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Emotional Debtor

Episode #89

zachspafford.com/freecall Emotional debt We’ve talked about this on the podcast before – we bought a house. It was super exciting for us to buy our house here in st g because, for about 18 months we lived in Milwaukee and missed all our friends and the life that we had here in st g.  We are super excited to have the chance to buy our house.  But when I look at the amortization table, which is the thing that tells you how much you end up actually paying for the thing you just purchased I cringe a little.  In the end we’ll pay 2x the amount that we purchased the house for.   When we talk about buffering we often just call it a behavior that creates a net negative in your life.   While buying a house is probably not exactly a net negative in your life, in fact, hopefully it is a net positive, loans and money offer a great analogue for what we do when we buffer or really how we manage our emotions. Let’s talk about how we are both borrower and lender for our own emotions and how we can better manage that process by using some very simple math.  I like to talk about emotions as the math of our lives for a couple of reasons.   One is, I’m usually speaking with men and we men like to think of our life’s journey as a series of solvable puzzles and problems.  Unfortunately, the men and women I work with often think that the emotional struggle that is often part of leaving pornography behind is a foreign land of mush and gush. Second, it really gives us some powerful perspective on what is happening and what it costs to choose certain ways of dealing with our lives. Here’s what the emotional loan process looks like.  Let’s start with a really simple example.   When we feel stressed and choose to turn to pornography, we feel arousal.   Now if this is where the emotional exchange ended then we would be fine.  That would be the end of it.  The problem is that this is usually not where it ends.   First, feeling arousal doesn’t actually deal with the reason why you might be stressed.  So, if I’m stressed because of work, then turning to pornography won’t get my work done any faster.   Second, that stressed feeling is now going to be compounded by additional negative feelings that I’m going to have to deal with as well.   Just like interest, when we borrow a positive feeling from ourselves, like arousal, that doesn’t fit into our moral compass, we are creating an emotional loan that will be paid back with interest.  So now, we have stress, guilt, shame, frustration, and maybe even more stress that wasn’t there before because we’ve spent time doing something that didn’t help us get work done and we are now even more behind.  We’ve just created a 4 or 5 to one exchange.  Imagine if someone walked up to you on the street and said, hey, I’ve got a nice crisp new dollar bill.  I’ll give it to you for that crinkled up old 5er.   You’d say, no thanks.   But that is exactly what you are agreeing to when you take the emotional loan of arousal or overeating or checking our phone.    We are taking an emotional loan from ourselves, short changing ourselves and paying back at a 5 to one ratio, sometimes more, in order to feel good right now.  In the moment.  When we feel a negative emotion, often times we look to mitigate it by using a good feeling emotion, like arousal, which is what we feel when we look at pornography.  So, in that moment we have done what I like to call, taking an emotional loan.  Meaning we have now borrowed a positive emotion from ourselves which we will need to pay interest on over time.   The interest that we usually end up paying is a compounding of the... Support this podcast