Understanding Addiction
An addiction is a micro personality that has been encouraged to grow stronger by repetitive use of hyper stimulation. Circuits in your brain in the region that is being reinforced by dopaminergic bursts end up developing a strong micro personality with its own cognitive function capable of taking up a large percentage of your personality, hijacking your brain, treating you as a puppet while the addiction is the puppeteer.
The brains reward system naturally rewards healthy behaviour, like exercise, healthy eating, socializing, and more.
From repetition and reward, your brain develops micro personalities to carry out micro routines. These personalities grow over use. For example: You like eating a peanut butter and jam sandwich, a personality is developed for obtaining your goal of a peanut butter and jam sandwich.
When you take an addictive substance, or hyper stimulate your brain in general (like porn use), your brain associates the actions you took to get your fix with behaviour that deserves to be rewarded.
Your brains reward system confuses your actions with good behaviour because you artificially rewarded it for the wrong thing.
If taking a drug, drinking alcohol, or porn consumption are all easy to do a question arises.
“Why would I need to partake in healthy gratification which takes effort when I can get even more powerful feelings of gratification by doing something way easier?”
As you can see, the monument to the absolute becomes about getting your fix.
Your subconscious and addiction do whatever they can to manipulate you into getting your fix.
Your behavior then becomes determined by the addiction, which means you lose control of yourself.
The addict might beat themselves up for being so weak-willed, but what they often don’t realize is they have to help the addictions circuits decompose so it isn’t so strong that it makes them think they are weak-willed.
How do you help the circuits decompose?
You deny your cravings what they want.
A very basic understanding of memory is:
The neuron the memory exists in is like a needle in a haystack. The more familiar its location, the easier it is to find. Associating more with its location creates a bread crumb trail.
Now with addiction, your brain becomes really familiar with finding the addiction needle in the haystack.
Things that happen local to getting your fix (Local — Happens immediately before) trigger stronger cravings than things that are distal (Distal — Happens farther away in the chain of events). Everything in the chain of events becomes associated with getting your fix.
For example, you have coffee every morning before doing cocaine. Now every time you have coffee you crave cocaine.
So if you want to help your addictive circuits decompose, you have to deny cravings what they want in every context.
That can be difficult, but it’s still possible.
A highly effective way to get rid of addiction is mild personality conversion. It’s like the untangling of the entanglement addiction has with your survival instincts.
How Addiction Manipulates
Addictions manipulate the addict and the people around them. A few ways addiction manipulates is through:
Entwining itself with survival instincts (Creating emotional delusions)
Suppressing thoughts irrelevant to drug use
Disregarding consequence’s
Mitigations
Gas lighting
When the addiction and survival instincts are entwined, your subconscious views addictive substances just as essential as food, air, and water. After a while without the substance, your body simulates dying. It’s an extremely painful experience which manipulates you into doing the drug so you can feel relief.
Since the micro personality grows in the brain, it has the capability to disrupt thoughts. Any irrelevant thoughts get suppressed. This includes not being able to see the potential consequences beyond getting your fix.
Drugs, like alcohol, which reduce anxiety, also reduce your ability to care about threat. This is a downside because it stops you from caring about the dangers of speeding while intoxicated. Your aggression rises when you are under the influence of alcohol. You are more likely to do aggressive things without caring about the consequences that are a danger to you.
There are also different forms of aggression you can learn about.
An addict abuses substances despite harmful consequences. Their brain mitigates the seriousness of consequences. Mitigation is used in manipulation to convince you to do something. For example: When someone says “Want to join me for a quick 30 minutes” Quick is the mitigation. No 30 minutes is quick
If you catch the manipulative tricks of addiction, you have an advantage over it, and you’ll want all the advantage you can get.
Gas lighting is another trick that it uses. When completely valid concerns are exaggerated as overreacting or being sensitive, the credibility of the concerns diminish.
“I haven’t been able to stop myself. I must be weak willed.” — Misidentification of the problem to exaggerate the situation so that you can keep doing drugs under the belief you are weak willed. It implies you learned helplessness against your cravings. The belief enforces hopelessness.
When the seed of hopelessness is planted, you figure there is no way of gaining control over yourself.
Taking to heart a philosophy about finding ways to be accountable for everything that happens to you means you find ways to create solutions to things that you make your problem.
What adapting a philosophy of accountability does to you when you are in a hopeless place is it reduces how hopeless you feel by you knowing there are things you can do about your problems. You are tougher than you think.
What if you have trouble taking action?
There are many ways of taking accountability. For example if you believe “I am shit” and a belief can be defined as an unquestioned command, then if you question your belief you will have a response.
The belief diminishes over questioning it and comparing it to the truth.
Overcoming addiction
There are numerous methods for overcoming addiction. A few of them include:
Acknowledging the problem
Tracking yourself (Incremental improvement)
Help Groups
Other supports and services:
Self-help
Harm reduction
Counselling
Alcohol and other drug education
Medications
Withdrawal management
stress or anger management
grief and trauma
Finding something more important than your addiction (Ex. finding a job and going back to school)
healthy eating
accessing safe, affordable housing
getting social assistance or disability benefits
managing money and budgeting
developing parenting skills
Mild personality conversion (Introduce healthy behaviours)
Dopamine detoxes (Learning delayed gratification)
Research
I’ll talk about 3.
1. Acknowledging the problem
CAGE questions help find problems.
Have you ever tried to cut down on your substance use?
Have you ever felt angry or annoyed by someone else’s comments about your substance use?
Have you ever used substances as an eye-opener (have you used first thing in the morning?)
Most people are addicted to something. You feel completely normal when you’re addicted to something. A little trick the mind plays. A false sense of sanity. If you are likely to return to substance use when you try to quit, the odds are the substance has more control over you than you know.
The first step to solving a problem is to acknowledge it’s a problem.
Addictions use mitigations to conceal their severity. They also suppress any non-related thoughts to prevent you from thinking clearly. Just like putting blinders on a horse.
You want the horse to go where you want it to go without it noticing something that could interfere with its path. The addiction is the rider, making sure you have blinders on so you are more easily focused on getting your fix, and you are the horse, focusing on what the addiction wants you to do. Luckily horses without blinders know how to disrupt where they are headed.
2. Tracking yourself (Incremental improvement)
By creating a chart where you can track your progress over the course of a month, not a week, you can improve. Aim to do less in general. As long as you are doing less consistently by the end of the month, you’re good.
Avoid aiming for a strict number.
If you aim to do a strict number of a substance, when you do miss the mark you’ll feel negative emotion. If you used to cure yourself of negative emotion in the past by using substances, then the odds of you relapsing increase when you miss the mark.
You want to make a tracking system which reduces the amount of negative emotion when you use it.
There will be times you slide back, there will be times you do really well. There is no reason to feel like a failure when you believe in incremental improvement. Improvement isn’t linear.
Whenever you do go to use a substance, a trick for prevention is to say out loud “Bad habit” or “Stop”
Your mind is like an animal that listens. You are most vulnerable when your guard is down. Raising your guard prevents addiction.
3. Help Groups
Turning to help groups is a very effective way to treat addiction because you get to speak to people. Speaking to people helps regulate thoughts. When your thoughts are regulated it allows you to think clearly.
Clear thinking goes a long way.
Communicating to other people in a civilized manner forces you to be self-aware because the people you are speaking to are regulating you, not judging you.
In order to communicate you need to think clearly so you can be understood. Understanding is like the gateway into the answers and questions that hide in the unknown. When you speak you don’t know what to expect. People do what they will with your words, and in groups the reply is directed to be useful.
It’s a pretty good deal when you go to speak and the outcome is something that helps regulate your life.
Conclusion
An addiction is a micro personality that entwines itself with the survival instincts of the brain. It has its needs and wants, and it wants its fix. You can help this personality decompose by not using or thinking about using. If you are going to improve, there’s a list of things you can do to help yourself.
References (Further Reading)
Mental Illness & Addiction Index | CAMH
Depression and Substance Abuse — Addiction Center
The Connection Between Anxiety and Addiction (renewallodge.com)
Forensic aspects of drug-induced violence — PubMed (nih.gov)
7 Benefits of Professional Treatment for Alcoholism and Drug Abuse (renewallodge.com)
Alcohol Intervention: Why You May Need to Stage One and How to Go About It (renewallodge.com)
Common Ways People with Addiction Manipulate Others | Gateway Foundation
Jordan Peterson — What Makes Overcoming Addiction So Difficult? — YouTube
