Loading practices
Loading practices
Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › When you use something to cope
So treat it as a doing problem rather than a knowing problem. Decisions made calmly and in advance travel into hard moments much better than decisions you hope to make during them: what you will say, who you will message, where you will stand. It also explains why demanding an explanation afterwards leads nowhere useful.
If you are using something to cope and it has become hard to stop, please speak to a doctor before changing anything.
If You do not protect me from their treachery, I shall yield to them and do wrong (Quran 12:33). Joseph knew perfectly well what was right and still asked for help holding to it, which is not a failure of understanding.
يوسف
قَالَ رَبِّ ٱلسِّجۡنُ أَحَبُّ إِلَيَّ مِمَّا يَدۡعُونَنِيٓ إِلَيۡهِۖ وَإِلَّا تَصۡرِفۡ عَنِّي كَيۡدَهُنَّ أَصۡبُ إِلَيۡهِنَّ وَأَكُن مِّنَ ٱلۡجَٰهِلِينَ
Joseph said, ‘My Lord! I would prefer prison to what these women are calling me to do. If You do not protect me from their treachery, I shall yield to them and do wrong,’
Qur’an 12:33read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A review of imaging studies reports that the brain systems supporting deliberate emotion regulation work differently in substance use disorders, overlapping with what is seen in mood and anxiety problems. It reviews correlational imaging, so it maps a difference rather than showing what caused it. What it does support is placing the difficulty in control under load rather than in comprehension.
Wilcox CE, Pommy JM, Adinoff B. (2016). Neural Circuitry of Impaired Emotion Regulation in Substance Use Disorders.. The American journal of psychiatry doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Strong feeling knocks out the part of you that does the deciding, and it leaves what you know untouched.
Drink can make talking easy and still leave you with friendships that feel like nothing. Worth noticing which of those two you actually came for.
When someone tells you how much they use, take it as a floor rather than a total. Then keep that adjustment to yourself.
If stopping has been harder for you than it seems to be for other people, that is worth taking seriously rather than reading as a flaw in your character.