The Addicted Mind Podcast

We have Kenneth Anderson, from HAMS (Harm Reduction Abstinence and Moderation Support) and the Harm Reduction Network with us today. He will be talking about harm reduction, what that means, how that differs from traditional forms of treatment (like twelve-step abstinence models), and the way that the harm reduction model can help people who are not yet ready for, or not willing to practice total abstinence, but would still like to change their drinking habits.Kenneth is the founder and CEO of the HAMS Harm Reduction Network, a free-of-charge support group for people who want to make any kind of positive change to their drinking habits, from safer drinking to reduced drinking, to quitting altogether. There are seventeen elements to the HAMS program, which are all optional and can be done in any order. Although HAMS is an alcohol-focused group, they don't stop anyone from talking about any other addictions or problems that they may have.Episode link>>>>www.theaddictedmind.com/89HAMS has a handbook, called How To Change Your Drinking, which was written by Kenneth. The book was published ten years ago and about 22 000 copies have been sold on Amazon.Kenneth used to drink a lot and he was getting into trouble as a result. He tried turning to several different groups, Alcoholics Annonymous included, for help but they did not work for him. He tried Moderation Management for a while, and while he was there, he developed the Harm Reduction approach. He was fascinated by the concept of harm reduction and began volunteering at the Needle Exchange Program in Minneapolis. There, he learned a lot and it completely changed his perspective. He realized the importance of encouraging every positive change.The problem with abstinence models is that they are perfectionistic. So any improvement that anyone makes, apart from abstaining entirely, is not deemed to have any value whatsoever.The Harm Reduction Model is about every positive change and it is a very pragmatic model in the United States. It was started in Holland, when drug users decided to do something to help themselves, and decided to start handing out clean needles to prevent their friends from dying. This model used to be illegal in the United States and it is still illegal in many places.Harm Reduction encourages people to pick a goal that fits them. A goal that is do-able and right for them. Many people who come to Harm Reduction eventually choose to abstain completely.Generally, about 85% of all the alcoholics who recover do it on their own. It sometimes takes a long time, but recovery from alcoholism through controlled behavior does happen.Early on, there were a great number of approaches to addiction treatment. Kenneth is currently writing a history of addiction treatments in America. Aversion Therapy was big in the US until the 1980s. There was a chain of about 25 Aversion Therapy hospitals, using conditioned taste aversion, or electric shocks, and there were no alternative treatments available at the time. What sets the Harm Reduction Network apart from all other recovery programs is that they are willing to welcome and support anyone who wants to make any kind of positive change to their drinking habits. They have online groups and a forum on their website so that you can do all the work yourself, for free. They also have a very popular Facebook group. Better Is Better is one of HAMS's most popular models.Links and resources:The HAMS website - www.hams.ccThe National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC) Waves 1 and 2: Review and summary of findings - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4618096/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Josh Rychert joins us today. He will be talking about the recovery community called Recovery Dharma, in Boise, Idaho. Josh shares his personal story and explains how mindfulness, Buddhism, and learning to understand his dharma assisted him and can assist others too, by bringing the elements of peace and calmness into their lives and their recovery process. Episode Link>>>>>www.theaddictedmind.com/88Josh is in Boise, Idaho, where he has been involved in the recovery community since 2014. Recovery Dharma, under that name, only came into being last year. Recovery Dharma in Boise started as Refuge Recovery, with small groups and alliances with other similar groups through an online presence. Recovery Dharma is an addiction recovery peer support group, with meetings all over the nation. It uses Buddhism, with the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, as a way to structure recovery for individuals.Josh's recovery began in 1995. After having had issues with an alcohol use disorder, he became involved with Twelve Step groups. And after many years of recovery, Josh eventually found himself moving away from the Twelve Steps and developing an interest in meditation, to help his depression. Eventually, he rediscovered his need for a recovery community, and he fell into the Buddhist addiction recovery path, under the name of Refuge Recovery.Buddhism was something that recognized Josh's capacity to have a life where compulsions and addictions were not the primary focus. It offered him an opportunity to identify with a recovery path that didn't identify with his addiction. He could, however, still recognize the risk of compulsions and addictions in his life. The kind of present moment experience that Josh wanted from Buddhism was the experience of seeing the world clearly, being able to participate in life, and simply being alive and happy. While recognizing, at the same time, that he had certain risks to his wellness.For most people in recovery, options are not offered to them in the beginning. People with addictions are usually referred directly to Twelve-Step-based recovery programs, although many people don't resonate with that. Having Buddhism as an option is valuable because it recognizes a modern incarnation of our knowledge of recovery and it does not require reliance on a Higher Power.Mindfulness has been scientifically validated. With cravings, mindfulness helps people to be with the discomfort, and sit through it. Also, when the cravings have lessened, mindfulness helps people to thrive, in the moment.Recovery Dharma is broken down into some general categories. There is the practice of meditation, there are recovery meetings, and there is the study of Buddhism.Dharma is often the word used to describe the teachings of Buddhism. More broadly, it describes a sense of truth, or a clear understanding of reality, or the wise teachings that bring about in people a sense of well-being and an ability to connect with the world. It allows people to share their wisdom and it offers them a sense of togetherness.The Recovery Dharma meetings facilitate a sharing of wisdom through engaging in a practice to build a sense of calm and equanimity.Recovery Dharma is a branch of Refuge Recovery and it addresses the underlying causes of people's addictions. There's a recognition within the professional community today, that Recovery Dharma, and the practice of meditation, are very valuable to people on the path of recovery. Links and resources:https://www.meetup.com/recoverydharmaboise/ Recovery Dharma's Facebook page - https://www.facebook.com/groups/recovery.dharma/The Addicted Mind Website - www.theaddictedmind.com For more info about Novus Mindful Life Institute, go to www.theaddictedmind.com/helpJoin our Facebook group. Go to www.facebook.com, type in The Addicted Mind, and click 'join'.Book: The Mindful Way Through Depression by  Mark Williams, John Teasdale, Zindel Segal, and Jon Kabat-Zinn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Today's guest is Alex Katehakis. Alex is a Clinical Sexologist with a doctorate in human sexuality. She's also the Clinical Director of the Center For Healthy Sex in Los Angeles, California.Alex has written several books - Sex Addiction As Affect Dysregulation, Erotic Intelligence, and Mirror Of Intimacy. Episode link>>>>www.theaddictedmind.com/87In today's episode, she shares her wisdom and insight about recovery and we have a great conversation about the root causes of the addictive process. We focus on the early developmental trauma and the way that it affects the ability to regulate our affect, and how addictive substances or processes are used to escape from those feelings. Alex has always been fascinated by human sexuality. After practicing as a licensed marriage/family therapist for twenty-five years, she decided to dive deeper into human sexuality, rather than psychology.Talking about affect is referring to emotions. These emotions live deep within the body, and they only come forward when they are registered by the brain as feelings. When a person is dysregulated and stressed out, their affect becomes dysregulated. When a child feels threatened, perhaps from an alcoholic, raging, shut down, or mean parent, their affect becomes dysregulated and they will always find themselves looking for something to make them feel better. In their waking life, a dysregulated person will feel anxious, depressed, dead internally, or dull. There's a general lack of feeling vitality in the body.Dysregulated people say they don't feel joy states, or they are super anxious, so they have to drink to make the anxiety go away. They may use sex to make themselves feel powerful or good about themselves.Anything that we're doing outside of ourselves to make ourselves feel 'right internally' speaks to affect dysregulation. Someone who is securely attached, and has a good heart-rate variability in general, doesn't have to reach for anything to change their internal state or mood. Love addicts, and some sex addicts, learned very early on that they had to get their needs met by themselves, so they used fantasy, which is a form of mild to moderate dissociation. This makes it difficult for them to connect to another person, as an adult, and to have intimacy or closeness. People often don't know this about themselves until their lives become unmanageable. Change is possible, however, it takes time. Willpower is difficult for people experiencing a lot of stress. It's not the best way to change long-standing patterns that people have developed over time.Long-term psychotherapy can help people feel into their bodies, and it allows them to feel the things they could not feel, as a child. Twelve-step programs help people change because they are inclusive and non-judgmental. As humans, we all need other people to survive. In her book, Sex Addiction As Affect Dysregulation, Alex looks at the underlying mechanism that drives problematic behavior. It helps people to see sex addiction in a new way, and it offers hope for the people who are struggling with it. Sex addiction is being recognized more and more by the scientific community as a bone fide problem. It was first recognized in about 1978, although people were talking about it as an affliction as early as in the 1800s. In 2011, the American Society of Addiction Medicine made a public policy statement, in which they included sex as an addiction. In 2018, a proposed diagnosis of compulsive sexual behavior disorder was established for the international coding book, the ICD.Remember, it's never too late to take a step in the direction of health!Links and resources:To find out more, go to www.thecenterforhealthysex.com Alex also has a Youtube channel with hundreds of videos from sex-experts around the world. Alex's books: Sex Addiction As Affect Dysregulation           Erotic Intelligence           Mirror Of Intimacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

David Fawcett is our guest for today and he will be talking about chemsex addiction. He will explain what it is and how people recover when they fuse a drug addiction and a sex addiction. Episode Link>>>>>www.theaddictedmind.com/86David is a licensed clinical social worker and a sexologist (sex therapist). For the last twenty years, he has been working with men who have sex with men who use methamphetamine, other drugs, and high-risk sex. He has now developed an interest in what has become known as chemsex.  For years, people were coming to David, as a sexologist, with their sexual problems. By looking at their history, he noticed that the sexual problems were being caused by methamphetamine. And he realized that people were often seeking help for their sex problems rather than for their drug problems. This led to David's discovery of the fusion between sexual behavior and drug use. And the devastation that it caused for the affected individuals. People simultaneously using drugs and sex causes a fusion, or bonding, of neuropathways in the brain. This brings about a specific set of behaviors, making it necessary for them to deal simultaneously with both their sex and their substance addictions. People's sex lives become so set by the super-stimulation of sex and drugs that nothing normal is appealing anymore. Sex and porn addiction play out similarly and the brain has to reboot in recovery. There is even a state, called anhedonia, where people are no longer able to experience any pleasure and life feels grey and depressing. This is often due to the brain shedding its receptors. People who were a year or eighteen months clean were coming to see David. They had virtually no sexual desire because sex been so fused with their drug use that when they gave up the drugs, the sex went with it. This happens because of Dopamine, one of the neurotransmitters in the brain, that bonds actions and rewards together.  With chemsex, there is a high-level volume of stimulation coming into the brain. So the brain sheds its Dopamine receptors to control the level of stimulation that it is receiving. This can lead to depression. Methamphetamine is neurotoxic. This means that it consumes and destroys the receptors in the brain. It can take several years in recovery for the neuropathways to recover. Recovery from chemsex involves working with both the chemical and the sex sides of the addiction. David uses an abstinence-across-the-board model, combined with recovery plans for sex and substance addictions. One of David's goals is to re-integrate healthy sexuality back into people's lives. Anything that gets people into their bodies and out of their heads speeds up the process.  Peer support is really valuable for recovery from chemsex addiction. Recovery is possible! Links and resources:David's email - david@seekingintegrity.comDavid's websites - www.seekingintegrity.com              www.sexandrelationshipshealing.comSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-addicted-mind-podcast/donations Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Kathleen Oh is our guest for today. We have a great conversation with her about breathwork, facilitating change, and non-ordinary experiences. Episode Link>>>>www.theaddictedmind.com/85Kathleen is an Integration Coach, and her work started three years ago, in the foundation of her addiction, and her recovery. She had plenty of help from some great mentors and teachers along the way, however, it was ultimately the tools that she acquired for herself, in her journey out of her addiction, that got her to where she is today.Kathleen has a food addiction. This was very hard for her, and although her addiction wasn't obvious to others, it was clear to her that there was something profoundly wrong with her brain because she saw how she was continuously cycling through addictions with cigarettes, alcohol, and food. She was a binge-eater who used to eat secretly. She was obese, and her appetite for refined foods was insatiable, so she knew she had an issue with food but she did not realize at the time that it was an addiction. She thought it was an emotional need that she was trying to fulfill.The specific foods that Kathleen cannot tolerate are refined. Due to their molecular structure, her brain takes in refined foods as if they are drugs like heroin or cocaine. It was a huge eye-opener for her when she discovered that by removing refined foods from her diet, she was able to access the non-ordinary experiences of a spiritual awakening.Breathwork has resulted in some of the most profound experiences that Kathleen has ever had. She started her relationship with breathwork about twenty years ago, when she encountered Breath Therapy for the first time, and her facilitator became her mentor. Breathwork has allowed Kathleen to feel safe to be in her body. This connection to herself has given her something wonderful that she has never experienced before. Breathwork supported Kathleen in a way that she could accept the difficult moments in her life and power through them. Breathwork became a place of surrender for her, and this became the foundation for her recovery.Although the method that Kathleen's breathwork facilitator used was initially very challenging for her, it became the primary breath that Kathleen used at the time. It involves a sharp intake of breath, into the top third of the lungs, and the sound it makes can create a shocking feeling and cause one to re-experience past traumas that have been stored in the body. Holotropic Breathwork is probably the most effective and best-researched breathing technique. It was developed in the 1960s by a psychiatrist called Stanislav Grof, who came to the US to do LSD research. When his research into LSD was terminated in the late 1960s, he continued looking for ways to bring about the non-ordinary state. He found that breathwork was as effective as LSD, and using yogic breath practices, shamanic journeys, and loud cultural music and drumming, he developed the Holotropic Breathwork system.The breathwork that Kathleen coaches and facilitates is intuitive and unguided. One of its premises is to inhale a lot more breath than you exhale, to build up CO2 in the body. This shuts down the default mechanism in the brain and allows people to connect with parts of themselves that have previously been inaccessible on a day-to-day basis. This technique works very well for addictions because it allows people to access their inner truth, and see themselves in a different light. They can then work with their experiences with more resources than they had when the initial incident occurred.Breath is our life source. Kathleen believes that breathwork is our highest power and something that everybody needs because it connects us to something greater and more powerful than we are. By practicing breathwork, we are creating a better version of ourselves which will ultimately benefit everyone. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Today, our guest is German Lopez. German a writer and he is currently doing a project called The Rehab Racket, which involves looking into addiction treatment, exploring some of the issues associated with it, and bringing them to light. This challenges the addiction treatment community to provide the very best care for people who are suffering from addictions.German is a senior correspondent at Vox.com. Before, he was writing mostly about drug policy and criminal justice issues, but for the past few months, his focus has been on The Rehab Racket project, which was created to investigate the cost and quality of the treatment that is available for addictions in the United States. At this point, German has received more than 1100 submissions from patients and their families.For the last few years, German has been researching and writing about the opioid epidemic. He saw that policy-makers had been making an effort to put more money into addiction treatment, which is something that activists had been calling for, for quite some time. This information initially seemed contradictory to him because addiction is hard to treat, and there was a general understanding out there that much of the available treatment was inadequate, not evidence-based, and not really helping a lot of people. German wanted to make sure that the money being poured into addiction treatment was indeed going towards something worthwhile and effective. So he started talking to families, to ascertain whether or not he was onto something. This is how The Rehab Racket project came about.It seems that the idea that people who use drugs and go through addiction treatment are under-represented overall in the conversation, has changed in recent years, particularly with the opioid epidemic. This is what motivated German to want to hear directly from the affected people.Hearing from people who found a treatment that worked for their addiction, and got them into recovery, who had spent thousands, and sometimes even tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on that treatment was alarming for German. The American health insurance system is supposed to protect people from these catastrophic costs, and in a lot of cases, the insurance is not doing that due to the many barriers that are involved.For a long time, society neglected this particular area of health care. There were initially no places that provided treatment for addictions, so that forced all the assistance to come from community groups, like AA and other twelve-step groups.Treatment for addiction is still a relatively young field, it takes good research to make a good change, and we are still learning about the most effective ways to help people who are struggling with addictions. However, many treatment facilities don't track their outcomes and many of the surveys that are done around addiction and recovery are of very poor quality, so it's difficult, at this stage, to know what kind of treatment is the most effective. But, based on the data that's available from the federal survey of treatment facilities, there seems to be more push lately to find out more about this particular field of health care.People with addictions need support. However, there's still a stigma with addictions, so people who struggle with them often get treated badly, with a lack of compassion. German has seen that even doctors, nurses, and other people who have been trained to deal with the suffering, tend to be prejudiced towards people with addictions. He would like to see this change and see the people in authority and policy-makers realizing that people with addictions need to be treated kindly, with compassion and care. He points out that this could be one of our society's main lines of defense against the current drug crisis. Links:German's Reporting on Vox - www.vox.com/rehabGerman on twitter - @germanrlopez Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Today, we have a great conversation with Jen Sugermeyer. She shares her story of addiction and recovery, and she talks to us about overcoming her shame and her fear of reaching out, and how she managed to change her relationship with herself. Jen's addiction started at the age of twelve, with an eating disorder. At the time, she did not realize that she was paving the way for her brain to become accustomed to satisfying her reward system. When she reached her mid-thirties, she was an alcoholic and she had been trying to get sober for more than a decade. Looking back, Jen could see her pattern of gaining control of one addiction, and then that leading to another one. Jen was living an extremely chaotic life, running in and out of jails and hospitals, and then straight into work. She was trying to keep the two parts of herself separate and it was eating her up inside. She even became suicidal towards the end, from living such an unmanageable lifestyle. She kept trying to fix her symptoms when she was the problem. She couldn't get a hold on her addictions, and she knew that at some point, she would have to come to terms with the fact that she needed to work on herself. Although Jen really wanted people close to her, she could never get too close to anyone because she only wanted people to see one part of who she was. And she was working in Corporate America, where there was a stigma around having any kind of mental health issue. So there was a constant battle raging within her between the two aspects of herself, and she felt very alone because there was nobody that she felt she could talk to. It was around this time that she became suicidal because it seemed the easiest way out. It was only when she was about twenty-five that Jen admitted that she had an addiction problem. And it took at least another five years before she could admit to being an alcoholic, even though she had to acknowledge before that, that there were things about her behavior that didn't line up. From the age of twenty-five, she was in and out of AA for about ten years.Jen had to learn to love herself. This became abundantly clear to her when the man she was dating told her so and it was his words that finally launched her into sobriety. This was the first time that she understood what she needed to do. Coming out and talking about everything has been an interesting road for Jen. She has been well-received and she's found the experience more liberating than she imagined. However, she realizes that there's still a lot of work to be done. Although Jen gave herself an entire year to work on her recovery, she knows that will have to continue working on herself every day, after that. Because, since she was twelve, she has never really felt her emotions and she has always been suppressing her feelings.About five years ago, Jen finally started admitting to her alcoholism. She got sober and began wrapping her head around the recovery process. Although it took a long time for her to find her sobriety, she's okay with it because she doesn't think that she would be the person she is today if she had found her sobriety at the age of eighteen.There is a whole lot of forgiving that goes with recovery. Not just for others, but yourself as well. Jen knows that she would not have been where she is today without having learned to let go. Jen has written a book, called RESET (Recognize, Eliminate, Standardize, Elevate, and Transform). She started writing it on the first anniversary of her sobriety. It's about what she went through, and how to claim the life that you deserve. It will be coming out in the spring of 2020. You can sign up on her website for the VIP launch, to get a copy of her book for only 99 cents.Jen also has a 101 coaching program that will be coming out in 2020.Links:Jen's website - www.jensugermeyer.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Today, Dr. Faye Mandell is with us to talk about spirituality, connection, and how being in the present moment and looking at our reality from a quantum perspective can help us find more joy and happiness. Dr. Mandell is a practicing Awareness Coach. Although she has a Ph.D. in psychology, she does not use the old paradigm psychological framework that she learned in graduate school. Dr. Mandell wanted to continue educating herself so she went to the Cambridge Adult Education building in Massachusetts and decided to randomly choose a course. At the time, she did not yet know that random was the order of the universe. She had never studied anything to do with physics, before, and by chance, the course that her finger landed on was called Quantum Physics In The Face of God.The course was given by Fred Allen Wolfe and it completely re-oriented Dr.Mandell's life and changed the way that she interacted with people from then on. She started to see things clearly and understand that reality is not what it seems. You cannot solve a problem with the same information that you used to create it. Thought moves you in time, so when you're thinking you cannot be in the present moment. When you are in the present moment, however, the mind is quiet and the information from your body becomes what you focus on, and what's intelligent for you. This is because the body has superior intelligence.All our cells have memories, and memories are intelligent. They can sense what is good for us and what is bad. And we're getting information from all our cells continuously, moment by moment. This kind of information is known as natural codes and it does not require any input from the mind. The function of the mind is to create and innovate ways to connect with the present moment.Our feelings are the information from the body to ourselves. Built into each feeling is the right action to perform to recalibrate ourselves to come back to the present. So, to get the body to use its superior intelligence, we need to pay attention to our feelings. This is the exact opposite of what our culture tells us to do. Anxiety and frustration are examples of the type of feelings that give us information.Feelings lead to thoughts and negative emotions are feelings plus thoughts. We need to learn how to separate the feeling from the thought so that we can stop pulling lower emotions back into ourselves. We want to listen to how the thought is structured, rather than the content of the thought, so that we can find out where we are in time and space.Our experiences create forms that then become our belief systems. This locks us into a false belief about what reality is and it can make us lose our creative ability. Dr. Mandell calls this being in the matrix. She helps people by reframing things for them so that they can see them from a different perspective.To get people off their addiction to listening to their stories, and to move their attention to the structure of their thoughts rather than the content, is the challenge of awareness.Addiction to thoughts is as powerful as an addiction to a substance. Shifting your focus is the key to your freedom. When you are free from addiction, you become able to make choices and become driven by the wonderful six drivers of behavior. They are service, compassion, integrity, accountability, courage, and gratitude.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Steve Rio, Founder of the Nature of Work is our guest today. Today, we’re talking about work and recovery and what affects the recovery process. In a quest to live our best lives, we want Steve to share his take on how we can optimize our lives and live in a way that fulfills us.Episode Link>>www.theaddictedmind.com/81Steve is a futurist, technologist and researcher born in Vancouver BC, Canada. Steve is founder and CEO of Briteweb, an international social impact agency delivering strategy, branding and digital, and the Founder of Nature of Work, helping people be more productive, creative and happy in their work and their lives. Steve thrives at the intersection of social impact, culture and technology and is an expert in exponential organizations, remote and distributed teams and workforce wellness and performance. He has real world experience leading remote and distributed digital teams as well as implementing technology and systems for over a decade. It’s through the lens as a freelancer turned business owner and entrepreneur that he thinks about performance for modern workers.   Social media has invaded our daily lives and because we are engaging with technology in such a persuasive way, we now have one of the most addictive devices in our pockets at all times. It’s hard to separate ourselves from social media because we feel like it is a way to engage with our friends. However, we forget that social media platforms have been engineered to be addictive. Steve founded Nature of Work out of his own need. He wanted a quiet space, close to nature, where he could do his deepest and best work. Despite his best efforts, he still could not calm his mind and focus in the way he expected. Because many of us have complicated relationships with work and technology, we can’t just control our external environment to get a productive outcome - we have to look internally as well. Our time, attention and focus are pulled in a million directions each day, and the technology we use to accomplish our work, is also what causes us the biggest distractions and the lowest productivity. We are in the information age, and our tools can be used across multiple platforms to accomplish various tasks. In previous times, the tools used for work could only accomplish the task we were working on - think about a shovel. You wouldn’t be able to check Facebook on a shovel, so you could have long periods of attention and focus in order to accomplish the task. Steve advocates optimizing your work so that you can be more productive, but also so that you can have a higher quality of life and an increased level of fulfillment. We work ourselves to burnout level without taking into consideration the quality of our lives. When we get back to basics with our daily routines and practices, we can begin to see profound changes. Our time and attention are the 2 greatest assets that we have. They are non-renewable and determine the quality of the experience of our life.   Resources: Nature of Work Steve on Instagram Steve’s Podcast - Now with Steve RioSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-addicted-mind-podcast/donations Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Recovery from addiction is a particularly challenging process for women, who are also mothers, to go through. Emily Lynn Paulson, author of the book, Highlight Real: Finding Honesty and Recovery Beyond the Filtered Life, is our guest for today's show. She shares the story of her addiction and her journey along the path of the process of recovery and healing. Emily used to dislike herself a lot. She had difficulty with being honest, both with herself and with others. From a very young age, she used to tell white lies to cover up the things she didn't like about herself and to make up for the things she thought she lacked. When Emily started drinking, it helped her to cover up, and make up, for the things she didn't like about herself or that she thought she lacked. The first time she ever drank alcohol, she realized that it affected her differently to the way it affected her peers. Rather than just having fun, when she drank, she felt that she was finally the person she was always meant to be. This theme wove its way into different areas of her life and followed her until she found recovery.As an adult, Emily had five children and she didn't drink while she was pregnant. So she continued denying her problem for quite some time until the consequences of her drinking finally started outweighing what she thought she was getting out of it.Emily didn't believe she was an alcoholic at first because she thought she could stop drinking. She made several attempts to stop but she always started again. Deep down, she knew that she had a problem but she was not willing to let it go forever. That is alcoholic-thinking, and it is very common. Eventually, it got to the point where Emily could no longer deny her alcoholism. All the dishonesty, secrecy, and lies of omission can make addiction a soul-crushing condition. Other people are often not fully aware of what is going on, so they don't step in and offer to help.Although Emily came to realize that dishonesty didn't work, it was still very hard for her to become fully honest. She found that coming out with her sobriety, and also writing her book, helped her to make the connection and become truthful about who she was, and about the things she still needed to deal with. She knew that she could not start afresh without first dealing with everything that had come before.It's very easy to give a false impression of what is going on in our lives with social media. And many people fall into the social media "comparison-trap". Having to confront her kids with her alcoholism was the most difficult part of recovery for Emily but it was also her biggest blessing because it brought about some very necessary conversations. Alcohol is not something that women have to do to survive their kids. For Emily, her book is an important message to women, telling them how necessary it is, to tell the truth to other women about what alcohol does to mothers. Since Emily started putting her sobriety first, she has been able to be there for her family in a way that she has never known before. Her life has become so much better. She's not perfect now, but her best day when she was drinking was always way worse than her worst day, sober. Links and resources:Emily's website - www.emilylynnpaulson.com Emily on Instagram - @highlight real recoveryYou can find Emily's book on Amazon Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.