This Former Catholic Priest Sees Amazing Miracles! | Dr. Francis Sizer

Dr. Francis Sizer, a former Catholic priest, led the largest Catholic
Charismatic healing meetings in the United States. He knew what was
wrong with people, and then he had major miracles. Then suddenly he left
the Catholic church. Dr. Francis Sizer says a power encounter with the
Holy Spirit changes you forever. And the supernatural follows!

When
he was baptized in the Holy Spirit and Fire, Dr. Francis Sizer was
taken into Heaven and given two gifts. First, his hands caught
supernatural fire, and they are still on fire today! When he prays,
major miracles take place. His second gift is the discernment of
people’s physical and emotional problems. Dr. Sizer’s new book, Power
Encounters, and the companion 3-CD series will equip you to have your
own supernatural encounters with THE gift-giver, the Holy Spirit.

Francis not only prays to impart the Fire, but also for your healing! He focuses on three topics:

•
Baptism in the Holy Spirit. Discover Old Testament prophecy on the
coming of the Holy Spirit, who enables personal holiness and
supernatural gifts through the fruits of the Spirit.

• Healing. Learn about the three kinds of healing including healing from curses and destructive patterns of behavior.

•
Deliverance. Find out how spiritual warfare works; the devil knows the
power of the Blood—you should too. Learn how to use your authority to
rebuke the enemy.

Dr. Sizer shows how to walk in greater intimacy
with the Holy Spirit to have your own powerful encounters. And that is
how we are changed!

Dr. Francis J. Sizer is a former Catholic
priest who led the largest Catholic Charismatic healing services in the
United States during the 1970s. Since then he ministers to all
denominations as a healing evangelist. He is a licensed clinical
psychologist and ministers in healing — physical, emotional, and
spiritual.

Marukarayil Naam Kandidum - Late.Evg. J.V Peter [Malayalam Christian Song]

Fire of the Holy Spirit falling in the Philippines!

Powerful Holy Spirit outpouring in ISRAEL!

Quitting to Win

Are you afraid that if you quit too many jobs or switch careers too often, your resume (CV) will make you look undesirable? And who’s gonna hire you then? No one wants a loser who can’t stay put.

You’re probably right to be concerned… assuming your primary career goal is to work for a company that wants to own you rather than simply pay you to do some work for them.

The funny thing is that many people who have extremely successful careers seem to completely ignore this advice, building the kind of resumes that would disgust any reasonable HR person.

For example, whose resume looks like this?

cab driver

landscaper

vitamin distributor

glass-blowing lathe operator

travel agent

gas station manager

U-Haul dealer

moped salesman

restaurant cook

business consultant

Answer: David Allen, author of the ever-popular productivity classic Getting Things Done. Last I heard he was expecting to do about $6 million in sales this year (source: CNN). That’s a lot of mopeds!

Yes yes, I know he’s the exception. Everyone who gets away with this kind of thing is the exception of course. Damned cheaters! We wouldn’t want to dent anyone’s comfy little excuse for sticking with a job they don’t like.

From the looks of his resume, it would appear that David Allen is a lifelong quitter.

Doesn’t he realize what an amazing career he could have had as a cab driver? He could have become one of the best cab drivers in California. He might be on his 4th or 5th cab by now.

And why did he have to give up on landscaping? Think of all the hedge mazes that will never exist because he quit. Now that’s a shame.

OK, so maybe he just wasn’t cut out for cab driving or landscaping, but surely he could have gone far as a vitamin distributor. Look at all the fabulous supplements we have today. He could have made millions pushing pills. He’s gotta be upset about losing that job. It was pure colloidal silver.

But nooooo… this guy couldn’t hold a job to save his life.

Yet somehow Mr. David Allen is able to convince businesses to pay him $20,000 a day to teach them productivity skills — the same businesses whose HR departments would likely throw him out if he tried to apply for a regular job.

Hmmmm… kinda makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Is it possible that quitting could actually increase your productivity?

Perhaps the truth is that you can switch careers as much as you’d like — and that those who’d judge you harshly for it are probably just pissed that you’re reminding them of how stuck they are. Do they really have your best interest at heart… or are they trying to enlist your support in assuaging their own self-doubt and insecurity?

Maybe it’s not such a great idea to go out of your way to impress the HR person who’s only looking for the most submissive loser they can find to fill a position that no one in their right mind would want to do for more than a couple weeks anyway. If you up and quit on them, they’ll just have to find another glass-blowing lathe operator who isn’t as smart as you.

Isn’t it amazing how social conditioning can teach you to place a high value on something that a free-thinking sane person would perceive as dreadfully undesirable? Maybe we should make the people that fall for that scheme pay more taxes too; they probably won’t even notice. Oh wait… we already do that.

If you can’t seem to hold a job, perhaps you’re cursed with genius. One of the biggest quitters of all was Leonardo da Vinci. I wonder if his parents ever told him to stop flitting about — painting, engineering, sculpture, botany, anatomy, architecture, music, poetry, etc. — and just stick with one thing. Otherwise, no one would hire him. Imagine Leonardo’s Mom saying to him, “For Christ sakes, Leo! Last week you told me you were going to be an engineer… and now I catch you painting! You march yourself back outside, young man, and go finish that Yard-a-pult monstrosity you started last week.”

So dark the con of man.

Scaling Your Value

If you want to provide value in ways that scale, you ought to think about scalability when choosing the format for providing your value. Some modes of providing value scale much better than others.

The Mindset of Scaling

Basically you want to consider these three questions:

What is the value I’m providing and to whom?

What would it look like for 100 people to receive similar value simultaneously?

How can I continue to provide value while I’m sleeping?

Let’s begin with the first question. Suppose you’re currently working as a hairstylist. You provide value by cutting and styling people’s hair. And suppose you currently serve one client at a time, so your income is determined by the number of clients you serve and how much you charge your average client. Maybe you sell some products on the side as well.

You can increase your income by becoming more skilled or by improving the way you market your services, so you can charge more per client. But your income is still largely determined by how many clients you can get into your chair. Scaling beyond a certain point becomes difficult.

Now let’s try the second question. You couldn’t personally perform hairstyling services for 100 people simultaneously, so you’ll need help to provide this much value at once. You could recruit 100 stylists, perhaps by opening a very large salon. Then you could invest your time in marketing and advertising, both for clients and stylists, and it’s easier to scale these activities than it is to scale styling hair. This might take some investment of course, but if you received a share of each stylist’s revenue, you could scale your income by hiring and training more stylists. Eventually you might need to branch out to other regions and open more salons too.

There are other pathways of course, but the key is that someone or something else needs to be doing the haircuts. You have to break free of the limitation of performing each haircut yourself. Instead of doing the haircuts, you need to be responsible for making the haircuts happen, which is a more flexible and expansive way of thinking about providing value. If the value has been received because of what you’ve set into motion, you’re still providing it.

What about the third question? If you want to provide haircuts even while you’re sleeping, you could open a 24/7 salon and have stylists working there at all hours. Or you could offer franchises for your salons. Or you could create courses or training programs for stylists or for other salon owners. If you make your training available online, then people could take your courses anywhere in the world, and people could be learning and using your methods to cut hair even while you’re sleeping.

Digital Scaling

Putting content into digital form is a major scalability breakthrough that allows you to create something once and then leverage it to provide value to people again and again at near zero cost.

The advantage of putting value into digital formats like text, audio, video, images, or software is that you’ve eliminated some major barriers to scalability. In particular, you’ve decoupled the delivery of your value from your personal time.

Going back to the hairstylist example, if you create a blog, video, ebook, or online course to help other stylists, then there’s no effective limit on how many other stylists can receive your value, even while you’re sleeping.

The main difference here is in mindset. By asking different questions, you end up with different solutions. The main focus is on how to provide value to more people. Today that focus is likely to lead you to the Internet eventually. The Internet is humanity’s great scaling mechanism for providing value globally.

How to Scale

A good first step in devising scalable approaches is to stop doing things that don’t scale well. At least stop doing them in the ways that don’t scale.

For the hairstylist that means to stop cutting so much hair because cutting hair yourself doesn’t scale well. Put more time and energy into figuring out how to make good haircuts happen. For instance, book slightly fewer appointments, and spend the extra time working on the scalability challenge.

Sometimes a good scalable source of value is a small pivot away from the non-scalable work you’re already doing. For instance, suppose our stylist is a great conversationalist, and suppose she noticed that she gets better tips than her coworkers, perhaps 20% better on average. And suppose she notices the pattern that hairstylists who can carry interesting conversations while cutting hair are typically getting larger tips from their clients.

She could create a course to teach other stylists to become better conversationalists. She could put that course into a digital form, such as audios or videos, and offer it online. And the tangible benefit she can offer is to help stylists increase their tips by up to 20%. How much would 20% more tips be worth to a stylist over the course of a year? Even if it’s just a modest 5% increase, how much would that be worth? She can price and promote her course fairly based on the real benefit she’s providing. Her course could be worth hundreds of dollars to the right people, so she doesn’t need a ton of sales to make a nice income from selling the course. As she scales up the course sales, she can continuing working as a stylist if she enjoys it, or she can retire from working as a stylist altogether and focus on her course and other scalable offers.

In this case she’s not making more haircuts happen, but she’s taking a small subset of her work, one she might have easily overlooked, and she’s recognizing that it can be a serious source of value for other stylists (as well as for their clients). Furthermore, she might even have the potential to expand her work into other fields that also involve carrying on a conversation while serving customers.

I know many dozens of people who’ve done these types of pivots in a wide variety of fields. They can work very well in practice.

Notice that the type of work changes though. First you create a source of value that can scale, such as a course. Then you must also do the work of scaling it. Nobody will know about our stylist’s course unless she gets the word out, so her real work just shifted to marketing and sales, most likely online. This will allow her to leverage marketing tools to find clients and scale up the number of people taking her course, even while she’s sleeping.

When people get stuck in this process, they often miss this last step. Scaling does take some work, and it is an activity. Most income streams don’t auto-scale. You need to do the work of scaling them up. Otherwise it’s like launching a website that no one visits.

But notice the key difference between doing one-time work that doesn’t scale versus doing the actual work of scaling up. In the latter case, your rewards are compounded. For instance, you could set up a decent system to attract potential students, and once you have that up and running, you can keep building it up further.

As I shared during Lesson 25 of the recent Deep Abundance Integration course, a common difference between scarcity-minded people and abundance-minded people is that scarcity-minded people typically spend most of their time doing maintenance work. This means that they work to maintain their income, such as by trading hours for dollars. By contrast, abundance-minded people usually spend a good bit of time on advancement work. They invest their time and energy to advance and increase their income streams, not merely to maintain those streams.

How many hours in a typical working month do you spend doing advancement work? This means creating scalable income sources and then scaling them up? Do you have any scalable income sources yet?

Of course you won’t always succeed when you try to create a scalable income source and then scale it up. But each time you try an approach that doesn’t work, you’ll learn something, and you’ll eventually discover approaches that do work.

Can everyone scale up this way? What happens when everyone tries to do this? Well… let me know when everyone really is trying in earnest to do this since it would be a pretty huge shock to me. People really seem to struggle with the basic mindset here, acting as if scalable income is some alien concept. It seems clear that we’re moving into a phase of life on earth where more and better scaling is becoming possible and accessible thanks to the Internet and ever-evolving tech, including further developments in AI.

I have many friends who’ve scaled up to 7 and 8 figure income streams, and they don’t work any harder than those with non-scalable income. They just approach the problem of providing value differently, thinking about scalability up front before committing to a particular direction.

Making Scalable Offers

If you do any work at all, then you’re already making offers. So how scalable are your offers?

If you make offers with low scalability, such as trading your time for money via salary or hourly rate, then you’re placing a fairly low ceiling on your income. You may also be setting yourself up for a sensation of time scarcity if the only realistic way to scale your income is to work more hours (if you even have that option).

On the other hand, if you make offers with high scalability, then as soon as you pass the threshold of covering your expenses, everything beyond that is a bonus. Interestingly, you may need different forms of motivation to move beyond this point, such as developing a stronger sense of mission or purpose.

Think about some small subset of your work where you actually feel you do a good job but you also feel like your skills in this area aren’t being leveraged too well. Could you teach someone to get a little bit better in some area of life? What would that mean to someone over the course of a year or more?

There’s nothing weird or odd about scalable offers. You may be less experienced with them if you’re more familiar with offers that don’t scale, but don’t dismiss the potential for learning to leverage scalability. Even if you aren’t scaling your offers, there’s a good chance you’re playing a role in someone else’s scalable system. So if you aren’t scaling your value, someone else is probably using you to scale theirs.

Personally I find that my best framing for making scalable offers is caring. If you genuinely care about providing value to people and creating some positive ripples in the world, then why be so selfish with your value and limit it to just a few people? Why not do something to help a lot more people if you can?

I learned this powerful lesson as a game developer. I could use my talents to create a game, which was limiting, or I could share what I learned from my own experience to help other game developers, which was more expansive and scalable. This helped more developers complete their projects, so more games got released, and more players got to enjoy them. The ripples I could create from helping other developers were greater than the ripples I’d been creating from working on my own games. It was this mindset that helped me carry forward into creating scalable sources of value when I began doing personal development work years ago.

You may have some internal objections to going this route, such as wondering if you can provide any value worth scaling. Join the club. Everyone has objections. The people who go this route just don’t let their objections stop them. They see the irrationality of those objections and use better reasoning. They understand that if they seek ways to provide scalable value, it may take time, but they’ll eventually figure it out.

This is where caring helps again. If you care then you’ll also listen and observe. You’ll find out if people are indeed receiving value from your scalable offers, and you’ll learn what effect your efforts are having. You won’t be able to measure all of the ripples, but you’ll be able to see some of them, and that’s very motivating when you start seeing positive ones.

One of the key benefits of scaling that people often overlook is how much thanks and appreciation they’ll receive (sometimes for the rest of their lives) for providing value to people in ways that scale. Consider how much appreciation J. K. Rowling must receive because she took the time to share her imaginative stories in the form of a scalable medium. When you tell a story, are you putting it into a scalable form that can provide value to others indefinitely, or will your stories die with you?

Environmental Reinforcement of Your Goals

Daily affirmations are something you’ll commonly see recommended in pop-psychology books. Each day you verbally affirm your goals as if they’re already accomplished. However, you usually won’t get any results at all with this approach — in most cases it’s an utter waste of time.

Why is this? Because every thought is an affirmation. If you spend 5 minutes a day saying to yourself, “I am a nonsmoker,” but 100 other minutes include thoughts that re-affirm your identity as a smoker, such as periodically lighting up and seeing the smoke rise in front of your face, you just won’t make a dent.

The basic idea of trying to condition yourself to think in new ways is sound, but verbal affirmations for a few minutes each day are a lousy way to accomplish that.

If you want to make some big changes in your life, you’ll need to shift your identity and your habitual way of thinking. In previous posts I discussed behavioral conditioning, which focused on shifting your behavior, assuming your thoughts will follow. Now I’ll tackle a different approach, which is that changing your habitual thoughts can lead to a change in your behavior.

Chances are if you’ve been stuck in your current situation and have been unsuccessful in your attempts to grow into a new role that you really want to achieve, your daily thoughts are continuing to reinforce your old role. Many people who want to take this leap can’t seem to do it, and one reason is that they spend too many hours per week reinforcing their old identity while investing much less time thinking about their new identity. So if you want to start your own business, but your full-time job causes you to spend 40+ hours per week thinking of yourself as an employee, it will be tough to make the shift.

Let’s bring this concept down to earth with a real-life example. One of my goals for this year was to shift my career from game publishing to writing and speaking. But of course I have an existing business which reinforces my old identity in the games business. In order to successfully make this shift, I have to change my thoughts and my behaviors. I have to stop thinking about selling games and put more thought and energy into writing and speaking.

But what happened when I tried to make this shift initially? I started out my day as usual and got caught up in the mindset of game publishing. I worked in the same office, communicated with the same people, visited the same forums, had to deal with the same kinds of emails, and so on, and after several weeks I was still on the old track. My environment was reinforcing my old identity, my old thoughts, and my old behaviors. For a few hours here and there I’d work on the new path, but very quickly I’d get sucked back into game publishing work.

I had to change my environment to stop reinforcing my old identity and start reinforcing my new one. So I joined Toastmasters and started attending weekly meetings. I shut down the popular game developer forums I was running and worked to transfer the community to another site, and then I stopped reading those forums completely. I automated my games business as much as possible, so it doesn’t require much maintenance at all. I decided not to renew my Association of Shareware Professionals membership for 2005, even though I’ve been a member since 1996. I declined an invitation to speak at the Game Developers Conference in 2005, even though I moderated a popular roundtable there for several years. I altered my office to reinforce my new role. I cleared out the top drawer of my filing cabinet to make room for speaking and writing files. I removed all programming-related shortcuts from my Windows desktop and rearranged my web browser favorites to add links to speaker sites while cutting game-related links. I stopped reading game and shareware blogs and found new speaking and personal development blogs to subscribe to. I cut back dramatically on the amount of game-related email I handle. I switched around the people I communicate with most frequently, such that now I spend more time talking to people who think of me as a speaker in training vs. a shareware or game publisher. I started going to new seminars and workshops on speaking. I started this blog. I discussed the change at length with my wife, so we’d both be prepared for what to expect. And so on.

Some of these may seem like drastic steps; most are minor adjustments. But the net result has been that I’ve been able to flow through this transition to where I now think of myself 90% as a speaker/writer and only 10% as a game publisher. My environment is now reinforcing my new role instead of my old one. The momentum is building in a new direction to the point where it would be hard for me to go back.

All of these adjustments create new thought affirmations. By removing most of the links to my old identity, I remove those triggers that would cause me to think in the old ways. And on top of that I’ve added new triggers to affirm my new career path. And these new thoughts affect my actions; my daily routine is now very different than it used to be. A year from now things will be even more different as the results begin to accumulate.

I must say it was hard making some of these changes initially. What helped me was to start with the small changes, like rearranging my office. Then after a week or two, I was better able to make the medium changes. And after some time, I was able to commit to bigger changes. Now my sense of identity has shifted so much that when I run into something that would reinforce my old role, it’s a lot easier to say no.

I recently popped into an old games forum I stopped reading months ago just to see what my perspective on it would be now. It was a strange experience; the discussions seemed familiar but also alien. I got a sense of just how different my thinking is today than it was six months ago. It’s like the feeling of going back to an old class reunion, when you realize that the people you knew back then are totally different people today.

I think this process can work with many other kinds of changes too. If your environment is reinforcing an identity you’re ready to shed, how can you change it? A few little changes won’t be enough to overcome inertia. But if you can keep building those changes so that you shift more and more of your environment to your new role, that probably will work. You’ll shift the balance of your thoughts from affirming your new identity only 5% to pushing it to 50% and beyond. Many people get started on this process, but they don’t take it far enough to see results.

Look around your home and ask yourself objectively, “What kind of person lives here?” If I didn’t know who lived here, what would I conclude about the inhabitant? Do the same for your office: “What kind of person would work here?” Then make a list of the six people with whom you spend the most time, and ask, “What kind of person would associate with these people?” Are your answers to these objective questions congruent with the kind of person you want to be? If not, then what kind of environment would that person have? What kind of friends? And how can you begin gradually shifting your environment towards the new one? Maybe you can’t immediately get a whole new house or a new job, but what little things can you change right now — today — that would start you moving in that direction?

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    Steve Pavlina is widely recognized as one of the most successful personal development bloggers in the world, with his work attracting more than 100 million visits to StevePavlina.com. He has written more than 1300 articles and recorded many audio programs on a broad range of self-help topics, including productivity, relationships, and spirituality. Steve has been quoted as an expert by the New York Times, USA Today, U.S. News & World Report, The Guardian, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Daily News, and many other publications.

    Steve's articles, podcasts, and videos are uncopyrighted, so his work has been re-published and translated extensively. He is credited as the author or co-author of more than 150 books, with more being published each year.

    Steve lives in Las Vegas and travels often.

Becoming Addiction-Free

How many addictions do you currently have? Are you addicted to smoking, caffeine, sugar, alcohol, any other drugs, the Internet, porn, masturbation, sex, orgasm, gambling, shopping, work, TV, movies, social media, video games, food, or anything else? What behaviors do you perform compulsively, even though they don’t really serve you in the long run?

The insidious thing about addictions is that all addictions weaken the prefrontal cortex, which is the part of your brain associated with self-discipline and willpower. The more addictions you have, the weaker your self-regulation abilities become, which increases your susceptibility to further addictions. One addiction tends to invite others, and pretty soon you find yourself with a half-dozen addictions, although you may only be consciously aware of one or two of them.

Addictions get conditioned when certain behaviors trigger a dopamine response. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that helps to solidify desired behaviors, such as eating and sex. Initially we experience a reward (a feeling of pleasure) to reinforce a new behavior, and as the pattern gets conditioned, the reward is gradually reduced. The behavior becomes automatic, even if the reward is stopped. If we want to feel the same level of pleasure we did when we first started, we have to keep increasing the dosage.

Unfortunately for us, our dopamine reward circuitry evolved during a much simpler time, when the triggers for addiction-prone behaviors were scarce. In a world of overabundant triggers, we see an overabundance of addictions. Our brains over-reward us, thereby over-conditioning short-term pleasures that often work against our long-term happiness and fulfillment. What’s even worse is that many companies deliberately target these neurological shortcomings to sell more products and services. Walk into a grocery store, and notice all the items on the shelves with added sugar, oil, or salt. One of the main reasons these items are added is because they make food more addictive than it would otherwise be.

These addictions have consequences for us. For instance, the latest Gallup polls report that 28.3% of adult Americans are now obese, an increase of 2.8 percentage points since 2008. That translates into more cancer, more heart attacks, more strokes, more diabetes, and a lot more money spent on healthcare (which is really sickcare).

The Addiction-Free Standard

Overcoming even one addiction is hard work. Facing several addictions can seem monumentally difficult.

But what’s the truth? The truth is that all addictions weaken us. Addictions lower our ability to discipline ourselves. They derail our best plans to one degree or another. They cause us to live more compulsively and less consciously. And as so many people report after overcoming a major addiction, life is better on the other side. It can take a lot of patience and resolve to get there though.

Even if it takes years, if we truly want to live consciously, then becoming addiction-free must be our gold standard in this area. Even if we never reach it, it’s wise to hold this standard as our goalpost. The closer we get to it, the better off we’ll be.

Imagine what your life would be like with no addictions. You’d be more disciplined than ever. You’d have the ability to make conscious choices in each moment. You wouldn’t have repetitive compulsions wasting your time or renting space in your mind. Your thinking would be more rational. You’d enjoy more freedom. You’d have more energy and better focus. You’d probably save money, and you’d surely save time.

Would you like to be addiction-free? If so, then a good place to start is to paint a picture of what your life could be like with no addictions.

Usually when people do this, they underestimate how good life will be on the other side, and they overestimate how deprived they’ll feel without their favorite addictions. The real cost of addiction is often hidden to us.

Did you know that addictive behaviors neurologically suppress thoughts and reasoning that might counteract the addictive behavior? Just thinking about overcoming an addiction can feel like pushing through a thick mental fog. Your own brain will often derail such thought processes in defense of the addictive patterns.

And yet there’s still hope. People have successfully overcome decades-long addictions. Failure is rampant but success is possible.

Noticing Addiction’s Irrational Logic

Part of the irrationality of addiction involves overweighing the downside of quitting. Thinking about leaving an addiction behind for good can feel like losing the love of your life. Of course that’s nonsense, but it can feel perfectly rational.

Try convincing a daily coffee drinker to give up coffee forever, and watch them rise up to defend and rationalize the habit as if you’ve asked them to sacrifice their beloved family pet. Notice how irrational this response really is. Can we live a happy and fulfilled life caffeine-free for all of our remaining years? Of course we can. Lots of people do. But when we’re in the grips of the addiction, our rational thinking gets hijacked, making us compute that dropping this substance (which is actually a poison) and replacing it with healthier alternatives will somehow rob us of life’s inherent goodness.

What if you never had another orgasm for the rest of your life? What if you never consumed refined sugar again? What if you never used social media again? When we ask such questions, our mind immediately objects. No orgasms… that’s ridiculous! No sugar… tell me it isn’t true! No social media… I’ll have no friends! Of course we could live happy and fulfilling lives without these short-term pleasures. When we think otherwise, we’re confusing pleasure with happiness. It’s the nature of addiction to treat pleasure and happiness as one. The less of an addict you become, the more you’ll realize how separate and distinct these are, and the more weight you’ll place on long-term happiness.

Often behind these objections is a bigger challenge we aren’t facing. How would you live if you couldn’t use social media? You’d probably have to develop a whole new set of skills, which could be an amazing personal growth challenge, one you might actually find deeply fulfilling if you tackled it. What if you never consumed salt, oil, or sugar again? Within about 30 days, your taste buds would adapt and become more sensitive, and food would taste just as good as it did before, except that it would be less addictive, so you’d probably eat less of it. You’d also be less likely to develop heart disease.

All or Nothing

One mindset for overcoming addictions is all or nothing, which in this case has nothing to do with the Arizona Cardinals. This approach rules out any kind of ongoing relationship with the addiction. The triggers and patterns must be squashed into submission. So if alcohol is your addiction, this means no going to bars, no having any alcohol in your house, and creating substitute behaviors when other triggers get activated (such as having a craving).

If you relapse with this approach, which is totally normal, you get back up and try again, each time with the realization that there is no middle ground. You can’t have a relationship with the addiction. There is no moderation for an addict. The standard you aim to reach is being permanently alcohol-free.

I used this strategy with overcoming an addiction to shoplifting when I was 19. For 18 months prior, whenever I went out, there was a good chance I’d steal something. Seeing an opportunity was one trigger. Feeling some edginess was another. Even boredom could be a trigger. Once I felt that surge of excitement, I couldn’t help myself. Lots of rationalization stemmed from there. Somehow my brain always had a way to explain the behavior as a good idea at the time.

Eventually I realized I had to stop this behavior for good. After several arrests I was facing the threat of serious jail time if I didn’t straighten out. Even with that motivation, it wasn’t easy. I successfully stopped, largely by moving to another city and nuking many of the triggers, but I didn’t feel like myself for several months afterwards. It felt like there was an empty hole in my personality. I missed who I was when I had the excitement of stealing in my life. I felt like a hollow shell of a person, like my soul was missing. It took a long time to feel normal again.

When I shoplifted, I probably got away with it cleanly about 97% of the time. Another 2% were near misses, where I almost got caught or did get caught and somehow talked my way out of trouble. It was only that remaining 1% where the punishment happened. Everything else triggered a dopamine reward-reinforcement mechanism. Even after I got arrested, I’d take a break for a week or so, and then I’d go out again, and I’d be right back into reward mode.

Even a decade after I stopped, I still had some of those shoplifting-related behaviors. I couldn’t help it. When I walked into certain stores, I’d automatically notice the security cameras and their blind spots. Or I’d imagine how easy it would be to get something for free if I wanted to. I didn’t do the actual stealing anymore, but the other parts of those mental pathways were still present and active. Eventually those other patterns faded too, which took much longer than I expected. Now that it’s been around 26 years, those patterns no longer activate automatically. I was only actively shoplifting for about 18 months. Imagine how long addictive behaviors may linger after quitting a decades-long addiction.

Regulation

An intermediate strategy that works for some addictions is to regulate the addiction. This works best in the early stages of an addiction before it’s grown too strong. It’s also a reasonable choice when some aspect of the behavior must be maintained in order to access certain benefits, such as using the Internet.

Relying on your willpower and discipline to self-regulate is usually a losing proposition since an addiction will weaken your self-regulation abilities. So it’s wise to acknowledge that you won’t always be as strong as you are when you’re at your best. Eventually you’ll be weak enough, tired enough, or foggy enough to succumb. And the more you succumb, the more you’ll reinforce the addictive pattern, and the more insidious the pattern will be at circumventing further attempts to regulate it.

This is where relying on some kind of outside help or tool is useful. For instance, if you suffer from Internet addiction, you can install the Freedom app, which lets you restrict your access to certain websites or to the whole Internet. It’s very customizable. I use this app liberally when I want to get some real work done, often scheduling the block times in advance. If I get triggered and try to check email when I should be working on some deeper task, I get a blocking page telling me that I’m free of that distraction. Going email-free doesn’t seem like a realistic option for my business – tempting though it is – but regulating this habit by restricting access works pretty well. I found this app so useful that I bought a lifetime subscription to it.

I’ve also completely blocked access to certain websites like Google News and MacRumors, which used to be distractions for me. If any other site becomes a problem, I can easily add a rule to limit my access or to block it permanently.

Because I used to access Google News and MacRumors so often (multiple times per day), I could just type the letters n or m in Chrome, and it would automatically fill out those URLs. As odd as it may sound, even many months after blocking those sites, I still sometimes catch myself unconsciously trying to visit those sites by typing in the letters and hitting enter, often after I finish checking email or when I’m between tasks. The behavior has been blocked for a long time, but the triggers still get activated. The pattern is fading, but it’s fading very slowly. If I didn’t use software to block access, my conditioned behaviors would see me accessing them automatically.

As ironic as it seems, the key to regulating an addiction is not to trust your own brain. When it comes to managing an addiction, your brain will often lie to you. It will tell you it can manage just fine if you want to self-regulate and tone down an addiction, giving you the false impression that you can trust it. And then when you aren’t paying attention, it will trigger the behavior, and you’ll be well into it before you consciously realized what happened. Or you’ll watch it happening and won’t be able to stop yourself. If you question the behavior, your brain will give you a convenient rationalization for why it’s okay just this once. And you’ll waste several hours each week, enough that you could have take an extra vacation or completed a significant work project with the wasted time.

Don’t trust your sneaky, addicted brain. Know that it will try to betray you, and take steps to thwart it in advance. Remove the triggers if you can, or put a roadblock between the trigger and the behavior. I know this sounds a bit schizo, but it works.

If porn (or masturbating to it) is one of your addictions, don’t keep any porn on any of your devices. If you have a collection, nuke the whole thing. Yup, all of it, permanently. If this makes you want to cry, recognize that those thoughts are irrational; the addiction is trying to defend itself. Porn is just a sea of triggers that you don’t need. You can also block access to your favorite porn sites by editing the hosts file on your computer. Google “edit hosts file to block sites” for instructions on how to do so. It only takes a minute, and it works for all browsers.

Some television addicts have found peace by physically getting rid of their TVs. Many years ago I listened to an audio program where the author recommended destroying every TV with an axe. That’s certainly one way to make the behavior more difficult to execute… although these days you might need to destroy anything with a screen to make this approach work.

Positive Relationships

I’m becoming convinced that addictions are very often a substitute for healthy intimate relationships. When we maintain addictions, they fill the void that’s supposed to be filled with intimacy and connection with other people. We often see that when people overcome addictions, their relationship lives improve dramatically. Real human connection fills the void.

Addictions can also cause us to push people away without even realizing it. Deep down we feel some shame or guilt, or we fear getting found out if it’s a socially unacceptable addiction. This infects our relationship posture, and other people pick up on those negative feelings, making good connections less likely.

If you feel less worthy of social abundance because of any addictions, you may very well be pushing people away. Moreover, your sneaky brain can predict that too much intimacy could shed light on your hidden addictions, making them vulnerable to change, so by sabotaging your social life, it protects the addictions. Your brain is clever, and it will often give you seemingly rational reasons as to why you aren’t ready to socialize yet. One of the most common rationalizations is the (false) belief that you have to get into better physical shape before you’re ready to connect more. You don’t. You can connect with people starting today.

Consequently, a good way to stave off addictions as well as to overcome them is to be more active in pursuing and maintaining healthy relationships. Would you rather connect deeply with a video game world or with some terrific friends face to face? Would you rather connect with a latte and the Internet or with a romantic partner? One side gives you short-term pleasure. The other side can create long-term happiness.

Now you might be thinking… I’ve got you there, Steve. I know I can have both! I play video games with my friends, and I have coffee with my girlfriend. So I’m doing the relating thing too!

Well… aren’t you clever! Sure, that sounds perfectly logical, but it would make Spock vomit. It’s just another phony rationalization from an addicted brain. Can you see why that would be so?

Turning the addiction into a social activity drags us all down. We do include some relating, which is good in general, but if we’re relating on the basis of addiction, then what are we missing? Of course we’re missing relating on the basis of non-addiction.

Those hours spent in addiction-themed socialization can be a lot of fun. They’ll surely trigger our reward circuitry, and we get a double-whammy of a reward. We get rewarded for the addictive behavior, and we feel rewarded for the social aspect. The reason this seems like a good investment of time is because we’re confusing the logic of short-term pleasure with the logic of long-term fulfillment.

Now if you aren’t an addict, then there’s nothing wrong with short-term pleasure. Mixing some pleasure into your social connections is all well and good. But you turn a corner when you mix in an addiction where some aspect of your behavior is compulsive. That’s when you talk endlessly about nothing of substance because the coffee makes you ramble, or you stay up late playing video games, throwing off your sleep schedule, and giving yourself an unproductive day, week, month, or year. In the long run, this sort of behavior will degrade your healthy relationships, especially relationships with non-addicts who may begin losing respect for you. I’ve heard from a lot of men and women who’ve had to leave relationship partners because of addictions, often while their partners were still in denial about it. It’s never easy to let go for this reason because in the back of the initiator’s mind, there’s the dream of what an addiction-free relationship with their partner could be like… if only.

When we remove addiction from the picture, we create the space for a deeper and more fulfilling connections with people. We also expose the shallowness of connections that don’t really serve us. What does it say about a connection that isn’t as good without gaming or coffee? What does it say about the quality of a relationship if going orgasm-free for a while leaves you feeling hollow and empty instead of deeply in love and grateful? Addictions so often mask substantial weaknesses that we don’t feel ready to face. It takes a lot of strength to face an addiction. It can take even more strength to face the demons hiding behind that addiction.

I’m not suggesting that addiction combined with relating always kills the relating, but I do think that in many cases, the relating would be more honest, more loving, and more powerful without the addiction in the picture. Addictions skew our thinking. An addiction can make a weak relationship seem strong, like giving you the delusion that pushing buttons and staring at a screen in concert with strangers on the Internet somehow makes you all a band of heroes. An addiction can make a conversation seem fascinating and productive, when all you really did was act out a Seinfeld episode.

Since addictions take us out of alignment with truth, we must do our best to shed them, no matter how difficult the challenge. Keep noticing the insidious logic of addiction. It always has a reason, an excuse, a seemingly good explanation to keep you obedient. It robs you of power, freedom, and connection while making it seem like an intelligent idea to do so. This is the part of yourself you’ll need to keep challenging and questioning – and distrusting – if you’re to have any hope of pursuing the addiction-free ideal in earnest.