Addictive Traps and the The Traps & Their Detector
Once you have fallen in, escape from an addictive trap is so tricky that some people never make it out. Each of us have a different biology, personal history, and current social circumstances, and so each of us have a different puzzle to solve. Escaping your particular addictive trap requires you to complete a passage that no one can take for you nor spare you.
Listed below are the six kinds of addictive traps that are responsible for most relapses and failures of will. This is a demanding, and potentially an overwhelming, challenge; you must use your time and cognitive resources wisely. To determine which trap to focus on, you may use the The Traps & Their Detector. There is no charge or signup, and all data entry and scoring occurs on your computer only. To take the The Traps & Their Detector please click here. After you read the results, come back here to interpret the results.
The Six Addictive Traps
- The PIG (The Problem of Immediate Gratification): Motivation is more sensitive to the immediacy than to the magnitude of the payoff.
- Counter-Regulatory Motivation: Perverse motivation may come in different flavors. One example is Reactance, which refers to the motivation to rebel against a restriction of a freedom, especially when the restriction does not apply to other people.
- The Karma of Behaving Badly: Don't worry about paying for your sins in the after-life; you will pay for them during this life. The true curse of the sinner is that the sinful behavior becomes stronger with exercise. With enough practice, the sequence of events that leads to incentive use becomes habitual, and now requires conscious effort to interrupt. The path of least resistance you create by exercising some habits, rather than others, is your Karma.
- Recursive Traps: Negative emotional states including depression, anxiety, and anger often produce outcomes that confirm the negative beliefs that gave rise to them.
- Attachment: Some people fail because they don?t care enough to perform well, and others fail because they care too much about outcomes to perform well.
- Dependence: Whatever has the power to give you happiness or take it away will be your master. You will remain its slave as long as you wait for an external agent of change to free you.
Interpreting the Results
After Completing the The Traps & Their Detector, your scores will be shown on your screen. We are interested in discovering which trap has the highest score, the one you should focus on first. By clicking on the trap name [above], you will access a more detailed description of the trap as well as tools and methods to escape it. To review the entire interpretation page please click here.