thought-feeling-loops

When I was held in a state of elevated tonic dopamine by aripiprazole I became able to feel my thoughts as physical sensations in my brain. The feeling was one of multiple disparate vortices, like sand tunnels or hourglasses. A diagram I drew at the time is at the bottom of the page.

I always struggled with looped thoughts; I think this was their physical manifestation. Addiction is one major looped thought, as is trauma. I now view them as thought-feeling loops, and I think that they are a byproduct of intensified learning due to high phasic dopamine.

There is dopaminergic dysregulation you are born with, like adhd, and dysregulation you develop, like trauma and addiction. They go hand in hand but the key factor is that the chisel of phasic dopamine carves extra-deep neural pathways which loop back on themselves. 

The thought triggers an emotion which triggers the thought again. The emotion is the pressure on the chisel and the thought is the route it takes. You wind up with a mind which is coiled tight, like a spring under tension.

want a drink -> feel bad -> want a drink

approval -> was it genuine? -> more approval

violence -> hypervigilance -> fear of violence -> hypervigilance

competition -> victory -> insecurity -> competition

noise -> irritation -> listening for noise

This is the pattern of reinforcement learning that we go through, and over time the lessons can become excessively ingrained. Heavy trauma like violence in early life can cause tight, painful loops, as can repeated exposure to addictive behaviours and substances.

I had lots. Violence. Alcohol. High-pressure job. Financial struggles. Ironman. Being the best. My brain was a planet full of bottomless pits, and dopamine was gravity. My planet was ruined and I needed a new one.

These thought-feeling loops have been broken now.

This happened explosively on 0710 and was consolidated over the coming days and weeks. I think the consolidation process is ongoing and, now the bliss and magic of the experience has faded, the flotsam is coming to the surface to be washed away.

Thoughts which would previously eat me up do so no longer. They have begun to occur again but they do not bite like they used to. They have become decoupled from the emotion and are no longer reinforced.

I have to stress that CBT and talk therapy does nothing for this kind of thought. It’s like you dig a channel in a beach and hope the ocean will drain.

Occasionally I could harness a moment of great clarity to break an addiction such as alcohol, but that was just one big-ass groove I needed to carve, with 18 months of intentional reinforcement after my last drink.

Now the thoughts pop up, as do the feelings, but they are no longer connected. The thought comes, I observe it, and the feeling manifests later as some ripples of tension in my face when I sit to meditate. They are no longer looped and reinforcing; they are free-floating and releasing. I think this is the ‘sankhāra’ or conditioning of my life being released, and the process is ongoing.

This is why I say nibbana is only the beginning. I was very receptive to reprogramming for the last 2 months. Translating the teachings of the buddha while instigating a meditation protocol was undoubtedly the right decision. I saw that this was my only chance and I took it.

My mind feels like an english countryside in the summer, with undulating hills instead of jagged crags. The thoughts can flow like wind instead of being sucked away by unseen and irresistible vacuums.

I can’t imagine this being because of anything other than the change in dopaminergic tone. Dysregulation means faster learning. Maladaptive learning, as some call it, but it’s just faster. A lot of our more urgent learning is caused by extreme situations like physical danger. The soldier learns to fight, under great duress. The lesson is ingrained hard, and sees him through the war. He comes home and the lessons that saved his life are labelled maladaptive. He is diagnosed with ptsd, cannot break the loop, and spirals into addiction.

I am confident in my hypothesis that this is a wide-scale reorganisation of the brain’s neural network, but I also believe that it requires active maintenance and cultivation once implemented. If you learned something once you could easily learn it again. The chisel is still sharp, even if the planer’s edge has been honed. For people like me, that planer will require constant maintenance.

The last few days have seen mild anxiety and a bit of low mood, but it is free-floating. The thoughts are no longer looping onto the emotions, and the residual emotions are working themselves out somatically as I meditate. They are being washed away in my sleep.

It’s amazing that you can reprogram a lifetime of learning in such an explosive manner.

We need to bring this to the world somehow.

/jb202509190646