Your thouts are part of your addiction

I was bit surprised to see that some people do not understand that your thoughts are the number one place to start with tackling your addiction.

I explained in detail how addictive behaviors work, and all of them begin with a thought, thoughts lead to focus on the activity(thinking about it), focus on the activity leads to sensations, sensations lead to response, response leads to action.

Thinking about something pleasant makes you feel pleasant feelings, thinking about something painful makes you squirm as if you are in pain. Thoughts are powerful and they direct your experiences, and with addictive behaviors thoughts about the behaviors begins releasing dopamine, which motivates you to act on the thought.

Increasing dopamine response is fairly straight forward, first though enters your mind and it feels novel, you begin to explore the thought and get more dopamine, this reduces your self control and mikes you feel better, so you explore it further until thoughts change from, thinking to what you can do. Lets say look at some photos, and so on, if you follow that line of thought, you lead yourself in to something I can only describe as dopamine trap. The more time you spend indulging the thought, further you go the more dopamine you get and less self control you have. At this point even if you have some self control and restrain yourself minor issue at work or something going wrong can make you say, hell with it.

Being in this state where you think about something you should not do, may seem like a struggle or a fight, you may feel like you are resisting but for some reason you just cant just say "done thinking about this. lets move on".

Its kind of like that ring in the lord of the rings, just draws you in but to anyone looking from outside its clear just move on.

The issue I see is that people do not seem to notice, that this is where core of their addiction is, they do not see how the thoughts draw them in and you will be surprised how difficult it is to manage those thoughts, but this is where progress will really show.

So my advice is not to just be aware of what you open on your screen, be aware of what you are thinking and the sooner you choke those thoughts less will enter your mind overtime.

 

Your completely correct my friend