the reward the compulsion offers if you would only give in to it. Later, perhaps, when you think about those moments of tension, you will feel like you could have held out longer, but that’s only because the human mind has trouble relating to emotional states other than the one it is currently in.

Sure, when you’re relaxed and calm, you can imagine having all the resistance in the world to these compulsions because you are not currently experiencing  them.

But when you are experiencing them, they tax all your mental resources and you have far less ability to resist as a result.

Anyhow…. hmmm. I am sure I was going somewhere with all this…. oh well.

My personal experience with this dread has to do with taking refuge in routine in order to escape having to deal with my emotions. By running largely on autopilot and staying as far away from my triggering stimuli as possble, a space is left open in my mind for my conscious mind to operate.

I can even fool myself into thinking I am relatively sane… as long as I always do what my overblown PBC wants me to do.

But the moment I try to resist, I realize just how crazy I am.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.