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I just realized that I have been going to the gym for exactly a year now. It’s the third time in my life that I have worked out for a long period of time, but it’s the first time I have done it sober.
Let me tell you how different this time is.
First of all, I want to say how beneficial it is to my sobriety. I honestly have not seen massive physical gains. I’m in better physical shape, and I am running on a treadmill almost every day after being told I probably would never run again earlier in my life.
But the impact on my sobriety has been pretty special. I haven’t seen any studies about the relationship between addiction and fitness, but the science seems pretty settled in general about the positive impact of fitness on your mental health. That has certainly been the case for me, and my mental health is centered around recovery. So I have loved the way those two things play in the sandbox together.
Secondly, I see the difference in myself this time around. The first time I ever went to the gym regularly was when I was a freshman in college. I went with my college roommate for a year and got pretty muscular… and the sole purpose was to impress girls. I had no desire to be in good shape other than to look as good on the outside as possible, for purposes of hooking up with people. As you could probably guess, the minute I got a girlfriend, my drive to go to the gym fizzled out almost overnight.
The next time I went to the gym regularly was right after I got married. That time, I again went to the gym just to try to impress my newlywed wife. I wasn’t doing it for myself; I was again trying to look as good as possible for the benefit of someone else. And again, that wasn’t enough to keep me invested.
This time, I’m going because I want to go, not because I am trying to impress anybody. That is a positive byproduct of sobriety. My time in recovery is the first time in my life where I have done a decent job of doing the right thing because it’s the right thing, not because somebody else might think more highly of me.
The third thing is related to the prior thing. When I got sober, I was told a series of suggestions about staying sober every day. Not for 10 days. Not for one year. For 24 straight hours every day, one day at a time. It was the first time in a very long time that I had a specific gameplan—go to 90 meetings in 90 days, get a sponsor, start the steps. And it was the first time I was able to stick to a gameplan, and I have seen the benefits of that.
That coincides perfectly with so many other things in my life since I got sober. Work projects, saving money, going to the gym, you name it, I am better at it than I would have ever anticipated because staying sober has been one huge example of having an important goal and doing something every day to achieve that goal. I’ve written before about how often New Year’s resolutions don’t work out for people, and I’m guessing it has a lot to do with not having any kind of program or network to support your goal. Recovery has been Exhibit A of that for me, but it has also paved the way for Exhibits B, C, D and so on. The gym is like that. I have broad goals I want to achieve, I try to do something every day to inch closer to that goal, and I don’t ever buy my b******t of skipping it. I can’t afford to skip sobriety stuff, and that drive has spilled over into my everyday life in a great way.
The last thing is that going to gym has helped me realize how much better my internal voice is. You know that voice, the one that tells you to say and do dumb s**t all the time! That voice was an absolute dumpster fire when I was an active addict. I couldn’t talk myself out of stealing, lying and overdosing.
Then I got sober, and that changed as far as drugs and alcohol went. But I still found that I didn’t have very good self control on most things. But I have found the longer I have stayed sober, the more I pause between having a thought and taking an action. I also have found that when my internal voice whispers that I should skip a meeting or ignore a phone call from another suffering addict, I have a louder voice that usually raises its voice and overwhelms that part of me. I tend to listen to the louder voice. And that voice has helped me enormously in sticking with going to the gym, which is a very easy activity to talk yourself out of! But in recovery, the voice saying I don’t need 12-step recovery is persistent, which has made the other voice get louder and more persistent, so when I deploy that voice on something like going to the gym, it’s still pretty loud and convincing. That voice has helped me get to the gym probably about 350 out of 365 days this past year. I would never be able to do that without a solid 12-step sobriety program.
So for me, the bottom line is, I won’t be entering any bodybuilding contests any time soon. But I am in better shape, physically and spiritually, and recovery has been the blueprint for that.
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
A drunk walks into a library and up to the librarian's desk. He says, "I'll have a hamburger, fries, and a cola."
The librarian gives him a puzzled look, so the drunk repeats it a little louder, "I'll have a HAMBURGER, FRIES, and a COLA."
The annoyed librarian hisses, "Sir! You are in a library."
"Oh, sorry," the drunk replied, and then whispered, "I'll have a hamburger, fries, and a cola."
(Credit; AA Grapevine, December 2006, by Andy S. of Rohnert Park, California)
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