Breaking My Addictions

In this episode of Breaking My Addictions, Clive, Matt and Dom explore what happens when you stop fighting your addictions and start redirecting your attention instead. Because it turns out the two might be more connected than most recovery programmes acknowledge.

They get into the reticular activating system — the part of your brain that filters what you notice. Buy a red car and suddenly red cars are everywhere. Start looking for things going right and the world quietly obliges. Start feeding yourself a diet of outrage, war and anxiety and watch your baseline happiness quietly collapse.

They explore:

• Why forty six percent of waking hours are spent thinking about something other than what we are actually doing and why that is linked to unhappiness
• How the news, social media and algorithms are not designed to help you grow. They are designed to bring you back
• Why addiction might be a cheat sheet for the dissolution of self that meditation spends years trying to reach
• The difference between people who focus on problems and people who focus on solutions — and why that one difference changes everything
• What happens when you stop doing things for outcomes and start doing them because you value them
• How improving your mental diet, your physical condition, your attention span and your relationships lets addictions melt away rather than having to be fought

Clive's closing thought is the one to carry with you. When you can live openly and honestly and expose yourself to the world, you claim sovereignty over yourself. And you would not trade that back.

Raw, unscripted and genuinely thought-provoking.

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Free books from the series: qrioustherapy.com

What are you most frightened of? Not the surface answer. The real one.

In this episode Clive admits on air that one of his deepest fears is not being real. That the simulation question genuinely scares him. That he has gone there in his head and had to find a way to lay it to rest. That kind of honesty sets the tone for a conversation that goes somewhere most addiction podcasts never reach.

Matt talks about finding opioids at exactly the moment his world fell apart and how that felt like sitting in the middle of everything going wrong and simply not caring anymore. Not healing. Not coping. Just not caring. And why that was so appealing.

Dom asks the question nobody asks. Why do we live lives we need to escape from? And whether the substances we reach for were always meant to raise consciousness rather than dull it.

Somewhere in the middle of all of that something shifts. A man with crushed legs runs up the CN Tower. A coffee cup says life begins where fear ends. And Clive notices that when a project finishes there is a gap, and what you choose to put in that gap might be everything.

This one goes deep. But it comes back up.

Join the community at breakingmyaddictions.com and mysoberaddiction.com

What happens when you leave the cage but still carry it inside you?

Clive, Matt and Dom explore what genuine community actually looks like versus the communities addiction builds around itself. From the ant mill that keeps circling until it dies, to a Sufi story about the one person who made it back to the classroom, to a thirty day experiment living exactly how society tells you to live and feeling the anxiety crawl in by day eighteen.

Clive talks about the podcast itself as a piton hammered into the rock face each Wednesday. However crazy the week gets, he can come back to the point where he sounded fairly sane. That is what community does. Not rescue. Not fixing. Just a handhold.

Plus the disease debate handled honestly, why the WhatsApp group might be the most important thing any of them have built, and why belonging is not a nice-to-have but the actual medicine.

Join the community at breakingmyaddictions.com and mysoberaddiction.com or visit Qrioutherapy.com

What happens when you leave the cage but still carry it inside you?

Clive, Matt and Dom explore what genuine community actually looks like versus the communities addiction builds around itself. From the ant mill that keeps circling until it dies, to a Sufi story about the one person who made it back to the classroom, to a thirty day experiment living exactly how society tells you to live and feeling the anxiety crawl in by day eighteen.

Clive talks about the podcast itself as a piton hammered into the rock face each Wednesday. However crazy the week gets, he can come back to the point where he sounded fairly sane. That is what community does. Not rescue. Not fixing. Just a handhold.

Plus the disease debate handled honestly, why the WhatsApp group might be the most important thing any of them have built, and why belonging is not a nice-to-have but the actual medicine.

Join the community at breakingmyaddictions.com and mysoberaddiction.com or visit Qrioutherapy.com

And more importantly, are we?

Clive ran up a hill to watch a solar eclipse this week and ended up explaining his entire life's work to his neighbours. That's about as good a cold open as any podcast could ask for.

This week Clive, Matt and Dom talk about children, theirs, ours, and the child still running the show inside every adult in the room. From Dom's daughter doing exactly what he raised her to do and refusing to apologise for it, to Matt's forgiveness conversation with his kids after years of active addiction, to Clive's realisation that the biggest changes in the people around him happened when he changed himself and stopped trying to change them.

The episode plays out with Are the Kids Okay? A four part original song suite written and produced by Clive, available now on QriousTherapy.com

Join the community at breakingmyaddictions.com and mysoberaddiction.com

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

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