Desexualizing Your Brain
The way to mindful decisions and thoughts.
Natural Sexual Thoughts
Would you give your phone to a random person of your friend group (maybe your girlfriend or your best friend) and give them access to any app or maybe even to any content you have ever consumed over this device?
Most of us would refuse. Do not get me wrong, I do not try to give you a bad feeling, I just know for a fact that especially men are struggling with the amount of sexualized content they consume on a daily basis. There are also girls who struggle with the same, but the majority are men.
This makes absolutely sense. Men are naturally wired to feel sexual interest quickly, but what is not natural is the amount of triggering content that a men’s brains are exposed to, these days. Nearly every social media platform has (soft pornographic) content and there is even a whole niche of business building up on the sexual dependencies of men. This is not evil it is normal, every marketing and selling strategy builds on dependencies and ardent wishes of humans. The term “Life Fore 8 ” is a common marketing term and describes the eight fundamental desires of humans.
I list them here in case you are interested:
protecting your loved ones
feeling superior to others
social approval and being accepted
sexual companionship
being out of harm
not dying
not being in pain
For every one of these you will find products and niches that aim to satisfy these human needs, therefore to also productize on point 4 (sexual companionship) only makes sense.
This market also existed 30 years ago, but today it is stronger and more dangerous for young men than ever before, because sexualized content is so easy to consume and often the consumption even happens unwillingly through the social media feed etc..
Why It Hurts Your Life
Maybe you had the experience in the past, that your thoughts turned to sexual ones, instead of focusing on your tasks at work or at university. Maybe you have been ashamed of yourself, because you could not resist these thoughts and procrastinated on the task required to be done. Maybe these experience even hurt you self esteem, because you do not trust yourself anymore with making the right decisions, and maybe you did not yet even realize that you might have a problem with overstimulation of your brain, because of sexualized content.
We are quick to think it might not be a problem or it is normal.
It is not.
The amount of sexual images we experience today in one single day is comparable to the amount of sexual images our grandfather experienced in their whole life. It is imaginable that our brain might not be designed to be overstimulated in such a way. Some people are so to say building a sexual relationship with others, which they have never even seen in their life, and even pay them to get access at first place.
It hurst your social life, it hurts your decision making, it hurts your productivity and it hurts your self esteem.
The Way Out
If you are convinced you might need to desexualize your brain, I will now describe a simple way out. It is a three step process, that had helped me to stop sexualizing too many thoughts of my life and focusing on the things, that actually matter to me. We all have goals, but our human desires can control us to forget about them, because we deeply know we need to listen to theses desires. This inner voice of telling us what to do was right a few decades ago. It is not right anymore. It is a skill required in the twenty-first century to protect ourselves form sexualized overstimulation to reach our full potential of performing.
The sexual energy is one of the biggest, which we humans have access too and we can utilize it to reach our goals instead of waisting it on the internet.
The three steps process is the needed Framework For Desexualizing your brain:
Bring Excitement into your life:
Most of the times where our thought start to flow away and get caught up on sexualizing a specific moment are caused by a inner unpleasant feeling. We start to distract ourselves to feel great for at least a short time period. A few of you might have had the experience that thoughts like this nearly never come, when we are really involved in what we are doing, for example if we have an exciting week on vacation or spend time with friends. It mostly happens when we are alone and feel sad or frustrated. A way to tackle these feeling is to distract your brain, but the better sustainable way is to solve the cause for these uncomfortable feelings. Meditate or go for a run, hit the gym or meet with friends!
Remove sexual triggers:
The easiest way to not get caught up in sexual thoughts in a moment, where you do not needed it, or want it, and it is just unmindful distraction of your priorities, is to remove all triggers out of your life. We all have different triggers, which are over the time taught to our brain. Maybe you are now thinking about specific Instagram accounts you currently follow, and maybe you have even had the thoughts of unfollowing, because you do not like the fact about yourself that you consume their content.
Now is the right time to unsubscribe. Remove the triggers for distraction and lift the burden off your shoulders. And if you have unsubscribed from all the obvious distraction go even further and pay attention to any content you consume and decide rather it is beneficial for your life or just mental sustenance. Also clarify which friends in your circle might cause difficulties, friends that might cause interaction with triggering images or thoughts. There even might be friendships, which only build up on these over-sexualization of life. Try to convince them of change, if your are convinced, and if they do not follow along it might be time to reduce contact for you to grow!
Use the tech tools properly:
Desexualizing your brain can be a longer process and is not done in only 2 weeks, but it is worth the process. You will feel more alive, more focused and free of distraction and less reliable on intangible sources of positive feelings. Instead you will feel more alive and energized to tackle new tasks and set new goals. The social relationships in your life will grow (especially the one with the opposite gender), because your brain will be more focused on the relationships and the benefits itself instead of bringing everything on a sexual level. To assure we can keep up our process and not relapse we need to learn and teach ourselves to properly use our technical devices (smartphone, tablet, PC). You have already removed all triggers, which is necessary and great, but not enough. You will encounter with triggering content again, and this mostly happens after hours of unconscious swiping and watching on social media platforms. We are not mindful of our actions and thoughts in these moment and will eventually go down the avoidable rabbit whole again. To protect us against these unpleasant incidents we need to define our technical device usage. If you work you want to limit all the distractions around you. Switch your phone into air plane mode, and focus on the task. This is not only beneficial for our task, but also revokes our phone the capability of sucking in our attention.
We do not want to swipe mindlessly around not knowing what we are looking for. Get mindful about your social media use and your phone use in general. What are you actually looking for? Do you want to learn something or are you just distracting yourself from real life problems. Face them!
This world is real don’t give yourself permission to not life your life.
Natural Sexuality
Before I finish this weeks letter I want to say, that there is no point in life where you 100% have a problem with over sexualizing thoughts or you don’t it is rather a feeling. You need to decide wether you have a problem or you do not! When you felt like I hit a point with this letter and you recognized some thoughts, because you also had them in the past you might shall try some of the described steps. They helped me a lot to refocus on my goals, achieve more and be more at peace with me, myself, and my thoughts. It also brought extrem benefits to my relationships as I was more capable of listening and have real conversations.
I wish you a great week. See. Believe. Achieve.
All the best.
Jakob.