The Psychology of Addiction - Why It Can Be Difficult To Change Habit Pattern

I'm not sure addiction is exactly the right word for this blog title, but neither am I sure there's a more succinct single word. Let's start by defining addiction a little bit. The most succinct definition I can think of is "self-defeating habit pattern". If that is true it would be as incorrect to say "I'm addicted to healthy foods" as it would be to say "I'm addicted to breathing". Habit patterns that reinforce health are not addictions, and habit patterns that reduce health are. And when we say health lets's assume we are speaking about both types of health, body and mind. Which we know overlap so much as to arguably be one and the same.

These days there's a lot of conceptual grey area around the topics of what is healthy and what is not. No one is making the claim that "alcoholism is healthy behavior", but it can still be a very difficult habit pattern to change. We know how difficult patterns known to be self-defeating can be to change, so what about the areas that are not so clear, that are actively debated by society at large?

I'm also going to diverge slightly from common definitions of addiction at this point to assert that addiction is more of an emotional problem than a physical one. We do feel physically addicted to coffee or cigarettes, but what I have noticed quitting both more than once is sometimes it's easy and fast and sometimes it's difficult, painful, and protracted. It's in the times it was easy I began to realize the problem is primarily emotional. What I have discovered is when I was "ready" to quit, the physical addiction part of it was really not as big a deal as I had been making it.

I'm going to diverge still further from common understanding about addiction to assert that we unconsciously believe that our addictive patterns are "good" for us.

So what does it mean to unconsciously believe something? We cannot unconsciously "think" something because thinking is conscious activity. To understand that thinking is always and only conscious activity is the beginning of really understanding "the unconscious". The unconscious is potentially a complex discussion, for the purposes of blog and brevity I'll try to be succinct.

To understand that the root of addiction lies in the unconscious, and further that we do not have direct access to the unconscious, is the beginning of understanding why addiction can be so difficult to overcome.

What is "in" the unconscious then, if not thoughts? Primarily instinct, those forces that we now have come to understand "drive" 90% of our behavior. Let me give a few brief examples of how instinct can drive addiction. We come out of the womb with two overwhelming impulses, first, to breathe, and second, to suckle mother's breast. Sound a little bit like smoking? What, we may speculate, were the impacts on a generation that was bottle fed some bullshit "scientific" formula (found later to be deficient)? Um, were we angry? Did we have a problem trusting authority?

True, not all addictive pattern is orally based, like shopping for example. But we do call it "consuming", and we are all identified in post industrial culture as "consumers"...right?

So when we smoke we are "feeding" ourselves in a way that tickles deep unconscious associations with the earliest survival activity of our lives. It's a way to "feed" ourselves 20x a day. And the unconscious association is it's good for us.

We can know intellectually, consciously, the reverse is in fact true, but that doesn't make a whit of difference on the unconscious level. It is however a type of control mechanism over the unconscious.

Many folks are more fortunate, and do not have unhealthy and healthy "fused" in their unconscious to a pronounced degree. Good love em, they are blessed and can show the way...if they clearly understand the problems "in the way".

Anyway, this is probably the primary problem with addiction, and the reason it can be so difficult to change. But wait, there's more. In addition to the "early association" problem there is the cultural reinforcement problem.

This problem is twofold: on the surface level it's a kind of wishful thinking, where we culturally say things to ourselves like "red wine is good for you, coffee is good for you". These are the grey areas that are rife with "scientific" debate. Scientific may be too generous a term here, speculative may be more accurate, but you get my drift.

And cultural reinforcement has much deeper roots in the unconscious, and so are consequently harder to "see" and become aware of. This is what we might think of as "the importance of belonging", without which we are quite literally dead.

Instincts are all about survival, and were formed by evolutionary adaptation to environment and sources of food hundreds of thousands and even hundreds of millions of years ago. Today, post industrial revolution, we have many many confounding factors for our instincts to be snagged upon. And many many (too many!) of these (addictive) confounders are marketed as "good for us", and take advantage of our strongest drives that "live" in the unconscious, that we cannot access directly as "thoughts".

But I'm digressing a bit, I want to make a few more points about the power of belonging, without which we are "dead". As mentioned instincts are all about survival, and belonging is as deep and powerful an instinct as any. It's how battered children remain "in love" with the offending parent, instinctually they "know" without which they will die, as they cannot yet "feed themselves". As adults we have as deep a need to "join" our immediate (adjacent) society, without which we are "dead". That society may be far from perfect, manifesting all kinds of counterproductive behavior patterns, but we "need" it to survive, unconsciously, instinctively, and to some actual level also. The line between instinct and actual in the post industrial world is a pretty blurry one.

For a moment let's take as a hypothetical and as a thought experiment the supposition that established scientific fact, debate over, case closed, has shown that animal products are harmful and cause a variety of diseases. And further that plant based diets reverse all of these diseases quickly and efficiently, and further, sustain excellent health and vitality going forward, without the need for medications or even supplements. Let's even suppose for a moment that science has also discovered that medications and supplements cause a net reduction in health and vitality, and we have been doing "health" all wrong for as long as we can remember.

You know, this might not be a hypothetical any longer. It may in fact be true. Something to consider? I believe it is.