Addiction

Physical or emotional dependency on a substance, person, or experience which is not actually necessary for survival. Withholding it causes emotional or physical distress. Usage tends to escalate over time, but cravings will also fade away if the thing is withheld for long enough.

When talking about addiction, people tend to focus on substances like nicotine, alcohol, cocaine, and heroin. This is because they have obvious effects on behaviour and emotions, and they act on the brain in a way that creates deep dependency and terrible withdrawal symptoms when they are withheld.

However, many people become addicted to experiences which don’t introduce new chemicals, but which stimulate the brain to endogenously produce its own chemicals, most notably dopamine. Gambling, sex, and doom-scrolling are the experiences most strongly associated with addiction, but many runners and athletes also speak of being “addicted” to their favourite sports because of the endorphin and dopamine rush they get both during and after.

Selectivity

What’s interesting is that most people struggling with addiction seem to have specific things they are attracted to, and others they have an easier time resisting. In other words, very few people have a truly “addictive personality” in which they become addicted to everything at once.

Some people love cocaine, but hate alcohol, and some people become totally dependent on “non-addictive” marijuana, but seem to be resistant to “extremely addictive” tobacco. Not all gamblers are sex addicts, and not all sex addicts have problems with drugs. A lot of food addicts couple their over-eating with binge-watching TV and movies, but don’t necessarily have issues with video games like League of Legends or World of Warcaft.

Basically, there seems to be some kind of preference or selection happening within the individual person. To me, this suggests that there has to be more going on with addiction than just dopamine.

So, how does addiction work, actually?

Cigarettes are a good example. The addicting component in tobacco is nicotine, and it is well-established that regularly ingesting nicotine alters our neuronal structure so that our brains don’t function as well without it in our system.

This is the source of the withdrawal and cravings that people feel: Your brain thinks it’s dying. But neurological changes which create this feeling don’t happen immediately with your first cigarette; you feel the nicotine head-rush right away, but it requires regular use for our brains to become dependent on the drug.

Which is interesting because cigarettes are gross. Very few people enjoy their very first cigarette. Most become light-headed and nauseous, and almost nobody likes the taste or smell until the addiction has kicked in and they have “acquired the taste.”

So if tobacco is disgusting and you don’t get addicted to the first cigarette you smoke, why and how do people ever get addicted to it?

Experience and Emotion

For me it’s all in the fact that the cigarettes don’t smoke themselves.

We can explain the first cigarette by way of ignorance and the natural curiosity to dispel that ignorance through trial-and-error. Basically, you just want to try it to find out why everybody says it’s so terrible.

The second cigarette, however, is a decision the person makes to do something they already know they don’t like and are disgusted by. Why?

There are a all kinds of reasons, but the two most important are experience and emotion.

Experientially, nicotine is a stimulant, meaning that it gives you a boost of energy and accelerates cognitive processing. In other words, it makes you feel confident, happy, and smart. This effect is very appealing if you struggle with self-esteem or if your work/school is mentally demanding and you’re having a hard time keeping up. Many academics, writers, philosophers, and lawyers use tobacco/nicotine for exactly this purpose, it makes you feel smart and confident in situations with very high expectations.

Emotionally, smoking is still seen by many as being cool, sexy, and sophisticated. The larger culture has shifted away from this to some extent, but if you’re feeling insecure and you want to get in with the cool/bad/sexy/rebellious kids who smoke, naturally you start smoking too.

So, the eventual addiction is because of the nicotine, but you become addicted because you want to smoke.

Similar things can be said about heroin, porn, coffee, cookies/ice-cream, cutting, and every other experience and substance we build rigid, emotion-regulating habits around. We don’t want to be addicted, but we do want the feeling that the addictive substance gives us. And often we want the feeling so badly, that we’re willing to put up with all kinds of terrible side effects, some of which quite literally destroy our lives.

Another way of saying this is that we stay addicted because of dopamine, but we become addicted because we feel too weak or afraid to say no.

Feelings

People become addicted to porn because they’re lonely and masturbation makes them feel better. People become addicted to cocaine because they want to feel confident and have a good time. People become addicted to ritalin and adderall because they’re worried they’re not smart enough to keep up at work or school.

They aren’t addicted to it beforehand, and so it has to be something more than dopamine and dependency that makes them start in the first place.

Quitting brings up a similar problem. Former cigarette smokers and alcohol drinkers experience cravings for years after the actual physical dependency has worn off. There is definitely a dopamine connection here through conditioning and association, but it’s more than just the dopamine system crying for activation.

What former addicts of all stripes talk about is no longer withdrawal symptoms, but a deep longing for the feeling that a cigarette or a glass of wine or a shot of heroin once gave them. For myself, red wine is directly associated with a warm and fuzzy feeling of safety and security which I still occasionally crave even after six or seven years sober.

The unifying feature of all addictions is that the substance or experience makes you feel better. “Better” can mean all kinds of things: cozy, smart, powerful, sexy, capable, and so on.

However, “better” is a compensation for something you feel like you are missing, or that is broken within you. It doesn’t mean introducing a new good feeling, it means getting rid of an old bad feeling. Alcohol takes away your shyness, cocaine takes away your difficulty with words, MDMA takes away your sexual inhibitions, adderall takes away the feeling that you aren’t smart enough.

Finding The Why

This is how we explain the selectivity problem. In psycho-dynamic terms, the substance/experience you are most likely to become addicted to is the one that best resolves your deepest emotional problem without the discomfort and pain of facing it directly. It seems to clear away the block that stops you from just being who you are, and so you get the effect without the effort.

Another way of saying this is that your preferred substance/experience is the tool you use to compensate for the places where you believe you are broken. And this is what makes quitting so difficult. By taking away the thing you rely on, you are opening the door to emotional pain and suffering that goes much deeper than a hangover and some withdrawal symptoms.

More than Just Quitting

Unfortunately, there is no cheat code for self-esteem and ego-strength. And the more you rely on your addiction, the worse it gets, and the more you pay for it over time.

This is the really hard part of addiction, and it’s the part that gets left out when we focus too intently on the dopamine explanation.

People who aren’t emotionally burnt out are less likely to doom-scroll, and people with high ego-strength might love the experience of orgasm, but they don’t become dependent on it for their happiness.

From this perspective, the state of our emotional health is far more important to successfully quitting an addiction than simply giving up the substance. Quitting smoking might make you feel more insecure and unlovable because of your withdrawal symptoms, but if you’ve spent some time building up your self-esteem those feelings are less powerful, and so quitting becomes easier. The same is true with every addiction.

It would be naive to say that quitting anything is ever easy or simple, but it’s amazing how much easier and simpler it does become when you spend some time building up your ego-strength and hanging out with people who don’t rely on addictions for their self-esteem.

This is also not to demonise or call weak/inferior those people who do struggle with addictions. We get sucked into a dependency cycle that we probably didn’t know we were getting into. And even if we did get the “don’t do drugs” lecture, as most of us do, it’s impossible to understand how difficult it is to get out of until you’re in it.