Ever since I reached my early 20’s, I have learned that I have an addictive personality.
A personality so addictive that if I love the first experience fo trying something, I’m highly likely to keep on doing it. At all costs.
I have been addicted to constantly dating, smoking a vape, sports gambling, and playing video games.
Addiction is a psychological and physical inability to stop consuming a chemical, drug, activity, or substance even though it is causing psychological or physical harm.
“Addiction is a family disease. One person may use, but the whole family suffers.”
The vaping made me feel relaxed.
The dating made me feel worthy.
The sports gambling made me feel wealthy.
The video games made me feel in control.
All of my addictions gave me pleasure in the form of entertainment and feeling good.
The bad news is that in one way or another each of them were potentially destructive behaviors.
To combat these addictions, I did one of 3 things:
Get a hobby
Getting the hobby to start a YouTube channel required me to put more attention into my creativity and providing value to my audience.
Much like writing on Medium, creating blog content makes me feel good and is extremely fulfilling.
Some hobbies you make take up could be sports, drawing, hiking, or cooking. The sky’s the limit!
Self-care
Eating unhealthy food and exercising regularly has tons of positive effects on the body where I forget about my urges and do something less harmful instead.
Lately, I’ve been on a schedule where I run every other day and lift at the gym on the days I don’t run.
Listen to your body, take care of it, and it will take care of you.
Reach out to others
Whenever I get cravings to spot gamble, smoke, get into another relationship, or overplay video games, I reach out to my support group.
My support group changes often, but I continuously get a bunch of value out of the conversations that I have. Conversations that include personal stories and the collateral damage addictions cause are the most insightful to me.
If an urge arises, you can reach out to the person that you trust and they will likely be able to talk you out of doing it. Especially if your addiction is something they’ve struggled with in the past.
You can fight through it
Dealing with addiction is never easy, otherwise it wouldn’t be an addiction. We all may experience it at one point or another. Just know that somewhere out there, someone in the world was in the same position as you and found a way out.
The key is to acknowledge the addiction and find out why we do it.
Once we can acknowledge our reasons, we can move on from there and take the proper steps to mitigate the addictive behavior.
“You were never created to live depressed, defeated, guilty, condemned, ashamed, or unworthy. You were created to be victorious.”
—
Previously published on “Change Becomes You”, a Medium publication.
—
***
If you believe in the work we are doing here at The Good Men Project and want to join our calls on a regular basis, please join us as a Premium Member, today.
All Premium Members get to view The Good Men Project with NO ADS.
Need more info? A complete list of benefits is here.
Talk to you soon.
—
Photo credit: Paola Chaaya on Unsplash