How Can I Stop My Behavioral Addiction on My Own?
The answer to what your first step in stopping your behavioral addiction should be lies in the addiction itself. What is it all about? As we’ve spoken about before, the first thing I would recommend is, without shame, without blame, and without putting yourself down, stand back, get out a spreadsheet or a piece of graph paper and start to just graph how often and the frequency of when you engage in this particular behavior. Beyond that, there’s a substantial amount that you might do. That is, figure out what times you typically engage in the behavior. If you look at an addict, generally speaking, they engage in their destructive behavior in a slice of hours. Let’s say 5:00 to 7:00, or early in the morning, or something like that. Those are the hours that the body has been taught (sort of like muscle memory) to go and to engage in these sort of behaviors, and the individual should try to find activities that are inconsistent with the destructive addictive behavior. Another sort of strategy: they may go to the self-help book section at their local library or bookstore, they might go on the Internet and try to get some basic knowledge about what might be going on, they can consult a professional; a psychologist or a physician who is specializing in addiction. Let’s just be frank. Most physicians have no idea about addictions. They have a very pessimistic view on being able to cure an addiction. So, you need to seek out somebody who really knows something about it, and don’t …