How To Use The New Year Energy To Quit Alcohol and/or Other Addictions

In episode #253 of Elevation Recovery, Chris Scott and Matt Finch discuss how to start the new year off right. The holiday season can be a time where many are surrounded by temptations such as alcohol, unhealthy foods, and loss of routine.

Chris and Matt define the differences between New Year’s resolutions and New Year’s intentions, and provide suggestions for free and paid techniques to keep up with your goals. 

Often times people set resolutions and/or intentions and get some momentum but then things fall apart. New habits or routines aren’t strongly wired yet and during the first few weeks, it’s easy to get going and then stop. Luckily, Chris and Matt have created this episode to help you overcome obstacles and barriers in a way that is strategic, empowering, motivational, and more.

Links to Resources Mentioned in this Episode:

Here are some ways to learn from this episode:

Chris Scott: ... and I always thought New Year's resolutions were a bit cliche, maybe tainted in part by my past failure to ever quit drinking, back during my drinking years due to a New Year's resolution. But I didn't have to fail, I failed because I didn't have strategies or tools that could help me. So I ended up quitting in the fall, actually. So it wasn't a New Year's thing.

Matt Finch: So many of the articles that show up at the top of the search results are from these rehab treatment centers. And of course they want you to follow their system so they can make the money from your insurance or from your cash. You're not going to find a whole lot at the top search results for Google on these alternative ways of thinking, which in the future is going to be the primary ways of thinking.

Announcer: Thanks for tuning into the Elevation Recovery Podcast, your hub for addiction recovery strategies. Hosted by Chris Scott and Matt Finch.

Matt Finch: Welcome everyone to the Elevation Recovery Podcast. It is now our first episode of 2022. I'm here with Chris Scott and the faithful sidekick, Papaya. And today we're going to be talking about a few things. Number one, how to use and harness the new year energy, the 2022 new year. It's like a new chapter of life. All the holiday seasons are over, the Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, Christmas, New Year's Eve, New Year's, family gatherings, lots of alcohol and time off and junk food and treats and cookies. I know that I indulged way too much in a few of those things. Not drugs or alcohol, but cookies, pies. Taking time off work and just a loss of structure and routine.

Matt Finch: So this episode's a kickstart to 2022. We're going to be talking about New Year's resolutions and also New Year's intentions. The difference between the two, how to write out some of those, if you like, as well as different free resources and different pay for resources that are either online, systems like courses, books, groups, free webinars, free emails and different detox methods for both alcohol and or drugs, like medical detox, outpatient detox, home detox, cold turkey taper. So it's just a smorgasbord of a bunch of different resources for you, writing exercises and ideas to give you a kickstart into 2022. So thanks for joining me. Chris.

Chris Scott: Good to be here. As usual, we have somewhat matching outfits, which is totally not intentional, but we're on the same wavelength. Maybe that's a astrological thing. I don't know.

Matt Finch: We're usually in the same wavelength. And I commented on that shirt at the beginning. I thought it was a Hylete, but you said it's a Lululemon. Mine's just Old Navy. It's been chillier here. And it seems like we've had colder weather across all of North America, not just San Diego. But looking at the news, way over the summer, we had a lot of much hotter weather than usual. Now we're having a lot of much colder weather than usual. And when I lived in the Northeast in upstate New York, when I first moved there, I was wearing so many different layer of clothing. I would have two t-shirts, a long sleeve thermal, a hoodie, a jacket, a beanie, gloves. And then I lived there for four years, each winter, as I started to get used to those long, brutal cold winters, I would have less layers on.

Matt Finch: Finally, by the last winter I was living there, it could be 25, 30 degrees out in the day and I just have a t-shirt and a jacket, unbuttoned sometimes. But now that I've been back in California for a long time, now I'm sensitive to the cold again. Today it's in the 50s, mid 50s in the afternoon, when I went outside I was like, "Well, ooh, it's cold." Even with the hoodie. And I would've laughed at myself when I lived in upstate New York, like, "Dude, it's a heat wave man. 55 in the beginning of January."

Matt Finch: So yeah, New Year's resolutions. Chris, do you make them, do you make New Year's intentions? What is your idea on New Year's stuff? Or do you just, whenever you have goals and intentions, do you just do it? I'm not sure, everyone's different.

Chris Scott: Yeah. I have a new resolution or series of resolutions every six weeks because I put a whiteboard up in my room where I keep the infrared sauna, which was my big and potentially stupid investment during the lockdown phase of the pandemic, now like a year and a half ago, but I was going crazy not being able to go to the gym. So I ordered a sauna from Amazon and I had this whiteboard. And I like to sit in the sauna and reflect on what I wrote on the whiteboard, because the problem with having a whiteboard in a room that you don't use is that you'll write things down, you'll get excited, and then you'll forget all about it. So I like to have it in a prominent place where I see it.

Chris Scott: And every six weeks I go through, figure out what's stale, what I was too ambitious about, what still needs to happen, but didn't for whatever reason. So I'm far from the most efficient person out there with my goals or desired outcomes, as I like to say, thanks to Tony Robbins, but having that whiteboard helps me a lot. And I always thought New Year's resolutions were a bit cliche, maybe tainted in part by my past failure to ever quit drinking, back during my drinking years, due to a New Year's resolution. But I didn't have to fail, I failed because I didn't have strategies or tools that could help me. So I ended up quitting in the fall, actually. So it wasn't a New Year's thing. I'm sure I had a New Year's resolution of sorts by the time New Year's rolled around. And we're talking seven years ago at this point, close to eight.

Chris Scott: And I'm sure I wrote something down in a notepad at the time, and eventually I figured that a whiteboard would be better. And I usually just have a list of desired outcomes in different categories. So for me it's personal health, relationships, professional life, fitness. And I to delineate between those. Sometimes there are intersections, clearly between health and fitness and doing what you and I do. There's some intersection between those things in our professional lives. I can't have fit recovery be my business if I let myself go and get out of shape.

Chris Scott: So I did, recently, write a bunch of things on my whiteboard. And if I were in the spot now where I was trying to quit drinking or cut down or taper down or take an indefinite break or just live consciously and live a more examined life regarding alcohol consumption and maybe the other biopsychosocial, spiritual pillars in my life, I would definitely utilize something like that, write something down. And I think it's a really good opportunity, because even though in the past, I thought it was cliché and part of that was my own bitterness about me not getting stuff done after New Year's that I wanted to do, I'm sure there's some studies that 90% of New Year's resolutions fail. There are similar statistics for people who relapse in terms of stopping going to the gym after some commitment, initial excitement as there is for people relapsing into addiction. It's almost the same number. It's like 90%.

Chris Scott: So I think there's an element of human nature here. And it doesn't necessarily have to do with some disease that you're plagued with. But the question is, how do you keep yourself motivated over an extended period of time? How do you maintain that excitement? And so for me, I think for everyone out there who hasn't done a New Year's resolution, I think it's a good time to, at the very least, whether you want to frame it like that or not, sit down and figure out, "What do I want for my life right now? What have I been doing right? What have I not been doing right? What can I be more efficient in? What can I optimize? Can I optimize my nutrition? Did I have certain fitness goals that I wanted to achieve that I haven't? Do I have one big missing link such as the fact that I drank two bottles of wine at night, that's keeping me from doing all of my things?"

Chris Scott: The cool thing about quitting drinking or taking an indefinite break is that a lot of people find that disparate problems actually had the same root cause, which ends up being the amount they were drinking. And because it's so easy to rationalize drinking in any given moment when you're physically and/or psychologically addicted to alcohol, it can be really hard to understand that that's the root of the problems.

Chris Scott: And of course, excising the alcohol is only the first step you have to, if you want to really thrive, you want to look at other potential missing links in the biochemical, psychological, social and spiritual pillars as we say. Make sure that you're getting the nutrients your body needs, make sure that your neural pathways, the routines and habits that you have are healthy and empowering and not self-destructive, make sure that you're not isolated and that you are surrounded by confidants whom you can share things with and get things off your chest. So you're not just a pressure cooker reacting to breaking news alerts on your phone and random emails that you get, or messages from people who may not be the best people for you to be associating with.

Chris Scott: And spiritual development as well is a huge part of the picture for people. If you really want to feel like you've transcended a state of existence or a mode of consciousness that you've been stuck in, then you're going to want to take a look at, "How can I develop myself? How can I self-actualize?" Rather than just exist and be okay with your job or your friends or whatever. You want to feel like there's a sacred sense of purpose in your life. And that you have a alignment with your family, your community, your country, the cosmos, et cetera.

Chris Scott: It took me a long time to feel like I had a sense of cosmic alignment to get to the point where I could go out on a cold brisk night with my dogs and look up at the stars and think like, "This makes sense." That's a stark contrast to back when I was addicted to alcohol. And I had a bunch of irrational phobias, actually, which was a result, I think, of the GABA glutamate imbalance for people who are hooked on alcohol. I had constant panic and random episodes of panic. And one of my fears, for some reason was some variation of agoraphobia, I think it's called, fear of open spaces. It just overwhelmed me to see, and the sky would overwhelm me. I had this irrational fear that I would be sucked up into the sky during episodes of moderate alcohol withdrawal.

Chris Scott: Which sounds absolutely crazy to me now. But I get a lot of emails from people who are like, "Is it normal to feel like there's demonic activity when I'm going through withdrawal? Is it normal to be afraid of X, Y, or Z?" The answer is, yeah. Because I get a lot of emails from people about that and I've experienced it all myself. And it is, I think, to some extent, related to an inability in that state of addiction or withdrawal to become aligned, to become centered in yourself, to become therefore, comfortable in your own skin and to live a life of purpose where you're not dominated by fear and worry and your immediate needs.

Chris Scott: So anyway, I just went off on a tangent there, but I hope that I've given some food for thought about the kinds of things that people who are stuck in addiction or withdrawal or a similar vicious cycle could start to think about when they're trying to figure out what they actually want out of life. And remember that the most important thing in maintaining your excitement is going to be gradual and perhaps slow, but constant growth and daily growth, daily improvement, which is the source of happiness. We're not happy because of the absolute state of our bank account or the absolute state of our health at any given moment.

Chris Scott: The absolute state of something will make you happy for a little bit, and then it's going to become the new normal. So constant, gradual growth and knowing that you're in a good spot seems to be the key. And in order to get that you need a certain spark. I like to call it an internal fire or the internal spark to just get yourself moving in the right direction. And then it's a combination of being patient and positive and proactive. Those are the three piece I like to tell people in my course, Total Alcohol Recovery 2.0, while you're implementing strategies that actually work, and as we know, if you want to obtain strategies that actually work for your particular conundrum, and addiction is the conundrum that we're alluding to here and that you and I help people with, then you want to find a role model who's actually done what you want to do.

Chris Scott: And so that's really the purpose of this podcast, the purpose of my program, Total Alcohol Recovery 2.0, the purpose of your programs for opiate recovery. And yeah, I think having a role model, figuring out what types of strategies resonate with you is really important. Because there are all kinds of recovery courses out there. Do you think that your missing link is primarily mental? Do you think it's primarily emotional or do you think that there could be a biochemical factor involved? And you and I and Chris Engen, are the only people that I'm aware of who have recovery courses that are geared towards people who may have biochemical missing links.

Chris Scott: And I think that's ridiculous because a lot of people, even those who assume that their missing links are mental, that they have a mental trick issue, like, "I can't stop thinking of alcohol," or an emotional attachment or they're resolving trauma, all of those things may be true. But it's going to be much harder to resolve those problems if you don't look at the biochemical aspect first. It's very hard to sit in a meeting if your body is flooded with adrenaline and cortisol and glutamine, the stress chemical. You need it, you need all of those things in certain amounts. But when you have imbalances that can linger. And a lot of people don't know that if you've been drinking for some time and you're at all physically addicted to it, your body and your brain does not go back to homeostasis within 24 or 48 or 72 hours or even a week or even a month necessarily, after you quit. It takes proactive, targeted supplementation, sometimes diet changes, rehydration, sleep restoration, a whole host of things in order to rebalance your body and your mind.

Matt Finch: I love how you were talking about that intense burning desire. One of the books that was recommended to me... You like that too, Papaya? Many years ago was Think And Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill and that book was geared towards making money, but also it can be used for any type of goal. And what he was talking about that book, is it all starts, all these type types of outcome achievements, in that case, growing financially rich. But also a rich life, it all starts, he says with an intense burning desire. All the times in my life where achieving the outcomes that I wanted to achieve were just happening, like crazy, like, boom, it's like you got the Midas touch. It was when I had that intense burning desire, that was going 24/7.

Matt Finch: When I first started my first blog in 2014, opiateaddictionsupport.com, it was after reading a few books. I went to a three hour small business association, free workshop. Or maybe it was like $30 workshop. It was a half day workshop and it was on how to use the internet to grow your business. And this was when I was helping my parents with their online stuff. And that peaked my interest in, "Oh, my gosh, look what you can do with the website." I ordered some books off Amazon. One was called Click Millionaires by Scott Fox. The other was a book on blogging, a really thin book by a guy named Mike Omar. I forget the name of it, but in that blogging book... Well, first of all, the Click Millionaires book was such a great book and it showed you this, there was these worksheet sections for how to come up with a niche for blogging or YouTubing or podcasting even.

Matt Finch: And there was lots of examples of people that started to do it part-time from home, whether it was a YouTube channel or a podcast or a blog. And all these different people from all walks of life, single moms or dads that was in a family or people that were hating their full-time career, wanted to do something from home, and they were an expert or an authority on some type of field that they were passionate about. So lots of real life examples, lots of great tools.

Matt Finch: And that blogging book came with the free online course on how to make $5,000 a month from, I think it was like 10 different... You created 10 different blogs and did keyword research. And then with these 10 different websites, you put a bunch of Google ads on there. This is a long time ago. This is like eight years ago now. And so the way he was-

Chris Scott: We don't recommend anyone try this anymore.

Matt Finch: No, don't do it anymore. That ship has sailed. But I got in on that strategy, just doing one website. The Google ads, I made some money with Google ads, but I made more money with online courses and coaching. And a lot of the Google ads were for rehab centers that I didn't know anything about, products and services that I didn't trust.

Matt Finch: So eventually within, maybe a year I took off the Google ads completely. But that gave me that intense, hot burning desire within me. And I knew it, there was nobody that could tell me otherwise, I was going to build a blog. It was going to be successful. I could see what I wanted it to look like. And every day, I remember when I first started the website, I had no skills on the computer whatsoever. None. Especially when it came to WordPress and Google ads.

Matt Finch: And it was really slow going for me. Even with these step by step training videos that I could go along with, it was so difficult for me, so foreign, but I remember I was so excited about it and I knew I was going to be successful, that I was waking up at like 5:00 AM in the morning, no alarm clock, jumping out of bed and getting up on the computer, making some yerba-maté tea. And this is a couple years after I'd been addiction free, taking DLPA and Mucuna and yerba-maté. And just eight hours would go by like that. 12 hours some days. I'd work 12 hours straight just with breaks to snack on something.

Matt Finch: And within 12 months, I was making more than enough money to, by far make better income than I was as a full-time certified addiction counselor. I was making 15 or $16 an hour. I started off at 14, worked my way up to $16 an hour as a substance abuse counselor, but the place that I worked, it tapped out at $20 an hour. And I would've needed to work there for many more years to make it to $20 an hour. That's before taxes and before health insurance. And a bunch of the other clinics and treatment programs that were the San Diego County area, where I live, they paid way less than that. Where I worked, at a medication assisted treatment outpatient program, they actually paid really well by comparison because a lot of the counselors are these old school, 12 step types that hate medication, "Oh, I hate methadone." And so they pay you really good to come work at these medication assisted treatment facilities. Other places, if I would've left, and I looked into this many times, it was like $10 an hour or $11 an hour or $12 an hour.

Matt Finch: So after a while, just getting burned out in that, I had to leave. And luckily, I had the blog to just, that was my new passion. And when I got off drugs and alcohol, I had been passionate about surfing in the past for most of my life, passionate about music and stuff and health in general and fitness. And after probably six to eight weeks of getting through the detox, getting through post-acute withdrawal, all that, taking dog walks and everything, just taking it really easily, I got so back into, I had this intense burning desire to get fit, to get back in shape, to get back good at surfing and everything.

Matt Finch: So for people right now that haven't been able to quit drugs or alcohol, even though they've wanted to, that can be one of the reasons, is without that intense burning desire to be off of substances, drugs and or alcohol, and to live that sober life or live a life of harm reduction where it's not complete sobriety, total abstinence, but it's some type of manageable situation regarding maybe it's a painkiller prescription for pain or maybe it's a Aderall prescription for ADHD or maybe some people want to be able to drink moderately, whatever their goals are, without that intense, hot burning desire to do so, getting up the courage or the belief and the starting energy, to get started, it's something like this.

Matt Finch: Takes a tremendous amount of courage, faith, logistics, some type of system or program that you're doing. It takes a lot to get going, that starting energy. I'm thinking of a train or no, no, no, screw that. A rocket.

Matt Finch: So Jeff Bezos recently went into space. I think William Shatner went into space recently too. How much energy does it take for a rocket ship, a spaceship to get off the ground and get out of the gravity? It takes a ton. Then once you get away from the gravity, once you get into space, it takes so much less energy. Same thing with, let's say a train. To get a big, huge train going, tutu train, it takes a lot of energy to get it going. But once that thing's going fast, hauling ass, this big buff, fast train, then you could come up to this huge, thick, brick wall, but the train has so much momentum that it just obliterates it, it just breaks right through it. So that's why I like New Year's for that starting energy. It's like people can close the chapter. There's an energetic separation, an energetic demarcation line.

Matt Finch: And I've never said a New Year's resolution in my life, but I do like to do New Year's planning. I like to harness the power of that energy and that mental way of thinking, this mental model, of looking at 2021, in this case, as shutting the door on that. So it's like a new chapter of the book of life and going back, and I already did this, I did this over this past weekend on Sunday, I spent about four hours and I actually did a program. It was a workbook, I think it was $29 or $30 from Rebecca Campbell, her New Year Envisioning Process. And I did the whole digital online workbook in like four hours. And it was great. Because I like structure. I like these structured things and I had never tried this one. It was amazing.

Matt Finch: And it had me look at the things from 2021, what were some of the challenges I went through? What were some of the successes that I have? What were a lot of the things that I learned? What didn't go as I had planned out? What did go as I had planned out? What are things from 2021 that I don't want to bring into 2022? What are things that I want to cancel out of my life? Whether it's thought processes, habits, people, et cetera. Then what are things that I want to carry into 2022 that I want to keep doing? And there was a lot more of it too. It was this very spiritual habit. It was like a mixture of habits, spirituality and energies. It's hard to describe. She's just super creative, brilliant. I've taken a course from her and listened to a few audibles. I'm a big fan.

Matt Finch: But using this energy of like it's a new year, it's 2022, you can feel it. And then people that are more in tuned with feeling energies, there's this noticeable difference for me where the holidays are over, the family has gone home from visiting. The kids are all back in school. I can sense and feel this new energy for me, that's making it much easier to start future thinking, "Okay, it's a new year. I want to really tidy things up with my habits, with my bad habits. How can I continue doing these good habits?"

Matt Finch: And so the way I look at New Year's resolutions, and I think Teal Swan on YouTube, if you type in Teal Swan 2022 on YouTube, she did a phenomenal 2022 video that I highly recommend. I'm not sure if I learned this from her or another person, but resolutions is like resolving something that's already been in place like, "I'm going to resolve to quit drinking." "I'm going to resolve to get off painkillers." "I'm going to resolve to quit using all this kratom and nootropics and Phenibut and all this stuff." "I'm going to resolve to quit caffeine."

Matt Finch: Whereas intentions, from my understanding, and I learned this from Dr. Wayne Dyer who passed away a few years ago in his book, The Power of Intention, one of my favorite books of all time, he taught about how to write out intentions, which is typically intending for new things to come into your life. "It is my intention to manifest a new relationship." "It is my intention to transform my health." "It is my intention to start going to the gym." So there's no right or wrong way to do it.

Matt Finch: For people that have not set any outcomes or goals or intentions or resolutions thus far for 2022, here we are. We're only a few days into it. Now's the chance to do it. One exercise, is you could simply write down 10 intensions, 10 things that during 2022, you want to do, you want to have and that you want to be, or you could even start off with five things that you want to do, five things that you want to have, five things that you want to be. Or you could simply start writing intentions, starting off like this in a journal or a notebook or digital, Evernote, something like that. Notepad. Type out, start the sentence like this, it is my intention to dot, dot, dot, and then write it out. It's my intention to start going to the grocery store more often, rather than Grubhub. It is my intention to... And just keep doing that line after line until you can't think of any more intentions.

Matt Finch: Then go through that whole list, circle the ones that are the most important, because if you got a big, huge list, you're not going to be able to focus on all of them, focus on one or two or three that you can start off with. But by all means, if you got a whiteboard or some type of planner system, or you could just put note cards up on your refrigerator or mirror. So those are just some of the things that I wanted to talk about.

Matt Finch: In addition, there's all these different... I've been getting emails from, I guess they're called direct sales companies because they usually have some of the best products. One of them is New U Life and another one is Kyäni supplements that I take, that are direct sales companies. You can't buy them at stores, you can only buy them from one of their sales representatives' websites. I've been getting emails from a lot of these different types of companies where they have this whole body fitness challenge, some type of health and/or fitness transformation challenge, where you get access to groups and instructional videos and PDFs and stuff.

Matt Finch: So there's a lot of people doing that. And the power of doing something like this is you have a system, you have support, there's some type of accountability. And I know Chris that you just launched a few things recently, one of which is that webinar that you did on something like proven supplements to help you quit drinking. So like that, that you did with Chris Engen, which is around an hour, a little over an hour, which is phenomenal. It's just absolutely phenomenal. You give away so much of your best information on supplementation, biochemical, individuality and Chris on her amino acid system that she learned from Julia Ross and has further customized for her own learning. You guys give away so much free information on that. That could be easily a $200 webinar because it's so good and it gives people so many actionable supplements, amino acids, steps and systems to experiment with things. And I think you also have some 10 day challenge as well.

Matt Finch: And then, so if you want to talk about those a little bit, go for it. And then we can just get into the detox methods and overview for people that are physiologically dependent, give people a menu of certain things they can look into more and we've done episodes on many of these and then we can call it a wrap.

Chris Scott: Sure. Yeah. I have a couple of more minutes here, so I'm going to try to keep it concise. But for anyone who's interested, you can check out fitrecovery.com. We've redesigned the homepage. So there is now for all newcomers, a free 10 day challenge, which consists of 10 daily emails that you'll get from me, upon signing up, which is a introduction to the things that I really have found with my private clients and course members to be most useful in fostering that desire to quit or to cut down or to tackle the problem.

Chris Scott: So it's important to know what your intention is, but in order to follow through, you need a why, in other words, intrinsic motivation. Maybe it's to stop fighting with your spouse or to be a good role model for your kids or to live a life of purpose or to find a purposeful career, it could be anything. You need a why. And most importantly, in order to follow through, you need a how. So that's what I provide with my course, Total Alcohol Recovery 2.0, that's what Chris Engen provides with her course, Advanced Amino Acid Therapy for Alcohol Recovery.

Chris Scott: And I won't spoil too much about that free training that we gave, which will be up on my website for a limited time. But we joined forces because we realized that we were the missing links to each other's programs. Because I have the groundwork, in other words, the biopsychosocial spiritual frame through which a lot of people have found it helpful to view their own recovery process and subsequent optimization for all pillars for the rest of their lives. And also, I delve into supplements of all kinds. And I talk about intelligent experimentation, how to reach that stable baseline.

Chris Scott: But a lot of people have particular trouble with amino acids. And so they end up hiring me as a personal coach or hiring you or Tana or Viana or Zach. And that can be costly, to do one-on-one training. And obviously, sometimes people need a personal coach for accountability. So we're not phasing out coaching, but Chris Engen's course delves deeply into that very specific, but arguably one of the most important parts of nutrient repair, which is amino acid therapy. In other words, providing your brain with the precursors for the neurochemicals, the feel good chemicals like dopamine, serotonin, GABA, et cetera, endorphins, that a lot of people are deficient in without even knowing it. And then lingering and suffering with emotional problems and various issues as a result of those things, but not realizing that's what's going on.

Chris Scott: So that's why we decided to do that free trainings, because as I said before, and this is very important, you and I and Chris Engen and her website is called Nutrition 4 Recovery, we're the only people that I know of who have online programs dedicated to nutrient repair as the centerpiece of recovering from addiction. And that's not to say we're the only people in the world who know about this or who have invented it. There are a couple of inpatient and outpatient rehab centers that I know of that help people, Dr. Ken Starr, who we've had on the podcast, Health Recovery Center, we had the son of the founder of Health Recovery Center on, also, the author of Seven Weeks to Sobriety, Larson. Joan Matthews Larson. We had her son on a podcast. They do nutrient repair.

Chris Scott: But as far as online programs where you don't have to travel somewhere and go away for a while, us three, you, me and Chris Engen are only ones I know of who do this. And hopefully more people join to help pioneer this, I think really important approach. And hopefully there are more programs for people. But we decided it's best to not be competitors, we decided it's best to team up and help people together.

Chris Scott: And so I've lately been working with some of her people and she's been working with some of mine on the various things that we do. And so that's the basis for that free training. And in that training, we talk about supplements that help to break the addiction cycle. So we do talk about which supplements and strategies we used to break that addiction cycle.

Chris Scott: Now, I also have a free training on... I'm sorry, a free challenge on Fit Recovery at the moment. That's the 10 day challenge. You're welcome to do both of those things. Again, if you're in my program, Total Alcohol Recovery 2.0, you may or may not learn something new from these. So I don't want to pitch this as something that is not covered in my course, because my course has hours and hours. Something like 20 plus hours of videos and discussion forms and written lessons. We just started a forum on discord. We have a private Facebook group with five or 600 members in it right now. So everything in that training or challenge would be in my course.

Chris Scott: But a lot of people may not be ready to do that, or maybe they don't have the financial resources to do that. So I wanted to provide some free options that give people a taste of the how, if that makes sense. Because if you're listening to this podcast and/or if you're a newcomer to a website like Fit Recovery, chances are, you know what your intention is, at least subconsciously, you want to break the addiction cycle and you have a why otherwise you wouldn't even be motivated to listen to you or me, or to go to that website. So you have intrinsic motivation.

Chris Scott: Then the next step is to figure out the how, what are the strategies? And there are a bunch of strategies that can be useful for quitting drinking, whether it's tapering down, using medication, benzodiazepines or the medications used for detox in most facilities, but there's also medication assisted treatment things like naltrexone, [Kempsey 00:37:00], Topamax, Baclofen. A lot of rehab centers don't even know about all of those medications. There are FDA approved medications, which I have my own personal opinions on, and I'm actually glad I didn't go the medication route. I'm glad I went the nutrient repair route, but I've had a lot of clients from coaching clients and course members who have used a combination of modalities, at times involving medication assisted treatment with nutrient repair and with an approach towards resolving the missing links in that biopsychosocial spiritual hierarchy. And it just really maximizes people's odds of success.

Chris Scott: So when I began this journey, for lack of a better word, I've been looking for a better term that sounds less cliche than journey. But when I started my transformation, I suppose, seven or so years ago, I had no idea what my options were. I didn't understand the nature of addiction. I didn't know if it was a disease or a disorder or a temporary thing or a lifelong thing or if it was a universal thing that was the same thing across all people who had it or if it was highly individualized. You and I have spent years figuring out answers to precisely those kinds of questions. And more than that, because we've also spent years researching what are the practical solutions, delving into the weeds and things like what exact supplements do people need? And Chris Engen as well, I should say, especially in the supplementation aspect.

Chris Scott: So if that's the kind of thing that anyone who's hearing this is interested in, go to fitrecovery.com, sign up for the free challenge, sign up for the free training, if you're ready for that. And of course I have 200 free articles on my website as well. If you happen to have a co-occurring addiction, dual addiction to painkillers as well or to prescription drugs, then check out Matt Finch's website, opiateaddictionsupport.com. And yeah, I just think it's really important to direct people towards resources that can help whether they're free or premium or whatever it is. And hopefully this podcast has helped people. I know we've gotten a lot of emails from people saying that this, and reviews, saying that this podcast has given people that little internal spark of motivation that they needed to keep going.

Chris Scott: So I never really know, whenever I'm doing anything, whether I'm sitting at my kitchen table writing emails that are going to reach a bunch of people or whether I'm doing a webinar or whether I'm doing a podcast or writing an article or making a YouTube video. I never know if I'm actually giving someone their first internal spark. I assume I'm not giving a person their why. Maybe I can be a role model of sorts, but usually people have their own burning desire reasons to make a shift in their mode of existence. But I always hope that I can at least increase that flame and help propel them, as you talked about with your analogy with the rocket ship, help them get into the atmosphere a little bit, because once you start accumulating new experiences with the new mindset with biochemical stability, and those are the things that I hope people do, then the process of staying in that new mode of existence actually becomes easy. It doesn't take a lot of effort for you or me to not slide back into addiction.

Chris Scott: And I'd venture to say, even if someone at gunpoint right now made us drink five beers or whatever, which sounds really gross, but if they did, I would not personally be worried about sliding back into addiction. I'm not an automaton, I'm biochemically stable. I have too many experiences of natural euphoria to ever want to go back to making toxic, self-destructive alcohol induced euphoria part of my life. So this is the, hopefully glimpse of the future that will motivate some people as well.

Matt Finch: Love it, love it. And I had forgotten about this until you started talking about your resources, but on the Elevation Recovery YouTube channel. So for people that are opioid dependent, listening to this on the Elevation Recovery YouTube channel, right now, I think there's, let's see, there's seven or eight chapters. I forget. I think there's eight chapters of my new book called Opioid Detox Step-by-Step.

Matt Finch: And first, the audio book's coming out for free on YouTube. Then the reason I'm doing it that way is because I was basically done with the book, but I couldn't put together the intrinsic motivation and drive and that intense, hot burning desire to just do it all. So I said, "Okay, well, if I just do one chapter at a time," first the introduction, then the chapter, "upload it onto YouTube. Work out any of the kinks that are in the whatever chapter it is, then get it good, then record the audio, edit it." So that's what I've been doing to be a form of accountability to get this book out to the public, around this time, 2022, the beginning.

Matt Finch: So I think there's eight chapters so far available on YouTube. There's a cool playlist, Opioid Detox Step-by-Step playlist. And the next chapter I'm doing is on getting your mind right. One of the recent chapters was the dark ages of addiction treatment, talking exactly what you were just talking about Chris, where when you research things online, a lot of it just like, "Whoa, you got to go to AA or you got to go to inpatient treatment." Because so many of the articles that show up at the top of the search results are from these rehab treatment centers. And of course they want you to follow their system so they can make the money from your insurance or from your cash. You're not going to find a whole lot at the top search results for Google on these alternative ways of thinking, which in the future is going to be the primary ways of thinking. And then the dogmatic stuff is probably going to be alternative in the future. Two years from now, five years from now, 10 years from now, eventually.

Matt Finch: Then there's opiateaddictionsupport.com. For people that are stuck on benzos, on opiateaddictionsupport.com, I do have some articles on benzo detox and on the Elevation Recovery YouTube channel, there's a few videos on benzos. In the future, very near future, I'm coming out with a course called RX Recovery Step by Step, which is going to be a comprehensive course on teaching people, how to detox from pain killers and other opioids, SSRIs and benzos. Those are pretty much the three most common medications people have trouble with and that I hear people wanting to detox from. SSRIs, benzos and opioids as well. So that'll be coming out eventually.

Matt Finch: In the meantime, yeah, we've got a lot of free resources. If you go back to our Elevation Recovery Podcast sessions, there's a search bar at the top of the website, you can just type in alcohol detox, opioid detox. And we've definitely done episodes on that stuff. Really when it comes down to it, for people that are physiologically dependent, meaning you have to either drink or take the drug every single day to avoid going into withdrawal syndrome, an acute withdrawal syndrome, your neurons have adapted to the presence of the substance and your neurons only function normally to the exact amount or close to the exact amount of the physical dependence that you have, there's just basically, if you think about it like this, there's really two ways to detox off something, traditional ways, a cold turkey or a taper. And from these different main groups of detoxing, detoxification is simply what it sounds like, it's detoxifying off of the substance. It's getting it out of your bloodstream.

Matt Finch: So there's the cold turkey, which is where you wake up the next morning and you just stop. That can be life-threatening for people detoxing from certain alcohol dependencies and certain benzo dependencies. Other than that, shouldn't be life-threatening, although in rare cases with other substances and concomitant co-occurring issues. There's also subsets within those primary sets. So there's outpatient tapering or there's home tapering, there's natural tapering or there's medication assisted treatment tapering, there's inpatient medical detox at a regular traditional program where they use comfort meds. There's also alternative inpatient medical detox, such as things like ibogaine. There's even alternative outpatient medical detox, such things as like NAD+ infusion therapy. A lot of those are expensive or it's either expensive or some insurance covers some of them, traditionally the typical ones. But leaving some for even 10 days or 14 days or 30 days, that can be really obtrusive to someone's life. If you have a family, if you have a career, you've got kids, it's a huge pain in the butt and it's not convenient at all.

Matt Finch: So a lot of people, the people that typically get our courses, the typically people that get coaching with us, is people that are wanting to do something from home. Maybe something with their doctor, with some comfort meds for withdrawal for a few days or a week. But they're looking for this holistic approach. A lot of people nowadays are able to follow a system from home, especially if they have support at home, but it's not necessary. So there's all these different ways to do it. So for people again, that are physically dependent, people that are taking SSRIs or benzos or alcohol or opioids, et cetera, if they're going to go through a withdrawal syndrome, of course, that's a huge fear of quitting. I don't want to go through the withdrawal. That's going to feel icky.

Matt Finch: So these are some things you can look more into, Chris's course, Total Alcohol Recovery 2.0, has a whole huge module, just one specific module out of the many modules, that's all on different alcohol detox protocols, things like we talked about, inpatient, outpatient, medication assisted treatment, a home taper, a home cold turkey. My course, Ultimate Opioid Detox 5.0, has a whole entire module on lots of different, really strategic opioid detox tapering protocols. And I cover the traditional ones like inpatient, ultra rapid opioid detox, medication assisted taper, that sort of thing. But a big part of that module is on these really strategic, really customized multiphase, acute withdrawal biohacking protocols. And then both of our courses also have complete separate modules on getting through the post-acute withdrawal phase too.

Matt Finch: So yeah, the reason we wanted to do this episode in these topics was two things. Number one, to harness the new year energy 2022, it's the very beginning, there seems to be this new energy in the air that the energies of last month were not as conducive at all to getting started, to getting momentum. Right now there's a lot more of these energies in the universe going like this or in this planet. I'm not sure about the whole universe. I don't think in every part of the universe or even solar system they celebrate New Year's day or anything like that. Who knows? It's fun to think about what other civilizations could be like. And then as well as that, give you a bunch of free resources, a bunch of videos, podcasts, free emails, signups, webinars. And of course our courses, which can be purchased as well and the different types of detox groups and subgroups.

Matt Finch: So now, comprehensive, we didn't go deep into anything, but it was an exciting vision casting episode for people that were needing some type of a motivational boost. Here we go. Maybe you're going into the year and you haven't quite done resolutions or intentions or maybe the energies of last month are still drawing you back, well, here you go. Now you've got some resources, even some writing exercises to make progress on your goals. So thanks so much. Thank you, Chris, for this awesome episode and thank you Papaya as well. You were awfully quiet today.

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