* This essay is a working progress. I have a lot of notes and scriptures ready to incorporate into this, it just takes time to do so. Since this essay already covers the big ideas, I decided to just put it online anyway.
Free Agency, Contorted Desires/Morality, Self Robbing, The Spirit, a SWAP
Dopamine vs Serotonin
Addictions often trick us into chasing quick pleasure through behaviors like drinking, scrolling, or gambling. These activities give us a burst of dopamine—the brain’s “reward” chemical—which feels good in the moment but fades fast. Over time, we need more and more to feel anything at all, and normal life starts to feel dull.
But what we’re truly craving isn’t another rush—it’s serotonin, the brain chemical linked to calm, connection, and long-term happiness. Unlike dopamine, serotonin brings a steady sense of peace and well-being. It’s boosted by things like meaningful relationships, time in nature, helping others, gratitude, and good sleep.
Addiction is often a signal that we’re trying to feel okay in the wrong way. Healing begins when we shift from chasing dopamine highs to building serotonin-rich habits that lead to real, lasting peace.
Altered Self
Another problem with addictions is they alter our desires and mentality for the worse. The things that we most desire should ultimately be uplifting: they nourish our bodies, connect ourselves with other people and nature, help us feel we are in beautiful, holy, and safe environment, help us connect to something higher than just ourselves, and help ultimately improve our lives and the world for the long run. Uplifting activities should encourage us to become our best selves.
If in the back of our heads, we worry an activity is wrong, then it probably is. Here is a quick list of symptoms implying an activity is bad: if it feel slightly creepy, or encourage us to use / hurt others it is bad. If it diminishes our mental faculties, then it bad. If an action overly focus our attention on the flesh over the spirit are bad. Activities that feel slightly gross because they make a mockery of our flesh are bad. Ultimately, anything that you would feel embarrassed about sharing with your mother is bad.
God is against addictions (I think) because they take away our free agency, subjecting us to the devil, and because they alter our desires and mindset. God wishes us to desire uplifting things that align with his will, however, addictions make us seek for things that make a mockery of our body. Addictions also alter our mindset in that they make it more difficult for us to feel JOY by switching our bodies from serotonin to dopamine. An additional problem with addictions is they focus our minds on our bodies rather than our spirit. It gets darker however: as addictions gain power over us they eventually have the power to contort our sense of morality to the worse. Almost all addictions have this element – alcohol and abuse, pornography and bondage, drug use and criminality, caffeine and aggressive behavior (need link). At the final stage, people then become convinced that their addictions are morally good – as seen in the proliferation of media promoting pornography marijuana. At this point, the commandment to not hold any gods before me starts to matter.
Replacing Uplifting Counterparts
Many addictions have a basis in something that could be uplifting, but the addiction contorts and ruins the experience making a mockery and reducing our happiness. To overcome addictions, you may need to figure out which uplifting activities the addiction is replacing and ruining and swap the addiction for those activities. Moreover, many addictions arise to fill holes in our lives left from unmet needs, and therefore to squelch an addiction we sometimes need to completely change our environment to fill in these needs. One hole that may need filling is having friends and company: studies show that mice left in isolation are much more susceptible to addiction than mice which live in a community of other mice. In the depths of despair, it can be helpful to reflect on the truly nasty nature that many addictions intrinsically have and feel a healthy sense of disgust towards it and contrast this to the uplifting counterpart to an addiction and let that work uplifting changes to your mind to replace addiction with purpose. Ask yourself which path your heart truly wants to take and try to focus your heart on uplifting things.
Purpose, Broken Heat, Self Mastery
Our Purpose On Earth
A primary purpose of our life on earth is to learn to affirmatively choose good and reject the bad. Therefore, in this life we are allowed to decide for ourselves to choose good or evil. Such decisions only have potency if they have actual consequences to our benefit or detriment. Likewise, we are only able to make true decisions if we experience oppositional forces while doing so – we simultaneously are drawn towards the good and the bad (2 Nephi 2:11-27). Consequently, experiencing temptations and addictions actually plays a pivotal role in our purpose on earth – they represent the opposition pulling us towards the bad that allows us to make real decisions, thus allowing us to become polarized towards the good. Therefore, strangely, we should be a tiny bit grateful for our temptations, because they represent opportunities for us to make spiritual progress in which we affirmatively choose good over bad, place the spirit higher than the flesh, and become overcomers.
This gratitude for temptations is magnified when we note that the stronger the temptations we experience, the greater the potential spiritual victory we may achieve to become our best selves. Overcoming a serious addiction represents a huge step people can make towards God that people who never had addictions never get to experience (though I don’t recommend deliberately becoming addicted to things for this lol). Let the anticipation of winning a spiritual victory supersede and replace any fleshly pleasure that tempts us. Ask yourself, what do you truly want? To live a life full of uplifting activities and spiritual progress, or to do “harmless experiments” seeing what lies just around the corner of Satan’s dark path for us. The wolf parable comes to mind on this topic:
“There are two wolves inside you—one is good, full of love, kindness, and peace; the other is evil, full of anger, greed, and hatred. They are in constant battle.”
The listener asks, “Which one wins?”
The elder replies, “The one you feed.”
Learn to Deny Yourself
I believe one of the keys to overcoming temptations is learning to separate our thoughts / emotions from our actions and learn self-mastery. To do this, we must learn to disassociate ourselves from fleshly urges. Self-mastery can be difficult because addictive urges sometimes seem like they will last forever. Therefore, we must learn to deny ourselves – to accept the fact that we have negative feelings from an addiction, but to realize that we don’t need to act on such feelings but can rather outlast them. This recognition sometimes needs to bring Godly sorrow, the acknowledgement that we have imperfect natures and that the internal war to become overcomers against the natural man is painful. Another term for this is having a broken heart – recognizing that part of our heart is evil, and thus we need to go to great expense to break our heart to reject this evil nature.
Beyond learning to separate emotions from actions, it also is important to learn which routes to happiness are good and which are bad. My understanding is that the flesh provides many different pathways to attaining pleasure, but not all of these routes bring long term happiness and many even accomplish the opposite. Therefore, to live a good life it is vital to pursue true avenues of happiness and reject all false ones that lead to corruption. Satan will tempt us to believe that we can’t be happy unless we have literally every single route of happiness satisfied, and to deny ourselves in one avenue will condemn us to eternal sadness. But of course, this is ridiculous – we decide to not pursue one route to happiness and instead choose a different one all the time. And experiencing peace in Christ is a mutually contradictory path to happiness from enjoying the lusts of the flesh – you must choose one since you can’t have both.
Learning self-mastery, putting into subjugation our emotions and lusts, and taking leadership over who we are is I believe another purpose we have in coming to earth. A good analogy for this is the balloon in the jar: the balloon represents addictions, and the jar represents our self-control. When addictive urges come, that inflates the balloon thus pressuring the jar until it cracks. To stop the jar from cracking, you increase the size of the jar. The analogue is that people think they can’t stop an addiction because they can’t get rid of their addictive urges – the balloon. Instead, they should have focused on increasing their capacity to not act on urges – increasing the size of the jar. Of course, this process takes time and involves setbacks. When such setbacks occur, it is important to not let ourselves fall into despair and condemnation, but to meekly return back to the Lord, seek repentance, and try again with hope that this time it will succeed. Remember: millions of people have successfully ended addictions, and you can too. Without hope, ending an addiction is basically impossible.
2 The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.
Lies, Flesh, Spiritual Sleep, Hypnotherapy
Seeing that Satan wants to bring us misery and control us, Satan loves it when our lives are full of addictions. Since Satan doesn’t have a body and hates the fact that we do have bodies, he also wishes us to engage in activities that make a mockery of our bodies. Hence, the disgusting nature of many addictions is actually by design, and awareness of this can help rescue us from addiction.
The Flesh / Temptations
The primary lie of Satan is that our fleshly desires are part of US. Satan then teaches that there can’t be anything wrong with engaging in fleshly activities because it is part of our nature. In fact, engaging in fleshly activities is good (teaches Satan), and people opposed to them are bigoted.
Of course, this is all false. The flesh doesn’t have to be part of us, firstly because fleshly desires will go away once we receive celestial bodies, but also because they can depart in this life as God works a mighty change in our hearts. And secondly, just because the flesh is part of us now doesn’t mean it is good. Addictions might bring pleasure, but they won’t bring happiness and only will bind us to Satan. Therefore, the gospel teaches us to label any fleshly urges as Temptations to overcome. To stop addictions, learn to differentiate between physical pleasure and peace in Christ.
Pride
Pride can prevent us from rejecting the flesh. First of all, pride can make it difficult to accept that a part of us, that feels innate (even though it isn’t), is wrong and evil. It can be difficult to accept that we have a problem that needs to be fixed and we need help in doing so.
Moreover, pride tempts us on occasion to think that we deserve the extra pleasure brought from addictions. Therefore, we see sometimes people believing that engaging in addictive activities are “self medication” for their depression. Conversely, people sometimes believe that addictions are a “reward” for an accomplishment. But, of course, both are lies – addictions will only increase our sorrow.
An ultimate expression of pride though is apathy, or the refusal to moralize an action. Pride leads us to believe everything we do is right or at least OK, and that we don’t need to be worried or change because what we are doing is wrong. Beyond self centeredness, pride also (in my view) represents a lack of centeredness on morality and consequences of our actions. Therefore, in combatting addictions, it helps to stop focusing on personal pleasure, and instead turn to duty, work, and service.
Don’t give up, it won’t last forever
Satan wants us to believe fleshly urges will never end until we give in. He whispers that we cannot be happy until we give in to our addiction and therefore we have no choice but to keep going with it. However, this is just Satan trying to scare us. Urges do end eventually, and all we need to do is learn to ride them and outlast. Moreover, as we strive to overcome the flesh, God will work a change in our hearts so that, at some point, we no longer even desire to engage in such fleshly activities. He then will give us a peace in Christ which brings far more happiness than addictions could ever offer. Remember, God promised that we are free, and that he will always provide a way out from temptation. The flesh is subject to us as long as we believe.
Spiritual Sleep
Ultimately, Satan’s final goal is to put us to spiritual sleep. This slumber represents periods where we are unaware of, don’t care about, or are not focused on spiritual matters. I reckon this is the most common factor causing addictions: Most people indeed are knowledgeable that their addiction is bringing suffering and misery, and that the addiction contradicts God’s plan for us. However, they are spiritually asleep – they continue with their addiction out of habit in a sort of hypnotic state. Thoughts warning against the consequences of addiction remain in the back of their mind, and whenever they do surface are quickly squelched by feelings of learned helplessness – I can’t stop my addiction so might as well continue with it. Excuses favoring addictions easily come to mind, and whenever addictive urges come, they find it difficult to exactly remember why they had been opposed to the addiction in the past.
Remaining in a state of spiritual sleep is definitely not something we want. Beyond decreasing our happiness and preventing us from following God’s plan by disconnecting us from the Spirit, it also leads us to being increasingly susceptible to temptations. This takes us down a very dark path: We become addicted to ever more substances and acts with each additional addiction taken on decreasing our free will. People who follow this road end up either inadvertently following Satan’s plan for them in all that they do or literally become susceptible to demonic possession (try spending time with homeless people to see the truth of this). And remember: if you aren’t actively trying to stop yourself from falling into spiritual sleep, you probably already are in it.
As we leave spiritual sleep, beware that Satan can discourage us by giving excessive feelings of condemnation for past mistakes leading to hopelessness. This is not from God: God has already seen every sin in the book and is not surprised by anything – he is celebrating your spiritual progress leaving an addiction. If you therefore are feeling a strong feeling of condemnation, this is likely just your own mind or Satan tricking you. Don’t confuse condemnation with Godly sorrow however – Godly sorrow works a positive change in our hearts motivating us to improve.
The first step in combatting spiritual sleep I believe is to be relentlessly honest with yourself. Write down a confession that you have a problem and the reasons why you are harming yourself and read it every day. Write down a list of excuses you have used favoring an addiction and rebuttals against each one. Then start experimenting with resisting addictive urges – even if you can’t stop immediately, being able to resist for just 24 hours is a good start. If you find yourself accidentally falling to temptation and not even really knowing why, write down the series of events leading to it so that you can avoid repeating yourself.
At this point, now that your heart is starting to be contrite and you are starting to wrestle with your flesh, you can truly start seeking the Lord. In prayer, ask God to help change your heart to help you overcome temptations. Turn to the scriptures, fast for repentance, start learning to harness your thoughts, and make living the life God wants you to live become your number one priority. In your journey you likely will still oscillate between periods of giving in and hope, but don’t be deterred – rather let the tiredness of going back and forth motivate you to just stop and give up pursuing your addictions.
Hypnotherapy
Self-hypnosis and hypnotherapy are also tools that can be used against addictions. Many reports exist claiming hypnosis to be hugely successful in combatting addiction, though I’d like to note that ending addictions is never easy, and you likely will need to undertake multiple approaches simultaneously to end an addiction. A benefit of hypnotherapy is you don’t risk becoming addicted to medications – therefore I recommend taking this approach first before trying drugs. And yes, hypnosis doesn’t work on everyone – but neither do drugs.
The success of Hypnotherapy also underscores the true nature of many addictions: addictions control people through belief. People believe they can’t resist an addiction, so give in. In my view, this factor may even supersede self-control: people give in to an addiction not because their self-control has actually been broken, but because they believe it has been broken or believe it inevitably will be broken after a long enough time. Thus enters the role of hypnosis: hypnosis controls people in much the same way as addictions – people obey the hypnotist only after they start believing they are controlled by the hypnotist. If we are convinced that we no longer have free will, then we actually do lose our free will. Therefore, fighting an addiction with hypnosis is somewhat like fighting fire with fire. I think at a certain level a lot of spiritual warfare also involves self-hypnosis, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work! It’s also worth noting that given the similarity between addictions and hypnosis, it seems likely that if you are the type of person susceptible to addictions, you will also be the type of person susceptible to hypnotherapy.
Promised Blessings and Spiritual Warfare
Blessings and Practicality
Another important reason to overcome addictions is the promised blessings associated with doing so. In my view, even if there were not promised blessings, it would still be worth overcoming addictions just because we are happier if we pursue uplifting activities that don’t make a mockery of ourselves and switch our brains from operating on dopamine to serotonin. However, even if addictions somehow could make ourselves happier, I believe the weight of blessings we stand to receive from obeying God’s commandments, even when we don’t understand their motives, is sufficiently great to make it extremely worth abandoning addictions.
Such blessings can also transcend financial and health blessings: We are also taught that as we strive to follow God, we will gain a greater access to the Holy Spirit. When man chooses to reject God’s council (by following addictions), slowly his spiritual senses to God’s will become dulled; conversely when man choose to be perfect in following the commandments (by resisting temptations) his spiritual senses become sharpened. Having better spiritual senses allows us to be lead and guided by God in all that we do so that we can accomplish God’s greater plan for ourselves and have a relationship with God. We also are taught that we will be able to feel the peace of Christ, which transcends all understanding, which represents how God can comfort us even during times of difficulty.
The final blessing associated with overcoming addictions is eternal salvation in God’s kingdom. In the scriptures, we are taught that we can only inherit God’s kingdom if we become overcomers. To become overcomers, we must learn to overcome the world (which teaches that having “fun” with our flesh is ok), overcome temptations brought on by the adversary, and overcome our own natural man (which wants to indulge in the flesh rather than adhere to the spirit). If you are still engaged in addictions, you haven’t overcome any of these. So don’t procrastinate quitting – you never know when you will die, and the weight of eternities transcends any earthly inconveniences.
Following the commandments of course can be hard – but that’s the point, it is supposed to be hard! Just remember that God always will provide a way for us to accomplish his will, and that he will be with us to help in situations where we never could have overcome by ourselves. It is in these moments that we can feel closest to God.
Spiritual Warfare
Because God is on our Side in helping us ending addictions, he has given us a few basic tools to help us change our hearts to resist temptation:
The 12 steps – you likely already know of them but they are still worth mentioning:
1 – We admitted we were powerless over alcohol — that our lives had become unmanageable.
2 – Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3 – Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4 – Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5 – Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6 – Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7 – Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8 – Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9 – Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10 – Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11 – Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12 – Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
Faith – Even if you feel like your whole body is telling you that you will be happier succumbing to an addiction, it is better to let such urges bring you to a place of faith: You know your body wants something, but you know God’s designs are higher than our body and that we will be better off following God’s path. The only way we can truly call God our Lord is if we are willing to obey literally every single commandment, rather than picking and choosing commandments to follow. Therefore, faith as only a knowledge isn’t good enough, rather faith should lead us to wrestle against our natural man. The faith journey (in my view) starts off by developing a healthy fear of the lord that drives your decisions but ends with yourself truly trusting God and wanting to follow his path.
Repentance – unrepented sins represent open doors for Satan’s influence. Therefore, to close the door on Satan, we must repent for our sins. Moreover, when we truly repent for our Sins, God helps to change our hearts.
Prayer – we can ask God to change our hearts. We also can pray to have demonic influences removed from our lives tempting us to indulge in the flesh. One must note however that the results of prayer are often conditional upon us putting in the work.
Music – listening to uplifting music can encourage uplifting activities. Conversely, worldly music opens the door for Satan to influence our thoughts and desires.
Reading Scriptures – Lets us spend time with God, giving him the opportunity to change our hearts. When Jesus withstood temptations he did so by quoting scriptures he had memorized (Matthew 4:3-10) – therefore we too may benefit from scripture memorization.
Fasting – fasting is very important to subjugating the flesh under the spirit because it is a gesture where your spirit deliberately kills the body. We are also taught that it increases the effectiveness of prayer because it shows God that our spirit is contrite and truly willing to follow God’s council even if it is uncomfortable. Finally, fasting is important because it is a tool we can use for repentance.
Covenant keeping – covenants (in my view) are sort of like prayers but on steroids. In a prayer, we simply ask God to help guide us in our lives and change our heart to align with his. In a covenant, we go beyond this and actually promise to follow God’s guidance for ourselves and promise to change our hearts for him.
Anointing and Blessing – Blessings are like a super charged form of prayer. The oil represents God’s anointing that can come upon us as we follow him – an anointing that we surely will need to overcome addictions.
Gratitude – being grateful for the progress we have already made in the journey of addiction recovery can qualify us for additional blessings.
No Exceptions
Satan tricks us into returning to our addictions by asking us to come halfway. The best example of this is Alcohol: first you have a sip at a social event, which turns to a couple of gasses. Then you think that if you can have alcohol at social events, you can also have it at home after a difficult day, and eventually you are drinking every day. So, if we have already gone halfway, it is easier for us to get the rest of the way there. But what is more pernicious is this applies to our thoughts as well: if we spend time ruminating on an addiction, that makes it harder to resist addictive urges.
So, stop going halfway! Harness every thought to not even think about giving in to addiction!
The direction we are going matters just as much as our final destination. If we are on a trajectory to get drunk, that is just as bad as being drunk already. Wanting to exploit exceptions is just as bad as not following the rules we set for ourselves at all. God doesn’t want us to be loophole seekers, but to truly change our hearts.
It is important to note that just as we can wage Spiritual Warfare against Satan, he can wage warfare against us. Having bad things happen to us, losing relationships with those we love, feeling let down by God and feeling prayers have been unanswered, having OCD, feeling we have already failed so there is no point in trying anymore, feeling what we are doing is so minor it can’t hurt, and feeling worn down and apathetic are all factors Satan can bring against us. Or he can bring them against us all at once. Spiritual attacks are real, and they can effect not just our thoughts in our brain, but also the rest of our body. So when this happens, be aware of what is happening and wage spiritual warfare back. Combat apathy by reading the scriptures, combat urges by praying and listening to uplifting music, combat the temptation to give up due to past failures by fasting, or use your own strategies.
To truly crush an addiction, you have to WANT to stop. You have to realize that dopamine seeking behavior only brings sadness and you want instead serotonin seeking behavior. You have to grow a healthy disgust for fleshly activities that make a mockery of our bodies, which are temples. We have to let our addictive urges transform into yearnings for more uplifting activities. Anointed one, you can do this!
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