Sustainable Change: The Psychological Perspective - Rabbi Efraim Stauber

[Music] so continuing with our last train of thought we explained in the last clip on a mystical level how we can change our desires it starts with manipulating the things that give us pleasure let's talk about that today on a very theoretical level but in a more practical sense in other words let's look at it from a psychological aspect what a Psychology Today taught us how we can change as associations what's amazing is that the bali masseur thought of this long before psychoanalysis where we saw cilantro lived in 1810 Froylan olijavi didn't come around till 1856 so the concept that our behaviors is rooted in our emotions in our desires is a tire idea and we can learn from psychology how to put that into very practical use for ourselves how we can manipulate our emotional world so we can get behaviors that are good for us that are healthy for us instead of the behaviors that are bad for us and here's the idea scientists used to believe that the brain doesn't change you know as a child of course it it develops but once an adult you know once a person had cheese adult level so the brain doesn't change much or really at all what scientists know today is that that's not true the brain is constantly in flux laying down new nerve centers and making new connections because actually what they're discovering is the way the brain works most of the brain is a subconscious part of the brain that regulates runs our entire life the way it works is that there's like I think a hundred billion of these neurons he's like look at it like electrical lights or sparks that are disconnected but connections are formed this thought causes that thought which causes which lights up to extend messages down the neurological system telling the body what to do until eventually the brain starts to take shape and you actually form a mind and a personality for example as a little child mommy comes in and mommy gives the baby food so eventually the baby learns say oh that person is associated with nourishment okay and now those links are fired up together and it creates associations and the brain that was created up of all these different lights now is forming into a specific mind the way these pathways are formed these associations are made there's actually two ways the first way is simply repetition when we do the same thing again and again so the associations formed between that action and whatever it caused gets deeper and deeper and thicker and stronger until the mind just learns how to do it subconscious a for example you drive home from work so the first time you drive home you're not sure you're looking at the signs okay followed make the second right yeah you do it a few times then you're not to think about it anymore you do it a lot of times do it all year you could think about something else and suddenly you're home your subconscious mind has learned how to do it all by itself it's like walking through the woods the first time you walk through the woods there's no path there but you walk through ten times a hundred times a thousand times eventually just because you're walking through again and again there's a trail there's a pathway that's exactly how the mind forms the circuitry and these associations until the mind gets a certain character besides for repetition there's another very very powerful way that these associative links are formed and the brain actually takes shape and that's pleasure the brain craves pleasure there's actually something what they call is the reward center now what happens is when a person engages in healthy behavior like you eat you know good food or you do a hard workout so serotonins are released there's like it activates it triggers this reward center in the brain there's a very very powerful feel-good drug and when the brain experience is that socio that action releases these serotonins which makes me feel so good oh so that action is a good thing to do and then when a person experiences pain you know you touch fire once you know so then ouch so oh my gosh that experience is associated not with pain don't do that again so pain and pleasure are very very powerful forces that actually shape the brain and the really cool thing is that there's limited resources up in the mind okay there's only a certain amount of neurons and energy that create those connections so when you choose to develop and focus on certain connections the other ones that you're not you wither away the atrophy and I basically use it or lose it so the more focus we have on creating specific kinds of connections we can affect how our mind is actually going to be shaped and scientists actually could see the brain changing shape based on the connections and associations that are happening in it now the way this is used in therapy with addicts because let's look at addiction how that works for a minute so we mentioned earlier that when a person engages in healthy behaviors so that triggers reward centers in the brain for example exercise or whatever right what happens when a user finds some kind of drug so what did what happens is the drug kind of tricks the brain and activates the reward center even though nothing healthy happens actually maybe something unhealthy happen okay so a person is smoking or injecting something in themselves not good for them but that triggers a reward center what happens is the brain makes an association between that drug and that pleasure and so the person feels like that is a wonderful thing and it becomes hardwired into the brain which is why it's so hard to stop once a person becomes an addict it's much deeper than their conscious mind and their conscious will the it gets hardwired into the brain this is a very powerful association that this is a good thing and what makes it even worse is that natural pleasures have a certain shot off point certain satiation points the natural pleasures of life so we enjoy them the pleasure center is triggered but at certain important there's a satiation but when a person is using these kind of drugs since it circumvents the whole natural system it just triggers that pleasure again and again I just boom boom boom and the brain just goes crazy craving this thing more and more well in hypnotherapy these are many different systems of therapy how to work with addicts and hypnotherapy the way this is way it works is we help the client create positive associations to positive behaviors and painful negative associations to the drugs I'll just give you example of how this works at smoking one person who's told me this this is how he stopped smoking he walks into the therapists office and the therapist says I want you to think of something that makes you regret it ate something makes you throw up something to disgust you so bad so horribly that you didn't you just you throw up with this person said is well when he sees throw up on the floor is so disgusting so well I just causes him to is okay great I want you to think about that and really get disgusted and conjure up that feeling disgust inside you and while you're feeling that I want you to think of a cigarette I would actually what the therapist is doing was creating a link and a source to do everything and actually the next time the person thought overseer they got very disgusted okay so there's a way that we can manipulate these associations to achieve the behaviors that we want and stop doing the behaviors that we don't want that's exactly what we're going to be doing and how we can utilize this wisdom in the mohammed aaser we explained that we have learned to associate pleasure with sin the same way it's almost exactly the same as an addict learns to associate pleasure with the drug when there's really nothing good there so we have learned to associate pleasure with her various because of the spirituality that's trapped in it but the same way that hypnotherapy works with an addict we can do this kind of therapy on ourselves with fun in the 8th Sahara what if we can realign and experience the pain of regret that is really associated with every Avera so that we won't enjoy that anymore and we actually allow ourselves to simply experience viscerally the pleasure that comes from doing mitzvahs and what's different about this then what you already knew is that we're not talking about thinking about these things you already know in your mind that good is pleasurable and bad it what we're talking about here is doing in a therapeutic kind of way actually sitting with this sensation of pain from of Eros and pleasure for mitzvahs and this is the crux of where change is going to happen so we're gonna be describing in our next share exactly what this looks like but send your email to the Torah Center at gmail.com so you can join us we have a whole pool of people already doing this and join our spiritual you kabura and stay tuned for the next clip we're gonna get to really precise detail of how this works [Music] you [Applause]