Status Updates From Unbroken Brain: A Revolutio...

If you haven’t learned that a drug “fixes” you, you cannot be addicted to it, even if your body is dependent on it. The mind/body distinction is a false one: psychological needs and desires drive addiction and these change with learning and development. Physical dependence does make quitting drugs harder—but if it were the real problem, addiction could be cured simply by being forced to wait out withdrawal.

Rather than making things better, it starts to make them worse. Unfortunately, by this time, habitual responses are already deeply engrained and well learned; and even if you know the ritual you perform to try to make you less anxious will actually make you more so, you don’t believe it. You feel compelled to repeat it, even when you are utterly sure that it will not help.

These changes affect the structures around the DNA that determine how it will be read. Some of these “reading instructions” can be passed down along with the genes—although these changes only seem to affect two generations and then disappear. What this means, trauma your parents or even grandparents experienced—and even their diets and their chemical exposures—may potentially affect your brain development

Substance use is just one of many ways that people learn to cope. If you learn that the world is not a safe and stable place—and that others are unreliable—when you are young, it can shape the trajectory of your emotional learning and the way you cope for the rest of your life.

while impulsiveness involves too little behavioral inhibition and a failure to prevent reckless behavior, obsession and compulsiveness is a problem with too much inhibition, a difficulty with getting out of a rut, rather than with preventing actions from being initiated. Further, inability to modulate fear and other emotions also involves a reduced capacity to self-regulate.

Our social environment and our reactions to it teach us how to be, and whether the world around us suits our personalities and inclinations or clashes with them helps determine our direction. In the context of addiction, the learning that occurs during preadolescence either enhances or diminishes the emotional pain we feel and our sense of either connection or isolation.

the meaning of pain profoundly affects how it is felt, and the more worry and fear involved, the worse the suffering. Pain that is viewed as life threatening literally feels more intense and agonizing than pain with a known, nondangerous origin or time frame;