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How to use patterns to quit the emotional prison
Intro
One of the 4 types of prisons that pirates are easily trapped in is the emotional prison.
Emotional prison means that we behave in an incongruent way. Or it means that we behave in an addictive way. In other words, if you imagine a prison, the prison bars symbolize the addiction and the person inside is emotions which are trapped and restricted by addictive patterns.
Instead of using our full range of emotions and motivations, an addiction restricts us to a narrow pattern of behaviors. And all this happens mostly unconsciously.
Emotional patterns
Scientists will tell you that most behavior is not caused consciously, but unconsciously. While it is true that our minds are very fast to take ownership of our motivations and actions, what is more true is that unconscious triggers come first, and a split second later our minds only justify whatever actions we took.
Some psychologists have compared our minds to a iceberg – whereas the conscious part is the tiny part that is visible above sea level, and the unconscious part is the huge part that is underneath the sea level.
Even though unconscious triggers are … well, unconscious … we can still identify patterns of behavior that identify unconscious behaviors.
One pattern is the chain. A trigger leads to event which leads to another event and so on. For example you pass by a restaurant, you smell fresh food. This is the trigger. The next thing you know is you study the menu, you enter the restaurant, you order a dish and you eat. You just experienced a chain pattern.
Another pattern is a loop. This is a chain that ends where it started. In the example above, you had your meal. Because it was exceptionally tasty you cannot just let it go. You MUST come back. So, the result, tasty meal, serves as trigger that brings you back to the restaurant the next week. You smell fresh food and so on.
The result of the loop is that you become a regular guest, you come back over and over, maybe even for years.
A third pattern is a spiral. In the example above, imagine you would experience a positive spiral. Now you would not just come back once every week, regularly, but more and more often. First you come back once a week, then twice a week and eventually you come back daily and finally several times a day.
A negative spiral would be the opposite, you come back, but less and less frequently.
What Addiction is
Now here is why this is important. Such pattern are prevalent everywhere in life. Think about advertisements. They all have the intention to install a pattern into your behavior that gets you to buy stuff, and sometimes stuff that you don’t even need, or is even harmful to you.
And if we have patterns that are completely unconscious and, in the long run, harmful, we call it an addiction.
How piracy is an addiction
Piracy can be an addiction too. Have you ever seen pirates that spend hours each day hording standards they don’t really need? Yet, even if they decide to quit, they end up doing the same thing over and over? That’s an addiction.
Each time you pirate, you experience excitement, but its like a sugar rush, its an addiction. Its exciting, but unhealthy.
Addictions prevent success.
The insidious thing about addictions is that all addictions weaken the prefrontal cortex, which is the part of your brain associated with self-discipline and willpower. The more addictions you have, the weaker your self-regulation abilities become, which increases your susceptibility to further addictions. One addiction tends to invite others, and pretty soon you find yourself with a half-dozen addictions, although you may only be consciously aware of one or two of them.
Addictions get conditioned when certain behaviors trigger a dopamine response. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that helps to solidify desired behaviors, such as eating and sex. Initially we experience a reward (a feeling of pleasure) to reinforce a new behavior, and as the pattern gets conditioned, the reward is gradually reduced. The behavior becomes automatic, even if the reward is stopped. If we want to feel the same level of pleasure we did when we first started, we have to keep increasing the dosage.
Unfortunately for us, our dopamine reward circuitry evolved during a much simpler time, when the triggers for addiction-prone behaviors were scarce. In a world of overabundant triggers, we see an overabundance of addictions. Our brains over-reward us, thereby over-conditioning short-term pleasures that often work against our long-term happiness and fulfillment.
Overcoming even one addiction is hard work. Facing several addictions can seem monumentally difficult.
But what’s the truth? The truth is that all addictions weaken us. Addictions lower our ability to discipline ourselves. They derail our best plans to one degree or another. They cause us to live more compulsively and less consciously. And as so many people report after overcoming a major addiction, life is better on the other side. It can take a lot of patience and resolve to get there though.
Even if it takes years, if we truly want to live consciously, then becoming addiction-free must be our gold standard in this area. Even if we never reach it, it’s wise to hold this standard as our goalpost. The closer we get to it, the better off we’ll be.
Imagine what your life would be like with no addictions. You’d be more disciplined than ever. You’d have the ability to make conscious choices in each moment. You wouldn’t have repetitive compulsions wasting your time or renting space in your mind. Your thinking would be more rational. You’d enjoy more freedom. You’d have more energy and better focus. You’d probably save money, and you’d surely save time.
Epiphany: changing patterns
Now here is the key insight. No matter if we call this behavior an addiction or if we just call it a pattern (and forget about making someone feel guilty for unconscious behavior) the good news is that once we are aware of a pattern, we can change it.
The point is not to avoid unconscious patterns alltogether. Because this is not possible. We simply do not have the willpower to succeed against our unconscious drivers.
Patterns fill a need. So if we remove a pattern it creates a void. So we have to fill it consciously.
A better way is to remove negative patterns and to replace them by positive patterns.
Instead of using pirate patterns that lead us deeper and deeper into behavior that we don’t want, we can install patron patterns that reinforce behavior that we do want. This means that without conscious effort, our unconscious drivers will HELP us obtaining the standards we need, instead of PREVENTING us from obtaining the standards we need.
Three Ways to Break A Piracy Pattern
So how can we break a pattern? There are three primary ways to break patterns.
Once you know the three vulnerability points you can use to permanently break unwanted habits and addictions.
- Break the stimulus
Prevent a stimulus from ever occurring again
In the above example, if we wanted to avoid eating out at that restaurant, we could simply choose another path so that we avoid passing by the restaurant and make it thus physically impossible to smell the food.
- Break the thought
Generate a different thought based on the stimulus
If we take the restaurant example once again, we could make a deal with someone else, for example the neighbour of that restaurant. “If you ever see me in this restaurant, I’m going to pay you 5000,- bucks!”
Now even though this does not change the stimulus, it changes the thought. The thought of paying a punishment of 5000,- bucks may be enough to stop us from going there again.
- Break the result
Ruin the result.
The result in our restaurant example is the meal we enjoy. If we wanted to break the result, we would have to ensure that we do not enjoy the meal any more. Or we would have to remove the meal entirely. For example, we could order foods that we don’t like. Or we add too much salt, so that we cannot enjoy the meal any more. Or we could go to the restaurant when it is closed.
While it is possible to break a pattern with only one of the three methods, the best way to break a pattern is to use them all together. If we use brute force, the chances of breaking an addiction increases substantially.
My success story
I used this strategy with overcoming an addiction to pirating music when I was 19. For 18 months prior, whenever I went online, there was a good chance I’d pirate music. Seeing a folder titled with the name of a sharing site was one trigger. Feeling some edginess was another. Even boredom could be a trigger. Once I felt that surge of excitement, I couldn’t help myself. Lots of rationalization stemmed from there. Somehow my brain always had a way to explain the behavior as a good idea at the time.
Eventually I realized I had to stop this behavior for good. After downloading a ton of music that clogged up the space on my computer, but which I never had the time to listen to, plus the disorganized way the files were stored started to cause me headache. Even with that motivation, it wasn’t easy.
I successfully stopped, largely by moving to another city and staying away from the computer alltogether, nuking many of the triggers, but I didn’t feel like myself for several months afterwards. It felt like there was an empty hole in my personality. I missed who I was when I had the excitement of piracy in my life. I felt like a hollow shell of a person, like my soul was missing. It took a long time to feel normal again.
When I returned to the computer I deleted 80% of the music, moved 19% to external harddrives, which I hid in a box in a cubpoard that was hard to get to and kept only 1%.
I deleted all piracy bookmarks in my browser, which had been strong triggers in the past.
I uninstalled the torrent app.
I asked my friend to not share pirated music with me any more and I announced that I would stop sharing with him. I was lucky to have his support.
And most importantly, I installed a new habit: I started buying music and created a collection with paid-for songs only.
This not just killed my addiction, it made me feel relieved, like a burden dropping from my shoulders. I particularly enjoyed the feeling of cleanliness I got when I added new pieces of music to my selection.
Instead of feeling like a parasite, I felt like a noble men when I pictured how my financial contribution would benefit an artist that I admired.
Action steps
I invite you to do something similar if you are still collecting pirated standards. Remove bad stimuli and replace them with aligned stimuli. Get your friends to support you dropping piracy.
Break the trigger:
- Delete piracy link from your browser
- Delete pirated standards from your computer/cloud.
Break the thought:
- Make an announcement to your friends and colleagues that you stopped piracy.
Install new triggers:
- Add bookmarks of standard organizations to your browser
- Create a new folder for purchased standards.
- Look at the licence of a purchased standard and feel proud for having started a healthy habit.
Install aligned thoughts
- Meet experts who purchase standards as well.
- Go to TC meetings. Partipate in standard development, if possible, so that you feel like an owner, rather than a parasite.
Calibration
A word of warning.
Don’t trust your brain: As ironic as it seems, the key to regulating an addiction is not to trust your own brain. When it comes to managing an addiction, your brain will often lie to you. It will tell you it can manage just fine if you want to self-regulate and tone down an addiction, giving you the false impression that you can trust it. And then when you aren’t paying attention, it will trigger the behavior, and you’ll be well into it before you consciously realized what happened. Or you’ll watch it happening and won’t be able to stop yourself.
If you question the behavior, your brain will give you a convenient rationalization for why it’s okay just this once. And you’ll waste several hours each week, enough that you could have take an extra vacation or completed a significant work project with the wasted time.
Don’t trust your sneaky, addicted brain. Know that it will try to betray you, and take steps to thwart it in advance. Remove the triggers if you can, or put a roadblock between the trigger and the behavior. I know this sounds a bit schizo, but it works.
Healthy Relationships: Consequently, a good way to stave off addictions as well as to overcome them is to be more active in pursuing and maintaining healthy relationships. One side gives you short-term pleasure. The other side can create long-term happiness.
I’m becoming convinced that addictions are very often a substitute for healthy intimate relationships. When we maintain addictions, they fill the void that’s supposed to be filled with intimacy and connection with other people. We often see that when people overcome addictions, their relationship lives improve dramatically. Real human connection fills the void.
Now you might be thinking… yeah, but I can have both! I pirate with my pirate friends, and hang out with them, so I’m doing the relating thing too!
Well… no. This is just another phony rationalization from an addicted brain. Can you see why that would be so?
The goal is relating on the basis of non-addiction:
Turning the addiction into a social activity drags us all down. We do include some relating, which is good in general, but if we’re relating on the basis of addiction, then what are we missing? Of course we’re missing relating on the basis of non-addiction.
Take a few days to install new patterns. Once you have installed them successfully, using those new patterns will create results on auto-pilot.
To recap, start here:
- Commit to the goal of becoming a patron.
- Identify your patterns that are misaligned with your goal.
- Design a new patterns that are aligned with your goal.
Good luck!