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Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › When you use something to cope
One young woman put it plainly: drinking took away the worry about what she was saying, and the people she grew close to were mostly the ones she drank with. The relief was real and the closeness was thin. Sitting with that gap is useful, because it is not an argument against you, it is an argument for going after what you actually wanted.
If you are using something to cope and it has become hard to stop, please speak to a doctor before changing anything.
Satan seeks only to incite enmity and hatred among you, and to stop you remembering God and prayer (Quran 5:91). What is named as the damage there is relational, which is where the hollowness turns up.
المائدة
إِنَّمَا يُرِيدُ ٱلشَّيۡطَٰنُ أَن يُوقِعَ بَيۡنَكُمُ ٱلۡعَدَٰوَةَ وَٱلۡبَغۡضَآءَ فِي ٱلۡخَمۡرِ وَٱلۡمَيۡسِرِ وَيَصُدَّكُمۡ عَن ذِكۡرِ ٱللَّهِ وَعَنِ ٱلصَّلَوٰةِۖ فَهَلۡ أَنتُم مُّنتَهُونَ
With intoxicants and gambling, Satan seeks only to incite enmity and hatred among you, and to stop you remembering God and prayer. Will you not give them up
Qur’an 5:91read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A systematic review across anxiety, depression, substance use, eating and personality disorders found that improvements in how people handle their feelings went along with improvements in symptoms, supporting emotion regulation as a target shared across conditions rather than belonging to one. Applied here, the fear before speaking is the thing to work on. The review reports outcomes moving together, not one causing the other.
Sloan E, Hall K, Moulding R, Bryce S, Mildred H, Staiger PK. (2017). Emotion regulation as a transdiagnostic treatment construct across anxiety, depression, substance, eating and borderline personality disorders: A systematic review.. Clinical psychology review doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Something that removes the fear of being known does not do the work of being known.
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.
If cutting down has failed over and over, that is information rather than a verdict on you. For some people the workable goal turns out to be none rather than less.
There are medicines that make stopping smoking easier, and one of them can sometimes cover a mood or attention problem at the same time. That is a fair thing to ask a doctor about.