How do high-performance people cope with their addictions?

March 9, 2019 12:47 PM

In 2014, Danish director Lars von Trier revealed that he was addicted to alcohol and drugs and had to go into rehab. Addiction stories like this are common in the biographies of high-performance people, notably artists, but also business people, politicians etc. How do they manage to produce great work for years, even decades, while struggling with severe addictions?

As someone with no experience of addiction, and who requires a good night's sleep to be able to function properly, this is puzzling. The only person with addiction that I've known, a trainee addicted to prescription drugs, was literally non-functional: not only she was completely unable to focus on her work, but most of what she did was problematic (begging colleagues for money, creating fake prescriptions on her computer, not finding the way out of the toilet) before we had to let her go after 5 days. But people like von Trier can juggle with the enormous demands of their work in spite of their addictions: until his mid-50s, von Trier drank one bottle of vodka per day and did drugs, and he was able to fulfill social or business obligations, orchestrate the activities of the 100s of people working for him, write and direct movies and TV shows, etc. He said and did a number of crappy things over the years, but he seems to have been largely, and successfully, functional. He's just one of many examples: Michael Jackson was doing terrible things to his body but he was still rehearsing and preparing a giant show just before his death. I understand that drugs and alcohol may boost creativity and alleviate stress and fatigue. But what about the daily necessities of decision-making, such as negotiating contracts, giving an informed opinion about complex business matters, hiring people, raising funds, the kind of stuff that requires a clear mind and full cognitive abilities? Are these people particularly resilient, or able to build resilience? Do they develop specific strategies to navigate the functional and non-functional parts of their lives?

posted by elgilito to Science & Nature (21 answers total)

Handlers, managers, and a whole entourage of enablers.
posted by Ideefixe at 12:57 PM on March 9, 2019 [32 favorites]

Don't know for sure, but I suspect the answer is money. When you never have to drive anywhere yourself, you cut down on the potential for DUIs. At that level you can basically hire someone to perform every single non-work-related task for you, freeing you up to do nothing but think and write and create. Which, for some highly creative types, you can still do even if you're sloshed.
posted by coffeeand at 1:11 PM on March 9, 2019 [17 favorites]

What's the main issue faced by addicts? It's about getting hold of the next hit. Take heroin: take your hit, get your high, and then you are a functional human being again for a while until you need your next high. Now, if you have no money, that presents a problem. You've got to scrounge up that cash from somewhere. Borrow from friends. Steal. Rob a house and fence the goods. That takes up a lot of time and has the potential to lead to all kinds of consequences - losing your home, getting arrested, shooting up with dirty needles, health problems, etc.

Now, say you (i) have money and (ii) have a level of importance that there are people around who would like to make sure you function. So everything involved in and around finding that next high? Someone else's problem. You're protected. You take your hit and you're good until your next one when there's someone around who hands it over. And repeat.
posted by humuhumu at 1:22 PM on March 9, 2019 [11 favorites]

Addicts are notoriously charming, so your everyday functional alcoholic probably has a whole stable of support people who help them out at work who do things like remind them of stuff they've forgotten and cover when things go pear-shaped. If you're good enough at what you do the people around you just accept dealing with stuff as the cost of doing business.

In your personal life, you have enablers who love you. I don't know about other addictions, but alcoholism is a progressive disease, so little enabling behaviors (like telling the kids the other spouse is "tired") turn into big ones almost imperceptibly.

Also, there are a LOT of adults out there who grew up in an alcoholic home. Way more than you think. These are an army of trained helpers who go on to "help" all the functional addicts out there. Addicts and adult children of addicts spot each other across a crowded room and it is love at first sight. This happens in the workplace too, again, more often than you'd think.
posted by selfmedicating at 1:30 PM on March 9, 2019 [11 favorites]

Being extremely busy and abusing substances are both ways to keep from thinking about / dealing with big scary problems like trauma or mental illness.
posted by momus_window at 1:30 PM on March 9, 2019 [10 favorites]

In addition to the issues of enablement, there's also the fact that they are dependent on the substances to manage their feelings so they aren't so distracted by them. They need their feelings managed to be able to work. The work itself is also a distraction from their feelings. So whatever the consequences of the substances are, it's just another cost of doing business. So they're building up a house of cards of running away from their own feelings that always eventually collapses one way or another. That's why so much of addiction treatment is teaching people how to deal with being able to experience their feelings directly without getting overwhelmed and craving a distraction.
posted by bleep at 1:31 PM on March 9, 2019 [7 favorites]

All the drudgery parts of life get outsourced and “handled.” If you have a spouse they handle the kids and domestic sphere, maybe with the help of lots of paid people. The work comes to you. Meetings happen and your driver takes you there. People give you space and clear your schedule. Maybe you’re “creating,” maybe you’re just drinking. Who knows? The people around you are paid to give you the space you need.
posted by amanda at 2:02 PM on March 9, 2019 [2 favorites]

The only person with addiction that I've known, a trainee addicted to prescription drugs, was literally non-functional

I'll push back on this: the only person with an addiction that you knew about was literally non-functional. You may have known plenty of functional addicts who didn't advertise their addictions.

Addiction isn't an either/or thing! There's plenty of space in between "no addictions whatsoever" and "rock bottom."
posted by showbiz_liz at 2:15 PM on March 9, 2019 [71 favorites]

To also explain how-- I recently learned that a coworker is drunk for ~80% of their work hours. I barely believed this-- I didn't recall any odd behavior. But then I thought back about the times when he was supposed to present at a meeting and someone else subbed in at the last minute; or he was supposed to write something but someone else wrote it instead; or when he was supposed to attend a meeting but his secretary said he got called away on other business; and other times when people (both higher and lower than him in the organization) covered for him.

Once someone gets to be so elevated, and is an alcoholic/drug abuser/etc., there's an incentive for everyone else in the organization to hide it, to help them cover it up, to keep the farce going, so no one outside gets to see the problems. To admit that there is a problem reflects badly on the person/group who allowed the alcoholic/drug abuser/etc. to rise to this level of power and influence.
posted by holyrood at 2:18 PM on March 9, 2019 [10 favorites]

Some artists believe that their addiction is what makes their art possible. Carlos Santana has talked about this in interviews. Some artists uses their addictions as the subject of their art like Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson.

And along the lines of some other comments above, a successful artist is an essential component of a corporate machine which delivers the art, so the machine does whatever is necessary to keep going. Managers and agents will make decisions as needed, drugs will be acquired, chauffeurs will drive, etc.

This is all for the benefit of the machine and not necessarily the artist. Many artists are swindled or just plain used, generating millions for corporations and dying destitute.

This is all from things I’ve read and not personal experience fwiw.
posted by DrumsIntheDeep at 2:20 PM on March 9, 2019 [1 favorite]

In addition to the issues of enablement, there's also the fact that they are dependent on the substances to manage their feelings so they aren't so distracted by them.

This is a good point too - many addicts are self-medicating for various mental or physical issues with their drug(s) of choice. In some cases they might be able to maintain this coping strategy indefinitely, and in other cases it may catch up to them - but either way, many addicts will often feel (or even be) more functional when they're using drugs/alcohol.
posted by showbiz_liz at 2:21 PM on March 9, 2019 [2 favorites]

The only person with addiction that I've known, a trainee addicted to prescription drugs

This is the only person with an addiction that you KNEW you've known as showbiz_liz states. There are a lot of high functioning addicts out there, especially drinkers or people managing pain (Tom Petty, Prince, two notable recent examples). I found out, years later, that friends I'd been with had been managing serious drug problems (cocaine, heroin, painkillers, not just "I like to smoke weed") for years and I'd had no idea.

Often they are people who are in somewhat privileged positions (whether that's a $$$ thing or just "I am a white dude in a position of power and people rely on me for their jobs so no one is going to tell me to drink less") and so get to keep on functioning at a less-than-optimal level for a long time. My feeling, as the daughter of an alcoholic who was also a very accomplished person in his field, is that these are people who are very high functioning people but who also have some sort of issue that they feel requires self-medication. So when they take drugs or drink, it lowers their level of ability and competence, but they are still highly competent individuals. You see this a lot with people with addictions, they are often highly talented, or creative, or charming, or manipulative or something, they have high degrees of skills (even sometimes in maladaptive directions)

But what about the daily necessities of decision-making, such as negotiating contracts, giving an informed opinion about complex business matters, hiring people, raising funds, the kind of stuff that requires a clear mind and full cognitive abilities?

You may have some misunderstandings about how various drugs affect people. "Full cognitive abilities" are really not required for signing contracts or making decisions a lot of the time as long as you are willing to manage/handle the consequences of the decisions you made. Often people will have other people who are acting as a check on the addicted person's decisions to make sure they don't lose a lot of money or kill themselves or others. For a lot of people drinking at least somewhat actually can enhance their abilities to do things like schmooze at social events. Whether that's a problem or not is a different question.

For my alcoholic parent, the alcoholism wasn't really the problem, and he never got treatment for it. He burned through two marriages and at the end of his life had alienated a lot of his family but he had enough money to keep the systems in his life going, most of them. For a lot of people who are not well-off and have to deal with addiction issues, usually it's the money issues (or related issues like "Oh hey you lost your license and you need to get to work") that will cause them to look in the mirror, say "I've got a problem" and seek treatment.
posted by jessamyn at 2:37 PM on March 9, 2019 [19 favorites]

In music (and I assume other fields but I'll stick with what I know), it's very easy for it to be something that spirals over time. Ironically, the more successful you are, the less you work. With heavy rehearsal days behind you, the energy of every day gets more and more focused on being "on" from 8-11pm. Coming down from the energy of a show is tough, and many people essentially start self medicating to help fall asleep vs all the leftover performance adrenaline. I mean, I'm playing a pretty low pressure concert tonight and I'm almost certainly going to have a glass of scotch when I get home to help me crash out, because even on an easy show my brain will have been racing at 100% for a couple hours. It's absolutely something I keep an eye on in myself and friends.

Your next gig is in 20 hours so of course you're good for another beer or whatever. Others start using more are more to handle increasingly high pressure stage fright situations -- paradoxically that's something that gets worse the better you get, since expectations ratchet higher, so maybe in addition to beta blockers you start drinking before shows. The biggest problem, obviously, is that it works, at least up to a point.
posted by range at 2:49 PM on March 9, 2019 [7 favorites]

I don't know anything about him specifically, but having spent many years in film and TV production I know that a director doesn't orchestrate the actions of the hundred(s) of people on the crew. All he has to do is communicate to one or two -- the DP, the 1st AD -- and then they can make literally everything else happen. That can be a whispered conference on set, or while the director is lying in the bed of their trailer. It can be vague as hell, but a good DP and 1st AD can still get the day's film in the can.
posted by BlahLaLa at 3:15 PM on March 9, 2019 [9 favorites]

NYTimes article: High Functioning, but Still Alcoholics

"Ms. Benton emphasized that people in positions of power are often the hardest to detect and help because they tend not to be closely supervised at work, they are assumed to be able to deal successfully with the pressures of their jobs, their high pay enables them to escape the financial consequences of excessive drinking, and they see drinking as their reward for hard work."...

"High-functioning alcoholics are highly skilled at leading double lives, Ms. Benton wrote. They appear to the outside world to be managing life well and defy the alcoholic stereotype by being fashionable, physically attractive, even elegant. They also tend to hide their excessive consumption by drinking alone or sneaking alcohol before or after a social event, and disguising or excusing the odor of alcohol on their breath."

So they are protected by their privilege and high level of skill, and often compartmentalize their usage to times they are not "on the clock". I would assume a lot of them also don't have a super busy life outside of their work and their problem behaviour.
posted by lafemma at 3:31 PM on March 9, 2019 [10 favorites]

Addiction is poorly portrayed in the media. FWIW, I guarantee you that this is not restricted to the rich and famous, and that you are surrounded by high-functioning addicts, many of them leading perfectly cromulent lives of very carefully modulated and controlled addictions.

If you were taking your kid's Ritalin with your morning coffee, maybe a little Xanax when it's making you anxious by lunch, maybe a bump of speed if your doctor will prescribe "diet pills" or coke if she won't to be able to make it cheerfully through your evening, you'd be very high functioning indeed and you'd sleep very well on an ambien washed down with a great big glass of Chardonnay. This is in fact my dream life; it works so well I literally dream about it. (Unfortunately I've already been through rehab and I kind of want my 25 year chip.)

What money gives you is the money to access multiple doctors and the ability to pay for drugs outside of an insurance plan, as well as access to better dealers and door-to-door deliveries. What fame gives you is more doctors who are not going to say no to you, and an assistant with a great dealer.
posted by DarlingBri at 3:44 PM on March 9, 2019 [13 favorites]

The one person I later found out to be a functioning alcoholic 1) had almost a pathological need to look they had it together, they could be dying on the inside but had to show an image 2) totally compartmentalized their drinking / non drinking time (again, to look like they had it together). They were not especially wealthy. Just couldn’t show weakness.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 4:13 PM on March 9, 2019 [2 favorites]

Frank Zappa wrote a song about it: Cocaine Decisions.

Lots of stuff can be fixed in post. For every Easy Rider, there's a Star Wars Christmas Special.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 5:54 PM on March 9, 2019 [1 favorite]

I've known a couple high functioning alcoholics. They weren't drunk on the job, they would generally drink alone, at night, after their work was done. Drinking was the reward for working all day and all night. Their hangovers ensured they were laser focused on their work, because it took all their concentration to just do that. The guilt they felt for drinking they tried to make up for by working more. Their work addiction and drug addiction went hand in hand. They would work all day and most of the night, blow off steam by getting sauced, wake up hungover but determined to do it all over again.

That's alcohol though. I've known other high functioning people addicted to marijuana or coke who were simply stoned all the time. In those cases, it helped them to be divorced from the reality of what they were doing. Think Wolf of Wall Street where none of the stock brokers really believe in the value of what they're doing. I could see a director working that way too. A lot of the theater directors I know jobs entail either putting the fear of god into people or inspiring them to do their work. You also, like a stock broker, need project an aura of absolute confidence in your decisions. The kind of confidence sometimes a substance can easily bring you.
posted by xammerboy at 11:07 PM on March 9, 2019

In my experience, the high-performance (as you put it) is in-effect long before the substance abuse comes along. This allows the addiction/abuse to become neatly integrated into their lives and processes.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:49 AM on March 10, 2019 [3 favorites]

Response by poster: Great answers from all, thanks!
posted by elgilito at 2:33 PM on March 10, 2019 [1 favorite]