I wonder if you have more ”grit” than Sugar Ray Leonard, one of the greatest boxers of all time. His fight with Roberto Duran are legendary.
As so many boxers (and many athletes for that matter) he was addicted to drugs and alcohol for many years. Probably sexual abuse he suffered as a kid had something to do with it. He was able to quit, but I think cold shower and a run in the morning was not quite enough to do it.
Nobody just starts abusing their body with chemicals. It is not difficult to quit, you can stay off your Jones for months, but if you do nothing to the demons that made you enter the 36th chamber in the first place, you are going to slip sooner or later. It takes more than a splash of cold water on the face.
Marcus Aurelius was literally a god and the emperor of the world. He prob had little bit more resources to help gim other than stoism. Similarly if you have loving family and friends, a good therapist and some sort of medication,you canmaybe wim the fight with the devil that gets you to use. Training and getting used to being uncomfortable surely helps, but you won’t kick anything for long only with them.
Therefore these drugs won’t be a solution either. Are you going to use them rest of your life? Whatever it is that makes you want to drink, smoke, shoot, gamble or whatever is still going to be there. Bit used together with therapy and loving environment might help. Of course, most addicts have no access to any of these resources.
I agree with all of what you said, and I'd argue that the stoics including Aurelius probably would have as well. Leaning into discomfort is just a step that can help you actually do things like get therapy and be present and engaged in a loving environment. At least for me that's the case- I have seemed to need all of those things together as a system to really thrive in life, not just one or the other.
CBT and ACT are modern therapy methods based on stoic methods, very widely used, and very effective for regular people that aren't emperors.
They are most often effective if you can afford them was my point. I have ADHD as well and boxing (waking up before work to run in cold November morning, 9 rounds with a heavyweight who had nobody his size to spar, thousand ab movements afterwords and hey it’s only Tuesday) helped me tremendously with focus, staying of the booze and so on, but if I had not done years of therapy and had meds as well as found more varing environment, I prob would no be hete. And I was lucky to have a god job to pay for all that.
I do think you need tremendous mental effort, or grit, even to fight serious addiction. But it is only a start.
CBT effectiveness is highly overstated, from anecdotal experience and talking with psychiatrists in a social setting.
It works for a subset of the population that doesn’t question stuff too much and is more or less ok with gaslighting themselves. There is evidence that it loses effectiveness the higher up the IQ scale you go.
The vast majority of mental health issues are a “not treating the root causes” problem. People stuck in a life they despise for various reasons and have no realistic way of changing those root causes. This ranges everywhere from the single mom with 3 kids and an eviction notice all the way to the high powered corporate executive stuck in an empty do-nothing career path.
Not everyone is wired the same but we’ve created a society that you must conform to extremely rigid norms or be at risk of destitution.