What if you stopped fighting the addiction and just started building something better instead?

Clive opens this episode with something quietly remarkable. In the last ten weeks he finished a book, rebuilt his business, started running again, spent more time with his kids, sorted the house and the garden. And somewhere in the middle of all of that the old addictions quietly melted away. No willpower. No white knuckling. Just construction.

Clive, Matt and Dom explore what it actually means to build a life worth living, the psychology of purpose, why people with a calling have measurably lower rates of addiction and depression, what retirees arriving at the finish line of a prescribed life can teach us about meaning, and why the butterfly you grab with force is the one you lose.

The episode features the story of Meekie, a 19 year old fashion designer, songwriter and poet from Lagos, Nigeria, and member of the Breaking My Addictions community. His words became songs. His songs ended up in Clive's new book The Impossible Knot, publishing next week. His story is what this episode is really about. You can support his journey and follow his story at T2LU.com

The episode plays out with All I Do Is Listen, a song built from Meekie's own words, made into music by The Department of Qrious Threads.

The Impossible Knot, a free book about the situations effort cannot fix and what to do instead, publishes next week at QriousTherapy.com

QriousTherapy.com is a free, ad-free platform where people share what actually helped. Videos, podcasts, poems, articles and more across channels covering addiction, mental health, creativity and self discovery. No accounts. No agenda. Just humans sharing what worked.

Join the community at breakingmyaddictions.com and mysoberaddiction.com

Your environment shapes your addiction before you ever make a single choice.

Where you grew up, how close together the buildings were, whether your parents had enough, what your peers were doing, the rats nest gets into the wiring before you're old enough to know it's happening.

But what happens when you leave the cage? Does the rats nest leave with you?

And what about the modern rats nest you invite straight into your home every time you open your phone?

Clive, Matt and Dom explore city versus rural addiction patterns, social media as a chosen environment, why intelligent people are often most vulnerable, and whether the WhatsApp community they've built is itself a form of Rat Park connection and social medication..

Featuring a real story about a girl who got out and never looked back, a Ferrari in a Walmart car park, and one line about a ten hour something that will make you laugh and think simultaneously.

Join the community at breakingmyaddictions.com and mysoberaddiction.com and for resources visit qrioustherapy.com

What if the peace you found in your addiction was actually a spiritual experience just with the wrong directions?

Clive, Matt and Dom go somewhere most recovery podcasts won't touch. From Matt's near death experience in a formless void that didn't match his religious programming, to the Catholic church abuse figures in France, to whether complete abstinence is a realistic or even healthy expectation, this is an honest, curious and at times uncomfortable conversation about religion, shame, spirituality and what we're all actually searching for underneath the addiction.

Carl Jung told one of AA's founders that alcoholism was a spiritual thirst at the wrong address. William James wrote in 1882 that substances give temporary access to states that feel genuinely transcendent. Gabor Maté's whole later work goes there too. This episode asks the same question they were all circling, what were you actually chasing?

The episode closes with an original song written from the themes of the conversation, a therapeutic piece that walks through the confusion of being human, the systems that fragment us, and what it might feel like to finally choose your own direction.

For more tools, therapeutic content and the Sonic Alchemy songwriting experience visit qrioustherapy.com

Join the community at breakingmyaddictions.com and mysoberaddiction.com

What if the peace you found in your addiction was actually a spiritual experience just with the wrong directions?

Clive, Matt and Dom go somewhere most recovery podcasts won't touch. From Matt's near death experience in a formless void that didn't match his religious programming, to the Catholic church abuse figures in France, to whether complete abstinence is a realistic or even healthy expectation, this is an honest, curious and at times uncomfortable conversation about religion, shame, spirituality and what we're all actually searching for underneath the addiction.

Carl Jung told one of AA's founders that alcoholism was a spiritual thirst at the wrong address. William James wrote in 1882 that substances give temporary access to states that feel genuinely transcendent. Gabor Maté's whole later work goes there too. This episode asks the same question they were all circling, what were you actually chasing?

The episode closes with an original song written from the themes of the conversation, a therapeutic piece that walks through the confusion of being human, the systems that fragment us, and what it might feel like to finally choose your own direction.

For more tools, therapeutic content and the Sonic Alchemy songwriting experience visit qrioustherapy.com

Join the community at breakingmyaddictions.com and mysoberaddiction.com

What if your addictions aren't weaknesses? What if they're given to you by design.

In this episode of Breaking My Addictions, Clive, Matt and Dom go deeper into the mental diet conversation - moving from the family dynamics of last week into the media, advertising and algorithmic machinery that shapes what we think and what we reach for when we're not okay.

They explore how soap operas quietly hand people identities to inhabit. How laugh tracks train you when to feel. How a trillion dollar advertising industry doesn't sell you products, but sells a version of yourself that needs them.

What if we lowered people's baseline dopamine through fear-based media, meaningless work, corrupt politics and a consumer treadmill that promises everything and delivers nothing?

Raw, unscripted and harder to dismiss than it should be.

Join the community: breakingmyaddictions.com

Mental diet tools and resources: qrioustherapy.com

Ready to level up? time2levelup.co.uk

What if the biggest protective factor against addiction isn't willpower, therapy, or even sobriety, but family? Not necessarily the one you were born into.

In this episode Clive, Matt and Dom explore one of the most overlooked threads in addiction recovery - the role of family, belonging and the need to be part of something. Matt shares candidly how his family's decision to stop enabling him and let him crash and burn was both the hardest and the most loving thing they ever did. And how when he crawled back, they were ready.

They explore what happens when the family you grew up in isn't the one that heals you - and how addicts often build their own family from scratch, dysfunctional as it might be. Sometimes that's the first place they've ever felt they belonged.

The conversation moves into the language of recovery, why being told to repeatedly declare "I am an alcoholic" might be doing more harm than good, and why the granularity of how we describe ourselves matters more than most treatment programmes acknowledge.

Raw, unscripted and genuinely thought-provoking.

Join the WhatsApp community: breakingmyaddictions.com

My Sober Addiction: mysoberaddiction.com

What if calling addiction a disease is actually making it harder to recover from?

In this episode Clive, Matt and Dom tackle one of the most contested questions in recovery - is addiction a disease or a choice? And why does the answer matter?

Matt shares the raw reality of going on complete autopilot - making the conscious decision not to use, then finding himself calling his dealer anyway without knowing how it happened. Is that a disease? Or is it something else entirely?

Clive draws the distinction between disease and dis-ease - the idea that addiction isn't a broken brain but an off-centre life reaching for the quickest way back to balance. Dom traces the surprising origins of the disease model and asks whether we were ever meant to stay stuck.

Together they explore the rat park experiment, the role of environment and poverty in addiction, the autopilot analogy, and why focusing on making life better might be more powerful than any label we put on the behaviour.

This is not a clinical podcast. It is three people who have lived it, thought about it, and found their own way through - talking honestly about what actually worked.

If you have ever felt like addiction was something happening to you rather than something you were doing, this conversation might shift something.

Join the Breaking My Addictions WhatsApp community at breakingmyaddictions.com - a free peer support space focused on moving forward, not staying stuck.

What if, your addiction isn't your enemy, but a message you haven't read yet?

Clive, Matt and Dom go beyond willpower and war metaphors to ask a harder question, what pain was your addiction solving? From opioids to alcohol to the subtle addictions of scrolling and escapism, this is an honest, unscripted conversation about shame, identity, culture and what it actually takes to change.

Clive runs breakingmyaddictions.com, Matt runs mysoberaddiction.com, and together with Dom they host the Breaking My Addictions WhatsApp community, a free peer support group with a simple but powerful focus. Not on the addiction itself, but on building a life so rich and purposeful that the addiction gradually becomes less important.

If you've ever beaten yourself up for falling back, this one's for you.

Search Breaking My Addictions on WhatsApp to join the community, or find us at breakingmyaddictions.com and mysoberaddiction.com

JD Tremblay - naturopathic practitioner, former military, ultra-endurance athlete and one of only three people in the world to complete the Epic Decker - talks candidly about porn addiction, identity shift, and building a system that works.

What does it take to go from hiding in a basement at 12 years old watching inappropriate TV content, to completing 10 back-to-back Ironman races and building a global men's wellbeing academy?

JD Tremblay doesn't come with a coaching badge or a polished origin story. He comes with a decade of military service, a degree in biomedical engineering, a system he built because he had to, and years of lived proof that it works.

In this episode of Breaking My Addictions, Clive Wilson sits down with JD to explore the fine line between addiction and obsession, how ultra-endurance sport nearly replaced one compulsion with another, and what actually broke the cycle - identity, not willpower.

They discuss:

• How porn addiction starts young and why it stays hidden
• The RISE framework JD developed for pattern recognition and identity shift
• Why swapping one dopamine hit for another isn't recovery
• The role of community, faith, and purpose in long-term change
• The Hungry Warrior Academy and their work across five countries

Guest: JD Tremblay - Director of High Performance, Hungry Warrior Academy Website: hungrywarrioracademy.com | hungerformore.com

In this episode of Breaking My Addictions, Clive is joined by Matt and Dom for an honest conversation about thinking, overthinking, and what happens when our minds get overloaded by constant information, news feeds, algorithms, and doom-scrolling.

We explore how mental noise quietly feeds anxiety, distraction, and old coping patterns, and how easy it is to confuse being “informed” with being overwhelmed. The conversation touches on mental diet, attention, self-regulation, creativity, and simple ways of noticing when our thinking is helping us live well, and when it is quietly working against us.

This is not a how-to guide or a set of fixes.

It is a grounded, human conversation about noticing our own mental habits, learning when to step back, and finding steadier ways to relate to our thoughts in a noisy world.

No gurus. No perfect answers. Just real talk about living with more clarity and less mental clutter.