TEN WORTHWHILE “ADDICTIONS”

            For most people, “addiction” is “a bad habit, something to get rid of.”   This stren addresses addictions that are worthy to cultivate, that will greatly enhance the quality of your life. 

            “Addiction” commonly means we acquire an experience so powerful that it wants to be repeated; and it occurs automatically, with little or no effort, and with such force that it requires great will power to resist.  Sometimes it includes physical effects.  The alcohol addict may experience irritability, shaking, see imaginary things, and have convulsions.  The heroin addict who fails to supply his acquired drug habit experiences muscle and intestinal cramps, nausea, diarrhea, restlessness, and sometimes spontaneous orgasm which is described as “draining,” weakening and unpleasant.  The addict may experience little or no noticed physical response but have severe mental and/or behavioral effects such as the craving, preoccupation with specific thoughts and/or performance of specific acts.  Consider what occurs with the gambler, smoker, the “food-aholic,” the praying of the “religious addict,” the guilt and/or resentment of the “blamer,” the perfectionist, and the more gender stereotyped “addictions,” viz., preoccupation with sports or the “appearance addict” whose discomfort grows with their perceived need for makeup, a regular visit to the hairdresser, and/or concern about their body size and shape.  I recall one woman who was so constantly preoccupied that her teeth were so ugly (they were actually quite perfect) that she persistently worried and refused to smile in public.  Addictions have powerful physical, mental, and/or behavioral components.   

            Addictions need not be negative!  Indeed, addictions can be beneficial, even life-saving.  Consider one simple acquired habit: looking both ways before crossing the street.  It protects our life and warns us with a bit of discomfort should we fail to exercise this action.  Positive addictions enhance our well-being and often prevent us from acting in a nonproductive manner!
 
            Positive addictions are very important.  Because they occur and reoccur relatively automatically with little or no effort, they spare our energy for new activity, new enthusiasms.  Positive addictions ensure the consistent regulation of our mental and behavior actions just as our heart and liver orderly manage our physical sustenance.  Most can readily be acquired and they remain faithful to their purpose, once established.  Wouldn’t you like to have an assistant helper, who will quite merrily work on your behalf, for your health, happiness, and well-being, with little or no demand for payment?
 
            I have come to realize that positive addictions are so useful that I have identified some of the ones I consider most worthy of cultivation.  Each is readily teachable and learnable, as explained in the Guide’s strens.   You already have many positive addictions.  I have prepared this list for your consideration: 

1. Faith: the belief that I can take responsibility for yourself.  The process of making a difference in my life, what has been called “becoming our own person,” begins with the faith that what I do does matter.  Absent this belief, there is a tendency to apathy and/or to blame “others” for not providing what we can do for ourself.  Science does not bridge the leap to faith.  However, the mere observation that many others, including those with the most severe limitations, make their life fulfilling is one inspiration to acquire the required faith to start with the premise, “Yes, I can!  I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.”  Recall the marvelous child’s story, The Little Engine that Could.
2. Self-endorsement: skill in habitually conversing with ourself as one best friend would with another.  Just as we have a minimum daily requirement (MDR) for vitamins and physical nourishment, we have a MDR for mental endorsement.  As adults, we don’t expect others to support us, feed us, clean us, attend to our bowel needs; yet, we commonly neglect to teach ourselves to regularly provide our MDR of mental and emotional endorsement.  The skills of self-endorsement are presented in many strens throughout this Guide.   
3. Loving, friendship: by filling our needs through self-endorsement, we “spill over” with love and sharing with others.  Love is a willing “gift” that is offered without strings or demands of “repayment.”   Giving to get is too often an act leading to disappointment.  The act of giving of ourselves, what we have created, is inherently self-satisfying.  In cultivating meaningful relationships, we also expand the opportunity for our personal growth and knowledge that comes with sharing.  Consider the stren, Your Love-making factory and related strens there indicated.      
4. Chronic enthusiasm: the habitual use of our energy for rewarding action.  Whatever the goal, success is most likely when pursued with chronic enthusiasm.  Persons who consistently feel good and do good seem to regularly generate enthusiasm by rewarding themselves for exercising effort towards a desired goal.  
5. Belonging: Just as we consist of many internal organs that make us whole, we are also a part of the greater community within which we thrive.  Developing the habit of “doing good,” in addition to “feeling good” sustains the harmony we may attain through our communal interest.    
6. Wisdom: the constructive application of abstract thinking, reason, probability, and the knowledge acquired through the past and current experience of “others.”  Wisdom is the key ingredient to enhance the well-being of ourselves and the community to which we are a part.  Too often, the will power of self-mastery is harmful when applied without wise direction.  Self-mastery + ANWOT + wisdom Þ peace-of-mind, peace-for-humankind.   
7. Work: the application of our energy to attain a desired goal.  Work is the path that enables us to fulfill our needs and wants.  It can be very fulfilling as we experience a “good tired.”  We are not inherently lazy; we willingly work hard when we foresee its productive outcome.  Freud concluded the two human endeavors that make for a satisfying life are “lieben und arbeiten,” to love and be industrious.  What a marvelous combination when we learn to love our work!  
8. ANWOT: acquiring the words, ideas, and assumptions of the new way of thinking (ANWOT) compatible with becoming one’s own person.  The “native” language we acquire through repetition, when our mind is undeveloped and our body is immature, addicts us to a childlike manner of thinking, and thereby feeling and acting.  It shapes our thinking to have unrealistic expectations from “others,” overdo blame and guilt, and remain dependent on the “prescriptive” and “either … or” processing of information that sustains the prejudices of our upbringing.  ANWOT is the readily taught and learned substitution of newer words and concepts that promote rational problem-solving more so than reaction and action through instinct and habit.  Our early manner of thinking emphasizes trial-and-error learning from mistakes which we can no longer afford in our new age of destructive power; ANWOT emphasizes “no-trial learning” through forethought and rational mental processing of alternatives before action is taken.  While we enjoy our physical freedom, most people are unaware of the degree we remain mentally addicted to the perspectives of our genes and nurturers … not until their second or third decade as they acquire physical and mental maturity.  The focus of this Guide’s collection of strens is addiction to a manner of thinking that promotes feeling good and doing good. 
9. Life style, nutrition, and exercise: promoting the habits of daily living that grow and maintain our physical well-being.  The skills regarding nutrition and life style are now widely promoted while the benefits of certain life styles are increasingly being identified.  Acquiring ANWOT strengthens our will power to more regularly do what we understand to be in our best long-term interests.
10.  Mental growth, education: Addicting ourselves to the chronic pursuit of practical knowledge and its beneficial application throughout our life, and especially in our later years when our physical resources are declining.  Habitually exercising our mind is equally and perhaps more important than the usual measures we take to promote our physical health.

I have found these ten addictions so useful that while I’m at it, I will add another ten:

11. Risk-taking: the willingness to let go of established patterns to make way for newer, more appropriate and effective ones.  How we wish to cling onto what has worked in the past, even when we recognize that it is no longer currently effective or appropriate.  Necessarily “old friends” die and sometimes it is our task to willingly aid in their passing.  You can understand why “risk-taking” is a fearful ingredient of change, yet it is essential for growth.  I like the analogy provided by Gail Sheehy in Passages: like the crustacean, we must allow ourselves to become vulnerable as the old shell is shed to make room for our new place in life. 
12. Optimism: anticipating the positive outcome that we may experience from our participation in life’s activities.  The use of forethought, fantasy, and mental creation of positive possibilities enhances our energy and directs it to constructive use.  It is virtually the opposite of “worry,” dwelling on the worst, usual unlikely outcome of our life experiences.  Too often we waste our energy in worry, creating unnecessary anxiety, phobias, and the like, when we would be wiser to “optimize.”  While objectively processing the data of our life’s experience, “optimizing” can be very productive and certainly a better choice than “worry” when we do stray from reality. 
13. Know our assumptions (world view, religion): recognizing the beliefs and values, based on faith upon which we base our actions.  Was this Socrates wisdom in stating, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”?  Science provides facts; it does not instruct us in matters of values and morality.  Our moral life is largely the outcome of faith in our assumptions, beliefs, and our “religion.”    We commonly become “addicted” to our values and religion early in our life, based on the authority of our nurturers.  Our morality, expressed in our actions, is largely based on assumptions based on faith!   In this sense, every person is “religious.”  Our religious values, habitually expressed day-by-day, support (or detract from) harmony within, and harmony (or its lack) in the world of which we are a part.   Habitual reflection and growing awareness of our assumptions, our beliefs, our prejudices (“pre-judgments”), our “religion,” are habits worth cultivating.
14. Patience: the ability to forgo satisfaction now by mentally gratifying ourself now to attain greater benefits (or avoid pain) later.  We are all born wanting what we want “now!”  Emphasis has been growing on “faster!”  We are addicted to “sell our soul” without forethought until we acquire more effective means of thinking.  While patience is one of the more difficult addictions to acquire, for unfortunately there is no “crash course,” it is surely acquired with a bit of work and direction.
15. An attitude of gratitude: acquiring the skill to habitually appreciate what we have attained, what we have available to us now, and what we may attain in the future creates a state of mind that leads to feeling good and doing good.  Alcoholics Anonymous is a staunch advocate of this important addiction. 
16. The three “success” skills: accurate empathy, unconditional positive regard, and congruence.  Research and observation show that these qualities routinely lead to successful outcomes in both individuals and programs that exhibit them. 
1. accurate empathy: the ability to empathetically experience the perspective of the “other” and convey that we understand (not necessarily agree)
2. unconditional positive regard: experiencing and conveying respect and concern for the well-being of the “other” (not necessarily the “others”  ideas and/or actions)
3. congruence: being consistent and reliably conveying the above, not so one day and quite different the next.      
17. Music: song, dance, movement: rhythm and engaging the symbols of music may enrich our mind, provide entertainment, influence our mood, invigorate thinking, and promote cooperation and mutual understanding through shared participation.  The benefits physically are evident.  Enriching activity tends to “squeeze out” negative preoccupation.  Such activity is readily and freely available, irrespective of status, and usually harmless to others.
18.  Hobbies: in addition to the pleasure innate in their pursuit, the acquisition of chronic enthusiasms promotes and sustains our vigor.  David Starr Jordan, first president of Stanford University, wrote a book extolling the desirability of acquiring multiple interests in our youth, more than we can possibly fulfill, so that they sustain us when we may have difficulty generating new enthusiasms.  
19. The “reasonable best” measure of self-endorsement: given our limited time and energy, habitually complimenting ourselves when we do what we reasonably can to “do good.”  We frequently don’t succeed in achieving what we prefer, often due to circumstances beyond our control.  Commonly, we have other more important priorities, and of course because we are human, we are certain to make many mistakes.  Perfectionists make themselves unnecessarily miserable due to their unreasonable expectations.  Notice the “reasonable best” measure is an “input measure” that is within our control, unlike the “outcome measure” more commonly and unwisely used to judge oneself.  
20. The Magical Sentence: “Given this situation, what is most likely to get me (and you) what is beneficial in the long-term as well as the short-term?”  Dealing with life’s challenges using rational problem-solving is usually more productive than the automatic responses we acquire through instinct and/or habit.  This promotes the mental “habit” of no-trial learning through reason in dealing with life’s challenges.  Learning to habitually guide our actions by this sentence is most likely to promote wise productive and beneficial outcomes to our action.  While not “magic,” it works so well, it is magical.

            What positive addictions do you have?  Are there some you’d like to develop?  What would you add (or subtract) from my list?   Do you realize that you can readily enhance and/or add to your positive addictions?  What are you willing to do about positive addictions that you might want for yourself?

            While I am “on a roll,” I will share my view of one more positive addiction because of its universal interest.  My assumptions re its positive addictive qualities are clearly open to alternative opinion. 

21. Actively and regularly experiencing sexual gratification:  Sexual activity has many positive and negative aspects.  Here I explain why I include regular sexual gratification in my list of positive addictions that are worth cultivating:

1. Sexual activity is generally considered our most pleasurable natural physical experience.  Perhaps sex is so paramount because survival of the species depends on it.  Animals seem chemically “required” to risk their lives to perform the rituals of reproduction.   While we are also powerfully driven, we do have choice.  Instinct, pleasure, curiosity, culture, parental and/or other social interests powerfully motivate sexual activity.  Sexual gratification brings both discharge of “sexual tension” and intense pleasure.  Sexual tension builds up with thoughts of re-experiencing pleasure, and cyclic interest is established.
2. Sexual interest occurs throughout the major part of our life.   Sexual activity intensifies at puberty when nature’s biological clock begins to audibly tick.  It does so through many decades until gradual decline in performance, and sometimes interest, with aging.  This may be due to the direct “wearing out” of our sex-related biology, or the indirect effects of other physical and psychological changes.
3. Sexual “need” is 100% satisfiable.   Self-satisfaction is readily available, free of charge, irrespective of status, race, religion, creed, etc.  The preponderance of evidence is that self-gratification is not harmful to oneself and need not involve an “other.”  Physically, our sexual organs are receptors of physical stimulation; they receive information, irrespective of what or who is providing it.   Thus, sexual gratification is available at one’s will, without an “other.”  It has been said, the only time you can be certain of the sincerity of your partner is when it is yourself.   Unlike sexual involvement with an “other,” self-stimulation is rarely associated with harm to oneself or others.
4. Observation and studies indicate that persons regularly experiencing sexual gratification enjoy greater well-being and longevity.
5. Sexual activity with an “other” commonly fosters related positive experiences: social sharing, intimacy, companionship, love, cooperation, and procreation.
6. Suppression of sexual gratification commonly leads to deviant forms of expression that may be harmful. 

            Humankind are “interpretive” creatures.  What has been said above about the positive aspects of sexual addiction may be reversed by one’s personal assumptive views, cultural and religious beliefs. Sexual activity can be a source of significant harm when unwisely expressed.  There are clearly consequences that can turn a positive addiction into a negative one.  Appropriate, honest information and preparation increase one’s likelihood of making sexual pleasure a positive addiction.

RECOGNIZE, PRACTICE, AND ENJOY YOUR POSITIVE ADDICTIONS