The Art of Iteration: Unlocking Lasting Behavior Change To Overcome Pornography For Good

Episode 248

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Zach Spafford: [: 00:00:00

They've all mastered what I like to call the art of iteration. This is the key to lasting behavior change. In a world of what I think we could all consider pretty constant flux and uncertainty, our ability to adapt is essential. It's everything.

Yet, when it comes to transforming our habits, we often find ourselves stuck in a loop of negative thoughts and yo yo results. So let's start with the myth of perfection. How many of you have set a lofty goal, dove headfirst into it and expected perfection from the get go?

How many times have you said. This is the last time. How many times have you said to a spouse or to someone that you value highly or who is, you know, there's somebody who is important to you and you want them to trust you. You want them to know that you're going to do your best here. You've said, I'll never do this again.

I'll never turn back to porn ever again.

I think we all have, and we've bought into this myth that success means never faltering, that progress is a straight line from A to B. But when life inevitably throws us curveballs and our motivation wanes and even disappears, we eventually backslide into the old patterns and we become convinced that we've failed.

Zach Spafford: How many times have you said, I failed? I slipped. I fell back into old habits. I've failed. I'm a failure. In reality, true change is a pretty messy and nonlinear affair, and it's full of unexpected detours. The problem isn't the lack of effort or discipline.

The truth is that our society, our own sense of who we're supposed to be approaches These behavior change systems in ways that actually work against what groundbreaking science tells us about our brain.

Let's start by talking about what the power of iteration is.

The power of iteration comes in, in this place where We can't be perfect, we're not perfect, we're not even actually supposed to be perfect, we kind of think we are, but we're not.

Iteration is the process of continuously experimenting, using that experiment as a place to assess, and then adjusting our efforts based on real time feedback.

This is about treating behavior change as a never ending series of better versions that keep us going longterm rather than the win, lose systems that we put into place of fixed goals or tracking.

With iteration, what we do is we tweak and we tinker, we learn, we improve, we hone our next version all while we keep our motivation alive.

In the research, what I've discovered is that this iterative mindset is an organic process of practicing healthy behaviors. We use that process then to assess the effect of those healthy behaviors and then adjust. That's the iteration part. That's, we just, we're looking at this and we go, oh, that's not actually working.

How could I do that differently?

A mindset of iteration is the antidote to this backfiring short term results, high motivation, high willpower, well intentioned attempts that we have at change.

So think about your brain and think about its role in behavior change, and in my experience with countless individuals, I've observed a pretty common pattern. Traditional behavior change methods often result in a lapse. Somebody behaving in a way that's outside of their value structure, in a moment of high stress, low awareness. And they're in that position because they don't have this iterative skill set. This high failure rate is pretty much an open secret in the field of behavior change. You know, I've talked about this in terms of the 12 step programs, and there's an example in one of the studies I just read on long term weight loss that showed that the gold standard of lifestyle change programs, which is called the diabetes prevention program.

So this is a gold standard program that utilizes the best of the best. It's the thing that, you know, you go to your doctor and you're like, Hey, what's the best way to resolve my weight? situation and deal with my upcoming diabetes. You might have early onset diabetes. You might have something that is driving you in that direction.

And this program, the Diabetes Prevention Program, DPP, what they found is that it yielded a 1 percent difference in weight loss maintenance between the intervention and control groups. So just like in the book by Lance Dotis called The Sober Truth, where he takes all of the AA programs and he does a, what's called a meta analysis of them.

step type of [: 00:05:00

So people who are utilizing the program, the DPP, and control groups. So people who aren't using the program. So there's no wonder that That our society is turning in droves to these quick fixes, like injectable weight loss drugs.

Traditional behavior, change programs, like the DPP, like 12 step programs, like almost anything else out there that you're doing.

They use performance based goals or tools like smart goals, long term tracking.

Now, these can be pretty engaging at first, but these approaches define success so narrowly that it's far more likely that you're going to fail at your actual goal, at your long term desire, eventually. When this happens, a brain area called the habanula, and this is where, this is a technical term, I don't know where the habanula is.

I remember taking Anat/Phys in college, at Rick's College, a hundred years ago with Dr. Kent Davis, and I don't remember this part of the brain, but there's this part of this brain, brain called the habanula, and when it turns on, this habanula, Essentially kills your motivation. It says, Hey, don't keep doing that behavior, even if it's healthy, because it's not, it's not working.

And this can lead us to feeling a lot of feelings of shame and self blame, depression, anxiety, demoralization. And what you want to understand is that this part of your brain is key to this research around iteration.

So what I do in this program, what I do with my clients, what I do with everybody that I talk to, is I help them overcome this habanula by doing something different than, Hey, we're going to set a goal that you don't, like, if you come to my program, you could ask anybody who's been in my program.

I'm not like, okay, we're going to set a goal that you're not going to look at porn at all this month. I don't care. That's not what I'm trying to do. That's not what you should be trying to do either, by the way, because if that's what you're looking for, and I can't tell you, uh if you listen to the podcast where I.

Interview my friend, John Layton. He says, I was good for a year and then I went back to it. I was golden for a year. And then I went back to it because I didn't have the skills. I was just using motivation and willpower in a very difficult time of my life. That's why these sort of like behavior changes where you're looking for like, okay, we're just going to not do this behavior for a certain period of time doesn't work.

It's the same as if you aren't a runner and you're like, okay, I'm going to run a marathon. So you do all the training, you get done with the marathon. You never pick up your shoes again.

The work that we're doing is actually starting to figure out, "well, why am I behaving this way?"

And digging into that and understanding that and getting more aware of that. And then dealing with the underlying problem directly, instead of saying, I'm going to just stop this one behavior.

So in my work with my clients, I found that people who achieve permanent change have this one thing in common, it's that they iterate.

It's that they tweak, they adjust, they tinker with what's going on in their brain, with what's going on in their lives. Because we can't set out a set of fail safe rules for every single scenario in your life. You might be fine in one area of your life and not fine in another area of your life. And we've got to go and dig into why that's working.

And when you adapt, just like my clients do, just like anybody who's using this process of iteration. What they're doing, what you're doing is that you aren't ever categorically failing. You're never categorically failing. You're never saying I failed today. Not because you didn't take a step towards something that isn't inside your values.

But because you're using that action in that moment as an opportunity to learn from a data point as to why it's happening.

It's never, I failed because I wasn't perfect. It's, I learned something about why I'm choosing this because I was willing to look at what happened. And that's how you never triggered this habanula, this part of your brain.

So iteration or slight change or whatever you want to call it, it's like a 1 percent improvements. There's a whole book on that all by itself.

Zach Spafford: Iteration is the antidote to the habanula, this part of your brain snapping your motivation.

By treating behavior change as a series of experiments, we bypass the brain's failure detection system and we keep our drive alive. We keep doing the things that are working. Instead of aiming for perfection and adherence to a rigid goal, we focus on progress over performance.

We celebrate milestones along the path. We learn, we glean lessons from setbacks. Gleaning, man, that takes me back. My mom, I was born in Idaho. I'm a, I'm a spud, I like to say. And gleaning is something you do when you go pick potatoes.

d I say to you, when was the [: 00:10:00

And if you can't tell me you're running from your porn choices, you're trying to move away from them mentally and emotionally. So you got to work to adjust your approach to learn from those moments in real time. And this is really important. The iterative mindset is essential to really succeeding in this process.

Just like when babies learn to walk, and I've said this before, I always love this. It's like, you never stand over a baby who falls down and go, you're the worst. You should know how to walk by now. Why haven't you got this down perfect? You never do that because that would be dumb. First of all, it wouldn't help the child either.

And you would look silly. Okay, but when babies learn to walk, they do it through trial and error.

Our most natural path to mastering almost any new skill is through a process of practice assessing and iterating. If you're learning to play the piano, you don't like learn all the notes and then be expected to go play the piano the next day.

You have to learn. I mean, just learning to type. I had to learn to type just like anybody. Each failure or each misstep is no longer a motivation killer, but instead it becomes a valuable data point that helps us inform the next iteration, helps us inform the next purposeful, meaningful practice. That's why I set up the program, the way that I did.

I'm not in here to say, Hey, in 12 weeks, you're going to quit porn. I don't know if you're going to quit porn in 12 weeks. What I do know is that if you do the work and you work through iterations, Could take you 12 weeks, but it depends on where you are on that spectrum, how mature you are as a, as an individual, whether or not you're willing to do the work.

I mean, there's a lot of variables there. So I don't go in and say, I mean, advertising, a lot of programs, they're like, you know, stop porn in 12 weeks. Like, no, probably not. You might be able to, for 12 weeks or for a period, certain with motivation, avoid a particular behavior, but you won't really leave porn behind unless you have this iterative mindset.

And that's what the yo yoing is, whether it's yo yo dieting, or I quit porn for a month, and then I go back on, on again, off again, whether you're exercising, regularly, or you have these short lived self improvement kicks that you go on. If this is the problem that you're dealing with around porn, especially around porn, but really with anything that's important in your life, you need to work on building an iterative mindset, a mindset that's willing to say, "well, how can I fix this? How can I get better at this? How can I learn from my mistakes?" And start by practicing. Start by practicing that desired behavior. One of the things that Darcy and I are doing right now, we've been working out for a couple months now, pretty regularly, but every once in a while, she'd be like, "Oh, you know, we didn't go yesterday. I feel like such a loser."

. And I'm like, "no, all we're doing here is we're just trying what, why didn't we go yesterday? What didn't work?, how can we make that different going forward?" We just iterate whenever you reach an impasse, whenever you miss something, whenever there's a setback in your goal, you just learn from it.

And with each iteration, you'll be able to get one step closer to becoming the person that you want to be, whether that's. Putting porn and being free from it forever, whether you want to thrive beyond pornography, or you just want to stop eating too much, or you want to exercise more, that's how you become better at it.

A lot of people think that there are overnight successes. I have never met a single overnight success. Here's what I have met. I've met people who have worked really hard for a long period of time, and then one day they're great at it and it gets noticed. That's what an overnight success looks like in real life.

Most of us only see the moment where they get noticed because we just don't have the external awareness of those people just because you know, they're not us. They're, they're maybe not in our circle. So just understanding if you want to be great at something, if that's leaving porn behind, if that's, being a great basketball player, if that's playing the piano, if that's exercising more, if that's getting better at the way you eat. What you need to be doing, what is most important is being willing to iterate.

Learn, iterate, learn, iterate, over and over and over again.

I hope this has been helpful.

If you're listening to this and you've been failing at quitting porn, this is one of the most important concepts that you can learn.

If you don't have this built into your system of putting porn behind you Then feel free to reach out. I would love to meet with you. Go to gettothrive.com/workwithme. I would love to meet with you and see if we can't get you to a place where you're iterating over and over and over again.

Hope this insight inspires you to embrace an iterative mindset and hope that it helps you achieve lasting behavior change. Remember, this is not about perfection. It's about progress . And as always, if you have any questions, you need any support, don't hesitate to reach out.

Email me at zach at zachspafford. com, or you can find us on thrivebeyondpornography, which has the X where the N goes in pornography, because you can't use that word on Instagram. But I'd love to meet with you. Reach out and I hope you have a great week and I will talk to you next week.