Transcription
Because this is really important to understand.
See, when I have a negative feeling, if I have to react to it, what that means is that I'm not in control of myself or my life. If I cannot sit with sadness and I have to turn to dopamine to make it go away, that means that if I am sad, I will engage in this action. A leads to B.
And this is what we see with sort of behavioral patterns of addiction is that the brain or body or human doesn't know an alternative. And what that means is that your feelings will dictate your actions. And if your feelings dictate your actions, then your feelings will dictate your life. And this is why we have a mental health crisis because we have way too many people in the world whose feelings determine their actions and their actions determine their their destiny.
It's not easy, but it's simple. All it takes is to separate your action from your feelings. How do we do that?
So if you look around you and there is something that is not clean and if you sort of think about why isn't it clean, it's because you didn't feel like cleaning it in that moment. You're like I'll take care of it later. I'll take out the trash tomorrow. I'll do this. I'll do this. It's something I'm very guilty of. So it's close to home for me.
The big mistake that we make is we try to get separation from feelings and actions for big things. How do I survive this breakup? Don't start swimming in the in the middle of the ocean. Start in the kiddie pool. Start by cleaning. Right? Notice within yourself, holy crap, I don't feel like doing this. Go ahead and do it anyway. You guys are like, how do I start? Just start with cleaning and not just like clean up your room for the sake of cleaning your room. Notice the internal drives when you don't feel like doing something and then run contrary to it. That is how you are going to be doing push-ups for your frontal loes and taking control. Decreasing the size of the connection between what you feel and how you act.
That's the really important training that you need to do because what happens every time you give into an emotion and you act when you act when you feel a certain way is it strengthens the connection between your emotional circuit and your behavioral circuit. We need to weaken that connection out to separate those two.