Experience - Not the Best Teacher
Posted September 26, 2009

Experience is the best teacher. That's what you hear all the time. It's not. In fact, experience can kill you. There are people who can only learn by experience. In fact, it seems most people have adopted that learning style. I did too for a long time. I changed that on September 2, 2002. That was the day I finally drove to the treatment center after trying to detox from alcohol on my own for two weeks. On that day, I made a commitment to start learning by listening. I've done that a lot during the past seven years and my life is immeasurably better.

When my oldest daughter left for college, I gave her a letter about the dangers of credit cards. It was well written and full of great advice. That was ten years ago and she's following every tenant of that letter. That didn't happen right away, though. First she had to get far over her head in debt and have creditors take initial steps toward court dates before she got her financial life in order. That was four years ago and she's just finishing paying that debt. It would have been much less painful had she learned by listening to my letter, but she had to experience pain because that was her learning style at the time.

That happens all the time with alcoholics, nicotine addicts, and overeating addictions. (And, yes, you overeaters are addicts. The sooner you accept that, the more likely it is that you'll get better.) The alcoholics hears about the dangers of drunken driving all the time. For many, it isn't until he spends nights in jail, or destroys a family by killing them in an automobile, that he finally learns to quit doing that. The cigarette smoke has heard a million times that cigarettes cause lung cancer. He finally learns that when the doctor gives him six months to live. The overeater knows the weight will cause diabetes, and when that condition is confirmed, he finally comes to learn it in such a way that he changes his behavior. Of course, sometimes the diabetic has to lose his eyesight before he's experienced enough pain to act differently.

We all have a choice, though. We don't have to be one of the learn by experience guys. If we start learning by listening. We do that by listening to the winners. When we listen to what many successful recovering alcoholics, nicotine addicts, and overeaters say over and over and act on that knowledge, we can change things before we experience pain or death.

As I've heard recovering alcoholic say, all we have to do is take cotton our of our ears and put it in our mouths. Listen to the winners and act on what we hear. It's just a whole lot easier that way.

After the Relapse
Posted September 19, 2009

When visitors to this websites use search engines to get here, I see what they searched for. By far, the most common search includes relapse. Let's talk about relapse today.

In my experience the nature of relapse is the same no matter if the addiction is alcohol, nicotine, or chocolate chip cookies. From what I've heard from drug addicts, it's the same for them as well. I'm going to talk about alcohol primarily, but don't go away if that's not your problem. The principles still apply.

The best thing to do is avoid relapse altogether. To learn more about how to do that, go here. But, relapse happens . . . a lot. The real danger with relapse is that we never know when we'll regain the willingness to start over. While I haven't experienced relapse of any kind for seven years, I did during my earlier attempts. While reflecting on those experiences, as well as a lot of other people's experiences, here's the necessary conditions for recovering from relapse.

1. Maintain rigorous honesty. Everything always starts with honesty.If you're not honest with yourself or others, you'll get nowhere. If you relapse, don't hide it. Shout it to the world. The more you do that, the greater the chance you'll avoid relapse in the future. The rest of the conditions are all about honesty.
2. Avoid self-recrimination. Relapsing doesn't make you a bad person. Not at all. It makes you normal. That's not to say that relapse is required. Don't plan to relapse. But, if you do, you're not different than most people. I'm reminding of lice here. There's an old saying I've heard often at school: "There's no shame in getting lice. The shame comes if you do nothing about it." Look in the mirror and say, "You're not a bad person. Now, go out and do something to be sure you never relapse again."
3. Eliminate embarrassment. Embarrassment kills. I've heard the stories over and over. Relapse happens and the relapser is too embarrassed to tell anybody about it. Alcoholics need others to keep from drinking alcohol. If embarrassment keeps them from admitting their relapse and rejoining others who are recovering successfully, their odds of success are extremely low. That's true of others as well. And, if that embarrassment controls us, there is an excellent chance our addiction, whatever it is, will kill us. Personally, I'd rather be embarrassed than dead.
4. Get right back in the saddle. Don't delay beginning your program of improvement again. Lots of people do. They relapse and it takes years to come back, if they ever do at all. Some die without ever regaining their sobriety. Don't be one of those. Be like the woman I know who had been alcohol free for three years. She got a new job just before Christmas. At the Christmas party, she wanted to fit in with her new colleagues. They were drinking alcohol. She had a drink, too. As soon as she took the drink, she knew she'd made an awful mistake. She didn't want to go back to the misery alcohol at caused. She left the party and the next day admitted to other recovering alcoholics that she'd relapsed. That was six years ago as of this writing and she's still sober. That's the model to follow.
5. Move back a step or two. Complacency is the predecessor of relapse. In the majority of cases of relapse that I've seen or heard of, the relapser was doing well, became complacent, and quit working as hard on their addiction as they did in the beginning. When you return from relapse, go back to doing those things that had been successful for you.
6. Reclaim your "virginity." Several years ago, it became popular to suggest to teenagers who were sexually active that they could "reclaim" their virginity by becoming celibate. You can do that even more so with your addiction. It's common for relapsers to focus on all those years of sobriety that they lost. If they return to whatever program they were using to keep from drinking, smoking, or eating, they can reclaim those years. They can't deny the relapse, but it doesn't have to define them.

The bottom line is that relapse is likely. Your first strategy is to avoid it. If you do relapse, though, quit beating yourself up and get back on your program immediately. If you do that, eventually the relapses will stop. If you don't, your odds of success are nil.

How to Quit Smoking
Posted September 12, 2009

It's rare when someone gets to this website because of queries about smoking. Weight loss queries are number one, followed by alcohol and exercise. Maybe that's because the percentage of people in the United States who smoke cigarettes has dropped to about 22%. Still, there are some folks who come here who appear to want to quit smoking.Let's talk about how to do that, one step at a time.

1. Maintain Rigorous Honesty: Honesty comes first with everything. Without it, you'll never quit smoking, or if you do, you'll be back at it soon. Here a couple of the things you need to be honest about.
   1. Quit saying that smoking is a bad habit you have. Cigarette smokers are addicted to the drug nicotine. You are a drug addict. If you try to minimize that in any way, your odds of success are low to nonexistent. Breaking bad habits require some discipline. Defeating addiction requires much more.
   2. Be accurate about how much you smoke. I've been around a lot of smokers and I was one for 31 years. When a smoker tells me how much he smokes, I multiply that amount by 1.5 to 2 times. I'm nearly always right.
      
2. Become Informed: You know smoking causes lung cancer and you probably know it causes emphysema. But, if you're like I was, there's a lot you don't know.
   1. In January, 1964, when I was 13 years old, the Surgeon General of the United States announced that a special commission spent two years studying cigarettes and determined that they caused lung cancer. I was 13 years old. By the time I started smoking when I was 21, I also knew cigarettes caused emphysema. I started smoking anyway because I figured it took a long time for that stuff to happen. I assumed that if I quit smoking before I got sick, I'd be safe. After I quit smoking when I was 51, I wanted to roll around in the good feelings of quitting smoking, so I read the literature to see all the things I'd avoided by quitting. Yikes! It turns out that my odds of developing lung cancer will always be higher than a nonsmoker. The damage we do to our lungs that cause cancer doesn't go away. The good news is that the longer we go after quitting without developing lung cancer, the lower our odds. The sooner you quit, the lower your odds.
   2. I loved my Uncle Charlie. He and Aunt Beverly always took us to do fun things when we visited our grandparents in Joplin Missouri. Uncle Charlie was a semi-pro baseball player and and excellent athlete. He was also a smoker. The last time I saw him before he died, he and Aunt Beverly came to visit us. He had an oxygen tank because he'd developed emphysema. I was still smoking then and knew I wanted to stop before I had to have an oxygen tank, too. Like before, I assumed if I stopped smoking before I got it, I'd be OK. Turns out emphysema is a progressive disease. You don't know you have it until it's developed and if it gets to a certain point, it still progresses whether you're still smoking or not. Now, if you quit before it gets far enough along, it won't progress. If you're past that point, quitting will slow the progress. The best thing, though, is to know that every cigarettes moves you closer to desperately gasping for air and the sooner you quit, the lower the odds you'll go there.
   3. Cigarette smoking does a whole lot of other bad things. It damages your heart and has been linked to multitudes of other cancers. As with lung cancer and emphysema, your odds of developing those cancers don't disappear as soon as you quit. But, the earlier you quit and the longer you go without smoking, the lower the odds.
      
3. Pick a Date—The Sooner the Better: As I prepared to quit smoking, everything I read said pick a date. I spent a great deal of time trying to figure out what kind of day that should be. A weekend? A work day? First I picked a Sunday, but that didn't work out. (Read more) So, my first quit day became the next day which was a Monday at work. I've decided it doesn't really matter. No matter what, you'll be miserable for a while. Just the way it is. But, you need a date and it needs to be sooner than the next decade or the next year. It needs to be, like, next week. Or better yet, tomorrow.
   
4. Create Accountability: Don't keep your quit date a secret. Tell everybody you know. If you don't quit on that date, or you quit and start again, they'll know. Surely by now you know it's just plain stupid to try to hide the fact you are smoking. When you smoke, you stink, your clothes stink, everything around you stinks. If your family, friends, acquaintances, and co-workers know you're quitting, that'll increase your incentive to quit and stay quit.
   
5. Be Willing to Hurt for a Week (Max): There's no way around this: quitting is hard and it hurts. Your body is dependent on the drug nicotine. There are some drugs out there that claim to make it better. Nicotine replacement tools such as Nicorette™ can postpone the pain. Chantix is a prescription drug that dulls the effect of nicotine. As with all drugs, there are side effects and it has been associated with a higher risk of depression and suicide. I ate one piece of Nicorette™ gum my first morning without a cigarette, then decided I didn't want that. I wanted to be shed of nicotine. It has controlled my life long enough. I'm grateful for that decision. I felt awful, really awful, for five days. The withdrawal symptoms ended during the night on the fifth day and I was done with my physical dependence on nicotine. I still had to deal with occasional cravings, but the really hard part was done in five days.
   
   I can do about anything for five days. Read about how my wife's Uncle Hoke and author Victor Frankl, both deceased at the time I quit smoking, helped me get through those five days here.
   
6. Once Quit, No Puffs are Allowed No Matter What: I know this with certitude: I can never, ever, ever, ever, take even a tiny puff of a cigarette again. If I do, my addiction will be immediately restored. I may not be back to two packs a day right away, but I'll be there soon. Do that, and you totally wasted those five days of pain and will have to do it all over again.
   
7. Be Willing to Change How You React to Life: The odds are high that you used cigarette smoking as a tool for dealing with life events. While the effect is much more subtle than alcohol or other mood changing drugs, nicotine does change your mood. You don't light up during stressful times just to have something to do. That's why sucking on a straw doesn't work as a substitute for nicotine. The straw doesn't act on your brain to change your mood. If you take away the mood enhancer, you need another way to handle stress. Or depression. Or anger. Or good news. If you don't find other ways to react, you'll smoke cigarettes again. That's guaranteed.
   
   How do you change the way you react to life? Use tools that are available. You can find a sampling here. Pay particular attention to the tool about relapse.

That's it. Five days to a week of pain, then a few months of consistent craving, then you're done. Your free. You can watch a movie without your body shouting at you to give it some nicotine. You can enjoy a leisurely meal in a restaurant. When somebody sits in your office and they stink of cigarettes, you'll be so happy you don't put people through that any more. Now, I have to admit that after seven years, every now and then a cigarette sounds good. I did enjoy the drug part. If they didn't cost a fortune, make you stink, and kill you, I might be tempted to light up again. But, they do all that so I think I'll stay quit.

Craving Ice Cream
Posted September 3, 2009

Has this ever happened to you?

You go to bed and your mind won't shut down. Something's going on that you can't quit thinking about. You toss and turn, start to doze, startle awake, and toss and turn again. Finally, you give up and get out of bed. You go into the den and turn on the TV. Soon, a little notion creeps into the back of your mind. It starts small, then grows until it's front and center. You go to the kitchen and pull that brand new quart of ice cream from the freezer. You'll just have a little bit, so you get a spoon and skip the bowl. Back in the recliner, you scrape the top of the ice cream and eat it. Just a little bit. You seen that movie fifteen times, but still get into it. After a while, you look down into the ice cream carton. Half of it's gone. At least a pint. Something like a thousand calories. "Damn!" You take the carton back to the kitchen and on the way take a couple of more swipes before you put the cover on. You go back to bed with a sense of unease, but finally doze off.

The alarm clock rings. Waking is slow because you didn't get much sleep. Suddenly, you remember and your mind becomes alert. Too alert. Damn. You did it again. You said you wouldn't, but you did. Demoralization sets in. As you climb out of bed, you feel every roll of fat and every inch of waist. You're full of self-revulsion. You promise yourself you'll never do that again. You'll throw out that ice cream and buy no more. If you don't have it, you can't eat it.

And, despite the promise, down there, deep beneath the self-loathing, you know you're lying to yourself. You know you will do it again. You know you just can't stop yourself.

And, when somebody suggests you're no different than an alcoholic, you're offended.

If you want to get better, you need to get over yourself. As a recovering alcoholic and a recovering food addict, I can tell you there's not a lick of difference between the basic principles of the two addictions. I woke up every morning full of self-revulsion when I remembered drinking alcohol all night long. I would promise that today would be different and it never was. There are some differences in how the addictions act on us. Eating a ton of ice cream doesn't cause you to kill people when you drive after eating it. But both addictions cause debilitating illnesses and early death. The addiction disease is always there, sitting on our shoulders and guiding our actions whether we're talking Jack Daniels or Monterey Jack.

Website owners don't know the individuals who visit their sites. But, we do know what brought them to us. If you come to my site by way of a search engine, I know what you searched for. Exactly. I have no idea who you are, but I do know you searched for "How do I quit eating ice cream at night?" I know which page you looked at first and if you looked at other pages, I know what they are. It's a fascinating thing to study.

And, here's what I've seen. People who are clearly interested in getting better by quitting drinking alcohol often go to the "Tools" pages. People who arrive at the website because they want to get better by losing weight and keeping it off almost never go the "Tools" pages. That's a major mistake. You are no different than us alcoholics. If you want to quit your uncontrolled eating, you must change the way you react to life and that's what the "Tools" are all about. You need strategies to avoid relapse, just like us alcoholics.Relapse avoidance strategies can be found in the tools, too.

Thank God, I'm an alcoholic. It was the stuff I learned while defeating alcohol that was instrumental in losing weight and keeping it off. The addictions are same at the root and so are the answers. If you're not fortunate enough to be an alcoholic, find one who's been successful at recovering for a number of years and pick their brains for strategies and try some out. Read the "Tools." Quit thinking you're different and you can open up a whole new world of possibilities for your own recovery.