When my kids were a bit younger, we lived in a pretty big neighborhood with lots of fun, mischievous kids who would often play a game called “ding dong ditch”. For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, “ding dong ditch” is when someone (usually a group of rowdy kids) rings your doorbell and then quickly runs away to hide, hoping you won’t see them. The unsuspecting homeowner will then answer the door, confused to find no one on their doorstep to the delight of the rowdy kids hiding nearby to watch the aftermath of their handiwork.
A Valuable Target
Our next door neighbor, an older gentleman, was not a fan of this game. When he would get ding dong ditched, he would come out on to the porch, yelling loudly, sometimes laced with profanities in another language, at his empty front yard about the kids disturbing his peace and his day and how he was going to catch them one day. Naturally, this meant that he was always the very first house to get targeted when kids were in the mood to test their luck at running away. We sometimes got to witness first hand as they snuck up between the bushes, whispering and giggling the whole way, to trigger the bell and our neighbor’s frustration levels. The more he reacted, the more valuable his house was as a target of their game.
Perhaps because we were next door to such a big fish, we got relatively little doorbell mischief. But on one occasion when the doorbell rang during dinner, my 12 year old son stopped us from going to the door. When we asked why, he wisely said, “We aren’t expecting company. If it’s a package it will still be there in a few minutes. If it’s ding dong ditchers, they’ll stop bothering us if they don’t get a reaction from us.” We kind of laughed at that unexpected wisdom, because he was absolutely right, the reaction was really the point of the game. And if we were really needed out front, we’d get another ring at the bell, or find our packages later when we were able to deal with them.
I sometimes use this story in groups at Centered, where I teach behavioral psychology and interpersonal neurobiology for people who are attempting to make sense of what is happening in their brain when they feel stressed, anxious, depressed, or are struggling with addiction issues. The exact same kind of process happens there whenever we are hit with a wave of unhealthy thinking. Take anxiety, for example, although you can substitute anxiety for anything you may be struggling with in this story.
Pressing mental bells
So imagine: you’re sitting in your house, just going about your day. Maybe you happen to come across something you haven’t taken care of, maybe you get a phone call, or maybe just an errant thought about something in the future suddenly pops into mind. “DING DONG” yells your brain. The rowdy kids at the front door are here to leave you with some anxiety on your front doorstep. If you’re used to answering the door and feeling a whole lot of emotions about that, then the gang high fives and marks that route as a high value target. The more you get riled up on that porch, the more yelling and cursing you do, the more that action gets highlighted in your brain as important, and thus, is morelikely to be repeated. Remember, in this story there aren’t really any kids outside, it’s just random thoughts that are passing by pressing your own internal buttons, but to you, it feels very real. Your own neurotransmitters flood your brain and body to help you emotionally and physically experience what it believes is a real threat, and now every time you think about that situation again, the doorbell rings again loudly.
Reinforcing the feelings
Funnily enough, if you go and tell others about your “ding dong ditch experience”, how stressed and anxious you felt, you will likely get a lot of well-meaning loved ones telling you that you were justified in feeling so emotional. “I would feel the same way as you,” they say soothingly. “That is so stressful.” While we enjoy validation and connection with others especially about trials in our lives, hearing this usually just solidifies that pattern even more in your own brain and it looks something like this:
“When I think about this, it presses the bell, and I experience anxiety. Therefore, this equals anxiety. I can’t help it, I’m just anxious.”
We become trapped in our own mental house, terrified of our own thoughts pressing the “doorbell of emotions” and what that might mean for us. So we either continually press that button and react to it, keeping us in a state of anxiety and suffering, or we attempt to avoid the button ever being pressed by setting up internal boundaries around it, erroneously believing that if we can avoid that person, place, thing, we won’t hear the bell and feel awful again. So we roll out the caution tape, place a big, glowing, neon sign saying “Don’t Touch” pointing to that bell, and we cross our fingers that our neighborhood gang will respect our wishes.
When internal boundaries don’t work
How quickly do you think that bell would get pushed in real life? It would be irresistible to that rowdy band of troublemakers, right? After all, it’s calling attention to that bell to everyone that passes by, even the ones who weren’t planning to ring any doorbells today. Again, the same thing happens in your mind when you draw a boundary around something you want to avoid. You have to think about it and thus light up the neural pathway to it in order to tell yourself not to touch it. Which only means that you are walking by it and up to it all day long, as long as you’re giving attention to that mental boundary.
The Solution
Okay, so what works? If we know answering the bell and freaking out about it only reinforces it happening more, and drawing a boundary around it to avoid it at all costs also only reinforces it more…then what? As my pre-teen clearly stated to us that evening, you let it ring…and you do nothing. You can’t keep the bells of anxiety, stress, frustration, or even addiction cravings from dinging. It’s a pattern, innocently created by you, and it will keep happening as long as you’re giving it emotional fuel. But hearing it ring, and knowing that it doesn’t mean you have to do anything about it, is totally different. It is exceptionally important to get comfortable with the doorbell ringing without following any conditioning to rush to answer it, because as long as you are alive, you will continue to have things that appear to be causing you stress, frustration, sadness, or cravings. Understanding and truly getting comfortable with the idea that the alarms of the outside world do not require suffering from you is the only way to be able to maintain peace, balance, and equanimity no matter what life throws at you.This is another reason it is precarious to simply disable the bell of one thing in your life (using avoidance, white knuckling, or even substances to mute the sounds)—because there’s always another situation that we would prefer to be different out there in the bushes, ready to press again.
For whom the doorbell doesn’t toll
Now when that anxiety, stress, frustration, or craving makes a mental sound, you know it isn’t a mandate for you to act. And because you don’t act, the rowdy kids of your own habitual patterns are not reinforced. They aren’t fed by your attention, drama, and emotional upheaval, and this pattern of ringing the bell gets just a bit lighter on the map each time it isn’t reinforced. Eventually, without the inclusion of emotion, there is less and less reason to ring that bell at all, and it becomes dusty, covered with cobwebs, and less interesting to passersby.
If there’s really a package out front, something real for you to deal with, it will still be there when you’re ready to peek out the door, but now you can see it clearly for what it is, rather than through the murky light of emotional suffering. And if there’s nothing real to deal with, meaning your mind was just ding dong ditching you with errant thoughts of anxiety, you can smile at the idea of the kids in your mind going home empty handed while you comfortably finish the rest of your dinner.
Shameless plug
If you’re interested in learning more about your mind and emotions, or if you’re struggling with addiction, anxiety, depression, or stress, call Centered at 800.556.2966. Our mindfulness-based mental health/addiction program is designed for anyone who wants to understand what is holding them babck so they can live their best life! We use tons of metaphors like this to help people understand their own mental processes, because we are dedicated to helping people really know themselves for lasting success–not just solve yesterday’s problems.
