But again, I'm coming back to this, how do you stop and never continue that for the day? I know that I'm having a very hard time to stay away from continuing later.
The urges, how we responded (when non-response is what we want), and the chaser effects are all signals from the lower brain, chemicals released, and the power of habit. Boiling all these down further, all these things are just
thought.
Understanding this makes this thing very simple really quick. Note: I said 'simple' but not always easy. Why? Because thoughts can be dismissed. They are not 'your' thoughts anyway. They are the motivations of the animal-brain using your own thought processes to justify and encourage using. But you sit in the executive seat of the cerebral cortex, and can dismiss and veto all these things.
What does this look like practically?
Say I was struggling earlier. I had browsed images on IG, and maybe realized that a good 15 minutes was spent doing this. Maybe I started feeling obsessive about it... I will (without judgement) find a way to disrupt this behavior. Maybe I'll look up a self-help video, or go to RN, and try and help someone.
That may help me in the moment to stop, but I know that the urges will return because of the earlier activity. Being aware of this, when the urges do come, I can breathe through them, dismiss them. Above all, don't react to them (it's all lower brain junk anyway). The urges invariably pass, eventually. If they return, rinse-and-repeat.
A major key to this, Escape, is not being too hard on yourself. When I say, 'without judgment', I mean that you have to see yourself as kind of 'outside of yourself', like seeing yourself on T.V. Whatever you did earlier will just be seen as the habit trying to express itself, and you can step outside of that mindfully, and dismiss the urges. Think about something else, do something else, not in a white-knuckled way, but because you're choosing what to dwell on, lower or higher brain activity.
