You Cannot Break Addictions Like This
Almost twenty-one million Americans have at least one addiction (Addiction Center, 2022) and if you’re struggling with any addiction or you know someone who is, you are certainly not alone.
Addiction is a broad topic with many sub-topics to talk about. Some people can choose to talk about what addiction is and what it is not, and others may decide to examine the psychological effects or even how to quit an addiction. Someone like me can even include the power of the mind, gateways to the mind and other sub-topics if I want to holistically talk about addiction.
If you’re doubting if you’re addicted to something, answer this question: Is there any habit you engage in and want to stop/control but cannot stop/control? If your answer is yes, then you are addicted. An addiction is ‘something you want to stop but cannot stop.’ If you cannot regulate anything you do at will in your life, it is an addiction.
For brevity, I want to isolate a subject under addiction that many people may not yet understand. And it’s about putting a calendar date to quitting ‘bad habits’ and addictions. Please note that for this writing, the word ‘addiction’ can be replaced with ‘bad habits.’
You might have tried it before or heard people say: “I will quit smoking when I start having children. I will quit seeing all my sexual partners when I get married. I will quit pornography on December 31” and other event-tied promises people make in a bid to kill their addictions. But does it ever work? No. If it ever does, an examination of the ‘how’ and ‘why’ it did will reveal that it was barely about the event it was tied to.
Calendars, events, and dates are no respecter of addiction. You cannot tie your freedom from destructive habits to dates, times, and seasons. “No. I beg to differ. There are significant moments in dates that can fuel your resolution to do something,” you may say. Okay. Now read the sentence in bold in the last paragraph above.
The power to quit an addiction will always and forever be first within you, not in dates, times, and seasons. Not in some ‘divine power’ and religious practices, motivational talks, or powerful sermons. Do these things help? sometimes. But what they mostly do is ignite a spark to quit and most times a lion’s share of us doesn’t fan the flame. So, in just a few days, we make up for the days we took a break from our addiction.
I will not be tempted to stray.
Putting a date to end an addiction doesn’t work. And if you have been there before you’d know that this is true. You might have said to yourself, “Today, October 1 will be the last time I will engage in illicit sex,” or “I wash my addiction to pornography away with the year 2021. This year 2022, I will never access any porn.”
Some religious centres even attached gestures to this. You may be asked to jump across an imaginary divide, wash your head with something or fight an invisible enemy believed to be the reason for your addiction in a bid to signify your transition into freedom. All is vanity if you haven’t looked inward. In most cases, you are back to ’business’ in a few days.
Again, addictions don’t respect the calendar. There’s no power in the calendar. Using calendar dates to signify the end of your addiction is merely scratching the challenge on the surface. And that’s why it has never worked. There is nothing special about December 31 and January 1. They’re both 24hrs and have day and night. So, thinking that when we cross into a new year, month or week can make a difference in quitting an addiction is a false notion.
It’s you that must make things happen for yourself not the calendar.
I may be accused of blaspheming by Christians with the word in bold. But I dare say that I am right. There is no anointing to remove an addiction but only one to empower YOU to resist its urge and dictates. There is a difference! I know a little bit about this because I am a Christian and have suffered under the weight of addiction myself. Let’s not start a sermon here.
The Truth
Those who have genuinely broken free from addictions cannot tell you a precise date they gained victory over their demon. They may know the year, (and sometimes, the month) they felt they started winning the war — even this is sometimes mere speculation. Yes! You can say when you started to ‘gain the power’ to resist not when it eventually disappeared. Addictions always go the same way they creep in.
Since you don’t know the day, month, and year you got addicted to a habit, you cannot know the date, month, or year you eventually became free from it.
In addition, I don’t believe that addiction dies. They only sleep. Hence, additions can be resurrected and only you can do that (if you have successfully put it to sleep). It obeys the law of conservation of energy. The energy didn’t die, you only converted it. To wake up an addiction, you reconvert the energy again. That’s why credible authors of this subject always say, and I paraphrase, ‘Leave no vacuum. Replace the habit with something else.’
They’re simply quoting the conservation of energy law: Energy can neither be created nor destroyed but can only be converted from one form to another.
The trickiest thing for humans to quit is something that is attached to their souls. And that’s how addiction works. It’s a function of something on your inside, first, not outside. Tying the disappearance of addictions to calendar days is tackling the problem on the outside; everything is wrong with this approach. “Ola, are you saying quitting an addiction requires no external effort?” No, I can’t go into details about the external aspect of quitting addiction in this newsletter but it’s not the best place to start from. It’s not the root of the problem where the axe should be.
Here is what those who are obsessively focused on tackling the external part look like. For instance, you can find them deleting all the pornographic images and videos on their electronic devices on Sunday after listening to a powerful sermon and end up downloading them again on Tuesday. Deleting all their sex partners’ contacts from the phone on Friday to end up asking their friend to resend it to them on Monday.
External methods of fighting addictions are mostly for regulation/control purposes not fighting the real stuff.
I faced this problem when I was trying to quit listening to any kind of music. My mind is very receptive. It’s the most powerful asset I have. And pieces of music easily penetrate it. The content of some of these songs messes with my mind and imagination. I knew it but I still couldn’t stop listening to them. It became an addiction.
So, I pegged my freedom from listening to any music on calendar dates, but it didn’t work. I went the external way by deleting them from my phone, but I still downloaded them all over again. I didn’t know I was fighting it on the surface. To cut a long story short, I stopped deleting the music from my device and concentrated on fighting from the inside.
The last thing I remember now was that one day I decided to delete all the audio files. That was the final. I had built enough resistance to do without them and I never felt the urge to listen to them again. As years went by, those songs never made sense to my ears again. As it should be, I don’t know the day, month, or year the habit creeped out.
Leave the calendar alone. It doesn’t matter what day or month it is. Don’t bother putting a date to it. Just decide right now and there that you want to start taking control. This newsletter isn’t about quitting addiction and I don’t intend to make it longer than it has already been. So, I will not say anything comprehensive about this. But today’s subject could be the mistake you have been making in your bid to find freedom from your addiction.
I will leave you with this: decide first, then identify the pain/feelings/experience you get from indulging in that habit, identify the activity that prompts you to indulge, and replace that activity with something else that gives the same feeling/eliminates the feeling. All of these happen on the inside — the mind. Then, regulate it from the outside by guarding the gateways of your mind — your eyes, ears, and let me add, skin as a gateway as well. These are 0’level hacks to be on the path to freedom from any addiction. Mind you, there is no addiction that cannot be put to sleep.
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