00:00 

Hey there, this is Intentional Living with Tanya Hale and this is episode number 67, "Buffering." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:21 

Well, hello and welcome to the podcast today. Thanks for joining me. Remember how last time I said that when we were talking about the balance of emotions and I said this is like my biggest one. Okay, so I'm going to amend that because as I have really dug into preparing for this podcast I'm like, "oh yeah, this is one of my issues too." But these two are very, very connected. The balance of emotions and buffering are very connected. So good mental health, this is number three, good mental health, a key here is having low or no buffering. So let's talk about what buffering is because many of you may not be super familiar with this phrase. 

01:07 

Buffering is defined as "using something external to solve emotional problems or discomfort, to solve for an internal problem." It is something we use to change how we feel emotionally. It is a way for us to avoid feeling the difficult feelings that come into our lives. Some common examples of buffering would be eating, shopping, smoking, drinking, drugs, that little mix, people pleasing, electronic games, TV, maybe social media. These are all activities that we turn to when we're feeling something uncomfortable and we want to numb out the feelings. We could add sleep to that list too, right? So we do something else that feels pleasurable in order to avoid the discomfort. The thing about buffering is that it keeps us from fully experiencing our lives because it allows us to hide from reality. 

02:02 

So remember last time we talked about this balance of emotions. Buffering puts us in a place where we are ignoring the negative emotion aspect that we talked about. Because as we talked about in the last podcast, a huge part of our human experience is having the full gamut of emotions. Huge positive, huge negative, and then everything in between, right? When we use external stimuli to distract us from the more difficult emotions, we call that buffering. So when we buffer, we do not show up and face the truth because we don't want to feel the negative emotion. We are wanting to replace discomfort with temporary pleasures in order to distract us from that discomfort. 

02:44 

Many of us buffer because we have this mistaken idea that we should feel good all of the time. We believe that negative feelings mean there's something wrong with us or with our lives and so we seek for something to take us from that negative place into a positive place. But what we're really doing is filling our lives with false pleasures that don't bring us any long term satisfaction or fulfillment. In fact, they even come with consequences that we are usually pretty unhappy about once that initial hit wears off. 

03:19 

Okay, so this pleasure that we feel comes from a hormone called dopamine. And anytime we do something that our brain finds pleasurable, it releases dopamine into our system and it feels good. But here's something I think that you will find very interesting. Though dopamine is produced naturally in our bodies, we start getting way too much of it sometimes because of the concentrated external pleasures that we're receiving and then it takes more and more of these pleasures to get the same hit of dopamine. So how are we getting these concentrated doses? Well, you know all of those processed foods we like to buy and eat, the sugar in those is so processed and so concentrated that it sort of sends our dopamine into overdrive and our bodies were made to handle the natural sugar in things like fruit, but not necessarily the processed sugar in, say, a candy bar. And because we get such a huge dopamine rush from the concentrated sugar in the candy bar, the fruit no longer gives us much of a dopamine hit at all. 

04:27 

Let's look at gaming. So many games are set up to give us the dopamine rush when we win a level and move on. With online shopping, we can get an immediate dopamine hit if we buy something and that's our buffer of choice. And when we experience this pleasure, we want to experience more because that is how our bodies are created and eventually our brain thinks that we should be having pleasure all of the time because it is so immediately accessible. So we actually find ourselves becoming slaves to these false pleasures. The urges to participate in these activities can be very strong, and since they're so easily satisfied, it can be very difficult not to give in, especially if it is keeping us from the feeling the opposite of the pleasure we anticipate, which is the discomfort of these negative emotions we're trying to escape, right? So hopefully you're starting to clue into what some of your buffers are. 

05:24 

So here's an interesting question. Who would you be without your buffers? Do we even know? I don't know sometimes. What could your life be without buffering? What if you could stop overeating or overspending? What if you could quit overworking, or overpeople-pleasing, or overFacebooking? Whatever your buffer is, what if you could set that aside and live without that? At some level, it's really helpful for us to recognize that these false pleasures are keeping us from real pleasures. But when we take away all of the false pleasures, we're left with just us and our real raw emotions. 

06:12 

But then we can start to tap into who we really are and learn the lessons our emotions have to teach us. We can begin to step into our true, authentic selves and really experience what we are meant to experience as humans. Buffering comes with some long-term consequences. As long as we are buffering, we are holding ourselves back from growing into this person we are meant to be. Another consequence of buffering is that it feeds into our selfish desires. We become more and more fixated on trying to get things that don't bring any real satisfaction, only a temporary reprieve from our negative emotions. But we can never get enough of something we really don't want, and so we focus more and more on ourselves and getting that temporary fix. 

07:01 

A shorter-term consequence of buffering is that, though very short-term, we may get a quick fix of dopamine and feel really good. It doesn't take long before we realize that we are sabotaging our ultimate mental health and well-being. For example, take the buffer of overeating. We may feel sad or upset or angry and head into the kitchen for a snack to distract us from the negative feelings. Sometimes even while in the very act of putting something in our mouth we're saying "this is a bad idea," but we keep doing it anyway because we're anticipating the pleasure that comes from the sugar getting into our system. It can definitely bring some temporary pleasure to eat something that tastes good. And this pleasure distracts us from the difficult emotion we're feeling. But it doesn't take very long before we start berating ourselves for binging like we did. Our primitive brain sought for immediate relief from the uncomfortable emotions, but a short time later, our prefrontal cortex steps up and then we have to deal with the consequences of lower self-respect because we now feel like crap for binging when we weren't really hungry. And if we do this consistently enough, then we have the consequences of our body not feeling or being as healthy as we would like it to be. So we have a lower confidence and a lower health level because we were trying to avoid a feeling of sadness or anger. 

08:28 

And it's definitely not just food. We may be a shopper when we feel these tough emotions, and we may get that dopamine hit when we find something we really want, or another hit when we swipe our card or another when we walk out of the store with the bag in hand, or when the Amazon box shows up on our porch. But give it a few weeks and the credit card bill will show up and then we have to work through the consequences of our overspending. I personally tend to want to buffer by zoning out while scrolling Facebook. And even while I'm doing it, I'm not enjoying it. That's the crazy thing. I'm getting some small dopamine hits, but really, even while I'm doing it, I am realizing that there's not a ton there that is really satisfying. And then it puts me behind my business schedule of what I wanted to accomplish for the day, and then I add to whatever discomfort I felt before because now I also feel the frustration or the pressure because I didn't stick to my time plan. 

09:30 

But if we can learn to not be a slave to our buffering addictions, we can become free to make other healthier choices that really open up the pathways to our self-discovery. If we can learn to expand our buffering energy into processing our difficult emotions instead, we can come to know ourselves in a much deeper and intimate way. At this point, we can begin to understand what our discomfort is trying to teach us and then we can start to move forward. And then tapping into our  natural pleasures, the ones that come when we process our negative emotions, we build our self-respect and we learn to have a better and more fulfilling human experience. 

10:14 

Now, we're still going to feel uncomfortable emotions, but rather than using our energy to buffer, we will begin to use our energy to figure out why we are having those emotions. This is where the thought model comes in. It's in this space that we will work to figure out the cause behind the emotion or the thought that is causing the emotion. And when we get in touch with our own selves in this way, we are in such a better mental health place. Our confidence grows when we forgo buffering, and more confidence creates more empowerment, which creates actions that move us forward into becoming our best versions, and we contribute to the world in ways that increases our self-respect and mental health. Will we feel deprivation and withdrawal when we choose not to buffer? Definitely, of course. Because our primitive brain is used to getting the pleasure hit that it wants when it wants it, and when we don't give into that aspect of our desires, we will feel it. 

11:16 

If the buffer is a physical addiction, we may feel it in other ways besides just a very strong uncomfortable urge. We may have really physical responses also, but ultimately we will begin to feel the emotion that we've been avoiding, and that's when we begin to discover the real us or the authentic us. This is the place where we begin to find out what we really think and believe, who is underneath all of that buffering. And through all of this, we will open ourselves up to learning lessons that the negative emotions are seeking to teach us. And part of this lesson is going to help us grow into finding greater fulfillment in life. Imagine a life where you are no longer afraid to feel and process tough emotions. Imagine being so comfortable with those tough emotions that you could easily step into understanding the lessons they're trying to teach you about yourself, your past, your present, and your situations. 

12:18 

We can ask questions of ourselves, such as, "why am I feeling this way? What false thoughts are creating my desire to buffer? How are these buffers robbing me of a better life? What is the feeling I'm afraid of feeling and why?" This is a vulnerable process. Many of us have buffered for so long that we're really not sure who is really underneath all of the false buffering behaviors. We don't know who we genuinely are and that can be scary and intimidating. We don't know how to live our authentic selves because to be honest, many of us never have. 

12:59 

So to move forward and grow into this real us that is often overshadowed by all of the buffering, we must be willing to experience negative emotion 50% of the time. This is the only way to remove our buffers and the negative consequences associated with them. We have to start feeling the difficult emotions. We have to be willing to give up the false pleasures of buffering in order to obtain the true pleasures of really living and obtaining greater mental health. So the big goal here is to find out who you are without your buffering. Who is underneath all of these false pleasures? 

13:39 

I love this analogy that Brooke Castillo gives. It's like walking into our house, we turn on the lights, and it's a huge mess. And that makes us all uncomfortable and anxious, so we turn off the light so we don't have to see the mess. But the mess is still there, we just can't see it. Avoiding the mess by turning off the lights doesn't make it go away, it just makes it so we don't have to see and engage with it. And because we don't see it, we can put off the negative feelings that arise from having a messy home. But until we turn on the lights and clean up the mess, we will just be adding to this problem. 

14:15 

Emotionally buffering is like turning off the lights. The mess is still there, but we are just choosing not to see it or deal with it. Good mental health means that we're willing to turn on the lights, leave them on, and start sorting through the messy emotions that can make us feel so uncomfortable. If we really want good mental health, we have to start doing what it takes to stop buffering and start feeling our true emotions. We need to turn on the lights long enough to see what is causing our pain. What mess in my mind needs to be cleaned up? What thoughts am I thinking that are creating all of these negative feelings in the first place? What am I buffering against? What am I trying to avoid? 

15:04 

So learning not to buffer is a process of slowing down the thought model. For most of us, when we buffer, we are completely unaware that it is happening. This is because we've been doing it for so long that our primitive brain just does its thing so quickly that we're buffering before we have any conscious awareness. It's almost as though the thought line and the feeling line have become involuntary, or even non-existent. But they haven't. Our thoughts and feelings are always there. It's just that the process is so habitualized that it happens without a conscious thought. 

15:43 

But when we learn to identify our buffering behaviors and then consciously choose not to buffer, we step back into being in control of those thoughts and feelings. And at this point, we will work to determine what we're feeling and what thoughts are creating those feelings. So I've been working on this a lot, especially this last week when I find myself doing something like eating something. I'm trying to stop and I'm trying to say, "why am I eating? I'm not hungry. What feeling am I trying to avoid?" So I'm learning how to slow down this process as well. So when I find myself engaging in a buffering action, I'm stopping and I'm saying, "what feeling am I trying to avoid?" And there have been a few times I've been able to identify that. And then I can say, "well, what thought is creating that feeling?" It's been really quite fascinating as I've really started to try and dig into this a little bit more. 

16:40 

But allowing for this uncomfortable emotion is going to help me solve my problems internally rather than seeking to buffer them externally, which will never lead to a better life. The amazing life we seek is only to be found in solving problems internally and creating greater mental health. So little to no buffering is a great indicator of mental health. So the less we can buffer, the better we're going to be. Growing up is pretty amazing, don't you think? I love learning things that are growing me into a better person. 

17:17 

Alright, you can find me on tanyahale.com if you would like to set up a free consultation with me. You can just get on my website and send me an email and I will get back in touch with you and we will get it together. Thank you for joining me on this podcast. If you haven't yet subscribed, make sure you do so. And if you will leave me a review and share this with your friends, that would be freaking awesome. I hope you have a fabulous day and that all your awareness starts to become more heightened around your buffering behaviors and how they're keeping you from really connecting with what's going on in your life. Alright, my friends, that is it. Have a terrific, terrific day and I'll talk to you next time. 

18:04 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya.