Three Steps Down the Rabbit Hole

The three steps that take us down the rabbit hole. As I have worked with hundreds of men and women over the past few years, I have noticed a pattern of behavior emerge that is the critical turning point from being fully the master of your behavior to viewing pornography and following the habitual following of feel good now based rituals. This doesn’t happen with every one every time, but it happens with such frequency that it makes sense to get a feel for it, if you are someone that is working to eliminate a bad habit in your life. It all starts with a near truth. A near truth is something that, on the surface is easily seen as true and something that most people would agree with you on. These kinds of thoughts sound like this: These are all actual beliefs that individual clients have said to me in the scope of our coaching. “I don’t want to be miserable all day” “being in control of myself is so hard” And “When I find something I enjoy, I stick to it” These are the kinds of thoughts that we think should be true. I’ve never met someone who wanted to be miserable at all, much less all day. We have all been in a position to where we think self control is hard. And who doesn’t want to stick with enjoyable things. They are near truths because they are the kinds of phrases that are hard to argue against. They seem right, others are likely to agree with you when you say them, and they are easy to believe because of these things. The problem here is that though they are near truths, they aren’t true in the long term. They are actually lies in the long term. Not because you actually do want to be miserable all day or because being in control of yourself is really easy or because when you find things you enjoy you don’t stick to it. Let’s start with the first one, “I don’t want to be miserable all day” There are at least two untruths in this statement. The first issue is that most of us, when we deal with our feelings directly, are not going to feel miserable “all day”. Modern research shows that most emotions, when felt out to their full extent, last about 90 seconds. That isn’t to say that your feelings might not last longer or shorter. Just that is the average. Usually, the reason our feelings last longer is that we keep retelling stories that refresh and restart the cycle of the feeling. When we fall in love, we tell stories of how our new love loves us. When we are miserable, we tell and retell stories about how someone has wronged us, how we are in the right, and they are not. This particular client was dealing with work struggles. He was telling himself how others around him were talking about him. The only way he was going to be miserable all day was if he kept telling himself repeatedly about what he thought others thought about him. All day is a long time to dwell on anything, especially, when we are aware that our thoughts, beliefs, and stories are the things making us miserable and we get to choose whether they are true or not and how long to dwell on them. The second issue with this statement is that we assume that we don’t want to feel miserable and that the proffered solution is going to make us feel better. Funny thing about emotions is that they exist to be felt and we often do everything in our power to avoid feeling them. In this scenario this client believed that he didn’t want to feel miserable all day, and the solution his brain offered him was 30 minutes of arousal to remove the miserable feeling. a thing that our brains often do is discount future pain based on current desire to feel pleasure, What his brain didn’t take...