Improving Physical Health In Addiction Recovery
When I got sober, Hot Pockets were a staple and I refused to enter a gym. I drank a pot of coffee and smoked a pack of cigarettes every day. I was constantly anxious, overweight, and out of shape. Now I’m into yoga, exercise 4–5 times a week, eat (end enjoy) mainly organic whole foods, drink tea instead of coffee (most of the time), and haven’t smoked for years. People tell me I’m calm, I feel great, and I look better than I ever expected to look in my lifetime.
I continue to be fascinated by the process and methods that have changed my life so drastically!
Since the beginning of this (6th) round of recovery that has lasted over 5 years (my longest by 5 years), I have been interested in meditation. This interest came from a combination of a life-long interest in Buddhism and from my 12 step program, which in step 11 specifically asks participants to meditate.
I also read the book “Buddhism and the 12 steps” by Kevin Griffin early on, which went through the 12 steps step by step comparing each to Buddhism and showing how they are similar.
Around 6 months into recovery, I attended a silent 3 day meditation retreat and a year later I was able to begin meditating on my own. I wasn’t very good at, but I was trying, and I got better over time.
In meditation, I was able to observe my thoughts for the first time as things that were not necessarily “me.” I wasn’t able to see the significance of this achievement until much later, but Michael Singer does a great job explaining in the series of YouTube videos on his book ‘The Untethered Soul’ (links below).
He explained to me that the thoughts in my mind weren’t just “not me”, they were something I needed to become free of. In fact, they were causing all of my problems.
In regards to physical health, this way of thinking allowed me to exercise and while exercising, ignore the thoughts that were telling me to stop because it was uncomfortable. It allowed me to eat healthily and ignore like ‘food that tastes amazing is what I should be eating every time I eat.’ It allowed me to stop smoking cigarettes, seeing that they themselves were the cause of my desire for cigarettes, plus that the addiction to nicotine was overriding my ability to recognize that my mouth constantly tasted terrible and I was walking around smelling myself smelling terribly all day every day. And it allowed me to reduce my anxiety-provoking caffeine intake from a pot of coffee to one or two cups of tea each day.
Hopefully, my discoveries can help you see similar things for yourself and take similar healthy actions.
Mental Detachment is the Key to Physical Health
Michael Singer teaches about recognizing our thoughts. His teachings have led me to many places over time, but the most important lessons I learned early on came from him, and I am eternally grateful. As you will see, recognizing thoughts, and how they are different from my ‘self’ was a key understanding in my journey to physical health.
I learned the difference between ME and MY THOUGHTS through the Untethered Soul Lecture Series on YouTube. To help you understand, lets discuss some of what Singer says, and how to relate that to physical health.
In part 3, Singer says:
“You are inside.
While you are in there, there are a lot of changes and activities that go on inside with you.
Energy shifts, thoughts, emotions… activity… it’s all just stuff going on inside of you…
What if you stayed inside and just watched all of the things go on inside of you?
What if you were aware that you were in there AND aware that there is a lot of things going on inside?…
What you will see is: The outside world has nothing to do with you.
It’s busy, it’s there all the time, and it never asked your opinion on how it should be.
It’s constantly giving input, unfolding. And it all has nothing to do with you”
In part 4, he explains the implications of this thinking: detaching from the thoughts in your mind is the starting point and the ultimate goal of spiritual practice.
As he puts it, once we see things clearly all we want is freedom from ourselves and this desire drives all further exploration into spirituality (which I like to refer to as the search for recovery, life improvement, meaning, and/or practical wisdom our lives)
You get to a point where all you want is to be free, but now you understand that that means you want to be free from yourself.
After a while, you see that thinking is overrated… it’s like [you are] working for your mind…
Your mind decides [that] you are not ok, and the moment it decides this, you’re not OK!
[You start to see:] My personal mind is the cause of every single problem that I have. The problem is me.
Once you know this so deeply that all you want is freedom from yourself, then that is when you begin.
For me, this thinking went in 3 stages from “I am my thoughts”, thinking that the mental models and specific thoughts that I had were all there were to me, to thinking “I am not my thoughts” but not really knowing what else I might be, to thinking about who I actually am (with Rupert Spira on YouTube if you want to go further)
A diagram of my progression in separation from thoughts:
This way of thinking paved the way for all other physical health improvements I have made in recovery by allowing me to make choices that I would not have been able to make if my thoughts & ego were the only things there were to me.
I hated exercise and I loved Hot Pockets. Exercise was hard, and Hot Pockets were easy. To get myself to do healthy things for myself, I had to identify with a new ‘self’ inside. I had to ignore negative self-deprecating thoughts I was patterned into thinking through addiction to see myself as a worthwhile pursuit, then every time I decided to do the hard thing and exercise or cook & eat a healthy meal, I had to ignore thoughts telling me the easy way out was better.
Healthy Eating — From Hot Pockets to Whole Foods
Long-term upgrades to my life strategy were possible in recovery because of this new way of thinking, separating myself from my thoughts, but also because living without hangovers or blackouts for days at a time allowed me to make decisions that would last.
I was inspired to learn about nutrition, and shown that there was hope, in one choice I was able to make after almost a year in recovery: I would eat as few carbohydrates as possible for as long as possible (not counting carbs in vegetables and some fruit).
I had lost weight in this way with limited success when I was still in addiction, but once I was sober I was able to stay out of my own way and follow through with it long term.
Following this routine, I lost 70 pounds and was shown that changes to my body and my health were possible. This revelation made me feel freer than I had in years and I was spurred on to learn all I could and attempt more changes.
I was inspired to search for more nutrition wisdom by my fiancee who introduced me to Paul Chek and his book “How to Eat, Move, and Be Healthy.” This book was enormously helpful and informative (and also easy to read with lots of pictures and diagrams for someone not wanting to get too academic about it 🙂
Paul taught me about eating for one’s body type, and says, basically, if your family is from northern latitudes (like Europe) you evolved to eat lots of fats and protein, and your metabolism is slower because you would have been eating animals less often and your body would have been trying to store that fat & protein for as long as possible. If your family from warmer climates where it was easy to hunt & gather or rely on agriculture year-round, your body is used to processing grains and other plans, so you should eat those because you are optimized for them through evolution. Some people are a mix of the two.
He provides a questionnaire in the book to help people figure out which type they are. This diagram of his “Primal Pattern” eating method, where we are all either Equator, Variable, or Polar types of people, summarizes his way of thinking:
He also first pointed out that eating natural, organic, whole foods is very important for a similar reason: our bodies did not evolve to break down chemicals like pesticides sprayed on non-organic foods, or pesticides sprayed on non-organic food that non-organic pigs & cows would eat that we would then eat when we eat the pigs & cows.
Since our bodies didn’t evolve to break these things down, it takes a lot more resources to do so, and when we all of our body’s energy to break those things down, our bodies are distracted from normal operations of metabolism and digestion, so everything goes slower and takes longer.
Seems simple enough, but I had not been able to understand this before learning it from Paul. My fiancee spent a long time telling me about it, but for some reason (probably my addict mind and Enneagram type 5-ness), I needed to read it in a book to believe and follow through on the information.
He also goes over the dangers of processed, genetically modified (GMO), irradiated, and pasteurized foods, all of which confused me quite a bit before discovering Paul’s work. To simplify things, he gives this diagram to help us decide what to eat (click the image for a higher resolution version):
Exercise — From Sedentary to Willing
In addiction, exercise was the last thing on my mind, so getting started was hard… Just thinking about it made me feel self-conscious and sparked a rush of anxiety.
The simple implication that I needed to improve myself in some way pointed a spotlight on the problems I was trying so hard to ignore, so I put a lot of energy into the denial of my need or desire for exercise.
I had been sedentary for years and I was going to need to attempt something I could actually accomplish. Any failure and I knew I wouldn’t stick around for long, so I started small (at least on the physical exertions side of things) with beginner yoga classes.
At rehab episodes 1–5 I had refused to have anything to do with yoga because I thought of myself as “a real man” who didn’t do yoga. On my 6th attempt at rehab, I hit rock bottom hard and decided to do everything differently… and realized that “everything” included yoga… so I gave it a shot. Eventually, to my great surprise, I came to love it. At one point I went steadily 2–3 times per week over 3 years.
Beyond getting me moving and exercising for the first time in my life, Yoga gave me a chance to marvel at my thoughts. It amplified my overthinking to a deafening roar in my mind every time I would consider going to a class. I came up with a million reasons not to go and was often able to talk myself out of it.
I had to focus all of my effort on simply getting to the studio, putting my mat on the floor, and sitting down on it long enough for the class to begin. If I could make it that far, I was usually good to stay for the rest of the class.
For a long time I practiced with my eyes closed as much as I could because watching other people practice sparked too much mental dialogue, which sounded like “I am a man, what am I doing here! This is for women!” and later “Look how much better they are at this than me! I’ll never get any better, why am I trying??”
These thoughts never went away completely, but after a while, they quieted down, and using the method described earlier, separating myself from my thoughts, I became better and better at ignoring mental protests and getting myself to exercise.
I felt good about myself for going to the class, against the advice of my ego, and for withstanding thoughts that had tried to hold me back. In this way, Yoga was helpful in cultivating my mind as well as body, and cultivating my body helped to cultivate my mind.
Yoga was my main physical outlet until I injured my back and knee a few times. To combat these issues I started focusing more on strength exercises which brought me back to Paul Chek after being pushed by my fiancee to not focus solely on flexibility and to start building a stronger foundation.
Paul presents the aspects of a well-rounded exercise program as:
- Flexibility — Almost everybody, from office workers to athletes, can benefit from stretching. He introduces why it is important, and how to do it without being a great yoga master.
- Energizing exercises — ‘It takes energy to make energy’ and ‘to do nothing is sometimes a good remedy’ are quotes that represent this section well.
- Core conditioning — ‘You can think of your core as an activity center. The core is very complex and serves many vital functions that contribute to your overall health.’ So take care of it, is the message.
- FUN-ctional exercises — This is the core of what I learned from Paul: do exercises that are representative of movements we as humans evolved to need to have to do often. These include squatting, bending, lunging, pushing, pulling, twisting, and running/sprinting/jogging (what he calls ‘gait’). For the same reason you should eat what we evolved to eat, you should move in ways evolved to move.
His teachings are the foundation of my exercise program today, which is a mix of a variety of exercise — exactly what I always wanted, but was never able to get.
Drugs that aren’t drugs… Letting go of Nicotine and Caffeine
In sobriety, it was pretty clear the ‘acceptable’ mind-altering drugs in my life from then on would be caffeine and nicotine. Walking out of my first 12 step meetings convinced me, seeing at least 10 people clustered together in groups on the sidewalk smoking cigarettes and chatting after a meeting.
At first, I embraced caffeine and nicotine as distractions from the desire to go back to the drugs that were more obviously destroying my life, but after the first year or two of sobriety, I realized they were running my life just as much as alcohol or hard drugs.
Common wisdom in the program is “one thing at a time” when it comes to smoking and other less immediately harmful substances, so people are encouraged to focus on quitting alcohol and drugs first. Waiting to take on cigarettes is good advice, and it worked for me. Eventually, I was stable enough to turn my attention to them.
Caffeine is generally considered to be a perfectly fine substitute for substances like alcohol and hard drugs, but eventually, I needed to look at that as well.
I was able to finally escape these non-life-threatening addictions through the same ‘spiritual awakening of the educational variety’ process that helped with drugs & alcohol and once I could see the truth of the situation, how the process of addiction was working in my life, my true self was able to make intelligent life-affirming decisions.
Caffeine
In sobriety, my caffeine intake became extreme, drinking a full pot of coffee (or more) each day. The caffeine was helping at work, so as a die-hard New England protestant capitalist it was hard to justify leaving it behind.
At some point, it became clear, however, that my anxiety was coming from my drinking too much coffee, so I turned my attention to it. I first tried switching from coffee to tea, which provided a much more manageable caffeine effect, and eventually, I was able to simply limit the amount of caffeine I took in each day.
Nicotine
In sobriety, my love of nicotine closely resembled my love of coffee. With no other drugs to turn to, there was nothing like the stimulant rush of coffee plus a cigarette left in my life, and I overdid it with those two for a long time.
To stop smoking I first switched to mini nicotine mints at 4mg, then 2mg, and eventually was able to stop taking them altogether.
The thing that helped the most, however, was Alan Carr’s book “The Easy Way to Stop Smoking” that used the observation of thoughts & feelings method, like meditation, to walk smokers through a reality check. Some excerpts that stuck with me:
“The only reason any smoker lights a cigarette is to try to end the empty, insecure feeling that the previous cigarette created.”
“Get it clear in your mind: CIGARETTES DO NOT FILL A VOID. THEY CREATE ONE!”
“for me, is the saddest thing about smoking: the only ‘enjoyment’ a smoker gets from a cigarette is temporary relief from the discomfort created by the previous one. All the smoker is looking for is the state of peace, tranquility and confidence that they had before they started smoking in the first place.”
“The whole business of smoking is like forcing yourself to wear tight shoes just to get the pleasure of taking them off.”
“Smokers do not smoke because they enjoy it. They do it because they are miserable without it.”
“The effect of the brainwashing is that we tend to think like the man who, having fallen off a 100-story building is heard to say as he passes the fiftieth floor, ‘So far, so good!”
He explained smoking is such a way that I no longer saw cigarettes as an appealing thing… I read this book, I thought about it for a year while I deepened my meditation practice, and was able to quit.
Sensitivity
As time went on without overconsumption of caffeine, without nicotine in my system, and meditating longer and longer, I was able to notice just how sensitive my mind was to the sensations from my body. With a newly quiet mind, it became easier to hear what my body was saying and I was able to get in touch with finer subtle feelings that I had been distracted from for a long time.
Physically, I realized I was very sensitive to hot and cold, the feeling of clothes on my skin, my glasses on my face… everything that I touched was something I was annoyed with until I was used to it.
Learning these are all symptoms of autism has me wondering if I might be on the spectrum, which could have been a third factor in my addiction and early life decisions (alongside my Type 5-ness and early trauma), but perhaps everyone is this sensitive, and they are just distracted? I wonder if you can relate.
Originally published on The Seeker’s Toolkit blog
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