MissionInfl
Joined 5 years ago
Joined 5 years ago
Highly recommend reddit.com/r/Alcoholism_Medication has a next step for anyone interested in learning more. Not only is the community extremely supportive, the sidebar links out to great resources including a free/legal PDF of the aforementioned Espaka book. That book was my starting point, highly recommended, it is a quick read and lays down the foundation for The Sinclair Method in the first few chapters (it is an incredibly simple system and that is why it works).
This is definitely not true having worked with addiction specialists on TSM myself. Plus I think it is safe to consider Sinclair himself as an addiction specialist
For those looking to learn more about different ways to use Naltrexone to treat alcoholism: https://academic.oup.com/alcalc/article/36/1/2/137995
For me, it felt as though the content of my work is what drove me to do this. Building CRUD applications, refactoring legacy code, writing exhaustive tests, etc were all things that I would get stoned for, saving things like writing design docs and meetings for the non-stoned days. Combine this with a decade of using cannabis to make mundane tasks more interesting in my personal life (playing a video game I have already logged 1K+ hours in, watching a TV show I have seen 10x times, washing dishes, etc) and it's easy to see how I got to this point. The reality of adult life and software engineering as a career is that a lot of it is just boring. Now, whether or not smoking pot actually fixed that boredom is a different question...
This is all to say, if you or a loved one is struggling with alcoholism, I highly recommend looking into The Sinclair Method. Check out /r/alcoholism_medication or this accounts recent comment history. That community supports those that use disulfiram as well, but I cannot comment on that medication myself
I smoked cannabis only after work for a long time in the before time. I had tried, although without any professional help, to get that down to only weekends. But inevitably it would creep back in: I'd end up smoking on a Thursday or Monday night, in addition to the weekend, and then slowly add weeknights back until it was every day. Things got so much worse during the pandemic, I started using it 24/7, it was seemingly the only escape from the mundane. At the very least I'm glad I wasn't drinking during those times but it was far from ideal given both my shift away from drinking alcohol limited my social life and COVID obviously made that oh so much worse. Smoking and playing video games was all that I had left. I'm back to the weekends now, given it is winter with COVID restrictions in my area, it is still the driver of my social life.
I'm not coming to you with all of the answers. I'm interested in what the community comes up with myself. But here are my own tips and learnings that you might find useful: - ADD is a HUGE part of this situation. I see you mentioned it in a comment but not the main post. I didn't even know I had it until I got help for depression during the pandemic and eventually was diagnosed. ADHD makes it hard to put up with the mundane. Cannabis can make any mundane task interesting for me, although with a pretty low success rate. Taking Concerta has helped in a non-trivial way but hasn't fixed everything - Recently I've started to put more effort into smoking the right way if I do smoke. For example, if I had some exercise planned that day, I do that before smoking. (I do powerlifting so I definitely don't wanna be high for that). Or, if I do smoke and play video games, do it when some of my friends are online so it's a social activity. I end up too introverted sometimes. I'm also working on starting later in the day when I do smoke. If I start smoking at 10am, I'm dead tired by 4pm and the rest of the day is ruined. Instead if I start at 6pm, I'm dead tired around when it is time to go to bed. This isn't some trick to get myself to consume less. If anything, this is causing me to enjoy smoking more, which might be my goal
I'll probably update this comment when I think of more things. Until then, I am with you my friend, your experience is shared. I wish I had better advice but I'm not any farther along in this journey so I don't have it. In the meantime, I hope you find these ramblings useful