Addiction : Short term gain, Long term pain

I haven't been a cocaine addict or a major addict of anything really, but there have been times that I have drained a lot of my time into social media and video games. Lately, I bought a new game on my ps4 and was really enjoying my time while playing the game, however the moment I got out of the game, I would start to realise all the things I need to do. All the problems I still need to solve and all the issues that I still need to work at. You know, at that moment I realised that addiction is simply running away from life's real problems, probably the more important ones and making yourself feel better just by having something or playing a video game. I am not against social media completely, but I am against the idea of being addicted to social media. You can make yourself feel better by having so many people like your instagram post or you can make yourself feel better by doing something that's important in your life, for an example planning a trip to Europe would make you feel even better compared to this social media thing. Working out will give you more endorphins than watching a video of someone else working out. Achieving your goals will give you more happiness than just sitting there scrolling the whole day. Point being, addiction is making you feel better in the short term by compromising on the long term happiness. Anyways this is not a rant about addiction. Let's genuinely try and understand addiction properly. 

The most common examples for addiction are : 

* Smoking

* Alcohol

* Drugs

* Social Media

* Work(When you overwork) :

These are possibly the most common addictions that come to our mind while thinking about addiction. If you think about it, it's all about escaping reality for a moment to feel better. For an example, one might have experienced something really traumatic in their lives and in order to avoid thinking about the trauma and getting help from someone, we might get addicted to something like drugs that give you an instantaneous high or maybe smoking. I remember when I worked at PwC there were people who would go down to smoke just because there were days where the stress level was very high and they would think, "Thode time smoke karleta hu, fir kaam karta hu". Now this is how you cope stress? This is how you deal with mental fatigue? Really? In fact, trying to work too much and being addicted to work can also harm your life a little bit, especially the relationship part of life can be harmed by overworking. The point here is that the cause of an addiction is actually any unpleasant feeling, whether that's trauma or whether that's stress. It can be an unpleasant feeling that you want to quickly escape. 

How do addictions really affect us? 

In my opinion, they affect us in the most negative way possible. We start to escape reality and find ways to avoid our problems rather than facing it head on. We start ignoring relationships, friendships or sometimes even work. We might not even realise it but we will start having very random issues at work because we are not able to get rid of the addiction nor we would be able to give time to our relationships or gyms. So mentally it affects us in every possible way. 

How do we get rid of our addictions? 

I don't think there's one single way to get rid of addictions but there is always professional help available for addictions. There are doctors, psychologists, etc who treat this in a very professional way. But if you had to ask a very shallow person like me to answer this, I would say replace those activities with something fruitful, change your environment, for an example, if you have a lot of friends who do drug, replace those friends, there's actually no need to keep such friends. If you have a specific time at which you go and smoke, just change that activity to anything that's different, maybe play a sport outside, go on a walk or just do some breathing exercises and count backward from 100. These are really shallow things and you might have to do more inner work, but my point here is to convey that these are things that are possible. Talk to someone whom you really trust to get rid of these addictions, whoever that person is, your father/mother, brother/sister, close friend, etc. Just make a very specific choice on what exactly you want to share with whom. 

How does life change when you remove addictions? 

In my opinion, life changes completely when you remove addictions. You become more real and honest with your own self. You understand your insecurities and shortcomings a little better. You start accepting yourself, and as a result of all this your relationships improve, your work improves and overall your mental and physical health also improves. At the end of the day, we all want some meaning in our lives and we find our meaning only when our addictions are removed. There's nothing like self control. 

After all true freedom is not achieved through escaping the dark realities of life, but embracing life's challenges with clarity and resilience.