This changeable and resilient quality is called neuroplasticity. All learning processes begin here.
For example, when you participate in new behavior, practice new skills, or explore new thoughts more and more neural pathways form. Each time you repeat the same things, those pathways become stronger. Their memory imprints deep in your consciousness.
In fact, your brain actually begins rewiring itself to invite you to use these new pathways again and again. And, over time, habits develop.
Clearly, neuroplasticity opens up infinite possibilities for learning and habit-forming – including unhealthy habits, like an addiction. But it also holds the key to regaining control.
Let’s take a closer look at what role the neuroplasticity of your brain plays in addiction and recovery.
How Does Addiction Alter the Brain?
Certain behaviors stimulate your brain to release a flood of the feel-good hormone dopamine. In addition to feeling highly rewarding, this discharge of dopamine also encourages your brain to remember what you did to make you feel this good.
At first, repeatedly indulging in the stimulating behavior, at the urging of your brain, simply forms a habit. However, the more often you perform it, the lower the level of dopamine release becomes. Your tolerance increases, and you end up having to go to more and more extremes to experience the same gratifying effects.
Eventually, repeated dopamine overstimulation can make your tolerance so high that the behavior no longer gives you any pleasure at all. It merely helps you prevent withdrawal symptoms. And yet, all the while, your neural pathways urge you to repeat the behavior when they are presented with specific incentives. Addiction fully emerges.
Has the neuroplasticity of your brain become the culprit in your addiction? In a sense, yes. How?
A major change has actually taken place in the synaptic connections within your neural network – your brain has remapped itself. Certain cells have been wired together so rigidly that your brain now is trained to invariably perform a particular behavior to the exclusion of everything else.
More than that, because the reward pathway created is so closely linked to your emotion and judgment areas, your reasoning ability becomes completely distorted. Your brain now thinks that the addictive behavior is necessary for your survival. Neuroplasticity has ceased.
Sadly, that learned automatic response and the impaired judgment make it seem that the addictive behavior is almost impossible to change. But is it?
Why Recovery Is Actually Possible
While physical behavior certainly can alter your brain and lead to addiction, you can also change its structure simply through thoughts. The fact is that unused neural pathways weaken and eventually die out. In time, your brain favors more popular alternatives instead, which makes recovery possible.
Yes, addiction can actually be unlearned. How?
When countering addiction, you can harness the principals of your brain’s neuroplasticity that helped create the problem. But first, you must completely abandon the pathways that feed addictive behavior. And second, you must encourage your brain to form new pathways for healthier habits.
This requires that you completely change your behavior and thinking. You must set goals, learn to recognize triggers for addictive behavior, make a conscious decision to not take that action, and instead seek the reward from a healthy behavior. Repeating these steps will strengthen the newly created pathways and weaken the old ones that enable your addiction. With time and determination, new healthy habits form.
In essence, your brain recovers and regains its neuroplasticity. It begins making major changes once again.
With help and support, you will have to direct and continue that ongoing neural development. Not haphazardly, but with intense focus.
