Mindful Thought Body pt2

 

Today Mindfulness Thoughts is about tackling our craving and addiction.

We function throughout the day thanks to habits: wake up, brush teeth, make coffee. Transforming behaviors into habits saves our brains from having to make extra effort to make the same decisions over and over, and this can work to our benefit like arriving in time at work, sporting 2 times a week etc 

but we can also form habits like smoking cigarettes, stress-eating, or constantly checking our social media and that may be holding us back.

Habits can be described as automatic behavioral loops, involving triggers, behaviors, and rewards. For example, you may feel stressed (trigger), eat junk food or smoke a cigarette (behavior), and feel better (reward). When you attain (and, later, anticipate) the reward, your brain releases dopamine in a neural process that lays down a memory of that behavior and helps you “learn” to execute that behavior next time to attain the reward. 

This reward-based learning system is conserved all the way back to the most primitive of nervous systems, for example the sea slug with roughly 20,000 neurons.

In everyday life, that reward-based learning can reinforce a diverse array of inconvenient habits. We can get in the habit of ruminating, constantly checking our phone notifications, and distracting ourselves, to the point that these behaviors become addictive. With tobacco use and unhealthy eating habits as leading causes of preventable death worldwide, and the rise in accidents due to texting while driving, habits can be dangerous.

Addiction is defined as “continued use, despite adverse consequences”. Even when someone is fully aware of how harmful their habits are, they continue to act on them, when we have an uncontrolled relationship with our habits, we can experience inadvertent cravings for reward and become blind to how these habits are hurting us over time.

As we grow up we expect the world to be a certain way, we soon find out, nothing is as we expect it.

Any attempt to change the world outside us fails, most of us will find a lot of struggle in many different forms

through out our lives. To fill this void we look for alternatives, habits and addictions.

And this results only in more struggle and stress. And stress is the main reason we form habits and addictions.

The only tools to cope with our world and life is to be found in our self and here Mindfulness will help you to do

exactly that.

Mindfulness and meditating activates the prefrontal cortex and takes you of autopilot so you respond instead of react, 

helps you see your thoughts as thoughts, recognize emotions, become aware of the body.

You can learn to surf the urge of craving and it also balances acceptance and change.

It retrains our mind to recognize that we don't have to believe everything we think.

Mindfulness helps us pay careful attention to our cravings, and see what they are made up of – thoughts and body sensations. 

Importantly, with this awareness, we can notice cravings as they arise, 

see how they change from moment to moment (instead of lasting “forever” as some 

of people describe), and as a result, stay with them and ride them out instead of 

acting on them. Also, paying attention helps us see clearly what we get from our behavior in that moment.

And this is the beginning of the end – we start to get disenchanted with what we were 

doing – just by paying careful attention. This dual purpose of mindfulness – disenchantment 

and being able to be with ourselves instead of reacting automatically – may be a winning combination.

Why would it work so well? It turns out that it targets the core addictive loop in our brain formed by addiction.

By helping people ride out their cravings instead of acting on them, it decouples the link between craving and acting on it, effectively dismantling the loop. 

This is an important point, because these data pinpoint a mechanistic link that is being targeted by mindfulness, which is not always easy to find in behavioral treatments.

Tasks:

When eating, drinking or smoking, be in the moment. Start with exploring the packaging, what kind of packaging is it? Plastic? Paper? What does the label say?  What are the ingredients?

Is it healthy or not so? Does it have calories?

Open the packaging and and hold it under your nose and smell. Does it smell as you thought it would? Does it smell the same as it tastes?

Now take it out the package and hold between your fingers, what does it feel like? What kind of texture?

Take a bite and slowly chew, how does it feel between your teeth? Is it soft or hard? Sticky? Does it break easily? What is the taste on the front of your tongue? The middle of your tongue? The back of your tongue? Does it take long to chew before you can swallow it?

When you swallowed what is the after taste? How does it feel as it slides down to your stomach? How does your stomach feel? 

Is your mouth dry or wet? 

You can do this with smoking too.

Being aware of the different steps can make the experience of eating what you love suddenly completely different.