Posts Tagged Choice and Behavior

Are You Reacting Reflectively or Reflexively?

One of the significant characteristics of the Discipline Without Stress approach has to do with acting reflectively versus reacting reflexively.

What’s the difference? Consider this example. You are at home and the telephone rings. You answer it.

Assume for a moment that you are NOT familiar with choice-response thinking. If I were to query you why you answered the phone, most of you would say—in one way or another—that the PHONE WAS A STIMULUS AND ANSWERING IT WAS THE RESPONSE.

Now, let’s assume that you are at home watching a television program that you had been looking forward to seeing. You are totally engaged in a scene and the phone rings. Would you disrupt your involvement in the program to … >>>

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Stress and Learned Helplessness

We know that when stress overcomes us, choices seem limited, thereby decreasing effectiveness. Behavioral scientists have a name for this psychological reaction: learned helplessness.

This phenomenon has been studied in laboratory rodents whose nervous system bears striking similarities to that of humans. Here is how one experiment works. If you provide mice with an escape route, they typically learn very quickly how to avoid a mild electrical shock that occurs a few seconds after they hear a tone. But if the escape route is blocked whenever the tone is sounded, and new shocks occur, the mice will eventually stop trying to run away. Later, even after the escape route is cleared, the animals simply freeze at the sound of the … >>>

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