It wasn’t the stress that made me drink more than before in the COVID – era. This is an interesting insight, because I always thought that I had a very stressful time during COVID. Yes, it was stressful. I had a lot of remote home schooling, I had shifts of emergency childcare at the school for children with special needs education and we had to manage household and family matters.

The question is: Was that stressful enough to induce heavier drinking? If so, the stress was not job related. Ok, there were stressors that attacked my self efficacy and identity values during that time, but in the end I won’t tell a secret that this was not the primary reason for more drinking.

It was idleness. A lot of idleness, a lot of anxiety due to the lockdown process and partly coping with the new situation.

I haven’t given COVID a deeper thought in recent years, because so much happened to improve my own mental well being.

But since ADHD has become some sort of game changer, I am putting a lot of developments in my life on trial again.

This is another good example for the rippling effects forwards and backwards in my system that change the view of the system as a whole and putting on trial old truths and mindsets.

I think the insight adds to the key conclusion I could draw a couple of days ago that idleness is one of the “7 deadly sins” in ADHD (at least in my world). It means that dopamine levels will sink. It means my mind is searching for something to be busy with, because it needs input and is searching for some relief (if it is the search for a dopamine kick or the coping with anxiety/depression or both interrelated, I am not quite sure yet). What I know is, the more idle my brain is and the more it lingers in the dark, the more probable it is that some fearful or depressive thought may come up to haunt me and that makes me want to kindle my troubled mind.

The processes are then becoming blurry, catastrophizing is one common process set loose, depression and anxiety will send off an avalanche of bad thoughts, gnawing on my self esteem, undermining my foundations of hope and optimism, shaking the very columns of my identification system. Yes, it can become this serious. Was it strong enough to feel existential fear? Yes. Did it paralyze me? Yes. Was I suicidal? No, thank god, I wasn’t. Even though reflecting thoughts in terms of “why am I not suicidal…?” came up. Sounds weird, but this is what happened. I talked with my therapist, I am safe here, no worries!

Well, today I am (thank god) far away enough from this spiral of doom and gloom but I need to be wary about it. But this is how idleness can cause a spiral of defeating thoughts that I didn’t want to have, so I climbed the next level of drinking.

The problem with self medication with alcohol is, of course, that I wasn’t able to cut back, because it felt too easy to grab a few beers when things got (seemingly) stressful. And then it becomes a self-sustaining problem: I didn’t need to be too idle or stressed to drink. The addiction will suggest to you how stressful and boring everything is and that it would be better not to put it to the test. “Because you know where you could end up…do you want that?” would be something the voice in my head would suggest: Don’t take even the slightest risk of giving thoughts to bad emotions and “what-ifs”, rather have a drink.

Of course, I have adapted. I am over it, or am I?

Well, mostly. I just realized that this is exactly the “Kollateralmeise” (read the according post to understand) of these days: Being idle with habits and granting myself too much “free time” could end up in these thoughts coming back up. And then the fear returns to my system that if I idle too much about my sports or my habits, I could stop doing these activities and that the fear loop will set in and I will be back in addiction sooner or later.

Now, that is (in theory) another game changer. I have not yet a clear path to keep on a balanced line (see last or the post before last post for explanation), but this theretical insight is a good beacon at hand for a goal in the darkness which I have yet to set: Keeping myself in the spectrum between black and white and not fall for the dichotomy and live in extremes. It is like a circle closing, but the remaining gap in the circle is not yet clearly found. Like a puncture in a bicycle tire: You know it is there, but you have to search for it in the water and you will only find it when the water doesn’t stir and you can see the bubbles from the escaping air. I am yet in search of the hole.

Until next time, keep up the faith in yourself and take one step at a time.