A change in diet is never only a change in diet. A big part of what I talk about in recovery from addiction, and in mental health overall, are all the things we have to do simultaneously while we're juggling a difficult life and anxiety. We have to get our diet in check. It's difficult to break the golden rule that if your chemistry is out of whack, you're going to feel anxiety through the physical body.
For some people it's very difficult. They have illnesses or pain, and they know exactly what I'm talking about when I say the anxiety it causes, and how a person has to work extra hard when life deals more adversity. But when you're in a position where your adversity and anxiety are almost choices we make, then through practicing the disciplines of breathing, meditation, exercise, reading, writing, and service work, we transform, especially when we include psychotherapy in the mix.
None of this is myth. It's really simple stuff, guys. Why wait to get it? Well, some people can't make change so easily and can't do self-help. There's no judgment in that. We all have to become ready to fix ourselves, and some of us can't. Some of us are wired with more adversity, which is beyond self-help. But that doesn't mean that if we can self-help, we shouldn't talk about it. We have to talk about it.
Where I think I grew from my main mentor Fred was that I incorporated more psychology into what I learned from him, into how I translated it to others, because I had a lot of background in addiction recovery. I really believe in learning about childhood experiences in a very technical way, where you write them out and map out cause and effect and really study your childhood for several years, so that it becomes easy to attach a cause and effect to all the behavior patterns we're looking to change. Understanding where some of those original character defects came from sometimes helps us untangle them from wrapping themselves around our neck and making us live by them.
There aren't many ways through anxiety except to explore, discover, and then work to develop a psychology that builds around our anxieties, and it takes time. It takes breathing exercises. It takes movement. It takes working to relax oneself, working at it every day, some days more gentle than others, some days more intense when we're feeling strong.
I believe there are methods for relaxing anxiety by closing your eyes and letting the thoughts come up, breathing through them, staring at them face to face, acknowledging their existence, continuing to breathe, visualizing their power, and then soothing the mind by telling yourself that you're okay in the present moment with whatever is happening. But the mind will fight back. The first thing it will say is, you don't know how much I suffer.
Everyone suffers to different degrees. Everybody has to work at a different pace to be free. If you believe in reincarnation, you can say that for some people it'll take many lifetimes, because one lifetime can't complete all the puzzles. Maybe when you die, you don't die. I'm on the fence about all of it myself, and I don't think we can answer it honestly. You could meditate on it for 25 years and come up with your best version of what you think is happening in reality, and it would still be a guess. That's why the great Chinese philosopher said that all that is mysterious like that, the Tao, cannot be explained in words, and those who try to teach it in words are foolish. They don't understand what it means.
Some of this sounds nonsensical to people. You laugh at it, or you look at it and say, it sounds really good what you're saying, but all of this is much easier said than done, so how do I get to really think like that? You might be thinking, does this guy writing this really believe this stuff, or is he just writing fiction?
The answer is that in this moment that I'm writing, I'm breathing and meditating and I'm very present in what I'm doing. These are ideas I've had for a long time that I write and refine and write in different ways until they make sense to me. I'm writing a guide for myself to follow. Maybe one day someone else will read it and take some solace or find value in it. I don't get too attached to any one thought process. I change them all the time. I learn more, I build on it. I try to test myself to make sure that I'm grounded and I haven't lost my mind. I make sure that I'm not a narcissist and that I'm not following addictive patterns that are destructive. It's like flying an airplane, really, living life. There's always turbulence. There are always processes and concerns and things to plan ahead for.
Making extensive lists about your diet, what you eat, what your relationship with food has been like, is an extraordinary technique for recognizing your patterns truly and in depth, and then finding the means to empower yourself. You might say that when we're down in the dumps and defeated by certain things, or when we have an addiction we feel we don't have the power to stop, only something greater than that addiction can cancel it.
An example of that would be when someone eats addictively without being held accountable to themselves. The power greater than themselves could be their doctor telling them they'd better change their lifestyle pattern or they're going to be dead very shortly. Maybe they do something, not always. Or perhaps a person decides they're lonely and they want to change their body type, they want to like their body, and so their desire to look and feel better becomes a power greater than the compulsion to eat poorly. There are all kinds of little things like that that we can find. You can empower yourself through writing and meditation, and through prayer if you believe in God. You can empower yourself through service work of any kind. But we have to find that power to get started.
I suggest praying for the strength to quit an addiction, even if you're an atheist. It's okay to pray, because religious people are not really confident that God exists most of the time, and atheists aren't really sure what they're saying either. They're both right, and they're both wrong about what exists in the realm of the divine. That's pretty well known by most great philosophers, that humanity as a whole gets the nature of reality kind of wrong. That's why we're a very anxious creature, because the future is really uncertain, and we behave with anxiety responses from that primal fear of a lack of control, the fear of death.
When you truly believe in God, you cannot fear death in that way. You know that life is sacred, so you do not take life for granted or put yourself in harm's way, but you can't be afraid of death, because you recognize that your soul is being transported in the chain from life to death. You have a place in that system, which means you are an eternal being. What is there to be afraid of? Maybe some pain, for sure, or maybe missing memories you love and cherish, or having to give away all your stuff when you die, including your body.
But surrender the fear of dying, and remember that our addictions trace all the way back to the fear of death, and then make their way forward into other anxieties, shame, fear of hard work, fear of humiliation, fear of loneliness, fear of boredom, fear of being hurt, fear of being abandoned, fear of being smothered. We could make a list a mile long of all the various fears we have, but the base fear is the fear of death and annihilation. So we breathe, and we share good things with the world, and we celebrate, and we temper our cravings, and we cherish the body and preserve it.
Diet represents one of the most important ways to gain control over our lives and our emotional world, to gain control over behavior patterns that make us feel terrible. Quite honestly, I don't judge people for whatever behaviors they're in. I don't body shame. That is not what I'm talking about here at all. The transformation in health is in making the change in the pattern, not in the result of a six pack. That's really exciting too, but that's not how we measure. We measure success by looking in the present moment and saying, am I in a relaxed mind and out of addiction, or am I in an anxiety state, reacting? That's really the first test.