Addiction is defined by the National Institute on Drug Abuse as a chronic, relapsing brain disease characterized by compulsive drug-seeking and use, despite harmful consequences.
That sounds accurate, and I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s wrong. However, the problem with this definition is that it merely states the fact. It doesn’t help us understand what’s truly happening or how to move forward – aside from simply saying, “don’t compulsively use anymore.”
But if it’s compulsive, then, by definition, you can’t control it. And that’s just not the case. Instead, let’s explore a deeper understanding of what’s specifically happening in any given moment of addiction.
So What is Our Definition of Addiction?
In the Self Recovery Program, I define addiction as:
“A trained pattern of seeking pleasure to escape intolerable painful emotion.”
I’ll say it again: addiction is when we’ve been trained to seek pleasure to escape intolerable painful emotion. Said another way: You’ve been trained so that you can’t stop a pleasure that hurts more than it helps.
So now, if we want to change our addictive patterns, we have a way forward and can think about how to change our relationship to pleasures. And most importantly, we can begin to understand and think about the painful emotion driving us that way.
Where Does Addiction Begin?
We’re all wired for addiction because we actually need the addictive part of our brains in order to live.
We all have an addiction circuit in our brain. Everyone. Think about this: how does anyone know what feels good? How does anyone get motivation to do anything at all? Those very basic functions of any animal require some sort of operating system, and that’s the addiction circuit.
Let’s start to talk about how addiction begins. If all our brains are wired for addiction so that we have craving, motivation, and reward for all kinds of things, then why do some of us suffer from addiction while others don’t?
Good research shows that addiction doesn’t begin with your first drink or substance. It begins much earlier, often as a small child, or even in the womb. The three key characteristics of children that are well shown to lead to addiction are:
- Lack of belonging
- Poor impulse control
- Emotional distress.
And don’t think for a second that those characteristics come from nowhere. Our environment and upbringing influence how we experience life, self-soothe, and regulate emotions.
So What Does Childhood Typically Look Like in Addiction?
The child’s parents are often cold, pressuring, unable to help the child through distress, or fail to protect the child from their fears (or outright abusive).
Parents often don’t notice their efforts, and are more concerned about their child’s performance than enjoying the experience. Rather than helping the child work through setbacks, they pressure them and set expectations without showing them how to do it. On top of that, the child’s parents criticize them a lot and reject their more personal ideas.
What all that means is that nothing is really pleasant or fun. That child’s experience leads them to feel like life is unpleasant, hard, and their efforts aren’t recognized. The child learns that they can only be appreciated or belong if they please other people, so things become empty and meaningless. The child sees that they’re on their own and doesn’t feel very wanted.
The Lack of Belonging, Poor Impulse Control, and Emotionally Distressing Environment
They also often don’t have enough quality, close relationships where they feel love, connection, and compassion. This leads to a lack of belonging that can be felt with friends and at school too, since they assume that’s how all relationships will go. That can lead to distrust and a hard time getting close to people.
They also usually witness short tempers and emotional stress, and don’t learn to sit with feelings or talk about them, nor to tolerate stress. That might look like yelling, or one of the parents crying or breaking down easily. The child’s parents usually get even more upset if they try to talk about feelings, so the child learns not to express themselves. And if the child doesn’t have any good role models to show them how to handle stress, all they know is how to be impulsive and emotionally labile.
As that child grows up, they develop all the characteristics that cause addiction. The child now feels like they’re alone because nobody really connects with them or helps them in a caring and compassionate way. They have poor impulse control after years of watching role models who are impulsive, get frustrated easily, or can’t handle stress. And they are constantly emotionally distressed or even depressed because life is just painful and hard. They feel like they have to meet all kinds of expectations and get punished if they don’t. They never learned to have fun or enjoy the journey of life.
If this Fits you at all, It’s No Wonder You Suffer from Addiction
But many people go through just some of these experiences and still develop addiction. In fact, I’ve never treated a patient for addiction who didn’t experience at least some of these factors. This isn’t about criticizing your parents or role models. We’re not discussing this to place blame on anyone. We’re simply bringing it up to help you understand your story.
We all have our own perceptions. The people who helped shape you might have seen themselves as caring and may have tried to raise you well, but what’s most important is how you perceived and felt those experiences. It doesn’t matter what a referee would say about whether you were raised well or not; what matters is how YOU were left feeling.
A common example of a confusing scenario for patients is when they were brought up in a family that provides for everything. Although it might appear they have no reason to turn to addiction, if they were always shielded from challenges, they grow up unequipped to tolerate distress. This is the most innocent pathway to addiction.
You’ll hinder your progress if you feel so guilty that you’re afraid to acknowledge what might have contributed to your issues. No matter how much of this you went through, you’ll still need to work on these key characteristics to finally break your addictive patterns.
Reflection on the Beginning of Your Addiction
Here are a few questions to help you reflect on your environment and experiences:
- Was I raised in a way that only rewarded me for my achievements, looks, or results?
- Was I criticized if I didn’t do things a certain way?
- Did I feel like nothing was ever fun?
- Was I shown how to do things well, or was I just expected to get it right?
- Were people patient with me if I took a while to learn?
- Did I feel well-accepted and included?
- Did I have good role models who showed me how to be patient and calm, even under stress?
- Was I over protected from issues so much that I never learned to tolerate or deal with typical life setbacks?
- Were my role models quick to get angry, cry, break down, or freeze up?
- Was I appreciated for my efforts?
- If I talked about my feelings, was that OK, or did it cause even more issues?
When it Comes to Addiction, What Does All That Do to Your Brain?
A stressful upbringing like situations we described don’t just come and go. Our brain needs dopamine to feel motivation and opiates to feel warmth and comfort. Stressful childhoods actually cause the brain to have fewer opiate and dopamine receptors, making it harder for the brain to feel things like love, belonging, or motivation. So, a childhood with less nurturing, protection, and praise can disrupt the brain’s development, preventing it from producing healthy amounts of chemicals needed to feel reward, pleasure, and soothing.
An extreme example is seen with babies who are just born. When I was doing my medical training in the newborn unit of a hospital, they made sure to teach us that babies needed lamps to warm them, and they also needed to be picked up and stroked for a while. If a baby is born physically healthy but doesn’t feel the warmth of touch, guess what happens? It can literally die. Babies need to be held, stroked, and protected enough, or they will die. I try to never forget that.
Our bodies NEED warmth and love. If a baby dies without warmth and love, imagine what this does to our physical health if we live for years without ever getting enough of that. If we’re neglected, abused, or always criticized, it changes our pleasure and motivation brain circuit so it becomes harder to feel those things.
Later in life, when you become addicted to something, you start flooding your brain with dopamine. Anything that’s addictive triggers a huge increase in dopamine release, which is exactly what your brain has been craving for so many years, so it feels extra good. Patients often describe a warm feeling or a sensation like they’re being held or cared for, or like they’re wrapped in a blanket when they take a hit. It’s no wonder it’s so hard to stop.
Understanding Addictive Behaviors
Even addictive behaviors like eating, sex, and gambling cause huge surges in dopamine. But the problem is that after a while of getting dopamine from substances or addictive behaviors, your body forgets how to make it on its own. Your body’s ability to produce dopamine weakens, so you rely more on addiction to feel excited. Fortunately, the brain can relearn how to produce dopamine, but it takes time. This usually takes several months, but if you can do that, your brain will have its own reward system back.
This is one of the reasons people relapse – our brains can’t just change after a few days of being sober. Anyone who demands or expects that you stop your addiction right now, after years of addiction, doesn’t understand that this isn’t just about a bad choice you’re making. You have to let science happen and give your brain time to heal. Any small amount you can reduce your addiction by is a huge step in the right direction. It’s not all-or-nothing. Any improvement you make is helpful for rewiring.
The Current of Addiction
Now that we’ve gone through an overview of how addiction develops early on, along with a definition, let’s start looking deeper into how to think about your addiction. I’ll introduce a model that can help you understand it and break down the different parts of addiction. We need to break it down because, in this program, we’ll carefully go through each step to eliminate your addiction completely.
Remember, we’re not just going to focus on the end result of addiction. We’re going to address all the steps the mind takes before it even reaches that point. Let’s dive in.
Understanding the Full Process of Addiction
Addiction is like being caught in a very strong current, going down the path of least resistance. Whenever you feel any type of painful emotion, you get swept away by the current that leads you to pleasure at any cost. Your mind and body do everything they can to escape pain and move toward pleasure.
The river is taking you to pleasure as quickly and easily as possible, because it’s the path of least resistance. This is how addiction feels. You feel pain, then experience a craving for an escape, then seek that escape with whatever you’re addicted to, and finally reach a place of relief and numbness from a high. Over and over, again and again. We can experience this current several times an hour, even. Some people live in this current their entire lives.
You Can Try to Fight the Current
But getting free from addiction is about getting out of the river altogether. That’s what makes us human. It means fighting the path of least resistance and creating a whole new way. True freedom comes when you can find the edge of the river, crawl out, and watch it from the riverbank. The river continues to flow, but you’re beyond it, observing. That’s health. Every moment outside the current is one where you are truly alive.
Now, let’s go through each step of the current to understand how it works.
Painful Emotion: The First Step in Addiction
The first step is the experience of a painful emotion. This is the very beginning of the current – it’s where all the water in the current flows from. The painful feeling might be anxiety, panic, sadness, anger, loneliness, emptiness, boredom, or guilt. It could also be relational pain, like rejection, feeling like an outsider or outcast, or feeling undeserving – anything that’s unpleasant.
Anything that doesn’t feel good signals your body to say: Get away from this. If we revisit our definition, addiction is when we seek pleasure to escape intolerable painful emotion. This first step – feeling a painful emotion – is the core of addiction. It’s what drives all the other steps into motion.
The reason you can’t stop isn’t because you’re weak or unmotivated. It’s because escaping your pain feels like such a relief. You’re in the current. And as you can see, if you don’t address the pain – the very core of addiction – you’ll never be free from it.
Craving: The Second Step in Addiction
If you experience pain but don’t develop a craving to escape it, then addiction doesn’t form — the current stops there. It’s only when we believe that any pain is bad that we continue to the second step: craving. Pain leads directly to craving because your mind is trying to come up with any option to numb or escape it. As soon as you feel pain, your mind starts searching for a way out.
The escape might come through numbing, distracting, or chasing a euphoric high. But in some way, you’re seeking relief from that painful emotion. It’s only natural – our bodies are built to avoid discomfort. This is actually an over-adaptation.
If you were a caveman, your brain would be excellent at fleeing danger – like running from a bear – and finding safety. So it makes sense that you want to be swept away by the current, away from pain and toward pleasure. The problem is, you’ve become too good at escaping pain. Your brain pumps dopamine into your system to motivate you to end the discomfort and chase relief. It believes craving is the way out – but it’s not. Craving only strengthens and speeds up the current.
What You Crave Doesn’t Reflect How “Good” of a Person You Are
I’ve had executives who are workaholics and think they’re better than someone addicted to meth. Nope. You’re just as addicted. Just because your addiction is work or exercise doesn’t make you morally superior. You’re likely to crave whatever is accessible or normalized in your micro-environment.
When Addiction Takes Hold: The Third Step
You can see that the current has already been flowing for a while by the time it gets here. This is the point where you finally find and get what you were craving. It’s the moment when your mind believes you need the pleasure just to get by. A craving is simply a want for pleasure, but addiction is the need for it. If all you experience is pain followed by a craving, the current can stop there.
Addiction is the next step that pushes you further down the current. It’s where self-destruction begins – where you follow through with something you believe will bring relief or pleasure. You might feel like you deserve it, like nothing else works or lasts, or like it doesn’t matter because you’ve already done so much damage.
Once we’re at the point of acting on the addictive behavior, it becomes a matter of damage control. In this stage of the current, the goal is to avoid hitting the biggest rocks in the river and to get whatever help we can. It’s not the time for deep reflection or lofty goals. There are a wide range of strategies to deal with this step – like finding healthier, safer alternatives, using powerful distraction techniques, and planning for relapses with support and accountability systems in place.
Pleasure – The Final Step in Addiction
Although at first it may sound healthy to escape pain and get all the way down the current path to pleasure, it doesn’t work in modern life. It’s true that seeking pleasure is exactly what’s helpful for most animals, because animals are wired to immediately escape harmful signals like scary sounds, horrible smells, hunger, aggressive enemies, and seek pleasures like a safe environment, the security of a group, calming sounds, or good food.
But for a modern human, we can’t survive if we always live in the current, going away from pain to pleasure. Nowadays, we have too much access to things like alcohol, drugs, food, video games, and porn. It’s also too easy in modern times to do things that feel good, like staying home all day, spending money we don’t have with a credit card, or being lazy.
And not only does the current of addiction generally lead to harmful behavior or destruction, it leads to guilt and shame. And that’s a feeling that starts yet another pain, with another current to get away from the shame. So you just end up getting pushed endlessly downstream, further and further, never really living with ease or freedom. It’s a pleasure, but a FALSE pleasure.
Your task here is to go over healthy ways to build your life so that pleasure can come in ways that don’t hurt you, and so that it comes in such new and deep ways that the FALSE pleasures aren’t tempting anymore.
Overcoming Addiction: Redefining Health
I don’t give health a step because it’s not even part of the current. Health is when we live outside or above the current. When we live in the healthiest way, we do so just to be healthy. We don’t do healthy things so we can feel happy or good right away. Living in healthy ways usually brings health, but also sometimes brings pain. It’s a way of living totally separate from the current, where life isn’t just about chasing happiness.
It’s living in a way that happiness finds you.
- Emotions aren’t avoided, but seen as signals to learn from and grow wiser.
- Stress isn’t seen as something to run away from, but as a part of life that will always come.
We can learn to weather the storms of stress and tolerate it because we’re not entitled to a life without any pain. Studies show two of the best traits to have to reach maximum health are tolerance and patience. If there’s anything you can teach to a child to give them the best chance at success and peace in life, teach them tolerance and patience.
What is True Health?
True health is when we do the right things simply because they’re healthy—when we work out because it’s good for our body and mind, not just to get a six-pack or release anger. Or when we’re kind not just because we want to get something in return, but because it’s kind.
It’s when we learn so we can grow as a person, and not because we’re just trying to get a promotion or get an A. Or when we can avoid using a drug because it’s healthy, and not just because we’re afraid of the law or a consequence.
Life in the current is exhausting and a never-ending battle of trying to escape things like criticism or low self-worth but never really getting away. The pleasure we find in the current is actually the farthest thing from true pleasure.
Living in healthy ways simply because they’re healthy will elevate you to experiencing life in a way most people never do. Life becomes fun, which is very different than you might have ever experienced.
Is Addiction Your Fault?
A lot of people who are starting treatment ask me if it’s their fault. I hope that after learning the science of addiction, and how it actually develops way before you actually become addicted, you can start to believe that this isn’t your fault. Please, hear that again: it’s – not – your – fault. I don’t care how many people have told you it is and blamed you, but it’s not your fault.
I’m sure you’ve made tons of bad choices and hurt people along the way, but you have to ask yourself why you would have ever done that. You were doing it because of your own pain. You aren’t responsible for most of the sources of your pain that led to your use.
I’ll Also Say That It Is up to You to Fix It!
Nobody but you can heal you. You might think the world owes you, but only you are responsible for yourself. You’re not responsible for whatever caused your pain, but you are responsible for fixing it. If you walk on a certain path home every day, and every day some idiot runs up to you and knocks you over, that’s not your fault. It’s a bad thing that happened to you, and it’s gonna make you furious and agitated.
But it’s not that idiot’s responsibility to pick you up. The anger he caused is yours, not his. It’s your job to get up. And it’s your job to pick a different way home or press charges on him. It’s your job to adapt. You’re allowed to use help, but help is just that: help. Help isn’t something that changes your life for you. Help is just something you use to change yourself.
It’s not fair, but it’s the case. So no, addiction has never been your fault, but it’s become your problem – and your problem to fix.
Addiction Recovery: Practice, practice, practice
This is a new way of being for most people, and like any skill, it needs practice. And just like most skills, you can do it if you practice enough. No matter how low you are right now, I’m confident you can grow in huge ways.
Our Self Recovery Program addresses any type of addiction. Some of you will find it easy, and some of you will find this the biggest challenge you’ll ever face in your life.
Everything we teach is like learning to throw a ball. It’s not gonna just “click” like in the movies and you say, “Oh, I get it now,” and be healed. You might know just how to throw, and even recognize every time that you throw the wrong way, but still keep doing it that way. We only get better after hundreds of throws. Repetition after repetition. Only then can we expect to get to the point of a noticeable change.
Right now, you’re making automatic choices that are destructive. You’ll need to practice the things we go over enough that it becomes automatic to make the healthier choices… and that takes a lot of attention and work. I can’t do the magic for you; I just show you the tricks. If you do the work, you’ll get better. It’s that simple. To me, that’s magical—that we can always adapt as humans – but it’s not the magic that’s in the movies.
