Taking Your Mind Off Autopilot - Adam Hanley

Wendy Hasenkamp speaks with psychologist and contemplative researcher Adam Hanley. Adam studies mindfulness-based interventions for addiction and pain, seeking to understand how they work, and how they can best be applied in these populations. In this conversation they discuss automaticity, habits, and addiction; his research showing how mindfulness may help us de-automatize our thought processes, and stay more in the present; self-transcendence and how he’s beginning to study it; and more.

Transcript

Hi folks,

Wendy here.

We're just dropping into your feed with a short bonus episode.

This is a conversation I had last year with mindfulness researcher Adam Hanley.

I wanted to share this with you because it highlights a recent study he did that I think speaks to one of the core aspects of mindfulness meditation.

It's often taught and many of us have experienced that mindfulness can help us break out of our automatic habits,

The thought patterns,

Emotional reactions,

These seemingly hard-wired responses we all have that we may previously not even have been aware of.

And when these kind of autopilot reactions become problematic,

They can be linked to things like intense negative emotions,

Ruminative thinking patterns,

Or addictive behaviors.

So with continued meditation practice and the growing awareness of our own mental experience that comes with it,

It seems that we can gain some kind of space where we can start to bring in our intention and maybe form a new response and start to break down that automatic habit.

In my opinion,

This ability to de-automatize our mental patterns lies at the heart of mindfulness's capacity for transformation.

There's a famous quote from the Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor,

Viktor Frankl,

That I think sums it up well.

He said,

Between stimulus and response,

There is a space.

In that space is our power to choose our response.

In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

What I love about Adam's work is that it takes on this question of automaticity using an elegant yet simple and extremely well-validated paradigm in the research world.

As we talk about in our conversation,

He's looking at whether mindfulness training reduces the automatic associations that are formed during a process called classical conditioning.

That's when two stimuli that are paired together become linked in memory.

I sat down with Adam at the 2019 Mind & Life Summer Research Institute in Garrison,

New York.

We talked about his research on mindfulness and automaticity,

As well as his early experiences as a graduate student getting into contemplative science and his current work on self-transcendence.

I hope you enjoy this window into some fascinating research.

And also just a reminder about the upcoming Contemplative Research Conference taking place online November 5th to 8th.

This is an international academic research conference for scientists,

Scholars,

And practitioners across diverse contemplative fields.

And it's also for professionals and leaders in the contemplative space who want to stay up to date on the latest research.

You can find out more and register at contemplativeresearch.

Org.

Okay,

With that,

It's my pleasure to bring you this bonus episode with Adam Hanley.

I'm here with Adam Hanley.

Thanks so much for joining us today on the podcast.

Pleasure to be here.

So I'd love to start just by hearing how you have come to be where you are in this field and kind of your path so far.

Yeah.

It hasn't been a very linear trajectory.

I hated psychology in undergrad.

So I'm currently a counseling psychologist.

And I did not like research.

I had to do an undergrad thesis and got four participants.

And I was like,

This is terrible.

Nobody wanted to talk about rap music in East Tennessee,

Which was,

You know.

Your thesis was on rap music?

Yeah.

The effects of rap music on children.

So no parents were signing that consent,

Surprisingly.

Right.

Yeah.

So it was a problem.

Were you forcing children to listen to rap music?

Yes.

Yeah.

Like Eazy E verse,

You know,

Whoever else I could find.

That's awesome.

Yeah.

So I just thought I wanted to do clinical work,

More or less.

I guess I'd been practicing for a while.

Practicing meditation.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And more in the context of sports,

Sort of as like,

You know,

Anxiety,

Work,

Kind of performance enhancement,

Work,

Just sort of focusing.

So then I got to graduate school and was pretty bored.

So you went to graduate school for clinical?

Counseling psych.

For counseling psych.

Counseling psych.

Yes.

And was just like looking around campus.

So I was at Florida State trying to find something that was interesting or compelling.

And stumbled across Eric Garland,

Who was a newly minted professor down there.

It's like,

This guy's doing interesting things.

It's meditation.

I'll explore it.

And so from there,

You know,

I got involved with Mind & Life.

And there's been this really interesting kind of merger of practice with research that's arisen out of that.

Did you come to Mind & Life through Eric?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I think I applied about three or four times and you guys rejected me every time.

Oh,

No.

That's the way it goes.

I bounced back.

That's good.

I'm glad you kept on.

Because look how it's happened.

Yeah.

I mean,

Because I like,

Again,

I had no research history.

I had nothing like going into this.

And so I came twice,

2013,

2014.

And I've been reflecting on it this year.

Which really kind of catalyzed the way I thought about sort of what my career could be as a psychologist.

In what way?

Just the complexities of clinical work and therapy and research.

Just like all of this stuff could kind of merge and weave and inform everything else.

And so I could kind of be studying at the same time these practices that I thought would be helpful for the folks I was working with.

So that balance was exciting.

And then so after you started coming to the SRI,

You got a Varela grant?

Yes.

I did get a Varela grant.

And I think I tried a couple of times on that one,

Too.

Which was super helpful.

Right?

So I didn't know about the grant writing process.

I didn't know about the review process.

Yeah.

As a graduate student,

That's a very new thing to learn.

Yes.

Yes.

So I was trying again and refining and just being clearer in that presentation.

It was a great learning process.

But yeah,

So I got this Varela award funded to study conditioning and whether mindfulness training would disrupt classical conditioning.

So can you describe for our listeners what exactly classical conditioning is?

Yeah.

So classical conditioning is this old kind of quintessential model of learning where you have a stimulus.

Again this is food,

Something that naturally elicits a behavioral response like salivation.

And then you pair that with just something else in the environment.

So like the sound of a bell or clapping or something.

So over time,

If you continue to pair these things,

That sound will elicit the behavior like salivation.

So this is like Pavlov's dogs.

This is Pavlov's dogs.

Many people have heard about this.

Yes.

Yes.

It's Pavlov's dogs.

It's a classic system of learning in the brain.

And so you said you were looking at whether mindfulness would disrupt that.

Correct.

Why would you hypothesize that?

Yeah.

So the definition of mindfulness that I grew up with was non-reactivity.

So there was kind of this attention component and there's a non-reactivity component.

And it's sort of that classical conditioning,

That automatic response,

I guess is sort of at least basic to my understanding of how mindfulness works.

It kind of slows down that automaticity.

Got it.

Yeah.

So there's this paper,

I think from 1967 or 68 by Dikeman that talked about the de-automization through mindfulness.

In the 60s?

In the 60s.

Yes.

Whoa.

I had not heard of that.

But yeah,

Nobody had really looked at it.

Nobody had really directly studied it.

And so that's also kind of the motivation for that project.

Wow.

Cool.

So tell me about your study.

Yeah.

So we recruited about 50 college students,

Mostly graduate students,

And brought them into the lab on six different occasions.

And we gave them mindfulness training or this kind of sham attention training where I read to them from an extremely boring book about the English countryside in the 1700s.

I gave far more detail than anybody needed on barn swallows and things of this nature.

Yeah,

Compelling read.

So what do you mean by a sham?

As I think of that as a,

Or sometimes you hear of that in a medical procedure.

So the participant might think that they're having a procedure done,

But they're not.

Is that what you mean?

Yeah.

So we presented the study to students as an attention training study.

So that hopefully wouldn't just get folks that,

Oh,

I want to learn meditation,

So I'm going to join this study.

So everybody was like,

You're either going to learn attention training through this kind of passive,

Sort of more mindful,

Just being aware of what's happening for you,

Or you're going to learn through white knuckle approach.

You're going to listen to a boring book and you're just going to hold on and just keep focused.

So did they have to report on content from that material?

No.

A lot of them,

The first two or three sessions,

Like when are you going to ask me about it?

When are you going to ask me about it?

I was like,

Well,

Maybe next time.

But yeah,

So we didn't make them do any sort of explicit report.

But they thought that they should be.

Everybody came in with the expectation that they were going to have to recall.

OK.

Got it.

So then we sent them through that training.

And then at the end of the study,

We brought them in to do an eye blink conditioning task,

Which kind of Pavlov's dogs,

You ring a bell and they salivate because they know it's dinner time.

Whereas in this task,

We rang a bell,

Which is a little tone through some headphones,

And puffed people in the eye with this little short burst of air.

So they learned when the bell rang,

Then they should probably blink because they were going to get a little puff in the eyeball.

Right.

So you were comparing the mindfulness training to this listening to reading as a form of attention training.

And then you were doing the eye blink startle.

And that's your measure of the learning?

Yeah,

That's the measure of learning.

So really the primary outcome was how many times the participants blinked in response to just the tone.

OK.

So when they do that,

It means they've learned that they've associated the tone with the response to blink.

Yeah,

So that was a conditioned response.

Gotcha.

And so what did you find?

So we found,

Number one,

That mindfulness training increased mindful states over the course of training.

So that's sort of a basic important finding because if that didn't happen,

Then who knows what we were doing with this study.

And how are you measuring the mindful states?

So after every study session,

We had them rate a little scale,

I felt aware,

I felt present kind of questions.

So self-report.

Self-report,

Yep.

And yeah,

So we found that it did increase state mindfulness.

And then we found that the mindfulness training delayed the onset of their first conditioned response.

So the folks in the mindfulness condition were slower to blink at post-testing by about 10 trials.

OK,

So slower to make that association.

Yeah,

Yeah.

And then we found that the mindfulness training decreased the frequency with which they blinked over the course of that whole task.

So they were slower to get conditioned,

And they were less frequent to demonstrate conditioning.

Yeah,

It's funny because I could imagine some people thinking like,

Oh,

Well,

Mindfulness makes you not learn so well.

Like,

That may be not so good.

Yes.

Which,

Yeah,

I think is an interesting prospect.

It may,

In fact,

Make people not learn so well.

But I think more of what's happening is that folks just aren't carrying the baggage of the past into each subsequent cue.

So this tone may be a brand new tone.

That doesn't mean I'm going to get puffed in the eyeball.

I did a few times.

But now here's a new tone.

Let's see what's going to happen.

Right.

So that notion of beginner's mind,

I think,

Is real.

Right,

So like an openness.

Yeah,

And maybe there's some,

I mean,

The word learning,

There's a lot in there,

Right?

So maybe that's also part of what could be confusing with some of the semantics.

So the kind of learning that you're talking about with this paradigm is a really,

Like you were saying,

Automatized,

Like automatic.

There's not a lot of conscious thought in there.

Correct.

And so that's the thing which you found mindfulness to reduce.

And so that,

Can you say a little bit about the kind of behaviors in our everyday lives that that kind of automaticity might be related to?

Yeah.

I mean,

I think,

So in a clinical setting,

The most obvious parallel is addiction.

And often you'll hear folks struggling with addiction that,

Oh,

I was just back in the bar.

I wasn't thinking.

I didn't want to be.

I just ended up there.

So I think this is a really concrete example of kind of that automaticity in action that's driving these maladaptive behaviors.

And so maybe what this can do is make folks just more aware when that cue pops up.

And so they can kind of have that freedom to choose in response to that cue instead of just being back in with a drink before they know it.

Right.

So you could have more intention and possibly kind of freedom in your behaviors and choices.

Yeah,

Yeah.

Awesome.

I wonder too about,

We're here at the Summer Research Institute once again,

And we've heard some presentations about implicit bias and the ways that our minds automatically form these kinds of associations potentially between certain groups of people and certain emotional responses or thoughts about them.

Do you think that also might kind of be part of,

Because there's also been studies that show different forms of meditation are helpful to reduce the implicit bias and implicit associations that we have.

Do you think that could also be related to your results?

Yeah.

I think free will is a powerful narrative.

And I think a lot more of our behavior is conditioned than maybe sometimes we give acknowledgment of.

So yeah,

Implicit bias,

I think it can really run the range.

Anything we practice gets automatic,

Right?

Right.

And whether that's practice via social conditioning or that's practice via family conditioning or anything.

That's really exciting.

When I saw your paper come out,

I was really quite struck by the possible implications.

I think it's a really important finding.

I'm glad somebody read it.

I think a lot of people are going to read it.

You've also done some really interesting work around the concept of self-transcendence.

Can you describe what that means from your perspective?

Yeah.

Thank you for clarifying from my perspective,

Because my perspective is rudimentary at best.

But let me also contextualize this research too.

So right now,

Pretty much what we're doing is looking at mindfulness-based interventions for folks with chronic pain.

And so your classic eight-week mindfulness-based intervention,

Pretty much every week starts with some type of meditation.

And what we started noticing was there was this pattern of folks that would talk about kind of like,

I couldn't feel my hands or I couldn't feel my legs,

Sort of like the body boundaries sort of adjusting or changing.

And these are the folks,

When you notice that what happened to your pain,

They're like,

I don't know.

I didn't really notice my pain.

It wasn't really there.

They were saying they couldn't feel their arms or legs when they were doing the practices?

So like,

Yeah,

During the inquiry stuff,

Just kind of breaking down their experience.

So we started thinking,

Well,

If these people are having these experiences and they're reporting kind of state effects of pain relief,

Then maybe there's something clinically relevant here.

So then we developed,

Started developing two ways of measuring this through self-report.

So like just a three-item brief state scale,

Did you feel yourself dissolved?

Did you feel at one with all things?

Did you experience bliss?

And a longer kind of trait scale showing like frequency of these experiences over time.

And my Varela project was kind of the testing ground for the state scale.

And it seemed like brief mindfulness training was able to kind of adjust how people were experiencing their sense of self in the moment,

Which is very curious.

People who were doing the mindfulness training reported more of these.

So I'm assuming that scale is what you're considering the self-transcendent state that is often reported from meditation.

Yeah,

It was our best guess at it.

So self-transcendence kind of classically is understood to have two or maybe three components.

So there's kind of this self,

Alteration to self,

And then there's these expansive emotional states of bliss or awe.

But those experiences of self often occur in kind of one of two ways.

So either this self can kind of feel at one with all things,

There's this unifying experience,

Or it can kind of dissolve and melt away into just kind of this emptiness state.

And so we tried to balance items so they captured both of those transcendent trajectories and that big kind of pleasant sensation of affect.

And so in that study with the chronic pain patients,

Did you find any results with their meditation or kind of their clinical patients?

Yeah.

So we found that after eight weeks of training that the folks that got mindfulness training were able to achieve these self-transcendent states during self-guided meditation.

So the majority of the studies we've looked at with this has been kind of therapist-led.

There's some sort of induction.

But the fact that these folks said,

Oh,

Yeah,

I just kind of shook my sense of self up a little bit without any kind of external aid is interesting.

And those folks that were best able to increase their self-transcendence over the course of training also felt better at the end of the study.

So it seems to have.

.

.

Like they had less pain?

Well,

So this is just a state effect.

Gotcha.

OK,

Like a positive feeling.

Yes.

Well,

So I think it's important because in chronic pain patients and folks that are taking opioids over a long period of time,

We really see these hedonic deficits.

So chronic pain just kind of saps the joy out of life,

Right?

You can't do these things you used to do.

Your body hurts.

So you just don't feel good very often.

Then opioids just kind of restructure the brain,

Kind of hardwire those pleasure centers so that you just have a lot harder time self-generating pleasant experiences.

And so I think that's why that state effect is really interesting and maybe has important clinical implications.

So these folks are finding a way to get a little pleasure.

To have some joy.

Yeah,

Which is so hard for them.

Yeah.

And so with respect to pain,

Then we also found that the folks that reported more frequent self-transcendent experiences from pre to post testing were the ones that reported reduced pain at post testing.

So actually saw pain drops there.

And then at three month follow-ups,

These folks were misusing their opioid medication less often.

OK.

Meaning like taking too much or.

.

.

Yeah,

So like had reduced their use.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's awesome.

Yeah.

It's a really.

.

.

Interesting downstream effects.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's pretty important implications.

Yeah.

Well,

Yeah.

Hopefully we can replicate it.

Right.

Yeah.

So yeah,

What's next for you on the research front?

So we're really trying to distill how to create these kind of therapeutic altered states.

So we're doing some studies right now for folks about to have surgery where we're kind of testing whether just a brief induction can kind of hit this transcendence and what that does to their clinical symptoms in the moment.

And then maybe what it can do to their post surgical recovery.

Just really trying to boil down like how best to deliver the practice,

How best to inquire into people's experience to better understand how they're experiencing these states so that we can then leverage them to more skillfully help folks feel better and recover faster.

Right.

Yeah.

Because it's probably not a very easy thing to,

As you say,

Inquire into.

It's just a subjective thing and people may not even necessarily be aware of it themselves until you ask.

Right.

Yeah.

And I mean,

Yeah.

So I ask people these questions pretty much on a weekly basis and they look at them and they just laugh.

What in the world are you talking about?

And then 15 minutes later after we do a mindfulness meditation,

They're like,

Oh.

Like it doesn't make perfect sense,

But at least I understand like what.

A little bit more idea.

Yeah.

So whether these people are transcending or like ultimately that doesn't matter to me.

They're having some sort of alteration that seems to be doing them some good.

Yeah,

That's cool.

Like even a little,

As you said,

Like a shake up of the self,

I think.

I know for myself,

Like that can have pretty profound effects of your state of anxiety or whatever else might be happening.

Yeah.

I mean,

Because if your self dissolves,

There's nothing to be anxious about,

Right?

Exactly.

That's pretty powerful.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I guess I'd also be curious if you have thoughts on where the field at large should go or what are the kind of most important questions from your perspective these days?

Well,

I mean,

I'm certainly biased in this response,

But I mean Dave Vago wrote this SART paper,

That Self Awareness,

Self Regulation,

Self Transcendence 2012 or something,

Right?

Like the year before I came to this for the first time,

I was super excited to see him.

I was like,

Yeah,

He wrote this paper.

But we spent a lot of time on those first two mechanisms,

I think,

Self awareness and self regulation.

And I think,

I mean,

To me it all comes back to a sense of self.

And it seems like the majority of our wisdom traditions sort of seek to kind of adjust the relationship with the self and the outside world,

Kind of these broader constructs.

And it seems like there's a lot of energy at this conference around kind of transcendence,

Certainly a lot more than I've heard at other meetings recently.

So it seems like that's one of the places the field is going right now.

I think I'm excited about the individual benefits that we're seeing in our chronic pain folks.

But maybe I'm more excited about sort of the social reverberations of this stuff that maybe we'll just be nicer and kinder people if we feel more connected to the folks around us.

So hopefully,

You know,

The field can contribute to that development because it's needed in a lot of ways right now.

Yeah.

All right.

Well,

Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us.

No worries.

It's been great to chat.

Yeah,

Appreciate it.

This episode was edited and produced by me and Phil Walker.

The topic on the show is from Blue Dot Sessions and Universal.

Mind and Life is a production of the Mind and Life Institute.

Are you sure you don't want to do a little rap?

Just a little beatbox?

You know what?

I think I'm good.

I've retired.

I've actually stepped away from.

.

.

Hung up the Spurs?

I have hung up the Spurs,

Yes.