Step Two Part 2
Sanity
The last bit of text in step two uses the phrase “restore us to sanity.” But what does that mean?
There’s a lot of context in the AA Big Book and the NA Basic Text but I want this to be accessible and a lot of the language especially in the AA Big Book is not. So let’s define our term.
Sanity is essentially being of sound mind. Acting rationally. Making good decisions consistently. And this is something not present during active addiction.
The 12-step programs all refer to their members as insane when acting on addiction. Sounds a little Scientology-ish to me, but that won’t stop me from understanding the concept. The texts of these programs mention all of these outlandish examples of insanity like selling oneself or physically hurting one’s loved ones.
While those things do happen, we can define insanity simply as making poor decisions for yourself on a consistent basis. Consistently enough that the phrase “doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result” becomes apropos.
So how do we “free ourselves” from this? I think it starts with routine.
So let’s use me as an example
Pretend you’re me. I work 9.5 hours a day, 6 days a week (9.5 includes a 15-minute bike ride to and from work). I sleep almost exactly 8 hours per night. There are 168 hours in a week. 168 hours per week minus 57 hours for work and minus 56 for sleep leaves me with 55 hours of free time every single week, not counting my weekly NA meetings and showering and brushing teeth and stuff.
You can do a lot in 55 hours. That’s 7 hours a day on average (yeah my day off throws that average off, that’s okay) that you have to form habits. So start there.
When I wake up, my knees immediately hit the floor and I do my own very specific form of prayer/meditation. I ask the universe for patience, humility, wisdom, understanding, and grace. I ask for those I dislike that they are given blessings and wealth and wisdom.
From there I drink water and take my waking supplements before going off to the gym, where I spend 1 hour a day. On getting home, cooking and eating breakfast takes about 30 minutes. We’re at 2 hours spent approximately now. Usually at this point, I have 2-3 hours until I work. For those 2-3 hours it’s any combo of things not involving social media: read, write, practice guitar, work on business, do camera tests for projects, cook for the week, journal, make to-do lists, etc.
We’ll stop here, not even counting the free time I have between work and sleep. Even this menial routine is enough to keep me grounded in my recovery. And it is adaptable to any changes in schedule that might occur (for the most part). But here’s the catch:
This menial, bare bones routine took almost 9 months to fully materialize.
Why? Because of something another anonymous account talks about often: Elimination.
In his tweets, this person often talks about eliminating one thing at a time from a diet or supplement stack in order to identify what works or doesn’t. This is how my routine came about. Logging everything in order to find what works and what doesn’t. And this routine’s cultivation is still in progress.
So the simple staring-out way to get out of the whole insanity thing is routine. Stop using your drugs of choice and create a routine that works for you. Like everything, this is going to be personal to you so don’t get too hard on yourself if changes aren’t happening right away.
Another part of sanity is proper exercise of control.
Going back to step one, we acknowledged that we were powerless over our addiction and that our lives had become unmanageable. But, to paraphrase my therapist from rehab, “The one thing we’re not powerless over is how we act on a moment to moment basis.”
Without delving too deeply, controlling our external reactions to stimuli is another way of showing sanity. This goes back to something i’ve tweeted about a lot: Nothing matters except the things you allow to matter.
You cannot control how a situation makes you feel but you can control how you externally react to it. Doug Stanhope said about this concept, “I should be able to walk up to you on the street and say ‘Hey cunt’ and your response should be ‘Oh my name’s Rebecca, but I guess I look like a lot of people.’”
This is overly simplistic but it’s exactly what I’m talking about. Except in situations where you’ve earned the right to be deferred to (rare in early recovery unless you’re a polymath), why do you care how people address you? You’re not entitled to certain treatment from anyone. Focus on the content that hides beneath their tone of voice or phrasing. React to that and that alone, and you will develop a reputation of being unflappable. Calm in the midst of chaos is indicative of a good head on your shoulders.
Thinking in this way takes practice, but applies to nearly everything.
An easy example of exercising this control is traffic (I’ve used this before). You can leave at the absolute last moment possible to get somewhere and get angry when traffic doesn’t operate on your schedule or you can leave early and get somewhere on time. Your only option when leaving at the last minute if you want to save your mental health from the frustration of traffic is radical acceptance. Reminding yourself when you are powerless is humbling and powerful, as your reaction to your powerlessness (acceptance vs. frustration) can dictate your mental state.
Notice when you leave early that traffic jams and red lights make you less tense than they do when they could make you late? You control the effect of the variables in this situation. A little change of 5-10 minutes has a massive effect on the mental health outcome of the smaller variables, so why would you not exercise that little bit of control for a massively better outcome?
When you practice acceptance of things you can’t change, and actively change the things that you can (jeez, where have we heard this before…), things become a lot more peaceful internally. When things are peaceful on the inside, you can make better decisions more regularly and all of life seems a little bit better.
Sanity, to me, has two components: Healthy behaviors repeated routinely and (look back to step one) acceptance of what is. When we cultivate routine behaviors and practice discernment between acceptance and action, we can change what we can and make life what it has the potential to be.
The only major barrier to this is targeting and wisdom about what to change.
Until next time.