Transcription
I want to answer one very big question with this video. It's a question I imagine pretty much every addict has asked at some point, and definitely anybody who has got sober has been asked. See, going from addiction to sober is not a straight line. You have lots and lots and lots of different attempts; some people fall back, but people do make it out. So what is it? What is it that separates the failed attempts from the one that actually worked?
This is a question that I got asked the other day on a podcast. The host was Matt Della; we were talking about sobriety, and he point-blank asked this question to me: How do you go for attempt 42? Like, how do you how do you go for that attempt and tell yourself, like, this time it's going to be different? I gave a bunch of answers in that pod, but I think it's really worth going into detail because, uh, at the end of the day, it might be one of the most important questions to answer. How do you do it? [Music]
I kept thinking about it, and then I started writing some stuff, and I realized that I had seven different answers to that question. So that's what this video is.
Number one: Revel in the shame. I want to make sense of this idea: reveling in the shame, in three ways: firstly, acknowledge that the shame is normal; secondly, by reflecting on the introduction you might have had to addiction; and thirdly, by identifying what moments trigger shame, and they aren't necessarily the big dramatic ones. If you are in addiction, or if you've felt addiction, or if you are not too sure and you're like, "Oh God, oh God, don't have a questionnaire that I end up answering yes to," please don't tell me I'm an addict. If you're feeling any of that, then, uh, yeah, you probably feel shame. And if you are, I really want you to know I am in no way going to judge you. I think a lot of people misplace the blame on addicts and not on the forces that profit off their addiction. You know, it's the classic thing: saying kids are always on their phones, they're addicted to their screens, instead of saying, "All right, social media platforms to be run by sociopaths who only care about shareholder growth," and that because they have money, the best and brightest minds of our generation end up working jobs, not going to the moon, but getting kids literally addicted to digital products. Now, the kids do it wrong. [Music]
My introduction to drugs and alcohol was, uh, I guess hard and fast is probably what you call it. First time I ever smoked weed, for example, uh, my friend's brother was just shooting up heroin, and I just assumed that drugs were all or nothing. Anyway, I had a bunch of those types of experiences as a teenager, around 16, started drinking alone, which is sad, quite depressing, and I also had my first overdose around then as well, 16. But yeah, none of that really stopped me. I just wanted to keep going. I just wanted to see how dissociated I could get, how high I could be, if I could be high all the time, and um, yeah, I really tried. I gave it a good attempt, and I hurt a lot of people, hurt myself. Same story you always hear, isn't it, when it comes to feeling the shame? It's no small feat because the shame is just so, so deep, especially if you've been doing it for ages. There's no shortage of data of people who've had rocky childhoods, with people who develop addictions later in life, so the shame is often far deeper than when you discovered the medicine. That's a lot to deal with as well. But yeah, my early attempts to use shame to kind of like pull myself out of addiction weren't actually using shame. A big thing that I got wrong in previous attempts was I conflated shame with tragedy. I thought that the juiciest shame, so to speak, would come out of the most dramatic moments, like all horrible stuff: losing friends to overdoses, the time I got sectioned, the time that I was the subject of an intervention, getting kicked out of uni for selling drugs, family fallouts, car crashes, suicide attempts, that sort of stuff. I think I thought that rock bottom was catastrophic as opposed to emotional, as opposed to, "What are you doing with your life, dude? Are you not better than this? What's going on, man?" Well, what I learned on the attempt that actually worked was that the deepest shame is ordinary. Just about anybody in the face of crisis, it's that everyday living; it's rough. [Music]
So now we move on to thing number two: You need to retail the story because you are feeling so much shame that shame is not where the story ends. You can't stop watching a movie at the end of the second act when everything's going wrong. No, you need to stay in that story and do something with it. So, uh, the question that I used to reframe is, uh, "How is this the best thing that has ever happened to me?" And I'll tell you about the very last time I drank because when I woke up, that is pretty much the question that, yeah, saved my life. All right, so, oh God, are you ready to hate me? Okay, I had been relatively sober before my daughter was born, and then once she was born, I just got so stressed that I found myself having a beer to take the edge off. You know, I don't do moderation very well, and within a few months, I was like, "Oh God," you know that phrase, "One is too much, 20 is never enough?" The living embodiment of that, man. Anyway, uh, it was the anniversary of my wife's mother's passing, and we were all going to a family house to help her dad cleanse a bunch of the clutter. I know it was also his birthday, a weekend that is just so not about me, and it's about mourning. Yep, I had one beer, and then I just ended up having more and more and more and more. I had some drugs, which I did in secret, 'cause I was ashamed, and yeah, I ended up just being so obnoxious around the people that I really, really, really love the most in this world, and at one point I even broke glass near my daughter's head. Didn't do anything, but real, real low moments. In the morning, I woke up, realized everything that had happened. I had felt shame before that about everything, but now as a parent, you know, and why was I acting like this? I thought that I had dealt with it. I thought that I had, yeah, put myself on the straight and narrow a couple of years earlier, but now it turns out I had relapsed, and I realized how dangerous that was, how selfish it was, and how much my wife just could not rely on me in that moment, and how much she's already got on her hands, because I'm not even looking after our kid. That day is like just absolute, just shithead behavior: being obnoxious, being loud, saying all of the wrong things, just chucking in conversational hand grenades, humiliating my wife, making everybody feel uncomfortable, all that sort of stuff. I've done worse things in my life, definitely, especially when it comes to drugs and alcohol, but that was the most shame I've ever felt with it, I think, because of the company I was with, in the situation, and also my daughter. So in the morning, I asked myself, "How is this the best thing that has ever happened to me?" And I was like, "If this is the last time I drink, that is the only way this could ever, ever be good," and it was. Yeah, it was. Yeah, it really was, man. I something changed in me, but it wasn't all just because I asked that question. There were a bunch of other stuff, so I guess that's what I'll take you through now. I have to include this in the video, so I was just finishing the edit, I was all going to press upload, and then this came in the mail. This is my new book. This is so cool. This is the first printed copy. Check it out. Ready? Oh, that's so crazy. Worldwide available for pre-order. So yeah, check it out. Link in the description: Doom and Bloom: The Case for Creativity in a World Hooked on Panic. Oh my goodness, oh my goodness. Um, yeah, back to the [Applause] video.
Number three: Admit you are powerless. I thought this was just a, a jogging dude: "I have a problem with alcohol and I need help." I had read a bunch of those books, and I was like, "Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, anything that takes 12 steps isn't worth doing. Okay, got it, got it, got it. I'll just skip that one," because what does it even mean? Admit that you are powerless to alcohol, admit that you are powerless to drugs. Like, "No, dude, I'm powerful. What are you talking about?" As almost like I took it as an insult, not realizing what it meant in the slightest. But uh, I realized that morning exactly what it meant, and that is: you only control the first drink, you only control the first line, you only control the first pill, whatever it happens to be. You are in control when you're sober, but if it's around you, if you have access to it, if you've already started, God forbid, then someone else is running the show. You know, you got the freaking demon Ratatouille just gobbling up all the freaking pills for you, dude. All right, just one. Basically, what I realized is that I cannot do moderation, and even if I can do moderation, it was not helping me in the slightest to believe that I could, and I'm almost certain that I can't. So in previous attempts, and you can even say this if you go back through my channel, I was doing what I called being 90%—no, man, just kept, I just kept relapsing. I needed to completely abstain. And because I had admitted powerlessness, like that first of the 12 steps, I realized that I had to act as if I was powerless, and this meant changing my environment, my physical environment. So I took all the alcohol and drugs out of my house. I don't even know why they were there. I don't know why they were there, and I gave them to my, my friends. I'm like, "Here you go, all for free." That was pretty big actually, 'cause yeah, access is such a demon. If you can reach for it, you're going to do it, you know. And even if you can't, you are going to waste so much mental energy being like, "I shouldn't do it, I shouldn't do it, I shouldn't do it, I shouldn't do it," and then you just end up doing it. I think this is especially important to people who, I don't know, you know, the very first time that you did a particular drug that became your drug of choice, and you were like, "Oh, oh, oh no, oh no, uh oh, unscrewed you've been on my life, 'cause I really, really like this." I had that with a lot of things, I think, growing up, and um, powerlessness really helped.
Number four: Understanding the carrot and the stick equation. So you know, the model where you've got the carrot and the horse following the carrot, but you've also got the stick. So it's like, "Ah, here's something I want, something positive, and here's something that I'm running from," the stick, man. Yeah, so I'll start with carrot because it was huge: understanding sobriety as a massive positive. I found that the more I expressed sobriety in terms of things that I would gain, the more it just started looking like something I actually wanted, not something that I had to do. When I was younger, maybe 10, 15 years ago or something, I was living with a friend of mine, and he was a big smoker, and he really wanted to quit smoking, and he used to have this—it was like a government ad, there was actually a pretty good government ad that talked about: within 2 days your lungs will heal these particular cells, within 4 days you'll start to get a sense of smell back, and it talks about everything that you would gain if you stopped smoking cigarettes, and it talks about them on a realistic timeline. So I was like, "Hm, what do I get from sobriety?" And I started using this app. I just typed "sober" into the app store. I saw one called "I Am Sober," so I downloaded that, and it said to put in your sober date, and then it had this calculator where it could calculate, from the day that you would put in, obviously, how many days you've been clean, but also how much money you'd save, and then you could even put in other things, for example, you could count the mornings that you get back, 'cause you're not feeling that [ __ ], or you can count the athletic progress that isn't hindered because you just, you know, go on a bender, and it was really cool to see things tick up. All right, let's spice up this carrot. Let's do some uh, sobriety myths. I got three for you: Firstly, sobriety is boring; secondly, it's going to solve every single one of my problems; and thirdly, it's constantly hard. We'll go backwards. Sobriety myth: It's constantly hard. Sobriety fact: It's very hard for the first 30 days, but it gets a lot easier after that for most people, no matter the drug and no matter sort of the severity and chronicity. Once they get to about 30 days, they begin to feel better. He wants a recommendation? I really recommend anal lenti. Just remember, you will feel worse before you feel better, but that is withdrawal-mediated suffering. Once you get through those first 14 days, you'll begin to feel better, and potentially by 30 days you'll feel much better than you have in a really long time. Sobriety myth: It'll solve every single one of my problems. Sobriety fact: It will solve the lifestyle problems that are hiding the actual problems, the emotional problems. It solves a lot of problems. I will say that: you never have to text people, "I'm so sorry for whatever I said last night." You never have to chase drugs at 3:00 a.m. You never have to look around and realize that you know nobody in the room with you, all tweaking, all in your own world, or maybe having conversations at each other at best, and just being like, "Jesus Christ, is the sun coming up?" Never again, up, man. Sobriety myth: Sobriety is boring. Sobriety fact: Addiction is boring. Yeah, this is something that I was worried about, like, "Oh God, am I going to take the fun out of my life?" Two thoughts on this: So firstly, you've got "same night syndrome," when it comes to substance use, or if it's fun use, it's like, you know, same freaking scroll syndrome, whatever it happens to be, it's like you know exactly what you're going to get, you know this night, you know how this plays out, you know what's going to happen, and lo and behold, it does happen. Sometimes things are cool, but it's always about the people, never really about the stuff you put in yourself. But yeah, basically, at some point, substances stop being fun, but that isn't the point when you stop them. It's just the point where you stop enjoying life. You keep doing the stuff, you keep doing the stuff. So when you compare that to the growth that comes with sobriety, and to all of the cool, like, weird little superpowers that you get when you're like, "Oh my God, I can use my brain for anything I want," and the self-respect, it is anything but boring. And uh, the second thing that I want to say about that is: it is, is a lie, man. It's propaganda sold to you by big alcohol and big drug. What's that crazy statistic? It's like something like 70% of the world's alcohol is consumed by 10% of the people, and you know, when you think about that, all you can think is: the most common use case for drinking alcohol is almost invariably the lonely alcoholic. But when do you see that in the commercials, man? No, they're trying to sell you friendship, they're trying to sell you togetherness. It's all just freaking marketing. It's like, yeah, it's just a lie, dude. And uh, if you are particularly political or rebellious, sometimes it can feel nice to, I know, marry your sobriety with a bit of ideological resistance: be like, "Nah, dude, yeah, screw that. I'm fighting the freaking man. I won't do what you tell me," and all of that becomes the carrot.
Let's talk about the stick. The stick for me, particularly with alcohol, was seeing it as literal poison, which is exactly what it is. It is literally a poison, and I'm like, "Why am I doing that all the time? Do I love myself?" Answer is no, by the way, spoiler. I don't know if you ever saw that movie *They Live*. It's the movie with all like the reptilians and the glasses and stuff, but yeah, there's this point where the main character actually sees reality for what it is, and instead of billboards, it says things like "obey" and "consume," and I'm all out of B. Really fun movie, but I felt like that when I realized that drugs and alcohol are, yeah, literally just poisons, man. And don't get me wrong, I know the revelation is equally hamfisted, but that rush of clarity was a Rubicon. I could not cross it back, man. Actually, on that *They Live* moment, if you ever want to see what alcohol and drugs are truly like, just stay sober at a party past midnight, and you'll be like, "Oh my God, you're all just spitting at each other." I've got one that can see. But yeah, I think when you realize that you are the victim of basically a bunch of forces way bigger than you that all profit off your addiction, it can be, you can feel a lot of lament, but you can also feel anger, and that anger can be really motivating. So yeah, that was the stick. If you would like to read a little bit more about alcohol, if you are not too sure if you want to delve into a whole book, I do have a code for Shortform, the book summarizer, and what I like about it is that it's the only book summarizer I found that has active reflection, like, uh, they build in journaling stuff, so you know that the information is sticking in. So yeah, if you want to sort of dip your toe into the water of books about this subject, but you don't know where to start, there's a link in the description if you want to check it out.
Thing five: I will not drink with you today. This is a clunky but very lovely series of letters. It's a message that I first encountered on the subreddit r/stopdrinking, and it's a message that people just say to everybody on there, like a little piece of solidarity. And there are two things that I really like about it: Firstly, "with you." I will not drink with you. Oh, man, sometimes sobriety can feel incredibly lonely, especially if you are the only one in your friendship group who is becoming sober, or who is trying to get sober, whatever it happens to be, who wants to be sober, anything. And just knowing that there are other people doing it with you can be, yeah, pretty mood-ing. Especially if people are making you feel as if you're betraying them by becoming sober, that can be a really hard thing to deal with. And the second is the word "today." Yeah, this was um, something that I learned from a dude who would end up becoming a huge pivotal piece in my sobriety, uh, who was also the host of Australian Idol and The Bachelor. Super weird, but uh, yeah, big prime-time TV host in Australia ended up becoming like my sobriety sponsor. Weird. Like many people, I tried to stop. I tried to stop many, many, many, many times. I'd do it 2 weeks or 3 weeks or 6 weeks. I think 6 weeks was my, my record, but then like, like a duck to water, like, so hard. But the final night was no bigger or smaller than any other night. It was just another night of me doing the same [ __ ] thing, but I'd come to realize that no matter what I did, no matter what I tried, no matter how many different ways I tried to behave, it was inevitable that the same thing was going to happen. It was like I was on tram tracks, and there was no, nothing different was going to happen. Every single time, every time was the same. Something he said to me was, "You don't have to go 5 years sober right now. You just got to make it till tomorrow," and I was like, "Whoa," 'cause I think when I was trying earlier and earlier, I really just wanted that badge. I wanted to be able to say, "I'm 10 years sober," you know. There was something so much more dignified about that than saying, "I'm 3 days sober." But the way he put it, and he was 15 years sober at the time, was: "I'd just make it till tomorrow. Every single day, I just make it till tomorrow."
Number six: Replacement over removal. I've talked about this concept a lot on this channel, but yeah, it's the idea that you aren't just removing the drugs, or you aren't just removing the alcohol, and just having a cavity in your life that you stare at longingly while you cried. No, it's about replacing it, replacing that hole with something fun, something that you are building, something generative, man, something cool and sober. Actually, this whole channel was started because of replacement over removal. The very first video that I uploaded here was called "I'm making videos instead of doing drugs." I realized that in the past 10 years, the longest that I've gone without drugs or alcohol is 2 days. Granted, some periods were better than others. The start of last year, man, I was pretty good, pretty good drinking, then the second half of last year, not so [Music] much. Then the New Year tick over. Now I'm a sucker for a New Year's resolution, so I gave myself one, just a simple one: every time I feel like getting cooked, instead I'm going to turn on the camera to make a movie. Instead of drugs and drinking, it's YouTube and thinking. B, that's what this is: me getting my [ __ ] together in public, and it kind of was. Like, I cut down on the drugs a lot when I started this, but I still relapsed quite a bit. The actual thing that worked from the very last time that I was hungover was running. And the cool thing about running, being a replacement, is obviously you get the endorphins, uh, you start feeling better, you start feeling good, but it also helped me sleep. I think that's a big fear that a lot of people have when they are thinking about sobriety is: how the hell are you going to sleep? But uh, if you can exhaust yourself, sometimes that's the best thing.
Then number seven: Revel in the self-respect. This is maybe the biggest one. So the first thing that we talked about was reveling in the shame, really feeling it, and that might have felt negative, but the reason that it worked is because the story gets completed on the other side. When you are sober, you need to congratulate yourself. You need to look at yourself in the mirror and say, "Well done," because if you don't celebrate yourself and celebrate how far you've come, it's uh, very unlikely to stick. You got to positively reinforce. An apprehension that a lot of people have about being sober is things like birthdays, events, weddings, Christmases: how the hell am I going to make it through that? And I had the same fears, but my birthday was a few weeks after that very brutal shameful hangover, and I remember looking at my reflection in the mirror afterwards and being like, "Dude, dude, you made it. You made it through your own birthday." Then came Christmas, there was a wedding somewhere in there, and every time afterwards, I just look at the mirror and be like, "Oh my God, thank you, thank you so much for doing that." It was a feeling that it was basically the complete polar opposite of the shame; it was beautiful. And I think it helps so much to pause and uh, take stock of it, otherwise, what are we doing here? [Music]
Last thing I want to say is: if you are watching this and you have made it this far, and you are in addiction, you probably feel a mix of really, really awful and a longing to not feel like that, and you also might feel like it's impossible. You know, you're like, "Oh, good for you, guy." I truly thought it was impossible for me. I honestly thought it would just never happen. I thought, I don't know, lost a few friends to drugs, and I thought I was just going to be the next in line, you know, young funeral. But I have learned, and I know I sound like a cliché, that it actually is possible. What really helped was understanding that sobriety doesn't happen tomorrow, it doesn't happen after one last hurrah, it literally happens now, now. And you might have stuff in your house, and you might be thinking, "All right, tonight's the last night." It's not. Last night was, you know, and that's how it works. Don't need to have a ritualistic finish. You don't need to hit rock bottom. That's not what the journey is. The journey is everything that comes afterwards. So if this does push you over the edge into long-term sobriety, and uh, welcome to the first day of the rest of your life. Congratulations, and uh, I will not drink with you today. Have a beautiful day. Catcha. [Music]