Self-Awareness is the Opposite of Addiction - Brian Pennie
On October 8th, 2013, Brian Pennie experienced his first day clean after 15 years of chronic heroin addiction. Instead of perceiving his addiction as a failure, however, he embraced a second chance at life and decided to study the intricacies of human behaviour. Since then, he’s become a keynote speaker, PhD student, a lecturer in Trinity College and University College Dublin, a life change strategist, a radio presenter, an author and the creator of an online course called “Master Your Self-Talk”.
I didn’t have a heroin problem. I had an anxiety problem
Brian Pennie was a heroin addict for 15 years, and during this time, he worked as a graphic artist. People around him noticed he had an addiction, but believed he was an alcoholic. Which somehow made it ok in their eyes. Looking back, Brian can now firmly say, “I had an anxiety problem. I just used heroin to medicate that problem”. He found it hard to cope with his mind and his compulsive thinking. Heroin was the substance that relieved his anxiety and put his mind to rest. “I remember it was just like a warm, soft blanket that wrapped around and eased me away from that anxiety, and that’s pretty much where I stayed for 15 years,” Brian says.
Channeling addictive behaviour to positive means
Brian describes getting clean like a sudden shift in perspective. To him, self-awareness is what helped him get rid of his addiction to heroin. “They say sobriety is the opposite of addiction. I think awareness is the opposite of addiction. So if you’re an addict, it’s a lack of awareness. And that’s just self-awareness.” He describes it like waking up one day and asking himself, “What was I doing?”. And once he became aware, he couldn’t help but change. There was just no going back for him.
Getting clean also meant channeling his addictive behaviour to positive means. He developed a passion for wellbeing and decided to follow a degree in psychology. He chose psychology for a specific reason. He wanted to understand why anxiety had such a devastating effect on him and also to be able to share his experience with other people.
The impact of mindfulness-based interventions on adults who misuse substances
In his PhD research, Brian is exploring impulsivity as a multi-faceted construct. “There are lots of different kinds of impulsivity, like choice impulse and motor impulsivity. So we’re looking at different aspects of that. We’re looking at depression; we’re looking at stress, we’re looking at levels of mindfulness.”
His eight-week mindfulness intervention program addresses people in early recovery that have recently come out of a centre. “We’re assessing variables before and after. So we’re looking at their levels of awareness, the levels of experiential avoidance, personality aspects, impulsivity, depression, and stress. And then we’re looking at the people that stay abstinent.” Because very few people stay 100% abstinent after leaving a treatment centre, he is working on predictive analysis to see which variables can predict successful abstinence.
Stepping away from scientific research to online teaching and public speaking
Brian also talks about his work on his upcoming online courses. To him, the end goal to his hard work is teaching people about practical tools they can implement in their lives.
He is now preparing a course on mental models. “Mental models are just psychological explanations of how the world works. And I’ve delved deep into this researching the lives of Elon Musk, Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Arianna Huffington, all of these people; they explore these mental models. And it’s a multidisciplinary approach of looking at the world.” It’s this way of creative, lateral thinking and the creative problem-solving skills that he wants to focus on during his course and bring to people and organisations in Ireland.
The best mentors in the world have left their best ideas in books
At the beginning of his career, Brian was very focused on reaching out to people, to CEOs to find out their stories, their tactics and the tools that they use in their daily lives. He wrote a heartfelt email and got an astonishing number of replies. He then developed a close relationship with John Boyle, the founder of Boylesports and the person who gave him the idea behind the title of his book “Bonus Time”.
When talking about mentors, Brian says: “I have loads and loads of mentors, and most of my mentors are dead for thousands of years, like Marcus Aurelius, who was my first mentor. Eckhart Tolle, he’d be my spiritual mentor. He’s still alive, but I’ve never met him. Anthony de Mello is all about awareness and self-observation. He’s passed away, he’s another one of my mentors. [...] Well, I think that a lot more mentors are in books and I’ll always have access to them, but I do have one to one mentors as well.”
Brian has a healthy and positive outlook on the future. Even if COVID-19 affected his book launch and public speaking engagements, he feels it hasn’t affected him on an emotional level. He looks at failure and tries to reframe adversity: “Instead of saying, why me, say what can I do about it?”. It’s all about taking that victim mentality and turning it into an action mentality.
You can watch a video of our conversation here.
If you’d like to find out more about Brian Pennie, in particular his course “Master Your Self-Talk” you can do so through this link.