Society today is riddled with destructive compulsions. There are just so many ways in which people feel helpless to stop doing something they do not want to do. Whether it’s overeating, yelling at your kids, mercilessly driving for success, or caving in to anyone with a loud voice, or even those darn Sudoku you don’t really enjoy but can’t seem to stop buying and doing, billions of people in the world today are living with the inanity of feeling compelled to do something they do not really want to do.

I would go as far as saying that through the lives of everyone reading these words runs at least one compulsive behaviour that they would love to do without. And so often, we are left asking ourselves “Why do I keep DOING that?”

In this article, I will tell you why. But first, we need to set the stage with some facts.

First amongst these facts is the fact that human beings, like all other animals, need pleasure. They need reward. This is far from being a weakness. It is, in fact, the engine that fuels all behaviours. Nature equips us with this drive for pleasure and reward because that is what drives any animal to follow their other drives. Mating feels good. Eating feels good. Defecation and urination feel good. It is this desire for pleasure that makes us go seek all the pleasurable sensations we know of, and to seek ones we do not.

But what happens when a complex animal like our complicated selves doesn’t get enough pleasure? The answer should come as no surprise to anyone but bears underlining : our biological urges override our conscious mind and drive us to seek enough pleasure to restore balance by the most efficient means available regardless of any long-term considerations.

That is why you feel helpless against these compulsions. In a very real sense, you are. The conscious you, the sentient you, is having its control usurped by a more ancient animal part of the mind, and seeing as as modern thinking humans we invariably identify with our full robust conscious selves, it feels like we are enslaved to an alien force against which we are helpless.

But we are not helpless. Once we realize that this short-sighted animal force can override our conscious will only when we let it get hungry enough, we know that is truly we who are in control, and it is up to us to make sure that beast never gets hungry enough to rebel.

Whatever your compulsion is, it is serving a purpose in this emotional ecology. Maybe it’s a simple, reliable pleasure that is easy to get whenever you are feeling low ^[1] and so it is what your starving beast goes for when it is in charge. Maybe it is how you release emotional pressures that you otherwise, for whatever reason, are unable to release. Maybe it is the way you avoid facing something it feels like you would die if you faced it.

Whatever role it plays, you will not succeed in ceasing the behaviour unless you learn what need the behaviour fills and find another, less destructive way to fill that need. Merely stopping the behaviour is worse than useless. You are just setting yourself up for the beast to get hungry enough to take over. Unless you replace the now missing pleasure, the compulsion will continue and will in fact grow stronger each time you try to fight it by sheer force of will and lose.

Why? Because force of will is always in very short supply in any human’s mind. It is a very limited resource meant only to be used in dire emergencies when it is vitally important that the conscious mind be able to override the beast for short periods of time, in matters of life or death or similar importance.

It is not, I repeat, not a long term solution for anything. If someone is able to rid themselves of a destructive compulsion, it is not because they have more “willpower” than those who do not.

It simply means that they had enough other sources of pleasure in their lives that it was not that big a deal to shift the pleasure burden on to other things for long enough for the compulsion to essentially starve. Your beast mind eventually gives up on the compulsion as a way to solve the pleasure equation, and moves on to something else.

That is the only way to kill your compulsion : starve it to death. That is why it tries to convince you that if you do not satiate it soon you will die. That’s not true, of course, but the compulsion will use any and all tricks to stay alive and in control, and that includes lying to manipulate your emotions.

I think this principle of replacement is what is missing from most of the approaches people take to all the various compulsions. It is the easiest thing in the world to tell someone who keeps doing something to just stop doing it. And it is good for the ego to imagine that people with compulsions are just weaklings lacking willpower, unlike you. And that is where a lot of approaches stop as well, no matter how sophisticated they seem on the surface.

But, depending how you look at it, willpower either does not exist or does exist but does not come out of nowhere as some permanent aspect of character, but is a fluctuating and transient thing that depends on many factors to feed it and the people who have it are simply the people who happen to have a healthy emotional ecology right now.

I am not saying replacement is easy. If your compulsion is advanced, it will be very tricky to convince your beast that anything else can every replace the compulsion it serves like an acolyte of a dark religion.

But given this new approach, you are better armed to go find new, wonderful pleasures, and let the old compulsion(s) rot on the vine and die.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.