Learning about addictions helped me quit drinking and smoking

In January 2018 I simultaneously quit drinking and smoking and never looked back.

Addiction is a disease of the brain so that’s the part of my body I was targeting when I was learning about the background of my various compulsions. If I know how they came to be, where are they coming from and what they mean it’s much easier to ignore them, not take them so seriously, and not base my actions on them.

I haven’t seriously considered drinking or smoking since then nor have I had any uncontrollable or even controllable cravings. I have had a few very vivid dreams about drinking a glass of wine or smoking a cigarette and instantly regretting it. They reminded me that I am just one lapse of judgment away from my old, addicted ways but I am also the only person who can fuck this up.

I do not preach abstinence as the only way, I was never able to moderate long term myself, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be done.

If you’re wondering how bad it was with me let’s just say I have a 12-year smoking and drinking career behind me, with various ups and downs but I don’t really want to get into it. This article is about finding our way out of the maze that we got ourselves into, either on purpose or by accident. It doesn’t matter. It’s a human condition to want to feel good most of the time and substances are by far the fastest way to get there.

When nobody is watching you and you live in a society where binge drinking is considered almost a hobby things can quickly get out of hand. Don’t blame yourself for slipping down the slope. It’s naturally very slippery. Under the right circumstances, everyone could be where you are right now.

How do drugs work in the brain?

What I understood from the wonderful Coursera course created by Emory University called The Addicted brain is that your brain will reward you for evolution-related activities like pooping or eating by releasing endorphins. Drugs, when they reach your brain trigger neurons responsible for releasing those hormones but your brain can’t tell the difference between the naturally and artificially induced endorphin rush. The more you do it, the more your brain learns that the drug-taking is important for your survival and will eventually start to encourage you to do it more often.

Enter cravings.

They might not feel as you expect them to so you might not recognize them as when they come. Just because we consume alcohol by drinking, it doesn’t mean that cravings will feel like thirst. They can feel like:

a general feeling of excitement that we get when a pleasant event is about to happen
the extreme lack of patience to deal with nuisances of everyday life, the feeling of being intensely overwhelmed
the need for floatiness and the need for being outside of your head

An addiction is defined as behavior that persists despite the negative consequences and this is why it does that: our brain paints us a picture of our next drink or our next cigarette being very rewarding for us even when our tolerance is so high that we get all the physical damage but none of the benefits. The best way to encourage us into it was to remind us of the pleasure we used to have.

It almost feels like a trap, doesn’t it?

Surprising side-effects

One side-effect of flushing your brain with too many feel-good hormones for a longer period of time is that your brain is always trying to maintain a certain balance and if an excess of something is consistent enough it will simply stop producing it. That is why thinking of quitting drinking might make us feel as if we’ll never be happy again. If your brain has stopped producing endorphins drugs of your choice might really be your only source of happiness right now.

Recovery is entirely possible but it might take different amounts of time, depending on how long you’ve been consuming excessively. So hang in there!

Another fun fact related to this balance maintenance is that alcohol is a downer, which means that your brain will produce an upper to counterbalance it — this is why some drinkers wake up at 3 or 4 o’ clock in the morning, a couple of hours after they’ve been drinking and feel fully awake.

It baffled me to find out that our pre-frontal cortex, the very same part of the brain responsible for our decision-making process isn’t fully developed until the age of 25. (whoosh! — the sound of my mind being blown). I mean just think about it. I’ve been flooding it with extra endorphins for 10 years while it was still developing. I’m no neurologist but I assume this is why I’m so reward driven?

Life after? Not. Bad. At. All.

Learning all this, honestly, I felt like I’ve been duped. How could nobody have explained this to me when my parents started giving me glasses of wine and beer at the age of 15? When in high school it was the most normal thing in the world to get shitfaced on a random weekday, on a bench, with a bottle of red wine? When social occasions were carefully planned with the maximum intoxication potential in mind throughout my university years?

I’m not going to lie to you. Since I’ve quit my life has changed significantly. Mostly for the better but my social life has really gone down the toilet. Going to bars really seems pointless now and I wasn’t much of a clubber before either. I still live in a world of binge drinkers and they don’t always like the fact that I refuse to fully participate in their rituals. Sometimes I get excluded from things on the premise that I must not be much fun if I’m not drinking. It makes people feel judged even though I never encouraged anyone to follow my footsteps. I suppose I used to be quite douchey about it too.

I have more money now, my sleep has become more stable, I’m no longer afraid to get cancer — even though that’s still a real enough possibility, I don’t have to go on long guilt trips every Saturday morning and I don’t embarrass myself as often as I used to.

But the main benefit is that I’ve become whole again. I’m no longer torn between the person who says she will do something and the person who bows to her compulsions instead. There are great relief and wholesomeness, sort of coming-back-to-oneself type of feelings when the cognitive dissonance dissipates and you unapologetically do what feels right for you.