Abstinence for Emotional Maturity
Article by Stefan Burns - Updated November 2021. Join the Wild Free Organic email newsletter!
Existence has a dual nature. Happiness and pleasure can quickly turn into suffering and pain, and vice versa. Yin and Yang. Like a pendulum, the further it swings into either side, the further it will swing to the other side. Many people live for the happy and pleasing moments, and do their best to ignore the hard times, but these volatile swings in existence can be greatly subdued by practicing abstinence.
Abstinence is the practice of restraining yourself from indulging in wanted or enjoyable bodily pleasures. Most commonly this refers to abstinence from alcohol, sex, masturbation, drugs, food, technology…any activity that can release neurotransmitters like dopamine and naturally produced opioids. Abstinence is self enforced and requires discipline, and that’s the reason it is so difficult for so many people to practice abstinence.
Find balance within the duality of Yin and Yang in order to transcend beyond it to the next stage of consciousness
Practicing abstinence to the extreme can also be unhealthy, but in our current consumer driven society focused on pleasure, money, and fame, abstinence is a powerful tool that can be used to build emotional stability while freeing oneself from the volatile swings of pleasure and suffering that define many peoples lives.
Abstinence Requires Discipline
The first thought many people have when abstinence is mentioned is that it is a lifetime decision. There is this all or nothing mindset which is common, rock-stars and celebrities often taking the all and everything approach (often to fatal consequences) and many religious groups and organizations preach complete abstinence from sex or alcohol, you name it.
Discipline is not an everlasting resource, and for the regular individual who doesn’t suffer from mental illness or have addictive tendencies, then taking a lifetime vow of abstinence for most things is not needed and can be counter productive. Certain drugs like cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamines are poison no matter the dose, and should be avoided completely. Other recreational drugs like caffeine, alcohol, and cannabis have reported health benefits with limited use, and with moderation can integrate with a healthy lifestyle. Moderation is a ambiguous term though, and often this is abused.
“Many activities done in excess are often rationalized under the umbrella of moderation”
Abstinence for different periods of time is the best way to truly discover your definition of moderation for a pleasurable substance or activity. Using cannabis as an example, for some individuals, cannabis usage every weekend might be totally fine and not impact their life in any negative way. For others, they might find that if they use cannabis more than once in a blue moon the psychoactive effects of THC negatively affects their mood and increases their anxiety. The same can be said for alcohol, masturbation, and even caffeine.
Self diagnosis of how a chemical, food, or activity makes you feel and how it affects your health is impossible to achieve when it is currently being used in excess of moderation. Only with a period of complete abstinence where the pleasurable variable is removed does it become clear the impact that variable had, and what might be a better moderation limit to follow.
How to Practice Abstinence
For an emotionally unstable individual, a lifetime vow of abstinence from what is afflicting them might temporarily see positive results, but if that vow is broken, then a binge session is likely to ensue. The psychology of this is very important. No one knows the future, and for the best chance of lasting success, it is better to be fully educated on the subject and understand all the consequences while still living in the moment, being fully aware. Come to acceptance with the pleasure seeker inside of you, and learn how to coexist with both aspects of your personality in a way that is optimally healthy. The pleasure seeker that craves alcohol, sex, nicotine, or unhealthy foods can be appeased in other ways. Time spent in nature, exercise, meditation, and other wellness activities produce dopamine as well and will nourish your soul in a healthy way.
Practicing abstinence goes hand in hand with practicing mindfulness. Abstinence requires discipline, and it also improves discipline and strengthens your willpower. If your maturity is low, a very long period of abstinence might be out of the books just yet, but this can be trained and improved just like anything in life.
A Day of Abstinence
24 hours is a short amount of time, but depending on what you’re newly abstaining from, it can seem like forever. A good example of 24 hour abstinence would be a 24 hour fast. Fasting is a state of not eating food where you only drink water, and if you’ve never skipped a day of eating, you might be surprised at the initial difficulty of it. Without a period of abstinence from food, it can be difficult to learn to control food cravings. A food craving is when you’re starving for one type of food, lets say Italian, but you’re not really hungry for something else, such as Mexican. Normal hunger alerts you to eat what you need, calorie, macronutrient, or micronutrient wise.
After a 24 hour fast, usually from dinner to dinner, you’ll be amazed by how you feel, how fasting improved your digestion, and how the absence of food caused many swings in energy and emotion. The energy swings which might or might not occur depend on your individual metabolism and how efficiently you can burn fat. With practice these dampen and disappear. The emotional swings have a connection to your microbiome, which in the absence of food might have released neurotransmitters causing cravings. The microbiome is a collection of 100 trillion microorganisms which live outside your body in the digestive system, outnumbering your cells 10 to 1. Gaining control over the microbiome is one of the fundamental steps needed towards gaining control over your health and wellness, and a period of food abstinence for 24 hours can help tremendously with this.
A Week of Abstinence
Many organizations recommend not drinking more than 14 alcoholic drinks per week, as amounts greater than that begin to tip over into the definition of alcoholism. 14 drinks over a week is two per day, and this is already a state of excess alcoholic drinking. Over time, having 1-2 alcoholic drinks everyday will change your brain structure and have lasting effects. The depressing effects of alcohol are from ethanol, and ethanol once consumed requires immediate processing and filtration by the body. The many enzymes required to metabolize ethanol into energy, water, and carbon dioxide are primarily stored in the liver, and because of this alcohol usage stresses the liver.
Drugs are used to achieve unique states of consciousness. Meditation is a better method of achieving this.
Many prescription drugs and common over the counter drugs like NSAIDS are hard on the liver, and daily alcohol usage paired with daily pill usage can stress the liver into a state of disease. 14 alcoholic drinks a week might be considered moderation by some groups, but depending on your health circumstances, it can be in gross excess.
A week of abstaining from alcohol is easy to achieve even with limited discipline and willpower and over the course of seven days a lot of physical, mental, and emotional observations can be made as to the positive and negative effects of regular alcohol consumption. You might find that an alcoholic beverage now and then helps you to relax and enter into a “rest and digest” parasympathetic state easier, but frequent alcohol usage impairs your digestion, sours your daily mood, and lets emotions of frustration and anger surface.
A Month of Abstinence
Porn addiction is a serious problem affecting millions of people worldwide, and it goes hand in hand with excessive masturbation. Viewing porn and the bodily pleasures of sex and masturbation release large amounts of dopamine and endogenous (naturally produced) opioids in the brain. When done infrequently, the effects of this chemical cascade on the brain is transient, and lasting changes to the structure of the brain are unlikely. When porn, sex, and masturbation are done frequently, brain structure can change through neuroplasticity, neurotransmitter receptors can become desensitized, and lasting behavioral changes can occur.
Abstaining from porn, sex, and masturbation for a month can reset these systems to a large degree, and thirty days of careful mental, physical, and emotional observations can dramatically increase your understanding of yourself and how the hedonistic pleasures impact all aspects of your life.
A Year of Abstinence
365 days is a very long period of time, but in the context of average lifespan, it is still a small percentage. What you eat is fundamental to who you are, as Socrates said “You are what you eat”, and a year of abstinence from certain foods can transform the rest of your life.
Common foods which can be abstained from for a year to gain deeper understanding on how they affect all aspects of your life include meat, sugar, heavily processed foods, desserts, soda and sugary drinks, bread, and more. Abstaining from meat reduces your impact on the planet and reduces your death toll. You might discover how by replacing meat with fruits and vegetables improves your digestion, stabilizes your energy levels, and increases your inner happiness. Cutting out all processed foods and added sugars for a year could transform your physique through fat loss, improve your cardiovascular health, stabilize your emotions, and so much more.
While food isn’t as acutely strong as drugs or sex, food is something needed to survive, and because it is consumed everyday multiple times, it’s effects positive or negative, can manifest very strongly over time. Choosing the foods you eat consciously and carefully is very important as it relates to your overall health and wellness.
A Lifetime of Abstinence
A lifetime of abstinence might seem like a tall order, but with certain things it is a must. Dangerous drugs like heroin, cocaine, and meth should never be consumed. These drugs are very powerful in their effect, and if you haven’t used them before, then there is no draw to use them again. Usage opens Pandora’s Box. The more addictive the chemical, the greatly the lifetime risk of using it once again once used before. Nicotine from cigarettes is also highly addictive, providing a very fast head rush, and as a one-off isn’t likely to be addictive, but after just a few regular uses the reward seeking part of the brain grows addicted to nicotine. The long term mental and physical health effects from these drugs and more are well documented and have ruined the lives of millions of users and have greatly affected their friends and family.
Building Emotional Maturity
Periods of abstinence, whether short or long, can teach valuable lessons that can impact all areas of life. Emotional maturity is another way to phrase self-realization, and when all aspects and dimensions of the mind, body, and soul are in alignment, an incredible level of emotional strength and resiliency is created.
Having the emotional maturity to stay in the present moment and live with your current situation, and not seek to escape it, is the true path towards achieving lasting and effortless happiness. Happiness comes from within. Discipline, willpower, and abstinence might require a lot of mental effort when first being practiced, but like any skill, it becomes second nature with consistency and time. Once human experience is no longer distracted by pleasure seeking, your true life purpose can begin to be fulfilled.
