 This question is from Eugene Kavanaugh. I'm addicted to the gym and go six times per week even when I'm hurt. Is this good or bad? Well, obviously not good. Not a good thing. You know, exercise addiction is like any other addiction. It starts to decrease your quality of life. It reduces your ability to have good relationships with the people around you. The obvious, it can injure your body physiologically. You can cause problems for yourself. If you're that addicted to the gym, it probably carries over to the way you eat and the way you supplement. Here's the thing. There are a lot of things that we can do in the world that have a potential to be phenomenal for us and then they also have the potential to be bad. Opiates have amazing potential for alleviating pain when people really need it. They also have a potential to become extremely addictive, gambling, sex. We can talk about food. You look at food. You can nourish your body, make you healthy, or you can kill yourself by being addicted to food. Exercise is no different. This is a very difficult one to conquer, though, because the common belief is that exercise is good and more exercise is better. It's always good. It's always good. It's like work. This is why work addiction is so difficult to beat. But I'm working. I'm not being lazy. I'm not doing anything. I'm productive. Yes. It still can harm you. Here's a big question. Here's a real question. How do you reverse out of this? Boy, is that hard. Boy, is that hard. Now, first off, the only way, in my opinion, that you can address this kind of an issue is to figure out the root reason of why you're addicted to the gym. What are you medicating with fitness? Why are you using the gym to medicate yourself? What is it that you're hiding from, running from, or numbing with working out? Are you, is it your relationship at home? Is it that you hate everything else? You hate your job? Is it that you feel depressed if you're not exercising? Or maybe you have body image issues to where if you're not working out, you're just focusing on how much you hate the way you look. If you don't find that root cause, what will end up happening is you'll stop working out or reduce your exercise, and you will find another way to medicate yourself. And it may be something else that's going to also harm you. So really got to find that root. You went right where I was going to go, which, you know, we started this episode off about talking about self-awareness, and here's an exercise that you can do for yourself around self-awareness that I think would really help. And that is, tell yourself you're going to miss the gym today, or for this week. And the first thoughts that come into your head, and fears that come into your head if you do that, is the secret to what Sal is alluding to right now. If you're a body thing, you should get fat. Yeah, right. I'm going to take the week off. And the first bit of fear that sets in, because you're going to take a week off, the things that go through your head is the key to unlocking the root cause, because then what you need to do is unpack that. Where does that come from? Where did it start? Is it true? Why do I believe it to be true? And start to dive into that. That has to be solved first. You have to figure out why you feel that way. Why do you think it's necessary, because the science is already out there to prove it. You can work out two to three times a week, eat a balanced nutritional diet, and have a phenomenal physique, phenomenal. If you eat well, train two to three times a week in the gym, you can build damn near almost any physique that you really want. I mean, aside from probably competing at the professional level in bodybuilding, you can have an incredibly healthy physique. So, it's not whether that's true or not. So what is it that makes you feel that you have to do that, and then start to dig deeper into that? That will give you the answer, and then the area where you can start to work. Yeah, when I was addicted to exercise, it was all rooted in body image. So it was like, if I miss a day, I'm going to lose muscle. If I miss a day, I'm going to shrink. If I miss a day, I'm not going to be stronger. I'm actually going to get weaker. And that it's funny because that drive, here's the irony. The irony is it actually reduced my gains, it actually reduced my body's ability to progress. So because I use the gym as a way to medicate my insecurity, and my insecurity being I need more muscle and I need to get stronger, because of that, I was using it inappropriately and ineffectively, actually built less muscle as a result. I actually had less, I had worse results as a result. The funny thing about this is that you're going to get, whatever your insecurity is that's driving you to do this, being addicted to the gym is only going to make you look worse or whatever. Now, here's the kicker. That's not how you're going to solve this. So you can't solve this problem by saying, I'm going to work out less because it'll make me look better because it's going to feed your insecurity even more. You have to be comfortable with it. It's interesting, though, because I had a friend like this, too, where it went from a bull rider, and then went from a full-time skateboarder, then went into this addictive, went through a phase of drugs, and then went into the gym, and then became like ever, like always living in the gym, working on a physique, and was just obsessed with it because it was starting to promote what he thought was very healthy, but took a long time to unpack that fear of not having something that you had to always be doing, and always having to fill that up with something was part of the problem. So, yeah, that's going to take a lot of soul searching and work.