Why do addicts want higher and higher doses of a drug, even if it’s ruining their lives?
Why do people spend endlessly on gambling only even though it saps their financial resources?
Why do people that are addicted to junk food even though it’s fattening them up?
When it comes to how addiction works, drug addicts are not so different from those who get addicted to seemingly less harmful behaviors like food addiction.
We like to think of drug addicts as those who’ve deviated from ‘normal’ behavior, but the truth is we’ve all engaged in that seemingly abnormal behavior at least once in our life.
How addiction works
Without going much into the neurological details, I’ll briefly explain what happens in the brain once we get addicted to some substance or activity. For the sake of simplicity, let’s assume it’s a drug.
Every time you hear about addiction, you’ll invariably hear the name ‘dopamine’. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that performs many functions in the brain, the most significant and famous ones being ‘learning about rewards’ and giving us that pleasurable feeling.1
When a person takes a drug that stimulates the release of dopamine, he feels extreme pleasure and is motivated to take the drug again to feel the same high.
Next time he takes the drug, the level of excitement and pleasure isn’t usually the same as the previous time. This is because indulging in addictive behaviors makes our brain dopamine resistant- a sort of desensitization.
What that means is the more we indulge in addictive behaviors, the harder it becomes for our brain to release dopamine, except when we take higher doses of a drug. The same amount of dopamine that was released by, say 5 shots of a drug the previous time is now released by taking 10 shots.
So an addict becomes motivated to take the drug again and again in higher quantities to experience the same level of pleasure as the previous time.
This dopamine resistance phenomenon not only happens with drug addiction but with other types of addictive behaviors as well because the neurology of addiction is more or less the same.
One of the reasons why binge eaters and compulsive masturbators can’t seem to get enough and stop their behavior is because of this decrease in dopamine production.
When their dopamine levels decrease, they find other normal life activities less enjoyable and non-exciting, even if they liked doing them before.
In other words, addictive behavior makes us crave only addictive behavior, and we find everything else boring, dull, and colorless, thanks to our brain’s reduced ability to release the neurotransmitter.
It’s never too late
The brain has an amazing capacity to change itself in response to the changes in behavior that we incorporate in ourselves. Known as neuroplasticity2, the implication for addiction is that addiction is essentially a skill that the brain can unlearn.
The basic idea is this- if we consciously change our behavior, then our brain structure also changes in a way that supports or promotes that behavior.
This means that even if you’ve developed significant dopamine resistance due to your past addictive behaviors, you can always recover if choose to.
For some, it may take days, and for others, weeks or even months, depending on how long they’ve been addicted or their genetic predisposition before the brain reverts back to its normal level of dopamine-releasing mechanism.
If you’re an addict and you give up your addictive behaviors now, you’ll already have started on the path of restoring your brain settings back to default, and you’ll gradually start enjoying other life activities that you loved before your addiction took over your life.
The longer you hold on to your addiction, the harder will it be for you to recover.
References
- Volkow, N. D., Fowler, J. S., & Wang, G. J. (2002). Role of dopamine in drug reinforcement and addiction in humans: results from imaging studies. Behavioural pharmacology, 13(5-6), 355-366.
- Madsen, H., Brown, R., & Lawrence, A. (2012). Neuroplasticity in addiction: cellular and transcriptional perspectives. Frontiers in molecular neuroscience, 5, 99.