Dear Roberta, Dear Tee and Dear Anita,

thank you for your responses and your care. I really appriciate it.

Tee, you asked “What are those thoughts?” which I might try to avoid when falling into addictive behavior. I tried to take some time and think about it but I guess it just quickly becomes painful or too much, hard to tell. I am in general not a strong person although from the outside it might looks like the opposite. My inner critic… I don’t think I have a loud one, at least my inner slacker is louder. Nervertheless thoughts which I try to avoid can be summarized with: I am not good enough, I could do more, work more / put more energy in my education / start some side business, do more sports, do more for / with my kids, be more creative (it was a big passion during my childhood years) etc. All of these thoughts just kind of overwhelms me and numbs me alltogether. I know I don’t have to do / be all of those things, but I feel like my life lacks something special. I am like everybody else or worse and it annoys me. I am annoyed with my incapability of pull through a plan / an idea – because I am afraid I fail or worse I will quit my plan early on again, proving to myself that I cannot do it. My guess is, I am just lazy. I just do enough. The last time I did more than needed was during Highschool probably. And of course, I got rewarded with a good grade, but in other subjects I did not, no matter how hard I tried (my thoughts around this time, not now, I could have probably done more if I really wanted to). Now I am telling everyone who is asking me about my ongoing master’s degree that I am just putting enough effort into it to pass. I don’t work my butt of. I choose easier courses, I just do what is needed. I don’t even try to understand some things. I just gave up (?). I mean I am almost done and I feel like I didn’t even “earn” this degree…so all in all I am not very ambitious, I have a great fear of failing which is why I find it hard to commit to anything.

Anita, you wrote “You were able to stop other addictive behaviors because you removed access to the items” – yes, exactly. With the sweets and snacks I could probably try the same. No one snacks at home except me, meaning we don’t keep extra snacks/sweets for the kids in the house (or stuff I eat anyway). Sometimes I manage a week or too (last when I had problems with a teeth), but then before I know it I just buy some sweets/snacks again and I am not sure why. I tried intermittend fasting (you only eat in an 8-hour window during the day) which worked quite well for me to reduce the not-needed-calories-input. I might try this again…sometimes I fall off when I’m sick… It’s like with sports – I had a healty routine of 45 minutes sports in the evening until I had an operation which made me stop for over a month. Starting again is just hard but probably needed.
I hope my post didn’t feel too much like a monolog.

Thanks again for all your input and care.

Julia