 مِ اللَّهِ الرَّحْمَانَ الرَّحِيمَ الْحَمْضُ لِلَّهِ رَبِّ الْعَلَمِينَ والصَّلَاتُ والسَّلَامَ لَاشْرَفِ الْأَنْبِيَةَ والمرسَلِينَ سَيْدِنَا مُحَمَّدْ وَأَلَا آلِهِ وَسَحَابَتِهِ أَجْمَعِينَ اللَّهُمْ مَا أَلَّمْنَا مَا يَنْفَعُنَا وَاَنْفَعْنَا بِمَا أَلَّمْتَنَا وَزِدْنَا اِلْمَنْ يَنْفَعُنَا So we've been talking about the nafs and the stages of the nafs, how to nudge the nafs forward to help us reach our goals and break our habits. The important thing to understand is the nafs can change. So Allah says in the Qur'an قَدْ أَفْلَحَ مَنْ زَكَّهَ The successful one is the one that can purify the nafs. So success is attached to handling the nafs and getting it under control. But the more important, an important part here is that the nafs can change. So however hopeless it feels, however long it feels like we've been going at this, the nafs can change. And also sometimes we can misinterpret or understand things as if we're just born in a certain way. There's something that might be deficient about us. True. We might have been born into a certain circumstance, family, community. We might be born with some predispositions in terms of our personality and just our makeup, but the nafs can change. And the nafs goes through stages in order to make that change. We talked about last time the nafs is part of insan that consists of their desires, their drives. The nafs has animal like qualities. And what's interesting about this, as many of the scholars in our tradition would liken the nafs to an animal. So many of the scholars talk about it in this way. For example, Imam al-Ghazali says he has a section on the nafs in his book, Menhaj al-Abideen, and he describes the nafs as adab, a writing animal. So a horse mule donkey type writing animal and how to manage an unruly defiant nafs, adabatul jamur, the unruly nafs that doesn't listen to you. So just like our scholars studied the human nafs and its behavior, contemporary neuroscientists also study human behavior. And just like scholars use animals as a teaching tool to understand the nafs, neuroscientists also use animals to understand the nafs. So our scholars use animals available to them when they were formulating their ideas and communicating them. Contemporary neuroscientists have studied human behavior and animals as well, but they've used animals that are convenient for their experiments. So neuroscientists, they've done studies on monkeys, dogs, rapids, spiders to look at behavior and habits. But much of the research on habits have been done on rodents, like laboratory rats and also laboratory mice. You know, one of the questions that come up is why has the research been done on rats and mice? So there's a couple of interesting points here. Most of the scientific interest is on bad habits. You know, although there's good habits and the way we understand habits today can be used to build good habits. But then also, once you understand how habits work, we can break down bad habits. But most of the scientific interest has been in how do we break bad habits? And it just wouldn't be ethical to give humans bad habits to study them. Maybe interesting, but not ethical. It would also take too long to ingrain habits into humans because habits take a long time to develop in humans. Where rodents live in a lab, they can be trained hours daily and develop a habit, like the habit of lever pressing. And then also the organization of the rodent brain is similar enough to the human brain. And there's a lot that we can learn from them. But also there's differences as well, of course. So all of this information at our disposal is important for us to utilize to break our habits. And when we understand how habits are formed, we can understand how to break them. So last session, we discussed triggers as part of habits. These are things that are constantly associated with our habit, like waking up in the morning and then I brush my teeth, which is the behavior and waking up in the morning is the trigger. Closing the door and then automatically just lock it. That's a behavior that triggers closing the door. And one thing triggers the other behavior to happen subconsciously without our conscious awareness of it. Now, the triggers can be people, places and things, but they can also be emotions like we discussed. So a certain emotion happens like we're trying to quit eating in an unhealthy way. We're trying to quit smoking. We're trying to quit smoking cannabis. So anytime we're stressed, that might trigger us to engage in our behavior and habit. And that's something we talked about last time. This session, we talk about rewards. On page 84, it talks about the behavior chain and how habits work. And once you understand that chain, we kind of introduced it a little bit last week. But what I want to do is talk about a little bit more. The first slide is how our habits formed. There's a paradox between our intentions and our habits. So this is where we talk in our tradition. It talks about the rider and the animal and the metaphor extends to raining that animal in, raining that unruly animal in. So simply put, if you want to go right, your animal wants to go left and it's not obeying you. The idea is to come up with different strategies to rain that animal in. Neuroscientists, behavioral economists look at it like the intention habit paradox. So I intend to go right, but my habits pull me to go left. And so to understand how intentions work, that's simple. We consciously just desire to do something. But then to understand how habits work, why does that animal pull us left? Once we understand the mechanics of it, then we can break it down and start pulling it to the right. So for example, in the slide, it says, new behaviors take conscious attention. So in the past, we talked about cars. When you first drive, you have to be consciously aware of how you drive. You feel the cars zipping past you, the accelerators, something you're consciously aware of, though the wheel is something you're constantly aware of, the stick, everything left side, right side for. It's very like anxiety, a provoking experience. You're almost like, how are we going? How does this even work that these vehicles move at 60 miles per hour? And how has this been something that's worked for so long? So it's a new behavior over time. The second point, after repetition, over and over and over again, behavior becomes automatic. You're doing it without thinking about it. You're doing it without thinking about it. And then the decision making part of your brain goes to sleep. The rider goes to sleep. The beast is just walking on. So repetition makes the behavior become automatic. And on the second slide, it talks about how this is a good thing. So there's a good side to habits and there's a bad side to habits. So now when our actions are automated, our brain can work on something else. That's good. So I can multitask now. So I can drive on autopilot. I can drive the car on autopilot. And now I can take a phone call or I can listen to a podcast. I'm a commute to work or I can review notes for work. So that's a good thing. But there's a bad side to it. And that's the inability to switch off bad habits that you no longer want to continue. So you start a new diet, but somehow you're still snacking on autopilot. You intend to not eat, but all of a sudden like you just wake up and there's a bag in your hand and you're eating. You don't even know how it happens. Maybe you were triggered by a long day of work, a stressful day of work, so on and so forth. You want to reduce your screen time. But every time you hear a phone buzz, you just check your pocket. It's on autopilot. You're not even thinking about it. It just happens. So how do these habits work then? And on the next slide, this is really important to understand how habits work. All habits have these four components. This is on page 84 of the book, but then also it's on this slide. All habits have a trigger or a cue. They have a craving. It's a strong urge that drives us, that commands us within us. And then there's a behavior. Either you respond to that urge or you don't respond to that urge. And then once you do the behavior, you get a reward. And that's important. It's actually all about the reward. But let's pause for a moment. When you understand these four components. When you understand these four components of a habit, then you have four opportunities to break that habit. Either you can break the habit at the trigger stage so you can eliminate the triggers. And that's what we've been talking about, eliminating people, places and things, eliminating things that trigger us to use, working on emotions that trigger us to use so you can eliminate the cue or the trigger and your habit will never start. You can go to the next stage, which is you can reduce the craving. You can challenge the thoughts that are driving the habit. So cravings are feelings, but they're thoughts. I want to use right now. I want to do this right now. And it's also this feeling, this drive. It's like a magnet pulls us. So you can reduce that craving. By challenging those thoughts and also just by being mindful of those feelings. If you can just be aware of those feelings, it decouples it from the automatic behavior. It goes from subconscious to conscious and it decouples it from the automatic behavior. And there's a lot of literature on mindfulness based relapse, prevention and mindfulness based strategies to deal with addictions. And that's simply how it works. It's by becoming mindful of subconscious unconscious behaviors. So now at least you have a target you can hit. So now the third point is the behavior, the response. So let's say you eliminate the trigger, you fought with the cravings and thoughts, and now you still have the response and behavior. If you make the behavior difficult, you won't be able to do it. If you make the behavior difficult to do, you won't be able to do it. So let's say pornography or cannabis or a food habit. Let's say you're triggered, you have the thought urge, and then you have the behavior. If you make the behavior difficult, it's going to be hard to do. So with cannabis, let's say you get rid of all the lighters, ashtrays, foils, pipes, whatever in the house. You got triggered, stressful day at work, you have thoughts and cravings. But now it's like, how do I even put this together? I have no way to do it. The behavior is harder to do. I got to put more organization and thought into do it. Same thing with pornography. If you put all the software and make all the limitations and restrictions, then it's harder to do that behavior and with food the same way. If you're triggered emotionally, stressful day at work, you want to eat your feelings. If the food is in the garage, if the junk food is in the garage, if the junk food is in the back of your trunk, the junk food is just 10 feet farther away. It becomes harder to engage in that behavior. And then finally, the last part is the reward. And that's what we're talking about today. If the reward of your habit fails to satisfy your desire, you'll have no reason to do it in the future. So the main point, the moral of the story, without the first three steps, a behavior will not occur. Without all four, a behavior will not be repeated. So if it's not rewarding, it's going to diminish how a trigger works, craving works. It's going to diminish your desire to want to do that in the future. So if you look at the next slide, the habit loop, this is an example of trigger craving behavior reward. The trigger is, let's say, a cell phone buzzing. The craving is you have a cell phone in your pocket, it buzzes, it vibrates, it rings. And then the craving is you have this strong urge to just pull it out of the pocket and look at what happens. What's going on? Is it the phone call? Is it an update? The behavior is then to open the phone and bring it out. And the reward is being entertained, distracted. If you disrupt any of these things, let's say the cell phone buzz, you turn it off, vibrate, out of sight, out of mind. It's not on vibrate, it's not on ring, it's just completely off. So you don't hear the buzz or the phone is away. Let's say you wake up in the morning, the phone's not right next to your bed to look at, to grab, it's downstairs or it's in another room charging. It disrupts that habit. Then the second, the craving. You have that urge to pick up the phone. If you're able to have that inner dialogue with yourself to say, well, no, I did make a commitment to myself that for four hours I'm not gonna look at my phone, I'm gonna spend time with whatever of my kids. And then you have the inner dialogue with yourself. You can diminish those thoughts cravings. If the behavior is hard to do, like picking your phone out of your pocket and looking at it, if that's hard to do, then it's gonna make that habit even more difficult. And then the reward. If you diminish the reward, then that is gonna be even more difficult as well. So the next slide, how can I make the trigger out of reach? The next one is with craving and thoughts. How do I challenge these thoughts to make them less desirable? The next one is with the behavior, how do I become more conscious of this unconscious behavior? How do I become more mindful of it and harder to carry out? And by the way, the last one and this one we'll spend a little more time on next week. And then how do I make the reward less rewarding? You can look at this whole habit loop. Remember, the nuffs can change. And the nuffs is what's driving us to go left when we wanna go right. And these four components are the components of how that drive operates. But they all in the end of the day are chasing a carrot. They're chasing a reward. It's like the rider with a carrot on the end of it taunting or driving their animal. Rewards are the end goal of every habit. The trigger is actually just, the trigger being the first component of this habit loop. The trigger is actually just about noticing the reward. The trigger is about noticing that a reward is possible. The craving is about wanting the reward. The behavior is about obtaining the reward. So if you can obtain that reward through some other means that behavior diminishes and you go to another behavior. Without the reward, there's no behavior. If you look at laboratory rats, the common way to study laboratory rats is by putting them in a box with a lever. They push the lever, they get a reward and then we watch their behavior. And they give them food as a reward. And what they find out is the more rewarding the reward is, the faster the behavior gets set up. Once they train them to push the lever, if they give them amphetamines, methamphetamine, heroin, opioids, cocaine, which they do in the studies, they use all these chemicals. If they give them these really highly rewarding things, they learn how to push the lever quickly. So they teach them how to push the lever, then they press the lever, they get the reward. As they get more and more reward, they continue to push the lever so much so that they stop exercising, they stop thinking about food and they become preoccupied and quote unquote express the addiction and are focused on pushing the lever to their own detriment of their health and their lifestyle, their life. And now what happens is, and this is important, people get caught up in the lever as if the lever is what it's all about. When they take the drug away and they're just pushing the lever and they're not getting the reward now, what they find is over a period of weeks, the lever pressing extinguishes, it goes away. They are no longer obsessed with the lever, they're no longer preoccupied with the lever and they go back to their normal rat life, running on the wheel, eating the food, focused on other things. So it's not about the behavior, it's not about the lever pressing, it's not about the marijuana, it's not about the whatever. It's about the reward you get from it. And once you understand that, then you understand so much. You understand so much, whether you're 10 years out from your habit, 20 years out from your head, then you start realizing, well, I was addicted to heroin, then I got addicted to cannabis, then I stopped that and I went to pornography, then I had a eating problem, then I had a relationship problem, then I just workaholic, that's because it's a different lever you're pressing, but you're getting the same reward in different ways. Because it's all about the same principle, about developing habits that are healthy and balanced. If you think about dopamine, dopamine is the neurotransmitter that mediates reward. Dopamine is the buzzword nowadays. All of these different chemicals, whether it be heroin, marijuana, all of them, any of these behaviors that are constantly repeated, dopamine is what's released in the reward pathway to drive those rewards. So for example, you can use heroin, you can inject it in IV, it'll go into your blood, go into your brain, but in the brain it's translated into your reward pathway in a release in dopamine. Heroin releases dopamine in supra normal, unnaturally normal amounts that natural rewards can't compete with. Same thing with cannabis. The fallacy is that cannabis is benign, safe thing. It's an excellent marketing, but it's just not science. So cannabis also releases dopamine and supra physiologic, supra normal amounts in the brain that natural rewards can't compete with. So it's also releasing dopamine and hijacking this reward pathway. So cannabis, you smoke it, you inhale it, there's other ways to use it, but you inhale it, it goes into the capillaries in your lungs and it picks up in the blood, goes to the brain. That's where it all happens. Dopamine's released in the brain and the reward and motivation occurs. You look at something like pornography. Pornography hits your eye, your retina. It's bypasses all the blood delivery. It goes directly into your brain, releases dopamine. And unnatural amounts. Pornography is a reward that is not like any natural reward. There's a lot of confusion about that. It's an unnatural reward because the amount of variety and novelty. And then also food. Food oftentimes is a processed unnatural reward. It's the perfect amount of salt, sugar, fat in order to keep you coming back and provide unnatural rewards to keep you coming back. Drugs, pornography, cannabis, overeating. But one of the things is like, oh, I smoke cannabis. I don't do heroin or I'm looking at pornography. I'm not doing drugs or I have a problem eating. I don't have a problem doing drugs. All of it is they're all a reward. They're all just different intensities of rewards. And that's why these principles are helpful for everybody. The other principle about understanding rewards is number one, abstinence is important. Just letting yourself get a break from the reward will then break the habit. The lever pressing extinguishes after a period of time. So a period of abstinence is incredibly important to allow your brain to reset and to get stimulated by natural rewards like family relationships, like hobbies, like goals, career goals, so on and so forth. They'll create natural rewards that will then hone our neurobiology and infrastructure towards seeking out those natural rewards away from our unnatural or harmful rewards. Okay, so a period of abstinence is important. And again, the laboratory rats, when you think about them, oftentimes after the lever pressing has extinguished, the behavior is gone, what they do is they don't leave these poor laboratory rats alone. Then they will inject a little bit of the substance. Remember, the laboratory rat wasn't looking for it. They weren't pushing the lever. There was no habit returning. They just inject a little of the substances. What they find is once that reward comes back, then the habit comes back. So they start pressing the lever and becoming preoccupied with the lever again. But then they realize they're not getting it anymore and then the habit extinguishes. So a period of abstinence to allow your reward pathway to reset is incredibly important. And it's hard to circumvent that. Okay, so that's that. The second thing is that if you can make your reward less rewarding, however that can be, a less of a dose of your substance. So it doesn't have to be all or nothing. If you can make your reward less rewarding, like a healthier food, a less potency cannabis, and just like less of the reward of the behavior, that's a win. That's a win. And do it. Because you wanna disrupt this, you wanna rebel against this in any way possible. And that's a success. The third thing and the final thing is that if you can create competing rewards, if you can create competing rewards, then you can reduce the behavior. You can reduce the behavior. And inshallah, with that, we'll close up. And we can just open it up and check in.