confessions of a practice rat

All this talk of practicing is making me realize - I need to go practice! Well, that and:

My name is Matt, and I am a practice addict.

The first realization that I might have a problem was New Year's, 2000. I was visiting my family in California for the holidays, in the middle of my senior year at New England Conservatory. I'd been practicing more that year than I ever had, trying to shape up for grad school auditions and prepare for professional auditions - like Jason and Joe, I basically lived in a practice room that year.

So I was with family over winter break, and I was away from my bass for two weeks - and suddenly I was a complete basket case. I had never been anywhere near that depressed. The rest of the world was drinking and partying like it was 1999, because it was. Everyone else seemed to have a noisemaker in one hand and a glass of bubbly liquid in the other; the only noises I was making were muffled sobs, crying into a plastic cup of champagne. My mom, a psychologist, knew it was depression, and we both knew it was serious - but neither of us could explain what was causing it.

A Skinner box is a cage equipped to condition an animal's behaviour through reward or punishment. In a typical drug test, a surgically implanted catheter is hooked up to a drug supply that the animal self-administers by pressing a lever. Hundreds of trials showed that lab animals readily became slaves to such drugs as heroin, cocaine, and amphetamines. "They were said to prove that these kinds of dope are irresistible, and that's it, that's the end of the addiction story right there," [psychologist Bruce] Alexander says.

- from "The Rat Trap" by Robert Hercz, p. 37 in The Walrus, December 2007

Without realizing, I had been running a sort of Skinner box experiment: depriving myself of any sort of stimulation or activities - those things I called "distractions" - not having to do with the double bass. I would even mentally play through excerpts while walking back and forth from my apartment to the practice room. I had conditioned myself into a bass-playing machine, doing, thinking, even dreaming about nothing but bass. No wonder I'd turned myself into an addict.

The problem with the Skinner box experiments, Alexander and his co-researchers suspected, was the box itself. To test that hypothesis, Alexander built an Eden for rats. Rat Park was...the size of 200 standard cages. There were cedar shavings, boxes, tin cans for hiding and nesting, poles for climbing, and plenty of food. Most important, because rats live in colonies, Rat Park housed sixteen to twenty animals of both sexes. [...] The denizens of Rat Park overwhelmingly preferred plain water to morphine (the test produced statistical confidence levels of over 99.9 percent). Even when Alexander tried to seduce his rats by sweetening the morphine, the ones in Rat Park drank far less than the ones in cages.

- same article, p. 38

Doing one activity 8 to 10 hours a day (besides sleeping) is not normal behavior, for a rat or a human. Why then do we do this to ourselves? Like drug addiction, it seems to start with a severely restricted, oppressive environment. Not that NEC was a cage - though at busy times people would circulating through the halls, looking into practice rooms like rats in a maze - but I built my own cage out of low confidence and self doubt. I decided that I would have to work harder than other people - I wasn't as naturally gifted, but I still wanted to be successful, so I would have to squeeze out any other interests. To be the first one practicing in the morning, and the last one to go home at night, was really a sort of high - and the fact that I still wasn't making as much progress as other students only seemed to confirm that my attitudes were correct.

Rat Park showed that a rat's environment, not the availability of drugs, leads to dependence. In a normal setting, a narcotic is an impediment to what rats typically do: fight, play, forage, mate. But a caged rat can't do these things. It's no surprise that a distressed animal with access to narcotics would use them to seek relief.

- p. 38

Luckily I wasn't a complete practice rat: I still had some friends who would pull me out of my cage, and later that year I started training to run a marathon. I really think having a supportive social network and some form of physical exercise are vital for all music students; I doubt I could have survived those years without them, and I've seen other young musicians lacking them fall apart. My mom was very concerned, seeing my depression that winter, and from that point on she would often tell me not to practice so much. I didn't really take her advice - how could I ease up the compulsive practicing, when I was still bombing at auditions? But at least she provided a voice of caution, and helped me to pull back from really hurting myself.

Practicing would go through cycles for me: for a while I would be completely gung-ho, pounding away, burning up the hours, feeling great about the work I was accomplishing. And then I would find myself crashing, becoming either depressed, sore, or nauseated by the just the sight of a practice room. In retrospect, those times were my mind and body's way of telling me: "Lighten up, take a break, do something different for a while." When we're too stubborn to listen to what our bodies tell us nicely, they'll sometimes resort to injury or burn-out to get the message across.

His message - that the core values of Western life have created an environment of rootlessness and spiritual poverty that leads more and more of us to addiction - is Rat Park writ large. And by addiction, Alexander means a great deal more than illegal drugs. There are legal drugs, alcohol and tobacco, of course. Then there's gambling, work, shopping, the Internet, and anorexia ("addiction to starvation," as Alexander puts it). Research is showing that as far as the brain is concerned, these activities are drugs, too, raising levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine, just like alcohol, heroin, and almost every other addictive substance we know. In this broad - but not loose - sense of the word, addiction is not the preserve of a coterie of social outcasts, but rather the general condition of Western society.

- p. 39

The stereotypical drug addict - dependent, desperate, dangerous - is not a figure I like to associate myself with. Though if I've never been much of a drinker, smoker, or gambler, it's probably because those weren't my drugs of choice. I went for the hard stuff - Findeisen, Simandl, Bottesini. A week without Sevcik still leaves me jonesing. And the underlying problems, of doubt and low self-confidence, never really disappear. I just have to manage those feelings, and take pride in the efficiency of my practice sessions, rather than the length.

Recovering from this addiction isn't about going cold turkey - I'm always going to practice. But hopefully I can learn to do it sensibly, safely, and in moderation. And maybe save some time for fighting, playing, foraging and mating.