Getting through an average day with an above-average outlook is a learnable skill

Life will be difficult no matter what — staying peaceful & happy is all about the skills you develop to take on common every-day suffering that will ease life on average.

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“Life is suffering” — Buddha

“Live life on life’s terms” — overheard at recovery meetings

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I suffered from many forms of mental illness for most of my life including psychosis, paranoia, anxiety, and depression, and to cope with it all I used drugs and drank every day.

The more I used & drank, the worse my mental health got, and as my mind deteriorated, the more I used & drank to cover it up. It was a vicious cycle, getting worse and worse in both departments as life went on.

5 years ago, things got bad… so bad, I decided to devote myself to figuring out how to live life happy & sober, despite having to live through life unhappy & sober for a while to do it. No matter how hard it got, I was going to keep trying. In other words, I had to begin handling life on life’s terms instead of my own.

I also had to see clearly what the problem was: I was drinking to cover up negative feelings & thoughts of a sick mind. Beyond that, I had to admit that life was hard & by association, I am just human and have weaknesses (which goes against everything I was taught about being a man in our culture growing up) and even further, I had to be willing & able to let new information in without judging or dismissing it quickly. At least, I had to let it in long enough to observe it in my own life to see if it was true for me.

All of these things took time sober, without drugs or alcohol clouding my mind, and a level of open-mindedness I personally found in a recovery group then expanded through research into psychology, philosophy, and spirituality.

When I was drinking & using, and for a long time early on in recovery, I couldn’t see all of that. It was extremely confusing, and I questioned everything because it went against what I was brought up to believe.

It’s much less scary or confusing than I thought it would be, and looking back it feels like a lot of the suffering and pain I went through was for the following reasons, which i’ll try to solve here:

1. I didn’t think the answer could be so simple
2. I couldn’t imagine long term processes because my unhealthy mind had been so warped by addiction
3. I had ADHD which made it hard to focus on solutions or stay focused on anything (especially when I was using & drinking)
4. I was firmly toxic in my masculinity — unwilling to ask for or receive help, admit weakness, or sit and listen without judging what others said

In this post, I’ll lay out the terms & conditions placed on life when one lives life on “our terms” in active addiction, then on “life’s terms” in recovery, then go over why life is hard (in case you didn’t know), and some things you can do to protect yourself. In the end, I’ll go through some charts to show simply how one can implement these things in daily life.

My goal here is to show how a bunch of simple actions, practical tools & tactics, can truly increase happiness & peace in one’s life. The key point there will be: life is not easy all the time, even in long term recovery, but keeping the tools in your toolkit sharp & ready can increase happiness on average, which makes living life much more fun.

Our terms vs. life’s terms

Living life on “our terms”

Terms & conditions:

• One may feel good at any time. If things get hard, one has an inalienable right to put blinders on & ignore any problem with drugs, alcohol, or addictive behavior (e.g. sex & gambling).
• One may give life a stern warning: “If things get hard I’m outta here!”
• One may evaluate each moment of each day and determine whether circumstances are worthy of escape via whatever is available from heroin to scotch to rubber glue.

For me, living this way became a problem because over the years the threshold for escaping by using became easier and easier to pass… which had several mental health consequences:

1. I became more alert for the smallest irritation, as an excuse to escape, leading to high anxiety
2. The time of day when I encountered “too much” (and would start using/drinking) got earlier and earlier until it was virtually all-day
3. I stopped allowing life to unfold as it would naturally & went on the defensive full time
4. The more I was using the worse I felt about myself, which increased my depression more and more over time

The vicious cycle.

Living life on “life’s terms”

Terms & Conditions:

• One must handle each blow, hardship, and difficulty that life throws at them, without any addictive substance to defend themselves.
• One’s consciousness can’t block input or un-perceive something it has perceived, so we are wide open to input that could hurt us deeply at all times.
• Personal methods of mental wellness & defense must be learned, otherwise we will suffer from these negative perceptions.
• Life is essentially out of our control, given we can’t choose our parents or early experiences in life that shape our subconscious mind, so we must learn to cope with the way things are.

As the Buddha said so famously: “life is suffering,” implying that to live happily we must develop mental, physical, & spiritual strategies.

For me, it took a long time to truly live life on life’s terms… First, I had to figure out what the problem was, so I could start to understand how to protect myself.

What destabilizes our peace of mind & how can we protect ourselves?

All of our senses, our own mind, and the uncontrollable actions of others can lead to suffering in one’s life.

Most of the time, we have the seemingly trivial daily suffering of life. We overhear something that makes us upset… We think of something that makes us anxious… We see political signs on the side of the road… We check Facebook… Whatever peace and happiness we have at any moment can be taken away in the blink of an eye, or the think of a thought.

Sometimes we encounter “very difficult things” like losing a job or a loved one, which can be even harder when it is unexpected. This suffering is especially potent and can make self-protection even harder. Without tools & tactics to protect ourselves, an addict has no ability (or reason) to stay away from the practiced behaviors of addiction… using their drug of choice to regain lost peace & happiness.

With time sober, I came to see this impossible situation and recognize my desire to figure out how to live in such an unpredictable world. Eventually, I was able to increase the amount I spent happy & peaceful on average which led to a more peaceful & happy life overall.

I fought negative mental states by increasing the number of skills in my toolkit, which I sometimes refer to as Mental Jiu-Jitsu. I study the ways of wise beings, develop healthy habits, and practice healthy practices. I try to do different things, to get different results than I got when I was in the depths of addiction and in early recovery when I had no skills.

These are just some of the problems that naturally occur in my life that I must be ready to defend against.

• New things
• Things I didn’t plan for
• Change
• Mental illness
• Emotions
• Fear
• Regret
• Anxiety
• Depression
• Sadness
• Addiction
• Cravings
• The existence of death & fact that I’ll one day disappear

It took a long time for me to learn to notice how I felt throughout each day. When I first came into recovery, I was quite mixed up and very distracted… and I couldn’t slow down my body or mind.

Being sober, I became aware that my inner state changed quite often. I saw that my feelings changed all the time, and were often making me crazy.

I eventually saw that sometimes I was happy, and other times upset. Of course, I did know that I was happy sometimes & sad other times, but after being sober for a while, it really started to become glaringly obvious that these feelings were what life was made of. They were the most important thing in my waking life, driving my decision making around activities, friends, what to eat… everything.

With more time, I began to see what inputs & perceptions were making me happy & upset. And only then did I start to question why I was continuing to do the things that were making me upset.

Actual situations & mini charts

Without examples, this advice can seem right at home on the Reddit feed of /thanksimcured, where pithy overly-simplistic self-help advice goes to die, so let’s talk about real life.

I’ll present methods & outcomes of various tactics I have used personally to great effect by laying out three examples of negative events, and for each three charts to show how things went for me in the 3 different phases of my recovery:

1. In active addiction, with substances to handle things
2. In early recovery, without substances, and without healthy defense mechanisms
3. Today, in later recovery, with more healthy defenses in place

The examples will be in three areas where I have struggled greatly in the past: traffic, social media, & work.

Traffic

Let’s say I get cut off in traffic on my way to work…

and let’s say I’m still drinking & using drugs… My day might look something like this:

I might stew on getting cut off in traffic all day.

I might tell everyone I see how I got cut off, and I might think about how much of a jerk that other guy is often.

Then later on I’ll start to feel like I need a drink because the negative chain of thoughts & actions has exhausted me, or I just can’t stop thinking about it…

I’ll get home and drink my worries away… and this will work to relieve me of the tension & stress.

Waking up with a hangover the next day, I’ll likely be more irritable than I would otherwise, but back then I was used to that, so let’s just say it worked fine.

Another way it might go is like this when I am sober, but I have no defenses…

I get cut off in traffic and I get very upset.

I think about what a jerk the guy is, and I consider chasing him down… I’m in recovery now though, so I don’t do that… so I become sad & contracted, only slowly improving over the rest of the day.

As the day goes on I am less and less upset, but only because time is passing and I naturally forget about the experience. You might end your day near the middle, ‘just OK’, and your happiness chart might look like this:

With mental defenses & strategies practices & at the ready, there are many alternative ways this negative event could go…

Maybe I have already meditated that day, and have reflected on how “I” am not my perceptions, so I have separation from the event when it happens.

Of course, I’m still quite upset, but I’m only brought down to 50% happiness…

Then soon after it happens, I remember in my recovery group hearing someone say something about how changing my perspective can help… and that when someone cuts you off it can be helpful to imagine that the other person was bringing a family member to the hospital, so they had a good reason to cut you off… in fact, they may have needed to cut you off to get there in time! And this allows your mind to let go of negative feelings you may be experiencing.

Whether or not it’s true doesn’t matter, because you’ll never really know what the real reason was.

Your day might look like this, and you end up on a positive note:

Facebook (Social Media)

Let's say I post something on Facebook…

I might post my status and reveal something about myself, or simply update others about what I’m planning for the day.

Someone might make a comment that is confusing or upsetting, which might send me into a spiral of self-doubt…

Then someone might make a positive comment, which would make me happier…

But then someone else comments agreeing with the first commenter… sending me down hill for the rest of the day thinking about whether I need to edit the post, or make some changes in my life… whether I’m a loser or not in general… and how stupid I am for posting what I posted.

With substances at my disposal, I can drink as soon as I get home from work (or all day if it’s Saturday!), and my day might look like this:

In early recovery, without substances, and without many healthy defenses, my day might look like this:

And with defenses, I might just short circuit the whole ordeal by not posting on Facebook, and maybe even not checking social media all together.

Couple that with meditation, and you might have a pretty good day:

This is a bit of a cop-out for an article like this, but it felt the most like the truth to me these days.

Making a mistake at work

Finally, let’s say I make a mistake at work (which used to be one of my biggest sources of despair personally).

While drinking, my day might look like this:

In early recovery, I might be cheered up a little by a nice sunset at the end of the day, which I could see because I was sober and had begun to notice things like that:

But I would still end the day on a pretty sour note.

Later on in recovery, with defenses, I might remember that work isn’t my only focus in life…

I might even take a look at my ranked list of life goals, which explicitly shows me that in my deepest thinking I determined my health & relationships are higher priorities than work.

I might also remember that people make mistakes, and I’m just human, so I shouldn’t be too hard on myself… This might remind me about what Alan Watts taught me about being part of a larger system, how I’m not in control (and how that’s OK), and how i’m lucky to be here at all… Not to mention what I know about toxic masculinity…

Then I might see that sunset and end the day quite happy:

It was still a volatile day, but overall, on average, it was pretty good.

This post originally appeared on The Seeker’s Toolkit