In thinking about what states of mind are desirable and what it takes to get us there, I find Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s exploration of flow to be most compelling. Most of us have experienced flow at some point – when your attention is so fully absorbed in an activity that you are undistracted by anything outside,… Continue reading States of Flow
People struggle a lot to meet goals, and there is a lot of writing on the subject. Hey, me too! I can write about it too! As a morbidly obese alcoholic with depression, I had a lot of behavioral health goals that eluded achievement. In fact, most of my life, I knew nothing but failure… Continue reading #Life Goals
I’ll spare you the George Thorogood song. Like a lot of people, my early drinking was always with a group. Like a lot of people, a happy effect was feeling looser in socializing, and fitting more easily in with the group. Even when the drinking reached binge-status after hours of partying, no one was concerned… Continue reading I Drink Alone
The first two weeks I quit drinking were terrible. I was obsessed with thoughts of alcohol. I wanted nothing more than to drink. I wasn’t a better person who didn’t need to drink any more. I wasn’t a more mature person who had learned better coping skills for her problems. I had sobriety in a… Continue reading The First Two Weeks
Drinkers, after all, find other drinkers. We tend to choose people who speak a certain language: Let’s go get a drink. Let’s have another. Oh, c’mon. Just one more… The chorus plays in the mind, liquid lyrics. The drinker who’s always game for another, who’d rather stay and drink than go out and eat, who… Continue reading A Chorus of Drinkers
It’s the framework psychologists love to hate – Elisabeth Kubler Ross and David Kessler’s 5 stages of grief. A lot of this hostility is rooted in the misunderstanding that the expectation is that people march through these stages in order, when in reality, they are constantly shuttling between them – in denial about one aspect,… Continue reading Addiction and the 5 Stages of Grief
When you’re thinking about your drug and alcohol use, your mind plays all kinds of tricks on you. Even the healthiest among us falls into maladaptive patterns of thinking sometimes. Throw chemical dependency in there to mess with your motivations and rationales, and the addicted mind is a powerful and single-minded captain of the ship.… Continue reading Brain, Heal Thyself
