When Is "Moderation" More Than Moderation? Signs You Might Be Crossing The Line

Addiction actually exists on a spectrum. The line between casual use and full fledged severe addiction or alcoholism isn't always black and white. That's where this concept of gray area thinking comes into play. If you've had some concerns about your drinking or your other substance use, but you don't feel like you're full fledged addict or alcoholic, then this video is definitely for you. For those of you who are new here, my name is Amber Hollingsworth. I'm a master addiction Counselor. And this YouTube channel is all about helping you understand the science and psychology of addiction so you can stay five steps ahead of it. And today's topic, gray area thinking, is spot on with that because if you can recognize the signs and symptoms earlier, then you can prevent a whole lot of mess and damage in the future. There's a bit of a difference between gray area drinking and gray area thinking. Let's talk about those differences here. We're going to start with gray area thinking. Now, here are some signs and symptoms that you may be having. Gray area thinking. Do you secretly vasculate back and forth between feeling like your substance use is problematic, and you make promises to do better, to stop, to do less, and then at other times, you move over here to this side of the continuum where you feel like, you know what, I'm probably overthinking it. It's really not that big of a deal. Back and forth, you have all these mixed ambivalent friends feelings inside. And on top of that, you're probably kind of avoiding wanting to talk about this with other people because you have this ambivalence inside and you're not sure where you stand and you're definitely not sure what you want to do about it. You're worried about talking outwardly to other people about it for a number of reasons, right? Because you don't want to be judged and because you don't want to be pushed into some sort of solution that you don't feel like is right for you. That's a very natural and understandable place to be in. But it can be hard to figure it out when you're keeping all this in your head. So if that's you, maybe today's video will help you get a little clarity on that. You're probably experiencing gray area thinking if your substance use is having a negative impact on your life in more than one way. For example, it's impacting your relationships or your work performance or school performance, or your ability to stay consistent with your regular responsibilities. But it's not like you have to have it all the time. It's not like you, like, have to wake up and drink or have to constantly use or you're going to go into withdrawal. Usually when people get to that point where they absolutely have to constantly keep this steady stream of the substance inside, they kind of know that they have an addiction. They're usually past that gray area thinking, now, they may be ambivalent about what they want to do about it, but they sort of know where they stand. But there's a lot of area in between there. Most people, long before people get to that point where they're like waking up and using or even using every day, there are a lot of other stages for. So, for example, if you're in this gray area, then you probably can stop for periods of time. In fact, you've probably already done that. Maybe you've been able to reduce your use for periods of time. Maybe you've even stopped completely for a week, 30 days, 90 days. So it's like you do have some control over it, but it just keeps sliding back into problematic. And to make things a little bit more confusing, a lot of people on the outside probably don't even recognize it. Chances are one or two people in your life are starting to talk to you about this issue. Maybe it's your spouse or your parent or your best friend or your sister. This is somebody that's really close to you, that kind of knows more about the daily ins and outs and all the things than other people. But your regular co workers, your friends that you see regularly, but they're not your best friend. Even family members that you are close to, but you're not the closest to those people probably don't see any kind of problem with your substance use. And when you have conversations with those people about it, and even if you bring up, hey, my partner thinks I may have a problem or this is going on, but I don't really think I have a problem, then you're going to get feedback from the environment, says, no, man, you don't have a problem. I do way more than that. Or you're fine, you're successful. So you have these feelings of ambivalence inside the outside people in your life. A lot of them are reinforcing it. Besides this, one or two people who are kind of like over here in your ear kind of nagging you about it. And that nagging you about it is probably making you feel even more defensive about the issue because it feels like you're being forced into making a decision that you're not quite ready to make. And you're considering it. You know that there's a problem somewhere, but you're not all the way there. And so having somebody in your ear and on your case feels not all that helpful. When that happens, we can start to push away from those people. Even though they're important people in our life that we love, we end up in this cat and mouse kind of dynamic where they're sort of chasing us or spying on us and not letting us have any freedom or flexibility to make our decisions. Which, let's be honest, is only making us cling to the issue even more when deep down inside we know we need to figure this out. It's not like it's causing problems all the time. It's not like terrible things are always happening. You're functioning pretty well overall. It's just that there are these sort of cracks in the dam where negative stuff happens not all the time, but sometimes. And it's happened enough that it's got your attention. And you've given thought to stopping drinking, and you've given a lot of thought to cutting it back, maybe even a lot of thought to stopping completely. But you're probably asking yourself, if I'm not an alcoholic, if I'm not an addict, do I really have to stop completely? I think that's something that everyone kind of has to figure out for themselves. And my guess is, if you're watching this video, you've already done some work on figuring that out. You've already done a little trial and error in the process. You've probably tried different ways to cut it back. You've made promises to yourself. You keep the promises sometimes, not other times. And the whole thing's just a mess and kind of confusing. If you're seriously trying to figure this thing out and you feel like you're in this gray zone and you're trying to decide what you need to do about it, can you cut back or do you need to stop altogether? Then I want you to try these things. First thing I want you to try is try to increase other healthy activities in your life. Like try to enjoy other things other than the substance, like relationships, hobbies, interests. Get your focus outside of the substance. If you're having a hard time doing that and doing it fairly consistently, then. Then let's put a check mark by that that maybe we need to go back to the drawing board and rethink these things. Another thing I want you to do is, you know that person in your life that's kind of hounding you and driving you crazy. This is the biggest ask right here. Ready? I want you to try really hard to stop being defensive with them. And you don't have to completely agree with them. You don't have to do everything they're saying, but make a promise to yourself that you're going to be more open minded to it and you're going to be less walled up and defensive about it. What that means is you're not gonna throw a fit when they bring it up. You're not going to turn the situation around and blame it on them or remind them of all the things that they do that are problematic. Because that's just your defenses coming up. And that's a very normal, natural process. Hey, we all do it even when we know we're in the wrong. It's like a natural instinct to get control of this sort of psychological mechanism. Because if you don't, you're never going to be able to see the problem accurately. Because if you don't, you're never going to really find clarity on the. Because you're going to be so caught up in trying to defend yourself and trying to maintain control of yourself. Because naturally you don't want other people controlling you. The problem with that is, is that sometimes because we don't want to be controlled by others, we could be hanging on to something, we could be continuing to do something that we actually don't even want to do. We're just kind of rebellious and we haven't stopped long enough to think about it for ourselves. It's really just this adverse reaction to feeling controlled more than it is thinking, more than it is actually wanting to hang on to this substance or behavior, whatever it is. And if you haven't already, then I want you to set some limits on your substance use. Okay? I want you to set them sort of firm lines in the sand. And then I want you to see if you can keep to those limits consistently. That's the key. Because we can all keep to the limits to some degree. But if the cracks in the dam keep on breaking open, then we can continue to have a lot of problems related to this substance. Another question I want you to ask yourself is, do I really enjoy this as much as I think I do, or do I really enjoy this as much as I used to? You know how sometimes like you can be like in a relationship for a really long time? Maybe it was great in the beginning, but it kind of went sideways somewhere. But you're just in it and you just keep going with it because you're in it. And it seems really complicated to get out of it. But maybe it's not great, it's not healthy, maybe it's even like toxic or really terrible. But the idea of what you'd have to do to get out of it seems extreme. So you just keep going along. A lot of times that same kind of thing happens when it comes to substances. We're just used to it, we're just in a rhythm. It's just what's expected of us. It's habit. And we haven't stopped to reevaluate is, hey, does this relationship with this substance still work for me? If I look at the pros and cons of the issue, do the pros still outweigh the cons? Now a good way to really think about the pros and cons is not just to make like an old school list and put pros and cons. I want you to go into a little bit more detail about it because it's not going to feel genuine to you if you don't do it this way. If you're trying to do the pros and cons thing, what really works is to list the pros and cons of continuing and then list the pros and cons of stopping. And then beside each thing on each list put a weight, like a number weight like 1 to 10, like of how big or important this thing is. Because not every pro is equal to every other pro. Not every con is equal. Right. Some things matter more than other things. And like literally like math. Add up your columns and decide, where am I at? Is this still working for me? How often is it working against me? It takes a lot of courage to get honest with ourselves. The biggest thing is facing our fear. Our fear of letting go of this thing that has it has served us well at some point in our life. It's kind of like a security blanket. You may be feeling like, well, life is going to really suck without it. Will I ever have fun again? Will life just be lame or boring? Or will I have this severe anxiety or these other issues that I'm trying to self medicate. That's probably where this ambivalence is really coming from. It's those fears of what's life going to be like without it. Well, if you do these little experiments that I'm telling you and you kind of come to the conclusion that maybe it's more problematic than helpful and you're not really able to stick to your limits and you're kind of being more open minded to your Loved ones who are trying to get you to see something about the issue. If you come to terms with the idea that maybe it really is way more on the problematic side, then those fears that you have are probably not quite true. And what I mean by that is, will life be boring without it? Yes, initially. Will. Will you have more anxiety, difficulty sleeping, all that kind of stuff? Yes, initially. But once you get into that problematic use of substances, then you actually start slowly losing the ability to experience joy, happiness, pleasure, the ability to be present with other people. You know, like all the good stuff in life, you may not even notice this, but you've probably started to lose those abilities more and more and more. If that's happening to you because of your substance use, if then there's good news, you can get all that back, but it may involve letting go of the substance altogether. You know what a lot of people I see? Here's the conclusion that most of the people that I see come to about this whole gray area thinking thing is that even if they can control their use, it's a lot of work. In fact, it is exhausting and controlled use. It's not that fun anyways. And so a lot of people I see decide it's not even worth it. You know, this idea of I'm just going to drink a couple of drinks and no more than this or I'm just going to smoke occasionally. The problem is it just keeps you craving and keeps you kind of like wanting more. And therefore you have to put a lot of energy into keeping it under control. And because you're only using a little bit, you don't even get the great benefits of it. So it's like, do I really want to keep this in my life? That's the conclusion that a lot of people come to. But you've got to be open minded to looking at the big picture and some painful truths about your situation. I actually talk about this concept in my videos a lot for those of you that follow me only I don't usually call it gray area thinking. That's sort of this new term that's came out. If you've been following my videos for a long time. And you know what I typically refer to this as? Put it in the comments below. I'll give you some gold stars and I'm gonna give you a gold star because you are a good student now. Because I know you're being open minded and you're trying to find out the truth. You really want to know, do I have a substance abuse problem? Like, am I an addict or an alcoholic, then you can actually download the clinical criteria. There are 11 of them. Like, officially, how to like doctors and therapists and psychiatrists. How do you diagnose this issue? We do it in this real sort of official way by using these 11 criteria. I'm going to put a link in the description and the comments below. You can click that link, you can download them, and you can ask yourself these questions, which is going to get you one step further to getting clarity on where you fall in that addiction spectrum. And if you've already decided that you know it is more problem than help and you want to stop, then I want you to watch this video next. I'm going to put it right up here. It's all about what sobriety is really like.