B F Skinner, the famous behavioural psychologist, held that we humans are all conditioned at a very simple level by reward and punishment. We are little more than clever trainable monkeys (or donkeys, if you ask me!). The theory goes like this: If I get an electric shock enough times while sipping alcohol, eventually I will no longer want to drink alcohol because of the immediate unpleasant association. If a rat gets rewarded with a sugary drink every time it pushes a lever, it will be motivated to push that lever. Get a reward and you will do more of the rewarded behaviour. Get a punishment and you will do less.
But I think there’s more to it.
Take smoking (or even sticking to a diabetic diet). When someone lights up a cigarette they get an instant ‘reward’ (because of dopamine receptors in the brain and positive associations they have built up around the habit). The ‘punishment’ that smoking dishes out comes along much later (impotence, cancers, faster aging, etc.). Yet, in spite of the fact that the punishment is so delayed, and seems unconnected with the behaviour of putting a cigarette in your mouth, millions of people manage to quit smoking – and most do it with no help whatsoever.
In contrast, if I have a severe peanut allergy, I don’t have to use too much will power to avoid nuts because I know I will be instantly ‘punished’ for consuming the said nut. My airways may close, I may go into shock, I may even die! That’s a no brainer.
Now of course a diabetic may experience certain immediate unpleasant consequences of letting their eating get out of balance (too much carbohydrate, for instance), but the really severe punishments, as with smoking, come much later (although always sooner than you thought they would). Blindness, amputation, heart disease, coma, etc are all just concepts until they actually turn into ‘punishments’ for real ‘some time in the future.’
The idea of this new hypnotic download session from hypnosisdownloads.com ‘Stick to your diabetic diet’ is to link the long term likely consequences of straying from a good diabetic diet to a sense of immediacy. Instant gratification maybe OK for mice and monkeys (or dogs and donkeys), but we can all learn something very important from people who stick at something because they know it has real long term rewards, rather than just reacting to ‘what feels good now’.
Diabetes on the increase
In the USA almost 21,000,000 people have diabetes. That’s 7% of the population! Diet and other life style factors play a huge part in increasing the prevalence of diabetes. It’s also estimated (by the American Diabetes association) that around 54,000,000 Americans are pre-diabetic. And other western countries are not far behind, it seems.
With carbohydrate-rich sugary foods so widely available, with their promise of ‘quick fix’ energy release and tastiness, it’s perhaps never been more important to develop ourselves beyond the reward/punishment simplicity of a laboratory rat.
I hope many diabetics – and also people at risk of developing diabetes – get a lot of benefit from this new session – stick to your diabetic diet.
That’s all for now.
Mark
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