Battling Monsters is not a recovery program. It does not have a finish line. It does not promise you will beat anything. The name is not a metaphor for triumph. It is a description of what you do every single day when you live with addiction, trauma, or the aftermath of incarceration: you battle. You do not win. You manage.

That is the framework. That is the whole thing. And if that sounds simple, it is because the truth usually is.

"You don't beat the monster. You manage it. Every day you show up, you gain a little ground. Every day you don't, you give some back."

Where It Came From

Battling Monsters was built from lived experience, not clinical theory. Jamie Leibert spent his twenties deep in meth addiction. He was arrested. He served 4 years in federal prison, including 6 months in solitary confinement. He got out. He built a multi-million dollar business. He lost it. He rebuilt.

During and after all of that, he traveled to and flew wingsuits in more than 80 countries as Captain Manicorn. He BASE jumped. He climbed. He did the most dangerous things he could find. Not as escapism. As medicine. Because movement, physical, extreme, demanding movement, was the only thing that consistently reset his brain in a way therapy had not.

Battling Monsters is what he built from that understanding. It is now a program of Just Care More, Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. More than a half million people across 80+ countries have encountered it.

What It Actually Is

At its core, Battling Monsters is a daily management practice. Five minutes. Every day. Not when you feel ready. Not when the conditions are right. Every day, including the ones where you do not want to.

The practice has four principles:

Show up. The hardest part is not what you do when you get there. It is showing up at all. Showing up on days when the monster feels bigger than you is the practice.

Struggle. Do not run from the hard thing. The monster does not get smaller when you avoid it. It gets bigger in the dark. Struggle is not failure. Struggle is the work.

Suck less. You do not need to be good. You do not need to feel better. You just need to suck slightly less than yesterday. That is the goal. Not transformation. Not cure. Incremental, repeatable improvement.

Repeat. This is not a program with a graduation ceremony. You repeat it. You repeat it when it works and you repeat it when it does not. The repetition is the point.

Why Adventure Matters

The adventure component of Battling Monsters is not an add-on. It is not motivational decoration. Adventure, extreme physical challenge, does something specific to the human brain that sitting in a chair and talking about your problems does not. It forces presence. It demands that you exist entirely in the current moment. There is no room for the past or the future when you are making a life-or-death decision 1,000 feet off the ground.

For people managing addiction, trauma, and mental illness, that enforced presence is not just relief. It is practice. Practice at being here. Practice at controlling what you can control. Practice at existing outside of the story your brain tells about who you are.

You do not need to BASE jump to use Battling Monsters. You need to find your version of the thing that makes you show up fully. For some people it is running. For others it is surfing, or jiu-jitsu, or climbing, or cold-water swimming. The specific activity is less important than the commitment: show up, do something hard, do it again tomorrow.

Who It Is For

Battling Monsters is for people who are not looking for a cure. It is for people who already know there is no cure, who have been to therapy, tried the programs, done the steps, and who need a daily framework that meets them where they actually are, not where a treatment model thinks they should be.

It is for people in active recovery from addiction. People rebuilding life after incarceration. People managing PTSD. People supporting someone who is doing any of those things. People who feel like the system has run out of ideas for them.

It is not for people looking for an easy answer. There is no easy answer. Battling Monsters does not pretend otherwise.

"The program for people the other programs missed."

That is the simplest way to say it. If you are still here and still fighting, this is for you.

Start the daily practice at justcaremore.org/battling-monsters →