Playing Chutes and Ladders With My Neural Pathways

One of the goals of both Buddhism and behavioral psychology is to help you identify and overcome unhelpful mental and behavioral patterns. In Buddhist mediation, as well as in some types of therapy like CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy), you aim to see the pattern, slowly dissociate from it, and then use intentional repetition to try and replace it with new patterns. Essentially, you work to intentionally rewire the neural pathways in your brain. It can clearly be seen how the two main branches of Buddhist meditation contribute to each of these goals: mindfulness or awareness practice - vipassanā - helps you become aware of patterns without immediately falling into them (usually harmful ones such as hatred, greed, anger, jealousy, etc), and allows you to get some distance from them; loving-kindness or metta practice helps you to actively create new, more wholesome patterns, principally among them the four Brahma-viharas: loving-kindness, compassion, equanimity, and sympathetic joy.

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As someone who tends to identify as being good at new things and able to pick up and master new skills pretty quickly, I often get frustrated when I notice myself continuing to fall into old patterns even when I’ve long ago identified and begun to dissociate from them in mindfulness practice. I know how unhelpful it is to get angry at the person who cuts me off on the highway, or how useless and maddening it is to continuously check my phone hoping for a text from a cute guy, and yet I continue to fall into those patterns. Conversely, I know how great it feels when I do loving-kindness practice or manage to make myself practice real compassion or acts of kindness in everyday life, yet it always feels a bit forced and unnatural, not easy to slide into like my old habits.

Luckily, I have friends to help bring me back down out of the clouds where I'm flogging myself for not being good enough and remind me that 1) this shit is hard and 2) I’m probably doing better than I think. That’s the practice! my friend Kavya reminds me every time I'm beating myself up for noticing a pattern without being able to move away from it. We now regularly say it to each other in a jokingly patronizing tone - it’s always SO obnoxiously right. These habits won't go away overnight, or even over the course of a few months; many of them will be a lifelong process.

One obvious reason is that they are seriously, deeply ingrained; another is that they are still being reinforced by forces outside of us. But a friend of mine named Varsha once said something that seemed to me to be the perfect metaphor; an offhanded remark that I later took and ran with that turned into this article. She talked about how you can be working on your new patterns and thinking you’re following them really well when, all of a sudden, you slip and slide down the deep neural pathways of your ancient habits that have been deeply grooved into your brain for years.

The more I thought about this, the more obsessed I became with the metaphor. The idea of walking along and then all of sudden sliding down a slide made me think of the game Chutes and Ladders, and as I started exploring the metaphor, I realized it was almost too apt. Picture it: your mind is like an infinite board of chutes and ladders, except one that was drawn by M.C. Escher where some slides go up and some ladders go down. There’s not necessarily a “right” direction to be going. Also, there are probably way more chutes (which I’ll probably call slides, because who really says chute?) than ladders. In fact, there are slides all over the place, some of them leading into dark, scary pits of isolation, loneliness, sadness, helplessness, etc., pits filled with monsters who attack and literally beat you while you’re down, like shame, self-loathing, or unworthiness. If you’re like me, my default reaction after I fall down one of my slides (aka repeat an old habit that I know is harmful) is to beat myself up about it. “You’re worthless. You never do anything right.” After falling down the slide that is obsessively checking for texts from a love interest and not receiving any, the demon at the bottom says smugly, “See? I told you no one would ever love you.”

The chutes and ladders of my mind. Credit: Relativity by M.C. Escher

Of course, not all slides are so nefarious. And, of course, some ladders may already be there. Perhaps you are already a caring person who does a lot of acts of service for others. Perhaps you are already a strongly empathic person who feels a lot of compassion for others. All of us, naturally, have a combination of good and bad habits. But right now, we’re focusing on the process of trying to consciously undo a bad habit and replace it with a good one, and why that’s so difficult, and why we should therefore be easier on ourselves when we inevitably trip up (or trip and slide down, pun intended 😛).

Think about it: it takes more energy to climb up a ladder than it does to slide down a slide. The tricky thing about establishing new habits is that, not only does it take more energy to climb up a ladder - or establish new, healthy mental habits - than it does to slide down a slide - succumb to your ingrained patterns - but you are also building the ladder, rung by rung, as you climb up it! Meanwhile, all the slides of bad habits you've built over the years are laid out and ready to go.

So it’s not surprising that, sometimes, you just physically (or mentally or emotionally) don’t have the energy to build and climb up a ladder. Some days you just need to rest, and that’s OK! Sometimes external circumstances come along and shove you off the ladder - someone says something mean to you, a person leaves your life unexpectedly, a commercial strikes your most insecure spot. Sometimes, as was the case for me during the conversation with my friend that sparked this metaphor, you really like someone but, as you open to that feeling of love and vulnerability (a new, beautiful ladder you’re working on building, realizing you’ve always been too afraid to open even to positive emotions for most of your life), the ladder can inadvertently lead to an old and all too familiar slide, which is the very unhealthy but very ingrained ways I’ve always thought about and approached romantic relationships most of my life - obsessively checking for texts, feeling like the stakes are “all or nothing,” like my life and my self-worth will have no meaning or validity if the relationship I desire doesn’t come into being. And, suddenly, a little demon bat has flown by and shoved you off your beautiful ladder that was leading to joy and openness, toppling you down into the all-too-familiar pit of neuroticism and self-doubt.

Finally, to make this weird, alternate-universe, M.C. Escher chutes and ladders board with demons hiding in pits even more crazy, there are many versions of “you” inside navigating different parts of the board. I can yell at someone for cutting me off and then in the next moment feel real generosity thinking about someone I care about; I can obsessively check my phone for a text back from a cute guy, feeling more and more worthless every time I look and find no message, and in the next minute sit down to do a 30 minute loving-kindness practice where I feel warmth and compassion and a strong sense of connection the whole time. The process is not in one lane and it’s not linear, and as my friend Jenny astutely pointed out, the biggest flaw in my metaphor is that you’re not necessarily going “up” AND there’s really no way to win.

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Jenny pointed out that it’s not like climbing up the ladders means you get to the top, win the game, and never have to worry again. Perhaps unless you’re the Buddha, most of us can’t hope (and aren’t trying) to attain perfection. All you can do is have good intentions, work diligently to change yourself for the better when you have the energy and inner resources available, remember to practice kindness and selflessness, and occasionally leave your ladder hanging to go help someone else with theirs; and, when all else fails and you end up inevitably slipping and sliding down an old and all-too-familiar neural pathway, can you learn to not see it as a bad thing? Or, even more radically, can you befriend the demons at the bottom? Can you embrace and enjoy the ride?