TAM+ Episode 39- Five Crucial Mindset Shifts for Addiction Recovery

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Welcome to the Addicted Mind plus the podcast where recovery, mental health and wellness take the front seat. I'm Duane Osterlund, and joining me is.

My co host, Eric Osterlund, known for.

His insightful work on the Stuck Brain podcast. In each episode, we'll dive into actionable small steps to help those in recovery journey further along the path to wellness. Our conversations are designed to be concise.

Typically around 15 minutes, though we may.

Occasionally delve deeper when the topic demands it.

Our goal to provide you with practical.

Advice grounded in real experiences and expert insights to empower your recovery journey. So whether you're on a break, on a walk, or just taking a moment for yourself, join us as we explore the many facets of recovery and mental health one small step at a time.

This is the Addicted Mind plus where.

Your journey to wellness gets an extra boost.

So let's get started. All right, everyone, welcome to the Addictive Mind. Bless. We're on to another episode and I think we have another really good topic. Simple, but in some ways really important. We're going to explore the five crucial mindset shifts needed for lasting addiction recovery.

Yeah, this one is simple on its face, but if you dive in, it becomes pretty complex. So I'm excited we're going to talk about this one.

So before we dive in, let me ask you this question. How many times have you tried to quit only to find yourself falling back into those old patterns? How often have you felt like you're fighting a losing battle against your addiction? And if you're not in your head right now, you're definitely not alone. The truth is, addiction recovery isn't just about willpower or following a set of rules. It's about following fundamentally changing how you think about yourself, your addiction, and your future. When people really get into recovery, they've really shifted over to a growth mindset. And that growth mindset shifts how they show up to the world and enables them to get the support, the emotional resilience that they need to get to the other side and really enjoy recovery. Yeah.

I see this often. And a lot of clients don't even realize that they're stuck in that old mindset. Some of these mindsets and the way we view the world has been set since childhood.

Yes. And for a long time we've known that your thought patterns play a critical role in your recovery process. Recovering from addiction, recovery from other mental health issues. How you think about the world plays such a huge role in that. We've broken it down to five main things that we think are really helpful. And I think you will find those as helpful as well.

Yeah. And what's nice about this, once you realize you're doing them, you can start to change them and you can start to change that mindset and start to perceive the world differently.

Yeah, absolutely. So let's just jump in. So the first one we're going to talk about is. Is moving from the idea that I am my addiction to I am a person in recovery. And what I see over and over, when people have started to be able to practice self compassion, this is a shift that they start to make. They start to see themselves as bigger than the addiction itself. And the addiction is not the. Their overarching identity. And oftentimes when we're in a lot of pain and we're struggling with addiction, that's how we define ourselves. This is me. This is what I am. And realizing you're so much more than that enables you to look at all these positive aspects you have in your life that get in a way ignored when you're in your addictive process. And that helps you lean on those positive things. It helps you see them. It helps you see those positive sides of yourself that you can then incorporate into your life more.

Yeah. And what I like about this one is when you change this just in that statement right there, I am an addict or I am a person in recovery changes your mind to become more of a growth mindset. Because what would a person in recovery look like? What are they going to be doing? So that encourages your actions to be different than I am. This label, addiction.

Yeah. It opens that mindset to all these new possibilities. I think that's well said. I think that's a really important aspect of this, that these mindset shifts. Really just add a little bit to our thinking. That makes it more expansive and opens up new possibilities for us. A person in recovery. And this is what a person in recovery does.

And we stay away from those labels.

Let's go into the next one.

This one is common. Recovery is a destination. We want to change that to recovery is a journey. If you can change that mindset to this is an ongoing thing. It's a journey. I'm in it. That brings you more present and you'll have better success than it's a destination. Because what happens is most of the time we want to look at we're going to be cured or we're going to put this goalpost out there. But then what happens is we get to that goal post and then we move that goal post. So accepting that it's a journey is so important. So changing that recovery is a destination to recovery is a journey is super important.

Yeah. This is a really important growth mindset hack. It can be really, really difficult for a lot of people when they're in a lot of pain, they look outside of themselves to this future place where if I get there, everything's going to be great. That doesn't show up. Right. We don't work like that. We're always moving in and out of positive and negative emotions or painful emotions. And so when we understand it's a journey, when we get into those difficult spots, we can say, okay, this is transitional. I might be struggling in this moment, but I'm not going to be in this moment forever because I'm on a journey. Having an idea that I'm in a journey enables you to be more present in the present moment. Like, this is what it is right now. And as I'm moving along through this present moment, things are gonna shift and change for me.

Yeah. And many people enter recovery with the idea that once they're cured, everything will be perfect. But recovery isn't a finish line. It's an ongoing process of growth. And like you said, Duane, self discovery.

Yeah, absolutely. So the next one. And this is really important too. And I can say for myself, I often fall into this without even knowing it. But it's. I just need more willpower to. I need skills and support. That is a huge shift. When we start to look at addiction, we understand that willpower, although at times can be very useful, willpower is a finite resource. And eventually willpower will fail. So you have to have skills and support. Having this shift allows you to surround your life with supportive people that can help you. And also the idea that I need to build skills here. I need to get emotion regulation skills. I need to get recovery skills, interpersonal skills, etc. To help me create the life that I want. And if we just try and rely on willpower, which we won't be successful with. We're not going to have that growth, we're not going to be building a life. We're just going to say, oh, I'm just going to have more willpower. But we don't actually grow. I don't want to ignore the role of willpower in addiction, but once again, understanding how it works and that it's a finite resource and our brain doesn't have the energy to keep willpower at its maximum all the time takes a lot of cognitive energy, a lot of glucose in the frontal cortex to stop impulse.

Yeah, and we've researched that a lot more. Like if you looked at recovery about 30 years ago, we used to always say, oh, they just, they're weak willed, Right. Anybody that's struggling with alcohol, weak willed, they just don't have enough willpower. We've matured as a society and science and research has basically showed us that, no, you have a finite amount of willpower. So I love this one because this is a big change. If you can change, I need willpower to. I need skills and support. You're going to go further in your recovery journey and I think this goes.

Back to what you were saying earlier. It opens your mind to new possibilities. If I need skills and support, you're going to ask yourself, what are the skills I need? What is the support I need? If you go, I just need willpower, that's all internal and, and doesn't get you to that growth mindset. So I think this is a really important one. You can really start to say, okay, these are the skills I need. Everyone's an individual and we're all unique in how recovery will look for us. One person may need skills over here and another person may need skills over there and it won't be exactly the same. So being able to ask that question of yourself helps you craft recovery that is specific to you, to your mental health needs.

Recovery is not the same for everybody. I love that. And the more you're open to changing your recovery to fit you, the better you'll do. Let's move to number four. What does that look like?

Yeah, this is a hard one, right? Relapse is. Failure to relapse is a learning opportunity. We know in our research that relapse is part of the recovery process and that if you're struggling with addiction, you're going to have some relapses along the way. Now, you have to be careful with that because in some instances that can be life threatening. So you have to be really careful. But if you take the mindset that I relapse, I'm a failure, I'm a horrible person, I've messed this all up, it's all over. And you don't take this as an opportunity to learn and say, okay, what happened here? Let me reconstruct this going back to the one before it. I guess I need more skills and support here. What did I learn from this experience? And take all of that learning. It helps you not only get the skills and support you need, but it also helps you have more self compassion and kindness to yourself, which also builds more resiliency into your recovery system and it decreases and reduces that shame and helps you also reach out for help and get that support. Yeah.

The analogy I like is if you're an inventor or an engineer, you're going to build something and you're not going to build it right the first time. Right. You're going to, it's going to fail. But if you have a growth mindset, you actually love when it fails because then you learn from it and you, you go, oh, okay, what happened there? Right. What can I learn from this situation? How can I build a better light bulb? It didn't work the first time. I'm going to build it a thousand different times until I get the light bulb that works. We see that in history. So look at your, your recovery the same way. You're going to have setbacks. Learn from them and then move forward.

Yeah, often when I'm working with clients and they've had a relapse or a slip, they come in and they are so filled with shame, they feel so defeated and they're stuck in that zone. And with compassion and kindness moving them to the idea of, hey, let's just learn from this piece. What do you got here? Let's understand it, what happened? Let's reconstruct it. And what they start to find is they start to see the patterns in their behavior and they're like, oh, oh, I realize, you know, two days ago I wasn't paying attention to the mood I had or I could see that I was stressed out or I didn't have any sleep. Well, with that information, what changes can we make? And once again, that leads to more self resilience.

Let's move to number five.

So I, I like this one a lot. And it's moving from I'm powerless to I have choices. And it's very true that addiction can make us feel very, very powerless. And in some ways that's important to Recognize, especially when you're talking about 12 step work, there's this idea that you're powerless over your addiction. And there is helpfulness in that frame to be able to accept this is my situation, this is what I'm in. I have addiction and I'm powerless over it. But at the same time, it's being able to say, yes, I can see that I can accept that part of myself that I struggle with addiction. I have choices I can make to be able to move my life towards recovery, towards what I want.

Yeah. And if you need more help with this one we did in episode 12, you only have four choices. That's where you solve the problem, change your perspective radically, accept the problem, or stay stuck and miserable. And so I love this one because a lot of us in recovery, we just feel like, I have no choice, I. I have nowhere to go. We feel stuck. And this one pulls us out of that. This one says, no, no, no, no, no, no. There's some choices I can make, whether it's radically accepting it, whether it's changing my perspective. Maybe I can even add a little bit of solve the problem in there. But there, it's a choice that you get to make. You have the power for that.

And what's really powerful about this, once you really understand that, that I have choices, you can also say, I have choices on how I want to feel about this situation, I think that becomes really powerful. I can choose to stay in my anger and rage, or I could choose to seek compassion, understanding. I can choose to be anxious about this situation, or I can choose to face that fear and walk into that anxiousness or run towards it. Yeah. These are choices that you get to make and they're really, really powerful. Once you begin to really harness the power of choice in your life, that there's so many immediate choices right in the moment that, that you can make that will be more beneficial to you. Takes time to be able to see that and do that. It's not hopeless. There's so much you can do.

So the first stage on all of these is to recognize when you're in one of those mindsets and start to change that mindset, that language that you use into more of these productive ways to look at it.

Yeah. And I think it's really important when you're doing this work to be able to practice this with self compassion. Treat yourself with kindness. Be your own friend in your recovery.

Well said. Be your own friend. You need to be your own cheerleader.

So remember, these shifts don't happen overnight. They require consistent practice and a lot of patience when we're changing our thinking. It takes time and dedication to do that, but they will become second nature to you, paving the way for lasting recovery in your life.

Yeah, and don't forget, Duane, we created a worksheet, so everybody out there that's listening to this episode, if you want to dive into this a little bit deeper, go ahead and download the the worksheet. It's at the Show Notes or you can find it on our website, the addictedmind.com/plus. You can download it there and it will help you walk through some of these mindset shifts that are so important in recovery and just mental health in general. Right. It just makes us more of a positive person and a growth mindset, which is so important. If you want more information on this, we do a deep dive on this topic. So you can go to the addictedmind.com deep dive and join us there. We will be going through the worksheet with you together, and that way we can help you change your mindset to live a better, more productive life.

All right, everybody, until next time, keep shifting those mindsets and embrace this recovery journey. Everyone, have a wonderful day.

We'll see you on the next episode.

Thank you for tuning into the Addicted Mind. Plus, we hope today's episode has brought you valuable insights and a small step to support your journey in recovery, mental health and wellness. For more information about this episode and additional resources, please visit our website at the addictedmind.com forward/plus. And if there's a topic you're eager to hear about or a question you'd like us to explore, we'd love to hear from you. Reach out to us@theaddictivemind.com and let us know your thoughts. Your journey is important and we're here to support you every step of the way. Until next time, take care and keep stepping forward on your path to wellness.