Conscious Living – Overcoming Addiction and Embracing Transformation

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Please note that this podcast addresses topics that some listeners may find difficult, including graphic details of drug use, traumatic experiences and addiction. For further support, please refer to the resources in the podcast description below.

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You’re very welcome to this month’s episode of Ziva Talks, Points of Power, Controlling the Controllables. In this session, we’re going to be digging into the topic of conscious living and overcoming addictive behavior patterns that are so pervasive in our modern life.

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For any listeners that may be employers or HR are just generally interested in ways to enhance well-being at work, we very much hope that this conversation will inspire a fresh take first and foremost on understanding employees who may be struggling and help raise awareness about their challenges, but also to know how to better support them.

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When it comes to addiction, we can often tend to instantly think about the more severe end of the line things like drugs, alcohol and tobacco. However, the seemingly less serious ones like screen time, work and even health habits like exercise can also actually become very compulsive, self-limiting and extremely damaging in the long run.

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And there’s no doubt that some of these less apparently harmful addictions do play a big part in the escalating cases of burnout and chronic stress related illness that we’re seeing globally. So it’s really a crucial part of employee well-being that requires attention.

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But our conversation today is not only for those that are enrolled supporting others, it’s also an opportunity for all of us to get a gentle reminder on the importance of reflecting on how we live our own lives and to get some inspiration from an amazing human who’s here with me today.

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Brian has been serving as a powerful advocate for recovery and personal empowerment for many years, openly sharing his experience of moving from one of the most destructive and life-threatening addictions to completely regaining the reins to live a much healthier and happier life.

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He’s a living testimony to our capacity to reinvent ourselves and come back from even the depths of despair. Aside from Brian’s very impressive academic and professional achievements, completing his PhD and working as a corporate keynote speaker and lecturer in Trinity for several years, as well as his heavy involvement in addiction prevention strategies for vulnerable teens, the word that comes to mind for me in describing him is looses.

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In the glimpses I’ve got into Brian’s world through his social media presence, talks and podcasts find the others. He’s an incredibly self-aware, intentional and humble soul and it honestly is an absolute pleasure and privilege to have him on our show today.

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Brian, thank you so, so much for joining us. You’re very welcome. Thanks so much, Sarah. Thank you so much for the wonderful introduction. I really, really do appreciate that. I think the word lucid that you mentioned is something I’d never really talked about or really thought about before in terms of my own experience.

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And I actually had to when I when I when I read that, when I heard that word recently, I actually had to Google it. And it actually means to think clearly, which I didn’t really I thought lucid dreaming was something that came up.

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And I think I don’t think none of us are ever always thinking clearly, but that is probably a core goal of my life because of the blind spots and the insidious nature of self-deception. I’m always trying to catch those lies we tell ourselves.

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So that’s an incredible, an incredible thing to say. I really appreciate it. Add on to the clarity that the life that you are, you clearly are doing powerful work in the world. And so I guess to kick off, we just love to maybe for listeners who don’t know you or aren’t that familiar with your background.

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If you’d like to just briefly introduce a little bit about where you come from on your journey so far. Yeah, so basically, like obviously, my story at its at its core looks like a story of addiction.

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But for me, it was a story of trauma. I’d like trauma as an infant and then as a child. And that sort of developed into really chronic anxiety, agitation, fear, very fearful kid, always worrying, always overthinking.

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And even though, like I started doing well in school, I had aspirations to do well, and there was elements of a very happy childhood. But it was just smothered in anxiety that wouldn’t go away. Like I was never clinically diagnosed, but I would have had generalized anxiety and phobic fears as well.

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And when I lived in an area, a great area, but a highly disadvantaged area. So there’s a lot of drugs, a lot of violence, a lot of challenges in the area where I grew up. And it was only inevitable I was going to try drugs, to be quite honest.

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smoking at 14. I soon started smoking hash, taking tablets, sniffing petrol in the fields. And I started to escalate it very quickly and then by the time I was 16 I started playing around with opiates, taking methadone interestingly enough for the first time.

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We didn’t believe, we didn’t know the depths of, we didn’t think it was like heroin, although we know now it’s a substitute for that. And I tried heroin for the first time at 17 and I always remember that experience.

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I wrote a book about a memoir of my life and I dedicated a whole chapter of that book called falling in love to my first time doing heroin. And it literally just took away all of the psychological and emotional challenges, the anxiety, the worry and the bodily agitation.

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It took it away in an instant. It brought me to heaven, but soon brought me to hell and I literally spent the next 18 years of my life addicted, 15 years chronically addicted to heroin. and yeah it stole my soul it stole so many years of my life it took everything away from me and I was very lucky in 2013 I had what I can only call look dumb look perspective shift and awakening some people call it but I just began through and near that experience I started looking at the world through a different lens and I became obsessed about the human mind and I wanted to learn I had this thirst this hunger to learn about human behavior and the human mind and that literally brought me on a journey through a degree in psychology I done well I got a scholarship for trinity done my phd and I suppose in all I’ve really developed programs and courses and workshops that I deliver in schools as you as you kindly mentioned and I also deliver in in the corporate world as well which is around I call it a program for life there’s other elements of it as well um but I just delivered them now today so my my it’s a mix of my lived experience and my academic expertise that has really come together to help me to help other people and get paid for at the same time so it’s it’s turned it’s a dark story to turn into a bright one absolutely I love I was listening to a podcast recently where he shares how your corporate work is like a sideline to the passion project it helps fund the the core work which is yeah satisfaction the robin hood was yeah satisfaction in working with young young vulnerable populations um I’m interested in two things that you really jumped out of me and what you shared there one was about the early trauma and many people listening may be familiar with the work of Gabor Mate and the amazing advocate he is for this expanded awareness in the biomedical field around how these early childhood experiences can profoundly shape us um so would you share if you feel a little bit about what that trauma was in in your early childhood yeah so it’s quite shocking for some people especially mothers when they hear So prior to 1985,

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infants did not receive a general anesthetic when they went under the knife for surgery. So I was born in 1978. So after three weeks, I had what’s called intestinal malrotation. So my guts were twisted.

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So I went under the knife without a general anesthetic. I was simply given a muscle relaxant to stop me squirming on the table. And the rationale behind that was it was based on some neurological evidence from the 1940s.

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These pinprickin tests, so babies didn’t feel pain like adults. And I think there was a cost benefit analysis saying, well, the anesthetic is dangerous for an infant. And they’re not going to remember it anyway.

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Now, the research today shows that they got that. badly, badly wrong. And basically, although you don’t cognitively remember the event, as a pal of Gabramates has said, Vesel van der Kock, I hope I got his name right, his book, The Body Keeps the Score.

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So the body keeps the score. And every time I talk about this for over 40 years later, I have this little urge to rub the scar on my belly, it’s still there. And what we know from the research of trauma now, like it leaves an imprint on your body and brain.

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So it literally oversensitizes an area of the brain. And it’s an adaptive process. It’s basically saying you had a massive trauma. If this happens again, we need to be hypervigilant, we have to be ready for potential danger again.

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But it’s a maladaptive response in the world we live in today. So I just became a hypervigilant, overly sensitive infant kid that was on the lookout for threats. And that just sort of manifested the self as anxiety and bodily agitation.

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And it’s the same for many people, like even relative traumas can turn into challenges for people going forward. Yeah, so it doesn’t have to be like you mentioned something quite extreme, and also that your addiction was quite extreme.

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But for many people, these shocks in early childhood can come in different forms and then lead to varying degrees of addiction in adulthood. Yeah, definitely. It’s really important point you made there, Sarah, because when it comes to addiction, like you often talk about, oh, heroin addiction is so bad.

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But at the end of the day, every addiction is to escape and avoid some kind of psychological and emotional pain. Nobody wants to be an addict. Nobody wants to be addicted. There’s an element of self-deception and denial and justification within it as well.

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But it’s like, whether it’s like exercise addiction, whether it’s phone addictions, whether it’s food addiction, numbing, numbing your feelings, eating your feelings, we talk about eating your feelings, you know, it’s there’s all these different addictions, and it could be subtle anxiety, subtle stressors, we’re having a couple of glasses of wine, but addiction is addiction, the process.

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processes are the same. And I think some people go to more extreme lengths, probably depending on multiple factors, but the processes are the same. When we talk about addiction, I’d love your take on it.

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For me, I kind of tend to think of it as synonymous when we’re railroaded in an automatic way of behaving. Oftentimes not conscious, sometimes it’s conscious and it’s against what we actually prefer, but we find ourselves looping in these behaviours.

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And then there’s this lack of autonomy or control or agency to choose something different. Would you see it that way or would you also bring something to it? Yeah, definitely. You’ve pretty much confirmed from me the general consensus of what addiction is and my beliefs around it as well.

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And I think the way I would usually describe it is it’s a habitual behavior which could be like phone addiction or substance use as well, habitual behavior that’s causing problems, that’s a key piece, it’s causing problems and you can’t stop despite the problems that it’s causing.

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Now that’s that autonomy piece, a lot of autonomy that you talked about there. So some people like, let’s say they’re having a few drinks a couple of times a week, maybe it turns into every night of the week, but then all of a sudden, now this is causing problems, then they stop.

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They don’t necessarily have an addiction per se, but if you can’t stop, that’s when it becomes what we try to define as addiction, but it is a little bit more nuanced than that as well. I don’t like labeling things in absolutes, but that’s loosely how I’d say it.

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There’s a gradient or spectrum there. So then the second thing that popped out when you first did your intro was the turning point for you and you kind of brushed over a little bit about the great awakening, or that some people would call it an awakening, which is this sort of a Tiffany or a moment of illumination.

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Would you like to talk a little bit or unpack a little bit about what that turning point was and what form it came for you, and then how this segues into having that restoration of power to choose consciously?

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Yeah, and I really just link into that. I love that. I love how you’ve taught about that there. So for me, I had no power. I was very self-deceptive. I had no agency. I was just sort of rolling along, and the world was choosing my path, and it came to a point where I was on debt’s door.

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I had no way of earning money anymore. The drugs had stopped working, and it was the fourth time I tried to get clean for the fourth time in my life. I tried to break free from drugs, and through that process, I’d done a detox from benzodiazepine so I could get into an opiate detox.

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This was the process I had to go through, and I ended up having what’s called a grand malconvulsive seizure, so literally every neuron on me branched for it at the same time. Basically, in my house, through that seizure, I bit my tongue, split my tongue down the middle.

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It was a horrific scene. I was rushed to hospital. When I got to the hospital and I woke up later that night, I felt like I had a bag of tongue tacks in my mouth and I was just so broken mentally, emotionally, physically, in every way and there was a moment where I couldn’t make sense of my reality.

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I couldn’t label my reality when I woke up and I thought I was brain damaged and I remember just thinking to myself, oh my God, game over, there’s no coming back from this and I remember just thinking, I was waiting to just be consumed and overwhelmed by the anxiety that those psychological challenges that consume my entire life and I remember just thinking, I gave up, I can’t do this, you beat me,

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I’m done, you beat me, game over, I’m done. I can’t fight this anymore and as I lay back down on the trolley while I was in the hospital, I was waiting just for the overwhelm and anxiety to consume me.

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But it was like a sense of peace came over me. And that was the first moment of some sort, kind of a shift in my life. And a couple of weeks after that, I was allowing a home, having other seizures, having other other I was waiting for the bands to come out of my system, waiting to get into an opiate detox, but that was the start of a surrendering experience for me where I stopped fighting.

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I couldn’t fight anymore. I was knocked out. The fight was knocked out of me. So I feel very grateful for that horrific experience, which is strange. And when I landed in the opiate detox, a couple of weeks later, there was just like this shift in perspective.

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It was like there was an energy coming into me and a sense of hope that I might be able to get through this and have a life again. And I was at that detox in that detox, a little farm on the outskirts of Dublin, where I start reading books about psychology.

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I was interested in the human mind, but something happened during that process as well. I start meditating for the first time and my first day clean officially was the 8th of October, 2013, and I remember waking up on the farm that day in the detox facility and I was going for a little walk around the farm because I was up before everyone else and I had this profound experience that I can only describe as the world felt like it was glowing.

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That’s the only way I can really describe it. It’s very hard to describe verbally. you And what I experienced, how I seen that was, it left me, you know, it left me so many questions. Why was I so emotionally psychologically broken?

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Why was I now in the depths of a heroin detox feeling so good and energized and in tune with the present moment? And how could I find out what the hell happened and share it with other people? So I set off this sort of born and desired to learn about the human mind.

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And to be honest, I’ve started to been living on that bose ever since. It’s like it’s alleviated to a certain extent. Like if I could go back to any time in my life, I’d be like, oh my God, I can’t do this.

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I can’t do this. I can’t do this. life, as a great moment to really sense a moment to experience again, I would go back to when I was in a heroin detox, which is a crazy, crazy thing to say. But that was the start of it all.

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And it started tempered over time. But it sort of left me with a feeling of gratitude and goodwill and energy that’s never really left me to be quite honest. I’m smiling away listening to you here. Because yeah, I know through my own lived experience that the deepest pain can be that gateway to the greatest freedom.

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Yeah, when you were sharing, I could hear the word surrender. So it’s sort of like, host this dark night at the soul. You have this profound realization. The dark night of the soul. Yeah, and it’s been unfolding ever since.

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And you’ve been such a gift in your journey and contributing so much to people in the process. It’s so, so powerful. Zevo is a fully integrated workplace well being provider. We understand that every company has different goals, needs and characteristics.

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Our broad range of services available both online and on-site are designed to improve employees’ overall well-being and increase engagement within the workplace. We aim to create the healthiest workplace across the globe to ensure that your most important assets, your employees are energized and thriving.

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Contact us today to start your workplace well-being journey www.zevohealth.com I guess when you like maybe look back retrospectively and again as we were chatting at the start you really had this intention to make this relatable to the audience and as we spoke about heroin addiction is that kind of ultra extreme.

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So for people who are maybe not quite at that end but find themselves grappling with even low low-grade anxiety and kind of habitual patterns that they are struggling with, is there anything from your process that’s supported you kind of incrementally in regaining a sense of power and agency?

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Yeah definitely so and I’d like to share two of my struggles today. I wouldn’t call them struggles because you’ve said the word a couple of times and it’s come up several times and I really love the word it’s intentionally, intention, setting intentions and I think that is really related to power as well.

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If you can set intentions you’re putting your feet in the ground and setting yourself for the position of power and two of my challenges today like funnily enough I feel I could sit around like I’m not I could sit around and I’m gonna plan to sit around heroin but it doesn’t faze me.

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I don’t want it. I don’t want to. drugs or alcohol or anything like that. I haven’t got this craving, this need, and that’s because I’ve sort of gotten to the core. I befriended anxiety, so what drove my addiction was anxiety.

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I sort of enjoy anxiety today, which is a very strange thing to say, but for some strange reason, food has a pull. I think it’s because it’s so bloody gorgeous, like the dopamine. We have the best scientists, food scientists in the world making fields that are so delicious, and I just love food.

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So that’s something that challenges me as well. I’m always trying to watch what I eat, and sort of set my intentions around what I eat as well. As we speak and do research with a glucose monitor on me, I’m always tracking certain things and metrics and health metrics, but one of the things that I struggle most with would be the phone, and I’m not a doom scroller.

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I don’t scroll on Instagram. I don’t really scroll on social media. I need it from my business in terms of what I do myself, but I suppose because I have my own business now, when I get emails in, that sort of opportunities that I guess.

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So I just have this habitual thing where I pick up my phone and check it. So it’s like, that’s a very unpowerful situation. That’s a lack in power because you’re new as an agency. I’m habitually picking up the phone when I don’t wanna pick up the phone.

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So you’ve got to set your intention. So what I’ve done only recently was I’ve created a box in our apartment where it’s the box for the phone. And when I feel like picking up my phone, it’s out in the box.

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So if that phone was beside me, I would just habitually pick it up. So you’ve got to intentionally take an action and do something about it. And I still want to grab the phone and check it, but I just do something different.

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And I’ve started to replace that bad habit with picking up and reading a book now. And I used to, it was me phone. I used to check me phone while I was there. I’d get the traffic lights and I’d pick up my phone.

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And I’m not even checking it for anything. There’s nothing I want to see. It’s an habitual process. It’s a lack of power. So I changed that around. And what I do is I introduce a breeding technique. I put my phone, I put my phone in the boot at one stage.

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So when I go to get my phone, I was like, oh, it’s in the boot. You’re in the middle of an intervention here. And I would take a deep breath. So when we’re replacing habitual unconscious behavior with present moment behavior, I’ve taken a breath in a conscious way.

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And that for me is taking power, intentionally switching streams of behavior to something powerful that you can do with addictive streams of behavior, something powerful you can do. Well, intention is the big word for me.

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And giving yourself that buffer, that time buffer. So by creating the distance, making it go that extra little bit of, you’ve got space to take the breath. I do that with chocolate brown, by the way.

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I have the chocolate press and it’s on top shelf. I’ll still get there. Don’t you worry. It’s so hard. It’s so hard with food. It gives you that extra time. Well, there’s, by reflecting on this sort of friend lately, and do you think about seared food is one of those two different behaviors we’re doing since we’re finally in the world.

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Like from birth, you know, there’s other behaviors we take on later in life, but consumption of foods there from the start. So it’s no day. And you can’t, you can’t abstain. Like you can. You can detox off your phone.

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You can get rid of your phone. You can change it to a little Nokia that doesn’t have a smartphone. You can eliminate alcohol from your life, but you’ve got to eat. You’ve got to eat. That’s the challenge.

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And it’s like, I think the problem with it today is just everything’s so full of sugar and sugar is so dopamine induced. And so, and I think when I see kids eating so much sugar, when I look at the research of how bad sugar is, like it’s basically inflames our body in so many ways.

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So for me, sugar is a no-go for me. And I think that’s really important as well, because when you get the basics right, like your nutrition and your exercise and your sleep, you cut off so many of the challenges.

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It increases your energy, it increases your mental health, it increases your physical energy, your spiritual energy. And that’s a game changer. When you get the basics right, that can be really, really powerful.

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kind of primacy it creates a space it’s much easier to make the healthier choices and just when you said dopamine like that seems to be the common denominator across many addictive behaviours doesn’t it especially the automatic ones I am curious just with regard to so just to reflect on what you shared you really said what helped you is the meditation piece was kind of the catalyst for that kind of inner glow and lightness and present moment awareness you said intentionality so being more deliberate in how you nearly the choice architecture of your space in terms of the problematic behaviours and then also just it’s an ongoing process that’s also what I hear that there’s no end point there’s not a ceiling where you’re perfectly devoid of addictive behaviours that it’s just an ongoing journey that sums it up that sums up and that’s really important as well Sarah because sometimes people can see like if you don’t exercise in your diet isn’t great and you’re not into meditation and you’re not into personal growth or any of these kinds of things that many people talk about the leap from that to change in your life completely the chasm is so big it really is and it’s not about making those big changes because what you want you don’t want to do something for a week or a month or a couple of days or even for a year for that matter it’s got to be a lifestyle change it’s got to be something that you do habitually and that’s how you change habits and tournament routines over time so I think what’s really important around that it’s baby steps it’s taking small steps making small incremental changes over time things that aren’t so demotivating that you’re gonna stop doing them because all of a sudden if you try to change your life completely and you have to wake up every day and you have to it feels like you have to climb Mount Everest on Wednesday you’re gonna say I don’t want to climb Mount Everest anymore and you’re not gonna try so make baby create baby step changes within your life and that really is the way and you got to be patient with it as well I think that’s really key patient and the long-term game.

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So that’s goals. I would just be curious now how we take this and put it in that workplace setting. So I know you do a lot of Keno corporate talks and you mentioned you’ve got a program. When you are dealing with middle managers or who are so responsible at the moment or certainly have been highlighted as being so responsible as facilitators of teen well-being or senior leadership, what sort of let’s say key takeaways or advice might you have for them when it comes to raising awareness about addictive behaviors patterns in the workplace supporting employees?

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Yeah I think it all comes down to connection and community at the end of the day and it comes down to psychological safety. That’s something that’s really really important as well because if you’re a manager and you have a team you’ve created culture and culture is really interesting because there’s cultures of organizations you also hear here but you often hear about an organization with 6 000 employees and the culture is great and they have great value systems and maybe a lot of people live those values as behave in an alliance with those value systems as well but within that culture there’s lots of little mini cultures within the teams like you could have a manager who is a bad manager and the staff do not like that manager because he’s mean he’s angry he’s a bit of a bully I shouldn’t be saying he could be a woman bully as well so that could be just a bully and the culture within that team within the organization could be toxic it could be a terrible culture so I think it’s up to the manager of a team to obviously align with the corporate culture and values but they’ve got to create a space within their team as well and it’s got to be psychological safety if you want people to feel safe and if they are struggling in any way they don’t feel afraid to speak to the manager because at the end of the day if you go to someone say you have a village the drink problem between stigma and then worrying about the job getting done on that side it’s good there’s very obvious challenges within that so they’ve got to create an environment where it’s safe for someone to speak out and go to that person and be a go to them themselves or maybe they can just create an anonymous gateway so there’s a company I know called Robis a good friend of mine he’s a mentor of mine was the founder of that company and they created an opportunity within that so there’s an anonymous company so you don’t go to someone internally within the company you go to an anonymous company who they pay for to see that service so it’s outside of the company and that makes it psychologically safe for them to go and and that would be the first step that they need but there’s there’s lots of ideas around mitigating mitigating the challenges as well so I think I think it’s it’s about creating a sense of belonging a sense of community and a sense of safety within that as well and a sense that that you’re all in it together.

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Because we’re all struggling, teams, individuals, we’re all struggling at the same time, different struggles are going on. So it’s just creating that sense of belonging within that space as well, I think is really, really important.

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But that’s obviously, there’s a lot of challenges around that too. There is with the remote and hybrid setup, I think there’s all these new challenges emerging for many managers and they’re trying to figure out how to do it.

Unknown speaker

Creating the psychological safety piece, would you say, adopting that sort of coaching mentality and how you engage with your team? I know it’ll be contact specific in different workplaces, we’ll have the requirements, but would you say that sort of eliciting solutions and support from the team themselves and kind of being there as a kind of a coach, mentor, or yeah, what’s your take on it in terms of creating safety?

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Yeah, the coach of mentoring piece is, I think that the person in charge, the leader per se, needs to be non-judgmental. They need to be living the values that are going to instill that psychological safety.

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So it’s non-judgment, it’s integrity, it’s honesty, it’s trust, all of these things, it’s consistency. Because you think of trust, what is trust? Trust is a value, so you trust that person to continue acting in the way that they act.

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So you need to be consistent in your actions and consistent in your behavior to instill a sense of trust so people can trust the leader within that space as well. So I think that is really, really critical.

Unknown speaker

But something else, and I think this is the big challenge, and you already mentioned it around this hybrid work, and I would be very pro people working in the way that serves them best. But I think post COVID or through COVID, we think what serves us best is working in a hybrid way, is working from home because we don’t want to get into the traffic, we don’t want to do that commute.

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But is that really serving us long term? And I don’t think it is. If you have a company where it’s a good culture, the atmosphere is good, I think you should make your business despite the commute to get into that workplace.

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Because I talked about psychological safety, it’s very hard to build psychological safety across a Zoom call. It’s possible, but it’s very challenging. Because there’s no eye contact made across Zoom.

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We’re speaking to each other for the last 30 minutes, over 30 minutes, we haven’t made eye contact. I’m looking at the screen, you’re looking at the screen, the camera is looking at my eyes, if it is, there’s no eye contact.

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And only there’s a very little amount of communication is actually done through the verbal word. Now we are seeing each other, we’re seeing body language that definitely helps, but there’s no eye contact.

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And there’s no crossover of energies. There’s something different when you’re in the room with other people. So I think to create that psychological safety, whether it’s anchored days, whether it’s team meets, whether it’s getting people together in terms of a play atmosphere, orienteering, a helping volunteer day, whatever that is, I think it’s really important for people to get together in the physical form and connect at that level.

Unknown speaker

And I don’t think you’re going to be able to instill in the required psychological safety unless there’s some of that in there. It actually reminds me of like Dan Beiber’s Blue Zone research where he looks at you know the different regions across the world where the highest per capita centenarians and always these communities that are so built upon social connection, intergenerational mingling.

Unknown speaker

Yeah, it’s like a central pillar in how the different societies or groups add functions, others need truth in your sharing. And deep scientific evidence on that as well, like biological evidence within that as well.

Unknown speaker

There’s like, I just gave an example of that, because I think it’s really, really important. So some of the latest research on that, there’s a metabolite called tachyconin that basically builds up within your brain.

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So when people are socially isolated and feel lonely, there’s a build up of this metabolite that robustly predicts anxiety, stress, aggression, paranoia. And when you are together with people, whether it’s a handshake or a hug, there’s oxytocin, that is the biological bonding that we crave.

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Like when you look at young kids, that bonding experience with the kids, that’s just not between relatives, that’s between friends and work colleagues as well. And all of those things reduce amygdala activation as well, the stress hormones within the body.

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And there’s some great research, I was talking to Dr. Stephen Porges recently as well. So he’s the godfather of polyvagal theory. And polyvagal theory is that biological and element of it, is that biological safety that we feel.

Unknown speaker

And what happens when people are together with each other, they start co-regulating each other at that biological mechanism. So you form a sense of trust at a biological level, because you can sense each other’s energies and feelings within that as well.

Unknown speaker

So there’s an awful lot of science backing that up as well. Absolutely. I’m jealous that you got to speak to Stephen Porges. He’s brilliant. And when you say the word, I guess maybe this is the last piece because I’m so aware of time, you mentioned the word co-regulate, and often with addiction, we hear the term co-dependence.

Unknown speaker

Yeah. So there’s a vast difference in there between like a healthy dynamic where you’re both kind of reciprocally helping each other to thrive versus that enabling, I think you mentioned in when I heard you discuss your addiction before that well-meaning co-workers were actually enabling you rather than supporting you to recover.

Unknown speaker

Yeah. And you know, the challenge with that is because people that are co-dependent and people that enable other people, it usually comes through love like that. It was enabled by my family and I was enabled in my own workplace for years while it was addicted to heroin.

Unknown speaker

Like we had a very family orientation. We all grew up together within that. There was a stage where the auditors, I worked in a pharma company, ironically, designing methadone labels and anti-anxiety medication, and we would have a pharma company coming in to audit us, and they audited the QC manager would say, can you tell Brian, can you hide Brian in the dark room?

Unknown speaker

I’m like, oh, they needed to sack me earlier at that stage, they needed to sack me. They were enabling me in a very loving way. And I think at a more subtle level in the workplace, you might be someone that commends the smell of alcohol and just hide and don’t don’t let anybody let them know that that person is having a drink problem where you need to tackle that head-on, that’s codependence.

Unknown speaker

And it happens in relationships with husband and wife and different kinds of relationships as well. So that’s the challenge. So yeah, so for some managers, some employers maybe listening to this might feel a little bit out of their remit, but even that initial intention, start learning more about it, start fostering that connection, the community.

Unknown speaker

and then raising awareness among co-workers about supports, even signposting supports, any of these little things can maybe serve employees who are struggling. Yeah, and I think something that’s really important as well Sarah, just from the manager’s perspective as well, if they think that something is actually going on, I wouldn’t go, definitely don’t preach, definitely don’t tell them what you think they should be doing or whatever like that,

Unknown speaker

because the person that’s struggling with addiction is, as I said, they’re trying to avoid some kind of psychological or emotional pain, and nine times out of 10. And so it’s like, if you try to preach and tell them what to do, you’re like taking their coping mechanism away, they’re taking their shield of armor away.

Unknown speaker

So it’s better just to go and say, hey look, if you’re struggling with that, and I just want to let you know that I’m here, I’m here, if you want to talk, I’m open, you can trust me, I’m here, or if there’s someone else you want to talk, that can hook you up with someone anonymously, it doesn’t even have to come through the company.

Unknown speaker

Just that’ll give them a sense of safety as well. Well, these have me back, you know that way. So because it is a teaching subject and people are going to be afraid, especially in the workplace, when they’re paying mortgages, when they’re paying bills, and there’s other people depending on them at home.

Unknown speaker

So try to capture it in that way. And I think that’s something that’s really, really important. So trying to overcome that impulse or reflex to swoop in and kind of save and rescue and fix all the paradoxes that people sort of address.

Unknown speaker

Motivational interviewing has a kind of a strategy, a quadrant, I don’t know if you’ve ever come across it over the years, and just some of the interesting questions are like, what is it you love about your addiction?

Unknown speaker

What do you love about not changing? And just even prompting these questions where you’re not in resistance to the individual, but rather kind of pulling forward answers. Because deep, deep down, as you said at the start, people do want to change and they’re likely aware of the destruction to some degree.

Unknown speaker

Peripheral level, definitely. I think we’ve touched on a couple of things today. And there’s a line by a guy called Johann Harries, wrote books on addiction and depression and a lot of great, great artists, really brilliant guy.

Unknown speaker

But he has a line from one of his books. that sobriety is not the opposite of addiction, connection is. And I really do love that because you’re not only disconnected from others, you’re disconnected from yourself because you are trying to escape your psychological and emotional pain, you’re trying to escape your feelings or eat your feelings if it’s filled.

Unknown speaker

So you disconnect, you’re going to numb yourself, you’re disconnected from your feelings and therefore disconnected from other people. So massive impact of disconnection there. And I think in the world of COVID that we worked in today and the Harvard world, try to connect as much as you can with your work colleagues and with the people that are in your life.

Unknown speaker

But although I love Johanna Harvey’s work and I love that line, I don’t know if connection is the opposite of addiction. I would say awareness, self-awareness is the opposite of addiction. As you said, you put it beautifully, that word lucid, which I love it today.

Unknown speaker

It’s thinking clearly because when you are struggling with addiction and even these low level addictions, you are going to deceive yourself. The weapon of someone in addiction is self-deception. That’s what they deceive themselves.

Unknown speaker

So it allows them to do things that they didn’t want to do going forward. And they will justify and rationalize their way into behaviors, destructive behaviors. And it happens slowly over time. And it’s just, there’s no awareness around that.

Unknown speaker

And I think when you raise your level of awareness, and awareness is a tricky one as well. I think you can do it in different ways. Meditation, spending time in nature, asking friends, their opinions of things that you’re doing.

Unknown speaker

There’s lots of different ways to build your level of awareness. But once you become aware of your actions, your behaviors, your thoughts, your feelings, your beliefs, that’s a game changer. Because for me, awareness is the catalyst for change.

Unknown speaker

And once you become aware of things, you can’t help but change. And I think from my own perspective, it was like the shift was like the lights came on. I was like, what was I doing? It wasn’t new knowledge, it was new awareness.

Unknown speaker

So that’s the key, try to, whatever it is, reading books, listening to podcasts, chatting to people who seem to be on a good path, raise your level of awareness. And that’s the protective buffer we need for those addictive behaviors.

Unknown speaker

Presence, intention, awareness. These three pillars. They’re the pillars. You’re three points of power. You’re three points of power. I love it, I love that song. I’m not gonna put my bow on it here first.

Unknown speaker

So I guess in summary, we didn’t even mention the term control, the controllables and the whole thing, but that’s it, in essence, those three things. Well, could I just actually, that’s so important.

Unknown speaker

Controlling the controllables is so important. I think it’s, people speak about it a lot, that some of these most basic things can get looked over because of result of that, but we have no control over external events.

Unknown speaker

No control, very, very, very little control over external events. What other people say or do? We always have control over how we respond to challenges. So that’s setting the intentions there. So start with yourself.

Unknown speaker

That’s really, really key. Yeah, absolutely. I was laughing. And just before we came on for our interview, the neighbour’s dog started barking like crazy. And I was just like, I had this momentary, this glitch where I was like, oh, what are we going to do?

Unknown speaker

And then I laughed, like, control the control of us, sat down, meditated, dog went quiet. But I’m sure we would have managed anyway. It would have managed, we would have managed. You had no choice. It’s outside of your control.

Unknown speaker

Let you gag the dog. You don’t want to do that though. No, no, no, no, I don’t want to do that today. Thank you so much. Honestly, it’s such a joy, such a pleasure to talk to you. And I hope we’ll get to talk again.

Unknown speaker

Name here Sarah. Really, Janine, you really enjoyed the conversation. It was great. Really was. Lovely. Thank you so much. So I hope you’ve enjoyed listening today and will leave with one or two little ideas to maybe experiment with and explore and thank you for your attention.

Unknown speaker

look forward to seeing you on another episode of Zevotalks in the near future.