Why You Keep Chasing The First High

Why do people in recovery keep chasing the first high? Why does a relapse after ten years sober pick up right where you left off? And why do so many people feel flat, foggy, and irritable at 30 days?Dr. Robbie Westerman has lived the answers. He was using IV heroin at 17, lost custody of his daughter, overdosed more than once, and was homeless at 21, living in an abandoned house on 19th Avenue. He got sober on May 1, 2013, went back to school, and today he is a doctoral prepared psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner treating addiction and co-occurring mental health conditions in Phoenix.He joined us live in front of the clients and staff at Camelback Recovery’s outpatient treatment center in Phoenix, Arizona, and walked through his story and the brain science behind it, one stage at a time.What we get into: adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and the stress system how the brain tags relief as survival why it’s the cues, not just the chemical isolation and connection dopamine downregulation in early recovery how long brain recovery takes the stigma around Suboxone and MAT why depression, anxiety, PTSD, and ADHD have to be treated alongside addiction ADHD that looks like anxiety and depression why relapse is not a moral failure neuroplasticity and new habits epigenetics and parenting ADHD in women continuity of care how TMS works finding a higher power in connection and service.

Tim Ryan didn’t grow up wanting to be an addict. He wanted to be a stuntman and a professional water skier. By 21 he was checking himself into rehab for cocaine. Over the next 32 years he built businesses and burned them down, made half a million dollars a year while crying alone every night, shot heroin in his office in the Wrigley Building, survived eight overdoses, and lost his marriage and his home.In 2012 a judge sentenced him to seven years in prison. In Sheridan Correctional Center, with a cellmate named Big Perk, he finally worked the 12 steps. Twenty one months into his sobriety, his 20 year old son Nick died of a heroin overdose. Tim called his sponsor. Then he told the police not to charge Nick’s friends: “I don’t blame them. I blame the disease of addiction.”Tim is the author of From Dope to Hope, the subject of A&E’s documentary Dope Man, and an interventionist who has led more than 1,500 interventions. He joined us live in front of the clients and staff at Camelback Recovery’s outpatient treatment center in Phoenix, Arizona, and the room opened up like few rooms we’ve had.What we get into: trauma, adoption, and learning disabilities as the roots of addiction the high functioning addict getting sober in prison Big Perk and the prison ministry that changed his life Nick’s death and staying sober through it Narcan and the Good Samaritan law whether it matters why you go to treatment ego, pride, and humility why a good therapist and a great sponsor change everything what’s broken in the treatment and insurance industry why sober living is not treatment what families should look for in a program three kinds of MAT patients his daily routine of prayer, Transcendental Meditation, and a 6 AM men’s meeting interventions and psych holds audience Q&A on hope, community, mental health, grief, and writing down your goals.

You breathe somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 times a day. Ryan McBurney says most of us are doing it wrong, and it's affecting our anxiety, our sleep, our cravings, and the way we think. Ryan found breathwork through a Wim Hof interview while he was in what he calls an existential depression, searching for meaning and leaning on substances. The first few sessions gave him something he had been reaching for his whole life. In his words, breathwork was "in large part" a gateway to sobriety. He has since trained in seven breathwork programs, studied with breathwork pioneer Dan Brulé, and with his fiancée and business partner Shelby Von Oepen, RN, founded Liquid Breathwork in Phoenix, where they have certified more than 60 facilitators. Recorded live in front of clients and staff at Camelback Recovery's outpatient treatment center in Phoenix, Arizona. What we get into: how Ryan found breathwork why most people overbreathe and mouth breathe the slow, nasal breath Ryan calls optimal the difference between breathing practices and breathwork what makes Liquid Breathwork different the theatrical sigh of relief breathing to wake up versus breathing to wind down humming before bed box breathing "the same sun that melts wax hardens clay" breathwork as a gateway to sobriety what to do with your breath during a craving, using David Hawkins' Letting Go why breathwork can feel like a psychedelic experience without a substance whether anyone can guide breathwork, and how to do it safely what treatment centers should look for in a facilitator audience questions on feeling safe enough to let go, rebirthing breathwork, and how to do circular breathing.

Most of us have heard that cortisol is the stress hormone and the goal is to lower it. Dr. Erin Kinney says that is backwards. Cortisol is your body’s energy currency. It gets you out of bed, handles stress, and helps your body heal. The real problem is running out.At 22, Erin was a marathon runner who gained thirty pounds almost overnight, couldn’t get out of bed, and cried all the time. Labs showed her cortisol was nearly nonexistent. That sent her to naturopathic medicine and, years later, to her Cortisol Bank Account framework: everything you do is a withdrawal, rest is a deposit, and healing only happens when you earn more than you spend.Recorded live in front of clients and staff at Camelback Recovery’s outpatient treatment center in Phoenix, Arizona.What we get into:why cortisol is not the enemythe stress muscle and the relax musclewhy Tim wakes up at 2 AMwhat alcohol and drugs do to your cortisol bank accountwhy anxiety and depression often rise in early sobrietyswapping drugs and alcohol for exercise, social media, or gamblingcaffeine as a credit cardthe earliest signs of burnoutcortisol, hormones, and women in recoverywhy people feel exhausted even when they’re doing everything rightthe ten minute “toes up”what a day that supports cortisol looks likewhen to get labsaudience questions on nicotine, chronic pain, thyroid and autoimmunity, and whether remembering hard times stresses the bodya live exercise with an imaginary lemon; andErin’s own story of burning out again in 2021 and how she got better.

Getting sober is an amazing step. But as Dr. Gary Sanchez told a room full of our clients, not being shackled doesn’t mean you’re free. It just means you’re sober. The next question is the hard one: now what?Gary practiced cosmetic and sedation dentistry in Albuquerque for 32 years. He picked dentistry at 18 because his dad was a dentist and he didn’t know what else to pick. About 28 years in, sitting in an audience of top dentists at a meeting in Scottsdale, Arizona, watching a surgeon rebuild a jaw, he realized he didn’t want to learn any of it. He had been good at a life he never chose.What he found next became the WHY Institute and the WHY.os, a short discovery tool built around nine WHYs: Contribute, Trust, Make Sense, Better Way, Right Way, Challenge, Mastery, Clarify, and Simplify. Everyone in the room took it before we started recording.Recorded live in front of clients and staff at Camelback Recovery’s outpatient treatment center in Phoenix.What we get into:why “What do you want to be when you grow up?” is the wrong question at 18, and at 40, and in early recoveryWHO first, then WHATwhy “just being sober is not freedom”the Halloween costume we wear when we don’t know who we arewhy the WHY of Challenge is the one Gary sees medicate the mostthe nine WHYs, one by onewhether your WHY changes after addiction or traumaTim’s own WHY.os read live (Better Way, Simplify, Challenge)a live read with a construction foreman in recovery“Drinking’s hard. Not drinking’s hard. Pick your hard.”and why “change” might be the wrong word for what recovery asks of you.FREE FOR OUR LISTENERS: Dr. Sanchez is offering the WHY Discovery free to I Love Being Sober listeners at go.whyinstitute.com/ILoveBeingSober. It is a third party tool and asks for your email address. It is a motivation framework, not a clinical or diagnostic assessment.

She was thirteen. She decided the world would be better without her, and she picked anorexia as the way she was going to leave it. She told her parents she would be dead by sixteen.She went into a treatment center three hours from home with four adolescent beds and a building full of adults detoxing. The program treated her by the number on a scale. Reach this number, you can call your parents. Reach this number, you can go outside. Nobody asked her why she was doing it, and she already knew.Paige Kelly, BSN, RN spent eight years in that illness. She got out at twenty-one on what she calls decision day, on a bathroom floor, with her body failing. She went on to become an emergency room nurse, because chaos was the environment her nervous system already knew how to live in. Then she got on a bike, then she got off it in a crash that showed her what eight years had done to her bones, and a doctor told her to start running to rebuild them. That is how she ended up finishing an Ironman in 10:07.This conversation is not about any of that. It is about what nobody taught her: how to notice the thoughts running her life, how to tell the difference between her own voice and everyone else’s, and how to come back into a body she had spent a decade at war with.Recorded live in front of our clients and staff at Camelback Recovery in Phoenix.What we get into:why an eating disorder is a decision about the world and not about foodthe difference between an eating disorder and disordered eatingwhy so many people eat before bed and what the nervous system is actually asking forthe “I should” inventory she did with a piece of paper and a penwhat to do when someone asks what you love about yourself and you come up emptythe day she said hello to her own body and her body told her where to gowhy she keeps her promises to herself microscopically small, andthe one thing she thinks treatment centers should be doing more of.

He was a Versace model living at the Clevelander on Ocean Drive, drinking fifty drinks a day for free because his friends tended bar, and getting handed cocaine because the dealers knew he knew everybody. He worked five times a year. The rest of the time was idle.Then the hangovers started lasting five days.Troy Casey — The Certified Health Nut — grew up a ward of the state, started drinking and smoking weed at thirteen, and spent four and a half years cycling in and out of sobriety before it finally held in 1999. What made it hold was not a program. It was an hour on a cushion the morning after a fight, and then, two weeks later, ten days of silence at a Vipassana retreat.Thirty-five years into holistic health, his position in the wellness industry is not what you would expect from someone who looks like he does: the things that actually move the needle are mostly free. Sleep. Sunlight. Walking. Water. Breathing through your nose. He is blunt about the rest of it — peptides, Ozempic, TRT, the twenty-supplement stack — and blunt about why a person in recovery in particular should be careful with all of it.Recorded live in front of our clients and staff at Camelback Recovery in Phoenix. The room does a breathing exercise together at 42:30 that is worth doing along with them.What we get into:the fashion industry’s open bar and what it did to a young man with no supervisionwhy he calls the friends who told him he was wasting his potential “love incarnate”the four and a half years of relapse before it stuckwhat ten days of silence actually doesthe nine pillars, and how to shrink them to three when you are thirty days soberwhy he thinks biohacking can become the same disease in a lab coatthe seven factors of stresshow to breathe like your nervous system depends on it, because it does.

Everybody in treatment eventually gets the insight. They can tell you why they drank. They can name the childhood, the trauma, the trigger. And then they wake up the next morning and do the same thing they did yesterday.Natalie Hunter has spent more than twenty years studying why that happens. Her position is blunt: insight alone does not change anybody. What she teaches instead is behavior over belief — that change comes from doing something different, not from finally thinking differently.In this episode, she walks through her Six Stages of Conscious Change, including the one almost everybody misses: the distance between wanting to change and being willing to change. She lays out what she calls the Four Core Human Wounds. And she is direct about where coaching stops and a doctor starts — including for people whose medication is the reason they are alive.Tim also ends up in the chair. What starts as a question about guilt and shame turns into an unplanned, on-air look at a pattern he had never traced before: stealing candy as a kid, the adrenaline, and what he was actually reaching for.Recorded live in front of our clients and staff at Camelback Recovery in Phoenix.What we get into:Why you can say all the right words in a coaching session and still not changeThe difference between desire and willingnessThe “horrification moment” and why it is fuel rather than shameThe four wounds underneath every limiting patternWhy the feeling you are having about your behavior is often the wrong feelingWhat an energy shift actually looks like from the outsideWhere coaching ends and psychiatric care begins

You got sober. You did the work. And you still wake up exhausted, foggy, flat, and unmotivated — and everyone around you says give it more time.Sometimes that’s the right answer. Sometimes something underneath is actually broken.Dr. Amie Hornaman spent her twenties competing in bodybuilding and figure competitions. Then the scale started going up while she was training twice a day and tracking every macro. Six different doctors inside a major medical system looked at her labs and told her she was normal — eat less, exercise more. The seventh doctor was the first one to physically touch her throat. She found nodules, and a diagnosis.Today Dr. Amie is “The Thyroid Fixer,” founder and CEO of the Advanced Thyroid and Hormone Clinic, host of The Thyroid Fixer podcast, and author of The Thyroid Fix.In this conversation she makes a case our clients hadn’t heard before: getting sober is a physiological stressor, and stressors are exactly what flip thyroid and hormone problems from dormant to active. Pregnancy does it. Perimenopause does it. Divorce and grief do it. So does removing a substance your body has spent years adapting to. Which is why she argues thyroid and hormone testing belongs in early recovery — not eighteen months later when you’re wondering why you don’t feel the way everyone promised you would.What we get intoWhy six doctors missed it, and what the seventh did differentlyWhy TSH alone is not a thyroid test — and the full panel to ask forWhat long-term alcohol and substance use does to cortisol, blood sugar, liver detoxification, and sex hormonesWhy thyroid dysfunction looks almost identical to burnout, depression, anxiety, and post-acute withdrawalWhat alcohol does to estrogen in men, and why testosterone often can’t be fixed without addressing itSHBG, and why your hormones can test “normal” and still not be reaching your cellsWhy she says you can’t put hormone therapy on a dumpster fireThe 30/60/90-day timeline for feeling differentAnd why chasing every biohack can raise the same cortisol you’re trying to lowerTim also shares his own experience — two to three years sober before anyone checked his thyroid, and what changed 90 days after they did.FREQUENTLY ASKEDCan getting sober cause thyroid problems? Dr. Hornaman’s position is that sobriety doesn’t cause thyroid disease, but it acts as a major physiological stressor — and stressors are what activate a dormant autoimmune thyroid condition. She places getting sober in the same category as pregnancy, perimenopause, andropause, grief, and divorce.Why do I still feel tired after getting sober? Persistent fatigue, brain fog, weight gain, low mood, and low motivation in sustained sobriety overlap almost completely with the symptoms of hypothyroidism and low sex hormones. Her recommendation is to test rather than wait it out.What thyroid tests should I ask for? Dr. Hornaman names six: TSH, free T4, free T3, reverse T3, and the two antibodies — TPO (thyroid peroxidase) and TGA (thyroglobulin). She argues TSH alone is a pituitary measurement, not a thyroid measurement.Does alcohol lower testosterone in men? In her clinical experience, yes — and it simultaneously raises estrogen, both directly and by burdening liver detoxification. She describes a case with an estradiol of 343 in a man in his fifties.How long until I feel better? Her typical timeline: mental clarity and energy around 30 days, changes on the scale and early hair regrowth around 60 days, and the full effect around 90 days.

Dr. Sharon Stills started drinking at twelve. By nineteen she was sitting in a parking lot in the Hamptons, too high to walk into the party — and that was the night it broke. She got sober at twenty, without AA, without rehab, and thirteen years later became a naturopathic medical doctor.In this episode she explains addiction the way she sees it after twenty-five years of practice: not as a moral failure and not purely as a brain disease, but as a nervous system trying to regulate itself. Which is why, as she puts it, we don’t quit addiction — we graduate from one to the next. She’s blunt about her own: coffee, work, the phone, hot yoga.Recorded live in front of our clients and staff at Camelback Recovery in Phoenix, with about twenty-five minutes of unscripted audience Q&A at the end.WHAT WE GET INTO:Why the physical body has to be fed before trauma work can landThe nutrient deficiencies she finds over and over in newly sober patientsWhat’s actually happening when someone says they’re crawling out of their skinHow progesterone, testosterone and estrogen drive cravings through GABA, dopamine and serotoninPerimenopause as an unrecognized relapse riskThe “backpack” model of toxic loadWhy she’d rather you eat a Big Mac in joy than organic food in stress.ABOUT DR. SHARON STILLS, NMD — Naturopathic medical doctor, 25 years in practice. Graduate of Sonoran University (2001). Trained in European biological medicine under Dr. Thomas Rau at the Paracelsus Clinic in Switzerland and served as a co-lead North American lecturer for the Paracelsus Academy. Board member, Bio-Regulatory Medicine Institute; former board member, the Archive of Healing at UCLA. Former host of The Science of Self-Healing podcast. She practices at Lasting Wellness Center in Scottsdale, Arizona alongside her son, Dr. Ben Stills.FIND DR. STILLS — Website and newsletter: drstills.com · Instagram: @drsharonstills · Her free five-day online summit opens for signup September 1 and runs live starting September 12, with 40+ expert interviews. Join her newsletter at drstills.com to get the invitation.ABOUT THIS PODCAST — Tim Westbrook is the founder and CEO of Camelback Recovery and holds an MS in Addiction Counseling. The I Love Being Sober Podcast records live every Wednesday at 10 AM in front of the clients and staff at our Phoenix outpatient center.If any of this sounds like your situation, a conversation could be a reasonable next step: camelbackrecovery.comThis episode is educational content and is not medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment, and it is not a substitute for clinical assessment by your own physician. Products and brands mentioned are named at the guest’s discretion; Camelback Recovery has no sponsorship, affiliate, or financial relationship with any of them. Views expressed by guests are their own.