Why sleep, alcohol and recreational marijuana are so tempting

 I want to write from my experience why sleep alcohol and recreational marijuana are tempting. Especially the first two. Make no mistake, deep sleep is a pretty healthy motivation. I think it is needed, especially now when we are all dealing with a pandemic. 

To really understand this, we have to be logical and reason with something that can be understood easily by human mind. When we sleep, all our senses are temporarily closed, all voluntary muscles take rest. We all know how good we feel after a dreamless deep sleep. Blessed are those who can go to deep sleep at will!, deep sleep is always dreamless.  

Alcohol and marijuana also will literally stop the senses. There is no judgement, but the only problem is they have just one caveat which will not serve well in the long term. We feel happy and light because the senses are suppressed, which means once the effect is gone, we get right back into the grind!. 

Also, all of us at times have experienced deep concentration. In this state, we will not see anything or hear anything other than what we have our focus on. I remember one experience, where I was working in a lab on one project, something extremely funny happened right next to me, and I have no memory of seeing or hearing anything!. I didn't even know anything about it until it was told to me.  I finished that project in 20 mins, I was working on that for the previous month without any focus! I haven't experienced that level of concentration again yet.

Imagine, if we could always be in the state of deep sleep or on the high from alcohol! unfortunately that is not possible. We all get excited for sleep, alcohol, but what we are really doing is we are all getting excited to calm down! 

In short, the happiness/joy comes from shutting down the senses!, this will come automatically when we are able to be calm, and not get much excited and concentrate completely on one thing at a time. Ironically, that is the trick to multi-tasking effectively too.

This is what we  much need at this time - the ability to be calm - which is a very challenging ask! There is no shortcut, but the more we can make an effort to be calm, the better it will be. Meditation is a good way, but that is hard-work too!. This is the time to slow down, let's try to be calm first, once you learn how to be calm, then just watch how fast you can actually go alongwith keeping that calmness in mind

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