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Comment by 123pie123 | Hacker News Reader

I would probably class myself as someone with an addictive personality. not with drugs (except alcohol), but with anything - if I like something, I find it very hard to not have more, wether it's good or bad. eg going to the gym 6x week or getting takeaways every day

I've analsysed this for sometime and the best (for me) way of dealing with it is to keep track of every thing I do or I like.

"The power of habit" book helped a lot with my ability to control my addictions

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Note that you could probably „weaponize“ this addictive personality to achieve what normal people cannot (eg dedicate an extreme amount of time to a difficult task and achieve it)

I'm not who you're responding to, but I very much identify with what they wrote. I once accidentally trained for a marathon.

Weaponizing this is unhealthy. It doesn't end well. The reason normal people can't do X and an addict can is because an addict is making egregious trade-offs.

"I know I'm going to mess up my shoulder for the rest of my life, but I'm going to bench heavy anyway"

"I know I haven't seen my kids in a month, but I'm going to shut myself away and work on my side business anyway"

It's collapsing your entire life into a single, simplistic max/min function. It's a quick path to misery.

I'm reminded of a quote from J. M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan: "You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it." I once thought it was, and have often seen it used as, an inspirational quote until I later read another opinion that it was a warning of the dangers of being too single focused.

I simply take it as a description of reality. As a child, you are nothing yet, but you have the potential to become almost anything. As you get older, you trade in that potential for something specific. It's up to you to choose. You can trade all your potential for one thing only or you can divide it up to become multiple things. The right balance is debatable. The real danger lies in taking it to the limit. If you try to become everything, you divide your potential up into infinitesimal pieces and end up remaining nothing at all, a child.

In any case, there is some real wisdom in Peter Pan, but it was completely lost on me as a child.

I don't claim to be well-read on the topic, but this reminds me of Kierkegaard's infinite and finite.

"A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis."

Note that dedicating an extreme amount of time to a task can be unhealthy in it's own right, if it's to the detriment of other aspects of life. Depending on exactly what you're picturing, it may also be worth noting that hyper-fixation can lead to working past the point of productivity (sometime you just need to sleep on it, take a walk, etc.). It's not a clear-cut advantage.

That's not where health is though...

Health is balance.

Same. I literally got addicted to exercise. Not trying to brag, I’ve also dealt with addictions to food, sleep, video games.

I also have mild OCD. And I’m not depressed, but i get bored very easily and very fast.

The key for me is also habits, diversion, and moderation. I have an easy time forming habits because of OCD so I just have to prune bad ones, easier said than done. I also keep track of how i feel, and just naturally feel bad if i eat too much or sleep late, which seems to subconsciously make me not want to do those things, so i don’t have to use as much willpower.

I have touches of OCD. It's not all bad (it got me through school and has made me decent at work), though when I was younger I used alcohol a bit to disconnect. Met a great girl, mostly quit alcohol, but that disconnect mechanism transferred to MMOs. Faster forward a year or so and I'm playing MMOs 8+ hours/day and girl leaves. I'm devastated and lost. Walk into work a few days later and give all my MMO accounts (yes, I had multiple accounts for the same game to bot, buff, etc...) to a co-worker, and never played again. Started back down the alcohol path, but this time caught myself and decided to try the gym one day.

20+ years later I still workout almost every single day. I think about how easy it could have been to take a far worse path, but exercise has been my savior. To paraphrase Henry Rollins, 225# is always 225# no matter what else is happening in your life. It is the great constant.

>just naturally feel bad if i eat too much or sleep late, which seems to subconsciously make me not want to do those things, so i don’t have to use as much willpower.

feeling bad works a little in reducing various cravings,

but my brain seems to have a way of fading my bad memories somewhat

It reads as if you don't consider alcohol a drug. Due to its social acceptance people tend to look at alcohol this way but when u give it a better look alcohol should be at least classed as a class 1 drug substance, especially if we're going to keep placing marijuana in the same class as heroine.

edit: typo

I read that the opposite. 'Not with drugs (except alcohol)' would include alcohol in the category of drugs.

I would definately class alcohol as a drug,

but I feel like almost anything food/ drink could be a drug (to me), since if I like it, it makes me want to crave it - for many days/ weeks after.

> I would definately class alcohol as a drug

I agree. It's incredible the lengths that people will go to separate drugs and alcohol.

I always like to phrase it like this ...

If you took alcohol in a pill form, are you drinking or taking drugs?

I'm somewhat surprised this hasn't been attempted as a product actually. Guess it would probably be dreadful for your stomach lining but would be a novel alternative to shots

you may want to check out alcohol powder

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_powder

I would suspect the volume is simply too large.

The “haircut” where you pour a mixer into your mouth, someone pours liquor into your mouth, and then you swallow in a way such that the liquor doesn’t touch your mouth or throat is the closest thing to an “alcohol pill” I can think of. Come to think of it, shots plus chasers are somewhat “pill like” too

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