Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction

by Maia Szalavitz

This was only discovered in the 1940s, when Rene Spitz, a psychoanalyst, compared infants raised by nurses who rarely touched them in sterile hospitals to babies raised by their own mothers, who were prisoners but were allowed to keep their babies.

All of the prisoners’ children thrived—but one third of the poor babies kept in a supposedly safer hospital died, and many were profo...

Without the obsessive, physical love of parents, either biological or adoptive, infants quite literally fail to...

Research finds that loneliness can be as dangerous to health as smoking and more harmful than obesity, in fact.

Improving relational health improves health in general, for both children and adults.

love is real when it expands and enhances your life—and troubling and problematic when it contracts or impairs it.

Whether you love a person, a drug, or an intellectual interest, if it is spurring creativity, connection, and kindness, it’s not an addiction—but if it’s making you isolated, dull, and mean, it is.

obsessions can get out of hand, but love is inherently obsessive and needs to be that way to keep us bound to each other.

When you are in love, in fact, the levels of serotonin in your brain fall and are comparable to those seen in people with OCD.

labeling caring as codependence particularly pathologizes behavior that is typically associated with women. It makes us the problem for “loving too much” rather than recognizing human interdependence and normal relational needs.

Indeed, calling the official diagnosis for addiction “substance dependence,” which was the label for the condition in the editions of the DSM published during codependency’s heyday, subtly implies the same thing. “Dependence” itself is pathologized, when, as we’ve seen, dependence isn’t the real problem in addiction: compulsive and destructive behavior is.

the DSM-5, published in 2013, recognizes this, replacing “dependence” with “moderate to sever...

Healthy relationships are essential to recovery: while love isn’t always all you need, without it, few people get better. Love can’t always cure addiction—but lack of it or inability to perceive it often helps cause addiction.

Addiction and love are both deeply culturally constructed. This means not that they aren’t real but, rather, that they can’t be defined in some generic context, that they must be understood where and when they occur specifically.

The exact same type and level of drug use may be healthy for one person in one place at one time—and unhealthy for another or even for the same person in a different situation.

all attachment, of course, is molded by and requires learning.

Critically, the learning that occurs in addiction or love is distinct from the way, say, you learn a fact about history or science.

The role of oxytocin, dopamine, and opioids in wiring future cravings to past memories of our passions means that we learn love and addiction much more perma...

Part of the function of emotions themselves is to carve important experiences into memory, so learning love or addiction is visceral. These experiences aren’t just stored like other memories; the ch...

relationship with Matt, however. I now had a much more reliable source of the opioid safety and comfort that I’d sought in him; that made me need him less.

the first time I kicked the withdrawal symptoms, it really wasn’t worse than having a moderate flu—and so when I started using again, I thought it would always be that easy. Instead, it got tougher each time—both physically and mentally.

studies find that adolescents often significantly overestimate their odds of bad outcomes from activities like sex and drug use.

But even absurd overestimations like this don’t deter youth. And that’s not because they don’t consider them. Instead, there are two important factors.

First, young people do tend to weigh immediate benefits more heavily: the visible prospect of pleasure literally looms larger in their minds than anything else that might happen later.

Second, adolescents get lost in deliberation when they do consider negative consequences—and being out in the weeds d...

Interestingly, this isn’t a problem limited to teens and risk decisions; it’s a difficulty seen with any type of inexperience or lack of expertise. If you haven’t encountered a similar probl...

That’s because of the way the brain learns to process information. When you first learn any process, you have to consider what you do carefully, think through every step deliberately, and monitor yourself closely. But once you become experienced—whether with dancing, decision m...

Your brain ultimately calculates the “gist” of the data or behavior and offloads its processing to less conscious and, ironically, more emotional brain regions. This is why “overthinking” c...

Once you know what you’re doing, your expertise lies not primarily in conscious consideration, but rather in what your brain and bod...

Research on expert decision making among doctors, for example, shows that the best physicians actually consider fewer variables when they make good choices—their gut tells them what to ignore. But this “gut” has to be tra...

As a result of the learning that creates these emotional algorithms, when adults think about risk taking, they tend to automatically get a bad feeling that immediately says, “No way!” Their brains have had years of experience with making choices and can now highlight the worst potential negative c...

Emotions, in fact, are probably best described, as the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio pointed out, as decision-making alg...

The emotions we feel now are the ones that prompted our ancestors to make the decisions that increased their odds of survival and reproduction. From fear and pain to love and desire, our feelings were built to guide our actio...

These emotional algorithms, of course, are largely unconscious. But like much about the brain, they require experience for development, and those that help us...

In contrast, teens and young adults haven’t developed this rapid gut-level calculus. Instead, they “rationally” and deliberately think through the odds of success in things like playing Russian roulette, drinking Drano, or setting their hair on fire.

One fascinating study in which adolescents were asked to consider whether such absurd and dangerous acts were a good idea found that it took teens a full sixth of a second longer to say no than it did adults.

Ironically, the same kind of process is the essence of addiction. Drug taking starts as a rational, conscious choice and through repetition becomes an automatic, unconsciously motivated behavior.

Addicted people, unfortunately, seem to offload their ongoing choices about taking drugs to the now “expert” systems that handle unthinking actions, just as musicians no longer have to think about the mechanics of producing the notes they want to play.

But the unique property that addiction has as a learning disorder is that, unlike playing music or learning math, addiction changes the values that gover...

Before I was able to get enough experience to make risk judgments in an automatic and sensible way, my brain was already being influenced by another set of automatic processing algorithms built through frequent drug taking.

These changes increased my perception of the value of drug experience, while lowering the weight given to other considerations.

emotionally, it became increasingly hard to make the choices that would have maximized the odds of a productive and connected future. I c...

One economic theory of addiction, in fact, suggests that the condition can be explained almost completely by the variance in values placed on prese...

George Ainslie, this theory suggests that addictive behavior occurs when people repeatedly choose pleasure now wi...

addicted people do consistently overvalue current pleasures—and that they do so while continually underrating those that could be better in t...

Ainslie’s theory also nicely accounts for why poverty, chaos, and trauma would ...

because your own experience suggests that a positive futu...

If the world is unpredictable and people are unreliable, an available reward now is more valuable ...

In these cases, children who eat the one marshmallow in front of them rather than waiting for two later are actually making the right choice, given the env...

One study, for instance, found that when children were given the option to have one treat now or two treats later by either experimenters who had previously kept their promises or those who had not, they sensibly scarfed down the first sw...