Emotional Addiction and the Thinking Cure
Television, Daydreaming, Boredom, and the Neuroscience of Becoming Contented
What makes us happy? What makes us appreciate what we have and why do some people always need more? What makes us capable of deciding what’s best for us clearly, rather than living on impulse?
The answer to those questions is the ability to think and utilize all of our brains, instead of just chasing good feelings all the time. Curiosity and constructiveness are important abilities in the creation of our own happinesses, and science suggests that powerful ways. These skills are the ability to take our surroundings and, in our minds, make an enjoyable experience out of them, whatever they may give us. That takes abstract thinking skills.
Emotional addiction is an idea that beneath the mask and various presentations of all other addictions, are the addictions we have to the emotions we feel from acting the other addictions out; conversely, emotional sobriety is the idea that it’s important to maintain an emotional balance and control, otherwise we’ll lose control in other aspects of our lives.
After all, many people often do extremely self-destructive things in the name of experiencing some certain feeling.
Abstract thinking skills which come from a brain that must be exercised and utilized, not one that’s watching TV all day. Can we maximize our brains to gain a greater degree of self-control, maximizing our natural mental faculties in a way that would make our lives better? Modern neuroscience suggests that we absolutely can. And even better, most of it is stuff we were taught in elementary school.
The Balance Between Thinking and Feeling
I’m not going to tell you to stop watching TV, don’t worry. Entertainment is actually a beautiful and valuable fantasy-world we get to step into whenever we want and experience the rich variety of emotions that life has to offer. But I can suggest cutting back on TV if you want to be both smarter and happier with the blessings of a lot of neuroscience.
When we want a laugh, we put on House M.D., when we want to cry we turn on The Notebook for the 54th time because we know that’ll do it every single time, when we want to feel anger or sadness why not turn on the TV news? When we want to be afraid or feel suspense, just watch another episode of The Walking Dead — that’ll do it. And that’s okay…but that fact is, many of us are “feels junkies.”
We totally binge on Netflix, at least every once in a while; we seek those forms of entertainment which give us emotional tugs and wild rides, and science is actually showing quite clearly that television actually increases our emotional sensitivity and maturity. This is a good thing for those who need it.
When we bond with a character from our favorite show that we binge on, we actually make a very real connection with a totally fictional character, we care about them and their well-being, much like anyone else in our lives. This teaches us how to bond, but it doesn’t teach us how to create.
And creating from the raw materials of life is the key to true happiness…
Have you ever seen an artist totally enthralled by the overpowering passion they feel as they create their work? It’s quite different from the passive enjoyment we feel having a silly conversation with a friend, because very different parts of the brain are activated.
TV is a great tool for many people to expand upon their empathy, but it comes at the expense of our ability to think abstractly. Television actually provides us a judgment-free place where we can just feel and not think, and in some applications, this can be a good thing.
But can we get hooked on those feelings? In a world where people are hooked on the adrenaline rush of gambling, the oxytocin-high of sex addiction, and the dopamine stream which comes from an endless supply of pornography, I can’t see why not. The thing about these lesser forms of addiction, like shopping, porn, etc., is that while they’re very real, they’re also very socially acceptable, so they’re hard to see as addictions.
Studies have shown time and again that television and reading effect the brain in radically different ways. Television actually quite literally causes brain swelling in multiple regions, causing a narrowing of the white matter fiber pathways which we need to formulate ideas clearly. When the white matter pathways become too restricted, people can actually even develop dyslexia.
People who watch more TV have issues with verbal communication and language processing, and also had increased activity in the hypothalamus, the region of the brain that controls many of our emotional centers as we feel too much when we resonate with the stories on the tube, leading to arousal/anxiety and aggression. This isn’t a choice we can simply ignore, these are the physical effects of emotionally-charged television shows on the human brain.
But most important of all, the prefrontal cortex is effected. The prefrontal cortex is the part of our brain that does our abstract thinking and regulates our self-control — we need to envision a better future clearly in order to be able to muster up the willpower to not overindulge now. In this way, TV is a cyclical addiction, by inhibiting our power to turn down the instant emotional surge we get from our favorite shows, or chocolate, or a beer, or whatever it is that we lack control over — maybe even gambling or shopping.
Reading is an amazing alternative, because reading actually activates the thinking and imagining portions of the brain. We need to imagine the characters, the setting, the entire universe in which the stories in our literary works unfold, all of it is subject to the infinite space of our imaginations.
Even reading a novel stimulates our brains in different ways and the difference is largely in the fact that when we read about a character, we use our imagination to fill in the blanks that TV usually fills in for us. Reading obviously boosts the language portions of the brain, but also overall brain performance, as fMRI machines have shown that the brain literally mimics the mind of the characteres its creating when we read, activating the sensory and motor functions of the brain as if what was happening in the story was actually happening to us.
The effects are felt globally, as the brain’s networks are reinforced all over the map, and the effects are also measurable for days.
So, if you were told that books make you smarter and television can make you stupid, they weren’t lying to you.
This is the line of thinking we need to adopt if we want to gain a greater degree of control over our lives. In short, TV leads us by our emotions, while other activities like reading and writing put us in the driver’s seat. It’s simply important to think more than we feel.
Television is just one example of millions that give us a rush of emotions that we can easily become addicted to, literally making us dependent upon the things in the external world to become happy. Cutting back on our going out and getting our fix of emotional shots, replacing them with creative endeavors can have a radical impact on our lives.
Becoming Stress Free
This one is also two-fold. Stress directly inhibits our prefrontal cortex’s activity, weakening the very neural networks that are responsible for decision-making, making us less focused, abstract, thoughtful, and even intelligent, which contributes to addictive behavior, everything from overeating to opiate addiction. Are addicts stressed because they’re addicts, or are they addicts because they’re stressed?
When stress happens in our lives, we’re less resilliant in the face of stress, because we’re less capable of building happiness with our dulled brains, making us more stressed, making us less resilliant, and so forth.
What’s the solution? Learning to live an overall more minimal life with just your mind to keep you occupied is a very good thing — for some people, being alone in a quiet room is askin to torment. They seek stimulation all over the place and become anxious, restless, irritable, bored, and even depressed when they’re deprived of that stimulation. This is truly addiction, in my view, addiciton to stimuli and feelings.
But we can overcome it. We can learn to be totally good with just ourselves and not much else, alone with our thoughts — in fact, daydreaming and not focusing on anything has been shown by science to reduce this problemby activating the areas of the brain which are responsible for physical defense and threat detection, as well as abstraction and intellectual reasoning. Meditation also helps in the same way — seriously, it works, and it’s been proven.
Sitting in a quiet place, especially one that’s serene and aesthetically pleasing, decluttered, can work wonders on the pscyhe. I discuss the value of daydreaming on the brain here, and we’re talking demonstrable, measurable brain changes here confirmed by neuroscience, here, not just some random guru telling us what they intuit from their feelings.
Daydreaming and meditation help the brain with what’s called stimulus independent thought, the ability for the brain to create without some profound input — basically, daydreaming and meditation are cures for boredom, and natural antidepressants and anxiolitics. Boredom is what happens when we rely on something else to make us happy, excited, captivated, etc.
Learning to Think Differently
The ultimate takeaway from all of this is that we should learn to think differently, and it’ll be uncomfortable at first, much like our bodies go through a massive unpheaval of physical and mental problems when we’re deprived of sensory stimulation, so too do we tend to go absolutely stir crazy when we first begin to minimize our emotional stimulation.
We tend to think of the word arousal in a positive light because of it’s connection with sex, but outside of sex, arousal is often times a bad thing; arousal is responsible for stress, anxiety, fear, worry, and a slew of other negative emotions, and thus calming arousal is an important aspect to learning a greater degree of self-control, so we can become much less reactionary and become the masters of our own destinies in life.
Professional body builders even obtain a competitive edge by mastering their arousal levels, calming themselves so that they may exert their energies when and where they need, rather than expending it in the binge-and-purge cycle of emotional addiction.
Arousal is toxic to the practice self-control, something that requires a sound and stoic mind as we determine our lives with precision. Are you being tugged around emotionally all day? It’ll take some time, but you can slowly reduce your total need for things to give you a rush, a kick in the pants, as you settle into a much calmer existence in simplicity. It’s learning to think differently and respond to different types of stimuli which effect different parts of our brains to find a balance — too much intellect, life becomes dull and we become lonely. So as with all things in life, it’s a balance.
© 2019; Joe Duncan. All Rights Reserved
