Buffers
Buffers are actions, routines, habits or thought patterns we engage in that help to keep challenging situations or things that we don’t want to confront at an arm’s length.
Our minds are incredibly skilled at inserting buffers into our day as a way to avoid and push away things that we know will cause us to experience some level of discomfort or that we think have the potential to cause discomfort.
Buffers allow us to hide behind something pleasurable or non-threatening that will put distance between us and emotions that we don’t want to experience.
But when we use buffers, we miss opportunities to cultivate strength, wisdom, knowledge, resilience, and to learn information that is essential to our personal growth that can only be learned through periods of discomfort or unhappiness.
In this episode we talk about how to identify buffers, how they’re holding you back, and what you can unlock if you choose to limit the number of buffers in your day.
Here we go.
Episode Transcription
Intro:
Let’s talk about buffers. So buffers are actions, routines, habits or thought patterns we engage in that help to keep challenging situations or things that we don’t want to confront at an arm’s length.
From an evolutionary standpoint, our minds have become incredibly skilled at inserting buffers into our day as a way to avoid and push away things that we know will cause us to experience some level of discomfort or that we think have the potential to cause discomfort.
So buffers allow us to hide behind something pleasurable or non-threatening that will put distance between us and emotions that we don’t want to experience.
But when we use buffers, what we’re doing is missing opportunities to cultivate strength, wisdom, knowledge, resilience, and to learn information that is essential to our personal growth that can only be learned through periods of discomfort or unhappiness.
So in this episode we’ll talk about how to identify buffers, how they’re holding you back, and what you can unlock if you choose to limit the number of buffers in your day
Here we go.
Main:
Today we’re going to talk about what has recently become one of my favorite concepts to discuss, and it’s the concept of buffers and buffering. I have come to learn and believe that the ability to recognize and overcome buffers is one of the most important aspects of personal and professional development.
But in order to discuss buffers, we have to start first with examining how our minds are wired.
From an evolutionary standpoint, our minds are wired to seek and experience pleasure. So as a species, we evolved in such a way where we were always looking for things that gave us pleasure and helped us stay safe, and to avoid things that would cause us discomfort or pain or put our lives in jeopardy.
So we evolved to understand that pleasure signals survival - so eating foods, procreation, comfort, and circumstances that make us feel safe and protected were all things that facilitated survival.
On the flip side, we evolved to understand that discomfort meant the potential for danger or death - things like harsh environments, actions that had uncertain outcomes, illness, starvation, and a whole host of other things that caused us discomfort are things we associated with danger.
And over time, as we’ve evolved as a species, we’ve become incredibly skilled at making pleasure convenient - in the form of food, entertainment, safety, social pleasure, and endless lists of things that moment to moment make us feel good and that we can use to occupy our time.
And in the process of doing that, what we’ve done is essentially edged out our tolerance for discomfort. So in other words, because pleasure has become so convenient for us, and we can have it at our fingertips in minutes and have access to it all day long, we’ve built up an intolerance to discomfort.
And what’s happened is our minds have become skilled at avoiding and pushing away things that we know cause us to have discomfort or that may cause the potential for discomfort. And the sneaky part about this is that it’s our subconscious mind that does this, often times without us even knowing it. So our thinking brain doesn’t necessarily make an intentional decision to do this, it’s our subconscious mind that does it for us - again, because that’s how it’s survived for tens of thousands of years.
That’s one of the reasons why you can walk into the kitchen and just start eating or snacking without making a conscious decision to do it. It’s why you can scroll endlessly through social media without realizing you’re doing it.
And it’s also why we end up avoiding certain emotions, or interactions, or experiences or thoughts that might cause us discomfort - without us even knowing that we’re doing it.
So that’s where buffers come into play
Buffers are essentially distractions - they’re thoughts or actions that help us avoid discomfort. They help us avoid people, feelings, emotions or anything else that will cause us discomfort or that will trigger something that we don’t want to experience.
Buffering allows us to hide behind something pleasurable so that we don’t have to confront something that might have the potential to cause us pain, or that might involve uncertainty. They’re things that put distance between us and emotions that we don’t want to experience.
And because pleasure is so readily available, we’ve become incredibly expert at inserting pleasure into our lives as a way to keep pain or uncomfortability at a distance.
Now buffers come in all shapes and forms:
Food, alcohol, drugs, shopping, mindless tasks, social media, tv, procrastinating, anything that provides us with what we think is a temporary sense of satisfaction or pleasure.
Now layered on top of this are the messages that we get all day everyday in the form of advertisements and media and social norms that tell us that it’s not only ok but that we are entitled to experience immediate happiness all day long; we’re literally trained that if something feels uncomfortable, we should buy a product to make it better, or engage in an experience that will whisk us away from that moment of discomfort into a different reality.
And what we end up doing is buffering so that we make the things that we don’t like about our life or our workday tolerable.
We feel entitled to experience happiness all the time, all day everyday, and because of that framework our mind is constantly trying to avoid things we know will cause us discomfort.
But here’s the deal - constantly feeling pleasure and happiness is not natural. It’s not how our day to day experience is supposed to be.
There is essential information that our minds and our bodies need to survive that can only be learned through periods of discomfort or unhappiness. We cultivate strength, and wisdom, and knowledge, and resilience, and a whole host of other important kinds of information that is essential to growth - and we can only learn this information from those periods of uncomfortability.
But when we buffer, we keep these important lessons, and emotions, and feeling at an arms length - which prevents us from engaging in the kind of uncomfortable experiences that we need to live a fuller more rich life.
Here’s another thing buffering does - it keeps us in a state of mediocrity. And what I mean by that is we substitute in things that are comfortable and safe for things that might otherwise cause us temporary discomfort but that will ultimately help us grow.
So I want to pause here for a second and I want us to think about how this concept applies to our workdays.
I want you to take a second to scan your day for things that you think might be buffers.
In other words, what things might you be doing during your day that are keeping you at a distance from experiencing discomfort?
What are you putting between you and a new experience that allows you to avoid discomfort?
In the workday context, we use all sorts of buffers like the ones I mentioned before in addition to others like the following:
Instead of working on tough projects, we respond elaborately to simple emails all day and fill our time with mindless tasks
Instead of taking on challenges that might advance our career, we keep doing the things that we know how to do and in turn we hinder our own advancement. So we fill our days with projects that are nice and safe instead of things that would help us grow and push us outside our comfort zone.
We come up with reasons why “I just don’t have time for XYZ” - when it turns out that XYZ is actually something hard that we don’t want to make time for because it means we’re going to need to be uncomfortable in order to do it.
And so I think if you look closely at your day, you’re probably engaged in all sorts of things that your mind has expertly designed to keep you at a distance from uncomfortability, and your mind has also told you a nice elaborate story about why you need that thing in your life, or it helps you justify why you should do that instead of doing the thing that will make you uncomfortable.
And in the big picture, buffers over time can truly impede your growth because they prevent you from unlocking the big, bold, powerful, motivated version of yourself that wants to grow and wants to achieve and wants to take on new experiences.
So. Buffers are incredibly powerful, and they’re ingrained in our day to day experience in a way that makes them hard to extract without practice.
But what I want to leave you with today is a mini framework you can start to practice that will help you begin to notice where you might be inserting buffers into your day.
So here’s how this works. First, I want you to start simply by identifying one thing in your day that you think you might be using as a buffer.
Again, remember that buffers can be distractions, simple tasks that you choose over more difficult ones, something that you’ve put in your day that gives you a sense of gratification or pleasure or happiness that you’ve inserted not necessarily because you WANT it or NEED it, but because it helps you avoid something uncomfortable.
For the sake of an example here, I realized a long time ago when I started my own business that I was inserting really mindless tasks into my day so that I didn’t have to take on some of the big, challenging, really important projects that I needed to take on in order for my business to grow.
So I’d fill my days with responding to emails, taking hours to work on administrative work, or spending all sorts of time “Planning.” and I realized I was doing this because if I was busy with the simple stuff, that meant I didn’t have to do the challenging stuff.
If I was busy, I didn’t have to try to sell or find clients and I could avoid the potential that they’d say no.
If I was busy, I didn’t have to create new products or trainings, which meant thatI didn’t have to risk someone telling me they thought my work was bad.
So it turns out I was putting all of this easy stuff into my day because it meant that I could avoid the potentiality that I’d experience those types of discomfort.
So as a staring point, just identify one thing you think you might be using as a buffer.
Second, if you want to truly see if that thing is acting like a buffer, ask: is this thought or action helping me to avoid something I don’t want to confront or experience?
Now again, our mind is so expert in deceiving us into thinking that we need things, and it’s very good at justifying the utility of something that’s ultimately holding us back from something greater that we want for ourselves.
But now that I’ve given you some background, I want you to really search hard to try to understand if there’s something greater that you might want that might require some discomfort but that ultimately will lead to growth that you want to experience?
Again in my example, it became clear that I truly wanted growth for my business, and I wanted not only growth but expansive growth for myself, but I had inserted all of these things into my day without even really knowing it until I actually surveyed how I was spending my time.
Third, If you identify something that you think is a buffer, ask “What could I experience if I limited / removed this buffer from my day?” In other words, what would some temporary discomfort bring you? What would happen if you exposed yourself to something hard or challenging on purpose instead of avoiding it?
What would intentionally sitting in discomfort a little bit each day bring you? What if you became expert at being uncomfortable for a few minutes a day?
Now I know that that might sound like something where you hear it and want to run the other direction, but when you get scared like that it probably means you’ve identified an incredibly important pocket of growth. If you’re scared, it means you’re suppressing a true opportunity to grow - either professionally or personally - and that growth is right on the other side of some temporary discomfort.
So how do you pull yourself through a moment like this? The key is to spend time envisioning and internalizing what lies on the other side of the discomfort.
If you can become expert at getting in touch with the growth or the opportunity that lies on the other side of being uncomfortable, then at some point the repetition of that leads to a willingness to go be uncomfortable because you understand that your desire for something greater for yourself outweighs the discomfort.
I will tell you personally that I feel uncomfortable all the time, and I still realize that subconsciously I create buffers to avoid things I don’t want to experience.
But when I become uncomfortable, I’ve trained myself to immediately start to think about all of the great things that are on the other side of stepping into that discomfort. I have the desire to impact the lives of hundreds of thousands of people through the work I do, and I also have personal goals that involve accumulating a certain amount of wealth and maintaining a certain kind of lifestyle, and cultivating a day to day experience that is fulfilling and meaningful.
And so when I feel uncomfortable, I take myself to a place where I’m living out those intentions that I’ve set for myself - and it pulls me past that moment.
Everytime I choose to engage with that discomfort, it’s because I’ve come to a place where I want the growth more than the temporary feeling of comfort that a buffer provides.
Sometimes it’s an immediate decision, and sometimes it takes practice to envision it, but I only get over the hump when the growth I want outweighs the discomfort.
So. Think about how you might be blocking your innate ability to access growth by holding onto buffers. And if you want to transcend past those buffers, and intentionally step into something challenging, just practice calling to mind and envisioning something greater for yourself that’s worth the temporary discomfort.
Go have a great workday.