by Hayley Steele



Lately, I’ve been working to understand my additions. Booze, candy bars, coffee, ice cream, pot — I been a slave to each of these substances in recent years.

As for my “addictive-style,” I’m a stress-grabber. When I get stressed out, I reach for a substance — without even thinking about it — and once it’s in my hand, I just compulsively smoke or swallow it. It all happens so fast, I’m barely aware of what’s happened.

Sure, these substances are supposedly harmless (and I thank my lucky stars I haven’t had to deal with “hard” drugs!) but these “harmless” substances still screw up my ability to think and feel for about a day. They debilitate me and hinder my ability to develop my personality. And when I ingest these things day after day, my experience of being alive starts to shrink.

So, this winter I got hooked on the weirdest thing…

(drum roll, please)

…fennel seeds.

That’s right, fennel seeds: those tangy, bitter little pods that can be obtained cheaply at any health food store.

I’d chew the seeds and let their savory zing overwhelm my senses for a minute, then spit them out like chewing tobacco. I’ve also started chewing whole cloves and cardamom pods. But fennel (Oh, fennel!) is what has carried me through those tough, stressful moments when I really just needed to… reach for something.

The cool thing about chewing fennel seeds was that (unlike all the other substances listed above) it didn’t debilitate me. The “fennel zing” lasted a minute or two, and then I could go back to my life.

“How cleaver I am,” I thought. “I’ve gotten myself emotionally hooked on a non-addictive substance.”

But then, this spring, I went on a road trip and left my fennel at home. To my shock, after a few days I was crawling out of my skin for fennel seeds.

Fennel is just a kitchen spice, right? There’s nothing “physically addictive” in it…. So what was going on?

I soon learned that a scientific study released in April 2011 shows that food and drug addiction have a neurological link: when a food-addicted person is exposed to a milkshake, the same parts of the brain are activated as when an alcohol-addicted person is exposed to booze. Food addicts even experience a reduced activation of the brain regions responsible for inhibitions after drinking a milkshake! [3a]



What this means is that it doesn’t matter what the substance is: the body can become physically addicted to anything.

Many people believe that they are “hard-wired” for addiction, that they were born with magic little receptors in their brain that respond to booze, cigarettes, or whatever substances they are addicted to. But recent research has shown that it is so much more complicated than that.

As explored by cognitive theorists like Alva Noe, the brain is actually an incredibly flexible thing. It is constantly reshaping itself to fit the way you interact with your environment. We aren’t born hard-wired for anything: we hard-wire ourselves through our behavior. The more we do something, the more our brains re-map themselves to fit that behavior.

One of the most compelling scientific experiments to show this was when a group of researchers at MIT operated on a bunch of newborn ferrets, hooking their eyes up to the parts of their brains normally used for hearing. You’d think that the ferrets would learn to “hear with their eyes,” right? But instead, the ferret’s auditory brains rewired themselves to see. [3b]

Just as the ferrets’ auditory brains rewired themselves to receive sight, parts of my brain rewired themselves to respond to fennel seeds.

As scientists continue to study addiction, I believe they are going to find that any action or substance can become an “addictive behavior,” triggering parts of the brain that have been trained to respond to a substance in a pleasurable way.

– – –

The other day, my friend Evan said, “You know what I think addiction really is?”

“What?” I asked.

“I think it’s when you’re reaching out for something you can’t have, so you grab something else.”

Evan had a point. And I’m sure Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalytic theorist, would have agreed with him.

Much of Lacan’s work focuses on how we use “signifiers” to replace the unattainable objects of our desire, chasing after these things to distract ourselves from our inevitable incompleteness.

If we are to ever curb our “reaching habits,” we must learn to accept the things that we can never have. We must learn to bare our feelings of incompleteness.

– – – – –

Three years ago, my cousin died. After he was gone, I found myself reaching out for him all the time. I would grab my phone and start to call him. Or look for him on the street. Or start to think of something I wanted to say to him.

The rational side of me knew he was never coming back, but the habit-oriented side of me kept making room for him in my activities. My brain (and spirit) still expected my cousin to be part of my daily life.

Grief is the process of letting go of the habits connected to something that is no longer there.

When we move to a new city, when an old computer dies, or when a romance ends, we need to let ourselves grieve a little.

Grieving is a mind-altering ritual that allows us to transition away from habits that cannot be physically expressed anymore.

But in our frenzied lifestyles embedded in this age of Late Capitalism [3c], we rarely get the time to grieve. Our emotions must be pushed aside, packed in.

At the time my cousin died, I was trying to get in to grad school, while in the process of moving to a new city, applying for apartments, and job-hunting.

Sure, I seriously freaked out when he died. But I didn’t get the time to actually grieve — to emotionally work through the fact that he wasn’t coming back — so I kept reaching out for him. And when reaching for him become too painful, I began to reach for other things…

I would consume and consume — boxes of ice cream, bottles of wine, loaded pipes — as if that stuff could fill the emptiness left by my cousin. It became a viscous cycle of consuming to the point of feeling sick, but never feeling satisfied and consuming again.

Now that I’m on fennel seeds, I’ve had the mental capacity to start facing my problems and work through my grief. It’s been a slow process, but I’m proud to say that — as I learn to bare the emptiness left by my cousin — my addictive habits are stating to fade away.

I’d like to say that I’ve found the “solution” to addiction — that everyone will get better if they replace their addictive behaviors with non-debilitating activities, while building the strength to bear the weight of their incompleteness.

But it is dangerous to talk about addiction in universal terms. No two cases of addictive behavior are ever the same. And if we reduce all addiction to the same thing, we lose touch with the unique personal obstacles that must be confronted on a individual level.

I think that switching to a non-debilitating substance (like fennel seeds) can help. And I think self-observation can be a great way to uncover the emotional core that underlies addictive behavior. And I think that sharing or writing about the experience can help (please feel free to share your personal story of addiction in the comments section below).

But ultimately, overcoming addiction is a unique, personal journey that each of us must take on our own.

– – – – –

Anti-copyright 2011. Steal these ideas.

