What does it mean that extinction is not suppression?

Suppression pushes behavior underground while extinction removes its cause.

Example: Two managers receive feedback that they interrupt colleagues in meetings. Manager A resolves to stop. She bites her tongue, clenches her jaw, and physically restrains herself from speaking. It works for three meetings. In the fourth — a high-stakes project review where she disagrees with the proposed timeline — the interruptions return louder and more aggressive than before. She has been holding down a spring, and the spring released. Manager B takes a different approach. She asks why she interrupts: the reward is the feeling of being heard before the conversation moves on. She redesigns the meeting structure so every participant gets an explicit response window. The interrupting stops — not because she is restraining it, but because the reward it was chasing is now delivered through a different channel. Manager A suppressed. Manager B extincted.

Try this: Choose one unwanted behavior you have been trying to stop through willpower alone. Write down the behavior, then answer three diagnostic questions. First: When you resist this behavior, do you feel increasing tension that eventually breaks? If yes, you are suppressing. Second: Do you understand precisely what reward this behavior delivers — not the surface reward but the emotional or functional reward underneath? If no, you have not yet identified the extinction target. Third: Have you changed anything about the conditions that produce or maintain the behavior, or have you only changed your response to those conditions? If only the response, you are suppressing. Based on your answers, write a one-paragraph extinction plan that identifies the maintaining reward and specifies how you will remove or reroute it — not how you will resist the behavior itself.