Champion Your Life with Leighanne Champion: What is Buffering?

Any activity, any behavior that you over-do to avoid unpleasant emotions or to ignore the truth of your life. Eating, drinking, binge watching Netflix, gambling, shopping, social media...etc!

Imagine if we would be willing to live a life where less pleasure is the KEY? What if we were able to focus on things that we really want to do with our lives….that we truly yearn for? 

Buffering is when we use external things to change how we feel emotionally. Sometimes we don’t have the energy to face the truth of what is going on in our lives because we don’t want to experience any negative emotions. What happens to our brains when we decide to buffer is that we generate a neurotransmitter called dopamine..and it’s the same neurotransmitter that we get if we were using cocaine. It helps us to feel better in the interim, but definitely not in the long run.

If we could have all those pleasures with no consequences, nobody would care. But let’s face it… there are consequences. Buffering does cause pain. Buffering only provides temporary relief from negative emotion, which always comes back harder than it started.