Welcome to The Meaningful Sh!t Show with your host, Vincent, in a world full of selfishness, blaming and scapegoating. Vincent aims to inspire inner work with deep topics and insights on emotion regulation, personal development, psychology, philosophy, and the trauma growth and healing process. Hello, welcome to yet another episode of The Meaningful Sh!t Show with me, Vincent. We're going to talk today about distress tolerance again, but we're going to focus on addiction.

So this is going to be a fun episode. I'm looking forward to talking about addiction. So I have some personal stories to tell there. So I feel a lot about this episode. Let's dive right in. I'll start with a quote. No, you need an adventure, man. You need to get out there and have something to do, something to wake up for. That's the substitute for the addiction.

Actually, the addiction is the substitute for that, if truth be known. So that's by Jordan Peterson, psychologist, public speaker. I bet some of you guys recognize it. And there's some deliciousness in there and deep truth as well. That addiction is the band-aid. It's something you use to cover something up where there's lacking. So we're going to talk about both the disease focus, which is like addiction being a disease, and we're also going to focus on what, if we just look at it from like a behavioral pattern perspective, how can we replace it with something better?

So different models, both useful. Like I said, this is part of the distress tolerance skill set of DBT. So we're going to refer to the DBT workbook again. I like to use that as you guys know. And today, the focus is, of course, the crisis being an addiction. So if we just do a quick flashback to distress tolerance, remember the stop skill, which stood for stop, take a breath, observe, and proceed mindfully.

Very important when you're in a distressed state, because you have a distress urge, an action urge, that you don't want to engage with. And there was the pros and cons skill, which sounds very straightforward, but we looked at the pros and cons of both acting along with the distress urge and against. So then you do like an analysis, standard pros and cons, but you do a devil's advocate analysis as well.

Very useful. The TIP skill focused on, gosh, I don't even know what TIP stands for off the top of my head, but I will always relate it to like, you're regulating using your biology. So intense exercise, getting your heart rate up and down, using cold water immersion to calm your system down. I talked about that as part of my Polyvagal Theory episode. So very important. Distract. So remember the distract skill, where when we're distressed, we want to be able to know what are the activity that we can engage in to get us out of that distress mode so that we can handle with it, handle it better later.

I also like to rename them mindful redirection because distraction sounds not very skillful. You really have to self-soothe, honestly, also like a form of distract, where we use the five senses to engage with our world, get us out of this distress state. And as well as the improve skill, which is focused a lot on imagery, finding the silver lining, feeling meaning, all the things that are very important, finding meaning in distress, because there is meaning in distress.

And we talked about urge surfing as well. We're going to talk about urge surfing some more. So I'm just going to mention it and move right on. Right. So before we dive in, I have a disclaimer. I have no formal training in addiction, reduction, DBT, any of these things. I just have my own experiences. I am enthusiastic about it. I've used it a lot in my life.

I have stories to tell. See it as that. So no formal training. I am not lying. All right, let's get started. How do you know if you're addicted to begin with? What is an addiction? Addiction is a very loaded term. Do we even know what it meant by addiction? Most of us think of drug addicts, hardcore drug addicts that are getting the shakes and whatever if they don't get their substance, the substance that they need.

But if you look at the DSM definition, it's a little broader than that. What's mentioned as well in DBT is, you are addicted when you are unable to stop a behavior pattern or use of substances despite negative consequences and despite your best efforts to stop. There's actually a bunch in there that can mess up how we relate to this. Because oftentimes we think of, you are addicted when you are unable to stop a behavior or substance.

That is the usual definition. The negative consequences are assumed. If you are shooting up with heroin, we just assume negative consequences. It's obvious, right? It doesn't even have to be mentioned. Despite the best efforts to stop, oftentimes people forget about that there were actually efforts to stop the pattern. DBT opens the definition to behavioral patterns as well. So if you would look at the DSM, the definition probably is different.

I know for example that sex addiction is not in the DSM, so that would technically be counted as a behavior pattern, but the DSM is the manual that all mental health professionals use, but it's not like the Bible. And it gets updated over time. PTSD used to not be in the DSM, and now it is. Maybe it will at one point. All right, let's talk about some of the negative consequences.

We talked about that in relation to heroin addictions, which are obvious, like your body is going to deteriorate, you can't hold a job, but other negative consequences that are smaller are just you're spending a lot of money on it, spending a lot of time on it, losing sleep, losing peace of mind, you have a loss of friendships, you are experiencing a lack of purpose or a feeling of isolation, a loss of connection, basically.

These are all negative consequences, and do think about the fact that, of course, shooting up with heroin does drain all your money, that's obvious, but there are smaller addictions that might use less money, and you wouldn't really count as an addiction. For example, playing games on your phone can just be you might spend a little bit of money on in-app purchases or something like that, but it might not be a drain like shooting up with heroin would be where you need $100 a day to maintain your addiction.

And also your time, like when you're playing a game on your phone, you might do that at the moments that you're not working, by the way, a negative consequence is also losing your job, by the way. So it might not be that you can't work because you're playing the game on the phone all the time, which if we compare that to shooting up with heroin, probably you're going to spend your entire day finding your dealer, getting money.

So it becomes your full-time job. Your addiction becomes your full-time job. And you can also think of the fact that some of these negative consequences are just also part of a hobby. Physical exercise takes up a decent amount of my money, takes up a good chunk of my time because you have to do it every day, right? It takes up my sleep as well. I get up early to go to the gym to go work out, right?

So some of these negative consequences, the fact that they're a negative consequence doesn't mean that you're struggling with an addiction, obviously. You spend time preparing food, you spend money making food. So we can obviously see that that's an issue wouldn't be complete. So where the addiction part becomes really important is that you're trying to stop and you can't despite your best efforts. And this is where some of the things get a little interesting and complicated.

Because let's first say that you do want to stop, because there's another case where you're not sure if you want to stop. So let's first focus on best efforts to stop. So the basic tool to stop, if you for the rest have no tools in your tool belt is just say no. That's what people say to drug addicts, right? What these helpful commercials are about, just say no.

That campaign did not do well. Another tool is a binge-purge cycle. Because as you're binging, that's the addiction. But because you're purging, you have a stable time. Like it's sometimes referred to as acting in and acting out as well. So if you're acting out, that doesn't mean that the rest of the time you're acting in. And oftentimes, especially if you look at things like food addiction, sex addiction, those behavioral patterns are actually very important because the binge and the purge, they balance each other out.

Because when you're in your purge state, more about that later, you are too clean in a way to maintain. You're too straight-edge. You're not taking care of some of the needs you have, and that's why you fall back into binging. So we oftentimes like to just go for the masculine approach, that basic tool of just say no, but it's not really effective. Sometimes it is. I know people have had, you could argue, addictions, and at one point they were just like, okay, no, it's enough.

They decided and it's possible. And I'm not saying that every addiction requires a lot of tools, but for a lot of people it does. So it's good to know the tools. I talked about as well about the situation where you are not even completely sure if you want to stop. So an example can be like, okay, am I addicted to porn or not? Is that just, is it an addiction?

Have I even tried to stop? Or maybe it's alcohol for you, or maybe it's exercise, or we're going to go through a list of all the things that would count as addictions. So I think that a lot of the addictions that are complicated are the ones that are actually not about substances. Because the moment that you have a substance such as alcohol, it's really clear whether or not you're using the substance or not, because are you drinking or are you not drinking?

With things like an eating disorder, an eating addiction, or a sex addiction, or an exercise addiction, these things are a little bit more hairy, because some of these things within moderation are very healthy things. We ought to have those things in our lives. So when does it become an addiction? When do we decide, hey, there are enough negative consequences, and hey, I've tried to stop and I can't?

Note as well the negative consequences. You have to weigh them with positive consequences. So I feel like this definition means like a net negative, right? Because some things would lead to more positive things than negative things. Like for some situations, video game addiction, for example, if you're a professional gamer, that can become your vocation, your livelihood. And is it really an addiction? Because the negative consequences aren't outweighing the positive consequences.

But it's tricky because the moment that starts to happen, like your health deteriorates to a level that you're just like not really okay with it anymore, you have to make that decision. So it's really hard for a professional to come in to look at your life and to be like, okay, you're addicted, then you should stop. That is not really how it works. Interesting stuff. So you have to make that decision.

I talked about that. Sometimes there's also like the moderation aspect can be complicated in the sense of abstinence is sometimes easier than moderation. I have a friend of mine, he drinks off and on, he has a drinking month and then the sober month. And the drinking months are harder because the sober month is just, am I going to drink? No. Where in the drinking month, he's like, I had two beers, am I going to have another?

That becomes more complicated. We've talked about addiction from the disease perspective a lot. And there's a lot of research on that, like the book, Your Brain on Porn, for example, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts by Gabor Maté is about addiction. I would say primarily the disease model, seeing from the perspective of how does it get its hooks into you. But we also have more of the behavioral model or the model where we look at the addiction as the solution, not the problem.

The solution, you would say, that's weird. How is my addiction the solution? Remember the quote in the beginning. The addiction is the substitute for an interesting life, a life worth living. And that is the problem. You do not have a life worth living, oftentimes. You would see that in situations with people that bounce from addiction to addiction as well. It's not that they can't handle alcohol because then they stop alcohol, and then they go and overeat, and then they stop overeating, and then maybe they develop a porn addiction.

Whatever, like you just keep going from addiction to addiction. So the addiction is being the solution. It makes your life worth living because you're engaging with some kind of activity that at least in the beginning gets you a lot of dopamine, just like a substance would. I mean, if I'm comparing it to behavioral stuff. Luckily, we are talking a lot about DBT, and remember one of DBT's taglines, making a life worth living.

So DBT works actually pretty well in this context of seeing the addiction as the solution because that's where all the other DBT skills are for. Let's talk about common addictions. We'll start, and this is in somewhat in alphabetical order, start with alcohol. That's easy. How about attention seeking or approval seeking? How about avoiding a certain thing, avoiding intimacy, avoiding bridges, avoiding certain people, avoiding family? Auto racing, betting, bulimia, purging, vomiting, cheating, cheating, sexually acting up, coffee, sodas, collecting various stuff, art, coins, junk, clothes, shoes, music.

Music is actually the example from Gabor Maté in The Realm of Hungry Ghosts, where he talks about working with a lot of hardcore inner city junkies. And his way that he's coping with things is with his music addiction, actually specifically buying classical music CDs, which I don't know, you have to read the book to fully appreciate it, but definitely interesting. Computer addictions, criminal activities, dieting, drugs, obviously, diuretics, food, eating, carbs, chocolate, specific food, gambling, games, gossiping, imagining, fantasizing, or gossiping.

Also, I count like, like, politics, these people that just have to talk about politics, have to talk about certain people that are bad and evil, and blah, blah, blah, etc., etc. They need that, even if it's costing them connection, right? These people are holding. Internet addiction, that I already mentioned, imagination and fantasizing, if you're just always stuck in a fancy world. Kleptomania, stealing, shoplifting, lying, pornography, reckless driving, risky behaviors, self-inflicted injury, self-mutilation, sex, shopping, sleeping, smartphone apps, obviously, dating apps, smoking, tobacco, vaping, social networking, obviously.

Speed, spiritual practice, yes, spiritual practices can be an addiction, can be addictive, can have negative consequences. Why are you doing it? Is it effective? And sports, biking, bodybuilding, hiking, rock climbing, running, weightlifting, anything can become addictive. Identity training, dancing, I think we talked about as well. Television is an obvious one, texting. Vandalism, Netflix, basically. Video games, we cover that. And all the way at the end of the alphabet, working.

Workaholics, we've heard of them, maybe you are one. I have some tendencies in that direction. I bet that you've heard some addictions here, things that you don't really consider addictions. I would want to add one to it, a relaxation addiction, where your need to be relaxed becomes, creates a lot of negative consequences. And maybe relaxing is not the right word, but like vegging out, it goes closely together with maybe video games, maybe TV, anything that just makes you passive.

So from a perspective of the addiction is the solution. So what is it solving? What are my actual problems? You would think of things such as anxiety. So many things, drinking covers up anxiety, obviously many of these things that I talked about. Relaxation even covers up anxiety, if you do that in a toxic way. What I'm trying to say here is that relaxation is a great way to overcome anxiety, unless that anxiety you're supposed to address something and you're just combating the anxiety instead of the thing that you're anxious about.

The same goes for boredom. How many things do we do in an addictive pattern to get that little dopamine blip? See my episode about different neurotransmitters. Just because we're bored, is jerking off to porn, is that really what's called for now? How many times do you do things about your, not just from boredom, but from sleep? Exhaustion. You're exhausted, but you're not going to sleep. You're instead watching another episode.

You're instead doing something that doesn't really address the actual problem. Overwhelm and stress, obviously. We don't like to feel these feelings, so we want to pave over them with something. Let's smoke some pot, for example. How about loneliness and isolation? If you're really lonely, you're isolated, no one around, you don't have people that are close to you, you feel unseen, the addiction is a solution because you're engaging with something, a dopamine machine is fired up, it's great.

How about lack of meaning and purpose? So many people have that, I think, because if you don't have values, meaning and purpose, what's there to do in life? These little things that fire up your reward system, but it doesn't last. If you're just dopamine chasing, it doesn't get you there. How about lack of novelty? Novelty is one of the human needs. I'm slowing down because I'm thinking of who set that, put that in one of the base human needs.

This is also a public speaking guy. Name escapes me. Sorry. But novelty is something that's really important to plan into your week, your day. If things are becoming, it's just like a drudgery. That is also something that you can throw some dopamine at. But actual novelty actually is something that scares you. Feeling of being stuck. If you're being stuck in your obstacle, the thing that is keeping you pinned down is very overwhelming.

We talked about overwhelm already, but excellent to engage with an addictive something. It helps you get through the day. The final one that I have is being unseen. I touched upon this earlier. If you have the feeling that no one loves you, no one sees you, that we have a basic human need to be seen, to be considered, this is important. It's something that we have to plan, which is something that is definitely possible.

But if you don't do that, you're very much at risk of being susceptible to the solution of addiction. Let's make it personal. I have personal stories, because, of course, just lots of people in life, there are elements of addiction I've definitely struggled with. I'm relatively lucky, I think. It could have been worse for me, but luckily it wasn't. But I still have some stories from the trenches.

So because I have a very, I would say, compulsive personality, I talked about that in the episode where I talked about neurotransmitters. I fucking love dopamine. These things that give me dopamine, my incentive reward system is, if there's nothing wrong with that, it is a working. I can guarantee you that. But that does mean that I have to twiddle the knobs there, because if you're just following the dopamine, you know that generally that doesn't last.

I'm going to have some examples of that. So things that I've dropped. Caffeine wasn't hard, actually. I did it gradually. First, in my 20s, I drank a lot of coffee. I got really jittery. And then as I aged, I got too amped up, and it messed up my bowel movements and stuff like that. And at this point, if I drink caffeine once in a blue moon, sometimes I have a bad idea.

I have a bottle of pre-workout that has some green tea extract or something like that. I pay the bill for that the rest of the day. Excessive added sugar, similar as caffeine, less powerful for me. It doesn't get me full jittery, but I've definitely dialed back on added sugar quite a bit. So for different reasons. Alcohol. I've done stupid shit while drunk. There's people that can attest to that.

I don't consider me having been full-blown alcoholic at any point in life, but these things are, they're very like, how do you call that? It's hard to pin down. By some standards, I'm sure I was. I feel like I outgrew it. I stopped feeling the, I stopped liking the feeling of just being buzzed. And I'm not like, I'm not an Alcoholics Anonymous or something like that. I don't freak out when I drink.

Like once in the blue moon, I have a drink, I have some sips or something like that, if it makes sense. And this is really like maybe two, three times a year or something, something like that. But I don't even, I don't even like it anymore. And I used to very much, right? Like you would get into the ritual. This is actually a really interesting aspect as well, because the ritual is as much the addiction as the addiction.

I'm sure that I'm going to talk about that more as we go on. But the ritual show for heroin addicts, that would be like starting to find money, like engaging with that, like stealing something. It's all part of the ritual. How about if you have like a porn or sex addiction, just a ritual of it's Thursday night, let your wife's out of town, you can do something.

It's part of the ritual. You start like getting amped up at work, and then maybe look at something on your phone to get you, it's all part of the routine. Routines are very strong. And I feel like for alcohol, that was very strong, related to the routine as well, because with alcohol, it became socializing, which has lots of great benefits, relaxing, letting go, not doing things for work.

So I think those got really enmeshed. And then once I isolated alcohol, discovered that alcohol wasn't even that interesting to me anymore. Separate for health reasons, one of the reasons was as well as I was very consciously working on health goals, and it just didn't jive with it. Porn and masturbation, or sometimes how it's called as PMO, Porn Masturbation Orgasm, that I call ritual. I feel like I definitely had an addiction, definitely in the past for me on that.

I got exposed to it very early in life, as you often hear with people that have a porn addiction, or identify as such. So it was a strong solution coping mechanism for me in my teenage years. It was something like you get great dopamine looking at pictures and videos of individuals you were attracted to. Of course, you get a lot of feel good chemicals from orgasm. Look at my episode on neurotransmitters.

There's things that are definitely like really tied up in your whole reproductive thing. Yeah, that had its hooks in me pretty strongly because it was a coping mechanism that I was able to use to deal with anxiety, isolation, etc. There's something about porn that, although you want to engage with it when you're in isolation, how many people go and watch porn and jerk off when they're on a business trip, when they're isolated.

It's an opportunity, but it also promotes isolation because as you get the perennial addiction, you want to be alone all the time so that you can act out. Shame and guilt as well, although this society is not particularly shameful from one perspective about porn and masturbation, but still it's something that you don't talk about, and it can affect your romantic relationship as well. There's good documented examples of that.

It affects your attraction and your standards. Erectile dysfunction is oftentimes, I correlate it with sex addiction as well, which if you think about it, makes sense. Yeah, so that definitely was a struggle for me. And more about that later, because some of the things that I'm going to talk about are around community again, so it's definitely for that. I've definitely benefited from being in a recovery community around that, because for some things, it's a little bit easier to talk about with everyone, like your family and stuff like that.

This is one of the things that I just feel like makes a lot of my friends and family kind of uneasy, because it's not something that you're supposed to talk about. And it's something that, at least in my circles, I feel some of my people are engaging in as well, although their partners are not necessarily happy about it. So it's an awkward topic at best. So it's nice to be able to engage with the community, with people that really just can't handle it, where it just really escalates for them, to give you a little bit of focus about that later.

I say that a lot. Gaming. I had a big gaming phase towards the end of my 20s, where I was never that good. That was the irony. But I was very heady, in the sense that I would research a lot, and I played World of Warcraft at that time. And I just remember how much time went into that. You're preparing for that, you're raiding, you're making sure that you have the right equipment, that you got your meat seared and whatever.

And I just also remember how much dopamine I got when you got the special loot when you were raiding with your guild. This is a great example of something where I would say that there were a lot of positives to that, but also negatives. The positives is that it actually taught me, and I know others that I've run into in the professional circles, that it taught me how to work as a team.

It taught me things about leadership. It talks how do you hurt, like you've heard the expression probably, herding cats. If you're doing something with video games, you're doing it with multiple people, how do you herd these cats to do what you want? These are people that are doing something for fun. How do you get them to show up and et cetera, et cetera? How does that work, right?

So leadership stuff. So there's positives to it as well. For me, it's one of the things is that it affected my sleep a lot, affected my time a lot and health as well, because it's not what your body wants to do. So I almost completely let that go. I used to work for a company that provided services to companies in the gaming industry. So then I had a little bit of a resurgence where I played games on my phone.

But then at one point, I just also gave that up. Sometimes miss it a little bit because it's like nice, especially if you get good at something, gets you a nice dopamine. But hey, there's a chapter for everything. I still struggle with, I am not perfect, finance, food, exercise, tracking. I get pulled into tracking things, which are compulsive bids for control, especially around finance. I have these obsessive tendencies, if it's about watching the stocks, watching a portfolio I have, maybe something related to crypto, just refreshing because it gets you a little bit nice dopamine.

To the level that I would look a lot if things are trending up, and then if it would start going down, I would lose interest because it's not getting me dopamine, so I would stop looking. Is this funny? I'm just like knowing. When do I know that there's actually dopamine for me, but then I learned at one point that I don't have to look because it's crashing anyway.

I have that with food and exercise as well. So exercise tracking, I would get anxious about Strava. I used to do a lot of cardio, a lot of running, and I would log my runs in. Was I faster? Blah, blah, blah. All these stats, ultimately, it wasn't good for me, I think. It has a place just like for food tracking. I occasionally still track food because I have specific nutrition goals or I am on a trip and I want to keep an eye on my protein or something like that.

By itself, there's nothing wrong with it, but I feel in myself when the negative stuff is starting to outweigh the positives. But I definitely feel that I am very much still in the danger zone there. And I could see this is one of these things, what I was talking about. I could see that maybe it's an addiction that I would have to completely drop because it stops me from dealing with some of the more important things in life.

Is it so important to get your exact protein amount? What if you don't do that? What are the other things that I can do in that time? For example, this example is not particularly strong because how much time does it actually take? But there's something to be said because I do notice if I'm in food tracking mode, I tend to not want to eat things that are not on my apps.

I'm just like, okay, if I can get something like a whole food, what the nutritional value of an avocado is or a piece of toast or whatever, that's a whole food. But then if you go to a restaurant and you just get a random pad thai, what's in that exactly? So I do notice that I feel like, oh, I don't want to eat out because then I can't be as accurate in tracking my shit.

So that's a negative consequence, I would say. Sex, I would say as well, related to the porn PMO that I was talking about, is such a source of dopamine for me, probably a lot of men with me. But it's important to find a balance because you do want to express yourself. I do find sexual expression an important part of life. I would place it in my values, actually.

And I'm not saying that it should be in your values. I'm even annoyed that it's in my values. I find it like a lowbrow in a way, like the judgy part of me is, come on, do I really have to find that so important? But I do, it is how I feel about that. And there's positives to it. I could also say the same about, I don't know, doing cocaine or something like that.

It's very positive. It gives me tons of dopamine. It's what it does, it gives you a good feeling. But of course, there's different reasoning around it, because it's not part of expressing yourself, or as much at all, where sex addiction is always a complicated thing, because you do want to express yourself, be true, be authentic, because it is a need, or at least a strong want. But there's an overindulging as well, where you're just going for the more and more, and it's not really aligned with the rest of your values.

And that's what's the key for me, is when it starts taking over, that's when I know I'm overindulging. Or if I'm hiding, but doing things secretly, if I'm not being honest and open, those are all keys to show that I'm doing something sneaky. And when you're doing something sneaky, there's usually an addictive element to it, because why are you lying? Why are you hiding something? What's the reason for that?

I could spend a lot of time talking about that, not going to. Workaholism. Do you recognize that? Partially, I have a full-time job and then I do a podcast. So you can see what my speed is there. It's a major time sink in my life. Partially, our society is designed in that way, right? Work is eight hours a day for five days a week, right? For me, it's more than that.

And then at one point, it's also a little bit hard to determine what's work, what isn't work. What is the exact boundary? Sometimes you have a job where that's very clear, but if you have a creative job, it's not completely clear. It's not that you leave the office and that's when you stop thinking about work. At least that's not how it goes for me. So for me, I know that this is constantly something that has a chance of taking over my life because it presses a couple of my buttons.

First of all, it gets me approval in society, like having a good job and making a high income is quote unquote good. It gets you stuff. Then it's just like the income by itself and the things that you can do with it. That's great. A lot of people are affected by that. And then it's also the individual approval that you get at a job like working. For example, if I can do my job well, my boss is happy, that does do something for me.

I like feeling productive, productive member of a company or society. Some people have that a lot less. They just want to be creative and authentic in their expression in a different way. They couldn't give a sh!t how people think about that. More power to them. If you're that way, that's cool, because it allows you to do other things than I'm doing. So it's great. So I do know that's a risk.

What I'm oftentimes focusing on is constantly seeking to reduce the time that I work and also really be specific to work that I do if it's creative or not. Creativity and expressing is something that having to do with community is right now very high in my personal values. So that's not always how my day job is. Smartphone apps addiction. I have to make rules, time rules for apps, set screen time up.

I don't use my phone in the bed, for example. I for a while even put it in the bathroom so that I really have to get up when the alarm goes off. But getting up is not really my problem these days anymore. So it's not a big deal. But I have to put in a couple of different boundaries to make sure that I don't spend excessive time on my phone.

Also the reason that I don't have social media. I guess technically I could place that in my addictions. I got over it, but it was never like really truly that addictive to me. Do you remember, or maybe you can relate with something that you did one time, two times for a month, and you immediately flagged, okay, this is not going to be good for me. And then you stopped, because it didn't really have its cause into you yet.

That's how it was with social media for me. I didn't engage with social media at all until later in life. Then I had a couple of years that I got into it, and it got unhealthy, and then I was like, okay, f!ck this sh!t. And now it's quite different. I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with social media. Again, this is the great thing about compulsion, addictive stuff.

The fact that I, quote unquote, can't handle it, or it's not my speed, doesn't mean it's bad for you, you should stop it. You might get super much value from social media because your algorithm is all exactly tuned to the stuff that you need to hear every day, blah, blah, blah, et cetera. More power to you, right? All right, another thing that I struggle with compulsion, addictive-wise, is approval.

I'm being seen. I have the best boy in class syndrome. I want to be noticed. I want people to see how good of a job I'm doing, ideally. I want to deliver quality. And that can hurt relationships and authenticity. And it also affects how I'm engaging with that task. Because if my reward needs to be approval or being seen, you engage with the task in a different way.

You might not do things because you know that it's not going to get you approval. You don't know if you're going to get the approval. And you might do the things that you know that are going to give you approval, but then don't really align that much with your values. They're not novel. For example, I would get more approval in being seen by working more. But I already have much of that, so it doesn't really work that much.

And novelty plays a big role in this for me. I do also, by the way, see the irony of that. I'm here speaking, doing a podcast, and I'm complaining, complaining. Saying something about approval being seen is addictive for me. And of course, these things rub each other for me, for sure, because I don't know. It affects me in some way. If people like my content, people see my content, but I really try that it's not about that.

What I love is expressing myself, like expressing these thoughts, talking about these kinds of elements about addiction helps me in my life. I hope that someone who is less far than I am, like talking to myself five years ago or something like that, that it will be useful to them. That would be awesome if I help one person. Great, but you can't know that, right? But I do it more for...

because I enjoy the process. Great. Another one. Too much alone time and isolation. I am more of an introvert than an extrovert. So oftentimes, I get in situations where I sign up to an event or a meetup or something like that, and then I'm like, you know what? No, I'm not going. I like one-on-one situations, but I am closed off to massively large groups, which is funny because I love smaller groups.

I love group therapy, running groups, other types of groups that are really focused on a topic. I absolutely love that. But if it's more like such an event where you just chit chat or something like that or networking events for work, it's like, please shoot me. I'm not about that. But that has a downside because that can cause me to spend too much time by myself alone, especially for example, work trips.

I oftentimes feel too exhausted to join these network events at the end of the day. But that does put me alone by myself in my hotel room, which is also not great. And that is like for me a solution. The solution being I isolate myself so that I don't have to deal with the problem that I was engaging with people. So interpersonal effectiveness, basically. Cool. So those were my personal stories.

I am going to take a break. And after the break, we're going to dive in to what DBT has to say on that. So you stay right here. I'll be right back. Hey everybody, welcome back after the break. Let's dive right back into what DBT says about when the crisis is an addiction. So first of all, as mentioned before, this is part of the distress tolerance module in DBT.

So addiction is yet another crisis we can have. And as we've talked about before, we can see addiction as the problem, the disease, but we can also see it as a solution. So generally, I would even rephrase that as the crisis doesn't necessarily have to be the addiction. The crisis is the crisis, but the addiction is entering the foreground as the bandaid, the numbing agent, whatever we want to do to not have to face the tough emotions that are involved in living through that crisis.

So again, I'm trying to mend the disease model of addiction as a disease that should be cured with the model of, hey, addiction is actually the solution. It's just not a very good solution. It's a solution with a lot of negative consequences. So DBT, the training handouts and worksheets by Marsha Linehan. I'm on page 355 for some reason you want to follow along. And we're going to go through the overview.

As per usual, DBT has an acronym. This acronym is very easy to remember because it's DCBA. Of course, the acronyms don't really necessarily make sense, as it usually is with DBT, but hey, it might help regardless. So we start with the D. The D stands for Dialectical Abstinence. This is interesting. There is a lot to be said about the dialectic aspect of that, so I'm enthusiastic to dive in.

Then there's Clear Mind, so C for Clear Mind or Community Reinforcement. There's the B for Burning Bridges and Building New Ones, like to think about closing the door, not leaving the door ajar, but opening another door, and the A, Alternate Rebellion or Adaptive Denial. This last one is interesting, fairly unique to the DBT approach, I would say, based on all the other research and work I've done around addiction.

Let's dive right in. Let's start with dialectical abstinence. So remember, dialectics is very central in dialectical behavioral therapy. It's right there in the name. So what is a dialectic again? A dialectic are two seemingly opposites that you're trying to balance. So the classic DBT dialectic is change and acceptance. We generally, if we see something that we don't like, we don't want to accept it, we just want to change it.

That doesn't work. So DBT focuses on the yes and approach. Yes, we have to accept that this is how it is in the moment, and we're working on change. We can't just do one. We can't do both because they arise together. And I think this is especially apt in addiction recovery. So the dialectic that DBT offers us here is abstinence versus harm reduction. Remember, when we're talking about an addiction, we're talking about a behavior that has negative consequences, behavior we can't stop that has significant negative consequences that we don't like, doesn't outweigh the benefits.

Abstinence, of course, is one extreme, where you're just swearing off the addictive behavior completely. And guess what? No negative consequences at first glance. That's what you would think. And on the other side, you have harm reduction. You're actually acknowledging that there will be slips, that the addiction is there for a reason. From the disease model, it's hard to kick. From the solution perspective, there is pain that we have to find other coping mechanisms for.

But at the same time, we're trying to minimize the damage and not demanding perfection. The pro of abstinence is that people who commit to abstinence stay off longer. Again, this is based on research. The con is it takes longer for people to get back on the wagon once they fall off. These things to me at least make sense. Let's take a look at the harm reduction side.

What's the pro of that? The pro is when a slip does happen, so you engage in a part of the addiction, you can get on the wagon faster. The con is the people who commit to harm reduction relapse quicker. Let's go through a couple of examples here. Let's just go for alcohol, easy. Of course, we can see if someone has a problem with drinking, especially if they're an alcoholic.

Swearing off completely gets rid of that addiction, but you can also see the moment that someone has done that and they have that first drink, there will be a defeatedness coming over them, making it hard to not engage with the second, the third, the fourth. Makes common sense, at least to me. Where harm reduction, you can see a problematic drinker being like, okay, what I really don't want actually is having those four drinks or five or blackout drinking or something like that.

Again, we're not only with this model looking at hardcore alcoholics that really go to blackout drinking. Of course, within alcoholism, there's a lot of gradients, right? There's a lot of functional alcoholics that don't really get drunk anymore. They just drink all the time to self-medicate for the numbing factor, but it's not that they're going to a blackout state or something like that. So the negative consequences are a little bit more sneaky.

If we're focusing on a harm reduction perspective, you would look at something like, hey, we're not going to get blackout drunk. We're just allowing ourselves to drink one or two drinks. We still want to not drink, but if we drink, let's just minimize it. So that creates room in our heart or acceptance in a way that inevitably it will happen, and we still have some form of accountability then.

It's not that our plan has completely failed. I go back from 20 days sober to zero. It's a slip. It's not a relapse. So there's something to be said, and you can imagine that you would take a step approach from harm reduction to abstinence. It can be hard to go cold turkey. Again, this is very personal. I know of examples, personal examples, where people have stopped something overnight.

But generally, that has not been an addiction that was especially pervasive. When we're talking about the more hardcore addictions, they have set root in our life. They're such a part of our life. Imagine spending the majority of your waking hours really thinking of a heroin addict or something like that. Everything is focused on getting that fixed. Everything is part of the routine, even the eventually getting up in the morning and thinking about how to get money, to get the next hit, etc.

It's all part of it. So the more hardcore an addiction is, the more it takes over your entire life. So then if you take that away, you suddenly have, let's say, 18 hours in the day. What are you going to do with the 18 hours? It's not realistic to do a switch light. Not in all situations, right? There's different gradients. Of course, if you change your surroundings completely, something like that would be possible.

But the complicated thing as of me talking about addiction is really I'm talking about all the different gray areas here. I'm talking about, hey, I'm really spending a lot of time swiping on apps or on dating apps, and I don't want to spend all the time on Instagram or Facebook or whatever if I'm getting upset because I'm engaging in political discussions that has some of these aspects of an addiction, both you can look at it from a disease model of, hey, it's grabbing hold of me, but you also can look at it from the perspective of a solution.

Why am I engaging with people talking about politics or looking at these apps? Is there something missing in my life? Is there an emptiness that I would want to work on? I said about this, but I hope what is clear in this situation that it's not just about abstinence, it's not about just swearing off the addictive behavior, it's combining it with harm reduction. Because remember, in a way, the goal is to reduce or eliminate the negative consequences.

Think about it. Say if I have an addiction, and I take away all the negative consequences, there is no negative consequences anymore. It kind of ceases to be an addiction. If we just look at the definition. Of course, practically, it's hard to imagine. It's generally all the negative consequences add up. For example, if you remove the negative consequences of bodily harm, you're still spending time, for example, or if whatever your addiction would become free, you switch from, for example, visiting prostitutes or massage parlors to online pornography, which of course is free.

There's no money problem anymore, but there's of course other problems. So it's really hard to reduce, to take away all the negative consequences without swearing off the addictive behavior. But there are situations where there is like a middle path. There can also be a situation where you're at a balance with the negative consequences. You're just like, okay, this is a good equilibrium that I have right now.

I want to maintain this equilibrium of harm reduction. What I think is that ultimately, if you get used to that situation, you're going to want to keep reducing harm. That's generally how these things go. So, good to keep in the back of your hat that it's not just about abstinence is the only direction to run in. And if you're not sober or abstinent, you failed. Booking harm reduction is very advantageous as well.

Although the goal, of course, ultimately is not to engage in the addictive behavior anymore. One of the things that you often hear in the recovery community is you're always either abstinent or working to get back to abstinence or working to get away from abstinence. It's important to remember whenever we're engaging in the change of behavior that there's not that much of a neutral state where I'm not really working on my recovery, so I'm fine, I'm not acting out, I'm not working on my recovery, I'm fine.

Generally, that means that you're slipping. If you're not actively working on getting closer to your goal. There are a couple of mind pretzels in there, where you have to pretzel your mind. And that is, you have to both plan for abstinence, so that is your success. What the worksheets mention is, like Olympic athletes, they must believe and behave as though they can win every race, although they have lost before and will lose again.

You can see that they have to cultivate a mindset of a winner. If they're already assuming, okay, I might lose. That's not going to get them on the podium. But at the same time, they also have to embrace the possibility of them not winning and getting back onto the horse and doing the next thing. So there's a little bit of a double thing going on where you're planning for the best case, but you're making space in your heart for not having best case.

As we're making plans here, making plans for harm reduction and of course making plans for abstinence, they are slightly different. And we're going to talk about the different states of minds as well. But one of the things is to enjoy your success if you're abstinent, with a clear mind. And we're going to explore what's an addict mind, clean mind and clear mind. So you're planning for temptations to relapse, right?

That's what I just talked about. You spend time or touch base with people who will reinforce you for abstinence. We're going to talk more about community reinforcement. So this is like priming the pump for all of that. Community is, in my personal opinion, very essential. You can't do it alone. Or maybe you can do it alone, but lots of people can't do it alone, put it that way.

Plan reinforcing activities to do instead of your addictive behaviors. Important, like I mentioned before, you're going to take away something that you normally spend hours of your day engaging in. What are you going to do otherwise? Burning bridges, avoiding cues, and high-risk situations for addictive behaviors. Burning bridges means absolutely closing the door. We're going to go into more detail. As I say, we're priming the pump here, so stay tuned.

You want to build new bridges, open new doors, develop images, smells, mental activities, to compete with information associated with craving. New pathway. Finding alternative ways to rebel. This is an interesting one. We're going to get into that, but oftentimes to just feed forward a little bit. Engaging in an addiction often has something rebellious. Can you see that? Can you go back in your past, think about situations where you're like, okay, yeah, indeed, when I went binge drinking or doing this or doing that, I was rebelling.

I didn't want to be a model citizen. I did want to rebel. So, interesting topic. Going to get into that in more detail. Publicly announced abstinence, deny any ideas of lapsing to addiction. Very similar to burning bridges. I feel publicly announcing is part of burning bridges. So, I know we're not really talking about the 12 steps that much. Maybe I will in the future, but it's a very essential step.

I want to say it's step number four. I might be wrong that it is very important to... I think step number four is more acknowledging what we did wrong and talking to people about it. But as an aside to that, I find that something follows from that, and that is publicly announced that we're not engaging in it anymore. Because it's fine to go and apologize to someone, sorry, I did that to you, and then just continue doing the behavior.

So, it comes with it. You can't really truly apologize unless it comes with a behavior change, unless it comes with it, and the next time I will. Of course, you can apologize, but it's not going to be an apology that carries a lot of weight. So, we talked about planning for abstinence. Of course, we're also doing this dialectical thing where we're planning for harm reduction as well.

So, what are some of the things that we can do to reduce harm? So, of course, you can call your therapist, your sponsor, your mentor for skills coaching. And again, when we're going to talk about community, community is an important aspect of harm reduction, which is also a point to get in contact with other effective people who can help. You need to surround yourself with people that understand that it's hard.

This can actually be really a tough first step to make. Going to dive in more. I'm really inclined to pick at these topics, go into depth, but we're going to get into it. So I'm going to try to keep my pace up. Reviewing skills and handouts from DBT. Obviously, DBT is designed for people that are being very sensitive to strong emotions. Of course, being well versed in the skills and knowing the handouts will help you dealing with some of the other aspects in life that will tempt you to engage with the addiction.

Remember that the tagline from DBT is building a life worth living. When you have a life worth living, addiction will have a much harder time taking root in your life. Some of the skills, opposite action from the emotion regulation handout, and I have an episode on that, you can rehearse that to fight guilt and shame. Guilt and shame is a very large part of the addictive cycle, hiding.

Now, other option works. You can go to an anonymous meeting or of any sort or publicly report your lapse. That's an important aspect of it. Don't hide it, and it doesn't mean that you tell everyone. You go to the barista at Starbucks when you get your coffee and say, hey, I drank again and I didn't want to. No, that's not the right person, although that could be the person.

But it's more effective to share it with others that are trying to achieve the same goal. Next, we have building mastery and coping ahead for your emotional situations. Of course, these are skills that we've talked about as well. They can fight feelings of being out of control. Because you are not out of control, you can regain that control. And when you're feeling out of control, guess what?

It's very easy to engage with addiction. Interpersonal skills, as in the interpersonal effectiveness, that is a module in DBT I haven't talked about yet. But that can be very effective when you want to ask for help from family, friends, sponsors, ministers, counselors. Very effective. If you are isolated, help can often be found via online support groups as well. But it can still be very advantageous to know how to ask for help in the right way.

And interpersonal effectiveness helps you with that. You can conduct a chain analysis to analyze what prompted the lapse. So there's handouts and DBT for that as well. I've talked about that within the emotion regulation module. Emotion regulation has gone through a model as well to see, okay, what was the prompting event? I am angry now and I yelled at someone, but what happened before? What originally happened?

You generally need a little bit of calm, a little bit of time to reflect on that. It can be essential for once you've had, how do you call it, like a slip, to make sure that it doesn't turn into anything bigger. It's an opportunity, really. That's the key to see it. Hey, something happened that I didn't want. How did that happen before it happened again and again?

Remember, awareness alone can be curative. Problem solved. Problem solved right away to find a way to get back on the wagon and repair any damage you have done. So this is another emotion regulation skill. This is something that I can relate to more in emotional outbursts. I'm still prone to not reacting in the best way to those around me. And it can be really effective to see, okay, how can I reset the situation?

Like I'm feeling guilt, I'm feeling shame about this thing. I overreacted to it. How do I reset? How do I get back on the wagon with myself? And problem solving can be very effective. Oftentimes in problem solving, like apologies can be a part of that. Or acknowledging your responsibility and your accountability. Distracting yourself, self-soothing and improving the moment. So these are the main distress tolerance skills that I spoke about in the episode on distress tolerance.

As I mentioned in that episode as well, distracting and self-soothing, I think they're dangerous in context of an addiction because guess what an addiction does? It distracts you and it self-soothes. And within the scope of what DBT means with improving the moment, it doesn't improve the moment. So that one is still a good skill to reach to. But it can be very good in the short term.

I like to rephrase distracting as mindful redirection because in the moment that you've engaged in an addiction and you don't want to, what might have happened to you is that you're upset. And that you can't center. And then it can be very effective to just take a break from it a little bit. Take a break from it, distract for a little while, self-soothe for a little while, self-care, really.

And then return to do your homework. Cheerleading yourself can be very important. And what this point really says, I think, is the reverse of the opposite. Don't be too hard on yourself. But partially or mainly because it's not effective. It's not effective. I've talked about effectiveness before within the scope of DBT, and I will talk about it more. It's been really mind- or life-changing for me, where you're analyzing and you're looking at the actions that I'm doing.

Are they effective? I feel like in the past, my main driver would have been, is it truthful? Is it rationally correct? Nobody gives a shit about that. Who cares if you're right? So this depends on your own values. And I have decided at one point that being right doesn't matter. What's the point of being right? Can I be right to begin with? Because it's an unattainable goal, you never know really that you can be right, which has more to do with epistemology, which I might talk about in the future.

Being effective, cheerleading yourself is more important. Being like, okay, I made it a lot further than last time. This is great. I've built up essential skills. I can do this. That's much more important. Doing pros and cons of stopping addictive behavior. So this is part plain vanilla distress tolerance. I am a fan of this skill, although it is a lot of homework. Again, if you're interested in that, check out my episodes on distress tolerance, previous episodes where I talk about the pros and cons.

So DBT, you do a pros and cons of both acting on the urge and acting against that. So it puts your brain in devil's advocate mode, which can be very important as well. So great skill. Stay away from extreme thinking. Don't let one slip turn into a disaster. I really feel that is the other side of the cheerlead yourself. Push up, not nose dive. And ultimately, you do want to recommit to your total abstinence, because that's ultimately what you're aiming for, depending on what you're aiming for.

Again, what I find complicated in this whole addiction work is it often for good reason is very black and white. Especially in early addiction, you have to be very black and white about these things. If an addiction is very severe, it has to be total abstinence, especially if it's, for example, sex addiction and you've been caught by your spouse for cheating or something like that. There's no alternative.

This is your chance to repair. Don't fuck it up. But still, we're also talking about more subtle addictions. So maybe it's recommitting to 100% acceptable negative consequences. But there's, of course, danger there because you're leaving the door open. But ultimately, the door... If you can decide to close the door and stick to that, probably that's the best thing to do. The fear that I have or the challenges that I see is a lot of the addictive behavior that's not super hardcore that I see friends and family engage in.

That step of committing to total abstinence is almost unreasonable. For example, if you have a smartphone addiction, you could get a dumb phone. That is possible, just you can text and call, that's it. But do you really want that? Because that's in a way like extreme by itself, and that invites questions as well. Why do you have a clam phone? And oftentimes, going all the way, making that sacrifice all the way is not worth it to people.

And I would find it a shame to throw away all the other lessons in this context. So, take it with a grain of salt. All right, let's talk about the different states of mind. So, DBT distinguishes, and plain vanilla DBT, non-related to addiction, focuses on emotional mind, rational mind, and in between a fusion of both, which is wise mind. I'm sure I've talked about it before. For addiction, there is a similar model.

Where there's addict mind, there's clean mind, and there's a clear mind in between. So, the addict mind is probably pretty straightforward. We intuitively understand what that means. It's impulsive, it's one-minded, and it's wanting to do anything for a fix. You're ruled by the addiction. The urges for habitual problem behaviors determine your thoughts, your emotions, your behaviors. You're being ridden by a demon, and that's oftentimes how addicts describe it.

A clean mind on the whole other side of the spectrum is naive, is risk-taking, and it's oblivious to dangers. When you're in clean mind, you are clean, great, but oblivious to changes that might cue habitual problems and problem behaviors. You believe you are invincible and immune to future temptation. Both extremes obviously can be dangerous. We've talked about this before with the athlete mindset that both has to make space in their heart that they might not win, but they're acting like they're going to win.

And that's what that fusion in the middle is really about. So the clear mind is the safest place to be. You are clean. That's good. But you remember your addict mind. You know that it's... You're just one trigger away. You radically accept that relapse is not impossible. There's space in your heart. You have to plan for it. This is essential. You enjoy your success while still expecting urges and cues to pop up and planning for when you're tempted.

So it can be very important to know your triggers. And groups that I've been part of often talk about that. What are the threats? What are the opportunities that are coming? Where opportunities is more like the positively formulated threats, because from a threat, you can learn. All right. Behavior patterns. So that you can recognize the addict mind and the clean mind. Remember, the both extremes that are not super useful.

Addict mind is, of course, engaging in addictive behavior. And thinking, I don't really have a problem with addiction. Thinking, and this is an important one, I can do a little. A little can't hurt. Thinking, this is not as bad as what I did before. Thinking, I can indulge my habit, if only on weekends. Thinking, I can't stand this. I'm just being ridden by that demon. What happens as well is glamorizing addiction.

Because addiction often comes with a lifestyle. There's negative consequences. We're talking about the negative consequences, but what about the positive consequences? There are advantages to the lifestyle. It can grant you opportunities, and that's the reason that many people get stuck in it. Being on the internet and researching ways to engage addictive behaviors, right? And this is similar to, I can do a little. I'm not going to go to a massage parlor to really give you a happy ending, but I'm going to research it anyway.

Not a great idea. Obviously, buying any paraphernalia, food, drugs, videos, that would support the addictive behavior. Engaging in selling or exchanging items at all. So even if you're trying to get rid of it, if you get rid of some of the paraphernalia related to your addictive behavior, that's still engaging with it. Of course, things like stealing to pay for the addiction. That's what you do in the addict mind.

Even selling your body, so you can get the money you need. We're more talking about hardcore addiction here at this point. Of course, major ones. Lying. The addict lies. The addict hides. The addict is leading. And the addict isolates. Many times, addictions, they happen in isolation. Oftentimes, people say as well, the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, it's connection. Implying that what addiction really is is isolation.

The addict also always acts busy. Have you seen this? I've seen this in people around me that were more engaging with it again. You get in this go mode, you don't really pay attention to the commitments that you've made before. Speaking of that, breaking promises, committing crimes, acting like a couch potato, like a corpse, right? Having no life, not engaging with any hobbies. Remember, DBT, build a life worth living.

You're not having a life worth living. You're acting desperate or obsessed. You're not looking people in the eyes. This is a very essential tell. Having poor hygiene, that goes. It's not as important to you. And avoiding care in general, self-care, doctors, things like that. You can probably take a minute and think about all the other things that come to mind. This is, of course, not an exhaustive list.

But you can probably sense that. You can recognize it in yourself. Let's talk about the other extreme now. Clean mind. When you're engaging in apparently irrelevant behaviors that in the past inevitably led to addictive behavior. Maybe if you've had something on the spectrum of sex addiction, maybe it's just being on Instagram. I'm just on Instagram. But what does being on Instagram lead to? You see a couple of models.

Oh, you're interested in this model. You go to their page, and before you know it, you're in territories that you don't want to be. Also thinking, hey, I've learned my lesson. I'm cured. Thinking, I can control the habit. It's so tempting, but can you? Can you really? Thinking, I don't have an addiction problem anymore, what I was saying, just now. Stopping or cutting back medication that helps with addiction, very dangerous.

Being in environments where others engage in addictive behaviors is a big no, of course. It normalizes it. Seeing friends that are still addicted, living with people who are still addicted, keeping addiction paraphernalia around. This is part of building your bridges. You don't need it, close it. And this can be true for many different types of addictions, if it's something on your smartphone. Setting it up in such a way that you can't install your problematic apps or access adult content or something like that.

You can do that. Nowadays, it's pretty easy to do that on your phone for free to set it up. In that way, you might need a person to set up a code for that so that you can't break into jail, as it were. Carrying around extra money, if that's how you've engaged with your addiction before, just having cash in your wallet so that there's no traceability. Excuse me.

Being irresponsible with adulting in general. Feeling like you don't have any problems. Not going to meetings that you've committed to. So, interestingly enough, the addict mind doesn't. It breaks promises, but the clean mind does as well. Not confronting the problems that fuel addictive behaviors. So again, there's a hiding aspect as well. Acting as if only willpower is needed. This is oftentimes when you're in the psycho, when you're in a high, you're just feeling great, and you're just like, okay, I could just say no to this.

Isolating as well. So this is an interesting one. Both in clean state and in addict state, there is a drive to isolation. So this is also the reason that in these communities, people talk about isolating so much, because you're doing it on both ends of the spectrum. Look at your own experience. Have you seen this in yourself? I see this in myself. Of course, it depends on the exact addiction that you're struggling with.

Big one here as well is believing I can do this alone. It's a very tempting thing to think, because there are some people that can do it alone. But realistically, not a lot of people can. Community is such an important aspect. So partially, although it is in a way, if you can do it alone, you don't have to face the shame and the guilt, because everything that you do by yourself is just within your own bubble.

But that does exacerbate the problem, because one of the things that you need to do is to get rid of shame. Again, I've talked about that in emotion regulation. DBT has great worksheets on what every sort of primary emotion is about and what your escape hatch is, in a way. And for shame, the escape hatch is actually talking about being seen, and it will drain shame right out.

That doesn't mean, again, that you have to go and tell the barista at Starbucks, or even your spouse, or even whatever. But to find someone who can carry that is very essential. This is 25% of the work, which is a wet finger in the air estimate. Thinking, I can take pain medicine, I can diet, I engage in addictive behavior. If prescribed or advised, I don't need to say anything about my past addiction.

This is important, especially if you've been clean for a while, and then you go get your tooth pulled, and it turns out that you've abused painkillers in the past. You should probably mention that to your dentist, even if you've been sober for 10, 15 years. So I've in the past listened a lot to the podcasts of Kevin Smith, and Jason Mewes is a person he shot a lot of movies with, movies like Clerks, Chasing Amy, Dogma.

Jason Mewes had a painkiller addiction, Oxycontin, I believe. And the second go around when he got addicted again, the initial trigger was legitimate. I forget what it exactly was. I don't know if it was a dentist thing or whatever, but his initial engaging with the pain medicine was legit. So you can't be doing that. Again, thinking, I can't stand this. So the thinking, I can't stand this is on both sides.

So it is on the addict side and is on the clean mind side as well. So it's like a rejection of the experience itself. And that leads to a negative vicious cycle basically. So the thoughts that you want to cultivate are more in a cheerleader way. So again, there's of course more characteristics of a clean mind, but let's leave it at that for now. I would love to talk about community reinforcement.

So I personally see a lot of benefits in community reinforcement. Partially for me, it is that I just love groups. I love groups with people that are committed to personal growth. So this can be in context of an addiction, but it can be in a completely different context as well. But community can really help, especially if that community is not very closely connected to your problem. For example, if you have an addiction and your partner has suffered from that, maybe they are not the ideal people to talk about for everything you're going through because you've hurt them with your behavior.

So they don't want to hear that much about how you're struggling. They want you to see the pain that you've caused them and work to repair that every single day. So how DBT formulates it is, community reinforcement means replacing addiction reinforcers with abstinence reinforcers. So this is a key thing. People often say as well that in order to break a habit, you have to make a habit.

As in, you have to replace it. If you take away something that you engage with for hours or helps you cope with life, what are you going to replace it with? And that can be something completely different. It can also not be a coping mechanism. It can just be something that makes your life better. But they need to be abstinence reinforcers, at least some of them. So it is critical.

Reinforcers in your environment play a powerful role in encouraging or discouraging these addictive behaviors, obviously. To stop addictive behaviors, you have to figure out how to make a lifestyle without your addictive behaviors, and how to make it more rewarding than a lifestyle with your addictive behaviors. So this is again a little bit of a Jedi mind trick, a little double thing, right? Because usually when we think about, oh, I have to give up a thing.

Oh, that means I can't drink anymore. Oh, that will be a sacrifice. Oh, that's going to suck. But that's a put down way of thinking about it. It's more focusing on what are you going to do with all those resources after you've kicked your addictive behavior. So what is rewarding about it? And surrounding yourself with the community, guess what? It helps there because you will be with people that have witnessed that.

You have to find a way to get behaviors incompatible with addictions to pay off and be rewarded by those around you. I'll say that again. You have to find a way to get behaviors incompatible with addictions to pay off and be rewarded by those around you. Oftentimes, the behaviors you have that are compatible with addiction, they might reward you in some way. There probably was a field of forces that kept them intact.

A good example is if you're engaging with an addiction, you're generally isolating. That means that the people around you don't have to deal with you. Where's that? Oh, he's in his study. You're there taking care of yourself. The moment that you stop doing that, that does mean that you have to do something else, and that's going to have an effect on those around you. You have to find a way to get the behaviors that are incompatible with these addictions to be positive for those around.

Or maybe not positive, but at least acceptable. And if you're working with them, it would be great if they're rewarded as well. So if people around you, the community, knows that you're trying to do, instead of engaging with alcohol, you're doing gardening or something like that, it would be helpful if people then actually support that, reward that, to give you a little bit of a boost, a little bit of tailwind.

The final part of why reinforcing abstinence is critical is that willpower is not sufficient. If it were, we would all be perfect. And I would like to make an addendum there. Willpower is probably not sufficient. Plan for willpower to not be sufficient. If you have tried this and failed, so this is again where awareness alone can be curative. Yes, people can drop certain behaviors just like that.

I remember when my mother stopped smoking, that at least how it came across to me was like an overnight decision. This is a long time ago, and at one point the studies showing that it was really bad for you, that became very conclusive. Once that information reached her, it was just like from one day to the next, it was gone. I don't know if that's actually how it went, but we like to believe in these kinds of stories, but oftentimes we don't know what actually was going on behind the scenes.

So it would behoove you to plan like willpower is not sufficient. If willpower was sufficient, you would probably not be listening to this because you would not have the problem to begin. It can be an important insight. How do we replace addiction reinforcers with abstinence reinforcers? Begin a series of action steps that will increase your chances of accumulating positive events to replace addictive behavior. Pretty straightforward. Search for people to spend time with who aren't addicted, just new friends.

Meetups can be related around addiction recovery. Doesn't have to be. I think both are very important. Increase the number of enjoyable activities you engage in that do not involve your addiction. This is actually much more important than you would think. And what I've witnessed, when people get deeper into addiction, even if it's not hardcore addiction, it's not that they're actually having a lot of fun. They're actually really serious about it.

And they're not doing things that actually recharge them. They just reach for this maladaptive behavior. So it's important to take a look at if you're struggling with this. Do the counterintuitive move of not just putting the screws to yourself, and you really got to get it together now, but also plan enjoyable activities, like actual enjoyable activities, especially just for yourself, where you do not get any external validation that you're doing something useful.

Maybe for you that's going for a drive. Maybe that's going to the movies. Maybe that's whatever, a walk in nature. Whatever is just like pure self-care. Maybe it's even going like skiing for a weekend, like any of these things. If you cannot decide what people or activities you like, sample a lot of different groups of people and a lot of different activities, right? So oftentimes you see that people that are engaging in addiction a lot, addiction has taken over their life so much that they don't even know what they like if it's not their substance, right?

There are a lot of things that you can engage with, especially these days of meetup, right? Just find a bunch of different activities. It's easy, it's usually fairly cheap, and it's essential. So those are abstinence reinforcers. Abstinence sampling, I would just more call it making a plan. Oftentimes, it can be advantageous to not make your initial plan too daunting. Make a plan of taking a certain amount of days off from your addiction.

It can be a week, it can be a 30-day plan, 60-day plan, 90-day plan. Observe the benefits that naturally occur. But know that you can get back to your addiction. So you're just temporarily avoiding high-risk addiction triggers, replacing these with competing behaviors to get you through the sampling period. You're focused on observing all the extra positive events occurring when you're not engaging in addictive behavior. So oftentimes, what I see is, well, an engagement journaling, right?

But you just have to do it for a number of days. That can make it easier to accept it. Of course, ultimately, if you're done with your 90-day plan, you're in a state to be like, okay, let's now make a year plan. And then at one point, this is just going to be your new normal. But it is important to sometimes sample first, right? Especially if something has really taken root.

Just take a vacation of it. And focus on awareness, because awareness alone can be curative. But you have to build up this experience in order to make the after state brighter for you, the after addiction state. Let's talk about burning bridges and building new ones. I find this one pretty straightforward, so I'm going to try to fly through it. Accept at the most radical level that you are not going to engage in addictive behavior again, and then move actively to cut off all addictive behavior options.

Closing all the doors, making an absolute commitment. Not this like, I don't know, maybe sounds cool, would be nice, like a little daydreaming about it. No, and even visualize it, like DBT is big on visualization. You can visualize it in a way of that you're putting it somewhere, you're slamming the door shut, and in your mind also that you're bolting that door. You have to remember the tiniest slit of space can let an entire elephant in.

So, really being diligent about that. Oftentimes, when you're burning bridges, you also have to sit down and engage a little bit of your creative mind, because what is everything in your life that makes the addiction possible? You have to be aware of these things. So list everything, do that with a friend or an accountability partner or whatever. That can be very essential. Then if you have that list, there's a second part to it.

Get rid of these things. Oftentimes, groups that I've been part of, that is the first step. If you're going to be part of this group, partially you're part of a group to accept some of the rules of that group. The rule of the group can be get rid of your stash. Get rid of if it's drinking, there is to be no alcohol in the house. If it's porn, no stashes, your internet access needs to be blocked.

Various of these rules, generally these rules are not 100% tight for everyone, but it can be really advantageous if you do something like that, to really get with the program. And it can also be contact information, like if it's your dealers of the past, throw as much information out that you actually can. Of course, you still have a memory of some of these things. Getting rid of cues and temptations can be very important as well.

And again, this is part of that creative process. You have to be able to see the entire ritual that you go through as part of your addiction, because oftentimes it starts with something cheap or not as something innocent, like an Oreo cookie that turns into more Oreo cookies, that turns into shame, that turns into isolation, that turns into whatever the addiction is that you're really talking about.

List and do everything that you can that will make it hard or impossible to continue your addictive behavior. So not just getting rid of cues and temptations, but also blockages. How can you make it hard for yourself in addict mode to actually engage with the behavior? Two things that can be very helpful there is that ruthlessly and at every moment tell the truth about your behavior. This is essential.

It doesn't have to be, again, the barista at Starbucks. It doesn't have to know everything. But have someone that you are telling everything. And if it's not someone, make it a journal. Get it out. Get the truth out. Tell your friends and family that you have quit as well. So this is part of the burning bridges as well. Some people think I can do it alone. I'm not even going to tell.

No, make it a moment. And that is by itself is going to present an obstacle because you're going to feel shame. But if you do it, you're actually going to jettison some of the shame because you will be more seen. Of course, we want to be building new bridges as well. These bridges often are on the subconscious level because oftentimes an addiction is sneaky in the sense of slip into it.

We don't consciously decide, hey, I'm just going to grab the whiskey and pour me a glass, although it's 11 in the morning. Usually, we wake up to it like when we're already doing it. Similarly, we want to create visual images and smells that will compete with the information loaded into your visual and olfactory brain systems when cravings occur. You want to build literally new neuron bridges. Like I said, cravings and urges are strongly related to vivid images and smells of what is craved.

The stronger the imagery or the smell, the stronger the craving. Can you see that in your awareness? What are the things that you've been addicted to? And can you visualize? I can. What kind of images? And of course, the images are strong emotions that are tied to that. Another thing that you often hear is what fires together, wires together. So oftentimes if you're engaging with an addiction, and more about that later, it's kind of rebellious.

So there's adrenaline. I'm doing something I'm not supposed to. So you have a fuck ton of adrenaline in your system. Guess what? Then there's a bunch of dopamine coming in. What does that create? Very vivid images and memories. Smells often tie into that as well. It depends a little. That's more like subconscious. I can't relate as much with that necessarily. But images, absolutely. You want to build different images or smells to think about.

You're trying to compete with this super shiny memory of something that it's a lot of addicts, and I can relate to this aspect of it as well. I find it hard to even replace that, that sort of like their ultimate positive addiction memory, which completely worked because we remembered a positive so much better than a negative in those situations. So you want to create stuff that competes with it, which is going to be hard.

So try to keep these images or smells in memory when you have an unwanted craving. So that vivid image is coming up because you like, I don't know, smell stale beer from a bar or something like that. Alcohol is your problem. Or whenever you crave a cigarette, like switch that, imagine that with being on the beach and other like very immersive experience. See and smell it in your mind to reduce the craving of everything that's related to engaging with that cigarette.

When you have unwanted cravings, look at moving images or surround yourself with smells unrelated to the addiction. Moving images and new smells will compete with your cravings. This is straight from DBT. Don't have that many personal experiences with that. For me, it's much more about mindfulness. So I would add that to, maybe that's not, it's building a new bridge in a way I would say. But craving is something that a lot of people say that it happens to them, but no, you engage with it.

You throw wood on that fire. You're fueling that fire. The moment that you're just like that, craving comes into your mind, you are engaging with it. You're making it stronger. Even if that's a craving and you turn it into a feeling of disgust or anxiety because you don't want to be having the thought. But this is like the age-old adage about not thinking about the pink elephant that they more often use in meditation.

You can't focus on not having the craving. Focusing on not having the craving engages the craving. That's just the nature of the mind. So what is important is to more center and be in the present. Because in the present, your addiction is not there in the present. There is the breath. There is the feeling of air on your skin. There's, and this is where smells come in, so you can light some incense.

That's there. That's something to focus on that you can associate with peace and sobriety in that sense. So that's what we're trying to do here, ground ourselves in the present. Another thing is mentioned here is urge surfing. I've spoken about that in previous episodes as well. Urge surfing is the concept of acknowledging that you're riding a wave of urges. That is a strong force that you have to ride.

But what is important to realize is a wave is not going to last forever. So it might be very hard to imagine having to not engage with that craving. But what you can commit to is not doing it for five minutes. Five minutes is doable. And once you've done it for five minutes, can I do it for another five minutes? If I can't, can I do it for one more minute?

Right. And that way, the wave will run out of steam at one point. So everything that you really need to do is postponing. And being mindful in those five minutes or engaging in distraction or self-soothing, as was mentioned in these other skills, very essential in combining the subconscious and the conscious there. So don't underestimate the power of smells and images in addiction because it's major. All right.

We're going to talk about alternate rebellion and adaptive denial. As I mentioned before, I've read and been part of groups and whatever. So I've never really heard that much about alternate rebellion and adaptive denial. I feel that's pretty unique to DBT. Maybe it's not, but to me, it's new. So what is it? What is alternate rebellion? So when addictive behaviors are a way to rebel against authority, conventions, and the boredom of not breaking rules or laws, which often is the case, try alternate rebellion.

Alternate rebellion replaces destructive rebellion and keeps you on a path to your goals. I love this. I have not that strong of an association with it. It's not super relevant for me, but I have people in my surroundings that I think of. And I don't know, maybe it's something that really works for you, but I have some elements of it. I have some elements of wanting to break rules, even if they're silly and small, just to feel that rebellion.

And I also know that the breaking the rules for me, for my compulsive and the addictive patterns, definitely was a part of it. It definitely had this, this is where the adrenaline comes from. You're doing something that's bad. If I'm like drinking alone and someone would come in, that's like bad. It gets your adrenaline going. So I have the association with that. So I can get into that.

I do things, tiny microaggressions of rebellion. And for addictive stuff, that definitely was a part of it. Let me speed up. So some examples that DBT gives us is shaving your head, wearing crazy underwear, wearing unmatched shoes, having secret thoughts, expressing unpopular views, do random acts of kindness, vacation with your family at a nudist colony, write a letter saying exactly what you want to do, dye your hair a wild color, get a tattoo or body piercing, wear clothes inside out, don't bathe for a week, print slogan on a t-shirt, paint your face, dress up or dress down, where doing so is unexpected.

So just a couple of examples. There's many more that I can think of, and you can probably think of as well. But it's a good tool. It's a good tool to have in your toolbox. And I would say that I also see examples of that, of people coming out of addiction and doing things like that, that are more visible. So in a way, it's also a way to...

Some of these things are still isolated, right? If you wear crazy underwear, like nobody's going to see that. It's not that big of a deal. But some of the other things, like printing a slogan on a T-shirt or painting your face, people will see that. And if you don't bathe for a week, probably that will be noticeable as well. Writing a letter saying exactly what you want is an interesting one as well.

I do think that is powerful. This is just like journaling in general. I don't know if I feel like it's so rebellious. It often is the case with DBT. There are some funky examples in there. Yeah, this is an interesting one. It required me to think about it for quite a bit. But the A for DCBA also stands for adaptive denial because the rebellion, it's not what everybody is engaging in addictive behaviors with.

When your mind can't tolerate craving for addictive behaviors, try adaptive denial. Give logic a break when you're doing this. Just don't argue with yourself. You can turn that part off. Remember that 90% of our decisions are emotional anyway. Logic is always post hoc reasoning. So when these urges hit, deny that you want the problem behavior or substance. Convince yourself that you want something other than the problem behavior.

For example, reframe an urge to have a cigarette as an urge to have a flavored toothpick, an urge to have alcohol as an urge to have something sweet, or an urge to gamble as an urge to alternate rebellion. See, we just talked about that before. Interesting, right? Be adamant with yourself in your denial and engage in the alternative behavior. Now, I'm curious, this doesn't really speak that much to me.

It just, it doesn't. But it's not, I'm not saying that I'm wiser than DBT. It just, it doesn't really make that much sense to me. But maybe to you it does. So that'd be great. I will experiment with it as well. So one of the advantages that I have doing these videos is I get to dive really deep into these skills, because normally I would read this and I would be like, okay, what kind of shit is that?

And move on. But now, of course, as I'm talking about it, I'm trying to do it justice and to really creatively think about what are the situations that this would actually do something for me. Yeah. Part of the adaptive denial is whilst putting off that addictive behavior, put it off for five minutes and then put it off for another five minutes and so on, which as far as I'm concerned, is the same as urge surfing.

But the advantage then is you only have to stand this for another five minutes, right? By telling yourself each day, you will only be absent for today, or each hour just for this hour and so on. You are saying, this is not forever. I can stand this right now. So that's also a denial of the feeling that you can't stand that. This part resonates with me just fine, but I feel it was already covered in urge surfing before.

So, excellent. This is where DBT has taken us. So this was the module, the DBT module, where we basically went through the DBT skills. I'd like to summarize it. We had DCBA, if you remember. So we focused on the dialectical abstinence, where we understand that there are... We ultimately want to go for abstinence, but we want to balance that with harm reduction. Because oftentimes, in order to get to abstinence, we have to start at harm reduction to make sure that it has less power over us.

That was the D. Then we talked about C, clear mind, and community reinforcement, being aware of these different voices, the addict, the clean mind, and the synthesis of both, and the power of community reinforcement. So there's a little bit of a choice there. Double C in a way. Burning bridges and building new ones. That was the B. Making sure the doors are closed, and not just closing doors, but opening new ones, new associations.

Being very aware of that addiction is oftentimes fueled by vivid imagery and smells, so that you want to work on vivid images and smells, but in more healthy contexts. And finally, the A was for alternate rebellion and adaptive denial. So addressing that aspect of your addiction that might be around breaking the laws and not wanting to be a good boy or a girl. Giving that a place so that you can do that, but in a way that doesn't hurt you.

And adaptive denial, which I would just rephrase as urge surfing, but it doesn't start with an A, so it wouldn't fit the rhyme scheme here. But just being aware that when you're urge surfing, even if it feels like you can't stand it, you can probably make the commitment to do it five minutes, and then another five minutes, et cetera, et cetera. So thanks. I think all in all, this has been a longer episode than I intended.

I might split it up in two. I might just make one of it. But thanks very much for having joined me on this journey. I've really enjoyed talking about this, researching this and putting this, doing all my notes, et cetera, et cetera. It helped me to look at it in a number of different ways. I hope that this provides a bunch of new insights to you as well.

I already started, I believe, with a disclaimer, but I do want to re-underline, of course, that I do not have any formal credentials. I'm not a certified DBT trainer. I'm just a guy. I have experiences, and I'm sharing my experiences with you in the hope that my stories, my personal anecdotes are helpful to you. So thanks very much for tuning in. This has been Vincent for The Meaningful Sh!t Show.

I hope to see you as soon as possible. And up next, I will focus on an episode on nihilism, which actually was very essential for me to build my values from the ground up. So I'm really excited to talk about that as well. So I hope that having explicated that to a camera helps me to prepare this episode quickly. I'm really trying to release these videos at a faster heartbeat, but it's a lot of work to do.

Not just the recording, the preparation as well. I would probably be shocked by the amount of hours that go into that. But anyways, do it gladly. Thanks for tuning in. I hope to see you next time. This has been Vincent for The Meaningful Sh!t Show. See you around.