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What’s the Drug in Your Life? Part II

Habits

This post is a continuation of a discussion of addictive behaviors that started in my previous article, “What’s the Drug in Your Life? Part I.”

Quitting addictive behaviors
Dealing with addictions often needs two things at once: a way to address the problem or problems that made running away attractive in the first place, and a change in habit to stop the addiction. In my case, I moved to a new place where I had a number of supportive friends around me. In this context, it became clear that playing computer games was stupid: it shut out my friends and created problems with them, and it wasn’t really necessary because with my friends around me, I wasn’t lonely. The fact that I didn’t see this in my life until my change in situation broke the pattern is disappointing, but I’m encouraged that I understood myself well enough, all those years ago, to take the step that put me in a situation where I could stop acting addictively.

I hadn’t realized it for years, but recent reflection made something obvious to me: the time when I stopped playing computer games was also the time when I started writing seriously again. After years of avoiding writing (following a year or two of earnest effort and no sales right after college), I was working hard once again, and I began to see signs of success early on in that process. It led directly to my being admitted to an exclusive writer’s workshop, getting an agent, selling my first book, and winning the Writers of the Future contest.

Putting ourselves in situations where we have more supportive people in our lives on a day to day basis makes a huge difference. This can be accomplished sometimes by moving, by making different lifestyle choices, by starting a new activity (check out the free site www.meetup.com for regular activities in your area), by participating in group therapy, or by re-energizing relationships with friends or family. A bonus of this approach is that increased time spent with supportive friends, family, and acquaintances cuts into addiction time, helping address the problem both directly and indirectly. Of course, it’s counter-productive to spend more time with people if they’re encouraging taking part in the addictive behavior; avoid that pitfall!

Counseling (my personal recommendation would usually be to work with an experienced cognitive therapist of some kind) can also help: when we identify what the problem or lack was that helped drive the addictive behavior in the first place and take steps to change that in our lives, the addiction loses a lot of its power.

 

Benefits of quitting
More benefits can come from beating an addiction than might be immediately obvious. Of course the ongoing damage the addictive behavior was doing is gone, but another major benefit is that our brains eventually return to handling dopamine in a normal way, making other activities more pleasureable. The addiction also yields time to do other things, opening up the possibility for more pleasure and improvements in our lives.

Quitting an addiction is also seen as a mark of strength and character by other people; being successful in this tends to raise our opinion of ourselves as well as other people’s opinions of us.

Finally, quitting an addiction opens up the opportunity of stepping up and facing whatever problem contributed to the addictive behavior in the first place. Is it loneliness? Fear of failure? Depression? All of these are much easier to address without an addiction in the way to complicate things.

So, while I hope your answer is “I don’t have one,” let me ask you this question: what’s the drug in your life?

Photo by absentmindedprof

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What’s the Drug in Your Life? Part I

Habits

I used to play computer games, a lot, mostly of the build-a-civilization-up-from-scratch variety–Civilization, Age of Empires, that kind of thing. I’d be annoyed when people interrupted me, even for important obligations. I might have to answer the door, go back to the computer grumbling afterwards, and then two hours later the phone would ring, and I would think “Again? Can’t I have a moment’s peace?”

Addiction to behaviors
You may have noticed how similar that behavior sounds to drug addiction–and the similarity isn’t just metaphorical. It turns out that the brain chemistry of addiction to drugs is very much like the brain chemistry of addiction to food, sex, shopping, television, computer games, and much else: the neurotransmitter dopamine activates receptors in our brains when we do the thing we’re addicted to, giving us a jolt of pleasure. There’s nothing wrong with that: the same process happens whenever we feel pleasure in anything. With addiction, though, we keep repeating the activity that gave us pleasure over and over, and this causes us to be less responsive to dopamine, which creates two problems: first, we have to do more of the addictive thing to get any pleasure out of it, and second, pleasure in other things we’re not addicted to is dampened. This can keep going and going, resulting in a situation where we take every possible opportunity to do the addictive behavior and give up on everything else in our lives.

Of course, some drugs have other chemical effects on our brains that can make addiction even worse. For instance, withdrawal from shopping can be difficult, but it doesn’t usually doesn’t involve vomiting, fever, and an inability to sleep like heroin withdrawal.

Also of course, not all shopping, eating, sex, television watching, and computer gaming is addictive behavior. The next section helps explain what addiction to a behavior looks like.

What addictive behavior does
Addictive behaviors may not start because the behavior itself is especially pleasureable. As cleverly-designed as games like Civilization are, they’re not necessarily a rollercoaster of pleasure so much as some pleasure interspersed with long periods of obsessively reacting to prompts. Like sex, shopping, eating, and television, computer gaming is something that we can lose ourselves in: almost all of our attention and awareness is caught up in improving food production in our capital city, or in comparing the stitching on one jacket compared to another, or in being passively entertained by a literally nonstop parade of television shows.

This can be a key insight for some of us: addictive behavior may not be so much about wanting the thing we’re doing too much of as about shutting out something we don’t want to face. Failure, feeling unsafe, conflict, lack of love in our lives, unfulfilling jobs–these things and many more can cause us to turn away from life and lose ourselves in running up credit cards or systematically munching through a large bag of Doritoes or playing World of Warcraft straight through the night.

Unfortunately, distracting ourselves from our problems rarely does anything to make them better, and the addiction tends to create problems of its own, damaging relationships, threatening physical and financial well-being, and otherwise pushing out things we’d need to do to make our lives better in favor of more and more of the addiction.

The second article in this series can be found here and talks about ways to overcome addictive behaviors.

Photo by DJOtaku

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