How to Beat Your Addictions ► Explained With Dark Souls

Have you ever wanted to break an addiction? You want to stop watching porn, scrolling, playing video games, weed, or whatever else, but they have such a hold on you that somehow you always end up doing it again. I used to feel so stupid and like I’m such like an undisiplined person because I always end up doing the thing again that I promised myself that I wasn’t going to do. It was only when I played the game Dark Souls

That I realized beating addiction isn’t about fighting harder. It’s about knowing when you’re not equipped to fight yet. We start locked in a forgotten cell. All seems lost. And maybe we’ve already accepted our fate as stuck here forever until something happens.

A knight, Oscar of Atora. He drops a body down through a hole in the roof of your cell along with the key to your cell. You use the key and leave your cell. You start exploring and moving through the game pretty easily until

For most players, the best solution when first meeting the asylum demon is to run away. It’s not impossible to beat, but chances are you won’t win right now. You don’t have the weapons or the skill, so you run away. You manage to find this cute little door to sneak away from the demon, and you continue your journey throughout the asylum. You gather weapons and strength, overcoming slightly tougher enemies than the very beginning of the game and small hurdles

Along the way like a big ball. Eventually, you find yourself facing the asylum demon once more, but this time you know what you’re facing, and you’re prepared. Still, the battle isn’t easy. A lot of players still die here because they’re just not used to the game and the fighting style and the controls. But all of a sudden, fighting this guy isn’t as impossible as it seemed before. Now you’re dealing enough damage where you think like, “Yeah, I could actually I

Could beat him now.” You might fail, but even in failing, you learn and have the opportunity to come back smarter. Eventually, you actually manage to beat the asylum demon and unlock the door to the asylum and travel to Firelink Shrine. But wait, hold on. What does any of this have to do with beating addictions? All I did was narrate the beginning of the game. I like described your first playthrough. Well, if we go back and actually look at all of the key

Moments I described, they actually secretly mirror what it takes in real life to beat an addiction. Because think about it, when we start the game and we’re locked in our cell, this is our ground zero, our rock bottom. Right now, all seems lost. And our identity of ourselves is that we’re just this poor little hollow trapped in this cell forever until someone offers a helping hand. In the case of Dark Souls, it’s Oscar Avastor, a knight, and he drops

You a key to your cell. But it’s really important to notice here that Oscar doesn’t unlock the cell himself and lead you out of it. He provides the means, but it’s up to you to act, to actually do the thing. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. You could sit back down and stay where you are, or you could take the key and open the door. It’s the same with addiction.

Those around you can help and support and even sometimes give you that one little nudge to really get you on track. They can literally do all the work for you, but they can’t force you to take those first steps toward recovery, which is the most important thing. You can’t start to change even if everything is laid out perfectly for you if you yourself are not yet willing to change in your heart. You could even be forced

Into rehab for your addiction, which could help for a time. But if you haven’t made the choice within yourself to change, then chances are that your recovery won’t last very long. When the asylum demon drops down and scares the out of you, this is the first big obstacle. For someone with an addiction, those first few steps on the road to recovery can often lead to a sudden obstacle, just like in Dark Souls, one that seems beyond your ability to

Overcome, impossible. But it’s not. This is the mistake most people make with addiction. They think recovery means standing their ground and winning right now. But Dark Souls teaches you something different. Sometimes the smartest move is to retreat. Not because you’re weak, but because right now you’re not equipped properly for this fight. But at the same time, if you spend so much time giving into your addiction when things get tough, it can seem insurmountable. You could keep

Trying to fight the boss the hard way with a broken sword that does like three damage. And if you do everything perfectly and don’t take any damage and hit him like a 100 times, then yeah, it’s possible to beat him. But think about how this mirrors addiction. Now, it’s technically possible to beat your addiction with what you have inside of you now with your current methods, too. But in order to beat it this way, you’ll need to be basically perfect and not

Even get hit one time and keep doing the dance with the demon perfectly without letting up until you finally chip away all its health. It is technically possible, but as a beginner, especially who doesn’t even know how to play the game yet, the best strategy upon first meeting the asylum demon is to run away. It’s not impossible to beat, but chances are you won’t win right now. You don’t have the proper tools. Recovery from addiction requires you to equip the

Proper tools and skills. It may be therapy. It may be a support system. It may be faith. It may be a combination of these things together, but you need to be sufficiently armed to battle addiction. So, you run away. You continue your journey throughout the asylum. You gather weapons and strength, overcoming small hurdles along the way, which gives you confidence. It not only gives you the kind of strategies and insights to better deal with the addictive thoughts, but it also builds

This identity in yourself that you’re getting stronger and more able to handle these addictions. Eventually, you find yourself facing the asylum demon once more. Only this time, you know what you’re facing and you’re prepared. Both literally and figuratively, you have the high ground. Still, the battle isn’t easy. You may fail, but even in failing, you learn and have the opportunity to come back smarter. And now with your new tools, at least you stand a fighting chance. Eventually, you beat the demon

And unlock the door to the asylum. What comes next can be a little scary. Yes, you’ve escaped your prison, but you still find yourself a long way from your eventual goal. It can be a disheartening realization, and some can’t handle it. There are still many steps to take and a lot more boss battles. Your goal is not just to beat this one boss. Your goal is to beat the entire game, all of the bosses. And if just this first boss of

The game could be such a challenge, then how could I ever think of beating bosses further along in the game? How could I ever think of beating the final boss? It’s the same exact feeling in real life. Your goal is not just to overcome one small urge, one small obstacle. Your goal is to be able to conquer all of them, even the strongest urges. And if this small little urge or obstacle had such a pull on me, then how could I ever

Even think of being able to handle a stronger urge or obstacle? It all seems so impossible. Well, you could choose to stay where you are. You’re slightly capable of resisting small urges now. So maybe you don’t need to do more than that. You’re good enough as you are now. You can handle small urges. That’s fine. That’s like pretty good. But are you where you want to be? Is this good enough for you? Or are there greater

Things that you know that you can achieve? Maybe the bosses will get tougher and the urges will get even stronger. But at the same time, maybe we can make ourselves stronger, too. Maybe we can keep upgrading ourselves to match or even outmatch the strength of our opponent. Level the playing field. You can do this. You can upgrade your character and his weapons and his armor in Dark Souls. And in real life, you can upgrade your character by developing

Good habits, slowly replacing the bad habits that are instantly gratifying with good habits that have delayed gratification. You don’t need some big grand gestures to see improvement and beat your addictions. You need some reliable tools and tactics. You need to equip some reliable tools, a reliable sword that isn’t going to break on you. need to replace these bad habits. The way that you can do this is by first giving yourself time in a blank empty

Room to just think. I want you to think to yourself or even get a journal and write this down. But what things in your life genuinely make you happy? Not the instantly gratifying things like weed or porn or anything like that. But what things do you like doing just to do them? What makes you feel alive? I’m not even telling you to change your life and do some big self-improvement habits. I’m just telling you to find this thing or

Multiple things that you enjoy doing that are not instantly gratifying and do those instead of the bad habits you’re trying to get away from. Because when your day becomes too full of things that you plan for yourself that are fun and might even involve friends or other people, you’ll be too busy to even think about your old bad habits. You won’t be thinking of doing them, and you won’t even be thinking of not doing them. They’ll just be removed from your life.

You might still fail sometimes and fall back into your old bad habits. And so the next step that you can take and tools that you can equip for yourself in real life to combat these bad addictions, whatever habits is the habit tracker and the daily planner. The habit tracker, maybe you’ve seen this before, is where you monitor yourself over the course of however many days you choose. I would suggest for you 14 days. You write 1 to 14 here on this side. And

Then you write down some tasks that if you do these tasks consistently every day, like if you complete these tasks in this first day, then that day is good. And like you’ve been productive that day. You did good that day. You can be proud of yourself. If you check off all of these boxes for me, I have meditate, gratitude, eat the frog, exercise, learning, and reading. I won’t go too much into what those mean. Some of them, most of them are probably

Pretty self-explanatory, but I just check these off every single day if I do them. And if I don’t do them, then I don’t check them off. This is just like it’s a physical reminder of whether you’re doing good or you’re doing bad. And it’s just a good way to like make progress and do better habits more consistently, which is what we want. We want to replace the bad addictive habits with the good ones. Right? So this is the first tool. The

Second thing that I do is I have a daily planner which I actually have on my phone. So for this guy here, you definitely want to write this on a piece of paper and hang that on your wall. But for this one, you can just have this on your phone just, you know, so that you go through the checklist every single day. So the point of this is the night before the day that you’re planning, you you plan this the night

Before the next day, right? So you plan step by step exactly the things that you want to do today. And you write it down in such specific detail that everything like nothing is left to your foggy morning brain to decide for itself in the morning. Because when you wake up in the morning and you don’t know what you’re going to do, you often do the bad habit. You often stay in bed and sleep in when you didn’t want to do

That, right? We can say that that’s kind of an addictive habit. It’s addictive to stay in bed in your warm comfy bed and then you stay in bed and then you open your phone and you start scrolling and you start looking at bad stuff on there, right? Does that sound familiar to you? So, having this eliminates three problems off the top of my head. There’s probably more problems that it just eliminates straight away. It gets rid of

Confusion and it breeds clarity for you in the morning. and you just want to time block it out so that like every hour of your day is accounted for. And then the thing is you don’t need to be perfect with it. You don’t need to be perfect, but you just need to try your best to follow it because we’re trying to make some slight progress to becoming better. You know, let’s say right now all you do all day is succumb to your

Bad habits, your addictions, right? But then let’s say that now you have these two tools and you kind of stick with them and you manage to do just imagine you just check off meditate one day. Imagine you just meditated. You didn’t do everything else on your list. You didn’t do anything else. Let’s say you just only meditated for 1 minute and you checked it off. That is still better than what you were doing before, right? Compared to doing absolutely nothing.

You managed to do a meditation and then you did meditation the next day and then the next day after that you did meditation and exercise and all of a sudden you’re on this trajectory which just keeps going up and up and up. All of a sudden like a week later you’re way different than the level that you were at before you did anything at all. So I really really suggest that you do these two things.

They’re so easy to do and I feel like they really like I say this I said this in my course and and if you want to know how to do this better like with more detail cuz I know that I’ve I’m doing this as a quick explanation if you want like autistic level detail I have my course that I’ve just made. You can find it in my new community. I’m not forcing you, but just if you want the extra

Detail and the extra guidance, I would suggest looking on that. If you already have plans and things that you really want to do, then how will you even have time to do your bad habits? The goal is replacement. So, those are two tools that you have now that you can use to beat your addictions. But it goes without saying that recovery from addiction will be filled with frustration. Even with these tools, it’s still totally possible to up.

You’re trying to retrain your brain to think differently, and it won’t always want to listen to you. People relapse because they confuse not being perfect with being hopeless. In Dark Souls, dying doesn’t mean you failed the run. It’s literally how you learn. But in real life, we treat one mistake like the save file is corrupted, so we quit. There are going to be days where the healthy replacements don’t hit. The gym feels pointless. Music sounds flat. Even

Your favorite game feels like it’s just boring. You’ll find yourself searching for something to occupy your mind. And all that you can think of is the same addiction you’re trying so hard to stop doing. You feel like your addiction is the only thing in the world that can help you out of whatever struggle or funk you currently find yourself in. And that can be incredibly frustrating. The frustration can also come from doing everything right and still failing. In Dark Souls, you could

Be playing through the game doing pretty good, actually, getting better at the game and not really having trouble. and then some glitch hits and you die. It’s not fair, but there’s nothing you can really do about it except for start over at the last bonfire. It can make you want to quit and there will be times where you’re looking for any excuse to quit. And it becomes very easy to justify falling back into old habits because of some relatively small

Setback. When we get motivation to stop our addictions and our old ways, it’s important to have a plan. Yet, life is never perfect. So you don’t follow your plan as diligently as you could as you wanted to. So then you say, “I need to start over and try from the beginning and I’ll do better tomorrow.” So you go back to your old ways and do the thing that you didn’t want to do again and start over with the best of intentions.

Then things don’t go perfectly again and you start over again and again and again It’s always tomorrow, never today. More frustration. My advice, like I was saying earlier, is have a plan, but make it flexible. Adjust where you need to learn from and forgive yourself for little little mistakes. Make your habit tracker and your daily planner so that you have an idea of what you should be doing instead. And even if you can’t follow your plans exactly, then maybe at

Least you manage to follow some of it and do a couple good habits, which is still better than the way that you were before or at least you have physical evidence that you’re falling back into your old ways. And then you can more easily see the reminder and try to be better. Find some way to remind yourself why you’re trying to be clean. Frustration is inevitable, but it’s also a slippery slope. Unchecked, frustration leads to despair, and despair leads to

Hopelessness. Hopelessness is dangerous for anyone, but especially for someone struggling with some kind of addiction. Sometimes hope is all we have. I found that when all else fades to black, I find hope in my reason to get clean. Find a good reason and hold on to it. a reason that inspires you to change. It might be an overwhelming idea to overcome your addiction or your urges. But you should understand, you should know that it’s not just all going to

Happen at once. It’s going to take time. And all you really need to do right now is keep trying your best and take some small steps in the right direction. We’re starting from rock bottom. Remember, stuck in a cage just like Dark Souls. right now. If we can just gain the courage to stand up and go and open the door, then that’s exactly the thing that we should be doing right now. So, all you need to do right now is try to

Replace your bad habits. I really think that you should make a habit tracker and daily planner for yourself and try to use them more to structure your days. They don’t need to be super strict military plans, but at least some kind of loose, flexible plan. and do your best to replace these mind-numbing addictions like porn and weed and scrolling or whatever else you might be dealing with. And replace them with things that make you feel alive, things

That you actually really enjoy doing but maybe haven’t done in a long time. Find them and you’ll be on your way to beating your addictions. I hope this helps. If you like Dark Souls and self-improvement, I have a free community you can join with the link in the description. Also, if you’re at the point if you want structure instead of just motivation, I made a new course that talks about exactly how I use like the habit tracker and the daily planner

And other stuff to my advantage to actually make my life better. So, if you’re at the point in your life where you’re trying to fix your life because you feel like one of the hollowos from Dark Souls, maybe you could check it out. Maybe check out my course and it’ll be also the second link in the description. Both things are in the description. You can check them out if you want to. There’s no pressure. They’re just there if you want. Take

Care, guys. Don’t you dare go hollow.