Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction

by Maia Szalavitz

research suggests that having an intention to do something only predicts engaging in the desired behavior about 33% of the time, even for people without drug problems. Learning a new behavior typically takes time.

I had three emotional states in detox: depression, euphoria, and boredom.

what once was an almost insignificant elevation in aptitude has become an enormous advantage

All three pathways really involve the same fundamental problem: a difficulty with self-regulation.

You feel compelled to repeat it, even when you are utterly sure that it will not help.

The problem isn’t the existence of activities and substances that offer escape; it’s the need for relief and the learned pattern of seeking it that matters.

Children’s stories, films, and TV shows also tend to have blunt moral lessons

without a label, children may come up with their own ideas about “what’s wrong” with them—because it is plain from how other people react that something is.

it can also make them feel relief that there are other people like them, that they aren’t uniquely bad, and that there are ways that social skills can be taught.

One 2007 study of nearly 400 seventh graders in New York City found that those who saw intelligence as malleable tended to have improvement in their math grades in junior high—whereas those who saw it as unchangeable plateaued.

because they haven’t learned that lack of drugs is the source of their symptoms.

but if it were the real problem, addiction could be cured simply by being forced to wait out withdrawal.

no one ever claims to be the peer who does the pressuring. Every addict is, instead, always the “victim” of this pressure that, apparently, springs from nowhere.)

contrary to popular ideas about “executive stress” and heart attacks felling the boss, it’s generally far less healthy—and far more stressful—on the bottom.

just 6% of tenth graders who were never bullied ranked in the bottom 10% for their age in both mental and physical health, 45% of those who were bullied in fifth grade and were still being bullied had the worst health as tenth graders.

some degree of adolescent risk taking seems to be a necessary part of normal human development.

Parkinson’s patients who are “frozen” may be physically capable of moving, but they don’t seem to have the chemical capacity to want to do so.

Berridge and Robinson’s work suggests that only one type of pleasure gets elevated

Anything you can associate with achieving a drug high, you will.