14 ms·

Self arrest on the slippery slope of addiction

57 points by mitko 5y ago

netizen-936824 5y ago
- OnlineGladiator 5y ago
  Have you ever actually tried drinking? I'm not a fan of alcohol, but it's obvious that it and other recreational drugs help people relax.
  - netizen-936824 5y ago
    Relaxation is different from relieving stress. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stressor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stressor
    - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
      ...are you saying that because alcohol has to be cleaned up by the body (increased stress on liver and company) that it can't reduce psychological stress? I'm pretty sure those are totally different things, even if they both go by "stress".
      - netizen-936824 5y ago
        Only partially, the primary way it increases stress is through down regulation of GABA receptors. A person consuming alcohol feels temporary "relaxation" through the GABA agonism of the alcohol, then when the alcohol is gone the brain does not respond as readily to inhibitory signaling.
        yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
        So that lines up with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-term_effects_of_alcohol_consumption#Alcohol_and_blood_pressure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-term_effects_of_alcohol_... which amounts to "reduces blood pressure for a bit, then increases it later on". But that's still not "alcohol doesn't help people relax", it's "alcohol helps people relax in ways that may not be a net positive".
        netizen-936824 5y ago
        Change "may" to "is" and you'll have an accurate statement. What that excerpt doesn't discuss is the long term effects on anxiety. The main byproduct of GABA down regulation is an increase in anxiety. I would not classify being anxious as anywhere near "relaxed"
    - haswell 5y ago
      Ah, but even in the article you cite here, it differentiates different kinds of stressors. The author didn't claim drinking alcohol eliminates stress, but rather is a helpful aid when wanting to relax after a stressful day. If one's primary goal is to achieve a state of relaxation, it is possible to do so by taking steps that stress the body in other ways. Bottom line: the author's statement is not incompatible with distinct definitions/understandings of relaxation vs. stress. Most people are familiar with the common "I need a drink" reaction to a high stress situation or day. Even most drinkers understand that the alcohol they're consuming is actually stressful on the body in other ways. Many will gladly trade their current mental/emotional stress for the physical stress alcohol puts on the body, because regardless of eventual harm, it feels good right now.
      - netizen-936824 5y ago
        Please see my other comment about GABA down regulation. Consuming alcohol may allow one to feel temporary relaxation but when the alcohol is gone, neurons down regulate GABA and stress is increased over the longer term. This is short sighted. Trading temporary relaxation now for worse stress down the line. Alcohol consumption increases stress over the long run.
        haswell 5y ago
        We are saying the same thing. People drink to feel better despite the fact that it doesn’t help in the long term. It’s just as important to examine and understand the psychological drivers behind drinking as it is to understand the physiological impact.
        guggleet 5y ago
        Many anxiolytics cause GABA down regulation....
        netizen-936824 5y ago
        Yes, because they are GABA agonists (like alcohol) and they generally are taken continuously.
- dang 5y ago
  Please don't make inflammatory posts about divisive topics—that just leads to flamewars. And certainly please don't cross into personal attack. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - netizen-936824 5y ago
    What is divisive about my comment? Its common knowledge for those who study psychopharmacology
    - dang 5y ago
      It's a shallow, adamant statement about an inflammatory topic that crosses into making a personal judgment and generally reads like a denunciation.
      - netizen-936824 5y ago
        I was stating that the author may not have the knowledge to write accurately about a complex topic they don't seem to understand. Perhaps its just my opinion but I don't understand how that is inflammatory. If someone came in here and starting writing about how Python was the best language for low level systems work, I would expect the same sort of response from people who actually know something about the topic. Perhaps my own bias prevents me from understanding how this is a problem, social communication is not my forte.
        mikestew 5y ago
        I was stating that the author may not have the knowledge to write accurately about a complex topic they don't seem to understand. Had you phrased it just like that, I question whether the original post would have been flagged. As it was, you quoted one sentence and said the author has no credibility. Call it poorly phrased, call it rude, maybe English isn't even your primary language, but "politely stated" doesn't appear to be on the menu of choices for how your original post came across. Which is unfortunate, because it would appear that you have some knowledge on the topic. Just my two cents from the peanut gallery.
quickthrower2 5y ago
Funny I was musing on this myself, with sugar addition. Rather than ban sugar (relying on an unlimited supply of willpower, and that "oh I'll just have one chocolate bar..." then breaks the cycle into a cycle of addiction again)... I was thinking it might be better to go sugar-free on 4 months of the year, and do what I feel like on the other 8. The idea is that less will power is involved, and might draw me down to a lower overall sugar consumption in the long term. On the 8 'free' months my natural cravings will be lower than they would have been too.
robocat 5y ago
For anyone worried about negative side effects of quitting caffeine, you can quit without the side effects using cheap caffeine pills (No Doz brand awakeners or similar). Quit coffee and replace with caffeine pills instead. Slowly decrease your dose over a few weeks (“titration”), using parts of pills, until you reach zero dosage. I’ve done it multiple times to avoid the headaches and other side effects (that I got if I tried to quit cold turkey).
- reducesuffering 5y ago
  Can't you also just drink less and less coffee?
  - robocat 5y ago
    You could, but it is harder to break your existing patterns of behaviour, and easier to slip up if you order a coffee at a cafe, for example. I have also quit by starting with a teaspoon of instant coffee without mixing it in hot water, then slowly decreasing the amount of instant coffee until zero over a couple of weeks. Now I know it is so easy to quit, therefore I restart a coffee habit without fear, which means I don’t stay off the coffee!
vcanales 5y ago
I don't get it; isn't he just listing stuff he stopped doing?
- nerdponx 5y ago
  Easier said than done, in some cases.
- mitko 5y ago
  Hey, OP here, thanks for the question - yes, and I also discuss to what degree I'm not doing them. And with scrolling addiction - I haven't been able to stop it yet, but I am trying.
  - tvb12 5y ago
    I can't quite beat this scrolling thing. This is ridiculous, but I'm currently building a second desk so that my computer won't be in front of me all the time. If that doesn't work... I don't know. Tell them I tried.
  - vcanales 5y ago
    It's the worst for sure. Managed to kick instagram for a month, but ended up going back when I had some down time. Regarding my question, I was wondering if I was missing something else within the article, which I feel like I do a lot of the time :) Glad to know that I actually got it.
PraetorianGourd 5y ago
Though not entirely aligned with the article, it does remind me of the toxic culture we have with drugs (at least in the United States) that I think makes it hard to have a non-toxic relationship with drugs. I like drugs. But I set a ton of rules for myself. I never buy more than a small amount of a drug at a time, I take scheduled breaks from any drug, I know the signs of addiction for drugs that I take and I take unscheduled breaks if I notice any of those. I also don't hide it from friends or family, so they can help catch signs that I may miss (though it hasn't been an issue yet). My point is that there is so much shame around doing drugs; that one bump of coke can make you a fiend or that everything is laced with fentanyl, that we lose sight of the true way in which drugs take hold of a person. Addiction happens "slowly, then all at once" and recognizing that and knowing the early warning signs helps. I am not suggesting everyone do all the drugs they want all the time; additive personalities are a thing, unknown quality of street drugs is a thing, and acting dangerous to yourself or others while high is a thing. But I think the shame associated with drugs, forcing people to use drugs in the shadows, exposes us all to the biggest risk, which is addiction.
- netizen-936824 5y ago
  I completely agree, the US does have a toxic relationship with drugs. Generally fueled by the ideology that sobriety is somehow superior to any form of intoxication. This misguided belief has done immense damage to communities through the application of criminalization of substances.
  - katzgrau 5y ago
    > Generally fueled by the ideology that sobriety is somehow superior to any form of intoxication. Huh? Perhaps fueled by the idea that intoxication leads to more harmful events for society, its members, and the individual. Perhaps we put on airs about being responsible and avoiding intoxication - but when it really comes down to it, society prefers the intoxicated over straight edge types.
- ezy 5y ago
sithadmin 5y ago
>The reason I decided to opt-out of caffeine is that I thought was abusing it to force myself to do work I didn’t actually want to do. I also had the hypothesis that the human body should be fine without it, as we’ve had most of our biological evolution without it. A wolf doesn’t drink an espresso before chasing a deer, after all. This excerpt made me stop taking this seriously. Using caffeine or any other stimulant for the purposes of doing work one isn't comfortable with doing is a character flaw (or an act of desperation, however mild), not a fault of the substance one chooses to lean on. Justifying abstinence from such substances on grounds that the substance isn't intrinsic to human biochemistry is both a naturalistic fallacy and a bizarre rejection of human social history of tool use (substances are just another tool).
- netizen-936824 5y ago
  What's even more interesting is if the author had ventured into mu-opioid agonists, those substances will make you happy to do work you didn't want to do before. Modification of task based dopamine response by mu-opioid agonists is a fascinating topic. Modulating different signaling systems can vastly change our perspectives, whether good or bad is a different question. One that may not have objective answers.
  - anchpop 5y ago
    Is there anywhere I can read more about this? I don't want to try it myself but self-modification is a topic I'm very interested in
    - netizen-936824 5y ago
      Absolutely! Most of these focus on social motivation in particular. https://www.nature.com/articles/mp20141 https://www.nature.com/articles/mp20141 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0963721417735531 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09637214177355... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4958027/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4958027/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4482114/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4482114/
phkahler 5y ago
Many years ago I noticed that my cafine intake naturally dropped during Christmas vacation. So I made a conscious effort to stop drinking it one year. It was easy. I've been on and off cafine several times since then. I'm currently at the point where I'll have headaches for a couple days if I quit cold turkey. Trying to get that down to where it's completely optional. Addiction is weird. There is no shame in setting a limit at zero. It works. On a related note, at one point I found myself stopping for a drink after therapy (when I tried that, what an adventure). Then I realized I was starting to drink to supress emotions that were starting to surface from therapy. Had to limit that to deal with stuff. Brains are weird, do what you must to optimize yours. Just remember that escape or avoidance is a copout.
LouisSayers 5y ago
I've switched from normal coffee to decaf and that's worked great. On caffeine I feel like I'm a bit on edge. I also limit alcohol as well. Not very consistently, but I'll easily go a month without a drink or just have one or two every couple weeks. What I've found though is that the drug habits flow into each other. If you drink one night, then the next day you'll feel like having caffeine to give you a bit of a boost and make you feel better. It's in these times that you have to resist the urge - otherwise you'll be back on that caffeine wagon. Doing exercise is also really helpful. I'll actively avoid alcohol the night before or after a workout. I've read that even a small amount of alcohol can negatively affect muscle gain, which is a great incentive not to drink around your workouts!
giantg2 5y ago
I'm not sure about the comment claiming caffeine withdrawal was worse than alcohol withdrawal. Perhaps there wasn't true alcohol dependence.
- rkk3 5y ago
  It probably wasn't, alcohol withdrawals can kill.
photochemsyn 5y ago
The concept of addiction gets floated around a lot but I think it's important to distinguish between actual biochemical addiction and what's probably better described as obsessive-compulsive reward-seeking behavior. Biochemical addiction seems to be characterized mainly by the alteration of the cell-surface concentration of receptor proteins for various endogenous substances as well as lower baseline biochemical production of endogenous substances, and is most well known and studied in opiate addiction. Notably not all of what are commonly considered 'drugs' result in such forms of physical addiction (characterized by physiological withdrawal with specific defined features, often life-threatening if not managed by a physician). The other version, obsessive-compulsive reward-seeking behavior, has so many modes that it's hard to even characterize simply. Sometimes society rewards such behavior, i.e. working 80-hour weeks even if that negatively impacts your personal health and leads to a breakdown at some point in the future. Sometime society derides such behavior, i.e. playing video games 24-7 (with no compensation) or eating compulsively and becoming overweight. Frantically hunting karma points on Reddit might fit this profile as well as things like gambling habits. Regardless this kind of thing is more of a poorly-understood psychological issue, and lumping it in with physical addiction doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense. To be honest I don't know which category caffeine fits in; even after drinking many espresso shots per day I'd find that stopping for a week had little physical effect as long as I drank lots of water, and perhaps took an aspirin or ibuprofen at times. This could vary from person to person however; some people appear to metabolize caffeine at much higher rates than others do.
_8j50 5y ago
Survivors' bias at it best right here. In reality, what happens is you set that point you will not go past, but when the "need" and desperation comes you ignore that point or rationalize an exception and go past it, each time you do this you undermine your own authority to control yourself. The more you climb up and then fall the less you can climb up out of the hole again. Discipline and self control are the key and to obtain those one must establish a good relationship with one's self and thereby regain acceptance of the legitimacy and force of one's authority over self. But the core of the matter is, why did the person's relationship with themselves go bad or did they never learn to like themselves and respect their own voice?

57 points by mitko 5y ago

OnlineGladiator 5y ago
Have you ever actually tried drinking? I'm not a fan of alcohol, but it's obvious that it and other recreational drugs help people relax.
- netizen-936824 5y ago
  Relaxation is different from relieving stress. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stressor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stressor
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    ...are you saying that because alcohol has to be cleaned up by the body (increased stress on liver and company) that it can't reduce psychological stress? I'm pretty sure those are totally different things, even if they both go by "stress".
    - netizen-936824 5y ago
      Only partially, the primary way it increases stress is through down regulation of GABA receptors. A person consuming alcohol feels temporary "relaxation" through the GABA agonism of the alcohol, then when the alcohol is gone the brain does not respond as readily to inhibitory signaling.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
        So that lines up with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-term_effects_of_alcohol_consumption#Alcohol_and_blood_pressure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-term_effects_of_alcohol_... which amounts to "reduces blood pressure for a bit, then increases it later on". But that's still not "alcohol doesn't help people relax", it's "alcohol helps people relax in ways that may not be a net positive".
        netizen-936824 5y ago
        Change "may" to "is" and you'll have an accurate statement. What that excerpt doesn't discuss is the long term effects on anxiety. The main byproduct of GABA down regulation is an increase in anxiety. I would not classify being anxious as anywhere near "relaxed"
  - haswell 5y ago
    Ah, but even in the article you cite here, it differentiates different kinds of stressors. The author didn't claim drinking alcohol eliminates stress, but rather is a helpful aid when wanting to relax after a stressful day. If one's primary goal is to achieve a state of relaxation, it is possible to do so by taking steps that stress the body in other ways. Bottom line: the author's statement is not incompatible with distinct definitions/understandings of relaxation vs. stress. Most people are familiar with the common "I need a drink" reaction to a high stress situation or day. Even most drinkers understand that the alcohol they're consuming is actually stressful on the body in other ways. Many will gladly trade their current mental/emotional stress for the physical stress alcohol puts on the body, because regardless of eventual harm, it feels good right now.
    - netizen-936824 5y ago
      Please see my other comment about GABA down regulation. Consuming alcohol may allow one to feel temporary relaxation but when the alcohol is gone, neurons down regulate GABA and stress is increased over the longer term. This is short sighted. Trading temporary relaxation now for worse stress down the line. Alcohol consumption increases stress over the long run.
      - haswell 5y ago
        We are saying the same thing. People drink to feel better despite the fact that it doesn’t help in the long term. It’s just as important to examine and understand the psychological drivers behind drinking as it is to understand the physiological impact.
      - guggleet 5y ago
        Many anxiolytics cause GABA down regulation....
        netizen-936824 5y ago
        Yes, because they are GABA agonists (like alcohol) and they generally are taken continuously.
dang 5y ago
Please don't make inflammatory posts about divisive topics—that just leads to flamewars. And certainly please don't cross into personal attack. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- netizen-936824 5y ago
  What is divisive about my comment? Its common knowledge for those who study psychopharmacology
  - dang 5y ago
    It's a shallow, adamant statement about an inflammatory topic that crosses into making a personal judgment and generally reads like a denunciation.
    - netizen-936824 5y ago
      I was stating that the author may not have the knowledge to write accurately about a complex topic they don't seem to understand. Perhaps its just my opinion but I don't understand how that is inflammatory. If someone came in here and starting writing about how Python was the best language for low level systems work, I would expect the same sort of response from people who actually know something about the topic. Perhaps my own bias prevents me from understanding how this is a problem, social communication is not my forte.
      - mikestew 5y ago
        I was stating that the author may not have the knowledge to write accurately about a complex topic they don't seem to understand. Had you phrased it just like that, I question whether the original post would have been flagged. As it was, you quoted one sentence and said the author has no credibility. Call it poorly phrased, call it rude, maybe English isn't even your primary language, but "politely stated" doesn't appear to be on the menu of choices for how your original post came across. Which is unfortunate, because it would appear that you have some knowledge on the topic. Just my two cents from the peanut gallery.

Funny I was musing on this myself, with sugar addition. Rather than ban sugar (relying on an unlimited supply of willpower, and that "oh I'll just have one chocolate bar..." then breaks the cycle into a cycle of addiction again)... I was thinking it might be better to go sugar-free on 4 months of the year, and do what I feel like on the other 8. The idea is that less will power is involved, and might draw me down to a lower overall sugar consumption in the long term. On the 8 'free' months my natural cravings will be lower than they would have been too.

robocat 5y ago

For anyone worried about negative side effects of quitting caffeine, you can quit without the side effects using cheap caffeine pills (No Doz brand awakeners or similar). Quit coffee and replace with caffeine pills instead. Slowly decrease your dose over a few weeks (“titration”), using parts of pills, until you reach zero dosage. I’ve done it multiple times to avoid the headaches and other side effects (that I got if I tried to quit cold turkey).

reducesuffering 5y ago
Can't you also just drink less and less coffee?
- robocat 5y ago
  You could, but it is harder to break your existing patterns of behaviour, and easier to slip up if you order a coffee at a cafe, for example. I have also quit by starting with a teaspoon of instant coffee without mixing it in hot water, then slowly decreasing the amount of instant coffee until zero over a couple of weeks. Now I know it is so easy to quit, therefore I restart a coffee habit without fear, which means I don’t stay off the coffee!

vcanales 5y ago

I don't get it; isn't he just listing stuff he stopped doing?

nerdponx 5y ago
Easier said than done, in some cases.
mitko 5y ago
Hey, OP here, thanks for the question - yes, and I also discuss to what degree I'm not doing them. And with scrolling addiction - I haven't been able to stop it yet, but I am trying.
- tvb12 5y ago
  I can't quite beat this scrolling thing. This is ridiculous, but I'm currently building a second desk so that my computer won't be in front of me all the time. If that doesn't work... I don't know. Tell them I tried.
- vcanales 5y ago
  It's the worst for sure. Managed to kick instagram for a month, but ended up going back when I had some down time. Regarding my question, I was wondering if I was missing something else within the article, which I feel like I do a lot of the time :) Glad to know that I actually got it.

PraetorianGourd 5y ago

Though not entirely aligned with the article, it does remind me of the toxic culture we have with drugs (at least in the United States) that I think makes it hard to have a non-toxic relationship with drugs. I like drugs. But I set a ton of rules for myself. I never buy more than a small amount of a drug at a time, I take scheduled breaks from any drug, I know the signs of addiction for drugs that I take and I take unscheduled breaks if I notice any of those. I also don't hide it from friends or family, so they can help catch signs that I may miss (though it hasn't been an issue yet). My point is that there is so much shame around doing drugs; that one bump of coke can make you a fiend or that everything is laced with fentanyl, that we lose sight of the true way in which drugs take hold of a person. Addiction happens "slowly, then all at once" and recognizing that and knowing the early warning signs helps. I am not suggesting everyone do all the drugs they want all the time; additive personalities are a thing, unknown quality of street drugs is a thing, and acting dangerous to yourself or others while high is a thing. But I think the shame associated with drugs, forcing people to use drugs in the shadows, exposes us all to the biggest risk, which is addiction.

netizen-936824 5y ago
I completely agree, the US does have a toxic relationship with drugs. Generally fueled by the ideology that sobriety is somehow superior to any form of intoxication. This misguided belief has done immense damage to communities through the application of criminalization of substances.
- katzgrau 5y ago
  > Generally fueled by the ideology that sobriety is somehow superior to any form of intoxication. Huh? Perhaps fueled by the idea that intoxication leads to more harmful events for society, its members, and the individual. Perhaps we put on airs about being responsible and avoiding intoxication - but when it really comes down to it, society prefers the intoxicated over straight edge types.
ezy 5y ago

sithadmin 5y ago

>The reason I decided to opt-out of caffeine is that I thought was abusing it to force myself to do work I didn’t actually want to do. I also had the hypothesis that the human body should be fine without it, as we’ve had most of our biological evolution without it. A wolf doesn’t drink an espresso before chasing a deer, after all. This excerpt made me stop taking this seriously. Using caffeine or any other stimulant for the purposes of doing work one isn't comfortable with doing is a character flaw (or an act of desperation, however mild), not a fault of the substance one chooses to lean on. Justifying abstinence from such substances on grounds that the substance isn't intrinsic to human biochemistry is both a naturalistic fallacy and a bizarre rejection of human social history of tool use (substances are just another tool).

netizen-936824 5y ago
What's even more interesting is if the author had ventured into mu-opioid agonists, those substances will make you happy to do work you didn't want to do before. Modification of task based dopamine response by mu-opioid agonists is a fascinating topic. Modulating different signaling systems can vastly change our perspectives, whether good or bad is a different question. One that may not have objective answers.
- anchpop 5y ago
  Is there anywhere I can read more about this? I don't want to try it myself but self-modification is a topic I'm very interested in
  - netizen-936824 5y ago
    Absolutely! Most of these focus on social motivation in particular. https://www.nature.com/articles/mp20141 https://www.nature.com/articles/mp20141 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0963721417735531 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09637214177355... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4958027/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4958027/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4482114/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4482114/

phkahler 5y ago

Many years ago I noticed that my cafine intake naturally dropped during Christmas vacation. So I made a conscious effort to stop drinking it one year. It was easy. I've been on and off cafine several times since then. I'm currently at the point where I'll have headaches for a couple days if I quit cold turkey. Trying to get that down to where it's completely optional. Addiction is weird. There is no shame in setting a limit at zero. It works. On a related note, at one point I found myself stopping for a drink after therapy (when I tried that, what an adventure). Then I realized I was starting to drink to supress emotions that were starting to surface from therapy. Had to limit that to deal with stuff. Brains are weird, do what you must to optimize yours. Just remember that escape or avoidance is a copout.

LouisSayers 5y ago

I've switched from normal coffee to decaf and that's worked great. On caffeine I feel like I'm a bit on edge. I also limit alcohol as well. Not very consistently, but I'll easily go a month without a drink or just have one or two every couple weeks. What I've found though is that the drug habits flow into each other. If you drink one night, then the next day you'll feel like having caffeine to give you a bit of a boost and make you feel better. It's in these times that you have to resist the urge - otherwise you'll be back on that caffeine wagon. Doing exercise is also really helpful. I'll actively avoid alcohol the night before or after a workout. I've read that even a small amount of alcohol can negatively affect muscle gain, which is a great incentive not to drink around your workouts!

giantg2 5y ago

I'm not sure about the comment claiming caffeine withdrawal was worse than alcohol withdrawal. Perhaps there wasn't true alcohol dependence.

rkk3 5y ago
It probably wasn't, alcohol withdrawals can kill.

photochemsyn 5y ago

The concept of addiction gets floated around a lot but I think it's important to distinguish between actual biochemical addiction and what's probably better described as obsessive-compulsive reward-seeking behavior. Biochemical addiction seems to be characterized mainly by the alteration of the cell-surface concentration of receptor proteins for various endogenous substances as well as lower baseline biochemical production of endogenous substances, and is most well known and studied in opiate addiction. Notably not all of what are commonly considered 'drugs' result in such forms of physical addiction (characterized by physiological withdrawal with specific defined features, often life-threatening if not managed by a physician). The other version, obsessive-compulsive reward-seeking behavior, has so many modes that it's hard to even characterize simply. Sometimes society rewards such behavior, i.e. working 80-hour weeks even if that negatively impacts your personal health and leads to a breakdown at some point in the future. Sometime society derides such behavior, i.e. playing video games 24-7 (with no compensation) or eating compulsively and becoming overweight. Frantically hunting karma points on Reddit might fit this profile as well as things like gambling habits. Regardless this kind of thing is more of a poorly-understood psychological issue, and lumping it in with physical addiction doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense. To be honest I don't know which category caffeine fits in; even after drinking many espresso shots per day I'd find that stopping for a week had little physical effect as long as I drank lots of water, and perhaps took an aspirin or ibuprofen at times. This could vary from person to person however; some people appear to metabolize caffeine at much higher rates than others do.

_8j50 5y ago

Survivors' bias at it best right here. In reality, what happens is you set that point you will not go past, but when the "need" and desperation comes you ignore that point or rationalize an exception and go past it, each time you do this you undermine your own authority to control yourself. The more you climb up and then fall the less you can climb up out of the hole again. Discipline and self control are the key and to obtain those one must establish a good relationship with one's self and thereby regain acceptance of the legitimacy and force of one's authority over self. But the core of the matter is, why did the person's relationship with themselves go bad or did they never learn to like themselves and respect their own voice?