Disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed

this is a saying I’ve heard for years at my local AA meeting. And it completely applies to me today.

There are parts of me that have gotten complacent due to other parts of me that are disturbed, and when my mental focus is obsessing about the negative, my daily routine of healthy stuff starts to seem a little less important so I stop pushing as hard. Here’s what I mean,

What’s disturbing me: intense anxiety!!
I have horrible social anxiety so my therapist has prescribed I push through the fear and do things anyway. This is makeing me very uncomfortable and is disturbing the crap out of me!! I can’t think straight, I can’t sleep well, my whole brain power is consumed by it and there’s very little sound reasoning.

Yesterday a friend from SAA said his sponsor told him that when life gets more intense recovery needs to get more intense to match, so there’s a balance. But for me so far I’ve been too distracted with the chaos of anxiety in my mind that recovery stuff has taken a back seat. For example I have nothing today that has to do with job interview anxiety provoking tasks, but I can’t stop thinking about it and it is consuming me.

So I need to find some comfort. I need to do what ever it takes to find relief from this cuz it will eat me alive! Comfort the disturbed part of me. Maybe a walk in the forest or go to the beach, to clear my head.

What’s become comfortable and need to be disturbed: my daily recovery routine
So when I first started getting sober I was very depressed, so I scoured the Internet looking for remedies. Many people said diet and sleep habits can reallly affect depression and also mentioned getting out of bed ASAP when alarm goes of will prevent morning depression. So I started doing that with lots of intention and focus.

Well recently, I’ve been feeling better, so I have become lazy about getting out of bed and I might spend an hour in bed watching YouTube and being on nofap. This is me slowly drifting back to old behaviors. (And I assume it is directly linked to all my fears about job search. Isolate from the scary by staying in bed.)

So in this instance I need to disturb myself and my returning unhealthy Patterns and become uncomfortable by shooting out of bed ASAP and never missing my morning cardio exercise.

So today my alarm went off at 8am I stayed in bed until 8:20am and got up. Tomorrow I’ll try to do it in under 10 minutes.

Remember to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed parts of yourself!