The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober

by Catherine Gray

‘The more you drink to soothe social anxiety, the more that “drinking is the solution” gets encoded into the habit centre of the brain,’ explains Korb. ‘And the more appealing it becomes in future. Eventually becoming something that is no longer pleasurable, and is just a compulsion.

‘The social habits that accompany addiction, like lying to yourself and others, mesh so very easily with the self-soothing (or self-feeding) habits that make up the addiction itself,’ says Marc Lewis.

Marc Lewis says that ‘dopamine is the fuel of desire, not fun’ and that ‘wanting something is not the same as liking something’.

‘Over time, only the user’s substance of choice is capable of triggering major dopamine release (or reception) in the brain regions responsible for motivation and meaning,’ says Marc Lewis. ‘Other goals such as work, self-care and healthy relationships generally fade into insignificance. Particularly if they interfere with the addictive goal.’

Imagine your brain as a ship. Marc Lewis calls the pre-frontal cortex (PFC) ‘the bridge of the ship’. It’s crucial for self-awareness, insight, judgment, logic, building new perspectives and adjusting previous decisions. The Bridge is ideally steering your life. In alcohol dependence, the PFC loses its control. Some sources say that the PFC shrinks in addicted drinking, but Marc Lewis says ‘it’s more accurate to say there is a loss of synapses in certain areas’.

Meanwhile, deep down in the hub of the ship is the striatum. This is where addiction is generated. ‘It’s the area responsible for pursuing rewards,’ explains Marc Lewis. ‘The hub of impulse, desire, craving and automatic responses. It’s fuelled by dopamine.’

In our ship analogy, let’s make this the Addictive Engine. The fuel chugging...

With regular drinkers though, the Bridge stops being able to override the Addictive Engine. ‘The pathways between the NA and the movement control areas in the brain become stronger with regular drinking,’ says Julia Lewis. ‘The response to triggers, such as sight, smell, memories, and emotions, become virtually habitual. The pathways from the PFC to the NA become weaker. This means that the poor old PFC struggles to moderate these responses.’ In other words, the Bridge has stopped steering the ship.

Your brain literally restructures. But this takes time. ‘Which is why it’s very rare for people to get sobriety on the first try.’

Another way to think about it is thus. Drinking has become our socializing mother tongue. Learning how to socialize without drinking, is like learning a whole new language, say Spanish. And having to resist using our mother tongue.

But then, they discovered something surprising. ‘Grey matter volume (synaptic density) in these regions (or closely related regions) continued to increase, beyond the normal baseline level, the level recorded for people who’ve never been addicted.’