“(O Prophet), recite the Book that has been revealed to you and establish Prayer. Surely Prayer forbids indecency and evil. And Allah’s remembrance is of even greater merit. Allah knows all that you do.” (Chapter Al-‘Ankabut/The Spider: 45)
The brain has been hijacked. You can no longer trust your neocortex. Your addictions have now gone into autopilot. You are serving a need by allowing your damaged brain to automatically choose an action that might seem good to you. You actually need to tap into your limbic brain, because you cannot trust your neocortex (frontal lobe).
The hijacker, is you. Not you, a version of you, making you do things you know are not good for you and steering you in a direction you don't want to go.
Playing sport, working hard and achieving a goal, doing things that require effort will dump dopamine into your system. Life's natural reward system, to make you want to do that thing again.
Certain addictions (especially modern) (backbiting, gambling, drinking, indecency/Zina etc) will dump a huge amount of dopamine in your system, it could be from 20mg on. The next time it will require 40mg. The next time, well the number can get much higher. The problem here is, you wire your brain to now receive an "easy" reward as opposed to one that you had to work hard to get. Normal activities will give you something like 10mg.
What's the result in some of these issues? Depression, anxiety, lack of focus, brain shrinkage and the list can go on from more physical effects to spiritual ones. Its the reason why people are addicted to gambling or are addicted to their phones.
To stop it, you must break the cycle. Even planning or anticipating doing something, will start to dump a whole load of dopamine in your brain, and you have not even started to do anything yet. You could be in brain fog.
How do you stop? Replace the anticipation with something good immediately. As Allah says replace something bad with something good. You will immediately rewire the brain to get back to its baseline levels (over time).
Most of these these things that people are addicted to is a form of escapism. To escape reality, stress and trauma. What looks like it will feel good will end up going back into a cycle of stress. You don't have many pivot points to escape the problem. You only have 2 main ones. Upon anticipation is the first, break it here. Moving towards doing something, break it here. The first option is the best.
How can you feed the problem, the inner child, the wolf in a better way. Understand what they want, replace it with something better and stop allowing them to take control of the steering wheel.
Your brain has been programmed to feed that cycle and you will be in autopilot, until you decide to change over and over again. The neuroplasticity of the brain will move towards making changes.
Gestalt therapy teaches people to address the problem as if the alter ego or inner child is there in front of you. You must say thank you for helping me, but, you must write a good bye to your problems.
Its the journey, not the destination.
Modern day spirituality teaches us that we most slow our brain down and get to a state where our brain waves are in a state where we can be in control again. If you pray Salah 5 times a day, properly, slowly, with conviction this is what the Muslims have always achieved from the time they have prayed. Hence why, the very first quote above from the Quran is very important to understand. If you are still in sin after prayer, then perhaps you are not praying properly, it should move you away from any sin.
Comments
Post a Comment