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Addiction as Learning:

— Addiction (and almost every human behaviour) is a learning process. When you repeat an addictive behaviour that helps you to regulate your emotions, e.g., alcohol, you’re reinforcing a neural network in your brain and building synaptic patterns. What wires together, fires together.

— In this case, negative emotion & alcohol start to form a network in your brain. The more you repeat the behaviour of drinking when you experience negative emotion, the stronger this connection becomes.

— The brain operates on a “use it or lose it” principle. The networks we don’t use get “pruned” in the same way that a gardener prunes unused plants or weeds in a garden.

— As increasing amounts of attention are devoted to the addictive substance or behaviour, the network becomes stronger and takes up more “real estate” in your brain. Other networks that are given less attention become weaker because of synaptic pruning.

— This means that your brain becomes highly focused on one thing (the addiction) at the expense of everything else (relationships, health, spirituality, etc.). As the neuroscientist Andrew Huberman says: “Addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure.”

The Neuroscience

— Emotional parts of the brain are involved in the learning and addictive process particularly an area known as the ventral striatum which is part of the basal ganglia.

— Evolutionarily speaking, this is “old” and found in most animals. It’s responsible for motivating behaviour, seeking resources, sex, and safety. It’s primitive but powerful in motivating us to pursue goals. It’s the circuit responsible for initiating action and

— It also assigns value to things. Dopamine is the neuromodulator that fuels the attractiveness of rewards and makes things seem valuable to us. So as you move towards your goals (or an addiction), you get a dopamine reward, which sparks further motivation. You also get a release of dopamine when you reach the reward particularly if it exceeds your expectations.

— The ventral striatum develops emotional incentives and gives us emotional urges to pursue goals. It’s also responsible for compulsive behaviours.

— Another important brain area to think about in addiction is the prefrontal cortex (PFC). This is responsible for making decisions, planning for the future, and exercising self control.

— It can be helpful to think of your PFC like a muscle. The more you exercise it, e.g., by making decisions, the stronger it gets. Conversely, when you stop making decisions and stop exercising self control, it atrophies and becomes weaker.

— When addictions take hold, communication between the ventral striatum and the prefrontal cortex decreases. This means that if you just do what you feel like doing all of the time—without exercising your PFC, this older, emotional part of your brain (the ventral striatum), is given “free reign” and starts to run the show.

— Research shows that the PFC loses synaptic density when a person is addicted. So the longer you are addicted, the more grey matter your brain loses.

— However, it’s not all doom and gloom. According to the learning model, the process of recovery is essentially about leveraging neuroplasticity to build new neural pathways, gradually reducing the salience of the addictive network, strengthening health promoting networks, and increasing the synaptic density of the prefrontal cortex.

— In addition to helping us understand how the addictive process takes hold, the learning model also shows the way out. Through this lens, recovery is essentially a process of neuroplasticity, in which the addictive network is weakened, other, more health promoting networks are strengthened, and the synaptic density of the PFC increases.

Book recommendation: https://amzn.to/3LwMxxq



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