Do We Ask Too Much of Food, Alcohol, and Drugs?

It’s hard to be in the right mood.

We have a tough project to face in the morning and we really don’t feel like it. We have a problem to deal with and it troubles us. After a strenuous day at the office we have a date to meet friends. We have bills to pay and don’t know how long we can keep up the struggle to make ends meet.

We have painful memories from the past that crop up in our sleep or when we have spare time that could be used for self improvement. We have thoughts how things could have been better or how we missed our opportunity to have more money or a different mate.

Our mind is a battle ground. Even adolescents and young teen agers are riddled with worry and anxiety about their lives and their future. After adults reach 50, they are clear they have less time to turn around past events and their future is pretty well sown.

How are we solving all these crisis?  We turn to food, caffeine, cigarettes, pills, alcohol, pot, and more. We try to load our senses in order to change our emotions. We look for gratifications to fill the emptiness or the deep holes in our psyches we don’t want to visit.

Recently I was with a friend and his slightly autistic room mate for whom he provides a role of partial care taker. She is 48 and on seven medications for depression and other symptoms. She works but is often anxious over the permanency of the job.

I suggested that if she wanted to combat the depression and get more positives into her life, we ought to list some things she would rather do than worry and complete some every day. We went through a list of seven things including exercise, reading, and cooking that would be fun and improve her abilities.

Did she complete any of them? No. She prefers her role as victim and leans on her medications. She does have the capability of making positive decisions to improve her moods and self esteem. Is she alone?

Are people trapped in their perceptions and victims to their circumstances? Are there alternatives to the future they perceive? In football, the military, and business, leaders assess their strengths and weaknesses. They evaluate the opposition and determine how they can best utilize their assets to beat the opponent.

In our personal lives our main objective is happiness. We often allow the opponents to hijack our thoughts to the exclusion of positive behavior. It is not easy, but it is not impossible. Creating enough positive activities in our lives reminds us that life is not all responsibility and worry.

When it is time to die or we are too infirm to finally enjoy our peace are we going to think that all our worry was the best use of our short experience of life on earth?  And you can believe that even though you think you have forever, you reach a point where you realize you are on the short side of the see saw.

It often takes a calamity or a near death experience for people to realize that the worry is robbing them of the full life experience. Sometimes the fillers they used to eliminate the emotions they didn’t want to face are the exact causes of their near death experiences.

Food, cigarettes, alcohol, pills, and other drugs can create the life crisis that make you realize you wasted a lot of good time and opportunity to experience the reason we are here.

Create a vision of what you can do for your life that doesn’t cost money. You can build relationships, you can eat healthier, exercise more, enjoy culture, contribute to others, spend more time out doors, and create new interests.

Maybe some of the paths that would open the doors is stop watching TV, put down your smart phones, spend less time on social media, spend two hours out doors in the evenings, start hiking on the week ends, read more books, eliminate the three worst foods you eat, start drinking water half way through the evenings instead of more alcohol or drugs, stop smoking, meet more people, learn one new skill, sport, or game.

We are not victims unless we are willing to be.