Tag: #Addiction

Health · Lifestyle

Coach Yourself Back To Full Health

jacquelineobyikocha17 Comments

The list of things that you could be doing to damage your own health could go on forever. Some things you know you’ll be doing wrong, but you’ll actively be ignoring. Others you’ll be blissfully unaware of. We’re so bad at damaging our own health because we believe we’re young, unbreakable and that nothing we do is going to damage our health as long as we give it all a rest as we start to really age. All of this is wrong, the earlier you start coaching yourself back to full health, the sooner you’re going to feel like a completely new person. Follow our life coaching advice below and you’ll be reborn in no time.

Health, Coach Yourself Back To Full Health, Wellness, Addiction, Breaking The Habit, Healthy Lifestyle, Health Insurance

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Cutting Out Serious Habits

We might as well start with the serious things first. The sooner you cut out the things that might seriously be damaging your health, the better you’re going to feel within most likely a few weeks. So, one of the main ways both Americans and Brits are damaging their health is through alcohol consumption. One little tipple a night soon turns into two, two turns into a heavy drink at the weekend, and before you know it you’ve got a problem that you don’t like to talk about. One thing you could consider is a rehab facility. You don’t necessarily need to be fully addicted to alcohol, we’re talking having a drink in the office to get you through the day. It could just be an evening problem that you believe is getting out of control. Just a week or two away can change your whole life. Another serious issue that a lot of people suffer from is smoking, and it is highly addictive. The best thing you can do here is to purchase an E-cig pen. They’re the best way to cut out the majority of harmful chemicals from cigarettes that you’ll be putting into your system.

Finding Your Health Plan

This is essential. You should have a plan for pretty much everything in life, but none more so than with your health. Having a plan gives you something to stick to, therefore making more long-term results possible. So do a bit of research and find out what plan might work for you. If we’re talking diet, you want to ease yourself into it. Start with dieting for a few days a week, the increase it by a day until you’re ready to tackle it full time. As for exercise, you can follow the same sort of principle. Light exercise once or twice a week, then increase the duration, intensity, and frequency of your workouts.

Sticking To The Changes

The last thing you want to do is to relapse and fall back into your old ways. So, the best thing we can advise is to make sure you’re reminding yourself of why you started to coach yourself back to full health in the first place. Pinpoint the exact moment that you said enough is enough, and keep that in the front of your mind.

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Featured Posts – Share Your Post Links

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‘PLEASE KEEP SENDING IN THE LINKS.’ 

Today’s featured blogs posts are:

Do step in and show some love.

Wordless Wednesday creative, fun and eerie to look at 🙂

Oddball This made me smile. Sweet and babyish but I like it 🙂

Going in This would be my best read for today. Raw, candid, painful, sweet, and teary too. Addiction and handling it is not easy on the sufferer as well as their loved ones. Please read.

Curry bard Now this is a lovely poem. I enjoyed the images created, the sound of the trundling train, the waft of curry dishes. A good read for today.

Self a mirage we swing through these emotions, edging on the highs of elation, depression, and oppression. Life is certainly a rollercoaster.

‘Do you want more eyes on your words?’

Well then, add your LINK INTO THIS LOOP.

Comments are disabled here to keep the loop tidy. Any comments or link you want to send can be added through the link in the post.

Thank you for your understanding and regards.

‘We create a cohesive community when we come together.

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Poetry/Poems · The Daily Post

Shattered Glass….

jacquelineobyikocha24 Comments

 

They created illusion for themselves

Living out their fake lives

Even as the noose tightened

With each passing day

He, in his fast car

And skimmed funds

He ran from the drug Lords

They are fast on his tail.

—–

She lived hers in the bottle of illusion

Where all was illuminated through her languid gaze

Fake, starry aura induced

From needle pricks

That zig-zagged

Through her veins

Until the glass fell

And shattered in the cold silence.

—–

Jacqueline Oby-Ikocha

Fake, The Daily Post Prompt

Blog · Inspiration - Motivation · Self Help

Midnight Motivations and Musings 26…

jacquelineobyikocha27 Comments

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Any life’s happiness that’s tied to the acquisition of material wealth as it’s major source, is in for a long haul of misery and disappointment.

The truth is that, in as much as the material goods and money around us can give that initial buzz of euphoric happiness, they fail to satisfy in the long run and the buzz wanes very fast, that the person in this cycle is in for the rough haul of the constant pursuit of the next buzz.

This is actually what leads to addiction. The perpetual search for the next high and kick.

Addiction comes in different forms, some more destructive than others, but the underlying factor that poses the problem is the addicted persons inability to find harmony within themselves, so they search for it through external factors.

If your happiness is dependent on others, then you are in for a roller-coaster of emotional instability.

It means that you are submitting your happiness to the ups and downs of someone else’s state of mind which can be rife with turbulence.

The true happiness that you seek to experience can only ever be found inside you and other people or things are just complements.

Dig deeper until you get to that root that transcends the state of happiness to the state of joy.

Joy is deeper. Where happiness is like a stream that might dry up when the sun gets very hot, joy runs like the deep ocean that flows from an unfailing source and that is The Lord.

© Jacqueline Oby-Ikocha

Creative Writing · Haiku · Hope · Lifestyle · Poetry/Poems · Social Issues

Crystal Meth…

jacquelineobyikocha34 Comments

A fascination of the Stars it held,

Purported to pleasure he heard,

Hope he keeps away from the Meth.

© Jacqueline Oby-Ikocha

PLEASE NOTE! ‘The usage of crystal methamphetamine is dangerous.’

This is my first time participating in ‘Ronovan Writes Weekly Haiku Prompt Challenge‘ with the prompt words, ‘crystal’ and ‘hope.’

Societal Issues · The Daily Post

Yes, There Are Boundaries…

jacquelineobyikocha29 Comments

In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “Too Soon?.”

Can anything be funny, or are some things off limits?

Title banner off-limits

A well developed sense of humor is something I think I possess.

I am a Christian but not a dour faced sanctimonious one!

I love good jokes any day and will even laugh at myself with ease.

There is no need sweating all the stuff (hard and small) because life is already hard enough and rather too short!

However, there are jokes that I will not be shining my teeth at ever at all!

I find such funnies to be insensitive and in very bad taste!

Things to do with Child Sexual Abuse, Domestic Violence, Terrorism of any sort, Rape, Murder are an absolute NO! NO! for me.

I am aware that some comedians thrive on such tripe and I do question at times if they are perpetrators of such acts themselves!

I am very doubtful that victims and survivors of certain obscene act would be laughing it off. Bad jokes

If that is the case, we won’t hear of women who often fall to pieces and commit suicide after acts of sexual molestation.

If it was so funny, we won’t have so many issues of troubled children who were abused till they lost their sense of self and are left battling with hangovers of such issues.

If it were hilarious, we wouldn’t have so many dysfunctional families due to domestic violence.

If it were rib-cracking, our jails will not be spilling over with perpetrators of nefarious crimes.

Indeed, there is a limit to a joke and a fine line should be drawn on such jokes that are in poor taste!

Jacqueline Oby-Ikocha

Inspiration - Motivation

From pain to prayer…

jacquelineobyikocha21 Comments

Trust GodWhat do you do, when each day seems like a struggle?
What do you do, when you are weary?
What do you do, when you are depressed?
When you are feeling ugly with negative emotions?
And everything around you seems to conspire to make it worse?

What do you do?
When the internal turmoils seems as if they will eat you up alive, from within?
What do you do when the anguish of your pain makes your eyes turn red?
And you feel like having a tiny switch button that you can turn on and take it all away?
So that you can experience blissful silence,
All your blues taken away.

Your vitriolic pain, your shame, your ugliness, your addiction, your anger, your depression, your fear, your bitterness, your mental anguish, your lack….,
All taken away at the flick of a button.

Your family have failed,
Your friends have failed,
The system has failed,
It all doesn’t seem right,
No human love seems enough,
To erase how you feel. That addiction has you in a choke hold, But you lack the will to stop,
That abusive relationship is killing you,
But stay in it you must,
No lover of yours, can fill the empty void inside you,

No booze, no drugs, no sex, no form of addiction, seems to help you out of the rabbit hole,
Hurt and pain of feeling lost are your steady companion,
Your grief hanging like a heavy cloak,
On your bowed shoulders from dawn to dusk,
Further pulling you down.

Yet you wear your smile,
Hiding your struggles behind the mask of your face,
Which is falsified like a clay cast,
You are trying to be strong,
Pretending to be strong,
Losing the essence of your authentic self, as each day goes along,
Pervaded by the feeling that you are not enough,
And that you can never be enough.

You float like a listless buoy, cast on roiling seas,
BECAUSE you seek for constant validation of fellow man,
Forgetting that he or she is equally fallible,
A mere human like you,
Bogged down by his/her own struggles, inner turmoils and pain,
Who cannot endorse neither the wind, nor the dust they were made of.

Ponder on the courage that you have to get up everyday.
The courage to face that job, to shoulder that pain, the hurt, the hunger, the loneliness, the lack, the emotional upheaval, the addiction and all the extra baggage.
Where do you think it comes from?
It comes from no other source; but from within you.
And you can do better
You can build that courage
Into a resilient dam of an over-comer.

BY CHOOSING NOT TO WALK ALONE!
The journey is harder when you walk alone,
BUT WHEN YOU CHOOSE GOD
Through Grace and Mercy
Through Faith and Hope
He leads you to Victory
A step at a time, out of the rabbit hole
A day at a time, to joy and peace
BUT ONLY IF YOU BELIEVE…

BE still and know that there is GOD.

© Jacqueline Oby-Ikocha

Inspiration - Motivation · Social critic · Uncategorized

Pornography… 10 reasons why you should stop the views.

jacquelineobyikocha19 Comments

good advice

Simple defined: “pornography is the depiction of sexual behavior that is intended to arouse sexual excitement in its audience” – The legal dictionary.

What set me down this path of thinking you might care to ask? Well, let me tell you a little bit why. I sat in the library several days ago, trying to wrap my mind around a book that I am putting together. I had escaped the confines of my home, trading it for a little slice of time at the public library so that I could escape having my children come barging in now and again, to ask for this or that and derailing my train of thought.

Okay. So I settle down with my paraphernalia of notes and different colored pens and laptop and lunch and all, trying to dig deep in my memory bank to fish out those words that I search for. Not far gone in my quest, the infernal chit-chat behind my back commences. I ignored it a little bit, but the consistent drip, drip of voices in the library behind my back, drew my curious mind to identify the culprits. I squelched every inclination to give them a good scold on etiquette.

Three young heads are planted close to each other, gasping and awing over the contents of a smart phone. My curiosity was piqued to no ends – I am a people watcher (if any hobby can have that title) so, I rose from my chair and I craned my neck. Voila! They were actively engaged in a watching a torrid sexual session of group sex on their Iphone, in the public library. If I could blush, I am sure my face would have taken the color of beetroot.

The best thing to do: I politely took my things and moved myself, a little reluctantly to another position (that seat, which I had appropriated gave me a vantage point to observe everything going on in that vicinity and I still struggled to let go of the desire to give that scold 🙂

Now my train of thought had digressed from creating the perfect murder scene, to wondering about the scene that I just witnessed and thinking of a storyline in that aspect.

I doubt if Porn makes a polite dinner conversation? It is hard to picture one’s dad slicing through that steak, your ma picking her peas and your maiden aunt Virginia sipping on her Earl Grey tea whilst you engage in recounting lurid details of a BDSM scene, they would probably choke to death.

Yet, this topic that does not make a rousing discourse at the dinner table, is a thriving billion dollar industry which keeps growing and is virtually available at the slightest click of the fingers. What a waste of good funds!

I may not be an expert in analyzing sexual matters, but at my age, I do know a thing or two I can assure you.

I think that irrespective of religious inclinations or belief, pornography affects its viewers negatively for so many reasons. I don’t want to sound like a righteous and sanctimonious preacher, so,  I will keep it simple, enunciate just a few reasons and encourage you to reason with me.

1. It rewires the brain and it’s short term gratification can lead to long term negative effects through the Coolidge effect of automatic response to continuous craving for more and more new excitement. The trappings of cyber-sex gives an opportunity to view millions of boobs and all which can span several life times in a few minutes and after years of consumption, the same material ceases to excite the viewer, thus the compulsion to delve deeper and explore newer grounds.

2. It then becomes an addiction. The repetition of this specific behavior leads to the release of the feel good hormone Dopamine, thus the continuous craving for repeats which is akin to what addicts of other substances experience.

3. It can actively damage or erode family relationships due to the unrealistic expectations from your relationships and in some cases, real women/men cease to arouse your interest as much as those that you see on the internet.

4. It causes decrease in sexual libido (testosterone) and erectile dysfunction, which will inevitably lead to depression, low energy level and lack of satisfaction.

5. Its leads to the development of thoughts and fetishes that would not have been encountered without porn.

6. This act reaches in and destroys the hearts, minds and bodies of its participants.

7. Waste of so much valuable time and funds surfing the net for an activity that eventually leaves the viewer depleted and possibly indebted through purchases made online for viewing rights to these sites.

8. It could even lead to loss of livelihood and reputation.

9. It promotes destructive practices and sexual perversions out there such as child porn, bestiality, necrophilia, rape and sadism and this in turn leads to increase of sexual crimes, human trafficking etc.

10. By viewing, the viewer supports this industry and facilitates its growth. The viewer also wittingly and unwittingly contributes to the sexual exploitation of whoever or whatever object he/she views.

We can no longer shy away from the realities of today by hiding our heads in the sand like Ostriches and hoping these things will go away.

We owe it to our young ones to educate them of the dangers that lurks in such habitual practice and hope that eventually, they will make the right choices.

Indeed, it is a danger in itself to allow them to flounder in their need to acquire information.

That’s it folks. I have said my piece and if I must say so, my digression from my initial assignment for my book, gave me quite an education. Maybe, as time goes on, we can explore ways that this habit can be broken.

Feel free to re-blog and share, you might be saving a soul 😉

© Jacqueline Oby-Ikocha

 

 

 

Creative Writing · Musings · Uncategorized

Ticks addiction..

jacquelineobyikocha9 Comments

internet-addict

What manner of intoxication is this?
What manner of fascination is this?
Eyes feasting on likes and follows,
Like there are no tomorrows.

So consumed am I,
Watching in bated anticipation for the rise of the ticks,
The highs and lows of the statistics.

The likes and nudges, the pokes and comments serve as melodious balm to my eager sapping soul and a fan to the embers of my creative juices.

With glee, I keep my hand shamelessly on the click, checking and rechecking the stats, like a fisherman who has cast a bait in hope of catching a fry.

What gives birth to such desire for validation, from friends and strangers to you and I?

Could it be our preening narcissistic selves that seek such adulation and approval? Wanting to know that we are not one lone echoing voice, unheard in the cacophonous decibels of all that goes on around us?

Could it be, could it be, the simple truth, that indeed no man is an Island? That we need each other to survive, be it in the real or virtual World?

We grasp with greedy, clutching fingers at any sign of love and approval sent our little way. Are we equally as giving, of this easily hard-earned love?

What manner of sorcery and captivation is this? To the likes, the ticks, the tweets, the follows, the apps, the phones, the comments and many more to come.

It is called Digital addiction.addiction

© Jacqueline Oby-Ikocha