How to Help Your Brain Overcome Addiction So You Can Start Living the Life You’ve Always Wanted
Let’s talk about addiction, the road to recovery and relapse, and what’s happening in your brain when this happens. Illustrations provided.
If there’s one thing that you could be addicted to right now, what would that be?
Throughout my 38 years of existence, I’ve experienced getting addicted to some choices, behaviors, activities, or coping mechanisms that are both constructive and destructive.
I got addicted to riding my bicycle, which started at the age of 8. I did it whenever possible throughout my schoolgirl life, even at midday.
The wind on my face whenever I ride my bike fast was exhilarating. It made me feel happy after a crazy school day.
That coping mechanism for the simple school day stresses that became a habit is at least constructive.
During puberty, I got addicted to writing poems and playing the guitar. I loved it whenever friends borrowed my notebook to scan some poems I wrote and pick the ones that would look great on their love letters for their crushes.
That helped me develop my writing, so that’s still constructive.
Young adult life came, and I got addicted to praise or fame. The praise from friends and strangers for being a bassist in a band made me feel so cool.
That’s both constructive because it developed my skill in playing the guitar and the bass guitar, but also destructive because my focus shifted from my studies to making music.
I also got addicted to online games in college. Watching my character get stronger and stronger after each kill to level up and experience a new world in front of me felt amazing. That world became my escape from the pain of the real world.
This was rewarding for me back then, but it was destructive.
The real reason why I indulged in that was because I didn’t want to take a BS in Nursing in college. I didn’t want to be a nurse. But I was a coward and wasn’t confident enough to push what I wanted to do in life. So, I let others control me.
Playing online games made me feel in control. So is joining the band. At least, back then, I felt like I could still take control of some parts of my life, apart from expectations that I needed to meet.
Constructive coping mechanisms are behaviors or choices in life that lead to addictions with a benefit, which is primarily personal development.
The destructive ones are behaviors or choices in life that lead to addictions that produce more pain eventually.
One example of the latter was a type of addiction that I experienced as an adult — getting addicted to some people.
Who are these people that we can get addicted to?
People that we care so much about. People that we fell in love with. People that we wanted to please most in life. And whenever we cannot satisfy them, or our love isn’t reciprocated, it results in more pain.
But since they were the very reasons that we believed could give us pleasure at that time, we stayed. That’s addiction.
Even though we knew that the relationship was toxic, we stayed.
Other examples of addictions like this with more likely destructive outcomes are addiction to the use of harmful drugs and gambling.
There are others. You name it.
I don’t need to explain all the reasons because most people already know the effects of overindulgence in those deeds.
Honestly though. It’s still not too late.
We can replace those harmful addictions with something that would be better and beneficial for us. Some examples are writing, planning, goal setting, and fitness.
How?
Let me tell you about the role of dopamine in all the pleasures and pain we experience in this life. That will be followed by what homeostasis is, how your actions affect your brain, and how it could lead to addiction. At the end of this post, we will touch on the topic of neuroplasticity, a topic I talked about in my previous post, and how this process could help us achieve the change we would ideally want for ourselves.
What happens in our brain before addiction?
According to Dr Anna Lembke, we are presented with rewards daily. The illustration below shows video games and social media, which are only some examples.
Other examples are watching the series you love, buying books you’ll never never have time to read, shopping, or those examples I’ve mentioned above.
What happens is every dose of that substance or experience brings a feeling of reward to us. Momentary happiness. Exhilaration, Joy.
Why?
Because of dopamine release.
Dopamine is responsible for making you feel pleasure, motivated, or even satisfied.
Each dose of these rewards brings us so much pleasure because dopamine gets released in our brains.
However, did you notice something about this illustration? On the other side of the scale is pain.
According to Dr Anna Lembke, pain and pleasure are located in the same part of the brain. It’s still dopamine.
Down-regulation of dopamine happens for the brain to achieve homeostasis.
What is homeostasis?
“Homeostasis is defined as a self-regulating process by which a living organism can maintain internal stability while adjusting to changing external conditions.” — Cristina Mas-Bargues et al., in Aging, 2023
Put it this way. Homeostasis keeps the balance in our body.
Since we, humans and other living organisms, are not designed to maintain high levels of dopamine, homeostasis happens.
In this process, that same amount of force that tipped the scale to pleasure because of increased dopamine levels was also applied to tip the scale over to pain by decreasing the amount of dopamine.
Our brain’s dopamine level has to go back to the baseline. The brain has to adapt.
This is why you may feel empty after binge-watching that new season of a series we like. That’s why, after attaining that high, you feel worse.
Your brain adapts, but you feel the pain in return.
Now you have two choices.
Either you counteract this feeling, or you let it pass.
Choosing the latter could quickly restore neutrality. Your brain goes back to that same balance that you had before you experienced that first dose of pleasure.
But if you have chosen to resist the feeling and decide to do the same actions to get another dose of pleasure, that is the road to addiction, my friend.
What happens in our brain during addiction?
You become a person who aways seeks pleasure — the very definition of hedonism.
Every time you seek pleasure to counteract the pain that you’ve previously felt after the down-regulation of your brain’s dopamine levels, the brain adapts again.
Suppose this is repeated over and over, where you always choose to resist the pain and choose pleasure every time for hours every day and maintain that for weeks to months. In that case, you are training your brain to reach a new baseline — one with a higher set of dopamine levels.
Once your brain is used to these higher baseline levels, the same amount of dopamine that made you happy the first time would no longer be enough to satisfy you. You will need more stimulus and more pleasure to achieve that higher level of satisfaction that you set.
It’s like weight training at the gym. There will come a point where you will need to use higher weights because 10 lbs does not work for you anymore.
Why does relapse happen?
Since the baseline for pleasure is higher in addiction, your pain feels worse.
Every time you try to stop, you will experience withdrawal. Some signs and symptoms are the following:
Restlessness or anxiety, because you are
mentally preoccupied by your unhealthy habits or addiction. You cravefor your addiction.
Insomnia
Dysphoria. You feel like you will only feel satisfied once you succumb to your addiction
Crankiness or irritability, because everything between you and your addiction feels like they are just in your way, or they’re keeping you from feeling the only thing that makes you feel satisfaction.
With these signs and symptoms, you’ll know when you are experiencing that the scale is tipping to the side of pain.
What can we do to recover and finally heal from addiction instead of relapse?
There is always a solution.
I talked about neuroplasticity and how it can help us become a better writer, and how this process can help us become a better writer, link at the bottom of this post.
We can use neuroplasticity to turn things around.
The solution
1. When you experience the scale tipping to the side of pain, you return to the two choices. You either counteract or let it pass.
The road to recovery is to let it pass. Always.
2. Do not overindulge. According to Dr Anna Lembke, stop looking for passion. Instead, look around you and see what needs to be done.
Whether that’s the laundry, the dishes, helping out a neighbor in the garden, or opening that door for a stranger at the grocery store.
Focus on the simple things. Do what needs to be done.
This leads us to the next one.
3. Don’t be scared of getting bored. It’s okay to live a boring life.
At least try to deprive yourself of high dopamine or high rewards for 30 days. In most cases, that is enough for your brain to recover and return to its original baseline.
Mind you, like all recovering Addicts would say, you’ll feel worse before you get better. Expect that.
4. Avoid intense activities, thrill-seeking, or escapism.
The world is not just about you and what you want. It’s mostly about what you can do today.
One day at a time.
The more you do it, the more your neural pathways get strengthened, changing the structure of your brain all over again.
If you let your neural pathways get used to the new habit you are forming, more lasting rewards await.
You will have healthy dopamine levels. Therefore, simple or unexpected joys can be genuinely rewarding again.
You will also feel less and less of your cravings and less and less mental preoccupation until they’re replaced by something more constructive and beneficial to you, like good relationships, mental clarity, knowing your authentic self, and being grounded, on the road to living the life you’ve always wanted.
You will enjoy this life as it is because you are in the moment.
Your neighbor,
Wam