Doc’s Thoughts Broaden your perspective. Live a happy, healthy, meaningful life. Subscribe to Doc's Thoughts Chemical coping is another name for addiction. It describes a cycle: feel distress, take a chemical, feel better. The specific chemical might be fentanyl, alcohol, nicotine, or cocaine, but the process is the same—it’s a learned response to distress that, when repeated many times, becomes automatic. Feel distress → take a chemical → feel better. From the outside, addiction looks...
11 days ago • 2 min read
Doc’s Thoughts Broaden your perspective. Live a happy, healthy, meaningful life. Subscribe to Doc's Thoughts When patients have been in recovery for a while, there often comes a moment when they want to put it all behind them. “Doc,” patients will say, “I want to get off this medication. I just want to move on with my life.” It’s an understandable desire. Addiction isn’t something most of us feel proud of, and it often comes with shame, regret, and a deep wish that it had never been part of...
18 days ago • 3 min read
Doc’s Thoughts Broaden your perspective. Live a happy, healthy, meaningful life. Subscribe to Doc's Thoughts We like to believe that we choose our norms—that we live our lives based on principles, values, and reasoned decisions. While this is true to some degree, one of the most powerful forces shaping our behaviors and the structure of our society is far more mundane: repetition. Repetition is a neutral force—not good or evil. It doesn’t care what it reinforces. But what we repeat, we...
25 days ago • 4 min read
Doc’s Thoughts Broaden your perspective. Live a happy, healthy, meaningful life. Subscribe to Doc's Thoughts “How did you go bankrupt?”“Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” Hemingway was talking about money, but he could’ve been describing almost anything that falls apart—our health, our relationships, our sobriety, even our identity. Collapse is rarely abrupt. Usually, it's a slow unraveling we tolerate, excuse, and ignore—until we can’t. We all do this, in one form or another. We normalize...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Doc’s Thoughts Broaden your perspective. Live a happy, healthy, meaningful life. Subscribe to Doc's Thoughts As we age and reflect on our younger selves, the amount we change is difficult to ignore. Think back to what you were absolutely sure of when you were 10 years old, and compare it to what you’re certain of now. Depending on your current age, we can repeat a similar exercise for different points in our lives—our 20s, 30s, 50s, or perhaps before and after kids, before and after marriage,...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Doc’s Thoughts Broaden your perspective. Live a happy, healthy, meaningful life. Subscribe to Doc's Thoughts “Stress” is one of the most frequent reasons I hear when people try to describe what ails them, and what limits taking care of ourselves. It gets in the way of exercising, interferes with sleep, turns food into a coping mechanism, makes real relaxation elusive, and leads to that extra drink (or two) in the evening. Because chronic stress affects our health, we spend a lot of time in...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Doc’s Thoughts Broaden your perspective. Live a happy, healthy, meaningful life. Subscribe to Doc's Thoughts When it comes to taking care of our health, my job is often less about delivering new information and more about helping people problem-solve, reframe their assumptions, and remember what they already know. Most of us don’t need to be told that exercise matters, vegetables are good, or sleep is essential. And yet, many of us struggle to exercise enough, eat well, or get to bed on time....
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Doc’s Thoughts Broaden your perspective. Live a happy, healthy, meaningful life. Subscribe to Doc's Thoughts I recently had a conversation with a patient about how hard recovery is– facing challenges, embracing honesty– there’s a whole suite of difficulties involved. And in truth, recovery is really hard. But continuing to drink or use drugs is also really hard. I think about this a lot when talking about difficult, uncomfortable decisions that we must make in our lives. We think that there...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Doc’s Thoughts Broaden your perspective. Live a happy, healthy, meaningful life. Subscribe to Doc's Thoughts Turn a world map upside down, and the almost automatic sense of understanding that we have about the globe feels less intuitive. We have to look harder at what previously for granted– and often, in that re-examination, we develop new insights. To solve difficult problems, it is helpful to look at them from another perspective. German mathematician Carl Jacobi wrote, man muss immer...
2 months ago • 4 min read