How to break free from life's cycles 🌱

#psychology ##buddhist-teachings

Examples of a cycle:
You feel lonely > You seek people out > You feel socially anxious > You go home and play video games > (repeat)

You feel hungry > You reach for some really good tasting junk food > You eat too much and feel full and sick >> (repeat)

How do you break out of the kinds of cycles?

From Buddhist Teachings, the Teaching of the two arrows.

The Buddha argues that the problem with all our cycles is our internal reactions- not just the bad reactions, but the good reactions too.

The internal reaction that you indulge in, whether it is pride, misery or something in between, is what instigates the cycle.

If you feel lonely, and you seek out company, that is the mistake fuelling the cycle of loneliness and social anxiety.

In your brain, the limbic system is where you experience a lot of your negative emotions and nucleus accumbens is where you experience cravings.

Both of those negative emotions and cravings go into your frontal cortex and then a decision gets made, which executes a behaviour.

The action you take based on your initial emotion is what fuels the endless cycle.

And, every time you do this, your behaviour get more and more controlled by these two circuits- Acting on emotion and the accompanying craving. You have programmed your brain to give into your emotions and cravings, becoming impulsive and emotionally driven. So then, when you get into that social situation and your social anxiety kicks in, this circuit will active instantly and you will crave to go home and play video games instead, since this part of your brain has complete control over you, you will turn tail and leave the social situation to give into that cope.

So, what are you supposed to do?
Are you supposed to do nothing and wallow in your loneliness?

You could instead:

  1. Be aware of the next arrow in the cycle
  2. Have an alternative thing to do when you have an impulse instead of following the next arrow in the cycle that is not seeking to cope with that emotion that has arisen. (e.g sit with the emotion and do not react to it) Do not try to make the pain go away. It will go away on it's own.
  3. Focus on neutrality. Try to stay in a neutral state between pain and please as much as possible in life. The more you become attached the pleasurable things, the more greed forms and greed is what makes pain intolerable.

E.g if you feel hungry you want to eat, when you feel full you bask in the pleasure of being full. The food can taste good, but your love or obsession with the food buys you the greed and the craving in the future because the moment you get dopamine it sets you up to go through that cycle again and again.

See Also:

Sources:
How to Break Free From Life's Endless Cycles - Healthy Gamer

Notes: