Mindfulness for Addiction

Two things drive addiction – Firstly it’s a way of avoiding emotional or physical discomfort – who wouldn’t want to do that?

It’s normal to want to avoid pain, but when we look outside of ourselves toward a substance or a behaviour to get that relief, then we will always be prone to addictive traps.

Let me show you how it works. Let’s take alcohol for an example, when you drink it shuts down your consciousness and becomes a barrier between you and your feelings ( all of your feelings not just the painful ones, but we’ll come to that). It deadens the anxiety loneliness heart ache or old trauma and gives us relief. You might forget your problems. For a little while anyway.

Then what happens? – nothing at first, you’ve just been ignoring your feelings and you’ll just be fine for a while and may even confuse it for a good time. but feelings you are ignoring don’t go away, they don’t heal you aren’t dealing with them you are burying them. and they will come back to haunt you!

The pain doesn’t go away it builds up and after a while even the things we are doing to avoid the pain start to cause it! And then what do we do? More of it of course! 

You can swap your addictions for a bit but eventually, we end up where all addicts end up. Where we can’t live with our addictions any more – but we have no idea how to live with ourselves without them. 

It’s not just drink and drugs other, people use work, shopping, sex even exercise to avoid their feelings and if you don’t think you’ve got addictions you haven’t looked.

Have you noticed how every time you feel emotional discomfort you reach for your phone?