Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
A
Most people think that when they remove explicit matter from their life, that their brain will immediately click and start healing and everything will be magically better. They expect clarity, motivation, attraction, healthy arousal to come back instantaneously. But of course, for some people, something very strange happens instead. They seemingly get worse. Their sleep gets weird and interrupted. There's urges that are spiking or unprepared, unpredictable. Your brain starts bargaining with you in strange ways. And you might even hear that quiet hijacker voice say to you see, I was right. We need it. But what most people don't realize is that in this very important moment, the exact moment when it feels like your brain is pushing back, it is actually a very specific neurological phase. Phase? I said it's the phase where your brain begins rewiring. And if you don't understand what's happening during this phase, it can be the exact moment where most people relapse. This episode is brought to you by my Harper Collins published book, Mind Over Explicit Matter. Learn how artificial stimulation miswires your brain and and what you can do to rewire it back to purpose, intimacy, and connection. Go to drtrishleigh.com book so today, I am going to show you actually what is happening inside the brain during this very pivotal stage. That can be success or a stumble that you will learn from, because once you understand it, you can stop interpreting the discomfort as failure and instead recognize it as a very important moment of your brain resetting sensitivity. So we are going to dive into the neuroscience behind this. But before we do that, I want to tell you something really cool that applies to this situation that happened last weekend with my daughter, who is an equestrian, and her horse, Laureate. We call him Larry. And this explains so much behind the brain science that a person experiences when they step away from explicit matter. But first, welcome back. I'm Dr. Trish Leigh, your hostess with the mostess here at the Dr. Trish Leigh podcast. Grab a cup of Joe and let's go, my friends, because we are going to dive in deep today. All right, so this past weekend, Saoirse competed at the highest level competition that she's ever ridden. The jumps were bigger than she's ever attempted before, and she didn't realize it at the moment, but there was a lot riding on it. She could feel that she was stepping up into the next version of herself as a rider if she succeeded in that important moment. Now, her horse, Larry, he's an absolute master. This horse knows exactly what he's doing. He's designed to teach her. At this point, in her career, he's jump courses much bigger. He knows what he's doing, he's powerful, he's experienced, he's incredibly intelligent, and, oh, my gosh, he's so sweet. I love him. You should see him on my Instagram. Okay. Anyways. But something interested. You know, something interesting happened in the arena during this past weekend. During the first series of classes that she participated in, Larry refused to jump. Now, when you see that for the first time, you might assume that it's the horse, that he's stubborn or he's nervous, or he's just not in the mood to perform that day. But horses, master horses, don't do that. They respond to signals. And it was Saoirse's signals that he was responding to. So Laurel, her trainer, pointed out that Laureate wasn't refusing because he couldn't jump. He was refusing because the signal he was getting from her wasn't clear. Her rhythm was off. Her timing wasn't quite right. The cue wasn't clear enough for him to trust the jump. So he did exactly what horses are designed to do. He hesitated to be safe when the signal wasn't clear. And you could see that Saoirse could feel she wasn't doing what she needed to do to tell him how to jump the jump successfully. Her confidence dipped it. It was trashed, actually. So he can absolutely jump this jump, but she has to figure things out. The system between them was not synchronized. So it was really cool because across the day, we joked, there was up, so there was downs, there was laughter, there was tears. But once her trainer helped her reset her rhythm, slow things down, get the signal clean again, everything changed. The approach was clear, the cue was confident coming from Search, and her and Laureate jumped beautifully. There is a picture of that on my insta. Watching that moment, or actually across the whole day, I realized something very important that applies directly to the brain science. When someone steps away from the supernormal stimulation of explicit matter, of course, this includes compulsive scrolling, constant novelty, high dopamine behaviors that hijack the reward system in the brain. They expect their brain to immediately cooperate and move in the right direction. They think the moment they remove the stimulation that everything should work again. But the brain doesn't respond like that. It's looking for the cues. So just like Search and Larry, they had to reset the rhythm before they could successfully jump higher and before they could move forward smoothly. The brain has to recalibrate back to natural motivation, natural attraction and arousal and intimacy have to come back online through brain regulation. It's a recalibration phase. So in that phase, things can actually be worse first, just like Search and Larry. So usually for people I work with, sleep shifts into a worse mode. Those urges spike. You might even have more fantasy, more irritability, and the voice in your head gets louder. But when you remove that excessive stimulation, there might be discomfort first. But Saoirse said it this way herself. Just because I'm struggling doesn't mean I'm failing. Oh, as a mom, I was so proud. When your nervous system is waking up, those pathways that have been desensitized maybe for a long time, you know, this can be challenging for your brain. It might struggle. And so your brain may have to adapt to stepping away from massive levels of high level, intense stimulation. When those levels disappear, the brain initially feels like something is missing, because it is. It's missing those high dopamine spikes. If you look at my briefing for the week, you'll see a graph that I made that shows spike, crash, spike, crash, spike, crash. And then when you step away, there's a flat line. But if you can stay steady in that flatline and instability phase, something remarkable begins to happen. Your brain resensitizes, and real attraction and real arousal for your partner in the real world comes back online. Your motivation begins to rebuild, and your energy can stabilize. This is the moment that your brain begins to regulate. But this instability in this phase, it's only temporary. It's not the new norm. It is a phase. But it's also the phase where so many people get stuck and they turn around and head in the opposite direction, back to the supernormal stimulation, because they don't understand what the brain is doing. I want you to understand if you've ever tried to remove the stimulation and things felt worse before they felt better, this isn't weakness. This isn't failing. It's struggling in the right direction. So keep moving through this phase. Now, of course, if you have the right tools, if you have technology, like the neuroregulation technology that I use in my regulate first program, and if you have the right support, like Search had Laurel, this phase can be so much shorter. It was one day for Search. It could have been a month or two months or three months, but she has all those things. The tech, the tools, the support. This was an awesome moment. Okay, so let's wrap up the idea of, if you're struggling, it doesn't mean you're failing. I want to give you a brain hack strategy that I do discuss, even in more depth in the briefing for the week. It goes like this. If you are struggling in that phase, stay out of your head. When you get in your head, that hijacker, he is a product of strained brain that is created by all the strain in the brain, in the nervous system because of the 4D dopamine cycle that's at the core of pornography addiction or compulsive masturbation or any other sexual acting out behaviors for that matter. So the idea is when you have an urge, that's a dopamine drip. When you feel that in that temporary phase of instability, it's your brain doing what it's been doing for a really long time in that cycle, it's signaling to you, I need dopamine and I need it now. You have three seconds to pivot and to not give it dopamine from the screen. If you do during that dopamine drip stage, you will end up going towards the dopamine deluge. The that's the flood of dopamine from explicit matter. Then you'll end up in the dopamine drowning. You'll feel good for a beat, you'll feel numbed out. You pornography will have done. What it's designed to do is to make you feel good and take you away from the cares of the world. Regulate your mood and your emotions for a moment, but ultimately land you in the dopamine deficit or drought where you feel irritable, angry, possibly you feel off kilter, and you feel like you need soothing and stimulation again, 4D dopamine cycle. So when you step away from that, when you pivot in those first three seconds and instead you ground yourself, you open your focus and you look around in your present experiential environment. Then you take a breath in for four counts, you exhale for six. That stimulates the vagus nerve and it creates a real embodiment exercise. Then it's imperative you get dopamine from the real world. We're going for a pleasure pathway reset. Go over to Dr. Trishleigh.com, click the masterclass page. You will be able to read about all the things that are necessary for a pleasure pathway reset. You can start there, but this pivot plan is one of them. It's imperative that you pivot and you get real world dopamine and get it from basketball, get it from darts or billiards. Fiona started playing billiards with her friends at college, which is super fun. Get it from equestrianism, like search, get it from boxing, like me. Go get it from anything besides the screen. Then you will be resetting the pleasure pathways back into your life. Of course, that helps to resensitize your brain. While you don't go to the screen, you're preventing more desensitization. So if you struggle from sexual arousal dysfunction. Sad. Then you will be in the midst of no longer desensitizing, but resensitizing. That's your brain hack strategy for the day. Go try it. It's your pivot plan. It is going to work, don't get me wrong. You may have to do it 10,000 times like Malcolm Gladwell says, but it will pay off. Now, if you are struggling, please go over to Dr. Trishleigh.com, get your brain mapped, reach out to me. We can meet privately. A brain map visualizes what's happening on the inside and it shows it to you unironically on the screen so you can take it all the damage and dysfunction that porn use has caused. And if you struggle with arousal dysfunction, it will pop off the page. That's my pledge to you. You will see it. So please go over to Dr. Trishleigh.com and check it out. Now if you're not ready for that, get my book, Mind Over Explicit Matter. It's coming up. Oh, I have the OG one here. It's coming up on its one year anniversary. This baby's been in the world for one year. If you don't have it yet, go get it. It will help. It's got all the brain hack strategies that you need to succeed. And always remember, control your brain or it will control you. I'll see you next time.