Module 10 – Mastering Compulsive Behavior

Module 10
Mastering Compulsive Behavior

MASTERING COMPULSIVE BEHAVIOR

All behavior begins with thoughts and passes through the way we feel. It’s our emotions that drive our actions.

Compulsive behavior is due to a build up of the emotion of desire that we create with a stimulus/reward cycle. Compulsive behavior is what we engage in when we want to avoid uncomfortable emotions – I call it buffering and can take many forms. Over eating, over drinking, over spending, over sex (pornography and otherwise), too much TV/Netflix, sleeping, exercise, drugs, and even working! When we aren’t in control of what we do (or want to change a habit that feels like it has power over us), it’s due to a build up of desire. Whatever your particular form of buffering is, it’s always created by your desire to feel better first and escape whatever emotion is being created with your thinking.

Desire is created with our thoughts. For a variety of reasons typically in line with the Motivational Triad of The Brain (to seek pleasure, avoid pain, and be efficient), we create the feeling of desire with thoughts like:

I want that.
I deserve that.
That will feel amazing.
I will feel better if I have/do that.
Everyone else is having fun.
They’ll think I’m strange if I don’t participate.
I will have more fun if I do this.
I’m more outgoing when I do this.

When we create desire with our thoughts and then reward that desire with buffering, we essentially program ourselves to desire it more. To make matters worse, in response to alcohol, sugar, social media, pornography, and drugs (which are all concentrated substances), our brain creates an artificially high dopamine response. Our primitive brain then begins to think that whatever substance or activity we use to buffer with is important to our survival.

Further, our brain’s desire to be efficient results in the delegation of these well practiced thoughts from our prefrontal cortex to our lower brain so that we use less energy. This is a sign that our brain is working as designed but often makes it seem as though we are buffering against our own will. We have created and rewarded our desire so often that it becomes unconscious and automatic.

Our desire to buffer comes from an effort to numb or avoid unpleasant feelings. Most of us are not taught how to manage our emotions, and we sometimes turn to alcohol or drugs or sex or television to dull or distract ourselves. This can be true for both positive and negative emotions. If our lives aren’t sustainable without buffering, we need to work on our lives.

How much do you believe you buffer for emotional reasons?

In our best effort to stop buffering, we attempt to use willpower, which is a finite resource, or to “white knuckle it.” Ultimately this worsens a vicious cycle of desire and reward. We want to buffer (eat sugar, watch porn, or have a drink at the bar), we resist the urge temporarily, and experience deprivation; our willpower exhausts, and we give in. The more we give in to our urges, the more our dopamine receptors down-regulate, which lessens the pleasure we receive from buffering and demands more of the substance (alcohol, sex, drugs, etc.) to get the same amount of pleasure. When we stop buffering, our dopamine levels drop below our baseline and we think we need to buffer just to get to feel normal. Our attempts to avoid feeling deprivation lead us to justifying our buffering, and the smarter we are, the better we are at finding justifications.

Our usual approaches (willpower, white knuckling, and resisting urges) make our desire more intense. All of this leads us to think that there is something wrong with us. We don’t identify as ‘having a problem with ______ (alcohol, porn, social media, television, whatever)’, but we buffer more than we want to. We feel as if we are buffering against our own will and unable to change.

Understanding all of this is good news!

Your brain is working exactly as it should, and because you created desire with our thoughts, you can also un-create it. The long term solution is to reduce desire so that you can take control of your buffer and free up your energy and time to live your purpose. When the desire is gone you will have no need for willpower or extra effort to resist buffering.

HOW TO ALLOW AND PROCESS YOUR EMOTIONS

Most of us humans aren’t taught to deal with our emotions. We don’t know how to process emotions and we aren’t taught that discomfort is a valued and necessary part of the human experience. Without sadness, we have no frame of reference for happiness. But no one tells us that half of our lives are supposed to be negative emotions that make positive emotions possible. So, because we believe we should be happy all the time, and since we aren’t taught to welcome negative emotions, we resist them or attempt to numb or avoid these emotions with food/sugar, alcohol, drugs, sex, or other buffers.

In order to change our behavior, we must stop trying to numb or avoid our emotions with buffering. The way we do this is to learn to allow and process our feelings, like Alpha’s. When we can allow negative emotions, we gain authority over them. When we resist or avoid them, we suffer.

Remember, a feeling is a vibration in our bodies. Nothing more. A feeling is different from a physical sensation like hunger. Physical sensations start in the body and travel to the brain. Feelings are always caused by thoughts and then become vibrations in our bodies. When we become curious and willing to experience these vibrations, we typically find they aren’t such a big deal after all. Most people hesitate to open themselves up to negative emotion because they imagine the experience will be intolerable, or worse yet, that they will fall into some sort of a black hole, unable to climb out. But this really isn’t true.

ASK YOURSELF:
 Can you recall a time you were trying to avoid an emotion with buffering?
 What emotion were you trying to avoid?
 Did you know at the time that you were buffering?
 What are your thoughts on just sitting with an emotion and allowing it?
 Have you done it before?
 What was it like?
 What emotion can you imagine that you would want to experience that you would like to avoid in the future?
What does that emotion feel like in your body?
What is the worst emotion you can imagine feeling?
Why?

HOW TO ALLOW URGES & UNLEARN DESIRE

So you have unintentionally taught yourself to over-desire whatever you’re buffering with. Just as you have taught yourself to over-desire you can also teach yourself the opposite.

Usually when you have an urge to buffer with something, you react to the urge by either giving in to the buffer (thus reinforcing the urge), or attempting to resist the urge, to “white knuckle” it using willpower. This typically works only for a short period of time and ultimately ends up reinforcing the urge anyway. The goal is for you to unlearn desire by allowing urges to be there without responding to them. This will require practice. It simply takes time and repetition, just like Pavlov’s dogs, who were taught to drool at the sound of a bell because it meant food was coming but were later taught to disassociate the ringing of the bell with food. Right now you have created an involuntary cycle of reinforcing an urge by responding to it with buffering.

Create an Unintentional Model of Alignment so you can see it. Think about the last time they had an urge to buffer when you were attempting to cut back or stop. What did you buffer with? (Put this in the A line. Put “desire” in the F line). What thought were you thinking that created the desire? (Put this in the T line and observe your Model.) The action (A) of drinking is how you reinforce the desire. We want to change this.

Unlike Pavlov’s dogs, who really didn’t have a choice in the matter because someone else rang the bell and then decided not to give them a treat, you must do the work of not responding to the urge yourself. This is done by interrupting your Model of Alignment. You will interrupt at the A line of your model. Instead of buffering with taking the action that rewards the desire, you will change the action to “allow the desire to be present without rewarding it.”

Understand this: an urge in your body really isn’t that bad. It’s just a programmed false pleasure you’ve created with repetitive behavior. It’s a craving for a chemical reaction and the deprivation that arises when that chemical reaction is not met.

There are four ways to allow an urge that are nearly identical to what we just discussed on allowing emotions:

Pretend that you are describing the experience to a non-human being (like an alien from space) who has never experienced an urge and write it down. What does it feel like? Where do they feel it? What are they thinking?

Watch how you experience the urge as though you are sitting across the room. This creates distance between the experience (including the thought you are choosing) and the feeling that it’s creating.

 Hold the urge in a place of peace. Accept the urge and be present with it. Allow it to be there. Pretend to hold it in your hand and approach it with childlike curiosity.

 Open up to the emotion. Allow it in. Move toward it.

To remove the urge, I want you to practice allowing urges and write about experiencing 100 urges. This is taking ACTION to remove the desire the same way you took ACTION to create the desire. Just like learning anything new, this will take time and practice. Don’t be afraid of the urge. Instead, see it as an opportunity to practice, to collect another allowed urge toward your goal of 100 allowed urges.

ASK YOURSELF:
 How do you usually respond to an urge? Do you try to resist it?
 What do you have urges to buffer most? Why do you think that is?
 What do you imagine allowing an urge will be like?

WELL-BEING vs. FALSE PLEASURE

Desiring things that bring us pleasure is part of being human. In fact, many activities that give us pleasure are essential to our survival. For instance, it’s easy to see that pleasure in eating has a purpose. If we didn’t desire and find pleasure in eating, we would starve to death. The same is true of reproduction. If we didn’t desire and find pleasure in sex, we would not reproduce. Desire and pleasure go hand in hand—and both happen in our brains.

There are many natural pleasures that we desire and that create a feel good dopamine response such as eating healthily, sex, cleanliness, accomplishments, exercise, connection, and warmth. However, we have invented additional sources of concentrated pleasure that we desire, including sugar, flour, drugs, alcohol, gambling, social media, and pornography.

False Pleasures.

Because human made substances are concentrated, they create a dopamine response that is about twice that of those pleasures that occur naturally. When your brain associates something with survival, it learns all the cues at a hypervigilant rate and pays very close attention to the details because it associates them all with intense pleasure and therefore with survival. In this way we inadvertently derive pleasure and create heightened desire for pleasures that create a net negative result. And to make matters worse, because of the way our brains handle dopamine, the more we buffer, the more we need to buffer to experience the same amount of pleasure (down regulation of dopamine receptors). Therefore false pleasures create a downward spiral of increased desire and increased negative results.

It’s in your best interest to your prefrontal cortex to consciously choose activities that will bring you well being instead of false pleasure.

VENTRAL STREAM vs. DORSAL STREAM

The Ventral Stream and Dorsal Stream of the brain are two pathways the brain operates to create movement in the body.

The Ventral Stream follows the Universal Truth; actions are driven by the chemical reactions that occur in the cells of the body, called feelings. This is where the majority of movement is generated from – actions taken to keep the organism alive (painful or uncomfortable emotions to avoid action and pleasurable or comfortable emotions to drive action).

The Dorsal Stream allows for the pre-frontal cortex to ‘override’ the function of the emotional brain so you can take an action from a non-emotional intent. The Dorsal Stream functions like a back-door (ironically located in the back of the brain). It’s the Dorsal Stream that you use when you practice courage – feeling fear and acting anyway.

Having the ability to take an action outside of the Ventral Stream is unique to humans. Other animals act on instinct and through their emotional messaging system. Humans, however, utilizing the pre-frontal cortex, can take actions to train their body and re-wire their brain to behave with intention instead of with emotion.