Untitled project from Captivate

You are listening to the Self-Mastery Podcast, where we break through barriers holding you back from becoming who you wanna be, whether you're struggling with pornography, overeating, social media addiction, or just wanna get better at succeeding at life. This podcast is for you. Now, your host, Zach Spafford.

Good morning and welcome to another Beautiful Mastery Monday. I'm your host, Zach Spafford, here on the Self-Mastery Podcast. I am gonna tell you a little bit about your brain today. In fact, the very first time that I talked to every single one of my clients, this is what I used to talk to them about. I used to talk to them about their brain and what it was doing and why it was doing what it's doing, and why you are probably using pornography and why it do is that you feel like you can't stop.

It's a really interesting study, so. We have this thing going on in our head. It's called the motivational triad. And the motivational triad is three very simple things. But before we get to the motivational triad, I wanna tell you about your higher brain. Your higher brain is the place where you make all of your really important decisions.

It's the place where you go when you do something that's hard, something that's difficult to do, you've never done it before, you don't have a habit of doing it. , the higher brain is that part of your brain where you create who you are, and then your lower brain is that part of the brain that makes it so that you survive.

It does three things. It does them extraordinarily well, and it does them to maximum efficiency. So your lower brain conserves energy, seeks pleasure and avoids pain, and every single thing that we do within our lives. , pretty much your lower brain tries to fit into one of those three categories. So when you go to work and you drive to your office every day, your lower brain eventually takes that path that you drive and it puts it into.

A habit, it puts it into a, a, a program essentially that automatically runs so that when you get into your car and you know that it's time to go to work, your brain just takes you to work and you don't have to think about it. And you know what I'm talking about. If you've ever driven somewhere and thought, oh, I gotta, you know, you driven, you drive to work and you think, oh, I gotta pick this up before I.

Get to the office or on the way home. I gotta pick this up before I get home. And you've driven, and you've driven, and you've driven, and you've arrived at home or at the office and you've forgotten to do the thing that you needed to do. You've forgotten to go pick something up or you've forgotten to stop somewhere.

Whatever that looks like. This is your lower brain actually taking over your drive, and it's an automatic disconnection. , if you will, from your higher thinking brain, and it's saying, oh no, I know what to do. And off you go and you arrive where you're supposed to be. Your lower brain is so, so extraordinary.

It's really quite powerful and it does this. Without you even trying, uh, brushing your teeth, same thing, right? If you were to brush your teeth with the hand, that's not your dominant hand or the hand that you don't usually brush your teeth with, you would find it to be somewhat excruciatingly difficult.

So our lower brain takes almost everything that we do, and it pulls it out of our higher brain where we had to do all the thinking to make that happen. And it. puts it into a habit. It helps you make it so that you don't have to specifically think about what it is that you're doing to make that thing happen.

It's really interesting, and, and this is for a lot of really important reasons, right? Number one is to conserve energy. The conservation of energy helps you so that you can put your energy into other things. This ability to create a habit so that we don't have to think about it, gives us the ability to go on and do more difficult, highly cognitive tasks.

Right. It also. It seeks pleasure now, especially if the habit that you're creating is pleasurable, your brain will latch onto that super fast. Now, if you have kids, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. If you've ever given your kids dessert two nights in a row, they are going to expect it the next night.

And this is your, the, the lower brain triggering you saying, Hey, There was this really good thing that you did, and I want you to do it again because it gave me dopamine and it felt good. And you want this because it's really important for your survival. That's what your lower brain thinks. Everything that gives you dopamine to your lower brain is important for survival.

So when you give your kids dessert and for two days in a row, the very next night, they're like, Hey, what's for dessert tonight? And you're of course like, no, we just, we, we , we we're not doing dessert tonight. We just had it for those last two nights because we happen to have a whole big, huge bucket of ice cream.

And now that's all gone, right? And they're like, no, I want it. You're low. That's their lower brain telling them, no, no, no. This is really, really important. and you like the higher thinking cognitive adult that you are, are like, no, no, no. We don't need that for survival. We'll be just fine without giant bowls of ice cream.

And your lower brain is super good at finding things that are pleasurable. Pornography, for instance, highly pleasurable, low risk, high reward, and so your brain almost immediately, Says, oh, this needs to be a habit. We gotta put this into the conserve energy bucket and create an easy neural pathway that you can run down so that the moment that you start down that rabbit hole, it's super easy to get to the end of it without even trying.

Here's the last one. Your lower brain does this thing. And this thing is a really interesting one because on the one hand, you really, really need this, right? . On the other hand, sometimes you need to just dive into what this will last part of your brain protects from, and if you don't dive into it, you're never gonna grow.

And that is, it avoids pain and on, you know, so there's the, the reflex of like, I'm touching a hot stove and now I pull my hand away. And that is part of your lower brain avoiding pain. But your lower brain also can't tell the difference. Between the danger of a lion on the Savannah and the fact that you just feel lonely or sad or frustrated or even hungry or tired or sleepy or doc.

No, I think that last one was a dwarf. Anyhow, so this, this avoid pain component of your lower brain is this piece that really says, oh, not only does this thing that feels good, give me dopamine. It also makes it so that I don't feel bad, and this is a really important component and, and pornography kind of hits all three of these really, really easily.

That lower brain conserves energy. It seeks pleasure and avoids pain when you're using por pornography because you know, pornography's a low risk, low cost. Activity, you know, you literally, you pick up a phone and it's all at your fingertips. Where like real true, uh, intimacy, which is what I think we all really crave, that is a high risk, high energy, high reward activity.

So when you, you know, when you're having, uh, an intimate relationship with your spouse, . That's not something that's just at the tip of your fingers, right? Like you have to put in a lot of effort. She has to put in a lot of effort. Then there's that risk component. You know, when you're being intimate with your spouse, you are literally letting.

them. See every part of you and touch any part of you. And it can be, I mean, if you like, obviously if you didn't know a person and they were like, Hey, I wanna do this to you, you'd be like, no way. But with your spouse, you might be like, uh, okay. I mean, if that's like, you wouldn't just let someone come up and kiss your neck and that is something that you might do when you're being intimate with your partner, right?

So there's a lot of risk involved there. Which makes those activities more difficult to do. That's that Your lower brain, that's not a lower brain activity. Intimacy's not a lower brain activity. A, it's, it's definitely a higher brain activity and it to costs a lot of energy. It's , you know, it's risky, so you might not be avoiding pain and.

it is pleasurable, so it only hits one of the three. So it makes it a little more difficult for you to create a habit out of it, and it takes more energy to to do that right now. Avoiding pain, right? Sometimes we have to experience pain discomfort. I is what it really is for most of us, right? If we're gonna get a new job, we have to go to an interview.

That is a uncomfortable situation for most people. They don't like talking about themselves. They're not comfortable with the, you know, the process. They don't know the people. And so avoiding pain is not always what we want to do, but our lower brain, that's the gear that it's stuck in. It's always trying to avoid pain.

That's why a lot of us turn to pornography is because. , we don't like the way that we feel. And part of the, you know, the process that I coach people on and part of the, um, work that we do within coaching is understanding that pain is actually a, a good thing sometimes and we need to seek it out.

Sometimes if, you know, when I decided to become a coach, it was not a comfortable experience for me to. Leave a job. It was not a comfortable experience for me to not have an income and be an entrepreneur. But in the end, that was extremely important to me. And so it was something that I said, I'm gonna take this risk.

I'm gonna create something that is an entirely non lower brain that's all higher brain activity. . So you know a little bit about your lower brain. Now you know a bit, a little bit about why you might use pornography. I wanna talk a little bit about agency here, or this ability that we have to choose between right and wrong, good and evil, all of that stuff, right?

One of the things that our lower brain does is when it creates a habit, we in, we in a sense, we relegate our, our agency to that lower brain habit. So to have agency, you have to have three things. You have to have a knowledge of what's right and wrong. You have to have, you know, you have to know what's good and evil.

You also have to have consequences, and you have to have the ability to choose and what's happening. When we, we, when we create a habit, sometimes we feel like we don't have. , any agency, we don't have the ability to choose. I hear a lot of people say things like, I can't stop looking at pornography. I also hear them say things like, I shouldn't look at pornography or, I should be better than this already.

And those three phrases, those are actually what I call abs of agency. Which what I mean there is when we think I can't, or I should or I shouldn't, we think that somehow the decision to do something is outside of us. I can't look at pornography. You know, if I asked you as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

can you drink coffee? You might say no, but if I put it another way, if I said, you're a Mormon, you can't drink coffee, you might say something to the effect of, I can, but I choose not to. And if we take that very same phrase and we apply it to pornography, which you can look at pornography, the, there's nothing out there that that makes it so that it's physically impossible to not look at pornography.

In fact, It's more true that you can look at pornography than it is that you can't, like I know that's true because some of you do, right? So I can't look at pornography is not true. And yet sometimes we say that sometimes that's what we believe, right? I'm a Mormon, I can't look at pornography. But what if we look at it from a slightly different perspective?

What if we think about it in terms of I can, but I choose not to Like the, the example of coffee. If we look at it from that perspective, we actually take our agency back a little bit, and this is a component of breaking the habit of using pornography. This is actually one of those things that when you do it, it becomes real.

It becomes a hundred percent, no. This is actually something I'm choosing to do. In fact, for me, I went from I can't stop looking at pornography or I can't look at pornography to, I can look at pornography. , and sometimes I'm gonna choose to. Now I'm like, some of you wives out there, some of you spouses out there, you're listening to me and you're going, no, you can't look at pornography.

That's absolutely not okay. And well, you might be thinking of that about your spouse. You probably don't even care about me, . I have no illusions about how much you care, but you know, you're and and I, it's not that you don't care, it's that you don't care about me the same way you care about your spouse using this.

Right. You're looking at it in terms of Yeah, I, you know, yes, I acknowledge that you have agency and you can look at pornography, but we don't do that with our intimate spouses. I always like to play this little, um, you know, scenario for people. Imagine walking into the relief society room and saying, I can drink coffee if I choose to.

That feels. one way. Holy. Right? Like everybody would be like, yeah, you can, but the word of wisdom says that it's really important that you don't do it, et cetera, et cetera. Right? But imagine walking into the release society room and saying, I can look at pornography if I choose to. For most men, that's a scenario where they're like, oh, which limb am I gonna lose before I get out of this room?

right? . And if you're not familiar with church culture, if you're not familiar with the Mormon Church Relief Society is the women's auxiliary. It's the, it's the, I don't think we're supposed to call 'em auxiliaries anymore, but it's, it's the room. You know, you're, you're, it's, it's the place where all of the women gather to do their Sunday school lessons separate.

Um, now I'm starting to sound like we're some, a bunch of weirdos, but they , they, they do. Every other week we get to do Sunday school. or do we get to do Sunday school just as men and just as women? So we talk about more, uh, gender specific topics I think is essentially the role. But you know, maybe there's someone out there who knows like why that is specifically I don't.

Anyhow, so imagine walking into that room full of women and all of them are looking at you and you say, I can look at pornography if I choose to. I can imagine some of them getting really, really upset about that. , and maybe you're one of those people, maybe you're listening right now and you're like, I'm one of those wives who would be in that room.

And I would be like, no, you can't. That's not okay. Right. Or maybe you wouldn't. Maybe you would be like, yeah, that's true. You actually can. And this is, I guess my point is when we maintain our agency, when we take our agency back from our lower brain, and we say things like, I can look at pornography and today I'm actually gonna choose to do that.

That puts us in a position of empowerment. And when we're in a position of empowerment, that means that we have the capacity to make better decisions and to choose to be the person that we want to be, rather than choose the person that we think we are supposed to be. And this is really important because.

If we are doing just what we're supposed to do and not what we want to do, we find ourselves in a deep, deep pit of despair sometimes, I'll be honest with you, like if you have no control over your life and you're like, I'm just doing what I'm supposed to do, like I, I know there are a lot of moms out there listening who they, this is exactly the life they lead.

right? They're like, no, I have to get up and I have to take care of the kids, and I have to cook lunch and dinner and breakfast and get them here and do this and do that. And they feel like they're completely out of control. Like they are not in control of their lives. They are at the whim of their children.

They're sometimes at the whim of their spouses. And that is a recipe for despair. It's a recipe for, for frustration in your life. , and this is not, this is not what agency is about. Our lower brain helps us feel good and it tells us what to do so that we can survive our higher brain. Tells us what we can do to thrive.

And you know, I had a conversation with a, with a, um, I had a consult this week and one of the things that he said to me, so one of the questions I ask people is, okay, if, if you could wave a magic wand, What would be the result? Like, what would your life be like and his desire? His greatest desire was that he would desire the things that others want for him, and I thought that was a really interesting way to put it.

He was basically saying, I want to be the person that I'm supposed to be to everyone else. and a lot of times this is exactly the place where the, the clients that I work with are, they're in this place of I am trying to do what I'm supposed to be doing, and they're not approaching this from a place of, this is what I want.

This is who I believe that I can be. This is what I am. I'm, I'm a guy who doesn't look at pornography. And I think next, so next week we're gonna talk about confirmation bias. If you, if you're not familiar with that term, um, you know, we're gonna discuss it all next week. But I want you to think about this.

If you're being the person that you're supposed to be, and you're not being the person that you want to be, Does that bring you the joy that you believe you could have in this life? Because there is a process, there is a, an ability, an innate ability within you to take back your agency, put it within your capacity to choose and decide who you want to be.

And I, you know, one of the things that I want everybody listening to this podcast to know is that they're not broken. Like, when you listen to this podcast, I hope you feel like I'm not broken. I, Zack gets it. I get it now because I can see that all of this stuff that my brain is doing is totally normal.

This is what it's supposed to do. Now I just need to use that capacity within me to make it do what I want it to do. , which is totally possible. That's, that's what coaching is, right? But. Seeing that your lower brain is kind of hijacking your agency and taking you down a path that you built. By the way, I mean it's not hijacking your agency cuz you built this, right?

You built this neural pathway that creates this usage pattern. That is, you know, what makes your pornography habit. Continue to happen. You built that. That's your agency, but you've abdicated your agency to that narrow pathway, that lower brain, and now how do I get it back? How do I go from where I am to where I want to be?

How do I take that agency back and put it into play so that I can create a new pathway, a new habit, a new way of dealing with how I feel, rather than continuing to go down that old pathway and just know that you're not broken. This is exactly the way that your brain is supposed to work. . That is good news because what that means is you can change it, which I think is even better news, and you can start to become the master of yourself, and you can begin to have that capacity to never go back to looking at pornography again.

Thi this is the thing, right? I, every single client that I deal with, the, the, the real question that's on their mind is, is this going to work? The short answer is absolutely, but the long answer is really this. It's going to work to the level that you put the commitment and time and...