Addictive Behaviors
Human beings are designed to be productive. Unfortunately, when we strive to do our best and we fall short, there are emotional tensions that come along with it. These can include stress, anger, fear, anxiety, depression, and boredom. Pleasure is also an emotional tension. It is important for us to not only develop but manage these tensions to be effective. It is also important to find healthy ways to manage them.
These demands begin in early childhood. The job of the parent is to teach and guide our children to have self-confidence and self-esteem through a healthy emotional management system. We should focus less on the demands to force productivity (negative) and on our achievement when striving to do our best (positive). We should connect with the issues that are driving those emotions.
I remember my early childhood growing up with my older sister and two younger brothers. My mother would constantly get on us about keeping the house clean, keeping our rooms clean, and washing our dirty dishes. “Your father likes a clean house.”, she would tell us. It didn’t matter because my mother and father were constantly arguing by the time I was ten. I was twelve when my parents decided to separate, and my father moved into his parents’ house. The emotional tension that I placed on myself included blaming myself for the divorce and feeling that I could have done more and that I didn’t do enough.
Of course, I had my own ways of dealing with the emotional tensions. I was a big Coke drinker and realized that it was cheaper to buy the 2-liter bottles than the 12-ounce cans. My first job was working at McDonald’s which led to a nourishment (and yes, I am avoiding the word “diet”) of hamburgers, French fries, fruit Danishes and orange juice. This became my coping mechanism. Eating, not for the nutritional content, but to trigger the endorphins (the pleasure) that the carbohydrates gave me. As I am writing this article, I can remember trips to the supermarket to buy pizza, ice cream, alcohol, or potato chips or going to Marie Calendar’s to pick out a pie on days that weren’t holidays or special events. Specifically, to cheer me up after a bad day or help me cope with some depression and anxiety from work. Normally this depression also leads to a decrease in physical activity and weight gain.
The reason why I am trying to open myself up and give a little personal information is to stress how much emotional tensions affect our lives, not to mention how unhealthy it is. It leads to addictive behaviors and raises Cortisol levels, the stress (storage) hormone. It is important to understand the connection between emotional tensions and how each one of us deals with those tensions. This gets down to the root causes of our addictive behavior, whether it be carbohydrates, alcohol, or drugs.
The one of changes that I have made in my life over the last several years is to worry about the things I can control and not worry about the things I can’t. I have also made time to walk my dogs twice a day. This is just one of my hobbies that is not only physical activity, but it allows me to relax, be by myself in a way mediate or listen to music or YouTube videos. This gives me a sense of well-being. My only suggestion is to focus on changing our views. I realized that my life became so much better when I focused on what I had rather than what I didn’t have.
“Successful people maintain a positive focus in life no matter what is going on around them. They stay focused on their past successes rather than their past failures, and on the next action steps they need to take to get them closer to the fulfillment of their goals rather than all the other distractions that life presents to them.”
Jack Canfield, an American motivational speaker
