🎙 Episode 16 — The Lies We Tell Ourselves

In this episode of Tripping Over Myself, I explore the strange connection between addiction, anxiety, and the way we talk to ourselves.

I look at how the mind can act like its own form of artificial intelligence — answering whatever questions we feed it — and how, inside alcoholism and anxiety, those answers can quietly turn into fiction we start living by.

We talk about:

• ​ How addiction trains the mind to protect itself with lies
• ​ Why anxiety keeps us stuck in worst-case thinking
• ​ The danger of using imagination as escape instead of truth
• ​ And how our own thoughts can become an echo chamber

This episode isn’t about technology.

It’s about the questions we ask ourselves — and the answers we choose to believe.

👉 Visit my website at trippingovermyself.com

Sometimes the mind doesn’t want truth — it wants confirmation. In tonight’s short bonus, I share how the questions we ask ourselves can keep us anxious, stuck, and believing things that were never true. Full episode on Wednesday.

Before alcohol… before gambling… before any of the obvious addictions… there was something deeper driving it all.

The need to be noticed.

In this episode, I talk about how chasing attention, approval, and a sense of belonging led me into a life filled with drinking, gambling, and smoking — three addictions all tied to one belief: that I wasn’t enough as I was.

From owning racehorses to chasing wins that never came, I was building a version of myself I thought people would accept… while slowly losing everything that actually mattered.

This isn’t just a story about addiction.

It’s about identity.

It’s about the quiet ways we try to earn our place in the world.

And what it costs when we believe we have to.

If you’ve ever felt like you had to become someone else just to be seen… this one’s for you.