The Bigger Picture of Personal Growth in Life After Addiction

Understanding Consistency, Diversification and Delayed Gratification

Rehabitus: Personal Growth in Life After Addiction

1500 words // 5-6 minute reading time.

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I’m no stock market expert, but I can spot a decent personal growth analogy when I see one.

If you look at the stock market over the long term, you’ll notice that investments tend to grow steadily over time. The longer you commit to the habit of investing, the greater the reward. You invest capital, that capital earns interest, and the interest earns more interest, and so on, creating compound growth over time.

The key takeaway points are:

Invest regularly. Stay the course. The benefits grow over time.

Stock market values bounce up and down, but overall, a good investment increases in value over time. Image licenced by Adobe.

But zoom in to the daily, weekly, or even monthly view, and things look very different. Everything looks unpredictable and erratic. There are constant ebbs and flows. For someone who isn’t a seasoned trader, this short-term volatility is distracting, disorienting and even downright discouraging. Take a look at a recent daily view of a popular stock market index:

Are you any better or worse off from one day of investing?

It’s easy to see why people panic and pull out too soon—the emotional weight of a loss, or feeling like you’re not making progress, can overpower the time-tested evidence that staying the course pays off.

If you only focus on a short time frame, it can seem like your efforts just aren’t worth it whatsoever. The day-to-day fluctuations are far too distracting and can make it hard to see why you’re invested in the first place.

The key here is to zoom out to the bigger picture.

When you shift to a long-term view, the daily noise fades into the background. The short-term highs and lows average out into an overall upward trend. Like life, when you look at the bigger picture, the temporary setbacks fade, and your overall progress becomes much clearer.

The same index viewed over the long run reveals a more powerful story.

The strength lies in diversifying your investments and committing to the bigger picture.

Long-term investors understand they’re not in it for the quick wins, and they don’t fret when things take a little dip. They understand that time, patience and consistency are on their side. By regular and disciplined investing, they give their capital the time it needs to grow.

They also understand the value of diversification and delayed gratification, which are essential ingredients in both investing and in life. Diversification means spreading investments across different areas, which reduces the risk that one poor-performing stock will drag you down. If one or two areas struggle, the strength of the others in the whole ‘portfolio’ combined still carries it forward, or at least minimises the damage.

Over the long term, this diverse portfolio approach pays off, and investors typically find themselves better off. Individual periods may fluctuate, but the average trend goes upward, and that’s achieved simply by staying the course.

Now let’s talk about you.

You have a ‘YOU’ portfolio, and for the best returns, you’ve got to build it on carefully selected investments. The most foundational investments are in your core needs, which are the building blocks of a fulfilled life. These needs contribute to your physical health, mental well-being, and emotional resilience. Meeting your core needs will keep you moving forward, and like a diversified portfolio, if one area struggles, the others can carry you through, allowing you to resolve the issues.

In my previous article, 'Shrink Addiction into Irrelevance', I outlined that every choice you make either moves you closer to a life well-lived or further from it. Meeting your underlying core needs is essential to living a more fulfilled life, and this is especially crucial to those with a history of addiction. In making choices to address these core needs, you steer your life away from addiction, and more importantly, toward genuine contentment.

Here are some of the core needs outlined in the previous article:

• Physiological: nourishment, water, sleep, shelter, air, exercise, vitality.

• Safety: physical safety, financial security, health, stability, predictability.

• Love: affection, intimacy, bonding, healthy relationships.

• Belonging: community, connection, inclusion, social identity, tribe, recognition, camaraderie.

• Autonomy: freedom, independence, personal sovereignty, self-direction, liberty, agency, choice.

• Self-worth: value, esteem, self-respect, competence, confidence, dignity.

• Purpose: meaning, direction, contribution, mission, goals.

• Growth: learning, self-improvement, achievement, self-actualisation.

• Creativity: expression, innovation, problem-solving, artistry.

• Play: joy, fun, recreation, leisure, spontaneity.

• Peace: inner calm, tranquillity, balance, harmony, oneness.

As you can see there are plenty of different areas to tend to, much like a well-diversified long-term investment strategy. Consistently meeting your core needs is much like making regular, thoughtful investments in yourself. Spreading your attention across different needs helps minimise the risks of setbacks in one area holding you too far back. As with investing, patience and delayed gratification are key parts of the journey. Over time, those steady and intentional choices lead to a more lasting sense of fulfilment.

Not every single good choice you make will have an immediate payoff, just like a good stock investment doesn’t pay out right away. The good choices you start making today might not show their impact for some time: one healthy meal won’t immediately boost your vitality, and one workout won’t get you jacked. These changes require consistent effort over time—and this is the downside to investing— you need to keep making those deposits even if you don’t feel like it. Every single action counts, just as much as the one before, and just as much as the one after. Over time they’ll compound together, putting you into an overall better position.

Sometimes, making good choices might feel… pointless. This happens especially when still dealing with the consequences of past bad decisions. But by consistently making better choices over time, your circumstances and your sense of contentment will begin to shift. As your actions improve, so will the outcomes, and you’ll gradually move into a life shaped by better decisions and greater fulfilment.

You are no longer the person who made those past decisions. Your power lies in learning from the past, weathering the setbacks, and investing in your future with the wisdom you’ve earned.

When you invest in yourself, you’ll realise that you have more control over your life than you might have thought. The beauty of personal agency lies in using the knowledge and tools you have to make better choices that actively upgrade your reality. Some problems may even begin to resolve themselves simply because you are making better choices that align with your long-term goals. Arguments fade from your day because you’ve saved up to move out of the flat you shared with a dickhead; your career prospects improve because you’ve invested energy into learning; and the dark cloud of feeling atomised might lift because you’ve found a cool new social group that has your back. These are the kinds of problems that need not happen when you invest in better long-term solutions.

That said, just as you cannot control stock market dips, you can’t control all the circumstances that affect your sense of well-being. You might make all the right choices in a day—nailing your morning routine, eating well, exercising and sharing beautiful moments with loved ones—and still face a setback. But setbacks are temporary dips. They don’t erase the investments you’ve already made. You’ve still deposited into the YOU portfolio, and most importantly, you’ve built the habit of making good investments. It is this habit that will carry you through in the long run, ensuring your well-being trends upwards despite occasional dips.

Your core needs are some of your most crucial investments, and moving forward, the returns might still seem to dip today or tomorrow, but those are temporary. Think of the initial ache in your muscles when you get back to the gym, the frustration of learning a new skill and not mastering it straight away, or the perceived discomfort of being the oldest person in your college group. These are temporary fluctuations that come with growth. More to the point, they are an inherent part of the process. You’re investing in your future, and this is a long-term journey, not a short one.

Over time, the investments you make will show you their long-term value. Learn to love the slow and the steady—after all, it’s the turtle who plods forward consistently and wins the race. Imagine the gratitude you’ll feel in five or even ten years of consistently investing in yourself. Now bring that sensation right into the present as you make your good choices today.

Here is the brutal truth: time is going to pass whether you invest in yourself or not.

In five years time, you’ll either have five years of progress or five years of excuses. That choice is yours.

Life comes with its fair share of setbacks and dips. But just remember this: when you invest in yourself consistently, even through the tough times, the long-term outcomes will pay off.

Consistency compounds. Better things come to those who commit, stay the course and trust the process. The only way to lose is if you stop showing up for yourself.

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Catch-up Service:

Here’s a chance to check out my recent articles, just in case you missed them:

Shrink Addiction into Irrelevance

Choices Are the Currency of Agency

Omnia Vincit Amor

I Could Relapse

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