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Speaker 2I was watching the Kevin Hart roast the other day on Netflix, and there was a joke in there that really sparked my interest in talking about this and being fun in recovery and being fun. One of the comics said, they were talking about Pete Davidson. And Pete Davidson, if you don't know, he's pretty open about being sober and his struggles with addiction. He's a comedian. He was on SNL Saturday Night Live for a long time. Very successful now. And he went sober, and he's open about it, talks about it. Okay. And one of the jokes was, oh, Pete, you know, you'd be a lot more fun if you were drinking. We need you to get drinking again. You're insinuating, obviously, that he's not fun anymore, sober. And this is a huge thing for a lot of us. A common misconception in addiction recovery is that I need drugs and alcohol to have fun, to be myself, to be loose. I talk about this a lot in the identity episode and getting a sober identity. But here's the thing with this. People on the outside don't realize. The low lows that we experience. They only see us out in public. And when we're presenting our stage character to the world. So when they see us, listen, a lot of people are more fun drunk. Let's be honest. There are people out there that are just fun when they're drunk and they're partying and they're high. I was not one of them. In the beginning, I was, or I thought I was at least. But towards the end, there's a lot of dark, lonely moments. We lose our personality and develop no personality towards the end. When I was using. Drinking every day, I became a shell of a human being. I didn't know who the hell I was. I was not fun to be around. You didn't want to hang out with me when I was in my active addiction. And so I want you to think about this. There are times when it feels like you miss the drunk high version of yourself. You miss the party version of yourself, the identity that you cultivated in active addiction. I'm here to tell you that if you're like me, you. Can develop a new identity, but also your brain will trick you to tell you that it was more fun or that you were more fun or that you need it to be more fun. You need it to be this version of yourself that you think everybody likes. That is not true. It is just another lie that addiction tells us another story that addiction spins us when things are going hard or things are getting rough in our life or things are just mundane or okay or boring. You can have fun. over. You just need to find out what you like to do and then do those things. So that was a little segue, a little sidetrack into today's episode. It doesn't really have much to do with today's episode, but I was thinking about that. I was prompted to share about that because we make jokes about people, oh, you know, he needs a drink. You'd be more fun with a drink, but it's often not true. And a lot of us become shells of humans towards the end. So don't ever forget that, that just because your brain remembers the fun parts doesn't mean that it was always fun. Doesn't mean that recovery can't be fun. And so today I want to talk about pleasure, seeking pleasure versus seeking meaning, seeking purpose, and the importance of stopping that dopamine seeking behavior, that pleasure seeking behavior in recovery, because we did it for so long. I did it for so long in active addiction, but also how to find meaning and why meaning is important. And I think a lot of us spend a lot of time seeking pleasure in recovery through cars, through jobs, through money, through relationships, through gambling. And we don't ever, we just go in this sort of treadmill, which I'm going to talk about the hedonic treadmill, this pleasure seeking treadmill over and over again. And we're never really satisfied. We're never satiated. We're never full because it's impossible to be full on outside things, on material. And so I think a lot of us spend a lot of time seeking pleasure in recovery, things. They lose their shine after a while. Pleasure feels good and means nothing. Meaning feels hard and changes everything. Recovery is the war between those two drives. And most of us, even years in are still picking the wrong side without knowing it. I chased pleasure for years in active addiction. I chased meaning for seven and a half years when I was sober the first time and I still picked up. So today, I'm going to tell you what I got wrong both times, because if you don't understand the difference between these two drives, sobriety can't save you from either one. I need to know the difference. I need to know when I'm living in pleasure seeking and when I'm living in meaning seeking. So welcome back guys. My name is Anthony. I'm an alcoholic and an addict. I came into recovery in 2015, had seven and a half years of sobriety and contented sobriety and recovery. And I relapsed on secrets, steroids, and ADHD medication. I'm here today with almost a year and a half sober again. I'm grateful to be here today. I'm grateful to be alive. I'm grateful to be in recovery because I know not everybody makes it back and I know how hard it was to come back. So I'm grateful for that. I'm grateful for the people that helped me put down the ladder for me when I was struggling. So this is a contest. There's two drives, one nervous system. They fight every day. Pleasure, fast, loud, exciting, front loaded, sensory ends. It ends. It's temporary. It's transient. Beer, the like, drugs, the win, the dopamine, the quick band-aid solution, the quick fix, the exciting bang, if you will. And then we have meaning. So meaning is slow, quiet, back loaded, structural, compounds, service, mastery, belonging, story, why, the why I'm doing things, why I'm here, what is my purpose, purpose, right? Delayed gratification instead of instant gratification. So we're talking about the experiencing self versus the remembering self. Pleasure plays the experiencing self. Meaning plays the remembering self. Addiction is what happens when pleasure runs the entire show. Sobriety doesn't automatically fix that. It just removes one of pleasure's favorite tools. So pleasure is biologically louder. Your brain rewards it on a millisecond timeline. Meaning rewards you weeks, months, years later. It's delayed gratification. You don't get that instant gratification, that high, that quick burst of dopamine. Sometimes never in a way you can feel at all. So every single pleasure source eventually recalibrates. The treadmill, is the engine of addiction. Restless, irritable, discontent. That's the treadmill talking. For me, I always chased that first line of cocaine, that first pill in the morning when I was on ADHD medication. That instant high, when my tolerance was down. I remember I used to take Tums to change the acidity in my stomach so I could get higher, more high. I could feel it more. I used to crush up my pills so I could put them under my tongue if they were extended release and make them instant release. I used to take Tums to change the acidity in my stomach so I could get higher, more high. I'm always searching for the most effective, efficient ways to use drugs and alcohol. How can I get high faster? How can I make this last longer? I'm always searching for more. It's never enough. So the pleasure trap. The core idea of the pleasure trap is that addiction is the most efficient pleasure delivery system humans have ever built. And it's the most reliable way to destroy a life. That tells you something. If pleasure were the answer, we'd all be the most miserable. But we were the most miserable, especially those that have spent years in active addiction. So Anna Lemke is a famous, I think she's a scientist. I could be wrong. She goes on Huberman podcast a lot, but she has a book called Dopamine Nation. She's sorry. She's a psychiatrist from Stanford. Her central image, the brain has a pleasure pain balance like a seesaw. Every spike of pleasure gets met by an equal and opposite tilt toward pain. The brain demands homeostasis. It's sort of level playing field. Every high writes a check, then comes back. Every high writes a check. The comeback has to cash. Tolerance is seesaw, is the seesaw recalibrating. Eventually baseline equals pain and the drug just gets you to neutral. The hedonic adaptations or the hedonic treadmill, as I mentioned earlier, you adjust to whatever level of pleasure you have. So the new car, the new relationship, the new dose of drug or alcohol, the new amount of drink, the new strength of drink. Three weeks in it's baseline. You're right back at baseline and you need to compensate. So Bruce Alexander's rat park study, sorry, this isn't Frank Sinatra, rat park study in the 1970s, isolated rats and isolated rats had, so they had the ability to hammer the cocaine lever. They had a button that they could press when they could get cocaine whenever they wanted. Rats in an enriched environment with other rats, in the community, barely touch the, the lever. They barely reached for the high when they had other rats around them. This suggests connection and environment matter as much as the substance. That's why you always hear me say community is so important. I need to be around other people because I get meaning in relationships. I get meaning in connection with human beings, connection with a higher power. My higher power speaks through other people. We were meant to exist in tribes as human beings, in packs. We were meant to exist coexist with each other in harmony and love and we were meant to be around people that's why isolation is so dangerous in addiction i need to be around people so for me i can think of countless times where i needed more to feel the same high or to feel less i even switched from drugs i i opted i went from cocaine i went from vivance to cocaine to meth to in pills because i needed more and i was buying it off the dark web who the fuck knows what was in that those drugs i remember i bought a testing kit and never used it or i used it once and the adderall i had tested for meth and then i never used it again i was like uh it's what's the point of this anyways yeah you hear this all the time the first what was the i want to ask you what was the first time you remember the drugs stopped working the alcohol stopped working it stopped achieving its goal you hear a lot of people come into recovery and say that the drugs stopped achieving their purpose they stopped achieving their goal they stopped working for me and so eventually the only option was to either off myself or to get into recovery and i'm happy personally that you're listening today you chose recovery you're choosing recovery i'm so glad that you're here because a lot of people don't make it out let's be honest and it's sad and it's tragic but it's the truth think about how many people you've been to rehab with if you've been to treatment if you've had the privilege of going to treatment think about the people that you were in there with how many of them think about it today i want you to think about this how many of them are still sober today still connected to you and how many of them have unfortunately passed away in when i was 23 and i went to hazelden in minnesota there was a lot of opiate users there i must have i think i lost 10 people 5 to 10 people that i went to treatment with in the years after post rehab the pleasure coded recovery trap most people don't get sober to find meaning i never came here to be a better person there was no moral high ground that i was seeking i just wanted the pain to stop i i was driven to to recovery by circumstance rather than by virtue i came here because my circumstances were so terrible my life had become non-existent i didn't recognize the man in the mirror anymore i didn't even know what was going on in my life i was so sick and tired of being sick and tired i didn't want to feel this way anymore i was done living my life this way i was done feeling like a piece of shit like a fuck up like a mess like i couldn't control anything in my life most people don't get sober to find meaning they get sober because pleasure stopped paying out and started taking everything yeah it's a good way to put it the problem is when the pain stops pleasure starts looking attractive again just in a legal packaging so you get sober and you start to seek other things because you stop doing the recovery stuff you lose your connection with a power greater than yourself or your recovery community and you're feeling that hole inside of you and instead of seeking something greater than you you're seeking material things because instagram tells me that i'm going to be happy if i have a better car well drake looks really happy he's got tons of money that must be the answer i'm going to chase that by the way shout out drake doing great things for the city of toronto love the guy i don't know him personally obviously yeah we're golfing buddies what a great night last night he froze the cn tower i live right downtown toronto so it's great to see the fireworks were amazing my wife loved them amazing amazing show doing great things for the city of toronto love to see it don't ever forget where you came from people so then we have the ism swap cross addiction you go from sober from the substance to still running the same operating system so work hits gym hits food hits money hits sex relationship hits achievement hits even recovery itself as a hit you're chasing those things you become obsessed obsessive about those things the praise the milestones the attaboys the pats on the back the chips the medallions the the stand-up applause the crying and laughing and cheering for me i got obsessed with golf when i first got sober i got obsessed with golf the gym i swapped addictions for a long time shopping good thing is i think today what's my addiction today instagram for social media is my addiction today chasing the likes chasing the follows i gotta stop it's not enjoyable my neck hurts i'm looking at my phone too much lately i had an app that blocked the instagram and the tiktok and stuff like that but listen to me i sound like an 80 year old man the instagram and the tiktok i had an app i blocked them i i guess i what did i do i stopped i stopped using those apps to block instagram because i told myself that i needed to look at it for business purposes good old addict i am why meaning loses the daily fight meaning is bad at marketing itself it's not a sexy thing it doesn't feel like anything in the moment sitting with a newcomer at 11 p.m is not a dopamine hit it compounds but it doesn't announce itself these are the slow i'm i'm putting down i'm investing in my recovery today in small increments and it doesn't look sexy when i save five dollars every week or every day but over time it compounds and you see the purpose of it you just don't see it now so the shift for me is to be able to see the work i'm putting in today the podcast work the sobriety work all the work that i'm putting in today it's not going to pay off in a couple of hours it's not going to pay off tomorrow i have to be patient it's going to pay off eventually and then to have the faith that it will pay off if i just keep showing up and just keep putting in the work that's hard that's hard man it's hard to have that faith to take that leap of faith i don't know what i'm doing right now i'm going to do it and i'm going to trust that the results are going to be whatever they're going to be and i'm okay i'm going to be taken care of i'm okay at the end of the day if i just take this leap of faith today if i just put in the work one step at a time today things are going to work out it's hard to do that but it's very powerful and very effective you just don't know it yet pleasure is front-loaded reward back-loaded cost meaning is front-loaded cost back-loaded reward your nervous system was trained for however many years to optimize the first one it does not naturally pick the second one delayed gratification is the goal here i'm sacrificing the new iphone today for the house down the road instead it's usually it's the other way around i'm getting the iphone today and i'm not thinking about the house i want to buy down the road i had a very effective psychiatrist tell me that dr joseph lee and hazelden changed my whole view of addiction when he put his hands out like that and he showed me instead of sacrificing your money for the iphone today think about the house down the road that is addiction right there the delayed gratification so i want to talk about victor frankl if you don't know victor frankl he's a man he wrote the book man's search for meaning he was a he was in a concentration camp during the holocaust and he wrote this amazing book and he wrote a book called man's search for meaning and he wrote a book called amazing book if you haven't read it i highly recommend it it's one of my favorite books i haven't read the whole thing actually i have to be honest but i've read a lot of it but it's a highly studied sought after book those this is what he says those who have a why to live can bear with almost any how i have to read that again that's beautiful those who have a why to live can bear with almost any how so if i have a why i have a reason i have a purpose i have meaning i'll do whatever it takes you tell me how if you told me to go left i'm going to go left if you tell me to go right i'm going to go right if you tell me to jump i'm going to say how high that's recovery man i don't really i'm taking suggestions from that i don't necessarily believe in but they're coming from someone doing better than me or someone who is knows what they're talking about because they've done it before that works with starting a business that works with getting sober that works with playing golf i'm going to trust that this guy or girl knows what he's talking about this person knows what they're talking about because they look like they can do it they they're look happy they look successful they are successful in whatever area we're talking about so frankl talks about the in the camps being in the camps the concentration camps survivors weren't the strongest or most optimistic they were the ones with meaning so i'll do a quick case study i relapsed after seven and a half years a lot of you have heard this already i'll make it brief essentially i relapsed because i stopped connecting with my recovery program my higher power with others i stopped helping others i stopped practicing the principles spiritual principles honesty hope faith perseverance service humility brotherly love i i stopped practicing those principles i stopped my connection and i started so i stopped looking for the answer within because i already i had already found it but it's i need to be reminded that the answer is always within me and i started looking externally i use outside things to change my inside so by process of elimination when i use the car the car doesn't work When I get the promotion, the promotion doesn't work. And when I say work, fill this hole. It makes me feel better. Eventually, I'm going to end up doing my drugs or drinking again because that worked for a moment. And my brain remembers that. And when I start keeping secrets, I eventually end up in the fuck-its. And when I'm saying, ah, fuck it, whatever, F it, F it, F it, I'm going to relapse. And that's how I did after seven and a half years of contented sobriety and recovery. The trap inside the trap. Most people who hear this episode will try to chase meaning the same way they chased pleasure. I'll do service until I feel meaningful. That's pleasure logic wearing a meaning costume. Meaning is not a feeling you achieve. It's a direction you live in. The test here is if it stops feeling rewarding, would you keep doing it? If no, you were after the feeling, not the meaning. Rig the fight in the meaning's favor. Tuesday at 3 p.m. What do you? Actually do. I'm usually doing podcast stuff at that time. I'm usually doing editing. I'm usually doing something with social media or my recovery page. And yeah, I mean, if I think about it, that's my meaning today is to carry the message to other addicts and alcoholics through the form of podcasts and social media. That might change over time. But today, that's the meaning. And when I post a podcast, I don't get paid for it. I don't get money. I don't get instant gratification. I don't get quick fixes. I don't get this band-aid solution. It's not sexy in the moment. But over time, I have to do these things if I want to grow the podcast, if I want to start a business, if I want to eventually earn income. I have to put in the work today. And yeah, sure. It's not all about money. This is true. But I would love to make a living off of this. I really would. If I'm being honest, I want to make a living off this because I love doing it. I enjoy doing it. And it doesn't seem like work on a lot of days. Some days it does. But some days it feels. It feels like a chore. So does recovery. But I do it anyways because that's how I built my recovery program over small moments, over repeated actions, repetition, getting in the reps. It's so simple. But it's really not easy. The verdict plus the warning. So take a side. Don't take, don't both sides this. Take a side. Are you seeking pleasure today? Ask yourself honestly. Am I seeking pleasure today or am I seeking meaning? And the best part about it. Is you can go back and forth and realize it and stop yourself before it's too late. And at any moment in your day, you can stop and think, you know what? I'm going to stop chasing pleasure today. I'm going to stop chasing pleasure right now. I'm going to start chasing meaning. I'm going to do the small things that pay off in the end. But I don't see the end goal right now. You can decide at any moment to look at anything and say, hey, I'm going to change this right now. Pleasure is not the enemy here. Pleasure as the organizing principle is the enemy. So if that's your direct guiding, only guiding force, your North star, not a good thing. Recovery is the slow process of moving meaning from the passenger seat into the driver's seat. If your recovery is still organized around feeling good, even if it's the good of being sober, there's a clock on it. It's going to end eventually. I had a mentor always tell me this. I don't need to feel good. I need to do good. I love that. It's simple. It's effective. I can grasp onto that. I'm not going to feel good all the fucking time. And neither are you. But I can do good in the small moments that point toward the end goal of meaning. I just don't see it yet. And I never will because I have finite power. Trust the universe that it's going to work out. Trust God that it's going to work out. Whatever you believe in. Trust the sun. Pray to the sun that it's going to work out. Pray to the sky, the clouds. The birds. I don't care. As long as it's not a human being. Pray to something that has infinite power. Not my finite power. It's all going to work out if I just do the next right thing over the small moments in my day. I'll get proof of that eventually. It just doesn't. You just don't see it now. Like I said. Okay, guys. Thanks so much for listening. Thank you for being here. I have a new episode coming out on Tuesday with Steven. We talk about crack cocaine addiction. We talk about benders. We talk about rehab. We talk about faith. And he did a great job. So stay tuned for that one. I love every single one of you. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for sending me amazing, heartfelt messages of inspiration and joy. I love hearing people counting days and going out, getting after it and doing the do things. Keep messaging me. If no one has told you this yet today, I love you. And recovery is simple, not easy.
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