We live in a world where it’s common to find the quickest possible solution to everything. While we’re obviously inclined to go for what works best and fastest to solving our problems, we’ve built up a sort of need for instant gratification when it comes to information and results. People are progressively getting worse at doing things that require patience and time – or more correctly, the average person’s mind is losing the ability to concentrate long term, and stay on task.
When most of us are running around with a pocket device capable of answering almost any question in seconds, we sort of become used to that sense of speed and efficiency. It’s gotten to the point that when a website takes longer than a few seconds to load, it’s going to severely suffer in traffic simply because people will close the tab and not bother coming back, instead of visiting the faster competitor.
That’s all well and good. There’s absolutely nothing wrong about being able to find out within seconds what the best method is for removing wine stains from a woolen carpet. But there are some things in life that will just never be solved with that kind of an attitude – there are some things that will never bow down to the whims and hunger for instant gratification. Good things take time, hard work, and any shortcuts you’re bound to find are going to hurt you more than they’ll do you any good.
The prime example for most people is weight loss. Despite starting to shrink, the weight loss industry is huge for a reason – people will pay large sums of money to find easier, different solutions from the one we all know work best: exercise, eat healthily and eat less. Some people legitimately can’t afford better food, or they’re struggling with a medical condition that predetermines their obesity or renders them physically disabled. But most people just want an easier solution.
For recovering from addiction, the simplest advice is the toughest to swallow: put the work in. Put the work in – that’s the only way you’re going to beat this. Put the work in – regardless of how you treat your addiction, you should shut off any scatterbrained behavior and focus. Go to your meetings, speak to your therapist, meet your weekly or monthly goals. If you’re struggling with that – and most people do – then learn to focus your focus.
The Power of Focus
The focus is basically your ability to channel everything into a single goal. When you’re focused, you’re single-minded – you cut out unnecessary distractions, avoid multitasking, and devote yourself to your task. But focus often only lasts so long. Most people fall out of focus, lose themselves, and get distracted. With addiction, the ability to focus becomes even harder as patients are expected to cope with all the emotional changes coming their way.
It’s a long-term application. The focus is the ability to stay motivated, to remember to hit the gym, to follow your schedule and do the things you’ve set out to do. When we falter in our self-discipline and get soft, we allow excuses to filter into our mind, and we start to go down the road of a relapse.
At a certain point in addiction, there’s no question that while willpower helps, it’s still rather powerless to the factors of addiction. But after rehab – when the drug is out of your system, and when you’re on the road to addressing the emotional issues caused or nurtured by your addiction of choice – your ability to prevent a relapse is largely your responsibility.
That doesn’t mean you should be ashamed for failing to stay sober – most people fail at least a few times before they truly overcome an addiction. But the only way you’re going to do that is to continuously get back on the horse and focus on the road ahead.
Training Your Focus
Focus, determination, will and motivation all go together and are all important for your successful recovery. In fact, they’re important for any goal in life. Being an addict doesn’t make you a lesser person, or any less human – you’re a person just like anyone else, and an addiction is ultimately a challenging adversary.
Therefore, learning to better focus in life and maintain your motivation – even after a setback – is an extremely powerful skill. And the best way to train it is through mindfulness. Mindfulness activities are best described as meditation – focusing on a single thought or idea to train your ability to concentrate for extended periods of time.
Some sports and activities are perfect active forms of meditation – for example, artists and writers like building their ability to focus and creatively flow by simply writing or painting in an ad-lib fashion. Others prefer exercises like jogging, lifting or sparring as “active meditation”. When you work on your ability to focus for longer periods of time, you hone your ability to stay motivated, to slip into a calm state of mind, to get away from negative or intrusive thoughts by “meditating” in your own way.
Working together in a group is another wonderful way to channel focus. Sober living environments are particularly effective for building permanent habits because working alongside others on your road to recovery means sharing in the collaborative and competitive aspects of self-improvement – through sports, through group activities, and through trips and adventures you’ll learn to communicate and rely on others, to rely on yourself, and to put aside any distractions and focus on the collective goal.
When Focus Is Truly Challenging
The ability to focus isn’t something universal, sadly. There are cases where negative thinking and addictive temptation can’t be escaped or combatted with mindfulness or focus – because you’re constantly flying around in your own head. Adult attention deficit disorder, for example, is one reason why people suffer from an inability to maintain their focus.
If you feel like you’re having an exceptionally tough time to shut off your thoughts or concentrate on a task, alone or in a group, then it’s best to consult a professional and see whether you could be diagnosed with ADD or a related mental disorder. In some cases, mindfulness is a fantastic way to improve your focus despite the ADD, and even without medication, you can learn to use focus to get away from the chaos of life.
In other cases, medication may be a perfect way for you to improve not just your ADD, but your addiction as well. There is a link between attention deficit disorders and the development of addiction, and literature to support that treating one can affect the other.