THE LIFESTYLE ENTREPRENEUR

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Naming and Taming our Addictions

I have an addictive personality.

I have alcoholism on both sides of my family.

I am a veteran and an entrepreneur - and both groups have a higher prevalence of mental health and addiction issues.

So I’ve logically been concerned about substance addiction my whole life. While I’ve been lucky enough to avoid any clinical addictions to substances - I’ve flirted with it with alcohol over my 25 years as an adult.

I’ve also learned that I can get addicted to pretty much anything I enjoy.

And letting my addictions run freely inhibits my overall performance and experience as a human.

Being a lifelong high performer who is always working to increase my performance and experience, I’ve worked hard to manage and mitigate my addictions.

And of course have developed a tool 🙂

Defining and Naming

The webster definition of addiction - Addiction is the inability to stop using a substance or engaging in a behavior despite the negative consequences on a person's mental and physical health, relationships, and daily life.

Most people equate this with substances or behavior that will kill you or ruin your life eventually - like alcohol, heroin, gambling, etc.

I choose to include anything that fits within the definition - basically anything that once I start using or doing, I want to do it every day and have to expend mental energy to resist it.

When you lower the bar of the definition, you realize you’re running around addicted to tens, maybe hundreds of things on a daily basis - using vital mental energy on avoiding that substance or behavior.

I made this realization a while ago and started growing tired of it.

Since then I’ve applied a simple therapy approach to help manage it, called “Name it to tame it”.

Name it to Tame it is generally used in emotional or trauma labeling, which can be applied to our addictions.

It involves identifying and naming our emotional experiences, or in this case our addictions. The act of labeling something engages the prefrontal cortex of the brain - which is responsible for executive functions like reasoning, planning, and problem-solving.

When we name it, we by definition “tame it” by reducing it’s intensity. This makes it easier to manage and work with, with multiple benefits:

1. Creates mental pause - allowing you to be objective about the emotion or addiction

2. Allows for therapeutic work - naming it makes it easier to discuss with therapists, friends, and/or family - which is usually attempted to hide from others due to shame of addiction

3. Empowerment and control - naming allows individuals a greater sense of control over their lives

4. Increased self-awareness - introspection and critical thinking about your behaviors allows for greater understanding of why you’re engaging in them

This concept has been groundbreaking for me - especially coming from a family that doesn’t talk about hard things and pretends everything’s great in life.

The first step in managing addiction? Name that fucker.

My Addictions

Ready to hear all mine? All the nasty little bits? I’ll try to name them, but only allot 90 minutes for newsletter writing so you’re going to get everything I think of in about 15 minutes.

I’m sure I’ll miss a few that are in the depths of my soul not wanting to come out, but we’ll get the point.

Over the past 5 years, as I’ve made transformational progress in my addictions, I’ve begun labeling them according to the below matrix for ease of use:

Ok that’s my list, and it goes way back to video games when I was 18.

Some of these are silly - granola? But yes, I randomly developed a granola addiction in October that caused me to gain some fat and I had to make adjustments to rid myself of the stupid addiction.

Some are major - like alcohol - where they affect many other aspects of life.

A few notes on mine:

Current:

• Whoop straps and Oura rings are AWESOME - I highly recommend them. I’m also slightly addicted to my data. It’s not causing any negative effects though so I’m currently good with it

• Work & empire building - when I’m building things (which is almost always, including now), I would literally work all day every day if I could. I’ve learned to manage it over the years so it’s not a concern. It’s there though and I have to manage it

• Alcohol - I originally had that in “past” but that’s not true - I have played with different levels of alcohol consumption over the past 5 years after taking 9 months off for the first time, and don’t think I’ve found my perfect balance. I had my last drink on 11/1/2023 and am taking the entire 2024 off drinking as an experiment - I’ll report back on that one

• Deal Celebrations - That’s when something amazing happens at work - land a new client, sign a new lease, whatever - and the adrenaline rush makes you want to “celebrate” - which to me means have some drinks or a rich meal. I’ve been working hard to normalize those feelings and not act on them over the years with great success - they still arise though

• Iphone pickups is my current worst addiction - I’m trying to reduce them, my tool is putting the weekly average on my scorecard. If I fail my next step will be to remove social media apps from my phone. If I fail at that I’m going to get a flipping flip phone

Past:

• Porn - I don’t use porn anymore, but also didn’t find it to be deleterious to my life or relationships, so it’s in the “fine with” category

• Chap stick - one of my greatest accomplishments!! I was a chap stick freak up until some point in my 30s, and then all of a sudden I wasn’t, success!

• Friday freakies - similar to deal celebrations, it’s the end of week craving to “get fucked up” that was built up over a decade of doing exactly that. I still feel it, I just don’t act on it

Tips for managing

Hopefully one benefit of reading this is to see that I have weird addictions just like you. And if you don’t have any, consider yourself lucky!

Then you can hopefully see that just naming yours can remove much of their power.

Bringing our addictions out in the open, giving them names, and talking about them with our friends, therapists, family, is probably the biggest step in overcoming them.

And the less energy we have to spend managing them, the more energy we can expend being awesome.

I’ll talk to you next week,

Mike

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