Module 1 – Buffering & The Motivational Triad

What Is Buffering?

Buffering is when we use external things to change how we feel emotionally and thereby create an overdesire for. It’s something we do to keep from fully experiencing our lives, to hide from reality, to procrastinate, to not show up and face the music. We don’t want to face the truth of our lives because we don’t want to experience any type of negative emotion. We feel entitled to feel happiness and pleasure all of the time.

WE’RE CONSTANTLY BOMBARDED WITH SUGGESTIONS OF WAYS TO FEEL PLEASURE.

You should go eat something.
You should go buy something.
You should do that activity.

There’s a lot of money made on pleasure – the pleasure of food, the pleasure of drinking, the pleasure of spending money, the pleasure of gambling, the pleasure of sex, the pleasure of social media, the list goes on and on. Many organizations and corporations take advantage of that by not just playing to our natural inclination to seek pleasure, but by compounding it by selling us things that are concentrated pleasure, or pleasure in heavy doses.

We decide these things are almost as important as survival because the dopamine hit we get from pleasure is the most important thing. The more we purchase, the more we purchase; the more we eat, the more we eat; the more we drink, the more we drink; the more we watch porn, the more we watch porn. It becomes a perpetual issue in our lives because experiencing pleasure just makes us want to experience more pleasure. Then, we feel entitled to have pleasure all the time, and it’s immediately available in so many ways. There is so much value to less food, to less drinking, to less stuff, but when you talk to people about less, all they want is more.

When are we willing, if ever, to give up a false pleasure? Giving them up makes us more available to experience the real pleasures in life. Constraining your drinking makes you more alert and available. Constraining your spending gives you more money for the things that are really important. It gives us freedom. The question becomes, “What is left? What remains when you stop buffering? What is your life without false pleasures?” What would the world be like if you didn’t ever overeat, overdrink, overspend, overwork, overpeople- please, over-Facebook? What would your world be like if you didn’t seek the false pleasures and just went for a true, honest, authentic life? Are you willing to live without any brain substance manipulation, without any false pleasures, without any pretend emotions?

What if we could purchase happiness? Most companies, including Coca Cola, will tell you that you can. Do we really feel happier, or have our brains been tricked into thinking that we’ve experienced something wonderful? Do we want to cobble together a bunch of false pleasures and call that happiness? Or, do we want to remove all of those things and find a way to be happy without them? Is it possible? When you’ve removed those things in the past, you’ve likely gone through withdrawal, and you’ve probably felt deprived, left with all the emotions you’ve been unwilling to feel.

Life is a hard battle. Why don’t we just buffer all the way through so we can make it to the end? Eat as much as we want, drink as much as we want, have sex as much as we want, buy everything we want, go into debt…

If we could have all those pleasures with no consequences, nobody would care. But there are consequences. Buffering does cause pain. Buffers only provide temporary release from negative emotion, which always comes back harder than it started. When you go out and buy yourself a brand new car you can’t afford, you have that one rush of pleasure, and then you have the payment to deal with. When you overeat, you gain weight, and you feel sick afterward. There’s always an equal, opposite consequence that keeps it from being worth it, even though we tell ourselves it is.

On the other side of that, when you take away all those buffers and pursue well being, you come out so much better on the other side. In fact, when you allow yourself to really feel your emotions, you get to know yourself in a much deeper way. When you get to know yourself in a much deeper way, you start finding the causes of your unhappiness, and then you can start to change them. This is sustainable, unlike the false pleasures you’ve been using to buffer before. When you limit your drinking, you don’t experience hangovers. When you watch your eating, you get the pleasure of not worrying about your weight. These results are real pleasure, and it’s ongoing and gets better and better.

Natural pleasures are the kind we’re meant to experience in our lives. The pleasure we’re meant to get from food is the pleasure of eating a regular meal for fuel. Eating healthy is a constant, steady stream of wellness that you get to experience over and over again. When you give up your buffers, you’ll still get upset, but you’ll deal with it differently. You won’t head for the ice cream, which will just make you feel sick. You’ll deal with it by using The Model of Alignment (Module 6) and examining why you’re upset. Soon, you won’t even want ice cream because the pleasure we get from food actually diminishes, and the pleasure we get from taking care of ourselves and fueling ourselves increases.

When you trade the false pleasures in your life for well being, you gain confidence, and that confidence begets more confidence, which begets more confidence, which begets more confidence. The more confidence you have, the more empowered you feel, the more well being you have, and the more you have to give and offer the world. That’s the point because we’re at our ultimate happiness when we’re able to be the best versions of ourselves and contribute to the world.

When we are in pleasure seeking mode, we cannot give. We get into a take, take, take, take mode. “I want to eat. I want to drink. I want to buy. I want to have sex” We’re caught in a false desire tailspin that we can never satisfy. You can’t get enough of something you don’t really want. If you’re trying to escape, you always have to be escaping.

Imagine your life without the thing you use to buffer. You’re going to feel fear and deprivation because you believe you can’t survive without it. You can. Your life without it isn’t just tolerable – it’s actually way better without it, whatever it is. Imagine never having it again, whether it’s cake or M&M’s or Starbucks coffee – whatever is causing you a negative consequence in your life.

What do you feel? You might feel a little bit of withdrawal. You might feel a little bit of deprivation. Ultimately, you’ll feel the emotion you’re trying so desperately to escape, and that emotion has some important information for you. It’s telling you what you’re thinking. It’s telling you what you’re believing. It’s telling you how you’re going to act and show up in the world. If you’re constantly trying to avoid yourself, you’re missing the authenticity of your life.

When you live in an authentic way, you get to offer the world your authenticity. It’s ultimately what will give you the most confidence to go out there and show up, to fail and not to have to pad yourself with buffers. Imagine your life without it. Think about what you’re so afraid of. What is the feeling that you’re so afraid to feel?

One of my students said, “If I can give up my buffers and I can get to my optimum weight and create massive wealth and experience emotion and do my mind management, what else will I be capable of? That’s what really scares me.” For most of us, it’s not that we’re afraid to make ourselves available to the world. It’s not that we’re afraid of showing up and being who we genuinely are. We just really don’t know how. We don’t know how to feel all of the emotions that are part of living an authentic life.

OPTION NUMBER ONE:
You believe that you should always be happy, and you use buffers to try to stay on this side of the line.

OPTION NUMBER TWO:
You recognize that some of your life is going to be negative emotion that should be listened to and used to manage yourself emotionally and cognitively.

Your emotions are an indicator of what’s going on for you. To be authentic, to have a true relationship with your life, is also to be willing to experience negative emotion 50% of the time. If you’re willing to do that without escape, you’ll remove all the buffers in your life, and at the same time, you’ll remove all the negative consequences that come with them.

Give up the false pleasures so you can enjoy the full pleasure of well being. It’s the best feeling in the world. You cannot shake the confidence of someone who has given up their buffers. Go out there, practice not buffering, and see who you really are without it.

The Primal Brain – Your Beta Condition

Alright guys, check this out. I’m not going to give you the entire dissertation on The Alpha State (your FIRST and TRUE Self) and The Beta Condition (your SECOND self – basically your brain and all the stories it tells you about you). That is outside the scope of the How To Stop Buffering Course. If you want to know more about that, the Spartan Academy awaits!

Instead, I am going to tell you a little bit about your Beta Condition and why it LOVES to buffer so much.

Basically, the function of the Beta Condition is to keep itself (the brain) and your body ALIVE. You see, it loves itself and doesn’t want to die. When the body dies, the brain goes with it. And the brain will do ANYTHING it can to keep you alive. This is 100% normal for the function and continued existence of the human species. The primal brain is obsessed with SURVIVAL – it’s own survival.

The way the brain does this is through The Motivational Triad (see below). The action of releasing dopamine into the body is a signal for the body to do that thing more. The brain codes whatever that action that it thinks is required to keep it alive as important and releases dopamine into your body to remind you that it feels good and you should keep doing that if you want to stay alive.

For the most part, this has worked out very well! That is why eating feels good – the brain gives us a dopamine hit. That is why sex feels good – the brain releases dopamine into the body that remind us to keep having sex. If we didn’t get that pleasure chemical from the brain, we wouldn’t know which actions are important for our survival (and which ones are a detriment to our survival).

Enter innovation, technology, science, agriculture, and the human-made world around us. Our ability to create things has brought us all kinds of development in various industries. Along with that, we have created for ourselves ‘false pleasures’. These false pleasures have been created in such a way that they signal to our brain to secrete highly concentrated hits of dopamine, which the brain now codes as SUPER IMPORTANT.

If eating food is important for our survival, the brain thinks foods made with concentrated sources of flour and sugar are SUPER IMPORTANT for our survival.

If having sex is important for our survival, the brain thinks pornography (concentrated sexual images) are SUPER IMPORTANT for our survival.

This is true of technologies as well; TV, video games, social media, and Netflix all elicit higher than normal dopamine secretion from the brain. As does the thrill of gambling and over-spending money.

Now that the brain has coded these actions as SUPER IMPORTANT, it wants you to keep taking these actions – or else it will tell you that you are going to die (just like it would if were a caveman and stopped eating or stopped looking for shelter from the elements). These thoughts aren’t conscious to you, but the brain is very clear with the way it send those pleasure chemicals into the body to keep you functioning (behaving) the way it wants you to in order to survive.

All of a sudden, these simple things become the focus of your attention and thoughts. You will find yourself wanting to go to the fridge for food when you’re not hungry, or watching pornography or playing a video game or scrolling social media when you’re bored.

This all happens because your primal brain just wants to keep you alive – and dopamine is the signal to your body that drive action TOWARDS a behavior. It is the pleasure signal that reminds you what’s important. Your brain is indifferent to the action itself or the consequence of the action – all it wants is to keep itself and, by extension, your body alive.

The Motivational Triad
Seek Pleasure, Avoid Pain, Become Efficient

The Motivational Triad is how the primal brain is wired to keep itself and your body alive. It is a beautiful process of evolution and creation that has developed the human brain into the Motivational Triad that drives all human action.

Very succinctly put, the Motivation Triad of the brain is to seek emotional pleasure, avoid emotional pain, and become as efficient at doing this as possible.

The brain is the command and control center of the body. It is a part of the body and thus, it works very hard to keep the body safe, surviving, and passing on cellular life. The brain is not the mind, however it does produce thoughts. The thoughts the brain produces in the moment (which is the present) is based largely on the past – all the education, experiences, knowledge, conditioning, lessons learned, and beliefs assimilated during the lifetime of the brain itself.

For this reason the brain only knows a small sliver of a tiny fraction of information about the world and operates mostly unconscious in a way that motivates action through an emotional pleasure/pain response to the environment it believes the body lives in and how to maintain a ‘living status’ for the body (and by extension, itself).

The function is elegant in its simplicity.

When the brain derives life from an activity, it releases dopamine into the body to ‘remind’ the body to do more of that activity. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that sends the message of ‘pleasure’ to the body. When this happens, the body feels good and is stimulated to do that activity again. These kinds of things or activities include eating, drinking, sex, and warmth. The process is:

Activity the brain pairs with survival/safety -> release dopamine into the body -> body undergoes a chemical reactions at the cellular level -> brain codes the pleasure and the cellular reaction (thinks about it more and desires it more).

This is the function of SEEKING PLEASURE to stay alive.

When the brain senses death from an activity, it starts to fire off neuron in an overexcited state. This happens in the Amygdala, a part of the primordial brain. The Amygdala controls the startle/flinch response. Following the initial motor reaction (startle/flinch) then brain then kicks into DANGER mode, finally sending a message of fear through the body. When this happens, the body feels fear and is stimulated to avoid doing that activity again. Other emotions are derived from other neurotransmitters, and those that feel uncomfortable are the ones the brain uses to prevent the body from taking action. These kinds of things or activities include falling and loud noises (the two we are born with), as well as predators, rejection, failure, and death. The process is:

Activity the brain pairs with death -> Amygdala kicks in Startle/Danger/Fear response AND/OR brain releases neurotransmitters into the body -> body undergoes a chemical reactions at the cellular level -> brain codes the pain (emotional discomfort) and the cellular reaction (thinks about it more and develops fear/anxiety/avoidant behaviors).

This is the function of AVOIDING PAIN to stay alive.

Now, the whole time the brain is doing this, it is burning HUGE amounts of caloric energy. The reason why babies, kids, children, and teens eat so much is partially due to their growing bodies and MOSTLY due to their brain coding belief systems around the way the world works and their place in it. The brain is the bodily organ that consumes THE MOST amount of energy when it is coding (when it is making circumstances mean something about the world, creating belief systems, learning a new skills or function, thinking about thoughts, and generally being conscious).

If the brain had been created or evolved in the First World during the 20th Century, this wouldn’t be a problem! We have food in abundance.

However, this wasn’t always the way humans lived, and back tens of thousands of years ago and before, humans had to hunt and forage for food. The energy consumption both in hunting AND in thinking was tough on the brain. The body desperately needs the energy for movement; avoiding predators, hunting, finding shelter, find a mate, foraging, and so on. Thus, the brain learned how to code its function to make it UNCONSCIOUS and AUTOMATIC. This way, the human didn’t have to sit and think about whether having sex or eating would be a good idea – the brain just made it automatic and drives action in the direction of survival. Similarly, the brain didn’t want the human sitting around thinking about whether that snap in the jungle, movement in the grasslands, or rattle in the desert is going to be a threat to life – too much caloric need! So the brain coded these fears into an unconscious and automatic function and drove action away from what it perceives as danger and death.

This is the function of BECOMING EFFICIENT to stay alive.

This Motivational Triad has worked for the brain and human for hundreds of thousands of years.

It is no longer working – and humanity is ready for a Momentous Leap.

This course is about How To Stop Buffering and it is complete in it’s purpose.

The Motivational Triad we aim to develop in our brain as Alpha’s (which is a part of the aim of the curriculum in the Spartan Academy) is the following:

Seek Well-Being and Avoid False Pleasure (Buffering) – as opposed to SEEKING PLEASURE
Move into Discomfort As The Price of Growth – as opposed to AVOIDING PAIN
Utilize conscious effort when re-coding the brain – as opposed to BECOMING EFFICIENT

(More on this in Module 7 and the Spartan Academy For The Development of Cognitive Mastery.)

WORKSHEETS

(Click to download)

There is no worksheet to begin the How To Stop Buffering Course – all the worksheets come in subsequent modules.

After completing Module 1 and before moving on to Module 2, journal all your thoughts around buffering, your buffers, and what your brain tells you about stopping or reducing these activities. 

Fill at least one page with your thoughts. You will use this later in Module 6.

Be careful not to censor yourself. Write down all your thoughts – including any anxiety or fear-producing thoughts you have. I tis important to remember that you are not your thoughts. Your thoughts are your brain’s way of keeping you alive and will have a multitude of irrational fear. It is valuable to observe these thoughts on paper.

Once you have completed this exercise, go on to Module 2 when you are ready.