 Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim al-hamdulillahi rabbil alameen. Wa salatu wa salam ala ashraf al-anbiya wal-mursaleen. Sayyidina Muhammad wa ala alihi wa sahrihi ajma'een. Allahumma al-limna ma yanfa'una wa nfa'na bima al-lamtana wa zidna il-mannafian wa ba'in. So last session we went over the nafs and the fact that the nafs refers to that part of us that drives us towards unhealthy choices and the idea that the nafs goes through stages. So there's a nafs al-amara, a nafs al-awama and a nafs al-mutma inna. And each stage has strategies to focus on to nudge to the next stage. So a nafs al-amara, what you wanna focus on doing is becoming aware of how the nafs drives us and what the strategies are and then start becoming aware of that and preparing for what are the things that we need to do in order to combat that. And then once you go from preparing to do that then you wanna go into a stage of just taking action. And that's when we're at a nafs al-awama where we're struggling against the nafs and we're actively introducing exercises and strategies not just any exercises and strategies but exercises and strategies that are adequate enough to suppress that nafs. So then what you do is, hold on one moment, I'm having some technical difficulties, I'm terrible with all of this stuff. Okay. And then what you do is you move from actively struggling against the nafs to a nafs al-mutma inna. This is the nafs that's achieved balance and is at peace. And then it's about just maintaining the changes that you've made. So when difficult situations arise leaning back on all the skills that we've learned and continuing to move forward. So the goal is not to just understand the stages but the goal is to understand the strategies to help us move through the stages. So first it's important to understand a nafs al-amara. So this is again, the part of us that discounts future rewards, focuses on the now, wants what it wants and it wants it now, immediate gratification and drives us to unhealthy choices. So everybody struggles with the different nafs. So some people, nafs drives them to overeat, over sleep, overlook, over speak, cannabis, pornography, different things for different people. So we all have more than one of these. The idea is to pick the habit that's causing the most dysfunction. Pick the habit that's causing the most dysfunction and then work on that, the most dysfunction in your family, your life, your future goals, your relationship with the law. So once you pick one, then it's important to realize that the nafs isn't driving you to these unhealthy choices all the time. So then the idea is to understand, well, how does the nafs work, the nafs al-amara? Is it, it's not constantly sending you this impulse, do this, do this, do this. It's dynamic. At times it's really strong and at times it's really weak. At times there's things that we can do to weaken it and there's things that if we neglect them, it strengthens it. So once we understand those things, then we can take control over how to strengthen and weaken the nafs. So what accounts for these differences? What are accounts for these differences? So when you look at how the nafs drives you, your environment is the major part of the battle. So imagine, for example, if you're trying to go on a diet and eat more healthily, imagine if you're at home alone around a lot of food versus being at the mustard where there's no food or being at the gym where people aren't sitting around eating a bag of chips, everybody's working, but you're at home, there's food all over the kitchen, there's food everywhere. Or if your nafs is driving you to look at things you don't wanna look at, imagine being home alone, screens all around versus being at the mustard or being at a different place. So the idea is to recognize that the environment is incredibly important. So when we talk about a nafs al-amara, we talked about the ayah in chapter 12, ayah 53, in the nafs al-amaratun besu. And so this was something that Yusuf al-alaihi salam said and was captured in the Quran for us to learn from. So what Yusuf al-alaihi salam was referring to when he said this that verily the nafs commands to evil or unhealthy choices, what he was referring to was a situation where he was being incessantly pursued by a powerful woman. So this is a surah, Yusuf, we don't have to go into the details. It's a beautiful surah and it's, encourage all of us to read it. But the point I wanna make was he was in her house, she locked the doors and what was his response? The one that is telling us about the nafs al-amara, what was his response to deal with a nafs al-amara? The first thing he tried to do is reason with her briefly and then once she escalated, once she was firm, she firmed her conviction, then he ran to leave the room to remove himself from the situation. And once gone, he resolved not to go back, even if that meant locking himself up. So the point being is that Yusuf al-alaihi salam was aware of how the nafs worked and to address the nafs, you have to address the environment you place the nafs in. Those are where the battle lines are. So the nafs will drive you to make bad choices and you have to keep it out of the environment that strengthens that drive. Another way to put it, to weaken that drive, you have to avoid certain situations or put yourself into certain situations. So in chapter 17, ayah 32, Allah says, la takrabu zina, don't even come close to zina. So fornication. So Allah says, don't do zina. He says, don't even come close to it. And when you look at the tafasir, like for example, tafasir ibn kathir, he says, this refers to those things that pressure you or trigger you towards zina. So don't even go close to zina. And similarly in surat al-Baghra, Allah says when talking about the story of Adam alaihi salam in jannah, don't even go, when he wasn't supposed to take of the tree, he says, don't even go close to the tree. That taqrabah had his shajara. So there's the tree and then you can almost create circles around it and larger circles and boundaries. So don't even come close to the tree. So this idea of keeping your nafs out of certain places is incredibly important in order to understand how to weaken the nafs. So this is geographical space. It's space in terms of time. So if it takes me five minutes to get to my addictive habit versus one minute to get to my addictive habit, then that time is gonna help reduce me from doing that. So getting, let's say, if it's smoking weed, getting the marijuana out of the house, but also getting like pipes and other things out of the house, because if I wanted to go back to it, now it's gonna take me, I can't just use it, it might take me a little bit longer to use it or getting phone numbers out of our cell phone, so on and so forth. Whatever barriers in terms of space, but also time, we can put up against our addictive habit you wanna do that, because what that's gonna do is give us the opportunity to maybe make a course change. And this includes digital space now, since everything can be, you can get everything at the snap of a finger. So whatever you need to do in order to make that happen, digitally, there's a lot of ways to do that. So what I wanna do is go into the text now, chapter five. So step three, becoming a self expert. So on page 84, it goes over it goes over becoming a self expert. And it talks about in order to become a self expert, that means getting an understanding of your triggers, of the range of situations, places that people and experiences that activated, activate your nefs or your addicted behavior or your addicted brain. These things that activate your nefs, your addicted brain, they're called triggers. This is page 84. When you encounter these triggers, they usually come as a sequence of experiences. So what it gives is a chain here. It starts with trigger. So that's a person placed a thing. Then that trigger leads to a thought. That thought leads to a craving. And that craving leads to engaging in the behavior and the reward from that. So, there's many components to this that if we're to intervene on them, we can disrupt that whole process. So you can interrupt the triggers by just staying away from certain people, people, places and things that are associated with their addictive habit. But once that trigger sets off that thought process, then we can intervene on the thoughts. And those are the strategies that we learn in the context of the process. That we learn in the coming chapters of this book. We can intervene on those thoughts. We can intervene on the cravings and then we can intervene in terms of the response as well. Because if the response is less rewarding, it starts to diminish its hold on us. And so we'll learn that as there are many components of cravings and it starts talking about how does a craving or an urge towards our addictive behavior happen? So some people it's just a thought process, like I need it or I can't handle these feelings without it. That it's important to self monitor. For other people, it's just a physical emotional feeling like a drive that comes up. But once you learn it, then you learn how to have an inner dialogue to yourself about it. So the first part is to become aware of it. Once you become aware of it, then you start to learn how to have an inner dialogue with it, which is basically talking back. But the important part is to have an awareness of it. And once you have those red flag thoughts, then you can identify those and intervene on it. So I'm gonna tell you a little bit about why it's important to have awareness of it. So we talked about this study in the past, but I'm gonna bring it up again. Dr. Childress showed that cocaine patients, and again, cocaine is just a strong reward. Anything that provides a reward can result in a habit. And if you continue to engage in that habit and reward, that habit becomes even more and more ingrained. So these researchers showed cocaine patients photos. So people who are addicted to cocaine, they showed them photos of triggers like crack pipes, chunks of cocaine. But here's the thing, they flashed these images for 33 milliseconds where so quickly that these patients couldn't be consciously aware of them. So these unseen images were still stimulating the brain in areas associated with addiction, craving, drug seeking. So despite these people not even being consciously aware of what they saw, it's still activating and triggering the addictive brain. What's interesting is they bought these people back two days later and they did a different test. This time, instead of flashing the image quickly, they allowed them to see the image and let them digest it. So they looked at the images and they found that the ones that had the strongest brain response to unseen cues and the brain imaging, so the brain lit up very strongly to the triggers. They also had the strongest association with the visible cues. So whether you see it and register it or you just briefly see it and don't register it, you're not even aware, you can still be triggered by your environment, by things you see here. So when it comes to triggers, it can be helpful to start with the craving because you might just have a craving to engage in your habit without even realizing how it was triggered. So for many people, it's helpful to start with the craving. I get cravings at 7 p.m. at night every night and then work back, what are my triggers? Maybe it's free time. Maybe it's stress from a long day of work. Maybe it's other things, you're watching television usually when you watch TV or listen to music it's paired to substance use or your addictive habit. So once you recognize the cravings and the pattern of cravings that they happen at a certain time and place, then you can start reverse engineering and start thinking, well, what are the triggers then? And maybe I can break those triggers. So if you have trouble identifying what your triggers are, start with your cravings and start looking at where you might be having conscious or subconscious cravings. So they say this is a key component of becoming a self expert in the last paragraph of page 84. A key component of becoming a self expert is becoming aware of the kinds of things your nefs, your addictive brain will tell you to get you to engage in your addictive behavior. These irrational thoughts or these feelings are like red flag thoughts that we can intervene on and talk back to. Okay, so it goes on page 85 to triggers and urges and then we'll wrap up. So there are biological and psychological explanations for why you feel a desire to engage in your behavior, habit, your addictive behavior, physically when you're addicted to something even if it's screens, your mind and body become sort of dependent or habituated to that thing. So let's say cannabis, for example, when you get a steady dose of cannabis and you take that away abruptly after your body's been dependent on it, your brain just in order to reach some sort of balance is going to send you messages in order to replenish that chemical. But as your body adjusts to being away from your behavior, as your body becomes adjusted to it, you can still have what they're calling here. It might be oversimplification, but what they're calling here is psychological urges or cravings. You can have psychological urges and cravings. So here's the point. When drinking or using drugs, and this is the last point I'll make, when drinking or using drugs becomes associated or whatever your addictive habit is, when it becomes associated or linked with a certain situation, then those situations become triggers. It's like Pavlovian conditioning. You guys remember Pavlov's dogs? Okay, so basically Pavlov had an experiment with dogs. He showed them food. Food is a stimulus that has value and the dogs would salivate when they would see the food. But then he would pair it with a bell. The bell wouldn't stimulate anything within them. It was a neutral stimulus. But then the food was presented to them and associated with a bell. So the food would cause them to salivate. Like you can't force yourself to salivate. If I wanted to move my hand up right now, I'd say move my hand up and I'd move it up. If you wanted to salivate right now, you can't do it on command. Sure, maybe you can visualize food or a lemon or something like that. And then over a period of time, you can then salivate. But it's an automatic process that you can't voluntarily control in the same way you can move your hand. So that's what's so interesting about this. The dogs would see the food and they would salivate. And then the food being presented them was associated with a bell. So every time they would get food, the bell would go off. And then pretty soon they would remove the food and they would just ring the bell and the dogs would salivate. So here was the bell, which was initially something that was totally neutral. And now it's associated with an automatic response with them that they can't even consciously control. So they took this even further in another study. This was a really interesting study by Peter Holland. They did the same thing, but they did it with rats. So they would pair food with a sound. And so when the rats would hear the sound, they would expect food. But then they took it a step further, which is super interesting. What they did was now they taught these rats to push a lever to get food. So now it's not them passively getting food, they're learning how to push a lever to get food. They had a group that learned how to push a lever to get food. And then they had a group of rats that they habituated and gave them a significant amount of learning on how to push the lever and get food. Put that aside for a moment. Once they had the sound that was paired with food, they would play the sound just like you would think, they would play the sound and the laboratory rats would wanna do what? They'd wanna push the lever to get food. So when the sound was played that was associated with food, the laboratory rats now were triggered to push the lever for food. The point being is it's no longer that with the dogs that were passively salivating, with these laboratory rats, now when they played the trigger, it prompted them to action. So now we're seeing this experiment which shows that triggers can not only change your automatic thoughts and processes, it can also propel you into action. The final part of the study was interesting. They injected the rats with lithium chloride, which basically reduces their appetite. So now they killed the appetite of these laboratory rats. So you would think they would play the sound and trigger them and the laboratory rats would say, well, I'm not hungry, so why would I go push the lever to get food? What they found was this was true for the laboratory rats that were not trained significantly on pushing the lever. So in other words, when they killed the appetite for the laboratory rats, the ones that didn't have a habit of pushing the lever, didn't push the lever to get food because they didn't have an appetite. But the ones that developed a complex habit around pushing the lever, every time they heard the sound, these laboratory rats, despite not even wanting food, would push the lever. So in other words, we get to this point with our addictive behavior where sometimes we don't even wanna do it anymore, but we just do it anyway. And it's almost like, why are we even doing it? I'm not even getting the pleasure out of it or I don't wanna do it anymore. And this is where it's important to recognize what are our triggers that are leading up to that? And that's why when we talk about the process of disrupting complex habits and behaviors, it's important to recognize triggers, avoid them, limit our interaction with them and recognize that they're operating within us almost like an allergy. Like if I'm allergic to cats, if I went to a house with cats and I said, I really, really don't wanna get allergic to cats, it doesn't matter. It's gonna cause an allergic reaction within me without me even wanting it to happen. Same thing with the addicted brain. If we become habituated to a certain substance, if I go and do certain things, despite me really, really wanting it to not affect me, I have to recognize I now have created an allergy within myself that I have to account for, which means that there are certain people I might have to avoid, there are certain places that I have to avoid and there's certain things that I have to avoid. So, and then the most important thing is a lot of times people will say, well, I didn't go to a person, wasn't in a risky situation, but I still had a trigger. So how can you account for that? What's interesting is that, and this is really important and they talk about it on page 85 at the bottom, that there are many different triggers. So sure, there's people, places and things, but there's also emotional states that are triggers. So if we constantly pair our drug use or addictive habit, this holds true for pornography, this holds true for gambling and other behavioral habits, if we constantly pair our habit with a negative feeling, a negative emotional state, guess what? Now that when we have that negative emotional state, it's like a bell that triggers us to use drugs and alcohol or to engage in our addictive habit. So that's why it's important, not only to avoid our triggers, but also learn how to manage boredom, how to manage stress, how to manage negative habits and negative emotions so that we can start to disrupt the connection between those and our addictive behavior and start to strengthen the connection between those negative habits, I'm sorry, those negative emotions and other coping skills. That's why the name of the game in recovery is like working on your mind, your emotions, your feelings, your thoughts, your triggers, because this is how the addictive brain works. So once you understand the addictive brain, then there's sort of no circumventing how to fix it because nobody wants to go to groups, people don't wanna go to therapy, people don't wanna do like workbooks, look inwards, talk, like chart their cravings. Many people don't wanna do that naturally, but once they recognize how habits work, that it's not just me being a bad person that there's this rewiring that occurs in my brain because laboratory rats, nobody's gonna say this laboratory rat is morally reprehensible. They're not gonna say these laboratory rats are wrong or there's something wrong with their psychology. Rather what we'll say is that there's a process of learning that occurred that now we have to undo. So in the same way with the brain and addiction and the process of rewiring or undoing this requires these things like therapy groups, exercises, so on and so forth. So with that I'm just gonna pause and show we'll go into check-ins.