Help for Addiction Video
In this ‘Help for Addiction’ video, Mark Tyrrell begins with a traditional story that illuminates the addictive state and its consequences. He then goes on to look at the idea that addiction is a disease, and how that theory compares with the psychological aspects of addiction. He points out the human tendency to addict during times of stress and talks about what this tells us about the nature of addiction and what can be done to break free of the addictive state.
Mark continues by discussing the specific addiction of smoking and how psychological aspects are key parts of the smoking process, and so essential to deal with if you are trying to quit smoking. This tendency for human beings to experience addictive states may seem strange in the context of adaptive evolved behaviour, but its usefulness becomes clear when Mark illustrates its place in the history of human development.
He finishes the video by talking about how addictions can ‘falsely’ meet our primal emotional needs and why therefore we need to look at meeting our needs more healthfully when attempting to break any addictive state.
Transcript of Addiction Help video
When I think about addictions, I often think of the old story about the monkey.
This monkey was obsessed with a certain type of nut that grew in the jungle; and as life continued for this monkey, it became more and more focused on just acquiring more and more of these nuts to eat. One day, the monkey went into a clearing in the jungle and saw the most delicious, beautiful-looking nut inside a glass container. So the monkey put its hand desperately into the container to grab the nut. But now, of course, what it found was that as it clenched its hand (or its paw) around the nut in the glass container, it couldn’t keep the nut and free itself from the glass container, because the glass container had a thin neck. Just as the monkey was wrestling with itself, trying to free itself and have the nut at the same time, of course a hunter caught the monkey.
Now, it’s often said that addictions are diseases, and there may be some genetic basis to some kinds of addictive behaviours; but there’s a much larger element of psychological compulsion. For example, we’ve all known people who, during times of hardship in their life, are much more likely to turn to drinking too much alcohol or eating too much of the wrong kinds of stuff or smoking more than normal and so forth. It’s not their genetics which is doing this; it’s the fact that they’re having a particularly hard time in their life that’s making them very vulnerable to addiction.
This gives us a clue as to how addictions work. When we don’t meet the emotional needs that we have through the way we’re living, through our lifestyle, we’re much more likely to addict to anything, be it smoking, drinking, illicit drugs, prescription drugs, pornography…exercise, even! We’re much more likely to over-focus on something that can produce what we call ‘diminishing returns’, make life harder for us.
There was an amazing piece of research done back in the 1970s. Thousands of young men in Vietnam - American soldiers - became addicted to heroin, and the authorities became very concerned about what would happen to American society when these tens of thousands of young men returned from Southeast Asia addicted to heroin. But what they found was - and this flew in the face of current thinking about addiction - was that once the young men returned home and became integrated with their friends and family again, then only a tiny proportion of them continued using heroin. The rest just stopped, just like that.
So there’s this huge element of association and emotional needs to consider when we’re looking at addiction. We find this with smokers, as well. I might treat a 60-a-day smoker and I’ll ask them, “Okay, when do you find that you don’t need to smoke, that it’s not an issue?” And they’ll often tell me times that have no association with smoking, such as a long-haul flight (because no one’s allowed to smoke on a flight); it’s not even an issue, they don’t even want a cigarette particularly, until they come in to land and they know that pretty soon they can smoke again. So, association is key.
With a smoker, I might say, “Okay, now, you’re telling me, ‘What do I do with my hands if I stop smoking?’” And I might say, “Well, if you were crazy enough to click your fingers a thousand times a day for twenty years - every time you had a cup of tea, you clicked your fingers; every time you had an alcoholic drink, you’d click your fingers; every time you have a break at work, you click your fingers - pretty soon it’s going to feel weird to have that cup of tea, that alcoholic drink, or that break at work without clicking your fingers, purely because the brain works like that, through association. This isn’t a genetic predisposition to clicking your fingers, it’s purely learning.”
So we might ask, “Well, why does nature leave human beings vulnerable to becoming addicted to things?” There’s a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens which produces ‘feel good’ feelings whenever we learn something new and we master something. So, for example, if you’re learning to play the piano, then once you’ve mastered a piece of music, you have a dopamine release; it’s a wonderful feeling and it makes you want to practice more, do the piano more. But pretty soon, that one piano piece doesn’t do it for you anymore, because you’ve done it - you’ve mastered it. So you need more and more piano playing to give you the same buzz.
And this happens with addiction. It’s called ‘habituation’. Eventually, one cigarette isn’t enough or one alcoholic drink isn’t enough anymore; you need more and more to give you the same buzz. And eventually, you need more and more just to make you feel normal. So that’s a trap, as well. Addictions are as much a trap as the glass container was for the monkey.
The way out of addiction is to begin to break those automatic associations so people don’t automatically associate feeling sad with having an alcoholic drink or having a break at work with having a cigarette anymore. They can feel sad and deal with those sad feelings without undermining their health, or they can have that break at work without having a cigarette. So breaking these old associations is one aspect of curing addictions.
The other aspect is to meet emotional needs in ways which are actually beneficial and healthy for the person and actually meet the needs. So if the person is lonely, rather than drinking themselves into oblivion, they problem-solve that loneliness by meeting people and getting out and actually meeting the needs of the drive to connect to other people. And once we really help somebody to meet their emotional needs so they don’t feel lonely, so they feel a sense of purpose in life, so they feel connected to people around them, so their physical needs are taken care of, then addictions usually lift very, very fast.
blog comments powered by Disqus
