Dallas Bragg, a recovery coach for gay and bi men fighting crystal meth addiction, argues that morning routines miss the point. Willpower peaks in the morning, but cravings hit hardest at night when loneliness and the social scene take over. Build a nightly routine instead: lock away your phone, use app blockers, check in with your recovery team. Make relapse structurally difficult.
Here's why I think a morning routine does very little to help you stop going back to Tina. Hi, my name is Dallas Bragg. I'm a recovery coach for gay and bi men who want to break free from the addictive patterns of crystal meth and live their best and highest life. Listen, we often hear from all directions the importance of a morning routine, and we see all the big influencers showing us a montage of what they do when they wake up, and suddenly We feel obligated to mimic that. But here is what the influencer doesn't understand: what it's like to use and recover from Tina. The mornings are your strongest part of the day. You have willpower, self-control. And at 8 AM, the Tina party is probably winding down, or the guys are zombies anyway, so you have no desire to go out. Where we need to focus is the nightly routine. We are creatures of the night. when we are a part of the Tina scene, and that's when our system is triggered to use. So a gratitude list in the morning isn't going to keep you off Grindr at 11 PM when you're horned up and you're feeling lonely. How can you systemize your nightly routine in a way that makes it impossible to relapse? Surrendering your phone to someone, or locking it up in a case, putting blocks on it so you can't access social media or triggering apps or sites, Have check-ins with your recovery team. Whatever it takes so that you aren't relying on willpower at night. You need a wall between you and your phone, your digital drug dealer. Comment, let me know what you think.
