Understanding and Retraining Conditioned Reflexes: The Toilet Trigger

 Have you ever walked past a restroom, thought you might need to go, and then the second you opened the door, it was like your bladder hit the panic button? You went from "maybe I could pee" to "I need to pee NOW!" in a matter of seconds. If you're nodding your head, you're not alone. This isn’t just a quirk of aging—this is your brain doing exactly what you accidentally trained it to do.

The Toilet Trigger: A Case of Classical Conditioning

What’s happening here is a form of classical conditioning. Just like Pavlov's dogs began to salivate at the sound of a bell, our brains associate certain environments or stimuli with specific responses. In this case, the sight of the bathroom (or even the door) becomes a trigger for your body to prepare for urination. Your brain has learned: bathroom = time to pee. The reaction is automatic. It bypasses conscious thought.

The good news? If your brain was trained into this pattern, it can also be retrained out of it.

How to Retrain Your Brain

Retraining your brain takes intentional practice. If you want to stop the near-accident urgency that hits when you see a toilet, you can.

Here’s how:

1. Awareness – Recognize that this is a reflex, not a true emergency. You have more control than it feels like.

2. Delay the response – When you feel that strong urge upon seeing the toilet, pause. Take a breath. Wait a few seconds. You’re teaching your body that the trigger doesn’t need to equal immediate action.

3. Gradual desensitization – Practice walking into the bathroom without immediately going. Do something else for a moment. Over time, this helps break the tight link between stimulus and response.

4. Consistency – Like any habit, retraining takes time—typically around 30 days of consistent effort. So practice. 

Why This Skill Matters

This isn't just about bladder control. This is about brain control. Once you understand how your brain is constantly reacting to triggers around you—often without your permission—you can begin to take your power back.

Your emotional responses to stress? Conditioned. Your defensiveness in conflict? Conditioned. Your impulse reactions when things go wrong? Conditioned.

Just like the bathroom example, all of these responses can be retrained.

This Is What My Book Is All About

In Mastering the Five Managerial Superpowers, I walk you through exactly how to retrain your brain to respond more strategically to the world around you. The foundational skills of self-awareness, compassion, and self-control allow you to stop reacting automatically and start choosing your responses with intention.

Whether you’re leading a team or just trying to lead a more centered life, understanding how to rewire your reflexes is a superpower worth mastering.

So the next time your bladder tries to boss you around, remember: it’s not magic. It’s just conditioning. And you can hack it.

Ready to learn how? Check out Mastering the Five Managerial Superpowers and start hacking your brain today. https://humanistlearning.com/mastering-the-five-managerial-superpowers/

Thoughts on Freedom and Behavioral Conditioning

Freedom means – freedom to resist conditioning so our conditions don’t condition us. 

We aren't as free as we like to believe we are. In fact, a lot of our behaviors and thoughts, are conditioned and happen whether we want them to or not. 

I teach people how behaviors are conditioning and trained up and how to resist that conditioning and how to stop unwanted behavior in yourself and others.

In a very utilitarian way, freedom really is the freedom to be free from your conditioned responses. After all, if you are responding in a way that is conditioned, it means, you are not choosing your response. 

Unlearning takes time

Think of the brain as a pattern recognition and prediction machine.  As you learn patterns, your brain cells create connections to contain that learning.  The more you practice, the more automatic whatever you are learning becomes.

This is one of the reasons why it takes ~30 days to learn a new skill. The brain needs time to learn the patterns of the behavior, recognize them and start to be able to predict based on those patterns.

Just as it takes time to learn a new skill, unlearning also takes time. You can't just say - ok - I will no longer recognize a patter that has become a physical connection in the brain. You have to practice ignoring the pattern and - basically - learn to ignore it and replace it with something else.

The good news, is - this is totally doable. The bad news is - it's REALLY hard to do. But knowing how to do this and how your brain works at least gives you a chance to change.

Critical Thinking is important

One of the reasons Humanists are so adamant that we teach people critical thinking skills is that in order to unlearn your conditioning so that you CAN choose your response to your conditions, you have to spend some time thinking about how you think.  And that is what critical thinking is. It's thinking critically about thinking.

Our brains get lots of things wrong. It takes a lot of energy to think so our brains like to do it as little as possible. It likes to recognize patterns and simplify things by automating our thinking.

There are tricks you can learn and practice that can help you interrupt the brain's automation. It's like learning a new skill and once your brain learns how to do it - it will self reward itself for doing it. I have a book and course on - Reality Based Decision Making where I teach some of these skills. https://humanistlearning.com/video-reality-based-decision-making-for-effective-strategy-development/

The point is - if you actively work at practicing critical thinking, you will get better at it and it will become more automatic and doing this - thinking about how you think - will help free you from your automatic brain processes so you can double check whether what your brain is thinking is true or not.

Finally

The reason I am writing about this is because - I'm watching people in cults believe they are free and - they clearly aren't. Specifically, I'm thinking about the violent extremists in the USA - the supremacist militias that are radicalizing young men to pick up guns and go on shooting sprees. These young men - are not freethinkers and they aren't free. They are being manipulated by others to do incredibly horrible and stupid things. 

What cults offer is community. The price? Conformity of thought. These men join cults because they have some idea of what sort of man they want to be. But - strong men don’t join cults. And they certainly don’t join violent cults. They are strong enough to stand on their own and don’t need a cult to make them feel safe.

Standing alone, takes more courage than standing in a group. If you want to truly be free, you need to think critically and learn how to choose your responses so that your conditions don't condition you to do stupid things.  

De-Conditioning Racial Bias

One of the reasons we still have problems with race isn't necessarily because people are racist, though, there are out and proud racists. It's more that well intentioned people are unaware that many of their impulses and thoughts are conditioned responses, meaning, we don't think about them, we just feel them and it makes us uncomfortable.

Deconditioning unwanted behaviors is something I specialize in. I have a background in behavioral conditioning. I know the science of how to make unwanted behaviors (including thoughts), stop and I also have the practical experience to know why exactly it is so hard to change, even when we want to.  And yes, I have a course/book on that (Why is Change so Hard?) 

First, I want you to read this thread by Claire Willet on Twitter. https://twitter.com/clairewillett/status/1266894029498675200 

This thread is super important for white people to read. It's about the history of our conditioned responses to black protests.  Specifically, how we have been conditioned, intentionally, to feel uncomfortable with black people protesting.  And yes, we were and are being conditioned to respond to protests by people seeking to not be shot for no reason, with discomfort. And there is a super long history in the USA of this happening. And yes, it was done intentionally. And yes, our government did it intentionally. Read the twitter thread! 

That uncomfortable feeling you have been having about how black people are protesting? It's there for a reason. You have been conditioned to feel that discomfort. And that was done intentionally to help people in power, stay in power by denying social justice movements support by other moral people, by making them, uncomfortable and afraid. 

I have a background in behavioral conditioning. I can attest that what Ms. Willet describes in her thread, is true. What she is saying, about how even when we find out we've been lied to,  we still believe things that aren't true, because it feels true even when it isn't - is absolutely spot on. 

That is the power of conditioned responses. Conditioned responses bypass your normal thinking. It's your gut reaction. You don't know why you have this gut reaction, you just do. And yes, your thoughts can be conditioned and ARE conditioned. All the time.  

If I start a commercial jingle, chances are you will sing the rest and would have a really hard time, stopping yourself.  Let's give it a try ... "plop, plop, fizz, fizz." 

There are people who want the rest of us to be afraid of black people asking for help. And they have spent, literally centuries convincing people to be afraid and uncomfortable around black people and about discussing discrimination against black people and minorities. And all this discomfort and our inability to deal with it, is preventing us from finally, creating a society where everyone is given the same opportunity and where people can actually be judged on their character and not on the color of their skin.

Deconditioning Ourselves

But in order to get there, we have to start deconditioning ourselves of these habits of thoughts that cause us to have negative thoughts when confronted by race. We have to decondition the habits that cause us to look away or deflect. 

The good news is that these various deflection responses, are a normal part of the deconditioning process. The bad news is that, unless you force yourself to challenge your own brain, you won't get past them, which is why collectively, we haven't gotten past it.

The other good news is that once you understand your own resistance response, you can help yourself decondition the uncomfortable responses you have whenever the subject of race comes up.  

So if you want to support black people but keep finding reasons why you don't actually support black people, then I have a few suggestions for you. And yes, I mean even well meaning liberal people who think they are beyond this but are afraid to go to the 'black' part of town because they are worried about crime - you too. Especially you.

What I want you to learn is first, why change is so hard (https://humanistlearning.com/book-and-program-why-is-change-so-hard/)  I want you to understand the resistance ideas that pop into your head for what they are, resistance to change. Then, you can calmly encourage your brain to calm down and think explicitly about whether the assumptions you have about a given situation are true.

Think Humanistically

The next thing I want you to do is think humanistically about yourself and about the situation you are concerned about.  Think explicitly about the values you think are most important. Then, apply those values to the situation at hand. Keeping in mind that what you think, may be incorrect because of your implicit conditioned biases to think negatively about black people doing anything other than being subservient to white people.  Try to understand why black people are upset and think, if this happened to you, would you be upset? Yes, then the black community is protesting for good reason and you should support them. 

Finally, you will make mistakes. That is ok. You will stumble. That is ok too. If you are worried about black people judging you because you are not a perfect ally, well yeah, that will happen. But how you handle learning that you made a mistake is key. Accept you made a mistake and learn from it, and your efforts will be appreciated.

The problem with centering yourself. 

If you have started to become aware you may have had someone say, stop centering yourself. Here is what that means and why you should NOT center yourself. First. you don't need anyone's approval or acknowledgement to do the right thing. The right thing is to say plainly that an injustice is in fact, an injustice. For instance, cops killing unarmed people who have broken no laws, is an injustice. 

Second: If your willingness to support people who are being abused is based on whether you get credit and props for doing the bare minimum of what a moral person should do, which is to say, what happened is wrong, then something is wrong with you. And you should check yourself. Because when an injustice is occurring, the focus should be on the injustice. Not on whether or not your allyship is being appreciated by people who are literally fighting for their lives. 

If someone tells you, you are centering yourself, you are. Don't argue. Focus on the person who needs help. Not on your need for approval. 

Stick with it

Undoing and unlearning conditioned thoughts is a time consuming process. Every time you manage to identify one of your triggered conditioned responses, don't get upset you thought the thought.  You were conditioned to think it. The goal is to recognize WHEN you've had a conditioned thought and to consciously and explicitly challenge that thought. 

And you can do this for anything. My son is convinced math is hard and he has some fairly extreme deflection responses anytime he is asked to do math. I won't go into the details of why he has these responses except to say that he came by his aversion to math the hard way.  As I am working with him to get past his aversion, which is a conditioned response, I have been encouraging him to challenge his negative thoughts and replace them with other thoughts. Even if they are sarcastically positive, it is still a better response than the extremely negative thoughts he has when math is presented to him.  As we practice turning the negatives into positive, it gets harder for a bit. Crying has been involved in it. But, the resistance eventually gets less hard and his ability to pivot improves. 

Positively reward success:

Every time you successfully challenge one of your conditioned responses, reward yourself. Recognize how hard that was to do for yourself and congratulate yourself. Treat yourself to something. 

The only real way to get rid of a learned response/thought is to replace it with a different learned response/thought. And whenever you succeed in doing that, reward yourself. Positively reward the behavior you want. Don't beat yourself up for continuing to have the thoughts/responses you want to decondition. Just focus on converting them to something positive and eventually, you will get through this. 

For a full list of my programs and books check out this list. https://humanistlearning.com/jennifer-hancock/  Pretty much everything on it, includes some of this behavioral learning. And the best part is, the more you learn how to do this, the easier it becomes and the less you resist it.  

Even if you start small, with just one identified response, like, the discomfort you feel about black people protesting the wrong way, start there and work through it and past it. Your response, that discomfort was conditioned by people with an agenda. Don't let them control you. 

PS - we need to do the same thing for sexism. 

Positive Psychology and the words "No" and Stop

Spoke to teacher, she asked about positive psychology – not allowed to use the word no or stop – as they are negative.

First – words aren’t negative. They are just arbitrary sounds. How you respond can be positive, negative or neutral.

Second, if you positively reinforce a word – it becomes positive, not negative.

Third, Stop and No – should be used as deltas and positively reinforced when the child or person responds positively to it – that’s how you create a positive association with the word instead of a negative one.

Fourth – you may not be able to totally do this – as others probably do use these words as negatives and negatively reinforce them.

Regardless – you do need delta’s and bridges. You just aren’t supposed to respond to a positive response to a delta using a negative response. You want to positively respond to the correct behavior once a delta is issued. All a delta is – is – that wasn’t correct – stop and reset.

Basically focusing on the words and not whether you are positively or negatively  responding to them – IS the problem.

Finally – this isn’t “new” – behavioralists have been studying this forever. Every time I come across a positive parenting or positive psychology person – it’s like – they just discovered behavioral psychology – read up on it and don’t fully understand it – but they start teaching it anyway.

I was apprenticed in this and it’s frustrating to listen to teachers who have been through a positive psychology training – a person with a background in clinical psychology a) not have been exposed to behavioral psychology at all and b) not be taught behavioral psychology properly!  It underpins everything. Seriously. It does.

Can I condition myself to be happy in the morning (be a morning person)?

Yes. You can condition yourself to be a better morning person. Habit and behavior formation is well studied and just takes time to accomplish.

1) set a regular time to get up and don’t push snooze. Just - get up and get started. Will you be cranky at first? Of course. That’s part of the learning process. Accept it as part of the learning process and don’t let your cranky get in the way of actually getting up.
2) Congratulate yourself on getting up. How awesome is it. Yes - you are tired and cranky - but you still got out of bed when you wanted to.
3) Find a nice way to use the extra morning time you just gave yourself. Indulge in a little something to reward yourself. Only do this when you actually get up and get going.
4) Remind yourself how awesome you are for getting up even when you don’t want to.

After about 1 month - it should be a habit and you will feel better about getting up on time and be way less cranky about it.

If you want to learn more about the science of behavior and habit formation - and more importantly - habit unlearning - check out my online course here: https://humanistlearning.com/change1/