Addicted To Everything

Why can’t we break out negative habits?

Bad habits are an unfortunate reality of our lives. We all carry with us a series of behaviors that we could benefit from extinguishing or replacing with something else. But as we have seen over the course of our lives, simply recognizing a bad habit does not put an end to it. In 1964 the surgeon general report on smoking and health highlighted, for the first time, the consequences and negative health effects of cigarette smoking. This was the first report of its kind as it listed heavy smokers as being more than twenty times more likely than nonsmokers to develop a form of lung cancer. Since then we have been able to link cigarette smoking to more than 85% of all forms of lung cancers developed in the late 20th and 21st century.

Despite this in 2016 more than 280 billion cigarettes and cigars were sold in the United States alone.

More than 50 years after the infamous surgeon general’s report, the United States is still spending a collective $300 billion dollars per year treating smoking related illnesses.

Obviously just understanding that cigarettes are bad is not actually ending cigarette smoking. While it is true that the overall number of smokers is going down, it is going down due to current cigarette smokers dying and younger teens never starting in the first place. Unfortunately the number of people who successfully quit using tobacco products accounts for only a small percentage of the improvement rate. The fact is that people just can’t stop that bad habit of smoking.

But these unfortunate trends don’t just stop at cigarette smoking. This is only an example to help demonstrate the point that we are horribly inefficient at changing our habits to improve our lives; even if staying our lane means an early death. The answer lies in the power and cunning of addiction.

While smoking cigarettes has a direct and observable addiction response in our physiology, this type of direct consumption isn’t the only way to become addicted to certain habits. Our brains, being the malleable and incredibly responsive things that they are, have the ability to create neurological pathways that coincide with any repeated patterns. This is the idea behind neuroplasticity.

Neuroplasticity is defined as: the ability of the brain to form and reorganize synaptic connections, especially in response to learning and experience. In layman’s terms this means that they brain can rearrange its physical structure, its synaptic connections, to better accommodate the fluidity and familiarity with which we perform and experience certain thoughts and actions. This is how we gradually get better at new skills. A new guitar player stumbles and chops their way through chord progressions, trying to remember what finger goes where. Yet if that same guitar player practices those chord progressions every day they would become more familiar and more efficient at playing them out. This has to do with the brain recognizing this repeated pattern of playing the guitar and arranging it’s synapses to better accommodate the electrical impulses needed to facilitate a higher level of performance.

Think of your brain as a large open field of waist high grass. The first time you do something it’s like struggling to trudge your way through this grass, stomping it down as you go. The next time you travel that same path it will be a bit easier because the beginnings of a path will have been made. The one thousandth time you travel that path it will be so worn that you would never be able to recognize that there was once grass and challenge along the way.

What does this have to do with bad habits and addictions?

Addiction plays strongly off of our dopamine and serotonin molecules. These two drugs are naturally occurring in the brain and drive what is known as our pleasure center, or our immediate satisfaction response. When you are addicted to cigarettes you get a surge of dopamine which causes the craving for smoking. Dopamine isn’t the prize, it’s the chemical that gives you the desire for the prize. After giving into that craving and smoking you become overwhelmed with serotonin. Serotonin is the prize itself, not the nicotine. Serotonin comes when we experience pleasure. This pleasure, or relief from craving, is what keeps us repeating a certain action; and it doesn’t always have to be desireable to our thinking mind. While a person can be repulsed by the idea of smoking, the pleasure center operates independent of that repulsion and drives the desire anyways.

What we don’t realize is that serotonin, the pleasure drug, is released any time we do something that we have deemed to be satisfactory. And anytime there is serotonin there will be a dopamine response to help drive you towards that serotonin rush in the future. This perpetuating wheel of impulse, desire, and satisfaction goes back to our evolutionary need for survival. Thinking back to the days when we were a species of hunters and gatherers, if we didn’t have any chemical direction, or instinct, for what was good or bad then we would have surely lived short and tragic lives. The only way we were able to survive was by avoiding things that brought pain and embracing things that brought satisfaction. This is the reason that sex feels so good, food tastes so good, and relaxation is our preferred state. These things ensured our reproduction, our nourishment, and our preservation of energy. Yet in the 21st century, when we have no real need for ongoing sex, food, and relaxation, we still have our survival instincts driving us towards those things of comfort.

The brain, specifically the mid brain, doesn’t care if what you are doing is necessary in your life, it simply knows that pleasure is good and pain is bad. It’s job is to steer you towards that pleasure. And traveling down those same habitual pathways is pleasurable, while forging new ones is not.

We know that if we want to achieve things we have never achieved before me must do things we have never done before. This almost always means shedding poor habits and bringing in better ones. We know this to be a fact, yet just like the smokers, we can’t always turn that knowing into action. Every time we overeat, sleep in, procrastinate,act out, or anything we ought to avoid we are simply giving into the dopamine and serotonin reactions to pleasure that have been enabled by our repeated patterns and habits.

Fortunately, there is a way to overpower these drugs. You can do this by utilizing your conscious mind. Your prefrontal cortex. When you feel the cravings to repeat a destructive pattern you need to remind yourself that you are being seduced by chemical reactions you didn’t ask for. If you are able to break this loop and begin forging new synaptic pathways then before long you will be able to reap the pleasure of a positive habit in which you chose instead of a negative habit with which you were enslaved.

The foundation for changing any habit is the understanding of our desires, and the foresight to know abstinence from immediate pleasure will bring greater long term rewards. When your understanding and your long term goals are greater than your need for a hit of serotonin you will be able to do the things you choose before all else.