Reality Check: Making the Best of The Situation - How I Overcame Addiction, Loss, and Prison

by Mike Sorrentino

However, shockingly, when I told the prescribing doctor—who KNEW I had just been released from rehab for abusing prescription pills—that I was suffering from low energy, he inexplicably gave me a script for Adderall, which is an amphetamine. For a recovering pill head, that was the absolute worst thing he could have done. Adderall would lead me down a pit of evil that would take years to crawl out of. I call the time period spent under the spell of Adderall “The Dark Years.” Like in Game of Thrones, winter was coming. I would completely lose my mind during the years I abused Adderall.

You see, I finally realized what the problem was: me. I had an obsessive personality, and nothing was going to change that. But what if I embraced that character trait and used it for good? I realized the only way I would find success was if I could harness and redirect that obsessiveness to feed myself only positive behaviors. The easiest way to explain it is that we all have a good wolf and a bad wolf inside us. The wolf you feed always wins. For years, I’d only fed the bad wolf—ego, money, drugs, sex, material items. When you do bad, you get bad. I had to reverse that and only feed myself positive behaviors and mindsets. Slowly, over time, I began to remove anything negative from my life in an attempt to only feed the good wolf. I created a list in my head. Anything unconstructive got eliminated. I stayed away from the people, places, and things that didn’t align with where I wanted my life to go. I knew these corrections wouldn’t happen all at once, but by making small changes one day at a time, one week at a time, one month at a time, I began to remove those negative influences and distance myself from problems, drama, and temptation.