No B.S Friday: Your brain chemistry can work for you. Your brain chemistry can work against you.
Most of us are addicts and don’t even know it.
(Not me. I am very aware that I’m addicted to sudoku. I’m enlightened like that.)
But I’m not talking about physical addictions. I’m talking about mental addictions.
Because what’s the difference anyway? A physical addiction to something like alcohol is just the brains reward circuitry being abused by a bunch of chemicals.
We can also abuse the brain’s reward circuitry with thought patterns, which, at the end of the day, seem to be just a bunch of chemicals as well.
Physical addictions, mental addictions, tomayto, tomahto.
Anyway, the success coach Tom Ferry says our dreams can be derailed by four addictions:
The first is an addiction to what other people think of us.
This gets hardwired in pretty early, and we’re taught that the key to a good life is to be ‘good’ – however some external arbiter decides what good is.
We create reward patterns around external validation, and end up hooked. We’re too busy trying to be good that we stop trying to be us.
That’s one.
The second is “an addiction to creating melodrama in a misguided quest for excitement.”
Ouch. Lol. I’m not sure it’s as simple as searching out entertainment, but I have definitely seen people addicted to the drama. It really is like they are so hooked on the chemical releases that come with drama and conflict that they just don’t feel normal without them.
I remember driving my mate back to his wife’s house after they’d had a huge bust-up. He was remorseful and committed to keep a level head and talk things over.
But they were shouting at each other before I’d even put my keys down.
The third is an addiction to believing we’re imprisoned by what happened in the past.
This is one I’ve seen a lot, and I think it’s one of the dangerous of performing psychotherapy on yourself.
At some level it is useful to know where your wounds come from. If you have fears around money, it might be useful to identify that this came from the fact that your father never bought you icecream.
But that knowledge is only useful if you leverage it into behavioural change.
Because if you’re not using it to create change – which is a whole process itself – then it’s just an excuse. An excuse for why things aren’t working.
The final one is an addiction to negative thoughts that fill us with anxiety.
And I think this is one of the most useful insights to come out of psychology in the past 50 years.
We can get acclimatised to any state of being. Once that state of being becomes normal, we actually start to prefer it because it feels familiar.
I think you see this a lot with anxiety. We end up so stressed for so long that we simply feel uncomfortable when we’re not stressed.
This is a terrible state of affairs.
At any rate, it’s an interesting list. We can get chemically hooked on many things, and many of those things will hold us back.
And now we start to get a feel for the size of the challenge facing us.
JG.
Manda Maderson says
Good tips & something that requires some contemplation
However 1 what people think about you DOES matter- societal approval is becoming more & more emphatic
& 3 you CANNOT leave your past behind particularly with the www ! No one will let you
So …… good BUT