 Bismillah alhamdulillah wa salatu wa salam ala Rasulillah. So today we go into the second to last chapter where we talk about learning to master our internal states and essentially what we're trying to do is change our behavior and to change our behavior we recognize that how we feel and what's going on within us is important to master in order to change our behavior. So for example the spiritual master ibn al-ta'idlah said تنوأت أجناس الأعمال تتنوء ورية الأحوال. So the difference in the types of actions that we do, the difference in his Kitab al-Hikm, his aphorisms, the differences in the actions that we do are due to the differences in our internal states. So even our scholars really understood that in order to change our behaviors and our actions because against what we're judged by our actions and if we're judged by our actions then we need to really invest in how do we make those actions right and what are the things around our actions that control our actions and one of those is our internal states. So they were very much concerned with our internal states. They wrote books about them outlining different internal states, good ones, bad ones. So the the point I want to get across is they didn't run away from this stuff or pretended like emotions or internal states didn't exist and bury them or shove them down and ignore them and say look we just need to buckle up and push forward with our actions and not think about them. They recognized that there was a connection between the two and that manipulating one ended up in a manipulation of the other. So then what did they do? They went into a deep study of outlining them and outlining different internal states and outlining what they were. There was a rich vocabulary around different types and names of different emotions and different internal states. So for example they had many labels for different internal states. So for example they'd have different words for let's say arrogance or pride or self-conceit. Takabur, kebur, ojub, different words for gratitude and acceptance, shukr, qana'a, kufranu n'am, different concepts or ways of describing them and the list goes on. So there was a lot of thought because of course when you have a lot of names for something in our tradition it really points to the importance of that thing. If you have a lot of commentaries on a specific book or a specific science it denotes that our scholars and our tradition and our people, our thinkers really were concerned about this and this is one of those things and it's important because although we may have come up like in a way where looking inwards was not something that we did like maybe we came from a family we're talking about emotions we it wasn't a thing or talking about what was going on inside you wasn't a thing or maybe you just had a concept of being a man or concept of being a strong person where this just we don't do emotions it's not something that we think about we talk about we acknowledge it's not something that is is important but when you're talking about just being real with a particular habit that you have or a particular behavior that you have that isn't going away when you start wanting to just get rid of that thing it's important to recognize that emotions are an important part of that you can think about every emotion having a tipping point think of a cup okay you fill that cup up with water fill it up overwhelm it eventually it has a tipping point where it overflows or it tips over and it affects the people around you in the same way when we look at our emotions in our internal states if we don't manage them regulate them restrict them acknowledge them then what tends to happen is they overwhelm us to a tipping point and that tipping point then leads to a behavior like acting out on a compulsive habit or maybe getting angry at other people whatever behavior and have what we're trying to change and this goes for addictive compulsive habits as well there was a really interesting study it came out of a lab in UCLA where they look at emotions what they found out bottom line is labeling your emotions can help reduce their effect on you just labeling them just being aware that they exist so the first step is to acknowledge them and not be in denial that they're operating within us and then once you label it then you can do something about it so they took a a group of people and expose them to spiders not just any spider they used a tarantula like a six inch tarantula that made sure to like document that part in the study it wasn't any spider it was a big spider and then they didn't take any people they took people that were were scared of spiders so they took these people who had a specific fear an overwhelming emotion and they looked at well how do they do when they're in a situation where their overwhelming emotion is going to be triggered all right so what do they do to these poor people they put the spider a certain distance away from them and they had them take 10 steps towards the spider so each step they had them wait there for about 30 seconds as if it wasn't scary enough they had to build up to it so each step was 30 seconds next step was 30 seconds and then they saw well what did they do what happened to these people so they looked at what was their subjective report of their fear what was their how to how sweaty were their hands so they looked at skin conductance to look at skin conductance is basically looking at physiologically your hand sweating so something outside of your control an objective response to fear and then they looked at just how close could they get to the spider so what they found was that certain things helped people overcome their fears so they took these people they split them up into four groups and they gave each group they gave each group a tool to use to try to overcome this overwhelming emotion the first group all they told this first group to do was label your negative emotion just label it you know describe it in in the negative terms that you would describe it in the second group they told them not to describe it in negative terms but to to reappraise the situation to say something about the spider to say something about the situation and their emotion to make that situation feel less threatening so the first group is labeling it calling it what it is the second group is saying let me rethink how i should think about this in a less threatening way the third group is now told to distract themselves from everything that's going on and the fourth group is just nothing don't say anything this is see as a control what what would happen now out of those four groups you would think okay if i told myself that this isn't so threatening that would be the group that would do better or you might say that the third group the one that says okay let me just distract myself from the situation and pretend i'm not here or focus on other things the furniture in the room maybe that that group would have done better but what they found is that the first group the first group that labeled their emotions did better they got closer to the spider and their hands were less sweaty so they had less physiological signs of fear and so it really talks about it's really here what what we're seeing is the importance of just starting with being aware labeling your emotion what you're going throughout that moment can have an incredible effect on reducing their effect on you because if you think about it our emotions overwhelm us they they occur and when they occur in real time they sort of drag us along with them once we label them and recognize okay right now i'm mad or i'm angry or i'm afraid or whatever it is now you put some distance between it and once you diagnose it now you have a plan that you can enact in order to start resolving that emotion so the first step is to define what's going on inside of you and be aware of it and then the second step talks about different ways of now regulating and challenging that emotion so the last thing i want to say is our scholars again they were so our tradition is so focused on this this internal states and trying to figure out how they influence us and they didn't consider them good or bad in and of themselves because that's the issue we think that if we label a negative emotion somehow it's going to make that emotion more negative right if you if we if we label a negative emotion if i acknowledge it as as what it is now i'm going to make that negative emotion worse so if i if i'm afraid now if i acknowledge that as i'm afraid it's going to make the situation worse i'm going to become more afraid it's going to lead to more fear but that's not what happens and also our scholars didn't consider emotions good or bad in and of themselves an emotion was good or bad based on the actions that they led to so anger if anger leads you to stand up for justice to stand up for the oppressed to stand up for your neighbor it's good if it leads you to be the one that's oppressing harming your neighbor then it's not good similarly shame and modesty which is important if it if it leads you away from harmful things because of the sense of shame and modesty it's a good thing however if it leads you away from doing the right thing from standing up from taking care of your responsibilities then it's it's not a good thing similarly fear and hope the right dose of fear and hope is important so if you fear Allah and it gives you the energy to do the right thing great however if you have a fear of something and it cripples you if you have fear of something and it cripples you and you freeze up and it makes you useless and you can't achieve your goals you can't live an Islamic lifestyle not good if hope gives you energy to run to Allah to your goals to do the right thing great if hope makes you lazy because everything's going to be okay anyway not good so the importance is to define the objective and then cultivate your internal states accordingly define your objective and then cultivate your internal states accordingly the Prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam taught us to master ourselves he taught us to that true strength is not in our physical strength only he was reported to have said the strong man is not the wrestler the good wrestler the one that can put you down but the strong man is he who controls himself when he's angry who can control his emotions so we're on chapter nine and the title of the chapter is conquer challenging emotions so this is the second to last chapter conquer challenging emotions so it starts in the first paragraph now that we've learned or we've reviewed coping with cravings and strategies to cope with cravings to for a compulsive habit you need the skills now to deal with some of the other unpleasant feelings when recovering from that compulsive habit like anxiety sadness and in anger most of the techniques that we went over like CBT mindfulness motivational techniques talking about exercise talking about different medications and therapy most most of these are have been geared towards cravings and triggers but many of them are important for managing our emotions as well many of them are important in managing our emotions as well so the idea is to mobilize these go-to skills and repurpose them for treating our negative emotions the way you want to think about it is look there's your compulsive addictive habit in the middle the first thing you're going to deal with on day one two three four when you stop is going to be think of a circle around that the dots in the middle that's what you're trying to stay away from is that compulsive addictive habit then a boundary around that is triggers cravings all of these things are pushing you back towards that addictive habit so the first thing you need to do in order to get away from it you want to cross that line of dealing with triggers cravings that's the pressing authentic concern to get to the next day but as you develop some success in a period of abstinence triggers and cravings may become less and less important they don't follow a linear line of reduction they'll go up and down up and down up and down and slowly become suppressed they'll like go into remission and then with some triggers they might come back but they they follow a pattern oftentimes with emotions so they're certainly related to our emotions like stress anger and other emotions now you have the dot in the middle the circle around it once you get to the that border of that circle once you get to the the edge of that circle you've had some success with dealing with your trigger triggers and cravings now what you want to do is get to the next border so you can draw another larger circle around that smaller circle and that's emotional balance now what you want to do is learn how to manage your emotions because it's going to be your emotions that are going to pull you back towards the center which is your compulsive addictive habit so the first thing you want to manage is triggers and cravings great you have tools for that now you use those similar tools to manage those emotions anger resentment anxiety so and so forth fear you manage those emotions because those are going to be the pressing concern authentic daily concern the authentic concern on a daily basis it's going to pull you back to your addictive habit you don't say i don't have triggers and cravings anymore i'm good let's just move on let me start doing something else now because three months into it life might happen the relationship stuff might happen the financial stuff might happen you know many people will have incredible motivation to stop doing their addictive habit in the beginning because they broke some relationship issue some health issue some money issue somebody found out is embarrassing so on and so forth that motivation will get you to a point but if you don't develop the skills to manage your trigger cravings triggers and cravings you don't develop the skills to manage your emotional emotions then that's problematic so you get to a point where your day to day issues are not triggers and cravings anymore and what the threat is and what the important challenges is to conquer your emotions because that's what's going to lead you back to your addictive habit all right then what i would propose is there's another circle in addition to that which is lifestyle and spiritual balance lifestyle and spiritual balance which then creates a purpose within you which then creates an even stronger grounding force within you which creates a bigger picture within you which creates a stronger a strength within you that allows you to then be even more successful and get farther away from your addictive habit and so the battle lines then are not in managing trigger triggers and cravings are not necessarily emotions but more so developing this lifestyle and spiritual balance then you start looking at what are my internal states and perhaps there's a different vocabulary perhaps there's a different set of books that you use perhaps you're looking at more like you have a different set of goals and that's a good thing to do you want to keep moving forward now of course it's not that once you're done with triggers and cravings and you move to emotional balance you never have to worry about triggers and cravings anymore or when you're doing with triggers and cravings spirituality and life living in your values is not important they're all important they just tend to have different times and places where they're more of a concern so so in chapter nine the next section talks about managing your mood one of the things that brings up right away and this is important the one of the first sections is managing your mood and it says although the addictive habit it says in the long run you've probably learned your addictive habit is not the most effective anti-depressant or not the most effective thing to manage your mood and the most important thing to recognize is especially for drugs and alcohol drugs and alcohol release neurotransmitters in the brain in in super physiological amounts in supernormal amounts in unnatural amounts drugs and alcohol can induce depression anxiety and psychosis it can induce a whole health a whole range of mental health issues okay so much so that when you look in the dsm5 there's a distinction between substance induced mental health conditions and mental health conditions like anxiety so substance induced anxiety and anxiety well why is there a difference because there's a different treatment approach there's a different treatment approach so if you're managing substance induced anxiety with just normal anxiety interventions that's not going to be as effective it's not going to be as effective because those substances in essence the drugs the alcohol even cannabis even alcohol even cannabis they lead to a imbalance neurochemically that your traditional or typical mental health treatment plans are not going to be able to adequately treat so much so that we see people in the clinic all the time that don't have an addiction they come and see us and they have a cannabis addiction and an alcohol addiction let's just use cannabis addiction as an example because a lot of people they're using like a hard drug like meth or heroin on a daily basis there it's less of a revelation to them that that might be affecting their mental health but a lot of times with cannabis because of the excellent marketing cannabis is seen as a more benign thing but it certainly is associated with anxiety depression psychosis more and more now that the strength of cannabis is increasing and will continue to increase a lot of times people will come to our clinic without an addiction they're just sort of experimenting with drugs or they it's a regular pattern of use but it's not affecting their life it's not out of control they can stop it for periods of periods of time without any difficulty they'll come to our clinic using let's say cannabis on a daily basis and they say i'm depressed or i'm anxious and we we say well you're using an amount of cannabis on a regular on a daily basis which can certainly cause an imbalance in your brain so let's let's run an experiment of two to four weeks of of abstaining from that substance and let's let's talk about it and it's a very common occurrence where after a four week four week period of abstinence allowing their brain to replenish its own feel good chemicals allowing their reward pathway and their other parts of their brain to reset that people will come back and their depression and anxiety will have resolved completely they don't have any more depression and anxiety now of course we also see people with baseline depression and anxiety and substance use overwhelmingly just makes that worse so they come back and they have improvements but sure then we have to treat them with the traditional methods of treating that depression anxiety or any of those other mental health conditions so keep that in mind the point i want to make is the strength like how strong how strong these substances are and being able to induce and disrupt emotions so part of managing emotions in emotional states is part of that is just abstinence or reducing the substance okay so then we talk about on the next page 174 to avoid falling back into the trap of your addictive behavior as a band-aid for negative emotions you can use the following techniques which you've already practiced for coping with cravings number one monitoring and challenging negative thoughts that lead to triggering emotions so number one is labeling the emotion being aware of it and monitoring it then number two challenging it the next the next point is revisiting your your motivation to remain abstinent because abstinence is going to be an important part of your of managing your mental health the third one is engaging in pleasant activities and other behavioral coping strategies and the fourth is using mindfulness-based coping strategies and then they go into reviewing how each of these apply to coping with negative moods as opposed to triggers and cravings so basically the chapter in a nutshell goes into all of the skills and tools we've been using and repurposing that for different negative emotions so it goes over anxiety and its own subsection it goes over anger in its own subsection and the idea would be to identify which one is your overwhelming issue and start with that and then continue to once you taste the improvements and the benefits of it then try another and try another and I don't mean to say that drugs and alcohol as addictive habits is the only thing that's going to cause distress or influence people's negative moods certainly pornography gambling other behavioral addictions are going to cause especially in somebody where it conflicts heavily with their values and who they are as a person there's like a split between who they want to be and who they are and it's going to cause an incredible amount of distress and so you know keep that in mind as well that abstinence from our behavioral addictions are going to be important in order to be able to start the process of healing emotionally as well or that's something to be kept in mind as a component to this so it's not just about chemicals reducing causing chemical imbalances external chemicals causing internal chemical imbalances there's also another layer there and of course you know behavioral addictions they consume a lot of time and they take us away from other things that we value and that in itself can cause problems in our mood and then of course behavioral addictions they cause a persistent stimulation in our brains and release those feel-good chemicals and amounts that are that natural rewards can't so then of course that's also going to have an effect neurochemically in our brain as well so then it goes the the rest of the chapter goes into talking about how to manage your mood so i'm going to discuss an outline of the chapter so we can get an understanding so we got a high level of view of the importance of it and the components of it now i'm going to talk a little bit more about the outline of the chapter so you get an idea of if you haven't read it already you get an idea of how to attack and approach this chapter so page 174 then starts talking about a section on mood monitoring so being the first up again is labeling and monitoring your mood and being aware of it then it talks about cognitive distortions or thinking patterns that lead to depression and anxiety so what kind of thoughts how does my thinking lead to depression and anxiety so managing addiction is managing our minds it's not just staying away from drugs and alcohol it's staying away staying away from negative thoughts and it goes over the the same sort of cognitive distortions that we talked about before but in a different way so black or white thinking how that leads to depression and anxiety or changes in mood discounting the positive jumping to conclusions exercise 9.1 has a mood and craving log so before we went over the craving log now it has a mood and craving log so you start to get an idea and this is really important for a long term success with addiction you start to recognize the nuances here of how our mood how characteristic moods in each individual leads to cravings so this is where it starts to come into mastering your own addiction because everybody's going to have a different signature of their addiction everybody has their own fingerprint when it comes to addiction and then the then they start talking about specific tips for specific emotion so page 178 talks about anxiety monitoring look if you don't have anxiety before you come into a compulsive habit many people will develop anxiety due to their compulsive habit just due to that addictive habit wreaking havoc on them neurobiologically like in their brain just messing with the chemicals in the brain inducing anxiety so anxiety monitoring and for many of us it's like we don't even know we started using engaging in our addictive habits so young we don't know which one of that is us which one of that is the addictive habit you know it's it's like who is who and it really doesn't matter because when you have a fire in the house it doesn't matter you just put to get the water put it out and then figure out is it coming from this person that person so it's really organizing how we approach this so the first thing is you have anxiety great let's manage that let's regulate that let's keep it below the tipping point and then let's discuss on a deeper level where did it come from all right so then it talks about anxiety and craving log so before it was like mood and craving log now it's anxiety and craving log so this really allowed a hat it really gives the ammunition for anybody that seriously wants to you know for for each person where they're at so somebody who feels like a this is a good introduction to them with addictive habits great somebody who's at a different stage and and they say well i need to read this and really get this down and let's say they have just by reading it and doing 50% of the exercises they're able to manage their addictive habit let's say somebody else needs to do a thesis on this like really read it run the exercises again and again and every time they do it they see some improvements then great that this book has the bandwidth to take you on because it has cravings for the mood cravings for anxiety i'm sorry a log sheet for mood a log sheet for anxiety and then it talks about different challenges to different negative thoughts so negative thoughts that lead to anxiety negative thoughts that lead to different emotions and it gives you some ammunition on how to challenge those negative thoughts and gives you exercises on how to challenge those negative thoughts all right now comes anger page 185 you know i debated just talking about anger you know because it's like anger is a really good secondary emotion like some of us all we know is anger because that's all we're allowed to know or allowed to feel or we're allowed to feel so in a lot of ways anger can be a secondary emotion of something that is deeper like i'm lonely or i'm afraid and i can't acknowledge that but i can't express anger so anger's a anger's a good one it's a good archetype of an emotion that overwhelms people and everybody can relate to to some degree if like fear or some other emotion is seems strange or hard to relate with anger is a good one to start with so bullet point one when you what are some signs of anger and what are some of the disadvantages of anger losing control so somebody who has a goal and then the heat of anger they say screw it i'm just going to go have a drink or i'll show this person they want to be they want to treat me like this i'll show this person i'm going to go relapse or i'm going to go engage my addictive habit and that's how i'm going to get back with that back at them but of course they don't find out and it just destroys us third bullet point you don't get your needs met when you're when you're angry fourth is you lose self-respect and then it goes into an exercise of how to master your anger and that's page 186 and it gives examples and then it goes into exercise 9.4 identifying your anger triggers identify what triggers your anger so just like those people who are walking towards the spider every step towards that spider is an increase in triggering that emotion anger has the same things like sometimes we just go closer every step we take to a certain person causes anger or every step step we we take towards a certain conversation finances or some history issue causes anger so understanding our triggers and then also like the places the feelings the thoughts the physical sensations it sounds familiar like people places and things which are triggers for the addictive habit people places and things are also triggers for the emotions okay and then it talks about having an internal dialogue and how to manage anger exercise 9.5 talks about changing angry behavior so this is really in a lot of ways you know we could go over it in detail in the same way that we've done with other things but I'm worried it's going to be too monotonous in the sense that everybody has a different emotion that they deal with or they struggle with and it's all tools that we've heard before it's more so just about reading them and learning how to apply them for your to your emotions so I would strongly encourage you to just start with the emotion that is most challenging to you and just read that section and then start to master your master yourself through that and then finally it ends on revisiting your motivation so no matter what your emotion is no matter what triggers it no matter what triggers your cravings you always need to keep a pulse on your emotions I'm sorry your motivation so reminding yourself of the reasons of why you're trying to stay free from your addictive habit because motivation will increase and decrease and that's normal it's it's it's normal for motivation to increase and decrease just like emotions increase and decrease so they say go back to exercise 3.2 in chapter 3 on resolving your ambivalence in which you explore the benefits and drawbacks of quitting your addictive behavior versus continuing it and it goes through a zero to ten scale of how motivated you are and keep it keeping an eye on how motivated you are through the whole process of recovery and then the wrap up so we're on page 196 so we finished the whole chapter and then we're going to go into chapter 10 which is your personalized recovery plan so now it's figuring out we've gone through the menu of options we've talked about everything 12 step programs treatment programs residential intensive outpatient outpatient therapy different levels of care we talked about medications early on in this these series we talked about then if those those are things that we're not ready for yet or those are things that we're doing then there's a whole host of other things that we we talked about to add in conjunction with that and then we talked about different therapy techniques and motivational techniques and mindfulness techniques and now we're sort of at a place where it's it's talking about your personalized recovery plan so adding tools so sure maybe there's a tool that you feel like that's what I need to do but I'm just not there yet that doesn't mean you you can't do anything at this point find what you can do and just move forward so create your recovery your personalized recovery plan do something this is like a fight I say this all the time but do something do something and what's interesting I was reading about a lot these fighters and you know of course we always see them doing these these drills like physically boxing and kicking but then there's a lot of the great fighters will use tools to really manage themselves internally through different techniques and I thought that was really interesting and how they manage their anxiety when they go into the ring of how they try to manifest success and how to how they not only manage their external training but also manage their internal challenges as well in order to be really successful at fighting so yeah so we'll go over your recovery your personalized recovery plan and shall we'll wrap up after that