Dr K Explains How The Addict's Brain Works

quitting an addiction is not a binary decision quitting an addiction involves a hundred steps the first thing you got to do is change your life addiction is environment plus you so overcoming an addiction is not about being strong it's about so there's a lot of thinking which I would call the addict's brain and I'm just going to highlight some of these there's a lot of them so you know on the surface we have things like denial or I would say deal making is another form of denial right so I'll stop when this bad outcome happens

I don't have a problem yet it's really going to be a problem if I start passing out at parties like this guy does so if you notice that your mind is deal making think about that are you telling yourself okay if I do this kind of work then I deserve a reward and if I deserve a reward then I can use it so it's not that you don't deserve a reward it's just that this kind of that basic idea of I worked really hard I get to do something in life that's fine the problem is

when it has to do with a substance so here's a really simple test for whether your deal making has been hijacked by your addictive brain if yall want to dive deep into the most important topics for our community check out HG memberships the first thing to understand is that there needs to be no outcome from small talk this is a Vasa 2o your mind is vasas all the way down so the key thing about Detachment is not that you don't have wants it is that your wants do not control control you membership grants you access

to monthly streams as well as a back catalog of a Year's worth of content in addition to quests and so much more if you're interested you can sign up for 10 bucks a month at healthy gamer. g/ memberships or click the link in the description below hope to see you there simple test so if the reward can consistently be not drugs or whatever you're addicted to then it's fine and if the reward that you're always giving yourself in your like oh yeah so why don't you just reward yourself with like a massage instead of getting

high on meth and if you find yourself arguing against that over and over and over again then you've got a problem and you have to be careful because the adct addict's brain is subtle it knows you right so it'll do oh yeah I can I don't need meth today you want me to do a massage I'll do a massage but next week we'll do something else oh we'll see next week yeah oh yeah see I did it I can handle it I controlled it it's fine you can use CU I'm in control which brings us

to another really common one the perception of control often times when people are addicted to things they have this idea that they're in control they do things to keep themselves in control but it's like the thing that's in control is the addiction like that's really what's in control so you got to be careful about that perception of control and then there are a couple of like so these these are like the really like in-your-face ones but there's a lot of really subtle ones that I've encountered that are like really tricky one is something called the

weakness trap so the weakness trap is when people view addiction as a weakness and if I'm an addict I'm weak I'm going to just draw write this out okay maybe you guys can follow I should be strong there I need to conquer my my addiction and if I don't then I'm weak therefore I am strong or will be strong so I know this sounds kind of weird because this seems like really positive but often times people who think this way do not do all of the crap that needs to be done so overcoming an addiction

is not about being strong it's about putting in lots of hours in stupid that you don't want to do it's about going to meetings going to therapy medit every day and what these people have is they have this almost like this fantasy of strength where they don't want to be one of these weak people who has to rely on others go to therapy weak people go to therapy like I don't need any of that I think imagine this community will be somewhat different but you know those thoughts can still pop up you want to be

you want to conquer it and so oddly enough the brain will tell you you should conquer this you can conquer this you don't need to do all this other crap that people are telling you be strong conquer it and do it without help very subtle very dangerous very Insidious that desire for strength gets hijacked oh this is a big one waiting to be done and forever so this is a really common thing that we see in especially postacute withdrawal syndrome so we talk about withdrawal which is when you're losing your tolerance to the substance and

by the way if y'all are going through withdrawal especially from substances really really good idea to do it with a medical professional because sometimes withdrawal can be lethal so withdrawal from alcohol and benzo aines can induce seizures and asy and literally kill people so you don't want to do that but then often times what is really overlooked in the medical system is the postacute withdrawal syndrome which can last for months so the way to explain this is that you know so we have tolerance and the development of adaptations at the cellular level but then we

also have de development of adaptations at the habitual level development of adaptations at the psychological level development of adaptations at the ego or identity level and so all of those adaptations which have been built on the addiction also need to be re-calibrated and that is really difficult so this is the postacute withdrawal syndrome and I'll give you all a really simple example of this when people are withdrawing or in the early stage ages of recovery it's really hard because you have to go to meetings a lot you have to go see your therapist you're working

through all these dormant emotions and the problem with working through dormant emotions is that like I worked on dormant emotions this week I worked on them the week after I worked on them the week after I worked on them for three months there's just more and more and more and more and more of them my emotional regulation skills are level three now instead of level two so my life sucks everything is hard everything sucks and people think this is what being sober is they think that this period of time will last forever that's how it

feels and then they think I can't do this this is too hard there's no way and this is literally what it's like and if you guys even pay attention literally to our subreddit in other places in our community you will see this thinking in all kinds of posts is this what it's supposed to be forever is this what life is so we see this a lot especially in like a lot of these burnout oriented tweets and things like that is life supposed to be going to work 9: to 5 coming home doing laundry doing meal

prep eating working out having 30 minutes of recreation time and going to bed is that what is the next 40 years of my life like this no that's not how it works things are hard right now until you adapt until you build habits until you sort of get everything sorted out this is the hardest period but it doesn't stay like this so there's a sense of foreverness which really induces hopelessness because people don't think that they can withstand this forever but the good news is it's not forever it's just your brain doesn't experience that and

why not it's because for weeks at a time it is this so the postacute withdrawal syndrome can last 6 months maybe even up to a year and so as the brain calculates that out it says I don't have the energy for this and that it induces some degree of hopelessness and then it starts telling itself things like well if I'm going to crack a year from now why not crack today so there are a couple of things that we strongly strongly strongly recommend so let's go through the rules of recovery so if you guys want

to try to tackle this here are a couple of things that yall should really focus on the first thing you got to do is change your life now you may say but Dr K that sounds like a lot and that's just step one absolutely man because remember that your addiction is a product of your environment okay so what's the pitfall the pitfall is first of all people want the same life without the addiction that's not usually possible but the good news is that the new life is almost always and I can't think of a single

case let me think I know I've heard this before but nothing is coming to mind is almost always better but it's hard to get there so this means changing your environment changing your friends also means changing your cognitive patterns right all this has to change changing the way that you deal with emotions and so it's weird because I I work work with a lot of people who will say like addiction was the best thing that ever happened to me and people are like how on Earth like what do you mean and what a lot of

people will say is like if it wasn't for the addiction it it becomes a wakeup call right it certainly was for me like I started down this journey because my addiction to video games really screwed up my life and I really had to change it I was like in a fraternity going to parties eating fried rice by the pound playing video games every day hanging out with other friends who are pretty degenerate you over time like I had to change all those aspects of my life but that's not a bad thing is it hard sure

you get better at it it goes slowly but it's good you should want that rule two complete honesty and by the way I didn't come up with these these are things that I've learned beautiful wisdom so there's a great saying in addiction recovery which is you are as sick as your secrets love this so true really important for things like trauma healing as well well cuz that's usually a secret so we talk about this some in like Dr K's guide we talk about Satya and truthfulness and there's YouTube videos and stuff so addiction fundamentally requires

lying I've never seen an honest addict I think can't think of one maybe I have so usually on the surface you lie to other people you don't quite tell your family how much you're spending on crypto when people ask you what' you do today you don't say I watch pornography for an hour and a half right and when people ask you oh like how much did you have to drink you downplay it I had a couple of drinks maybe a few so as long as you lie addiction has fertile soil to grow and then the

next thing is that like if you lie to other people the only way you can sustainably do that is by lying to yourself right so then you do little things like you stop paying attention intentionally stop paying attention to how many drinks you have the easiest way to not get caught in a lie is to be in denial so lying becomes a huge part of it so usually the then the question becomes how do you become honest how can you learn honesty I love the concept of something called a recovery Circle so recovery Circle starts

really small and it is a group of people that you can be completely honest with so often times when I'm working with my patients their recovery circle is me and that's where it starts and then over time you expand your recovery Circle you learn how to be honest you're honest with one person it feels good to have one person in your life that you don't have to lie to feels relieving it's so scary but it feels amazing and you know we say here in chat I feel personally attacked what does that mean when y'all feel

personally attacked you feel seen right I see what you are and that's good it feels good it hurts it's scary but it feels good and this is where peer support I think is really phenomenal we have things like alcoholic annonymous where it's like everyone else is alcoholic so like I can be honest and they know they're they understand what it's like and then usually this expands outward right so you start with like one person you start with maybe a sponsor you can go to meetings and you don't start sharing but then you tell one person

and you open up to them and then eventually you start sharing and then you start telling some people who are close to you and then eventually your recovery Circle can be the whole world you can go into your job and you can say yeah you guys want to go to happy hour totally fine I'm fine with just Seltzer I've been in recovery for 15 years and like that's cool like I I don't think people the only people who get upset by other people in recovery are people who have addictions and feel bad about not being

in recovery subconsciously rule number three is ask for help so what are the things that get in the way of this shame this whole weakness trap right so this is not a process that I I mean even though there's some evidence that shows that people kind of do it on their own we just don't know right because we we don't measure them because they did it on their own but even on their own may have been with help we don't know right they may have confided in a friend who knows but I just can't tell

you how much easier it is with help and a lot of people think oh if I ask for help I'm weak or like I won't be able to do it on my own or am I just becoming dependent on this person no you're not how can I say that let's just think about it for a little bit right so when I'm at the gym and I'm you know on my last W and I have a spotter help me a little bit am I becoming dependent on the spotter no the spotter helping me a little bit

but means that my muscles are at maximal contraction I finish the rep and they're actually going to grow more the alternative of not using the spotter is that I don't do the rep at all and then my muscles will grow less using help accelerates your growth doesn't impede it now there are some situations where you can sort of get dependent on help but that is almost never the case because usually the institutions that are good at helping people recognize that so as a psychiatrist I recognize when people are doing work with me towards independence and

growth and using me as a crutch and then we address that people in recovery understand this really well see what leads to growth is doing the thing what leads to not growth is not doing the thing now if help means substituting your actions with someone else's actions then you won't grow but if they are helping you and you are still acting you'll grow it'll work but there are challenges like shame and you know lying and embarrassment and all this kind of stuff rule number four is practice self-care so I want you all to understand this

right so addiction is environment plus you and you can focus on the environment and you can focus on you you really have to do both so if you're if you're not sleeping every day and you don't have enough willpower to resist the addiction that's going to be a problem if you don't eat properly then your brain is going to be using a lot of energy to suppress those hunger signals and then you won't have much energy left over to resist your addiction if you are living in a situation that is toxic if you have friends

who are not really friends of yours if you are in an abusive relationship all of those things will add negative emotional energy and will drain your willpower it'll be way harder to resist so you must take care of yourself addiction is very hard to beat in general so you might as well optimize yourself if you want to increase your chances of success and so a big part of what I teach is self-care go to yoga go to meditation do that stuff take care of your diet because it's going to be hard enough even without all

that stuff give yourself every chance of success last rule most important rule is don't bend the rules right so the first rule of Fight Club is and the last rule of addiction recovery is don't bend the rules see the moment that you start bending the rules the addiction can leak in I want you all to think about addiction is a poisonous gas that will fill whatever container you give it if you have a crack in the wall it'll slip through it right we gave you all a couple of examples of like oh I deserve it

it'll use whatever it can oh you're ashamed of yourself you're pathetic you might as well use you're not worth it you deserve to destroy your life you feel weak you want to be strong oh yeah don't get help be strong you want to be strong that's great let's go with that plan just do it all yourself you don't need to change your life oh it's too hard to change your life it's too much work to change your life oh you're feeling tired today and you're feeling like you can't do this forever thank God because you

can't do it forever oh do you want 40 years of this no you don't nobody wants 40 years of this come back to me baby at least with me every day wasn't bad if you're going to have a shitty life you might as well have the upsides by getting high every now and then don't bend the rules and recognize that as long as you stick with that the thalamus in the nucleus accumbens in the amydala in the lyic system have nowhere to run they have nowhere to act act if a rule is a rule and

it is impervious then you become impervious no means no I've been sober for a year I deserve it no means no sure I deserve it but I'm not going to do that and if you focus on not bending the rules that'll strengthen your frontal loes and it helps align your frontal loes since we're somewhat deficient in planning and executing tasks and predicting errors that's why we need to be stupid about it because the other dangerous thing that I oftentimes see is that the worst addictions happen to the smartest people because the addiction turns the brain

against you and so the more powerful the brain is it's like if I'm going to cast mind control on an enemy do I want to use a level 60 enemy or a level what two enemy so when addiction casts mind control on you on a level 60 brain it's going to be way harder to beat that's why you need Ste steadiness resilience unbending you can be weak you don't have to be strong we're just not going to bend the rules so I hope this has been helpful let's get to Q&A what questions do you all

have how did you game later without it becoming addicting again great question so let's understand a couple of things remember that an addiction requires giving pleasure and taking away pain an addiction requires activation of all kinds of neuros circuitry the short answer is I dealt with my dormant emotions I found a purpose in life so right now I could be playing a video game why am I not playing a video game because this is more important to me so I stopped using games as a source of emotional regulation when I feel bad about something I

go for a walk I started engaging in a lot of self-care started meditating a lot right so this is what I mean everyone thinks about addiction is I have this thing that I can't control and I lose the willpower battle against this thing but you can dismantle that addiction like One Table leg at a time and it'll just tip over and fall especially with the behavioral addictions substance use addictions with strong genetic predispositions May require abstence but it just became a source of pleasure and Recreation nothing else and when that's what it is then it

becomes healthy so I think sex and love addiction is another good example of this right so a lot of people who get addicted to sex will use it as a substitute for selfworth they use it as their source of feeling accepted by another human being and once those things go away you can have sex in a healthy way you can fall in love in a healthy way so you were telling me that when I tell myself that I can quit snooze nicotine addiction anytime I want I'm lying yes and no so I don't know if

you can quit an addiction anytime you want but my point is that quitting an addiction is not a binary decision so this is hopefully yall have taken this away quitting an addiction involves a 100 steps so can you quit it absolutely it's just about doing the work and so nicotine addiction is a really good example of like we have very good treatments for nicotine addiction what we basically know is there's a medication called verin that reduces cravings and then when you use the patch and some kind of acute nicotine supplement like gum or lenes success

rates are very high I think 60 or 70% so we have like addiction treatments for nicotine that are very successful but it involves asking for help what kind of help should I ask for so I think two or three kinds of help come to mind one is you can go to a psychiatrist or therapist and you can say hey I think I may have an addiction and they'll take it from there the second thing that you can do is go to any kind of peer support recovery meeting Alcoholics Anonymous Narcotics Anonymous computer gaming addicts anonymous

and say hi my name is whatever I may I may have a problem with this kind of addiction that's it yeah so this was uh really really really good point so this is something that we'll cover in the workshop but we just didn't have time to cover so great point to end on so Vladimir is saying I quit smoking after 14 years and drinking after 19 years cold turkey both times confronting and dismantling the positive associations I had with my addictions was critical so we didn't talk about this too explicitly so let's talk about it

now for a couple of seconds see the problem with addictions is that they're Solutions not problems so when I say change your life right and I say everyone wants to have their life without the addiction the problem is that when we look at these substances we see a lot of good right I like being relaxed at parties I like being able to go on a bachelor party and get hand with my friends I love being able to go to a bar barbecue and have a good time right I love partying with lines of coke like

people like this stuff and especially if you look at some of these fields like Finance it's like it's part of the socialization and people are like well when my boss when the managing director of my firm is like hey you want to do lines of Coke in the bathroom like I can't say no cuz he's the one who determines whether I get $300,000 of bonus this year or $450,000 of bonus this year so those lines of coke are worth $150,000 I've seen it as an addiction psychiatrist like it ain't pretty and you're you're spoton that

a big part of this is dismantling the positive associations a big part of this is the belief that you can't live without your addiction I've seen marriages end in divorce because people are addicted I've also seen marriages end in in divorce because people get sober I've seen relationships that are built on a shared addiction I found someone who won't judge me because they're just as addicted as I am and we're both going to go hard and I love this person so much because this person knows how to go on a bender and they'll protect me

if I go too hard they'll keep things in check so there are a ton of positive associations which are very hard to deal with and those absolutely need to be dismantled really great Point thank you all very much for coming today if y'all are struggling with something look at it a little bit critically really try to understand what's going on ask for help and know that you can live without it that the life that you build without it is probably going to be better it's going to be missing certain things and even as someone who's

a degenerate gamer addict who's gaming in recovery I miss some of the stuff too like going hard in gaming is its own special pleasure there's there's own special pleasure of real just debauchery right when some expansion drops and like I'm going to stay up I'm going to skip all my classes for a week and I'm going to grind to 60 there's something that's fun about that I gave that up and I think the challenge with addiction is that you are giving things up I think the good news is that you only have to give them

up for a while and then you really don't want them anymore you really start to appreciate what you have what's the end goal the end goal is freedom the end goal is freedom to live life the way it's supposed to be lived instead of living a version of life that is shaped by an addiction should you quit it right now why not why not hey y'all hope you enjoyed today's video we talk about a bunch of topics like this on the channel so be sure to subscribe for more if you're already subscribed GG and we'll

see you in [Music] chat for [Music]