What Are You Running From?
The dance of pleasure and pain.
What Are You Running From?
If you couldn’t do (insert distraction or coping mechanism here), what would you be feeling? Thinking? Doing?
In other words, what are you avoiding by indulging in your vice of choice?
Be it alcohol, social media, porn, drugs, codependent relationships, gambling, sex, food—we all have something we lean on a little too much. When we’re in the grips of temptation, we know it’s helping us avoid something we don’t want to feel.
So ask yourself:
What pain does this pleasure temporarily help you avoid?
Pain is the root of all addiction. And I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say we’re living in the age of addiction. We have every imaginable pleasure at our fingertips, and yet somehow, we feel more unfulfilled than ever.
Is it just the human condition? Or is it how our dopamine system is wired, such that we feel happiest in the pursuit of a reward, and not so much when we actually get it?
Pain and pleasure share the same circuits in the brain. When we move too far in the direction of pleasure, we inevitably swing back into pain: come downs, hangovers, emptiness, disappointment, heartbreak. And then there are times when we intentionally put ourselves through discomfort, through discipline, and the result is deep, lasting joy.
From my own years of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, whether through substances, behaviours, or toxic relationships—my honest answer is:
You can never get enough of what you don’t need.
Or maybe... we’ve simply lost touch with what we’re really searching for.
We accept situationships, or lust instead of love.
We get drunk or high when what we really crave is connection.
We drown our intuition in doomscrolling, ignoring the quiet voice that tells us what we’re here to do, then turn around and blame the world, or better still, those closest to us, for our unhappiness.
But there’s a simple question that can bring clarity:
What am I afraid will happen if I don’t use/ distract myself?
When I find myself craving a smoke, or reaching for my phone for the 33rd time in the last hour (when I swore I wouldn’t), I ask myself that question.
And my brain answers:
I’ll be stressed
I’ll be bored
I won’t be able to manage my emotions
I’ll feel disconnected/ isolated
I’ll be angry
And my personal favourite: “Because you’re worth it.” I deserve it. Why can’t I have this little treat?
Almost always, our vices are covering over painful emotions we don’t want to feel. And when we ask, What am I afraid will happen? What am I avoiding? We can finally start to unravel what lies beneath.
Because these patterns aren’t just “bad habits”, rather, they are maladaptive strategies—ways we learned to avoid suffering when we had no other tools available. They made sense once, perhaps they kept you safe or at least appeared to keep you safe at a time when you had no other way to self regulate. But they’re no longer serving you.
With any destructive behaviour, the cycle typically looks like this:
First, it’s fun, then it’s fun with problems, then it isn’t fun anymore.
What once brought pleasure now brings pain, it now becomes what you need just to feel normal. You know it’s bad, you know you’re hurting yourself but somehow you can’t seem to walk away.
When I look at my little list, I see the deeper wounds beneath the cravings:
The suffering of overwhelming emotion, the ache of not belonging, the pain of being unrewarded, unseen. The emptiness.
When we can be compassionately honest with ourselves about where we’re at, when we’re able to look at our pain instead of avoiding it, that’s when we can begin to transform our pain into purpose.
We can learn to see past our shame programming and childhood wounds and feel safe again. While it’s by no means an easy road, and it’s one that only you can decide to take, the reward is the recovery of who you really are, and what you were always meant to do with your life.