In this essay, I want to append on a previous one that was about vices and talk about it from the addiction point of view.
What are vices, why do we have vices, and what they can cause. To quickly refresh your memory. Vice is a habit that hurts you and the people around you in many ways like degrading physical or mental health, money loss, time loss, and more. The absolute majority of our population has some vice. Some are more and some are less damaging. Pretty much all the vices will sooner or later lead to addiction which is topic of this essay. My goal is to explain to you how you can identify an addiction, how to identify you’ve overcame it, what are the specific steps you should do to overcome it and in the end, I will walk you through my own story of addiction.
Do you want to live your life to the fullest? Do you want to reach your maximum potential? If the answer is yes, then you’ve got no other option than to overcome your addictions. Because as long as you’re addicted to something, you cannot reach your potential. You’re not truly in control. You’re just a slave to your dopamine system. Overcoming your addictions should be the main priority on your self-improvement journey. By not being addicted to anything, you’re able to get to your natural baseline (just reaching the baseline will put you before 80% of people), and once you’re on your baseline everything becomes much easier. There are no demons you need to fight only to get some work done. There’s nothing slowing you down. You’re at peace and both you and your head are working together toward the same goal. You’re allies, not enemies.
While you’re addicted and have no control over your urges and your self-image suffers, a lot. You feel like a loser without control. Once you get the addiction under the control, you will be your own boss once again.
Another and last reason I will give you is time. Time is running. We all have a limited amount of it, and we will never get it back. Do you really want to spend your time, your greatest asset doing something that is ruining your life?
The first key step on your journey of overcoming an addiction is identifying the substance or activity you’re addicted to. If you’re a human living in a modern country there’s nearly 100% probability that throughout your life you became addicted to a bunch of things. Some of them may not be too damaging, but some may be ruining your life completely without you realizing. So, how to identify an addiction?
There are many indicators, here are the most obvious:
These are the most usual symptoms of addiction. Try to think about your life and activities that fit these descriptions. It may be a little hard for you if you don’t have an experience with self-reflection, but it is worth pursuing. These symptoms can be obvious when it comes to obvious and well known addictions like cigarettes or alcohol, but beware because you can find pretty much the same symptoms even in things like social media consumption, watching pornography, eating, or even overthinking and listening to music.
You can be addicted to pretty much anything that releases dopamine, the important thing to realize is how much you’re addicted and how much of a negative effect this activity has on your life. The best way to realize how much of a negative effect it has on your life is to try go 30 days cold turkey on that activity or substance.
If you were able to abstain for 30 days and you feel pretty much the same then great. You were not addicted and the activity wasn’t damaging to your life which means you can come back to your previous usage.
If you were able to abstain for 30 days and you feel your life has improved then great! Keep abstaining.
And if you weren’t able to abstain for those 30 days, you can be pretty sure to be addicted.
Same as with identifying if I’m addicted it is also good to know how to identify if I’ve overcame it. Right?
Well, unfortunately when it comes to beating addiction it is not that simple. Most addictions are for life. You can be sober for years. You can completely forget about your ever struggling with staying sober, and yet one bad sequence of events can put you right back into your addiction days. There are cases reported of alcohol addicts that were sober for over ten years and yet after some terrible event something in their brains just switched and they came back to drinking like the days of sobriety never happened. And that was not only from the emotional site but also from a physiological site, the same reactions occurred in their brains as if they were drinking this entire time.
This phenomenon can be compared to the muscle memory you can see when you take a pause in the gym and then come back after some time. You will get back your progress very quickly. With addiction, it is pretty much the same as with muscle memory. Unfortunately, when it comes to addiction it is the bad thing that makes our recovery worse. This happens because of the way how addiction is written into our brains. Once you’re addicted to something you will forever be prone to do the activity.
However, this doesn’t mean that you can’t overcome your addiction at least to a certain extent. If you think about it, all that drives your addiction are habits. If you’re able to rewrite those habits and replace them with something else, then the fact you’re addicted to something will be irrelevant in your day-to-day life because you have no habits related to it.
This means that it is not the sobriety time that indicates you’ve beaten your addiction. It is knowledge and habits. When you completely understand why your addiction occurs, what are its starters, which habits makes the addiction worse, and which makes it better, then you’re on the right path.
This implies that you have to concentrate on your habits and starters that are putting you into an addiction spiral. If you have good habits you use to cope with negative emotions and you associations with activities and getting into an addiction spiral, then there’s a very low probability you will fall back into your addiction.
This leads me to the next topic.
First of all, I have to say that I still haven’t figured this out myself completely. I still sometimes struggle with my porn addiction. It actually isn’t more than 4 weeks since my last binge. However the longer I’m fighting this addiction, the shorter and less intense the binges are, and the bigger space there is between them. Which means that I’m on the right path for sure. And that’s why I think that these things that are helping me will help you as well:
1. Getting to know you better.
It may sound a little silly, but you probably don’t know who you are. If you knew it, you would know what are your needs, what your addiction substitutes for, and what necessary actions you need to take to beat your addiction. But instead, you’re just a slave to your dopamine system always looking for yet another high you can get. Don’t feel bad about this, in the end, it is the state in which the majority of our society is, but it’s a terrible state to be in for sure.
So, how to get to know yourself better? There are many options. The best activities are the following:
In the end, your goal is to become more aware of your day-to-day activities and thoughts that are appearing in your head. The more you understand your motivations and impulses, the more control you have. And the more control you have the more power over your addiction you have.
2. Removing the triggers from your life
As you’re getting to know yourself better you will start to see some patterns in your life. You will start to realize that there are specific activities, places, or even people that will cause you to have the urge to indulge in your addiction. Your goal here is to remove those triggers. The fewer triggers you have, the fewer urges you have to fight and by that the easier it is for you the overcome your addiction.
3. Replacing the habits
The last step is to replace your old dopamine-rich habit with something else. With something that will improve your life. Because in the end, you will always need something to cope with your negative emotions. Most people won’t consciously decide on their coping activity so they end up with the easiest ones like drinking alcohol, smoking or watching porn. The worst addiction usually comes from activities that are the easiest to pursue. But once you’re in control of yourself and you’re aware of all those things, you can simply choose a habit that you will use as a coping mechanism.
It can be pretty much anything. Meditation, exercise, journaling, talking to a friend you name it. Once you will realize who you are it will become obvious to you what is the best habit to adopt as a way of coping with negative emotions.
And now, for the last part of this essay, my own story of dealing with addictions. I will concentrate here on my porn addiction because it is the one I struggle the most with. It all started around 8 years ago when I was 12. It was the first time I’ve found out about pornography. In a pretty short time I became hooked and in less than a year it became a daily habit for me to watch porn. I didn’t realize that porn is something bad until I was around 16 years old. This was mostly for the fact that porn was considered absolutely normal and even healthy for young boys to indulge in. This fact is totally fucked up if you ask me but whatever that is not what this story is about.
So around 15 years of age I found out about the Nofap movement. This community was all about quitting your porn addiction and making your life better. At that time, I rejected the idea of being addicted to porn. After all, I was always so proud of not being addicted to anything and I was sometimes even making fun of people that were addicted to alcohol and cigarettes.
Oh, how pathetic I was back then. But fortunately, even though I didn’t admit to myself that I’m addicted to porn, I gave it a try, because around that time it was so popular to connect the Nofap challenge with a bunch of “superpowers”.
For example:
And so on and so on. Well, what can I tell you there? I was just a horny teenager that wanted to lose his virginity so when I saw something that could help me get some pussy I instantly jumped on in. However, I’ve realized that this challenge isn’t that easy. I’ve been struggling to keep myself on ‘the steak’. As time went by, I was slowly realizing that the superpowers are bullshit, but I was already doing it for a long enough time to realize another advantage in continuing on this challenge.
After this realization, I started to concentrate more on overall self-improvement and for some time it went well. I was sober for over 6 months, I started visiting the gym regularly, I took care of myself and I just overall enjoyed life, which was something I didn’t know how it feels until that time. Unfortunately, this state didn’t last forever, because I still thought that I’m not addicted to porn, that I was just able to cut it off from my life for good. Oh, how wrong I was back then. After 6 months of continual growth, my free trial on self-improvement ended. And it was time to pay.
I fell right back into where I started. I wasn’t able to go for even a week without binging on some fucked up shit. But now it was different than all those years before. Before I went on Nofap I felt a little bad after masturbating but I didn’t give much attention to it. But now, I just knew how bad it is to masturbate and watch porn, and yet I wasn’t able to stop.
This destroyed my mental health. I become depressed and for a short period of time even suicidal. It was probably the worst period of my life. And it lasted for over a year. Fortunately in the November of 2021, I finally got a crucial realization. I finally admitted to myself that I’m addicted to porn and that I have to handle it like an addiction, not just some challenge I can finish just by my willpower. I’ve realized that for all of this time, I was ignoring my mental health and my inner self overall .
I was concentrating on the outside and ignoring what was happening on the inside. I was so busy trying to get some pussy that I simply ignored that my head is falling apart. After this realization, everything changed. For the first time in my life, I was really caring about what I wanted and what I need. I started meditating and journaling and all the other mental health-related stuff. And I got better. It took some time but I slowly started to enjoy my life again.
Now I would be so happy to say that after some time something just switched and now I’m fine, I’m completely cured, but that would be a lie. And I don’t lie. So I have to tell the truth. I still struggle with depressive episodes and relapses, because many years of indulging in porn and over a year of constantly destroying my mental health just takes time to revert. Breaking this habits and mental states takes more time than it took to build them. It is same as with food. It is much easier and faster to eat 1000 calories than to burn them. So currently I’m a work in progress but I’m on the right path.
And when I think about it. It is pretty much the main reason I do online content. Every time I go on YouTube I see all those gurus who act like they have it all figured out. But they don’t. And what they do is that they’re setting an unattainable standard for the young men. And that makes their lives even worse.
I want to be different. I want to show you an actual experience of improving oneself. I want to show you all the good, bad and ugly. So you know that you’re not alone…