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 into account was the fact that when the arousal finished, and it always finishes, he would not only still be left with his miserable feelings from before he turned to pornography to feel arousal, he would also have some additional negative feelings to deal with. 

Guilt, frustration, loneliness, shame, and isolation often set in after we come back to focus on our reality outside of feeling arousal created by pornography. 

The analogy I often use is, if I came up to you on the street and offered you a brand new, mint condition one dollar coin if you will give me your dirtiest, oldest, ugliest five dollar bill, you would think I was an idiot and never take the exchange.  

Our lower brain often thinks that positive emotions are more valuable than negative emotions and will seek this five to one exchange rate even though our rational mind finds it to be unreasonable.  

So, if you’re going to feel miserable, wouldn’t you want to avoid compounding it with other emotions by dealing with it directly?  By turning to pornography to create an immediate sense of arousal to push away our misery we suppress misery for only a short time and end up with many more negative emotions once that arousal ends.  

So in the case of the idea, “I don’t want to feel miserable all day” what is more true, that we are going to feel more miserable, with the compounding of negative emotions if we avoid feeling miserable now, or If I feel miserable now, I’ll feel better later. 

So in the sense that avoiding our misery creates more misery long run, it is a lie that we don’t want to feel miserable, we do want to deal with our emotions up front more than we want to compound them by avoiding them for short term pleasure.  

Recognizing this near truth for what it is, a belief that is only true in the short term and never true in the long term is key to stepping back from allowing it to guide your actions. 

A great question to ask is, will this be true tomorrow?  Will believing this help me be more like the person I want to be?  Is this true all the time or only when I don’t want to feel bad?

The second step our brain takes when we start down the path of choosing pornography, food, or any other buffer is, to justify it.  

In this step we tell ourselves some kind of limit that we will follow. 

We say things like:  “I’ll only look at bikini pictures” or “I’ll only eat one bite” or “I’ll only scroll Instagram”

We offer ourselves a belief that is only true until it isn’t.  

These are the kinds of thoughts that really don’t hold up to the scrutiny of standing alone, but in light of our believing our first thought, they seem more plausible and, importantly justified because of our previous thought. 

Take the thought, I’ll only scroll Instagram for instance.  

If we have, in the past, used Instagram as a way to fully engage with pornography, then this justification is a thinly veiled lie that we basically know is not true in the long run. 

We know that the Instagram algorithm is eventually going to offer us some click bait that will lead us to the next thing and the next thing until we reach phase three, which we will go into in a minute. 

We can see this is a justification, we wouldn’t believe it if someone else came to us and said it, so why do we believe it when we are in the moment?  Because it feels exciting.  

Thinking, I’ll only go so far, is this exciting moment that puts us on the razor’s edge and allows us to simultaneously believe that we will be good, while also believing that we can fall into doing something that is contrary to our moral compass.  

This justification is also part of why we tell ourselves it won’t be our fault if we come to something that is outside our moral compass or self-defined boundaries. 

In the case of food, I’ll only take a couple of bites, leads us into the mountains with the idea that if a boulder crushes us, we had nothing to do with it.  

But the truth is, if we don’t want to get crushed by a boulder that we know is there, teetering on the edge, waiting for the slightest vibration in the earth to dislodge it, we must take responsibility for being on the path at all, rather than plead gravity as the sole force contributing to the devastating descent of our crushing burden.  

Justifications are a way to offload responsibility while concurrently choosing a path that leads to consequences we are all too familiar with.

To create greater awareness of whether you are falling into a justification ask yourself, Have I said this before and was it true then?  I know what will happen if I go down this path, do I want to deal with the consequences? 

The third thing our brain will do is outright lie to us.  

It will tell us that we are “already here, so we might as well keep going”. It will say, “this is the last time” when it has said that before.  It will tell you, “It’s too late to stop now”.  Or “you’ve already done it today, you might as well do it again.”

These are starker, they stand out more, they are more clearly untrue when they stand alone.  They require the previous two steps to be followed to even be considered in the moment of choosing pornography to arouse or food to create dopamine.  

This is usually the last step before we fully give in to our habit of buffering, regardless of what the buffer is. 

These are the final tip over the edge that creates the motion we call falling off the wagon.  

When in truth we pushed ourselves into this state. 

These beliefs are the kind of laughable thing a toddler might say to an adult to explain why they turned the kitchen into a flour based winter wonderland, complete with pasta sprinkles.  

When we hold them up to the light and see right through them no one is surprised and we wonder, ‘how could I have believed that?’

This is likely the hardest place to intervene and ask questions, because it is closer to the end of the path of lucid thought and right on the cusp of being in the state of lower brain control.  

This is the point right before we let our habit running portion of our brain run the show and just get out of its way. immersing ourselves in the feelings rather than consciousness. 

There are, however, even in this moment questions that you can ask, that will give you a moment’s pause and an opportunity to get off the train.  

Whatever the thought your brain offered you, just question it.  Directly.  

Is it really the last time?  Have I told myself that before?