My past is not important. Suffice it to say I was an average child who was lucky enough to be born into a relatively loving family in Los Angeles California. I went to private school and was on track to have a bright future. I was athletic and very social. I managed to squander all the gifts that were given to me either by genetics or luck. Fast forward, at 32, I found myself at yet another rehab/detox, I am clean and I am lost. So what's the problem? It's been the problem since I started the rehab cycle ten years ago. The problem with 12 step. Addiction is supposedly a disease as real as cancer and the treatment is all about god. So there I was, leaving this very nice rehab in Malibu California. It combines 12 step with money. All I kept thinking was I get to learn about the 12 steps in a beautiful place in Malibu where I can look down at all the common folk, who may not have my problems, but at least I can feel like I am looking down on someone. It’s an interesting view…. Imagine being at the lowest place a person could possibly be and being able to look down on the world from an ivory tower…. It’s the worst place for a human to be. I was a loser. There is no other way to put it. I had everything handed to me and I traded it in for willful slavery. Over a decade of this cycle of use/rehab/relapse and I wasn't any closer to the freedom I so desired. I had allowed myself to accept the conventional wisdom. That people are addicts or they are not. That addiction is binary. That a pickle can never go back to being a cucumber.

I had a breakdown. I honestly was having a problem deciding which was worse; being in active addiction or being sober and doing 12 step for the rest of my life. Because 12 step is centered around believing that god or a higher power is going to fix you it was always an extremely hard pill for me to swallow. When I voiced this I was always directed to the "We Agnostics" chapter of the big book of Alcoholic Anonymous which says:

"you may be suffering from an illness which only a spiritual experience will conquer. To one who feels he is an atheist or agnostic such an experience seems impossible, but to continue as he is means disaster, especially if he is an alcoholic of the hopeless variety. To be doomed to an alcoholic death or to live on a spiritual basis are not always easy alternatives to face."

This chapter basically posits that if you don't believe in a god it's because of some personal issue you have and you must get over that issue if you want to have a chance to be sober. Simply said, if you want arrest the disease of addiction you have to believe in a God/higher power. I can see how this wasn’t much of a problem in the 1930's. For me it was a death sentence. The standard advice on how to pick a higher power if you are not religious is to create one imbued with all the attributes you would want god to have. It got very strange when I expressed my views. I was told "you just have to believe in a power greater than yourself. It doesn’t have to be god, many people choose the ocean. Go out into the ocean, can you stop the waives? Some people have used a door knob as their higher power." Really? Praying to the ocean is going to fix my addiction? I couldn’t get with the "pray to the ocean" strategy so I opted for creating my own higher power. But this didn't work for me either because I thought "let me get this straight… this god that I just invented ten minutes ago is going to cure my addiction?" Years of being caught in this infinite loop and I finally broke down. There is a saying that is kicked around the rooms of 12 step "insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results" Finally something I heard in the rooms of 12 step hit a nerve. I had to finally admit to myself that continuing on this path of trying to find the answer to addiction in the 12 steps was insanity. If I was going to survive addiction I was going to have to figure it out on my own. That was the first day of the rest of my life.

I became a sponge soaking up as much information as possible to see how it might apply to addiction. Luckily by this time I had started listening to Tim Ferriss's podcast where he interviews people who are top performers in their field. I tried to see what they all had in common. Instead of trying to fight the obsessive nature of being an addict I decided to embrace it. Dr. Peter Attia says that a person should train to be the athlete of their life. So I decided to train the same way I would if I was competing in a sport at a high level. The training for a marathon runner is very different than the training for a basketball player. These athletes have a highly regimented training routine that is designed to target a specific skill. In trying to understand what addiction was I asked the question Tim Ferriss suggests; "what would this look like if it were simple?" Then based on what I discovered I started training to mitigate the root causes of this thing called addiction. I realized that whether I was in active addiction or not my life was an infinite loop of highs and lows. I deconstructed all the behaviors I engaged in in sobriety that eventually would lead to a relapse and discovered that everything I was doing from one night stands, to crazy relationships, to four ROCKSTARS a day, to gambling, etc. was recreating the chaos of highs and lows that are the hallmark of active addiction. So training to be the athlete of my life meant that everything I decide to do to combat addiction must target these patterns of highs and lows and move the needle to a steady more even state trending in the positive. At this same time I started reading "The 80/20 Principle" and "The 4 Hour Work Week" as a way to improve my professional life but their application to addiction was a windfall for me. I took a serious look at my rehab stints. They had an undeniable positive effects, the problem is that they didn’t last. It is drilled into you that if the program of Alcoholics Anonymous stops working for you it’s because you stopped working it. The question that is never asked is "why is it so hard to continue to do these maintenance procedures?" I did an 80/20 analysis I tried to find out what 20% of inputs from rehab/sober living/12step produced 80% of the positive results. What I landed on was very surprising. Almost none of the benefit for me came from the steps. When I was thinking about why 12 step never worked for me I asked the other question Tim Ferriss suggests "what if I did the opposite?' I took all the conventional wisdom of 12 step and did the opposite. If there was any power that was going to fix me I was going to have to create it for myself. I kept soaking up more and more information. I built power into my life through routine. I unlearned everything I learned in 12 step. I threw away my current conception of drugs. I developed a well formulated plan and attacked addiction on all fronts. I became obsessed with how nutrition, exercise, sleep, meditation, and drugs could be used to not just rewire my brain out of addiction but to help me to reach levels of happiness that I could have never dreamed of.

I will cover the specifics of everything I did in future blog posts but here are some. I got on a schedule. I have a set morning and evening routine (boot up/boot down). I got blackout curtains and eliminated all sources of light from my room to optimize my sleep patterns. I started not just exercising, but a scheduled exercise routine with metrics that I could measure to show forward progress. I made meditation part of my morning routine. I joined sports leagues (basketball and kickball). I do jiu jitsu three times a week. I do a five minute gratitude list every morning. I started eating clean. The nutrition aspect is one of the most important because it involved stopping the most crippling drug that I had used my whole life. Sugar. I replaced the drug cocktail that I had become accustomed to in sobriety of; Wellbutrin 200mg/day, gabapentin 400mg/day, Seroquel 400mg/day, diphenhydramine (Tylenol pm) 50mg/day, caffeine 1000mg/day, and sugar A LOT/day with; Psilocybin (magic mushrooms) 2mg every three days, THC 25mg/day, and caffeine 200mg/day. I will cover in detail why I chose those drugs specifically in a later post.

At first everything I was doing was a lot of work. I started noticing massive changes mentally and physically. I could feel myself growing stronger. I experienced profound psychic changes. The way I dealt with stress was improved. Anxiety went away. It became much easier for me to get into a flow state. I stopped having that post lunch crash at work. My work production increased. I quit smoking. I started looking forward to getting up in the morning. All of the sudden anything was possible. Everyone around me noticed the change as well. I didn’t realize how much mental real-estate addiction was taking up even when I was sober. Going to meetings five times a week, meeting with my sponsor, doing step work, and even when I was just hanging out with my friends in recovery addiction was usually what we talked about. Once addiction stopped existing in my life it freed up so much of my brain to focus on other things. Everything became easy. Replacing the 12 steps with maintenance procedures that I actually liked was a game changer. The problem for me with doing the "work" in 12 step was that it never stopped being work. It never got any easier. Now the "work" I have to do to maintain a healthy state is no longer work, it comes easy and I look forward to it. It was like the difference between having a job you love and having a job you hate. I became excited for what life had in store for me next.

This blog is a passion project. I want to see if anyone is struggling with the same things I was struggling with. This blog along with the eightytwenty Facebook group which can be found at https://www.facebook.com/groups/668946503505662/ is meant to be a repository of helpful information for people that just can't get with the 12 step program. I truly believe that there is a certain subset of the population for whom 12 step is the perfect answer. I also believe that 12 step's abysmal success rate (about 5%) shows that there is also a very large subset of the population for whom it will do no good. My goal here is to create options for people and to let them know that other options exist. The problem for a lot of people who are looking for something different than 12 step for answers is those answers are almost always wrapped up in a package that costs so much money it is out of reach for most of us. The water is further muddied by the fact that it is hard (at least for me) to trust someone who tells me they know addiction is not a disease and they have the answer when that answer is wrapped up in an $80,000/month rehab. We are dying in shocking numbers all around the country and throughout the world and there are so many people trying to cash in on our problem. That’s why I think it is super important for people to have as many free resources out there as possible. If you would like to know when I post new blogs please follow me on twitter. My social media links are at the footer of every page. If you would have your own story to tell and you think it might help others please send me your story under the "contact" tab. Thank you so much for reading my story.