1. Feature Article: "“Environmental Enrichment” is the Key to (almost)
Everything"
Today's article comes from the Renewed Man Boot Camp. Renewed Man is a systematic teaching and coaching series designed to help men grow emotionally, relationally, and spiritually ... developing the essential character quality of "self-mastery." Even though this community is created for men, the principles
are universal -- women will benefit from these insights as well.
We build this teaching around 12 Keys, and this week we focus on the second key. Here's
how we state it:
2. SUPPORTIVE ENVIRONMENT - We take deliberate steps to design a personal environment that supports our commitment to self-mastery and vitality. Knowing what gets us in trouble, we establish boundaries and support to deal with it.
Here's one of the daily messages from this week's teaching series. I hope this will help you:
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I’ve long believed that in order to overcome addictions and/or compulsive behaviors — and make these changes stick over time — you must change your environment. I came to this understanding myself, but it’s obviously not unique to me. It’s a fundamental principle that people have been working with for years. I just didn't hear it until later in my journey.
The power of peoples' environment is illustrated by relapse rates when people leave treatment centers. Treatment centers know that if they send recovering addicts back into the same environment, with the same friends, the same triggers, the same opportunities to get their alcohol and drugs … recovery
will stop. So one of the major goals in treatment is to help the client make changes to his or her environment RIGHT AWAY ... which might even involve relocating to a new community, and a complete overhaul of that person's social circle.
But environment a bigger issue than just being a key for preventing relapse when addicts leave treatment centers. It’s a central issue for ALL of us, addicts or not. If you don’t change structures in your life, if you don’t align your personal environment to your new commitments, you won’t be able to change your life. Period.
The great work of addiction researcher Bruce Alexander also illustrates this. Alexander was the lead researcher in what has become known as the Rat Park Experiment. They
found that changing the environment that rats were put into led to extremely different outcomes for addiction and recovery. Read my article about this research here.
New research also demonstrates the importance of personal environments (Alexander's Rat Park experiment is decades old). In fact, as researchers state in their study abstract, they have found that “Environmental Enrichment” actually changes the brain. You can read the research here.
"Environmental Enrichment" is a term with roots in lab research using animals. It's been found that animals AND PEOPLE respond powerfully to positive changes in their personal environment (friendships, surroundings, media input,
etc.).
Listen to a couple quotes from the research report:
“Environmental enrichment (EE) has been shown to have powerful beneficial effects on a variety of physiological and pathological processes. Accumulating evidence indicates that EE can mimic positive life experiences and prevent the development of drug addiction. More recently, EE has also been shown to eliminate
already developed addiction-related behaviors and to reduce the risks of relapse. These preventive and “curative” effects of EE are associated with dramatic plastic changes in several brain areas such as the hippocampus, the frontal cortex and the striatum.”
…
One of the factors researchers include in Environmental Enrichment is stress
reduction. Listen to this:
“We propose a unified theoretical framework in which EE is seen as a functional opposite of stress. On the one hand, the antistress effects of EE would reduce
the reinforcing effects of drugs and their ability to induce long-lasting neuroplastic changes and, thus, they would prevent the development of drug addiction. On the other hand, permanent or transient restoration of the normal, pre-drug functioning of the stress system would facilitate resisting prepotent desire to take drug and it would decrease the risks of relapse.”
Here is how we put it -- and this is a theme in the Renewed Man program:
Do you want to change your life? Then change your environment!
NEXT ACTION
Today do three things:
(1) Celebrate and congratulate yourself for
getting through this second week, and making the time to get these readings and daily actions in. High five yourself!
(2) Take stock about how this is working. Is the time you’ve
established for doing the work for this working? Do you need to set aside more time? Try a different time? Get up earlier? This is a good time — early on in the program — to think about how it’s going, and if you want to make any tweaks to your schedule so you set yourself up for success as the program unfolds.
(3) Decide to make ONE change with respect to your personal environment. Get rid of a social media account. Get a filter on your computer. Delete an app from your phone. Make a change in your schedule. SOMETHING. What will you do?
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Would you like to go "all in"
and join the Renewed Man Boot Camp? It's a 12 Week Immersion in these principles. You'll get these daily teachings, a weekly video on one of the 12 Keys of Being a Renewed Man, and access to a support group and/or a coaching group that I lead.
Find out more about the Renewed Man Program here.
