Buffering

Some of us overeat. Some of us drink a little too much wine. Some of us go on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, too many times a day. Some of us buy things we don’t need or can’t afford. Food, booze, internet, porn, drugs, shopping, whatever your poison, it’s all a form of buffering. Buffering is when we use external things instead of our own minds to change how we feel emotionally. When a painful emotion comes up, like discontent or boredom or fear, we distract and avoid with buffering instead of feeling the negative emotion and digging into our thoughts to find out what’s really going on.

We are biologically wired for survival. We’re designed to avoid pain, seek pleasure, stay safe, and expend the least amount of energy possible. It’s no mistake that the things that are essential for our survival, like food and sex, are also pleasurable. That’s to ensure we keep doing them. But it takes thousands of years for evolutionary changes to happen so our brains are still wired for a world where all this instant pleasure didn’t exist. Now we have access to everything easily so our primitive brains are saying, “why work at achieving something real when you can get this hit of fake pleasure so instantly and easily?!”

All of these instant pleasure industries are built on the dopamine reward system. For example, when our primitive brain tastes something delicious, it says, “yes, we like this, this tastes pleasurable so it must be good for our survival.” When it tastes something much sweeter than