Conditional Hobbies

Classical conditioning is a form of acquiring behavior described by Ivan Pavlov in the late 1920s. You've probably heard of his research with his dogs, some food, a bell, and a bunch of slobber. Here's basically how the theory works: A conditioned stimulus (the bell) is paired with an unconditioned stimulus (the taste of food), which results in an unconditioned response (salivating). After repeated pairing, the dogs developed a conditioned response (slobber time) to the conditioned stimulus (the bell) alone...no food involved.

This totally makes sense. Our brains thrive on connections--we finish peoples' sentences, predict the outcome of the big game, and don't even bother trying out that Cinnamon and Liver Ice Cream--because (we think) we know what's coming. The important thing with classical conditioning, though, is that the conditioned response takes a long time and a concerted effort to overcome. The brain has  become rewired to expect or output a certain type of behavior, and reversing that process doesn't happen overnight.

The connection to porn use is pretty straightforward. The conditioned stimulus is the sight of a beautiful woman, the laptop, the bathroom, the whatever; the unconditioned stimulus is physical pleasure; the unconditioned response is the lying, the manipulating, the secrecy, the behavior that makes the pleasure possible. If you think about recovery lingo, the "bell" is a "trigger." What's being triggered? The response that we've conditioned ourself into.

I'm going to take the conditioning one step further. As I've mentioned a few times, I also have an addiction to video games. I don't believe that video games are inherently bad--in fact, I cherish some of the positive memories I have playing video games with my siblings and friends growing up. My concern isn't even that video games can become a way to escape reality. My concern is that video games, for me, became a way to escape the reality of my sex addiction, and they became closely linked. So many times I would try to avoid the guilt from my lust addiction by drowning it in video games. Or I would try to manage and control my other problems with rewards of video games. So now, when I get really into video games...I overdo them and get triggered, even though there's nothing questionable in the games I'm playing.

The point I'm trying to make is that I'm convinced that part of the reason I'm having success in my recovery right now is because I've given up video games, YouTube, TV shows, and news websites (Reddit, CNN) that were acting as my "bells." There are obviously problematic content on any of those things I gave up, but I believe they can be used responsibly...but, for now, they are just too closely connected to my addiction for me to use them responsibly. I don't know if this is a universal thing, but I would challenge anyone who reads this to question behaviors--even perfectly acceptable behavior (though I'd wager not)--that may be a subconscious causal link to your addictions.

I'll end with one of my favorite quotes from David O. McKay (given in 1935): "We sow our thoughts, and we reap our actions; we sow our actions, and we reap our habits; we sow our habits, and we reap our character; we sow our characters, and we reap our destiny." Where we end up in the eternities and at the end of our lives depends on our thoughts. When our brain is rewired by the powerful chemicals involved in porn addiction, our thinking becomes skewed, no longer leading us where we want to go. The big question, then, is are we willing to sacrifice other hobbies that have been contaminated by our addiction in order to straighten out our thinking?