Ambient Addictions--an Inventory

I’ve been intrigued by what Mark Muldoon calls ambient addictions, the background activities or thoughts that preoccupy us and keep us sleepwalking through life. No one is exempt from an ambient addiction; we all do something to distract ourselves from moments of uncertainty, discomfort or emptiness.

 Muldoon observes that “we learn to do [ambient addictions] automatically when anxieties begin to flare and we need to manage them without acknowledging them. . . .The actual substance or activity that our bodies have learned to employ are only a means to an end to manage our un-owned anxieties by altering the mood of fear and threat that accompany them” (“The Addicted Pilgrim” 24).   Facing our “un-owned anxieties” is the work of a spiritual path.

Many ambient addictions are rewarded and made to seem the norm in our society--shopping, exercising, workaholism-- when they are actually “substitutes for the Holy,” in Muldoon's words. Spiritual growth occurs when we knock on the door of our ambient addictions and enter.

 

I've created this inventory to discover what my ambient addictions might be.  I hope you find it useful.

Ambient Addiction Inventory

1.      Who is the least addicted person you know? How do you feel around them?

2.      What do you tend to do with unscheduled time (10 minutes, an hour or two, a day)?

3.      On what do you spend discretionary money?

4.      List the traits and habits in your partner or someone close to you that most bother you.

5.      If you had a six month sabbatical in life, how would you spend it? 

6.      Why aren’t you doing that?

7.      During a typical day, what brings you contentment, ease or joy?

8.      What do you do that you know you shouldn’t do or should do less of?

9.      What do you not do that you think you should do or do more often?

10.  What gets in the way?