Timely article on addiction from Leo Babauta
I got some time to catch up on my RSS feed today and came across an article by Leo Babauta that I thought was timely. His article, Mindfully Coping with Urges & Addictions talks about approaching our urges and addictions mindfully. I believe this is the place I'm in. He explains it much better than I did in my previous article. One new thought I took away from the article, is the idea that handling addictions and urges is an exercise.
You don't just jump right into exercise if you haven't done it for a while. I can relate to this via running. A few years ago I decided to get back into running. I was way overweight (another good blog topic) and only getting bigger. It seems metabolism is something that starts to fade in your early 30s. I had run cross country my senior year of high school. Running long distances wasn't foreign to me.
When I started running again I could barely complete a lap around my neighborhood. Fast-forward a year and I was running my neighborhood four times. It took time, patience, and persistence to get to that point. Dealing with addictions is similar. It will take time and that's something that I'm becoming more comfortable with.