While I think the notion of genetic predisposition and physiological bias has merit, I would say that looking at JUST the psychological aspects reveals a pretty consistent "vicious circle" pattern -- addiction involves a conditioned / habitual cycle of anxiety, craving, choice, rationalization, action, gratification, and back to anxiety again.
Having suffered from and escaped a number of different kinds of addiction myself, I've become very sensitive to this cycle and had lots of time to study it from the inside. Addiction is the one thing I'm genuinely scared of (I'm not counting having my body invaded by an Alien Presence... although that would be pretty creepy too! :-)
The place where the cycle can be most easily broken in my experience is at the choice stage: in particular, the choice that is being made by the addict is to continue to entertain thoughts about acting on the craving. Nobody can stop random thoughts from arising in their minds -- the mind is a regular old thought-factory and is totally beyond any reasonable mechanism of direct control in that regard. But once the thoughts arise, it is possible to work at being aware of them, and to choose not to entertain and encourage them... you don't have to give in to the endless getting-lost-in-thought about the object of your craving.
If the addict continues to exercise discipline with regard to not entertaining these thoughts, that changes the dynamic of the vicious circle: it breaks the pattern of reinforcement at the place where it's most easily broken. Any conditioning which isn't reinforced begins to fade in strength and dominance, and it is possible to be free.
But you gotta get that choice part right.
Read more: What's the psychology behind addiction? | Answerbag http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/289393#ixzz1GEvik0v7
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by Spengo on August 12th, 2008
Okay, I am going to college to be a therapist and I work in a drug rehab center. I will give both sides of this coin but they work together to create one cohesive "coin"
Psychological standpoint
As we grow, we take queues from family and friends, and from the families of friends vicariously through our friends. If our friends smoke, and our families smoke and the friends of our families smoke, and the families of our friends smoke, it is hard to say "no" when one is offered because we haven't been given a reason to. No one has enforced the "smoking is bad m'kay" attitude. I say smoking because in my mind it's the real gateway drug, even before pot. If someone is a smoker at age 15, and they turn 18 and someone says, have a drink with us, it's not a stretch to imagine they will say "okay" instead of "nah, drinking is bad for me, I'm gonna just sit here and smoke" The same is true of pot, but then you have to weigh the legal and moral side, if someone says they'll smoke pot, they aren't afraid to break the law to feel good and that's where the gateway to harder drugs comes in. From smoking, they have already started the drug route, then pot pushes it to the illegal side.
Medical standpoint
Within the brain there are many receptors that are triggered by chemical interaction ranging from caffiene to heroine. The more you use these drugs/give yourself these chemicals, the more these receptors react. If they react too much and too frequently, especially with drugs that make you feel good, triggering dopamine in the brain, the more likely you are to crave an increase in dopamine. Not necessarily through drugs, but through any kind of stimulus. Sex/aggression/a funny movie/anything that makes you feel good. If you are sitting in your house and you are looking for something to make you feel good and you have a bag of pot and the movie theater is all the way across town, it's likely you will just get high. Which perpetuates the need to trigger dopamine in the brain. Rinse lather repeat. Eventually, you get high so much that the receptors are on full alert 100% of the time and you feel that you MUST get high to fix it. If you don't, the dopamine receptors will go crazy and you will have a sudden dip in dopamine. This pushes you to the other side of the chart, depression, anger, anxiety, frustration. So it ends up at a point (true addiction, not the people that just say they need a hit) where not being high hurts. At that point, you are doing drugs to stop feeling bad as opposed to doing it recreationally to feel good.
Not to sound like an essay, but as you can see, there are a lot of triggers both psycologically and medically from family to predisposition all the way to altering your brainwave patterns that will make someone need to get high and then conversely need to come see me in my rehab center so I can get you into NA and AA meetings.
Psychological standpoint
As we grow, we take queues from family and friends, and from the families of friends vicariously through our friends. If our friends smoke, and our families smoke and the friends of our families smoke, and the families of our friends smoke, it is hard to say "no" when one is offered because we haven't been given a reason to. No one has enforced the "smoking is bad m'kay" attitude. I say smoking because in my mind it's the real gateway drug, even before pot. If someone is a smoker at age 15, and they turn 18 and someone says, have a drink with us, it's not a stretch to imagine they will say "okay" instead of "nah, drinking is bad for me, I'm gonna just sit here and smoke" The same is true of pot, but then you have to weigh the legal and moral side, if someone says they'll smoke pot, they aren't afraid to break the law to feel good and that's where the gateway to harder drugs comes in. From smoking, they have already started the drug route, then pot pushes it to the illegal side.
Medical standpoint
Within the brain there are many receptors that are triggered by chemical interaction ranging from caffiene to heroine. The more you use these drugs/give yourself these chemicals, the more these receptors react. If they react too much and too frequently, especially with drugs that make you feel good, triggering dopamine in the brain, the more likely you are to crave an increase in dopamine. Not necessarily through drugs, but through any kind of stimulus. Sex/aggression/a funny movie/anything that makes you feel good. If you are sitting in your house and you are looking for something to make you feel good and you have a bag of pot and the movie theater is all the way across town, it's likely you will just get high. Which perpetuates the need to trigger dopamine in the brain. Rinse lather repeat. Eventually, you get high so much that the receptors are on full alert 100% of the time and you feel that you MUST get high to fix it. If you don't, the dopamine receptors will go crazy and you will have a sudden dip in dopamine. This pushes you to the other side of the chart, depression, anger, anxiety, frustration. So it ends up at a point (true addiction, not the people that just say they need a hit) where not being high hurts. At that point, you are doing drugs to stop feeling bad as opposed to doing it recreationally to feel good.
Not to sound like an essay, but as you can see, there are a lot of triggers both psycologically and medically from family to predisposition all the way to altering your brainwave patterns that will make someone need to get high and then conversely need to come see me in my rehab center so I can get you into NA and AA meetings.
The Pyschology of any addiction is almost all the same once you break by the complex issues of each individual. You want to feel good while forgetting all the pain in the world. I use to have a video game addiction (ridicule all you want but it was very real) and after the death of friends.I used it as my drug to feel good while forgetting pain. Like any addiction no one wants to be addicted. Most things we become addicted to start off as hobbies or spawn off of our hobbies because they can be more quicker to give us pleasures. Once a hobby to past time becomes a necessity to live life you need to take action before the necessity to live becomes a necessity to not kill yourself. Most hardcore drug users start off small with cigarettes and alcohol then as that "high" no longer helps them cope with life they graduate to next drug then the next drug then the next drug and then 10 years later your like what the hell happened. It's easy to bring selfcontrol into the equation but once you are doing activites to enjoy life or not kill yourself what control do you have? None really; self control comes with opitions and as long as a human beings believes his only options are to live in pain/die vs being addicted to a destructive force to be happy he/she will choose the destructive force 100% of the time with no hesitation.
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