Stress
Why It’s Hard to Learn From Our Mistakes
Understanding why it's hard to learn from your mistakes will help you change.
Posted April 21, 2021 Reviewed by Ekua Hagan
Key points
- Learning theory indicates we should learn from our mistakes, yet that doesn't always seem to be the case.
- Sometimes mistakes have a subtle or latent outcome that is positive to the person exhibiting the action.
- Mistakes can be a result of the same mechanisms created to help us survive. Survival assumes a higher priority than happiness or success.
- Focused thought and corrective repetition are the keys to learning from our mistakes and rewiring our brain.
In 1898, Dr. Edward Thorndike formulated a principle that would become known as Thorndike’s Law of Effect. Thorndike asserted that actions that result in a satisfying (rewarding) outcome are likely to be repeated in that situation, but actions that result in a dissatisfying (adverse) effect will be discontinued. So why is it we seem to have such a hard time learning from our mistakes? Why do we keep making the same mistakes over and over? Simply said, why don’t we just make a mistake, learn from it, and move on?
There seem to be at least two reasons: 1) Actions that yield consequences that appear to be adverse or undesired on the surface may actually yield a subtle or latent outcome which is rewarding (reinforcing); and 2) Some decisions we make or actions we take in stressful situations can trigger a primitive neurological reaction which makes them resistant to change or discontinuation.
Some Mistakes Are Actually Rewarding
Seldom does any human activity yield only one outcome. We often fall prey to understanding our actions and the actions of others on the basis of the easiest explanation and the most obvious observed result. The phrase “that doesn’t make sense” is a faulty and misleading conclusion. Human behavior may not make sense to the observer, but it almost always makes sense, on some level, to the person exhibiting the action.
Understanding the actions of ourselves and others can only be achieved by accepting Thorndike’s Law of Effect and then relentlessly searching for mechanisms of reward or reinforcement. Maybe some mistakes are actually somehow positive above and beyond the immediate consequences which seem negative.
Some Mistakes Can Become “Hardwired"
To understand why we seem to repeat the same mistakes in highly stressful situations and why those mistakes appear to resist Thorndike’s prediction of discontinuation, we must view those mistakes through a different lens.
Stressful situations are, by definition, processed in the brain as “threats” that must be defended against. There are three defense mechanisms that are genetically embedded to ensure our survival in stressful situations. As such, they override our otherwise natural tendencies for corrective learning from our mistakes. In fact, the more we use defense mechanisms, the stronger they become. More specifically, those defense mechanisms are: 1) irritability, knee-jerk reactions, and even aggression (the fight response), 2) impulsive giving-up, surrender, psychological withdrawal, and physical retreat (the flight response), or 3) paralytic hesitation to decide or the inability to overcome psychological inertia and to act (the freeze response).
For decades, I have been intrigued with the chemical and micro-anatomic bases of these self-defeating survival reactions and have written about their underlying mechanism, neuroplasticity (Everly & Lating, 2019). Neuroplasticity refers to the brain’s innate tendency to reorganize its own neural pathways. Two mechanisms increase neuroplasticity: repetition (the more we do something the better we get at it) and the stress hormone adrenalin (adrenalin makes it easier to encode a memory). Such reorganization is not only the basis for learning, it can dictate how quickly (impulsively) certain pathways can become activated.
As Dr. Donald Hebb once noted, brain cells that fire together, wire together and become self-sustaining. This helps us explain the seeming self-sustaining qualities of worry, irritability, impulsiveness, violence, and patterns of thought that contribute to poor decision-making.
Rewiring Your Brain: Neurological Overwriting Is the Key
The good news is the same neuroplastic mechanism that biases us to make poor decisions can be harnessed to reverse those self-defeating patterns. Neuroplasticity can be harnessed to make our decision-making less vulnerable to stress and crisis-induced errors. A process we shall refer to as “overwriting” appears to be the key.
From the perspective of information processing, overwriting refers to the process of creating new information and functionally superimposing it on pre-existing information. Overwriting may consist of two processes: 1) the creation of competing information pathways which with time and use subordinate the pre-existing pathways, or 2) utilization of the same characters or infrastructure which subsequently serves to erase any trace of the pre-existing pathways.
This overwriting process is applicable to pathways in the brain as well wherein it is possible to 1) create competing neuronal information pathways which with time and use subordinate the pre-existing pathways, or 2) utilization of the same neuronal infrastructure which serves to erase any trace of the pre-existing pathways. So powerful are these mechanisms, we believe they may even be capable of overriding some genetic programming.
Focused thought and corrective repetition are the keys to learning from our mistakes. Repetitive focused thought and tenacious corrective repetition over time are the keys to rewiring your brain, as well.
© George S. Everly, Jr., PhD
References
Everly, GS, Jr and Lating, JM (2019). Clinical guide to the treatment of the human stress response. NY: Spring.
