Beyond hormonal impulses and compulsive behavior

Following is an excerpt from a samvaad (dialogue) session with Acharya Prashant.

Questioner (Q): Acharya Ji, how to remain conscious of my actions when hormonal imbalance overpowers my ability to opt for conscious behavior over compulsive behavior? And since it happens only at certain intervals, I am actually conscious of the facts. I don’t know if that is sufficient or whether anything can be done about the compulsive part.

Acharya Prashant (AP): So there’s the type of behavior that we call as, the questioner is calling as, compulsive behavior. And she is rightly relating it to bodily secretion and hormonal chemistry, latent tendencies, and such things. Something very visceral and overpowering just arises without notice and takes control of the being. That’s what we call compulsive behavior.

And then she has already thought of a remedy and the remedy, according to her, is conscious behavior. In conscious behavior, the ‘I sense’ knows in the sense of cognizing. It knows in the sense of rather recognizing, recognizing by pattern matching; detecting that is the same pattern that arose at some point in the past. “At that point, it is called by this name so this being the same thing, I would again call it by the same name.”