Or are you trying to help someone do so?
Either way, you’ve probably very quickly come to understand how difficult it is. In fact, the Latin root of the word “addiction” means “enslaved by” or “bound to.” How true and fitting those expressions are!
An addict is enslaved or shackled to their cravings, wanting the object of their addiction—drugs, alcohol, sex, gambling, shopping, eating, etc—more than anything else, even if they don’t like its effect on their life as a whole. Eventually, they lose complete control over its use and yet continue using despite negative consequences.
That’s the great paradox of addiction.
How can you possibly find the power and courage to confront this menacing opponent?
Start with equipping yourself with knowledge.
What You Need to Know About Your Brain
Your brain is your body’s control center. It regulates all your basic bodily functions. It enables you to make sense of and reply to what you experience. Your brain forms your thoughts, allows you to feel emotions, and shapes your behaviors.
You’re brain records all feelings of pleasure the same way, no matter the source. Taking a psychoactive drug, drinking a bottle of wine, having a sexual encounter, winning money, buying a pair of high-priced shoes, or eating a delicious meal—they may all release the neurotransmitter: dopamine, the feel-good hormone related to your brain’s reward center.
What You Need to Know About Reward Pathways
Activated at normal levels, dopamine regulates your emotions, motivation, and feelings of pleasure as rewards to natural, life-sustaining behaviors, such as eating. This system teaches your brain to associate those activities with pleasure and create reward pathways. It ensures that you will automatically do the same things, again and again, to keep you alive.
However, overstimulation of this system results in such powerful effects that your brain urges you to keep repeating the behavior even if it’s not good for you. In essence, your brain is learning to abuse certain things to an unhealthy degree. Yet, that alone does not lead to addiction.
It’s not as simple as (1) the more pleasurable things you do,(2) the more dopamine gets released, (3) the quicker you become addicted to an activity. The situation is much more complicated. Your reward pathways actually respond to the differences between your expectations of the activity and the actual payoff.
In other words, this means dopamine release depends on how much a pleasurable activity meets your expectations, not on how rewarding it actually was. And the likelihood it becomes addictive is directly linked to (1) how quickly the dopamine is released, (2) how intense the release is, and (3) how reliable it becomes. Expectations created through repeated use speed up this process.
What You Need to Know About Addiction
Over time, receiving pleasure fades into the background. The thrill wears off and it’s all about filling the expectation of being able to perform the addictive behavior.
Eventually, your brain receptors become so overwhelmed that your brain responds by reducing the release of dopamine. As a result, dopamine will impact your brain’s reward center very little and addictive activity won’t bring you any more pleasure. That effect will ultimately spread to other aspects in your life.
This is the point at which you feel dull and lifeless. Depression often sets in as you simply become unable to find joy in anything that once gave you pleasure. Despite that, though, you’ll continue seeking out the addictive behavior more strongly just to obtain some “high” from the dopamine release. Instead, your body has developed a tolerance and become stuck in the vicious cycle of addiction.
Despite all of this, overcoming addiction isn’t impossible. Still, know the recovery process will require commitment. There is no quick fix. Addiction is a chronic disease. It changes your brain structure and its function.
Recovery takes more than willpower. Don’t beat yourself up or put it off. Do seek help. Recovery requires long-term strategies that include self-care, medication, and psychotherapy.
