What Are You Addicted To?

0:07Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor podcast. I'm your host Rob Dial. If you're the type of person who is into neurology, psychology, early childhood development, how all of those things come together to make you who you are, this podcast is something you're going to be interested in. You're going to want to make sure that you subscribe to this podcast because I put out episodes four times a week so you can combine all of those things, understand about yourself, how you became who you are so that you can start to re-pattern yourself so that you can create the life that you want. So if that interests you, hit that subscribe button.

0:36Today, I'm going to be talking about what you are addicted to and how to stop numbing yourself. Now, before we dive in, I understand the word addiction can be very triggering for some people. And I get it. My father was an alcoholic. My parents got divorced when I was 10 years old. And he passed away when I was 15 from being an alcoholic. So I get it. But when I talk about addiction, I talk about addiction in the way of numbing yourself in some sort of way. Most of us numb in some sort of way. And I've done a podcast in the past about numbing, but I want to go more in depth about speaking how the numbing works with your nervous system and why we do it and how to get past it so that we can create the life that we want.

1:21So when you look at the nervous system itself, your nervous system has two states. Neither one of them before I dive into it is good or bad. They just are. Both of them are necessary for our survival. That's why they're both inside of us. So when you look at the two different types, one of them is called the sympathetic nervous system. And the sympathetic nervous system is basically when your nervous system is alert. It has a lot of energy. It goes into fight or flight. Your heart rate will increase. Your rate of breathing will increase. Your pupils will actually dilate so you can see the world more clear.

1:59It's really, really good when you're running from a lion. The problem is a lot of people don't realize it, but they're stuck in sympathetic nervous system all day long. This was me for a very long time as I was in a stressed out state for so long, for years, and it becomes exhausting. The other side of the nervous system is what's called your parasympathetic nervous system. This is where you conserve and where you restore. This is, you know, you have a decreased heart rate. Your rate of breathing also decreases as well. And so you have sympathetic for when you need to take action, when you need to move, when you need to run, when you need to be in fight or flight, when stress is actually a good thing.

2:44And you have parasympathetic, which is rest, relaxation, conserve energy, restore, rebuild yourselves, all of that. Now, when you look at this and we talk about it from just like the idea of numbing, why would somebody numb themselves? Why would somebody numb their feelings? Well, there's a lot of different reasons. So maybe it's to escape your painful emotions. Maybe it's your way of trying to cope with stress of what's going on in your relationship or what's going on at work or things that are going on with your children. It could be that you do it to avoid past trauma that is unhealed that you haven't, you know, stepped back and said, I want to heal this thing.

3:27So it's kind of unconsciously taking your energy in the back of your head all day long. Maybe it's an unconscious pattern that you have. Maybe there is a unresolved emotional pain of things happen to you. When you were younger, maybe it's a heartbreak. Maybe it's being cheated on. Maybe it's a death of someone that you love that's unresolved. You didn't give yourself enough time to grieve. um maybe it's you know running from the fact that you're in a marriage that you've wanted to be out of for the past seven years i don't know the exact flavor of yours but almost everybody has one thing that they're kind of running from you know i don't i've been working myself for almost 20 years now and i don't feel like i'm anywhere near healed i've made a whole lot of progress but there is just still so many things that i just continue to keep working on and that's what i see with everybody i don't think we ever get to a point where we're just fully you know a perfect healed being and a lot of times what we do is we have that unresolved trauma the coping with stress the painful emotions unresolved pain from the past and what we do is we want to calm the nervous system it's like we are in in sympathetic fight or flight for so long all day long multiple days in a row and our our unconscious and our body is just like dude chill it out like just chill for a little bit.

4:47And we want to go from sympathetic to parasympathetic, which is just basically like another way of saying that is like, I've been so stressed out, I just need to calm down. Right? That would be the difference of sympathetic to parasympathetic.

5:06A lot of people, though, lack the tools to mentally and physically to be able to do that. And so what happens is they unconsciously go to something else that will do it for them much faster. So it could be drugs. It could be alcohol. It could be sex. It could be work. Mine was absolutely work. How I dealt, you know, ran, not dealt with, ran from my trauma of everything that happened to me in my past was I became a workaholic and worked 110 hours a week so that I didn't even have time to think about my trauma. For some people, it's screen time. It's watching TV for five hours a day. It's Netflix.

5:41It's doom scrolling on Instagram and TikTok and just turning your brain off while you're scrolling. And one of the most common ones and often overlooked is food. And food's interesting because we actually need food to survive. Like we have to have this thing to survive. But so many people are numbing themselves through food. And so it's a really tricky one where it's like you got to have it, but you also got to make sure you're not numbing yourself. There's a study that was done in 1996. It was called self-regulation failure, and it showed how people fail to control behaviors and emotions, and that led to issues like overeating and substance abuse.

6:24So because they don't know how to control the behaviors and their thoughts, they started overeating, they started having substance abuse. And the study really highlights that stress, negative emotions, lack of coping skills, and the pursuit of immediate gratification deplete your self-regulation resources. And so long-term consequences of that numbing that they found through this study was physical health problems, mental health issues, and strained relationships with the people who didn't have coping mechanisms. And so really when you look at it, they started building out this system of like, what does it look like to improve your self-regulation?

7:02And what they came up with was you need to learn to develop coping strategies. You need to set clear goals for yourself and your healing and stick to them. And then try to work on increased self-awareness so that you can understand how and why you feel the way that you feel. And so like I always say that the most important thing I think for everybody in this world to have is self-awareness. And so it talks about how to increase your self-awareness and how you need to increase it so that you can understand how you feel the way that you feel, why you feel the way that you feel, and how to actually work through it.

7:35And so the study showed basically how to find your addictions, how to better understand yourself, and how to work through these negative emotions so that you can release them versus trying to numb the feeling with immediate gratification. And so this is very, very common for people. But what it dealt with and what's really important is what I was talking about just a minute ago, which is one of the most common things that we use for numbing and one of the most overlooked addictions is food. If you have a problem with food, this might make you really start to understand yourself. So I was speaking with a friend of mine and I was speaking with another friend of mine who was talking to him.

8:17The other friend of mine is a psychologist. And one of my friends has a problem with weight. He, you know, has been up and down and up and down and up and down his entire life since he was a kid. And so what he does, it's really interesting because he doesn't eat like all day long. He works and works and works and works and works and works and works and works and works. So he doesn't eat much throughout the day. and then when he's done working so he like works so much to not pay attention to his stuff that he needs to work through he works he's so busy all day long and then when he gets done he just eats a ton of food that he knows he shouldn't he eats tons of fats and carbs and greasy stuff and just tons of cheese cheese isn't bad but a lot of cheese especially processed cheese And so it's basically like a complete overload.

9:12And my friend who was a therapist and I were both talking to him. And what we discovered is my friend who was a therapist, like what you're dealing with is very common, is that so many people overeat just so they don't actually feel what they want, but what's going on in the background. You know, like, why does he do this? Because he's in work, work, work all day long and sympathetic all day long, running from some things that will go unmentioned in this podcast episode. Then he eats a ton of food and the mind has to basically shut off and digest. The body's like, you know what? We need so much resources to eat all of this shit that he just put in.

9:51We have to put so much resources to it. Let's just turn the brain down for a while because digestion is the number one most energy consuming thing your body does. And so what it does is digestion, because it's so much that he's eating, sends his body into parasympathetic, which is calm and peaceful. Therefore, food becomes his comfort. So if you have the same thing of like, you can't stop eating or you overeat or you have a problem with this, sometimes what it is, is food becomes comfort because comfort allows you, the digestion takes so much energy that it takes away the energy from thinking and the mind doesn't really have much energy to think about the trauma or the pain or the fact that someone's in a relationship they don't want to be in, whatever it might be.

10:36He basically, and we spoke about this in the three of us together, he does not have the mental tools to calm himself down. So he unconsciously does it through food. You know, other people do this too, like wine. Like I love wine. There's nothing wrong with it. But when someone's going, oh man, I need to have a couple glasses just to take the edge off. I've said this in the podcast before. Why is, why is there an edge? What is the edge? If someone needs to smoke a joint because they want to take an edge, the edge off why is there an edge in the first place? You know, most people would rather drink a glass of wine or two versus try to figure out why there's an edge or think about their relationship they don't want to be in or their childhood trauma or how their, you know, children are doing X, Y, Z.

11:20And I get it. At the moment, it's the easiest thing to do. It's easy to just drink a glass of wine and say, ah, screw it. It feels better, right? It's easier to drink a glass of wine than it is to like sit down and try to heal your childhood trauma. I get it. Or, you know, all the worries that you have about your children moving out of the house or whatever it is that you worry about all day long, right? And, or, you know, what it might be that you're running from. But I want you to understand this. And I say this phrase a lot. The cave that you're afraid to enter holds a treasure that you seek.

11:51What you're looking for in your life is in the cave that you're so afraid to enter. So in the cave that you're afraid to enter, holds a treasure that you seek. Once again, though, this numbing is just basically an unconscious act to get yourself from sympathetic to parasympathetic, from stressed and anxious and worrying and fearful to calm. But I don't know about you, I would much rather be able to do it without needing something. I would rather try to develop the tools like breathing and meditation and journaling to be in charge of the body and be able to work through anything that pops up. When you see drugs, that's easy to see.

12:31But most drugs put people into parasympathetic. When you see someone that develops something like being a sex addict, sex is something that makes you so present and you have so many endorphins and so much oxytocin and so much serotonin, everything going through your body that you forget about everything else. When you're addicted to working out or you're a workaholic, all of these things are just a form of running. Running from whatever it is in the subconscious is doing to what the brain is doing, the mind is doing to put your body into a stress sympathetic state. It's also the reason why so many people have trouble being bored.

13:07Like for me, I was terrible at this. When I lacked the skills to be able to cope with these things, I would go on vacation with my wife. She was my girlfriend at the time. I would go on vacation to disconnect and I would not be able to disconnect. I had to be on my phone. I had to be working. I had to be, you know, on Instagram, all of those things because I couldn't be bored. And then, you know, you take a step back and say, what's wrong with being bored? Well, boredom is just the absence of something to do. And some people go crazy when there's nothing to do. Why? Because what comes up when you're bored?

13:42Your anger, your frustration, your sadness, your trauma, the things that you've been running from. What comes up is what's always there. It's bubbling under the surface. Now it just has an opportunity where you're not doing something and it's wanting to come out. So it's just bubbling up to the surface and you're like, nope, I can't do this. I got to scroll on Instagram. We got to do something else. I can't do nothing. Why? Why do we do this? Why do we run from, you know, and the way I like to think of boredom, replace the word boredom with relaxation. You know, like giving your mind a moment to relax for 30 minutes, or if you're going on vacation for a few days.

14:22But why do we do this? Why do we, why do we hate being bored is because people lack the tools to calm their nervous system down. And so like I did an episode in the past called how to self-soothe. I would recommend that you go back to that. Um, but we're never taught this. I realized, uh, when I made that podcast episode is that like for six, seven, eight months, I was like, man, we're, we're never taught how to self-soothe. Like babies know how to self-soothe. Children know how to self-soothe. We're not taught how to self-soothe as adults. And so we become addicted to stimuli, become addicted to running.

14:54We become addicted to numbing in some sort of way to not feel these things. But what I want you to understand is that there is short-term benefit in that moment. That's why we do it. Everything that we do is towards some sort of benefit. So there's a short-term benefit of not feeling anxious, not feeling stress, calming down, whatever it might be. but short-term benefit but long-term consequence is what it is. Most people think of now and they don't think of the compounding effect of their decisions over the next 10 years. And I want you to understand, I've said this many times in the podcast, time is either your best friend or it's your greatest enemy.

15:28If you're in your late 30s or more, you have friends on Facebook that you've seen in high school, from high school, and you can see who has made good decisions of taking care of himself over the past 10, 15, 20 years? And who hasn't made good decisions? You can, can't you? Like one of my best friends from high school never really stopped partying. You know, not a big deal when you're in your 20s, but now that he's in his late 30s, he looks like he's 45. And so if you're still in your 20s, you probably think you're kind of invincible, no big deal. Wait another 15 years, 20 years, and you'll start to see that time always wins.

16:05And so it's really important for you out there to understand that if you are numbing in some sort of way, it's really important to write it down and identify where you're numbing. And then ask yourself a question, write it down, pen and paper. Why are you numbing? So if you're the type of person who can't stop scrolling on Instagram, why are you numbing? What is it that you're numbing? If you're the type of person who has to have a couple glasses of wine every single night to quote unquote, take the edge off, What are you numbing? What are you running from? What is it? What is the cave that you're afraid to enter?

16:40Because that holds a treasure that you seek. Your freedom is on the other side of working through that thing. Sure, I get it. There's many, food, wine, drugs, sex, working, all of those things. Cool, great, amazing. But I promise you this, what you're really looking for is the freedom from whatever it is that's constantly taking up that energy inside of your mind. and you have to find a better way to soothe yourself and bring yourself from a stressed out state to a calm state. You can go back to my episode on self-soothing. You can listen to it if you want, but you've got to replace that numbing with action that will help heal you in some sort of way and drive your life forward versus keeping you in the exact same spot.

17:22So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories. Tag me in at Rob Dial Jr., R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. Also, if you love this podcast, you will definitely love Mindset Mentor Plus. I designed Mindset Mentor Plus to actively integrate every single one of these episodes into your life. And this is basically how it works. Every episode that comes out of the Mindset Mentor podcast, Mindset Mentor Plus listeners will get a whole lot more. You'll get multiple page detailed worksheets, effectively a tiny masterclass from every single episode that goes much more in depth than just the podcast that comes with journaling questions, that comes with challenges and assignments, that's all printable so that you can actually be listening to these podcast episodes but actively integrating every single one of them instead of just passively listening.

18:06We also do live Q &A sessions, a whole lot more bonuses as well. So if you want to learn more about it, just go to mindsetmentor.com. Once again, mindsetmentor.com. And with that, I'm going to leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.