PNTV - Positive Addiction by William Glasser

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Hey, this is Brian.

Welcome to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we're going to do Positive Addiction by William Glasser. Now, I gotta say, this is my hundredth Philosopher's Notes TV episode. I am just getting giddy. I've done all 100. Super excited about it. So now we've got 100 PDFs, 100 MP3s, and 100 of these Philosopher's Notes. That's 1,000 minutes of free content. Super excited. Just giddy to share. So back to the note. This book was written in 1985, positive addiction. The subtitle is not important, actually, as I look at it. But what we're talking about in this book is the psychology of stress, strength versus weakness. And Glaser is amazing, super intense, psychologist, therapist, who wrote another book called Reality Therapy. And he's all about recognizing the fact that it takes strength to live a happy, fulfilled life. And if we don't have strength, we tend to demonstrate more and more weaknesses, which leads to negative choices, which leads to pain and suffering in the form of headaches and depression, which leads to trying to mask that with addictive behaviors like alcohol, drugs, gambling, overusing tv, the Internet, whatever, right? And he walks through in the book Negative Addictions to arrive at the need for positive addictions. Positively addicted people tend to have a practice that they engage in on a nearly daily basis that involve things like running or yoga or meditation. What he found was those who are positively addicted to these types of activities tended to be more healthy, more creative, more engaged in life. And his whole book is about how we can understand how our weakness leads to negative addictions and how we can create strength which leads to positive addiction. And the positive addictions which increase our strength, which basically spiral up in really awesome ways. So with that in mind, I want to jump into negative addictions. Because the way he describes this was just so potent for me and really revealed to me my own experience with negative addictions.

Right.

In different areas. Just when I allowed myself to fall into weakness, I can see these things come up. And I come from a family. My father, unfortunately enjoyed alcohol. I don't know if he enjoyed it or not, but drank a lot. His father drank a lot. His father actually killed himself. Was an alcoholic. Killed himself. My father had his own challenges. My family has its own challenges. I've had my own challenges. So I'm keenly aware of what it's like to experience the negative emotional set. And I've worked hard in my life to develop my own positive addictions and my own practices. It's one of the reasons why I'm so passionate about sharing these ideas and compassionate about the challenges involved in the process and the need for diligence and also my belief that we can build strength. I've been in incredibly negative situations, emotionally and financially and everything else. And I know what it's like to experience that. And I know what it's like to live with an ever expanding sense of confidence and self empowerment and the joy and the bliss and the happiness that comes with that. So with that, I want to look at the psychology of strength and weakness. Glasser's point here is very, very important. He says that we need to recognize the fact that although we don't like to recognize it, and most people won't say this, we choose most of the misery in our lives. It's our choices and unfortunate choices based in our own weakness that leads to our suffering. And he says that if we want to find happiness, there are essentially three things we need to do. One, we need to know what we want. Two, we need to know how we're going to get it. And three, we need to have the strength to go for it, right? One, what do you want? Two, how are you going to get it? And three, the strength to go for it. He says most people actually have a reasonably good idea of what they want, right? And they have a reasonably good idea of how they get there, how they could get there. But a lot of people don't have the strength to go for it. And I would offer an ad that a lot of people don't even have the strength to dream and to get clear on what they want, right? So his point is that it comes down to strength. We've got to have the strength to move through our doubts and fears and anxieties and go for it. And here's what happens when we don't. If we don't choose to go for it and to actually go for what we feel inspired to do, take that constructive action. He says we make the first choice. There are three choices of the week. The first choice is we don't go for it. We give up, right? We see a challenge and we don't have the strength to move through it, right? We have a bit of fear of failure, so we procrastinate, we give up, right? Or we think about the presentation we want to give and then we just don't go for it. We give up. We want a relationship to really work, but we're just not sure. So we give up now. That's the first choice of the week. When we give up, we tend to experience pain. Pain is a very good thing. He says pain is there. It gives us. In our physical body, pain is there. So our body is responding to it. We can quit doing whatever is causing the pain. You feel a burn on your finger when you put it on a hot stove. That's a very good thing. You feel acute pain, otherwise you burn yourself up. So the point of pain is to move your finger off of the stove. The point of emotional pain is to change your behavior, to fix it, to remedy it, to improve it. To pull your finger off of the hot stove, that's creating suffering or to move through the fear that's creating suffering right now. The problem is that if we're weak and we see that pain, if we're strong, we see the pain of giving up and we go for it, right? That's what is strong person would do. A weak person. And we've all been weak people at different times. We experience that. We make the first choice of giving up, and then we experience symptoms.

We don't go for it.

We continue to give up. We experience symptoms, right? And he says, this is a choice. Very importantly, this is a choice we chose to give up, right? Many people just blame their circumstances, oh, I can't do that. I'm too old, I'm too young, I'm too hairy, whatever it is, right? I don't have enough hair, whatever, right? So another conversation on that. We've got the first choice of giving up. We get the second choice of symptoms. We've now created symptoms in our lives. The symptoms help us ignore the choice of giving up things like headaches, things like depression. Symptoms that come from the weakness of giving up. The weak choice of giving up. Two choices, giving up symptoms, they were both our choice. Really important distinction here. Then when the pain gets too great, what we want to do is we look for things that will remove the pain and give us pleasure. And this is where addictions come in. Addictions are formed when we do something, again, whether it's drinking or gambling or sex, whatever it is, addictively or we already said the drugs, Internet can do this, where we go to a behavior that removes the pain. We can forget about that which is painful to us, and we get a burst of pleasure. That's when addictions are formed. It's an amazing process. And that's the third choice of the week. Giving up symptoms. And then addictive behaviors that hide the symptoms of pain and and give pleasure. When you get into that process, you're in trouble until you see it. And then start taking your baby steps to create more and more strength in your life. So those are the three choices of the week. I go off on them. He's got some great quotes in the book and he mentions the important point here that headaches. He says most doctors don't recognize the fact in honor of the fact that unless there's an organic reason for depression, he's actually talking about in this context, we can talk about it in headaches too. It's a choice. Depression is a choice outside of some very exclusive and rare organic disorders that can be proved, proven by a pathologist that you have an organic disruption.

Right.

Otherwise, he would say it's a choice. And most doctors need to say when someone comes to them with a headache, which is also a choice in a sense, symptom of the weakness. You know, take some aspirin, go home and start making more courageous, more strong choices in your life and set some worthwhile goals to challenge yourself and move through your obstacles. It's pretty aggressive and pretty powerful. And I think you dig it in the note. And of course, he's also sensitive to the fact that we all have these challenges and what we need to do is build our strength. And the way we can do that is through positive addictions. In the note, I go off on the six criteria to create a positive addiction. Check it out. And the number one benefit you're going to get is a sense of confidence as you create these behaviors. You know, you're the type of person who can get stuff done that feels good. So there you go. Quick look at the psychology of strength and weakness with a focus on addiction and weakness so we can build more strength and go out and rock it. Hope you dug it. Share more with you soon. Go 100. Yeah.

All right.

Have an awesome day. See you.

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