I am no stranger to overcoming addictions. I used to be overweight, I used to smoke, and I used to drink alcohol. Neuroscientist’s Andrew Huberman’s definition of addiction as “the progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure” certainly resonates with my experience. Addictions are like fire—the more we feed them, the more they grow. And the stronger they become, the more insatiable they are, always hungry, always craving.
When I quit smoking, which for me was by far the most difficult addiction to overcome, I’d made a list of the benefits of quitting. On top of that list was my conviction that I’d have a deeper level of happiness if I freed myself of all addictions and cravings, because I’d be a truer version of myself.
Treats are gratifications which give us short-term satisfaction. We crave the pleasure that addictions bring because there’s some emptiness within us—we’re in pain. But the quick and easy fix that addictions provide deals with the symptoms, not the root causes of that emptiness. And the addictions become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The addiction creates a constant state of dissatisfaction because you always want more of it. That’s because we use the addiction to solve something that it isn’t capable of resolving.
I know how insidious the coping mechanisms behind addictions are—and how insurmountable they could feel. In overcoming my addictions, I discovered three distinctions that have had a profound impact on my success in transcending the addictive behaviours.
The addictive behaviour provides safety
When I quit smoking my mind went into absolute panic and offense for the first few days and started throwing all sorts of protests at me. It was attacking me, all day, every day, for about a week, trying to convince me why I should be smoking. The underlying theme was—we only live once and so why would I be so cruel to myself as to deprive myself of something that I really enjoy? And that’s quite a cunning argument, isn’t it? I was trying to convince myself that I was harming myself by not engaging in the harmful behaviour.
We feel overwhelming disorientation and desperation when we quit an addictive behaviour, because the addiction used to provide some form of safety. When we stop practicing the addictive behaviour, we feel threatened and exposed. The lack of safety we feel in the absence of the addiction is one of the main reasons we find it difficult to stay addiction-free.
Behind the addiction is self-love masquerading as self-harm
One of the most pivotal distinctions for me was realising that while on the surface level it appears that we fundamentally harm ourselves with the addictive behaviour, the addiction is actually a form of self-love. I used to think that I was trying to sabotage or even obliterate myself through my addictions—while, in fact, what I was trying to do is call my better, truer self into action. I was harming who I was not in order to reveal who I was. In that sense, the addiction is destructive, but it’s trying to destroy what we’re not—our limiting beliefs, lies, confining ideas about ourselves—for the purpose of unveiling our true self. On the most fundamental level, our suffering is caused by a misalignment between who we are at any point in life and our true nature and potential. And, in my experience, the bigger the misalignment the more consuming the addiction, because the addiction is the most effective strategy our subconscious could have designed to point out to us that we’re not stepping into our full power. And it’s in that sense that the addictive behaviour is an expression of self-love.
The addiction doesn’t cause the suffering, it mitigates it
The addiction is a coping mechanism. Yes, it causes suffering in the sense that the addictive behaviours impact our lives in undesirable ways. But that suffering is a by-product of deeper hurt which the addiction is trying to mitigate. In the words of physician and addiction expert Gabor Mate, “don’t ask why the addiction, ask why the pain”.
When we’re misaligned with our true self, we live with a lot of confining ideas about ourselves. We may think we’re not good enough, that we are not powerful, not lovable, not impactful, or valuable. We have unflattering, and sometimes even cruel, dialogue about who we are, what we’ve done and our abilities.
These narratives give rise to how we relate to ourselves, life and other people, and are the foundation on which our lives are built. Most of them are subconscious, so we’re not aware of them, but we can see their manifestations in our feelings, thoughts and behaviours, which is how we can start to reverse engineer them.
Investigating and challenging my own dialogue and self-defeating perceptions was pivotal in helping me to overcome my addictions and build a healthier and more fulfilling life. I used to say that I have an addictive personality. Now I know that I just had a painful life. Our personalities are not divorced from who we are and what we’ve been through—they are rather the response to that. The personality is the combination of the person and the reality—it’s the by-product of our personal reality. Behind the addicted version of us is our true self that’s using tailor-made strategies to engage our attention in order to liberate itself, and step into its true potential.