Have you ever stopped for a moment and thought about how conditioning may affect us all?  What exactly is conditioning?  Does it really apply to our lives?

From my experiences, this isn’t really a widely discussed topic, but it is something that I feel is intricately weaved within most of our lives, a lot of the time without us really realizing it.  But once we do realize it, we have the opportunity to reverse it and start on a direction toward freedom from the whims of unwanted habits, the whims of society, and the will that it and others unconsciously force upon us every day.

To start though, by no means am I suggesting that realizing this relieves a person from taking accountability for many things that he or she has experienced or contributed to inflicting up him- or herself.  Taking the stance of being a victim can only lead to powerlessness, which is contrary to the sense of empowerment which can accelerate your progress toward the life and habitual changes that you seek.

But to understand the powers that be is another thing.  Understanding that they can consciously and unconsciously influence your behavior and thought patterns and understanding what they are is imperative toward weeding them out from yourself and declaring your independence.  Realizing their influence and realizing how these influences can weave themselves into what you have control over and the actions that you take can be a very motivating factor to establish your defenses against them.  This can be very empowering and can help you plant your own roots deeper into the soils of your beautiful inner self, your true belief systems, your true happiness, and not someone else’s whims.

From my point of view, conditioning is the result of human societies and others’ desire for money, desire for control, and desire for power.  It can be the product of group “consensus,” superstitions, doctrines, traditions, habits, education, and a vast myriad of other systems.  It can be good, it can be neutral, and it can be bad.  Conditioning is very apparent in almost every aspect of life, and after all, we have to learn somehow.

So I am not going to label it really as anything in particular, and I especially don’t like to look at things as only good or bad, black and white, this or that, friend or enemy, or anything totally exclusive of one another.

It follows that conditioning is no exception.  It acts in a very good way, for example, when we were conditioned as young children to always look both ways before crossing the street.  The ingrained habit that resulted keeps us safe, most of the time without us realizing its influence.  Out of this habit, we barely even think about it every time we come to a crosswalk.  We “just do it” and cross.

The same goes for those of us who learned how to drive.  We learned that red means “stop,” and green means “go.”  How many times do we pass right through a green light, or stop at a red one, without really thinking about it?  We don’t really need to exert much though into it.  We “just do it,” because we have reinforced that habit for so long that it just comes natural.

Well, that is a good way to look at the conditioning that has affected us in not as good of ways.  With these habits that may be detrimental to our well-being, we “just do them” because we have reinforced them for so long that they just seem to come natural.  We can’t really get ourselves to think there is any other way.  I mean, could you ever imagine stopping at a green light?  In the case of safety, it certainly wouldn’t be advised, and it certainly would take a lot to get over the impulse to go right through it.

Enter the world of food.  As everyone has been eating it ever since they have been alive, this is obviously an important habit for every person and every other species on earth.  It is what keeps us going, gives us sustenance, nutrition, and much more.  It is what allows for our existence.

The biological impulse to eat is one of the most primal drives that we have.  It is what, in our ancestral times, kept us on the move.  It kept us in pursuit of survival.  It was our instinct to scour the land to find enough for ourselves and others within our community.  It was likely not as abundant as now, was likely much more simple and limited in variety, and there, in the earliest times, was likely no profit motive behind the distribution of it.

That impulse and instinct – hunger – has not really biologically changed within us over thousands of years.  But the way food is cultivated, produced, manipulated, advertised, distributed, and sold sure has!  Furthermore, the types of foods available to us certainly has as well!

During this evolution in the world of food, the by-product of habitual conditioning has resulted – a by-product which latches onto our most instinctual drive and can help create deeply ingrained thought-patterns, behaviors, emotions, and even obsessions.  Left unchecked, left misunderstood, or left powerless to them, the mind and its conscious behaviors can compel a person to react in certain ways around food – certain ways which can contribute to unhealthy habits.  This is one way to view conditioning, and a good starting point for you, if you feel that you have trouble with how you react to food, to begin to become part of an ongoing discussion about this, and a good starting point for you to condition yourself away from what you may determine is bad for you, and toward something brighter.

Tags: behavior and food, dieting behaviors, food conditioning, societal conditioning, what influences eating