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White knuckling your way through temptation. Does it ever work? No. No, it does not. True discipline through not only brain alignment, but alignment with your true authentic self instead of force. That's what we're going to be talking about today. Welcome back to the podcast with me, Dr. Trish Leigh, cognitive neuroscientist and your hostess with the mostest. I just want to remind you that this podcast is part of my outreach program to help people leave explicit matter. To that end, I have a nonprofit organization for young people. You can find it@pornbrainprevention.org if you're inspired. Please think of donating and helping people unplug from the digital chaos and reconnect to their true selves through neuroscience based education. I'm trying to help the world. You can help me. Let's do it together. All right, let's dive into our theme for today. What we're going to talk about today is willpower. Will not cut, won't. And I'm going to tell you why. Your BR is looking for coherence and regulation. When you try to push through, you're actually using the opposite brain pattern. That's why it doesn't work. So our culture has conditioned us, me included, to just try harder. I was the queen of trying harder. And honestly, I still have to train myself not to do that, which that's how the brain works, through consistency, training, not just trying. You have to train your brain, your mind, your body and your spirit, that true self in there, to operate differently. Now, the biggest conundrum of them all is how do you train your entire self to operate differently when the thing you're using is your current operating system? That, my friend, is the biggest challenge. Now, when you're trying to use willpower in and of itself, it lives in the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex up in the very front of your brain, that is the CEO of your brain. It's involved in executive function, which is planning, organization, all those cognitive thinking skills, judgment, impulse control, that's where that CEO lives, in the prefrontal cortex. But when you are stressed out, and especially if you're conditioned or trained to go back to explicit matter or to screen times and screen time in general, we'll break it down in a second. Your prefrontal cortex becomes fatigued. It's like the CEO is working 24 hours a day. He becomes burnt out. He's completely overstimulated. Now, especially if you're hitting that easy button of porn or explicit matter, it leads to dopamine depletion. So he's stressed, he's tired, he's all jacked up, overstimulated. Plus he's low on dopamine. Dopamine is that feel good reward chemical in your brain. But more so than giving you the reward, it helps you to seek the reward. It's a seeking and searching neurochemical. It's one of motivation. So if it's trained to be motivated to go back to the screen to feel good, that's part of the problem. But after consistent use, it becomes depleted. Now you need more and more dopamine just to feel the same. This is tolerance building and escalation. This is why willpower doesn't work. Essentially, the habit loop of explicit matter has taken out that CEO of the prefrontal cortex. He is offline. So this is how scrolling, gaming, shopping, binging, and especially porn or explicit matter create the abnormally high, those excessively high dopamine spikes that then lead to deactivation of the prefrontal cortex, which is where discipline lives. The CEO's disciplined. If you've ever met a CEO of a large company, that person is disciplined. I'm a CEO of not the largest company in the world, but a growing company. This girl has discipline. I have to or things don't get done. So discipline is the key. That's why willpower fails. The brain is offline at the moment and we're going to talk about how we can get it back. Now let's move into what I'm calling sacred science. This is really important to me because, you know, for a long time I've shown up here and talked about the neuroscience, which is obviously my jam, and something that I think is very, very important. But what I don't want to be lost is how this translates into being the true, authentic version of yourself. I mentioned this in my book Mind Over Explicit Matter a lot because it is a really important piece. Porn and explicit matter and screen time in general, it's a symptom. It's not the actual problem. It's a symptom of the deeper problem that's kind of flying under the radar underneath. That deeper problem is, is people aren't walking around as their true, authentic selves. That's what self actualization is. That's what spirituality is to me. You know, that divinely inspired version of yourself that you remember back to the days before you found the screen. What did you love to do? Who did you want to be? What did you want to accomplish? What did you want to achieve? What did you Want to contribute to the world. That version, that version gets derailed. I talk to people in my program all the time. A gentleman just told me last week he wanted to be a musician, but he went into tech for the money. Don't get me wrong, we have to live in the world, and I understand the logistics. But 30 years later, having this ache inside because he's doing a loveless job, that's not his purpose or passion. I contend you can do both of them. You just have to be really intentional. And if you're caught up in explicit matter of the screen, that intention flies out the window. Like we talked about, no prefrontal cortex activation. So you end up operating from a lower version of yourself. Not the higher version, that lower version. I liken him to the gorilla, the limbic system who just takes over, just looking for more and more pleasure. It's the pleasure driven self. And it's not even pleasure for pleasure. It's pleasure to offset pain. That's the reality. The pain of not being who you were meant to be. So that's what we need to talk about. But when this happens, it's hijacking the seat of awareness. You can't really be aware of what you want to do and who you want to be if your brain is caught in the loop of explicit matter or screen time. True discipline arises when your higher self reclaims that seat. As the CEO, I did a podcast with a gentleman who focuses on attachment theory. I don't know, two months ago, probably. And that gentleman was saying that when he works with partners, couples, men who are addicted to pornography, women who are struggling with betrayal trauma, which I also have a program. It's called Sanity After Betrayal. I work with couples too. But the idea is he was saying that the man should be the CEO and the woman should be the coo. This was his contention in his program. And of course I spoke up lovingly, if you know me, and I said, what if the CEO stopped doing his CEO position? You know, this is the position many women are in. If the CEO of the family has become addicted to pornography and now he's being pulled back by that dysregulated brain, not even by choice, by the dysregulation flying under the radar in his brain and he's pulled back into the screen, the wife has to become the CEO, the CEO stopped doing his job, that lower self has taken over. Impulsive, pleasure driven, avoiding pain, escaping. So then the partner, who may even want to be the COO or be CO, CEOs, at least you know, we're CO CEOs in this family. I'll tell you, the Lee family, we've got a little bit different hierarchy, but it works. But the idea is that, you know, everybody has to be doing the agreed upon roles. And if somebody gives that role up, like being the CEO, then there's havoc in the family system. That's when attachment breaks down. So here's my question for you. Are you being the CEO of your life? We'll just say it that way. Do you feel like your brain is a higher self, strong CEO for you? If not, let's keep going. Okay, so this is what I call sacred science because it's reordering your thought system with the intention of what you want to create in your life, but then taking aligned action. This is where integrity and congruency and coherence come from. Right thinking, which comes from a regulated brain. And that thinking, it's not right or wrong. It's what's best for you. Divinely inspired thinking so that when you're on your deathbed and you're looking back, you have rocked out the life that you wanted to. That's the intention then taking the actions that lead you there, not that lead you away from the goal you set. Aligned action, which leads you to integrity. Every day I wake up in integrity because I do the things that are important to me to create the life that I want. I want to serve people. That's why I'm here. I want to be an amazing mom. And that's actually changed. A new word in my mind is matriarch. I want to lead my family from a really strong position. So I've kind of shifted from, you know, doing the momming for them to leading by example and emotional co regulation, like a matriarch, which feels really cool to me. Yeah, I know. I'm getting older too, so that's just part of it. It's a cool title to give an older mom. Yes, I'm aware of that too. So let me tell you a story about my thinking. This was not always my thinking. I wish it was. I wish I came out of the womb thinking, you know, sacred science and, you know, very tapped in. We'll just say, but I didn't. I came from a family of six. If you've heard this podcast before, you've heard about my family. Big family, Irish Catholic, three boys, three girls. Unironically, that's what I have in my family. I have a stepson and then I have my five children, which equals three boys and three girls. Yes, I know. What you're thinking intergenerational trauma, but I call it intergenerational healing. But the idea is that, you know, my family was chaotic. We lived in a very small house. It was chaos. And I was being bred just like my five brothers and sisters to think like my parents. And honestly, my five brothers and sisters still think like my parents. But when I was probably about 25 is when I first heard the greatest mentor in my life, Dr. Wayne Dyer. Wayne Dyer became the greatest influence in my life. I listened to every book. I've seen him speak multiple times. He is my greatest teacher. My thought processes started to shift and honestly, when I still need a little tune up, I listen to Wayne Dyer. It feels like the fatherly voice that never taught me the things that myself inside of me wanted to hear. That was 30 years ago. He called the ego edging God out. But I think of the ego as the lower self. That's that pleasure pain complex that you've got going on. That's what keeps us in fear. That's what makes us angry and irritable. That's what makes us need to self stimulate and self soothe the ego. The ego is the lower self. It's very worldly oriented. Then there's the true authentic self where it's purpose and passion oriented. It does right by itself and the people in your world. It cares about the important things for passion, intention, for the life better lived. That's the higher self. So when I first heard Wayne Dyer, something in me shifted. And since that day, I've wanted to be the new Wayne Dyer, which is part of the intention that. No, actually Wayne Dyer died right when I moved to North Carolina. That's when I set the intention to be the new Wayne Dyer. I didn't have the idea to be the new Wayne Dyer until the old Wayne Dyer had had passed on. So before that, I was a grind and hustle person. I just worked around the clock. And when I met my husband, I felt like he was sent to me to balance me. He still does, maybe a little too much sometimes, but. So the idea is that, you know, it was control. I thought discipline meant control and pushing and striving and white knuckling my way through absolutely everything. But I had to train myself that it's not white knuckling, it's the discipline of setting up the life that I want and reminding myself daily and then easing into it and flowing. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, another teacher of mine who founded the Science on Flow State. Like, absolutely amazing. We don't need to push, it can just flow. And that's what Wayne Dyer said, not from a neuroscience standpoint, but just from a spiritual self actualization standpoint. So that's what I want you to know here, is that when your brain flows, that flow state in your brain is one of calm focus. It's not of willpower, it's not pushing, it's not striving, it's flowing like a river. The electrical energy in your brain and your nervous system can flow like a river, just gently but, you know, energetically flowing to accomplish everything you want, you don't have to push it. It's not about forcing your way forward, it's about removing the blocks of flow. So for you, the blocks of flow are screen time. They are explicit matter. If you are consuming any explicit matter, social media only fans, dating apps, you know, anything, porn proper. You are blocking the flow, my friend. You are keeping your brain in strained brain too fast and too slow, needs self stimulation, self soothing. You are keeping your nervous system in a state of the pain pleasure paradox like I talk about in mind over explicit matter. So what needs to happen is the re pattern, the rewire, the reset. Here's the connection to consuming explicit matter and blocking the flow. When you are caught in the loop of explicit matter, your system thrives on chaotic novelty. That's the exact opposite of discipline. It teaches your brain to keep chasing, not choose. It's about the chase, not about the choice. Discipline is choosing what matters most, even when dopamine is telling you otherwise. But you have to have enough brain control to make that choice. Prefrontal cortex, come back online. Chill out the limbic system from a sacred science lens. Every time you resist the counterfeit fire of the screen and you return back to intention, you are strengthening the neural pathways in your brain and the pleasure pathways in your life. It's neuroscience, which is the rhythm of discipline, not only in your brain, but in your life. And the repetition of it builds the circuits in your brain and in your schedule of control embodiment. The nervous system must feel safe to sustain discipline. And then there's your divinely inspired self, that higher self that leads your body and your mind, not vice versa. That's what we're talking about here. So let me give you a couple of brain hacks for the day and we'll wrap it up. Brain hack number one, map your triggers, write it down. When you feel the strongest pull toward explicit matter or even screen based distraction, notice what emotion precedes it. Is it boredom? Is it loneliness? Is it anxiety? Feel it. See what you're doing, what you feel. Like awareness begins with rewiring. Then you know how to choose differently. Number two, schedule stillness. I know that when I start running ragged, that's when my brain is most likely to take me in the wrong direction because my prefrontal cortex has been online too long that it will eventually drop out. When you schedule stillness, discipline grows. It grows in that gap between impulse and action. And actually, Wayne Dyer had gap training, which I still teach people in my program. I offer a program called Pleasure Pathways Reset. You can check it out@drtrishleigh.com and I'm just thinking about this now. There's actually a lesson in getting into the gap through stillness. Every day, practice a daily dopamine fast, short screen, free intervals where your brain can recalibrate. We're in front of screens all the time. You gotta give your brain a break. Number three is replace with rituals. Instead of forcing yourself not to do something, channel that energy into a new sacred ritual. So instead of abstaining, replace it with something that's dopamine producing in your real life. This is how we really get those pleasure pathways reset. Breath, work, journaling, prayer, movement, creativity, get the flow going. So replace this idea of don't or, I'm not doing this thing, and I'm staying away from this thing to do. I am doing this new thing. I am creating with intention. I'm becoming the person that I want to. I'm aligning. I'm getting integrity because I have new thoughts that align with what I want intentionally, and I'm taking aligned action. Your brain will follow this pattern. That's what flow is. All right? When your brain is imbalanced, you don't need to force yourself to be disciplined. You simply are disciplined. Discipline is the natural expression of a regulated brain and a connected soul. It really is. So I want you to remember, until next time, control your brain or it will control you. I'll see you then. Be sure to subscribe to this podcast, because next week we're going to talk about the dopamine illusion and how you think pleasure equals happiness, but it doesn't. I'll see you then.