Unbroken Brain Quotes

“Being bold and adventurous and being sad and cautious seem like opposite personality types. However, these two paths to addiction are actually not mutually exclusive. The third way involves having both kinds of traits, where people alternatively fear and desire novelty and behavior swings from being impulsive and rash to being compulsive, fear driven, and stuck in rigid patterns. This is where some of the contradictions that have long confounded the study of addiction come into play—namely, some aspects seem precisely planned out, while others are obviously related to lack of restraint. My own story spirals around this paradoxical situation: I was driven enough to excel academically and fundamentally scared of change and of other people—yet I was also reckless enough to sell cocaine and shoot heroin.”
― Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction

“I felt utterly stripped of safety and love. And so, what tormented me most as I shook through August of 1988 wasn’t the nausea and chills but the recurring fear that I’d never have lasting comfort or joy again.”
― Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction

“if punishment worked to fight addiction, the condition itself couldn’t exist.”
― Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction

“addictive behavior is often a search for safety rather than an attempt to rebel or a selfish turn inward”
― Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction

“good decisions aren’t always made for healthy reasons.”
― Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction

“Whatever the evolutionary precursors of drug use are, a permanently “drug-free” human culture has yet to be discovered. Like music, language, art, and tool use, the pursuit of altered states of consciousness is a human universal. With access to few alternatives, Siberian shamans imbibe reindeer and human urine to maximize the psychedelic yield of Amanita muscaria mushrooms (the metabolite that is excreted may be stronger than the substance initially ingested); on nearly the opposite side of the world, New Zealanders party with untested “research chemicals” synthesized by Chinese chemists. Drug use spans time and culture. It is a rare human who has never taken a drug to alter her mood; statistically, it is non-users who are abnormal. Indeed, today, around two thirds of Americans over 12 have had at least one drink in the last year, and 1 in 5 are current smokers. (In the 1940s and ’50s, a whopping 67% of men smoked.) Among people ages 21 to 25, 60% have taken an illegal drug at least once—overwhelmingly marijuana—and 20% have taken one in the past month. Moreover, around half of us could suffer from physical withdrawal symptoms if denied our daily coffee. While Americans are relatively prodigious drug users—topping the charts in the use of many substances—we are far from alone in our psychoactive predilections.”
― Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction

“If kids see traits and character as fixed, they may develop a self-defeating perspective; if they see change as possible and achievable, this is less likely. Often, what actually happens in children’s lives is less important than how those children interpret their experience. These interpretations, made at such a young age that they cannot truly be said to be chosen, can promote resilience or increase vulnerability. They are, like addiction, learned and shaped by the process of development.”
― Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction

“The very same stimulus that is sometimes painfully aversive—loud music, for example—can actually be enjoyed when it is chosen and the volume can be controlled or when sensory experience is not being felt as overwhelming.”
― Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction

“While, like anything else that is learned, addiction may get more engrained with time, people actually have increased odds of recovery as they age, not reduced chances.”
― Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction

“Our brains are embodied—much of the problem with the debate over addiction and psychiatry more generally is a refusal to accept this and our ongoing need to see “physical,” “neurological,” and “psychological” as completely distinct.”
― Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction

“Drug taking starts as a rational, conscious choice and through repetition becomes an automatic, unconsciously motivated behavior. Addicted”
― Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction

“I figured scraps were better than nothing at all. I failed to realize that the same thing that distinguishes addiction from passionate interest also divides unhealthy love from that which is the highest experience of humanity. That is, 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,”
― Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction

“Without oxytocin, mice cannot tell friends or family from strangers—and mothers do not learn to nurture their young.”
― Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction

“addiction is a learned relationship between the timing and pattern of the exposure to substances or other potentially addictive experiences and a person’s predispositions, cultural and physical environment, and social and emotional needs.”
― Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction

“There is often a struggle, and sometimes, even more interestingly, a collusion between the powers of pathology and creation. —OLIVER SACKS”
― Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction

“I can remember many, many times driving down to the projects telling myself ‘You don’t want to do this! You don’t want to do this!’ But I’d do it anyway.” “[M]y body’s saying no and my mind’s saying no, but … we started all over again. I didn’t need it, I didn’t want it … it’s like some kind of molecular thing in my cells would go for it, you know. I felt like a fucking robot.” “I used to smoke some [cocaine] that wasn’t good, feel sick and want some more. That’s totally fucking crazy. The point that is best learned from the whole experience is the craziness, the completely illogical short-circuiting of the normal human mental process that takes place in obsessive addiction.”
― Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction

“However, repeating the experiments and expanding on them led the researchers to a different conclusion. While dopamine is involved in motivation or the pleasures of the hunt, that’s not the only way we can feel good. Dopamine is not necessary, it seems, for enjoying sweetness, comfort, satiation, and calmness—research suggests that these pleasures are more strongly linked to the brain’s natural opioids, or heroin-like chemicals, instead of to dopamine. And this has implications for the broader understanding of addiction.”
― Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction

“In addiction, this means that because being addicted escalates wanting more than liking, the drug experience gets deeply carved into your memory. Anything you can associate with achieving a drug high, you will. As a result, when you try to quit, everything from a spoon (you could use it to prepare drugs) to a street (this is where the dealer lives!) to stress (when I feel like this, I need drugs) can come to drive craving. Desire fuels learning, whether it is normal learning or the pathological “overlearning” that occurs in addiction. You learn what interests you with ease because desire motivates. In contrast, it’s far more difficult to learn something you don’t want to understand or care to comprehend. Berridge and Robinson’s research also helps resolve another paradox: If dopamine signifies pleasure, then the brain should become less and less responsive to it as tolerance to a drug develops. But while tolerance clearly does occur, the opposite result is also seen in the brain. As I took cocaine, paranoia began to set in at lower and lower doses—not higher ones. The summer of 1988, it also took increasingly less drug to achieve the state of heart-pounding anxiety and mortal dread that I experienced so frequently. Neuroscientist Marc Lewis described his experience of this effect in his addiction memoir this way: “I kept pumping [cocaine] into my vein, this non-sterile solution, until my reeling consciousness, nausea, racing heart, and bloated capillaries told me that death was near. Later that night, I begged myself to stop.… But the urge would not relent.”
― Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction

“Needle exchange and harm reduction don’t say: Go on and kill yourself with drugs, no one cares. They tell people—both drug users and non-users—that everyone deserves life and dignity and that being addicted shouldn’t be a sentence of death or exile from humanity. To some of the most downtrodden and powerless people, these programs say: I believe in your ability to protect yourself and others. I believe you can do something that matters. You don’t need to be forced to make good choices. This teaches an extraordinarily valuable lesson.”
― Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction

“To his surprise, rather than reducing the odds that the rodents would press the lever, this variable reinforcement actually made them respond more. It also made them persist in trying for far longer periods of time after he’d stopped providing rewards. Later studies found that the most effective schedule of reinforcement to hook animals on a behavior pattern was the most unpredictable: if pigeons, for example, get rewarded only 50% of the time for doing a task (basically, completely randomly), they will perform the required behavior more frequently and will be more resistant to changing it than if they are always rewarded or are rewarded in a more predictable way. Humans behave quite similarly.”
― Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction

“Secular alternatives like SMART Recovery, LifeRing Secular Recovery, Women for Sobriety, and, for those who seek to moderate their drinking, Moderation Management should be given equal weight.”
― Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction

“Dependence” itself is pathologized, when, as we’ve seen, dependence isn’t the real problem in addiction: compulsive and destructive behavior is. (And indeed, the DSM-5, published in 2013, recognizes this, replacing “dependence” with “moderate to severe substance use disorder.”)”
― Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction

“During infancy, oxytocin focuses your brain on remembering the characteristics of the people who raise you and linking these cues with stress relief, even if your caregivers are inconsistent or cruel. Consequently,”
― Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction

“As noted earlier, having a highly affectionate and responsive mother turns on different suites of genes, compared to being raised indifferently. Not surprisingly, neglect and trauma make social connection more difficult. These changes, too, are mediated by oxytocin, vasopressin, opioids, and dopamine.”
― Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction

“Stanton Peele and Archie Brodsky published the groundbreaking Love and Addiction”
― Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction

“That is, love is real when it expands and enhances your life—and troubling and problematic when it contracts or impairs it.”
― Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction

“Fear and threat also literally shunt energy away from the areas of the brain involved in self-control and abstract reasoning—the exact opposite of what you want when you are trying to teach someone new ways of thinking and acting.”
― Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction

“addiction is the psychiatric disorder with the highest odds of recovery, not”
― Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction

“Indeed, today, more people than ever before see themselves as addicted or recovering from substance addiction: 1 in 10 American adults—more than 23 million people—said they’d kicked some type of drug or alcohol addiction in their lifetime, in a large national survey conducted in 2012. At least another 23 million currently suffer from some type of substance use disorder. That doesn’t even count the millions who consider themselves addicted to or recovering from behaviors like sex, gambling, or online activities—nor does it include food-related disorders. With the 2013 declaration by the American Medical Association that obesity, like addiction, is a disease, up to one in three Americans may now qualify due to their body weight.”
― Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction

“In Berridge and Robinson’s view, pleasure is divided into “wanting” (hunt) and “liking” (feast). As we’ll see, the distinction is especially important in addiction because each type has a different influence on learning. Like many discoveries in science, this one was made when the researchers were trying to understand why an experiment didn’t work out as they’d predicted. They’d used a chemical that selectively destroys dopamine cells in the nucleus accumbens of rats to eliminate their “pleasure centers.” Not surprisingly, after these key dopamine cells were eliminated, the rodents became so amotivated that if the researchers hadn’t manually fed them, they would have starved to death. “They wouldn’t want to eat. They wouldn’t want to drink,” Berridge says. “We’d have to artificially nurse them and artificially feed them, the way you would in a hospital intensive care ward.” The rats behaved as though they had extremely severe Parkinson’s, which they essentially did. Destroying their dopamine cells had taken away their motivation, leaving them with no desire or will to do anything at all, even what was necessary for survival.”
― Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction