In this episode of Breaking My Addictions, Clive, Matt and Dom explore what happens when you stop fighting your addictions and start redirecting your attention instead. Because it turns out the two might be more connected than most recovery programmes acknowledge.

They get into the reticular activating system — the part of your brain that filters what you notice. Buy a red car and suddenly red cars are everywhere. Start looking for things going right and the world quietly obliges. Start feeding yourself a diet of outrage, war and anxiety and watch your baseline happiness quietly collapse.

They explore:

• Why forty six percent of waking hours are spent thinking about something other than what we are actually doing and why that is linked to unhappiness
• How the news, social media and algorithms are not designed to help you grow. They are designed to bring you back
• Why addiction might be a cheat sheet for the dissolution of self that meditation spends years trying to reach
• The difference between people who focus on problems and people who focus on solutions — and why that one difference changes everything
• What happens when you stop doing things for outcomes and start doing them because you value them
• How improving your mental diet, your physical condition, your attention span and your relationships lets addictions melt away rather than having to be fought

Clive's closing thought is the one to carry with you. When you can live openly and honestly and expose yourself to the world, you claim sovereignty over yourself. And you would not trade that back.

Raw, unscripted and genuinely thought-provoking.

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