Breaking Everyday Addictions

I don’t have any addictions. Nope, not single one! How ’bout you? I thought not.

This book, Breaking Everyday Addictions, by Dr. David Hawkins focuses on the “other” people with the significant addictive behaviors (i.e., porn, alcohol, gambling issues, etc) as well as the people with the “every day” addictions. You know the sort . . . the other people who can’t seem to function without their daily caffeine fix. The people who are always reading blogs. (Ahem.) The people who run around with a blackberry in their back pocket. Yeah, you know the ones.

Hawkins talks about the stages of denial: rationalization, justification, minimization, procrastination, victimization and other -ations. He also spends a significant period of time talking about how we just need to own up to things and face facts. IS a caffeine addiction harmful to others? Is people-pleasing and an addiction to affirmation your thing? Own up to it. What Hawkins is saying in this book is that to truly be free to be the person you were created and meant to be, you need to be free from addictions. He talks about how addictions are not respectful of persons. People in every area and walk of life can be addicted to something – a behavior, work, e-mail, etc. The list can be long and intense. Honesty – a good hard look at what motivates and drives us – will help move us towards recovery.

I think one of the nice aspects of this book is that he doesn’t suggest that the road to “recovery” will happen overnight. He talks about how recovery is progressive, but does not demand perfection. Change takes time and a person who has lived with particular habits are going to have to work really hard to change them.

Overall, I’d say this book was interesting and helpful. I was intrigued by it.

I admit freely and wholeheartedly that I have an addiction to books. It’s true. I really am addicted. I don’t deny it and yet at the same time I refuse to change it. Seriously, sometimes I need to set my books down and deal with real life. I need to get up off the couch and clean the kitchen and prepare the next meal. I need to play with my kid instead of bury myself into someone else’s story. But I don’t. I sit. I read. That should change.

We all have our vices — mine are books! There is nothing inherently wrong with reading but is it taking up time that I should spend elsewhere? Perhaps. Most definitely? Sometimes.

I have a long ways to go . . . .

Carrie comes by her book obsession honestly, having descended from a long line of bibliophiles. She blogs about books regularly at Reading to Know.