I have no actual statistical research, only anecdote and personal experience, but your intuition about this definitely matches my experience of the world, and in particular it is why I swore off online gaming after spending three months becoming increasingly obsessed with a text based MUD in college -- I realized that I was on a bad trajectory, quit, and decided henceforth I would only engage with forms of gaming that had some kind of end-point I could reach. With a truly excellent game, like Breath of the Wild, there is definitely a let-down when it's done, and also some reflection on "was spending all that time on that worth it?" It takes a month or two of returning to spending that spare time on other stuff to "balance out" and be able to really decide for sure whether I think the game was a worthy work of art -- as worth spending time on as reading a novel or watching a long narrative TV show -- or whether it was just a rabbit hole that kinda wasted several dozen hours of my life (and so I should maybe be more discriminating about what game I pick up next, listen to reviewers who were negative on that one, etc).
As someone who has, for example, stayed up until four am on a school night two nights in a row reading a new comic series, I have expressed my love for art/books to be "at times bordering on addiction". However, although stopping might be very difficult, if there are several hours in between stopping and resuming, the urge to resume is much, much smaller.
I think it has something to do with which next 'want' is brought to the forefront of your mind when you are doing a task. There are many many things a human wants in their life but your attention can only really sit on one at a time. By eating a potato chip it fetches the want of "I want a potato chip" from the set of all wants and puts it front and center in your mind. Then it becomes both the thing you really want to act on next (cause its what sits in your attention at that moment) and it also feels bad when someone or something stops that want from being fulfilled (mum takes the bag of chips from you or turns off the tv when your 'movie want' is at the forefront of your attention)
Pretty sure addiction means the offending activity negatively impacts your living, you’re aware -although denial can exist- and you continue to engage in the behavior despite established risks/consequences. I don’t think watching a movie in one sitting equates.
Somewhat related: if I'm craving ice cream I'll trick myself by going into the shop and getting a couple sample spoons to satisfy the craving, then leaving. Or at the frozen yogurt-by-weight places, I'lll get like $0.90 worth of frozen yogurt.
I'm currently looking into "Dopamine fasting", which is what it's come to be called in certain circles when you abstain from cheap sources of pleasure, whether or not it's a misnomer (though it seems plausible enough to me) in order to combat being "below baseline" when you're supposed to be doing other things (e.g. working, or enjoying time with your family).
The idea is that if you're below baseline due to splurging on cheap pleasures, you won't be able to be motivated or enjoy work or leisure - and after the initial fun, you're not even really enjoying the addictive behaviours you get cheap pleasure from either.
I used to think that browsing Reddit in my free time was totally harmless - like, I was t being productive but it was my free time so that's ok. But the talk around dopamine fasting and the like has now got me thinking that I am damaging my motivation systems when I indulge in these things, and they might be contributing to procrastination and motivation issues generally.
I've experimented with leaving my phone outside my bedroom, trying to read books more instead of Reddit, and those sorts of things, and think I have seen some limited success. I haven't taken it to the extreme yet, but am considering taking it further.
What really helped was when internetting became more boring once the pandemic (which I was obsessed with) was waning here in Australia. I was really productive at work after that. Now with the war in Ukraine Im once again...well, addicted to keeping up with the news. It really feels like an addiction in every relevant way.
Many religions have practices of abstaining from easy pleasures, and I take it seriously when there's a confluence of ancient wisdom and modern science, even if it's a bit of heterodox science that isn't very solid yet.
Interested in anyone else's experiences on this topic.
Actually, heroin is not pleasurable for most people when they first try it and the overwhelming majority of people who try heroin never get addicted. In fact, most who try the drug don’t even like it. Dan Rather, the former CBS anchorman, famously shot up heroin in the 1950s for a news story. Yet despite taking the drug, the reporter says heroin only gave him a “hell of a headache.” Rather’s reaction is not unique.
A 2012 study on healthy volunteers found that some 15 percent of people given an opioid reported a strong dislike of it. 50 percent of test subjects reported mixed results, neither strongly liking or disliking the sensation. Only 30 percent of people in the study found the sensation to be pleasant. Of those reporting that the drug made them feel good, only half said they would want to experience it again. That’s a pretty poor showing for the world’s most addictive substance.
Clearly, there's more to addiction than the substance being abused. I think you're right on the money saying it's an awareness problem.
I write movies for a living and have worked on games too. For what it’s worth, the “flow state” you’re describing isn’t a neurological accident - it’s the point of (what might seem like) overly prescriptive story structures and “Save The Cat”-style formulas. The entertainment industry has been trying to figure out how to induce this state for a hundred years. It’s a moving target, but it’s not at all unintentional.
Anecdotally, I think the days/hours when I can find something so engrossing that I can hone in on it and notice until it's 4am are the best I have. Much of my life is quite monotonous, but if a new (or new to me) video game or book catches my eye in that special way, I give in as much as possible and just savor the ride while avoiding destroying other facets of my life. Certainly during those days I look dangerously addicted, but I know that the root cause is always fleeting novelty of the new experience that will quickly and naturally fade out, so I enjoy it while I can without being worried about a long term issue. It's rare enough that it never chains back to back.
I think the difference between my experience and a drug addict's is not the hyperfocus or enjoyment itself, but rather that I am fortunate that my poison comes with a rough but extant expiration date where it will no longer be interesting to me, and I just walk away. For an addict, this is where the chemical dependency kicks in and locks them into the miserable cycle
I have heard Andrew Huberman describe the journey of addiction (substance or otherwise) as a progressive narrowing of one's interests, and I find this to be pretty accurate.
Chimes with Marc Lewis's work (See The Biology of Desire) and various other cognitive science people, and I think Buddha, sort of. Addiction being not a problem of compulsive desire, but one of narrowing of vision.
Also, that Frito-Lay tagline, "betcha can't eat just one", sounds like a conditional prediction market advocating definitively for eating zero potato chips. "Frito-Lay: eat zero or eat the whole damn bag -- there's no middle ground!"
And my obligatory comment that I suppose this all bodes well for Beeminder's future.
Basically, addiction has less to do with the magical quality of the substance and more to do with how the person approaches it and the quality of the environment. I read about a rat study in Civilized to Death the other day. The gist is that the researchers gave the rats access to sugary and heroin-laced water. Those rats that were placed in an environment with other rats and cool leisure possibilities (like rat wheels, tunnels, and whatnot) drank very little of the water and none of them overdosed. In contrast those rats who were deprived of all these earthly perks coped by drug-laced water, with all the consequences it entails. All this to say - I think people already caught up on the idea that addiction is more encompassing than making the dopamine system hyperactive (although that might still be the major component). Which begs the question: what do meaningful experiences (however you want to define them) posses that make us prefer them over a snortful of heroin?
In my experience, a key part of many addictions is avoiding difficult emotional situations. Something that fully absords or distracts you - "one facet becomes much stronger than everything else" - means you get a break from having to worry about other things that you don't have the emotional energy to deal with.
I try to build the habit of realising that I'm only doing something because it is distractively absorbing (in my case, pointlessly doomscrolling the news), and instead trying to make myself stop and journal about whatever is happening deeper in me emotionally that I'm trying to hide from.
In terms of the model above, it isn't just one thing becoming stronger, it is also other things that are painful becoming weaker that matters. The addiction can be ultimately dissastifying to the reward centres, but if it sucks up attention and hides the painful things, that is a short term reward in itself.
I've seen this in myself and others with alcohol, eating disorders, work. In moderation it isn't always bad - the relief from the emotional pain is a genuine relief. Addictions like (predictable, successful) work or (well made) video games can have the virtue that they make you feel like you have agency and productivity, so have less destructive side effects on self image and depressive thought patterns.
Not a scientist, so take the ensuing thoughts with a pinch of salt but...
Is there an evolutionary angle to the phenomena you're describing?
If only the first few bites of food are tasty and then it's simply shovelling nutrients down your gullet, this makes sense from an evolutionary/survival POV: in a primitive scenario (mankind's lot for 99.9% of our existence) the purpose of the yummy taste is to get us to invest in the food source and keep going (the bait); then our body just wants us to mindlessly shovel down as much protein, carbs, whatever as we possibly can to improve our chances of survival.
So what about the "addiction" element in, for example, watching a movie or playing a video game? Well, let's return again to our (normal for most of human history) hunter-gatherer existence: in this state, activities in which we are investing a great deal of concentration and effort will have been geared towards surviving and/or passing on our genes.
Such relatively long term tasks might include working to extract food from difficult-to-access sources (individual nuts on a tree that each have to be picked, shelled with some difficulty before eating; grubs or insects extracted with a twig from inside the myriad crevices of a rotten log and so on). If you're engaged in such a task and are interrupted (forced to stop) it is upsetting because it's an interruption in meeting your basic survival needs.
Another example: hunters in primitive societies often rely on an exhaustive, meticulously observed scrutiny of their environment to (a) locate game and (b) catch it. This may entail staying in the same spot for many hours, barely moving, just observing, taking note of every movement in the grass or sudden flight of a bird. If your buddy strolls up mid way through this process and says "Hey! What's up?" all that good work of concentration is ruined and your chances of securing your calories for the day are diminished.
So when you get pissed because someone paused the movie, what you're really saying is: "You have just ruined my hunt and reduced my chances of survival!"
It's kinda weird to say that one is skeptical of a definition. Sure, that's a definition. There is a thing you can talk about: hijacking of your reward system by an externally administered chemical. Yes, you can get picky about trying to precisely define it so that food, oxygen etc.. don't count but at least relative to this society/environment we understand what counts.
Sure, that definition doesn't capture all things that are like addiction in terms of psychological behavior or neurology but it does capture an important/useful concept that's worth talking about so I don't think it can be dismissed as a bad or wrong definition. Chemical addictions have certain shared features (at least they do in our society...with different medical treatment/supervised usage who knows) and while you can counterexample almost any one feature that was claimed to be unique to chemical addictions it's still a useful concept for describing the world.
Sorry, I know that I'm being a bit pedantic and that you weren't denying that you could talk about the concept of external chemical addiction. However, I do think it raises the question of just what it was that you are claiming. Is the claim merely that, when you chunk the world up into concepts the way you find most salient or interesting that you'd not divide out the external chemical in this way? Or are you making a stronger claim about the neurological basis and how would we test it? I mean, of course, we all know that desires resemble addictions in some ways, but is there something more testable here?
This reminds me of the method I successfully used to quit both smoking and drinking. It came from Allen Carr's Easyway series. The books will not win any literary prizes but they were effective (at least for me, anyway, I know others who didn't have as much success).
He starts by asking the reader not to try quitting until they've finished the book and then repetitively drives home throughout the book that the pleasures derived from these addictions are illusury.
At the end he asks the reader then to mindfully (not the word he uses though) experience their last cigarette or drink. I remember feeling within my bones when I had my last smoke that it tasted horrible and gave me no pleasure whatsoever. Lo and behold, my nicotine craving was gone and I was from that day forward a non-smoker. So yes, I'm also sceptical about the chemical basis for addiction.
I repeated the process for alcohol, except that I wanted to cut down not quit. The book was cunningly called "The Easyway to control alcohol" so I thought it would help with this goal. It had the unexpected side-effect that I no longer felt the need to drink and so was a non-drinker when I finished that one and I have been ever since (9 years and counting)
I draw the opposite conclusion that you do. Since a lot of the psychological manifestations of "addiction" is just normal motivational dynamics, the part in classical addictions that really deviates is the fact that they involve chemicals that bypass your Cartesian boundary to directly mess with your reward system. So the term "addiction" should be restricted to that, and other terms like "superstimuli" are more relevant when talking highly motivating but boundary-respecting factors.
You should watch/listen to Andrew Huberman's podcast on dopamine( https://youtu.be/QmOF0crdyRU ), which, IMO, explains what you're talking about quite well. To elaborate - he discusses how ALL motivation and addiction works in the same way at the biological level - via dopamine.
I feel like this is the what meditators mean when they talk about cravings. The tendency you set out is why life can feel unsatisfactory, but training your mind not to react so strongly is the way to come to terms with it.
There's also a biochemical angle in which some addictive chemicals have withdrawal symptoms (usually due to prolonged exposure causing receptor downregulation). I don't think this exists for things like video games.
I reached a similar conclusion (everything can be addicted) after listening to this "dopamine masterclass" podcast episode from Andrew Huberman at stanford:
Although I don't get that 'angry when stopping' business (my daughter sure does...), what this podcast described was a mechanism where things that make you feel good in the short term lower your baseline rate of dopamine (tonic release) for some period of time afterwards. This suggests that anything which releases dopamine can be "addictive" in the sense that you'll feel a craving for more, and have a 'come down' afterwards.
This lined up with my own experience where sometimes if i was in an extra stressful situation (i.e. my house is filled with cousins who've come to visit, and is therefore chaos), i would binge on carbs and also look at the news more often, the end result being i would feel like absolute shit after a few days. Each time i had the carbs or the news, i did feel better in the _short_ run, but in the long run i just felt worse.
This is exactly what it was like being addicted to, and then coming out of the addiction to cannabis, except the intensity and duration was lower.
Mhm the flow state thing is very interesting to me. Probably why surfers stay in the water all day, at least that’s why I have when I’ve gone a few times. Probably the same with other types of flow state based activities like snowboarding, skiing etc.
This doesn't explain the whole phenomenon though. When I'm eating a huge bag of chips that (even) I cannot finish in one sitting, I will suddenly feel a repulsion towards the bag when I'm full. There was no tapering off. I was stuffing my mouth with chips, and suddenly I feel revulsion towards it. Can this be explained by the theory of feeding my addiction just to feel normal?
Most surprising of your posts, yet. This one sounded like "pretty obvious stuff everyone kinda knows to be more or less true." Video games addictive: hell, yes. I remember cycling through the Eurasian steppe and then feeling a strong urge to play. - Not as in “not what I want”, but: "that is a want I would rather not feel now, but sure: "I want it"". But then I also used to feel "I want sex", when I 'd better focused on another topic. ;) - Movies/stories: maybe a somewhat different neuro-mechanic, but eagerness for the next episode of GoT, BB or Charles Dickens sequel + hate to be interrupted: yep. You are just surprisingly(?) normal here. Welcome to the monkey house!
The appeal of the chemical model of addiction is that it provides a clear boundary around what is and isn't addiction. The microaddiction model seems like it risks collapsing into "anything that stimulates your reward center is addictive". If not everything is addictive then what's the principle that allows us to declare some things nonaddictive, and if everything is addictive then haven't you just redefined the word into a synonym for "enjoyable"?
An interesting thing here is that addictive behavior towards food exists on a spectrum that includes binge eating disorder (BED) at the high end. I'm not an expect on this subject, but BED bears some resemblance to more traditional addictions in that it involves the feeling of a loss of control and the feeling that the addictive behavior is negatively impacting one's life. On the flip side, addictive behavior toward non-food stimuli like social media and video games also falls on a spectrum. There are lots of ways to arrange this spectrum, but I think ADHD seems like it could be described as one extreme, in that it often involves being unable to avoid stimuli to the point of seriously negatively impacting one's life. And guess what, the same drug, Vyvanse, is approved to treat both ADHD and binge eating disorder!
"Are flow states just another word for microaddictions?"
I don't think this is quite correct. Can we reformulate as: "Are the rewards of specific flow states the same as the rewards that lead us to microaddictions?" If so, I think the answer is that there are common chemical elements, but the contexts in which we experience them are qualitatively different (although it's not a binary contrast, and you can create borderline dilemmas).
The psychologist who coined the term flow, Mihaly Csikszentmilhalyi, discussed resemblances between flow state ideals (performative artistry, sports achievement, etc.) and "addictions" (e.g., to gambling, sex) in work he published in the mid-'70s, long before his book "Flow." (Now video games are standard vehicles for measuring flow states in the lab.) An essential feature of Csikszentmilhayi's notion of "flow" is that the rewarding state involves the deployment of mastered skills (generally physical, but potentially intellectual). It has to do with "being in the groove" while doing something for a pre-imagined end. The association between the goal, the exercise of skill above a triggering threshold of complexity and duration, and the chemical experience is intrinsic to the meaning of the term "flow." At the end of the flow state, when a temporarily diminished or lost sense of reflective self returns, part of the experience is the residue of achievement that remains--the well executed ski run, expressive piano performance, quickly composed poem, and so forth. Those features can be distinguished, both through context and residual physical and psychological states, from the experiences and aftermaths of what actors themselves may be willing to name as "compulsive" gambling, sex, etc, which possess identifiers of what we mean by "addiction." The distinctions are as significant as the common features. Flow activities can become compulsive or obsessive, but they don't have to and very frequently don't. The essential element of the flow state is the experience of apparent autonomy of holistic skill operation, with minimal involvement of reflective intervention or sense of self-awareness.
I don't think that drugs are incompatible with flow experiences. Certain drugs might enhance performance, or psychedelics taken with "mystical" goals that are sought in the midst of an altered state might have goal/result structures similar to flow. But basically passive engagement that does not have a challenge/skill dynamic doesn't fit the definition of flow. (Some flow activities, like advanced Zen meditation, may appear passive, but require active discipline and skill engagement.) I think video games and card games are good borderline examples, hard to sort into or out of the "flow" category and probably falling to both sides of the line in specific cases. But I think potato chip eating, movie watching [I can think of exceptions], and the great majority of everyday drug experiences lack the context that turns dopamine into "flow."
So, you're applying the concept of the hedonic treadmill to small-scale experiences alongside the observation that people don't like to stop doing things they enjoy?
Question: Are there people denying that gambling addictions are "real" addictions?
Maybe this is actually a significant argument in psychiatry, but as a layman, I've never encountered this "purely chemical definition" of addiction.
Let me talk about smoking for a moment, though. I used to smoke. I'd still prefer to smoke than not smoke, holding all other preferences aside, but I do have other preferences, so I don't smoke. It's been years since I've smoked, at this point; any chemical concept of addiction simply doesn't apply.
Smoking is just pleasant. Nicotine is, basically, my favorite drug, and I've experimented with many of them over the years. This is how I feel now, and it was, exactly and entirely, why stopping smoking was difficult.
Is that addiction? That's basically just saying that a preference is equivalent to addiction.
Now, there's a stronger case to be made for, say, coffee, which has unpleasant withdrawal effects. I am physically addicted to coffee. But also I routinely quit drinking coffee, deal with the withdrawal, and then later go back to drinking coffee; I'll even deliberately do this for a tolerance break a couple of times a year. As with nicotine, I like caffeine, and over the years I've grown to like the taste of coffee, as well. But the thing I could point at with coffee, the physical symptoms of withdrawal, basically make no difference to my behavior; if we call that addiction, well, that's distinct from preference as addiction, but also it fails to capture the behaviors society regards as problematic with regard to addiction.
Any thoughts on how this applies to those with Binge Eating Disorder? The most common thing I hear from my BED patients is their inability to stop eating once they've taken a bite of a problem food. If they're in public, though, they're usually able to moderate the amount of chips, chocolate, candies, etc. they're eating.
Maybe I just have low willpower (and an ADHD diagnosis, but it's hard to tell how much that actually means anything given the hand-wavey requirements for such a diagnosis) but there are just so many times that I am doing a stimulating activity and cannot stop despite most of my higher faculties telling me to do so. That may not be "addiction." It seems useful to distinguish between this and the more destructive forces of drugs that will literally kill you if you stop taking them. But if not I don't know that we have a good word for what it is.
And while it may not be the same force that can kill a heroin user or heavy alcohol drinker if they try to stop cold turkey, I suspect it's the same force that causes people to spend their whole lives smoking pot.
This sort of speculation is obviously analogical, but for me it hits the sweet spot between being empirically grounded (but obvious or detail-laden) and being a diverting flight of fancy (verging on the purely subjective). The low epistemic status you assign it is actually for me a symptom of what is most appealing - but this is coupled with its being extremely plausible and coherent.
My only complaint is that it cut off way too soon. Totally broke my flow.
Slightly unrelated, but I’m curious whether taking naloxone is unpleasant for people who aren’t regular opiate users.
I was watching a YouTube video where the person allegedly got addicted to sun exposure (apparently it triggers some endogenous opiate receptors), took naloxone, and experienced opiate withdrawal symptoms. But he didn’t try the naloxone before the sunbathing stint (at least not on video), and also didn’t control for a placebo effect.
What if "addiction" and "focus" are two sides of the same coin? When I'm really productive in my home office, and the kids barge in complaining that one of the others was looking at them wrong, I get frustrated. I'm less frustrated if I was between activities. I'm more frustrated if I've tried multiple times to start an activity, but keep getting interrupted.
If you're focusing on a story (reading, watching, or listening) and you're suddenly interrupted, the problem isn't one of 'flow' but of focus. If your current activity requires you to put multiple things together at the same time, you need to focus or you'll lose the thread and have to start all over again.
I'm not sure how to connect this to potato chips, but it fits the experience with video games and TV shows. It's possible the same system that's responsible for rewarding you for being focused writing an important email is rewarding you for being focused playing a video game or understanding a complex plot. Indeed, many apps that market themselves as 'zen games' are designed to allow you to put them down at any point without losing focus/flow.
Breaking with consensus, I think this is straying a bit far into the trap of "Let's pathologize literally every aspect of the human experience" that psychiatrists of both the professional and armchair varieties tend to stumble into.
Yeah, taste-bud burnout can happen. I honestly assumed everyone noticed this and I've never had a real issue with it. But it's certainly not a universal or certain event, and I wouldn't describe it as a very small addiction. And then extending this beyond food to watching TV or film (and inviting logical extension to literally anything that makes people happy) strays into the bizarre.
It's an interesting thought, but I think its low epistemic confidence is deserved; a bit too much of a shower thought.
This doesn't match my experience at all, but it is possible this has to do with the nature of the food I'm eating versus what you are. I work from home, so cook all of my own food from raw ingredients, even making my own tortillas, salsas, broth, everything short of slaughtering my own animals and milling my own grain. So nothing mass-produced where the company is trying to make it addictive and I don't add sugar to anything. But I absolutely do not develop a tolerance or tapering off of food goodness. The last bite is just as good as the first. Another possibility is food is eventually subject to diminishing marginal utility, but mostly when you're eating more than you need, and I'm not doing that.
Also, thanks to a history of spine injuries and surgery recovery, I've been on opioids for pretty long periods of time. Tolerance and addiction may be related in some way, but they are definitely not the same thing. I did find the first few doses euphoric and later doses not. Effectiveness at pain relief also decreased a bit eventually, though it isn't always easy to tell because pain usually decreases as you heal anyway. Nonetheless, in spite of both enjoying it and apparently developing some level of tolerance or adaptation to it, I never got addicted. I took Percocet quite regularly for over three years and had zero trouble stopping when I didn't need it any more.
Do you have workable definitions for awareness and mindfulness? At the beginning of the article you talk about being mindful of the presence or absence of pleasure when eating, but it's pretty clear that the same process would happen even if you weren't being mindful. But at the end you speculate that addiction is about being hyper-aware of one facet of being motivated. Clearly addiction can happen without mindfulness, so mindfulness must be different from awareness, as you define the words.
I started reading the article expecting mindfulness and awareness to basically be the same thing, and I agree about how the mindful eating works, so if we use my intuitive ideas about the meanings of the words awareness must not be required for addiction. As I write this I can't fill in the blanks -- I don't have definitions I like of awareness, mindfulness, or addiction.
1. Some foods/food additives work on neurotransmitters in a chemical way. My first question here was “which brand of potato chips?” because some have additives that do this. There may already be an ACX/SSC article on the evidence for or against high fructose corn syrup doing this to some people. For myself there are a few chemicals that hit like a ton of bricks and it’s unpleasant enough that I make effort to avoid them (I am somewhat sure it’s those, and further personal research is unpleasant enough to not be worth it.) Others find those pleasant though or at least habit-forming. Some of the dust-type flavors on some chip brands will do this (sour cream & onion Pringles is one, there are many others.)
2. Flow state - I think repetitive stationary activities open up a type of cognitive processing which doesn’t always happen in awareness consciously. When I get the most annoyed at being interrupted in a movie or game, it’s usually this other processing that hates being interrupted. Leaving the game itself isn’t so bad, but that other track takes a while to get going and doesn’t want to stop. Depending on other life circumstances, people who need this processing will get very protective of their methods. Something might look like a compulsion or addiction, but it’s more like “I have to claim I really need this, or they’ll never leave me alone long enough to finish my thoughts about other topic Z.”
“ Opioids can still stimulate your reward system more strongly than video games and potato chips can, but not for lack of trying by Activision and Frito-Lay Inc.”
Is that true? Millions of people try opioids every year, they can me fentanyl at my last colonoscopy as an example. And people have surgery, dental work, etc. But only a very small percentage become addicted.
Everyone eats food but only a small percentage end up 900 pounds. Food is obviously more complicated as quitting food cold Turkey is 100% fatal.
As there are all manner of recognized behavioral addictions (including food) I think you're headed in the right direction here. But, truth be told, depending how you look at brain function, it's all a chemical addiction. When you over stimulate your dopamine producing brain parts, by for instance binging on porn, you do cause the brain to produce additional receptors, so you need more and more to get the same result. Which means that when you aren't binging on it you can't produce enough dopamine to be happy. Same thing probably happens when you get interrupted in the middle of the "flow state". Your brain is expecting the next dopamine molecule to pop in and it doesn't. So you feel bad.
In a way, I wish this happened to me with food. It doesn't. I have to be truly satiated before I perceive tasty food as less tasty. Twenty bites doesn't even begin to cause that to happen. I'm having a mildly difficult time believing your experience can be real. I mean, I believe it, but it seems very odd. As a side note, I own more than 200 cookbooks.
I'm a writer. When I'm in writing in a flow state, I experience a distinctive, unpleasant physical sensation when someone interrupts me. If I've forgotten to mute my phone and it rings, well, I'm too old to throw a temper tantrum, but I certain indulge in a curt tone as I answer.
Is 'motivational hyper-awareness' that which is mediated by ΔFosB (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOSB)? From what I understand, ΔFosB is implicated in reward salience and just keeps building up with chronic exposure to addictive substances.
I'm interested to know if ΔFosB might be an under-considered target for anti-addition interventions, as well as if it plays a computationally interesting role in reinforcement learning. Curiously, the neurocorrelate/MoA-knowledgeable people I know don't often talk about this mechanism - is that because it is uninteresting, weirdly hard to pharmacologically target, or just that more basic reward system stuff gets all the attention?
"The reward system" is a useful phrase for identifying brain regions involved in reward. But introspectively, I seem to have many different reward percepts. I would think each different reward qualia ought to count as a different reward mechanism, because what seems to happen in a potato-chip eating frenzy is that one particular reward signal outcompetes others. I am sometimes conscious while eating potato chips that I'm no longer enjoying them and do not, in fact, want more of them; would even like to stop; yet my arm keeps on reaching into the bag and stuffing them into my mouth. It's a confusing brain state, and "reward system activated" seems an inadequate summary of it.
I'm pretty sure my own perception of this experience is not universal, because I've watched lots of videos recently about how to lose fat, in which the leanest, most-successful fat-losers--say, Jeff Cavaliere Athlean-X Dot Com (his full legal name)--say "Just stop eating junk food!" They've clearly never experienced a diet blackout, in which you wander through the house apparently (to your conscious mind) at random, and then end up in the kitchen, where your conscious awareness fades for a few seconds until you "wake up" and discover your arm has reached out, grabbed some food, and stuffed it into your mouth. I think these super-lean people just have a defective hunger system.
I'm perplexed as to why we respond so much more strongly and quickly to food deprivation than to water deprivation. Most of us could survive 3 days on our water reserves, and months on our fat reserves. So why is it harder to go a full day without eating than without drinking?
As to movies and stories, I think that's quite different. Stories are, contrary to Aristotle's *Poetics*, very cognitive. A traditional story arc has a complex grammar to it, which involves a fractal structure of reversals and new initiatives, callbacks to earlier foreshadowings, the closing-off at the end of issues raised near the beginning, and tying the plot in several places to a theme which parallels it. Classical music is very similar in structure. Rhetoric involves similar principles.
I'll consider 'addictions' to e.g. video games more than just metaphorical when you show me someone who emptied their bank account and is giving $5 blowjobs to get an Xbox or another bag of potato chips.
The description of hyper-awareness of one facet of the motivation system is intriguing, but it seems to match various forms of arousal more than addiction per se. Addiction is usually defined in terms of a compulsive behavior. The example of "mindful eating" that the piece begins with doesn't sound much like an addiction, even a micro one, in that there was no compulsive element; it was just a weird effect of mindfulness applied to something we normally do unmindfully.
This is similar to the reinforcer pathology view of addiction, which involves an overconsumption of a reinforcer in the face of aversive consequences. (Reinforcer here in the behavioral sense). From this view, many things can be considered addictive beyond drugs, like food, sex, or video games.
From my own experience, becoming less pleasurable over time is not an inherent property of addictions. I have an actual physical addiction to caffeine (get a headache on a day I don't have it), but I still enjoy it as much as the first time I drank coffee. And when I eat junk food that I like, I feel like I enjoy it equally the whole time. (Sometimes I'll compulsively eat a snack I don't really like just because it's sweet or salty and in front of me, but that's different.)
I do not notice that tasty food becomes less tasty for me. I just tried this with French fries and ice cream, and they tasted good until I was full.
Additionally, heroin never stops feeling good, adjusted for tolerance. Even without increasing dose, it still feels good at first — just doesn't last as long as it used to.
If you are talking about things that you like, but are not actually addictive, then you are describing either adaptation or habitation, which are similar in outcome, but have different mechanisms. Basically, you don't feel as much of the effects of sensory stimulation the tenth time as the first time.
On the other hand, if you are dealing with things that are actually addictive, they have three properties: desire (you really enjoy it), withdrawal (you feel bad when you no longer can get it), and tolerance (you get less and less enjoyment with repeated experiences). The reason for withdrawal and tolerance is that the body does not like to be disturbed and if the drug (or whatever) disrupts its homeostasis, it produces a compensatory response that negates the drug (or whatever) effect. That's why addictive drugs have less and less of an effect as the body gets better snd better at negating their actions. Pavlov pointed out that the body does this by responding to the environmental cues that predict the onset of the drug. If the environmental cues that have predicted the drug are there, but the drug is not, you just get the negating effects that constitute the withdrawal symptoms, which are always the opposite of the drug effects.
Paul Grahams essay "The acceleration of addictiveness" is a great add on to the last sentence "...other ways are rapidly catching up". There's obviously plenty of people addicted to drugs, but in the 21st century we're starting to see more and more people "addicted" to other things (social media, video games, junk food, porn, etc). That trend is only increasing and is quite concerning.
I was an RA in a lab working on the neurobiology of the mammalian reward/motivation system using medial forebrain bundle stimulation experiments as our model. This was two decades ago and the study of drug addiction was a major application of our work. My way of conceptualizing it was that "addiction" was undesired compulsive behavior that ultimately comes from that signaling pathway(s) and chemical substances that are addictive that work by either directly or indirectly creating axon potentials in the right areas. But all addictions are chemical at their root. Cocaine and gambling ultimately do similar things in brain when they become compulsive. The route is just slightly different.
One of my favorite party tricks is to walk up to the bowl of potato chips and announce to whoever is paying attention - "I just want one". Then I eat one potato chip and walk away.
Let's think of a person as a reinforcement learning agent with a particular reward function. Integrating a reward function over time with exponential time discount is mathematically equivalent to integrating the time derivative of the reward function with the same exponential time discount (up to constants). So, this can be just a mechanism to motivate the exact same behavior. The advantage of taking the derivate can be a better dynamic range (the derivative of the reward usually doesn't vary as much as the reward itself can vary). That is, it saves us the need to use more neurons to represent reward values.
You're absolutely right about food, I've noticed that exact phenomenon. I'm told things taste better to us when our bodies are more in need of the specific nutrients they contain; I noticed the truth of it in pregnancy (when I used to open the fridge and grab whatever appealed to me most, e.g. a spoonful of mustard, in order to stay ahead of cravings--that was a delicious spoonful of mustard, folks), and in a more muted way I notice it now. The first (little) handful of chocolate chips tastes amazing, further handfuls less so--so if I've had a good enough day to have the willpower, I stop after the first.
But movies are entirely different. A story is like sex: it has a climax, and the climax is the part people want, it feels good and it releases tension. The buildup to it makes it better; few people want it instantly b/c they know it won't be very good that way; but the climax is the part people want. The frustration of being interrupted is the frustration of not being able to complete the experience, not that of not being able to repeat or continue it.
Granted, I don't know how chemical addictions work, so I don't know what exactly the import of this distinction might be. But it certainly seems important to me.
That description of heroin disagrees with my impression at least, as a multi-time recovered addict. I find that it is unpleasant the first time or two but once you get addicted it allows you this amazing ability instantly put your mind into exactly the state it is looking for. Outside of the physical addiction, it is that explicit control of state of mind which I think is most addicting to many people.
It was quite pleasant the very first time I tried it. I remember waking unusually early, feeling especially rested, climbing into the shower and thinking, (uh-oh) "What can I sell or steal to get some more of that?"
Recently I have watched a talk about addiction that complements this post. Talk is by Reinhold Bartl, head of the Milton Erickson Institute Innsbruck. He offers a hypno-systemic view on addiction as the loss of choice (der Verlust von Wahlmöglichkeiten). Addiction is a situation where a) someone enjoys a substance or an activity very much and b) is scathed for this by another person. Typically addiction is developed during adolescence where this conflict takes place between a kid and it's parent and is internalized in the further course of life. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B73Kot6M3wU
Seems the criterion for 'enjoying' food is focussed on taste. Isn't there an opposing force that stops one from eating 20 potato chips or 10 squares of chocolate, namely the "mouthfeel"?. I hate the feeling of my mouth being full of the residual debris of foodstuffs, especially chocolate or chip-dust. The moment I feel that coating start to accumulate, I'm done, which is usually after 1 square of chocolate or a handful of chips.
Is there a relationship between disgust-sensitivity and binge-eating? Can't tell if highly disgust-sensitive people are inherently resistant to binge-eating because of the mouthfeel effect; or if - conversely - binge eating is a shame-response to disgust for sensitive people.
"Everyone always says you should “eat mindfully”. I tried this once and it was weird. For example, I noticed that only the first few bites of a tasty food actually tasted good. After that I habituated and lost it. Not only that, but there was a brief period when I finished eating the food which was below hedonic baseline."
I really can't imagine having this experience with food.
> Instead, I think of addiction as what happens when you become hyper-aware of one particular facet of your normal motivation system.
This is a (the?) standard definition of addiction in the literature, right? "Hypersensitization of incentive-salience attribution" is what I recall from, e.g., The Mind of an Addicted Brain: Neural Sensitization of Wanting versus Liking, by Kent C. Berridge and Terry E. Robinson, in Current Directions in Psychological Science , Jun., 1995, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Jun., 1995), pp. 71-76
Not only can tolerance develop over the course of multiple uses of the same drug, but it also develops rapidly within a single use of a drug in a process called "tachyphylaxis". How long does Adderall IR last, experientially? About 5 hours. What's its elimination half-life? About 10 hours. So 10 hours after the dose you're no longer feeling the effects (or you're experiencing a rebound / "come down") and yet you're still at 50% of the peak plasma levels! AFAICT this is true for a lot of psychoactive drugs (though sometimes this happens due to protein binding).
Another relevant concept is "substance use disorder", which I assumed meant something along the lines of "has a serious tolerance to illegal drugs" but in fact means an individual is persisting in their drug use despite serious negative consequences in other areas of their life. Similarly for addiction, which is often used colloquially to mean "experiences negative effects without" but actually means "compulsive engagement in rewarding stimuli despite adverse consequences".
So if I'm drinking a fairly consistent amount of coffee every day and would have trouble living my normal life without it, I'm dependent but not addicted. Similarly one might argue that many of the early examples in this article are more akin to temporary dependences than temporary addictions.
But the article settles on the right conception of addiction, IMO. You're not addicted when it's hard to stop; heck, it's hard to change any habit. You're addicted when you start to sacrifice the rest of your life in pursuit of one source of pleasure.
I've encountered many addictive things in my life, and the strongest was World of Warcraft. It doesn't just hit the pleasure button in your brain (which drugs can certainly do _much_ more effectively). It gives you goals, it makes it easy to become part of a community, and to take on an important role in that community. It rewards your work with permanent incremental progress. I recall being frustrated not only with having to go to class, but also by normal social interactions - hanging out with friends - that were previously the highlight of my week. A few more hours and I could gain a level; what could friends offer me that would compare?
This certainly sounds like addiction / substance use disorder to me, though the DSM probably doesn't consider World of Warcraft to be a substance.
I'm a little bit surprised that this should be a new thing - especially with Scott's background as a trained and practicing clinical psychiatrist. My own model of addiction is like this since decades: you do something which feels nice, this produces dopamine and you want to do it again. And again. And again. No need for external chemicals playing with your brain, just nearly a billion years of evolution of life on earth. Some chemicals can speed up the addiction process because they emulate chemicals of our inner reward system. People call these chemicals literally 'dope'. But they call activities which do the same 'dope' as well. I just remember a lot of skiers and snowboarders wearing clothes from an brand called 'dope' these days and totally can understand this. I'm totally addicted to skiing recently, spending a lot of money on that, gave it higher priority then family and work the past months. Same with playing computer games (not me but a kid), reading all day (kids), Smartphones (the whole family) and so forth.
So I'm buffled that all this should be a new thing. Maybe I had learned a general truth by myself which ist not yet common wisdom? Can't believe that...
So, “all desire is suffering”, in an actual concrete way?
I have no actual statistical research, only anecdote and personal experience, but your intuition about this definitely matches my experience of the world, and in particular it is why I swore off online gaming after spending three months becoming increasingly obsessed with a text based MUD in college -- I realized that I was on a bad trajectory, quit, and decided henceforth I would only engage with forms of gaming that had some kind of end-point I could reach. With a truly excellent game, like Breath of the Wild, there is definitely a let-down when it's done, and also some reflection on "was spending all that time on that worth it?" It takes a month or two of returning to spending that spare time on other stuff to "balance out" and be able to really decide for sure whether I think the game was a worthy work of art -- as worth spending time on as reading a novel or watching a long narrative TV show -- or whether it was just a rabbit hole that kinda wasted several dozen hours of my life (and so I should maybe be more discriminating about what game I pick up next, listen to reviewers who were negative on that one, etc).
As someone who has, for example, stayed up until four am on a school night two nights in a row reading a new comic series, I have expressed my love for art/books to be "at times bordering on addiction". However, although stopping might be very difficult, if there are several hours in between stopping and resuming, the urge to resume is much, much smaller.
I think it has something to do with which next 'want' is brought to the forefront of your mind when you are doing a task. There are many many things a human wants in their life but your attention can only really sit on one at a time. By eating a potato chip it fetches the want of "I want a potato chip" from the set of all wants and puts it front and center in your mind. Then it becomes both the thing you really want to act on next (cause its what sits in your attention at that moment) and it also feels bad when someone or something stops that want from being fulfilled (mum takes the bag of chips from you or turns off the tv when your 'movie want' is at the forefront of your attention)
Pretty sure addiction means the offending activity negatively impacts your living, you’re aware -although denial can exist- and you continue to engage in the behavior despite established risks/consequences. I don’t think watching a movie in one sitting equates.
> The first minute of watching a movie certainly isn’t the best
Sounds like you should try 5-second films! http://5secondfilms.com/
Chew your food! Take human bites!
Somewhat related: if I'm craving ice cream I'll trick myself by going into the shop and getting a couple sample spoons to satisfy the craving, then leaving. Or at the frozen yogurt-by-weight places, I'lll get like $0.90 worth of frozen yogurt.
Reflected in the Abrahamic belief: Do not take false idols.
I'm currently looking into "Dopamine fasting", which is what it's come to be called in certain circles when you abstain from cheap sources of pleasure, whether or not it's a misnomer (though it seems plausible enough to me) in order to combat being "below baseline" when you're supposed to be doing other things (e.g. working, or enjoying time with your family).
The idea is that if you're below baseline due to splurging on cheap pleasures, you won't be able to be motivated or enjoy work or leisure - and after the initial fun, you're not even really enjoying the addictive behaviours you get cheap pleasure from either.
I used to think that browsing Reddit in my free time was totally harmless - like, I was t being productive but it was my free time so that's ok. But the talk around dopamine fasting and the like has now got me thinking that I am damaging my motivation systems when I indulge in these things, and they might be contributing to procrastination and motivation issues generally.
I've experimented with leaving my phone outside my bedroom, trying to read books more instead of Reddit, and those sorts of things, and think I have seen some limited success. I haven't taken it to the extreme yet, but am considering taking it further.
What really helped was when internetting became more boring once the pandemic (which I was obsessed with) was waning here in Australia. I was really productive at work after that. Now with the war in Ukraine Im once again...well, addicted to keeping up with the news. It really feels like an addiction in every relevant way.
Many religions have practices of abstaining from easy pleasures, and I take it seriously when there's a confluence of ancient wisdom and modern science, even if it's a bit of heterodox science that isn't very solid yet.
Interested in anyone else's experiences on this topic.
Actually, heroin is not pleasurable for most people when they first try it and the overwhelming majority of people who try heroin never get addicted. In fact, most who try the drug don’t even like it. Dan Rather, the former CBS anchorman, famously shot up heroin in the 1950s for a news story. Yet despite taking the drug, the reporter says heroin only gave him a “hell of a headache.” Rather’s reaction is not unique.
A 2012 study on healthy volunteers found that some 15 percent of people given an opioid reported a strong dislike of it. 50 percent of test subjects reported mixed results, neither strongly liking or disliking the sensation. Only 30 percent of people in the study found the sensation to be pleasant. Of those reporting that the drug made them feel good, only half said they would want to experience it again. That’s a pretty poor showing for the world’s most addictive substance.
Clearly, there's more to addiction than the substance being abused. I think you're right on the money saying it's an awareness problem.
More here: https://www.nirandfar.com/addiction
I write movies for a living and have worked on games too. For what it’s worth, the “flow state” you’re describing isn’t a neurological accident - it’s the point of (what might seem like) overly prescriptive story structures and “Save The Cat”-style formulas. The entertainment industry has been trying to figure out how to induce this state for a hundred years. It’s a moving target, but it’s not at all unintentional.
Anecdotally, I think the days/hours when I can find something so engrossing that I can hone in on it and notice until it's 4am are the best I have. Much of my life is quite monotonous, but if a new (or new to me) video game or book catches my eye in that special way, I give in as much as possible and just savor the ride while avoiding destroying other facets of my life. Certainly during those days I look dangerously addicted, but I know that the root cause is always fleeting novelty of the new experience that will quickly and naturally fade out, so I enjoy it while I can without being worried about a long term issue. It's rare enough that it never chains back to back.
I think the difference between my experience and a drug addict's is not the hyperfocus or enjoyment itself, but rather that I am fortunate that my poison comes with a rough but extant expiration date where it will no longer be interesting to me, and I just walk away. For an addict, this is where the chemical dependency kicks in and locks them into the miserable cycle
I have heard Andrew Huberman describe the journey of addiction (substance or otherwise) as a progressive narrowing of one's interests, and I find this to be pretty accurate.
Chimes with Marc Lewis's work (See The Biology of Desire) and various other cognitive science people, and I think Buddha, sort of. Addiction being not a problem of compulsive desire, but one of narrowing of vision.
Relatedly, Paul Graham arguing in 2010 that technology is accelerating addictiveness: http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
Also, that Frito-Lay tagline, "betcha can't eat just one", sounds like a conditional prediction market advocating definitively for eating zero potato chips. "Frito-Lay: eat zero or eat the whole damn bag -- there's no middle ground!"
And my obligatory comment that I suppose this all bodes well for Beeminder's future.
PS: Also related: https://manifold.markets/NcyRocks/will-the-commitments-community-have
Girl Scout cookies -- a vast conspiracy. Has anyone ever eaten just one? Of course not, the little rug rats know what they're about.
Basically, addiction has less to do with the magical quality of the substance and more to do with how the person approaches it and the quality of the environment. I read about a rat study in Civilized to Death the other day. The gist is that the researchers gave the rats access to sugary and heroin-laced water. Those rats that were placed in an environment with other rats and cool leisure possibilities (like rat wheels, tunnels, and whatnot) drank very little of the water and none of them overdosed. In contrast those rats who were deprived of all these earthly perks coped by drug-laced water, with all the consequences it entails. All this to say - I think people already caught up on the idea that addiction is more encompassing than making the dopamine system hyperactive (although that might still be the major component). Which begs the question: what do meaningful experiences (however you want to define them) posses that make us prefer them over a snortful of heroin?
In my experience, a key part of many addictions is avoiding difficult emotional situations. Something that fully absords or distracts you - "one facet becomes much stronger than everything else" - means you get a break from having to worry about other things that you don't have the emotional energy to deal with.
I try to build the habit of realising that I'm only doing something because it is distractively absorbing (in my case, pointlessly doomscrolling the news), and instead trying to make myself stop and journal about whatever is happening deeper in me emotionally that I'm trying to hide from.
In terms of the model above, it isn't just one thing becoming stronger, it is also other things that are painful becoming weaker that matters. The addiction can be ultimately dissastifying to the reward centres, but if it sucks up attention and hides the painful things, that is a short term reward in itself.
I've seen this in myself and others with alcohol, eating disorders, work. In moderation it isn't always bad - the relief from the emotional pain is a genuine relief. Addictions like (predictable, successful) work or (well made) video games can have the virtue that they make you feel like you have agency and productivity, so have less destructive side effects on self image and depressive thought patterns.
Not a scientist, so take the ensuing thoughts with a pinch of salt but...
Is there an evolutionary angle to the phenomena you're describing?
If only the first few bites of food are tasty and then it's simply shovelling nutrients down your gullet, this makes sense from an evolutionary/survival POV: in a primitive scenario (mankind's lot for 99.9% of our existence) the purpose of the yummy taste is to get us to invest in the food source and keep going (the bait); then our body just wants us to mindlessly shovel down as much protein, carbs, whatever as we possibly can to improve our chances of survival.
So what about the "addiction" element in, for example, watching a movie or playing a video game? Well, let's return again to our (normal for most of human history) hunter-gatherer existence: in this state, activities in which we are investing a great deal of concentration and effort will have been geared towards surviving and/or passing on our genes.
Such relatively long term tasks might include working to extract food from difficult-to-access sources (individual nuts on a tree that each have to be picked, shelled with some difficulty before eating; grubs or insects extracted with a twig from inside the myriad crevices of a rotten log and so on). If you're engaged in such a task and are interrupted (forced to stop) it is upsetting because it's an interruption in meeting your basic survival needs.
Another example: hunters in primitive societies often rely on an exhaustive, meticulously observed scrutiny of their environment to (a) locate game and (b) catch it. This may entail staying in the same spot for many hours, barely moving, just observing, taking note of every movement in the grass or sudden flight of a bird. If your buddy strolls up mid way through this process and says "Hey! What's up?" all that good work of concentration is ruined and your chances of securing your calories for the day are diminished.
So when you get pissed because someone paused the movie, what you're really saying is: "You have just ruined my hunt and reduced my chances of survival!"
It's kinda weird to say that one is skeptical of a definition. Sure, that's a definition. There is a thing you can talk about: hijacking of your reward system by an externally administered chemical. Yes, you can get picky about trying to precisely define it so that food, oxygen etc.. don't count but at least relative to this society/environment we understand what counts.
Sure, that definition doesn't capture all things that are like addiction in terms of psychological behavior or neurology but it does capture an important/useful concept that's worth talking about so I don't think it can be dismissed as a bad or wrong definition. Chemical addictions have certain shared features (at least they do in our society...with different medical treatment/supervised usage who knows) and while you can counterexample almost any one feature that was claimed to be unique to chemical addictions it's still a useful concept for describing the world.
Sorry, I know that I'm being a bit pedantic and that you weren't denying that you could talk about the concept of external chemical addiction. However, I do think it raises the question of just what it was that you are claiming. Is the claim merely that, when you chunk the world up into concepts the way you find most salient or interesting that you'd not divide out the external chemical in this way? Or are you making a stronger claim about the neurological basis and how would we test it? I mean, of course, we all know that desires resemble addictions in some ways, but is there something more testable here?
This reminds me of the method I successfully used to quit both smoking and drinking. It came from Allen Carr's Easyway series. The books will not win any literary prizes but they were effective (at least for me, anyway, I know others who didn't have as much success).
He starts by asking the reader not to try quitting until they've finished the book and then repetitively drives home throughout the book that the pleasures derived from these addictions are illusury.
At the end he asks the reader then to mindfully (not the word he uses though) experience their last cigarette or drink. I remember feeling within my bones when I had my last smoke that it tasted horrible and gave me no pleasure whatsoever. Lo and behold, my nicotine craving was gone and I was from that day forward a non-smoker. So yes, I'm also sceptical about the chemical basis for addiction.
I repeated the process for alcohol, except that I wanted to cut down not quit. The book was cunningly called "The Easyway to control alcohol" so I thought it would help with this goal. It had the unexpected side-effect that I no longer felt the need to drink and so was a non-drinker when I finished that one and I have been ever since (9 years and counting)
I draw the opposite conclusion that you do. Since a lot of the psychological manifestations of "addiction" is just normal motivational dynamics, the part in classical addictions that really deviates is the fact that they involve chemicals that bypass your Cartesian boundary to directly mess with your reward system. So the term "addiction" should be restricted to that, and other terms like "superstimuli" are more relevant when talking highly motivating but boundary-respecting factors.
You should watch/listen to Andrew Huberman's podcast on dopamine( https://youtu.be/QmOF0crdyRU ), which, IMO, explains what you're talking about quite well. To elaborate - he discusses how ALL motivation and addiction works in the same way at the biological level - via dopamine.
I feel like this is the what meditators mean when they talk about cravings. The tendency you set out is why life can feel unsatisfactory, but training your mind not to react so strongly is the way to come to terms with it.
There's also a biochemical angle in which some addictive chemicals have withdrawal symptoms (usually due to prolonged exposure causing receptor downregulation). I don't think this exists for things like video games.
I reached a similar conclusion (everything can be addicted) after listening to this "dopamine masterclass" podcast episode from Andrew Huberman at stanford:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmOF0crdyRU&
Although I don't get that 'angry when stopping' business (my daughter sure does...), what this podcast described was a mechanism where things that make you feel good in the short term lower your baseline rate of dopamine (tonic release) for some period of time afterwards. This suggests that anything which releases dopamine can be "addictive" in the sense that you'll feel a craving for more, and have a 'come down' afterwards.
This lined up with my own experience where sometimes if i was in an extra stressful situation (i.e. my house is filled with cousins who've come to visit, and is therefore chaos), i would binge on carbs and also look at the news more often, the end result being i would feel like absolute shit after a few days. Each time i had the carbs or the news, i did feel better in the _short_ run, but in the long run i just felt worse.
This is exactly what it was like being addicted to, and then coming out of the addiction to cannabis, except the intensity and duration was lower.
I can in fact just eat a single potato crisp without any problem.
The secret is that I don't like potato.crisps.
I resent anyone in line to get the burrito that will at best whelm me.
Mhm the flow state thing is very interesting to me. Probably why surfers stay in the water all day, at least that’s why I have when I’ve gone a few times. Probably the same with other types of flow state based activities like snowboarding, skiing etc.
"Addiction" feels like one of those fuzzy words that are mostly about emotional charge.
I am more "addicted" to water and oxygen than any heroinist. But since water is good for me, those addictions don't count.
I once took a bite of a Dove Bar and said it’s only the first bite that tastes truly fantastic. My wife offered to finish it for me. I declined.
This doesn't explain the whole phenomenon though. When I'm eating a huge bag of chips that (even) I cannot finish in one sitting, I will suddenly feel a repulsion towards the bag when I'm full. There was no tapering off. I was stuffing my mouth with chips, and suddenly I feel revulsion towards it. Can this be explained by the theory of feeding my addiction just to feel normal?
Most surprising of your posts, yet. This one sounded like "pretty obvious stuff everyone kinda knows to be more or less true." Video games addictive: hell, yes. I remember cycling through the Eurasian steppe and then feeling a strong urge to play. - Not as in “not what I want”, but: "that is a want I would rather not feel now, but sure: "I want it"". But then I also used to feel "I want sex", when I 'd better focused on another topic. ;) - Movies/stories: maybe a somewhat different neuro-mechanic, but eagerness for the next episode of GoT, BB or Charles Dickens sequel + hate to be interrupted: yep. You are just surprisingly(?) normal here. Welcome to the monkey house!
The appeal of the chemical model of addiction is that it provides a clear boundary around what is and isn't addiction. The microaddiction model seems like it risks collapsing into "anything that stimulates your reward center is addictive". If not everything is addictive then what's the principle that allows us to declare some things nonaddictive, and if everything is addictive then haven't you just redefined the word into a synonym for "enjoyable"?
There's a whole line of interesting work in cognitive neuroscience on how addiction dissociates "wanting" (i.e. motivation to pursue something) from actually "liking" it. Seems related to this idea. E.g. good review paper here: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.466.8030&rep=rep1&type=pdf
An interesting thing here is that addictive behavior towards food exists on a spectrum that includes binge eating disorder (BED) at the high end. I'm not an expect on this subject, but BED bears some resemblance to more traditional addictions in that it involves the feeling of a loss of control and the feeling that the addictive behavior is negatively impacting one's life. On the flip side, addictive behavior toward non-food stimuli like social media and video games also falls on a spectrum. There are lots of ways to arrange this spectrum, but I think ADHD seems like it could be described as one extreme, in that it often involves being unable to avoid stimuli to the point of seriously negatively impacting one's life. And guess what, the same drug, Vyvanse, is approved to treat both ADHD and binge eating disorder!
"Are flow states just another word for microaddictions?"
I don't think this is quite correct. Can we reformulate as: "Are the rewards of specific flow states the same as the rewards that lead us to microaddictions?" If so, I think the answer is that there are common chemical elements, but the contexts in which we experience them are qualitatively different (although it's not a binary contrast, and you can create borderline dilemmas).
The psychologist who coined the term flow, Mihaly Csikszentmilhalyi, discussed resemblances between flow state ideals (performative artistry, sports achievement, etc.) and "addictions" (e.g., to gambling, sex) in work he published in the mid-'70s, long before his book "Flow." (Now video games are standard vehicles for measuring flow states in the lab.) An essential feature of Csikszentmilhayi's notion of "flow" is that the rewarding state involves the deployment of mastered skills (generally physical, but potentially intellectual). It has to do with "being in the groove" while doing something for a pre-imagined end. The association between the goal, the exercise of skill above a triggering threshold of complexity and duration, and the chemical experience is intrinsic to the meaning of the term "flow." At the end of the flow state, when a temporarily diminished or lost sense of reflective self returns, part of the experience is the residue of achievement that remains--the well executed ski run, expressive piano performance, quickly composed poem, and so forth. Those features can be distinguished, both through context and residual physical and psychological states, from the experiences and aftermaths of what actors themselves may be willing to name as "compulsive" gambling, sex, etc, which possess identifiers of what we mean by "addiction." The distinctions are as significant as the common features. Flow activities can become compulsive or obsessive, but they don't have to and very frequently don't. The essential element of the flow state is the experience of apparent autonomy of holistic skill operation, with minimal involvement of reflective intervention or sense of self-awareness.
I don't think that drugs are incompatible with flow experiences. Certain drugs might enhance performance, or psychedelics taken with "mystical" goals that are sought in the midst of an altered state might have goal/result structures similar to flow. But basically passive engagement that does not have a challenge/skill dynamic doesn't fit the definition of flow. (Some flow activities, like advanced Zen meditation, may appear passive, but require active discipline and skill engagement.) I think video games and card games are good borderline examples, hard to sort into or out of the "flow" category and probably falling to both sides of the line in specific cases. But I think potato chip eating, movie watching [I can think of exceptions], and the great majority of everyday drug experiences lack the context that turns dopamine into "flow."
So, you're applying the concept of the hedonic treadmill to small-scale experiences alongside the observation that people don't like to stop doing things they enjoy?
Question: Are there people denying that gambling addictions are "real" addictions?
Maybe this is actually a significant argument in psychiatry, but as a layman, I've never encountered this "purely chemical definition" of addiction.
Let me talk about smoking for a moment, though. I used to smoke. I'd still prefer to smoke than not smoke, holding all other preferences aside, but I do have other preferences, so I don't smoke. It's been years since I've smoked, at this point; any chemical concept of addiction simply doesn't apply.
Smoking is just pleasant. Nicotine is, basically, my favorite drug, and I've experimented with many of them over the years. This is how I feel now, and it was, exactly and entirely, why stopping smoking was difficult.
Is that addiction? That's basically just saying that a preference is equivalent to addiction.
Now, there's a stronger case to be made for, say, coffee, which has unpleasant withdrawal effects. I am physically addicted to coffee. But also I routinely quit drinking coffee, deal with the withdrawal, and then later go back to drinking coffee; I'll even deliberately do this for a tolerance break a couple of times a year. As with nicotine, I like caffeine, and over the years I've grown to like the taste of coffee, as well. But the thing I could point at with coffee, the physical symptoms of withdrawal, basically make no difference to my behavior; if we call that addiction, well, that's distinct from preference as addiction, but also it fails to capture the behaviors society regards as problematic with regard to addiction.
Any thoughts on how this applies to those with Binge Eating Disorder? The most common thing I hear from my BED patients is their inability to stop eating once they've taken a bite of a problem food. If they're in public, though, they're usually able to moderate the amount of chips, chocolate, candies, etc. they're eating.
Maybe I just have low willpower (and an ADHD diagnosis, but it's hard to tell how much that actually means anything given the hand-wavey requirements for such a diagnosis) but there are just so many times that I am doing a stimulating activity and cannot stop despite most of my higher faculties telling me to do so. That may not be "addiction." It seems useful to distinguish between this and the more destructive forces of drugs that will literally kill you if you stop taking them. But if not I don't know that we have a good word for what it is.
And while it may not be the same force that can kill a heroin user or heavy alcohol drinker if they try to stop cold turkey, I suspect it's the same force that causes people to spend their whole lives smoking pot.
This sort of speculation is obviously analogical, but for me it hits the sweet spot between being empirically grounded (but obvious or detail-laden) and being a diverting flight of fancy (verging on the purely subjective). The low epistemic status you assign it is actually for me a symptom of what is most appealing - but this is coupled with its being extremely plausible and coherent.
My only complaint is that it cut off way too soon. Totally broke my flow.
Slightly unrelated, but I’m curious whether taking naloxone is unpleasant for people who aren’t regular opiate users.
I was watching a YouTube video where the person allegedly got addicted to sun exposure (apparently it triggers some endogenous opiate receptors), took naloxone, and experienced opiate withdrawal symptoms. But he didn’t try the naloxone before the sunbathing stint (at least not on video), and also didn’t control for a placebo effect.
What if "addiction" and "focus" are two sides of the same coin? When I'm really productive in my home office, and the kids barge in complaining that one of the others was looking at them wrong, I get frustrated. I'm less frustrated if I was between activities. I'm more frustrated if I've tried multiple times to start an activity, but keep getting interrupted.
If you're focusing on a story (reading, watching, or listening) and you're suddenly interrupted, the problem isn't one of 'flow' but of focus. If your current activity requires you to put multiple things together at the same time, you need to focus or you'll lose the thread and have to start all over again.
I'm not sure how to connect this to potato chips, but it fits the experience with video games and TV shows. It's possible the same system that's responsible for rewarding you for being focused writing an important email is rewarding you for being focused playing a video game or understanding a complex plot. Indeed, many apps that market themselves as 'zen games' are designed to allow you to put them down at any point without losing focus/flow.
This effect being noticeable might be the central defining trait of things we call "superstimulus" vs. things we call "Tuesday."
Breaking with consensus, I think this is straying a bit far into the trap of "Let's pathologize literally every aspect of the human experience" that psychiatrists of both the professional and armchair varieties tend to stumble into.
Yeah, taste-bud burnout can happen. I honestly assumed everyone noticed this and I've never had a real issue with it. But it's certainly not a universal or certain event, and I wouldn't describe it as a very small addiction. And then extending this beyond food to watching TV or film (and inviting logical extension to literally anything that makes people happy) strays into the bizarre.
It's an interesting thought, but I think its low epistemic confidence is deserved; a bit too much of a shower thought.
This doesn't match my experience at all, but it is possible this has to do with the nature of the food I'm eating versus what you are. I work from home, so cook all of my own food from raw ingredients, even making my own tortillas, salsas, broth, everything short of slaughtering my own animals and milling my own grain. So nothing mass-produced where the company is trying to make it addictive and I don't add sugar to anything. But I absolutely do not develop a tolerance or tapering off of food goodness. The last bite is just as good as the first. Another possibility is food is eventually subject to diminishing marginal utility, but mostly when you're eating more than you need, and I'm not doing that.
Also, thanks to a history of spine injuries and surgery recovery, I've been on opioids for pretty long periods of time. Tolerance and addiction may be related in some way, but they are definitely not the same thing. I did find the first few doses euphoric and later doses not. Effectiveness at pain relief also decreased a bit eventually, though it isn't always easy to tell because pain usually decreases as you heal anyway. Nonetheless, in spite of both enjoying it and apparently developing some level of tolerance or adaptation to it, I never got addicted. I took Percocet quite regularly for over three years and had zero trouble stopping when I didn't need it any more.
Do you have workable definitions for awareness and mindfulness? At the beginning of the article you talk about being mindful of the presence or absence of pleasure when eating, but it's pretty clear that the same process would happen even if you weren't being mindful. But at the end you speculate that addiction is about being hyper-aware of one facet of being motivated. Clearly addiction can happen without mindfulness, so mindfulness must be different from awareness, as you define the words.
I started reading the article expecting mindfulness and awareness to basically be the same thing, and I agree about how the mindful eating works, so if we use my intuitive ideas about the meanings of the words awareness must not be required for addiction. As I write this I can't fill in the blanks -- I don't have definitions I like of awareness, mindfulness, or addiction.
1. Some foods/food additives work on neurotransmitters in a chemical way. My first question here was “which brand of potato chips?” because some have additives that do this. There may already be an ACX/SSC article on the evidence for or against high fructose corn syrup doing this to some people. For myself there are a few chemicals that hit like a ton of bricks and it’s unpleasant enough that I make effort to avoid them (I am somewhat sure it’s those, and further personal research is unpleasant enough to not be worth it.) Others find those pleasant though or at least habit-forming. Some of the dust-type flavors on some chip brands will do this (sour cream & onion Pringles is one, there are many others.)
2. Flow state - I think repetitive stationary activities open up a type of cognitive processing which doesn’t always happen in awareness consciously. When I get the most annoyed at being interrupted in a movie or game, it’s usually this other processing that hates being interrupted. Leaving the game itself isn’t so bad, but that other track takes a while to get going and doesn’t want to stop. Depending on other life circumstances, people who need this processing will get very protective of their methods. Something might look like a compulsion or addiction, but it’s more like “I have to claim I really need this, or they’ll never leave me alone long enough to finish my thoughts about other topic Z.”
“ Opioids can still stimulate your reward system more strongly than video games and potato chips can, but not for lack of trying by Activision and Frito-Lay Inc.”
Is that true? Millions of people try opioids every year, they can me fentanyl at my last colonoscopy as an example. And people have surgery, dental work, etc. But only a very small percentage become addicted.
Everyone eats food but only a small percentage end up 900 pounds. Food is obviously more complicated as quitting food cold Turkey is 100% fatal.
As there are all manner of recognized behavioral addictions (including food) I think you're headed in the right direction here. But, truth be told, depending how you look at brain function, it's all a chemical addiction. When you over stimulate your dopamine producing brain parts, by for instance binging on porn, you do cause the brain to produce additional receptors, so you need more and more to get the same result. Which means that when you aren't binging on it you can't produce enough dopamine to be happy. Same thing probably happens when you get interrupted in the middle of the "flow state". Your brain is expecting the next dopamine molecule to pop in and it doesn't. So you feel bad.
Interesting stuff. This piece was an eye-opener for me on this subject: https://www.circeinstitute.org/blog/binge-watching-boethius-after-dark
In a way, I wish this happened to me with food. It doesn't. I have to be truly satiated before I perceive tasty food as less tasty. Twenty bites doesn't even begin to cause that to happen. I'm having a mildly difficult time believing your experience can be real. I mean, I believe it, but it seems very odd. As a side note, I own more than 200 cookbooks.
I'm a writer. When I'm in writing in a flow state, I experience a distinctive, unpleasant physical sensation when someone interrupts me. If I've forgotten to mute my phone and it rings, well, I'm too old to throw a temper tantrum, but I certain indulge in a curt tone as I answer.
Is 'motivational hyper-awareness' that which is mediated by ΔFosB (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOSB)? From what I understand, ΔFosB is implicated in reward salience and just keeps building up with chronic exposure to addictive substances.
I'm interested to know if ΔFosB might be an under-considered target for anti-addition interventions, as well as if it plays a computationally interesting role in reinforcement learning. Curiously, the neurocorrelate/MoA-knowledgeable people I know don't often talk about this mechanism - is that because it is uninteresting, weirdly hard to pharmacologically target, or just that more basic reward system stuff gets all the attention?
You're thinking is sound.
"The reward system" is a useful phrase for identifying brain regions involved in reward. But introspectively, I seem to have many different reward percepts. I would think each different reward qualia ought to count as a different reward mechanism, because what seems to happen in a potato-chip eating frenzy is that one particular reward signal outcompetes others. I am sometimes conscious while eating potato chips that I'm no longer enjoying them and do not, in fact, want more of them; would even like to stop; yet my arm keeps on reaching into the bag and stuffing them into my mouth. It's a confusing brain state, and "reward system activated" seems an inadequate summary of it.
I'm pretty sure my own perception of this experience is not universal, because I've watched lots of videos recently about how to lose fat, in which the leanest, most-successful fat-losers--say, Jeff Cavaliere Athlean-X Dot Com (his full legal name)--say "Just stop eating junk food!" They've clearly never experienced a diet blackout, in which you wander through the house apparently (to your conscious mind) at random, and then end up in the kitchen, where your conscious awareness fades for a few seconds until you "wake up" and discover your arm has reached out, grabbed some food, and stuffed it into your mouth. I think these super-lean people just have a defective hunger system.
I'm perplexed as to why we respond so much more strongly and quickly to food deprivation than to water deprivation. Most of us could survive 3 days on our water reserves, and months on our fat reserves. So why is it harder to go a full day without eating than without drinking?
As to movies and stories, I think that's quite different. Stories are, contrary to Aristotle's *Poetics*, very cognitive. A traditional story arc has a complex grammar to it, which involves a fractal structure of reversals and new initiatives, callbacks to earlier foreshadowings, the closing-off at the end of issues raised near the beginning, and tying the plot in several places to a theme which parallels it. Classical music is very similar in structure. Rhetoric involves similar principles.
I'll consider 'addictions' to e.g. video games more than just metaphorical when you show me someone who emptied their bank account and is giving $5 blowjobs to get an Xbox or another bag of potato chips.
The description of hyper-awareness of one facet of the motivation system is intriguing, but it seems to match various forms of arousal more than addiction per se. Addiction is usually defined in terms of a compulsive behavior. The example of "mindful eating" that the piece begins with doesn't sound much like an addiction, even a micro one, in that there was no compulsive element; it was just a weird effect of mindfulness applied to something we normally do unmindfully.
How would one test this model and differentiate it from the alternatives?
This is similar to the reinforcer pathology view of addiction, which involves an overconsumption of a reinforcer in the face of aversive consequences. (Reinforcer here in the behavioral sense). From this view, many things can be considered addictive beyond drugs, like food, sex, or video games.
From my own experience, becoming less pleasurable over time is not an inherent property of addictions. I have an actual physical addiction to caffeine (get a headache on a day I don't have it), but I still enjoy it as much as the first time I drank coffee. And when I eat junk food that I like, I feel like I enjoy it equally the whole time. (Sometimes I'll compulsively eat a snack I don't really like just because it's sweet or salty and in front of me, but that's different.)
I do not notice that tasty food becomes less tasty for me. I just tried this with French fries and ice cream, and they tasted good until I was full.
Additionally, heroin never stops feeling good, adjusted for tolerance. Even without increasing dose, it still feels good at first — just doesn't last as long as it used to.
Chemicals are the -only- way you think.
If you are talking about things that you like, but are not actually addictive, then you are describing either adaptation or habitation, which are similar in outcome, but have different mechanisms. Basically, you don't feel as much of the effects of sensory stimulation the tenth time as the first time.
On the other hand, if you are dealing with things that are actually addictive, they have three properties: desire (you really enjoy it), withdrawal (you feel bad when you no longer can get it), and tolerance (you get less and less enjoyment with repeated experiences). The reason for withdrawal and tolerance is that the body does not like to be disturbed and if the drug (or whatever) disrupts its homeostasis, it produces a compensatory response that negates the drug (or whatever) effect. That's why addictive drugs have less and less of an effect as the body gets better snd better at negating their actions. Pavlov pointed out that the body does this by responding to the environmental cues that predict the onset of the drug. If the environmental cues that have predicted the drug are there, but the drug is not, you just get the negating effects that constitute the withdrawal symptoms, which are always the opposite of the drug effects.
i'm reminded of david foster wallace's definition of malignant addiction. it's a habit that causes problems while also appearing to be the solution to those problems. https://www.thefreelibrary.com/E+unibus+pluram%3A+television+and+U.S.+fiction.-a013952319
Paul Grahams essay "The acceleration of addictiveness" is a great add on to the last sentence "...other ways are rapidly catching up". There's obviously plenty of people addicted to drugs, but in the 21st century we're starting to see more and more people "addicted" to other things (social media, video games, junk food, porn, etc). That trend is only increasing and is quite concerning.
I was an RA in a lab working on the neurobiology of the mammalian reward/motivation system using medial forebrain bundle stimulation experiments as our model. This was two decades ago and the study of drug addiction was a major application of our work. My way of conceptualizing it was that "addiction" was undesired compulsive behavior that ultimately comes from that signaling pathway(s) and chemical substances that are addictive that work by either directly or indirectly creating axon potentials in the right areas. But all addictions are chemical at their root. Cocaine and gambling ultimately do similar things in brain when they become compulsive. The route is just slightly different.
One of my favorite party tricks is to walk up to the bowl of potato chips and announce to whoever is paying attention - "I just want one". Then I eat one potato chip and walk away.
I recommend Judson Brewers The craving mind.
Samsara = mortido = habit loops
Let's think of a person as a reinforcement learning agent with a particular reward function. Integrating a reward function over time with exponential time discount is mathematically equivalent to integrating the time derivative of the reward function with the same exponential time discount (up to constants). So, this can be just a mechanism to motivate the exact same behavior. The advantage of taking the derivate can be a better dynamic range (the derivative of the reward usually doesn't vary as much as the reward itself can vary). That is, it saves us the need to use more neurons to represent reward values.
You're absolutely right about food, I've noticed that exact phenomenon. I'm told things taste better to us when our bodies are more in need of the specific nutrients they contain; I noticed the truth of it in pregnancy (when I used to open the fridge and grab whatever appealed to me most, e.g. a spoonful of mustard, in order to stay ahead of cravings--that was a delicious spoonful of mustard, folks), and in a more muted way I notice it now. The first (little) handful of chocolate chips tastes amazing, further handfuls less so--so if I've had a good enough day to have the willpower, I stop after the first.
But movies are entirely different. A story is like sex: it has a climax, and the climax is the part people want, it feels good and it releases tension. The buildup to it makes it better; few people want it instantly b/c they know it won't be very good that way; but the climax is the part people want. The frustration of being interrupted is the frustration of not being able to complete the experience, not that of not being able to repeat or continue it.
Granted, I don't know how chemical addictions work, so I don't know what exactly the import of this distinction might be. But it certainly seems important to me.
That description of heroin disagrees with my impression at least, as a multi-time recovered addict. I find that it is unpleasant the first time or two but once you get addicted it allows you this amazing ability instantly put your mind into exactly the state it is looking for. Outside of the physical addiction, it is that explicit control of state of mind which I think is most addicting to many people.
It was quite pleasant the very first time I tried it. I remember waking unusually early, feeling especially rested, climbing into the shower and thinking, (uh-oh) "What can I sell or steal to get some more of that?"
Recently I have watched a talk about addiction that complements this post. Talk is by Reinhold Bartl, head of the Milton Erickson Institute Innsbruck. He offers a hypno-systemic view on addiction as the loss of choice (der Verlust von Wahlmöglichkeiten). Addiction is a situation where a) someone enjoys a substance or an activity very much and b) is scathed for this by another person. Typically addiction is developed during adolescence where this conflict takes place between a kid and it's parent and is internalized in the further course of life. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B73Kot6M3wU
unfortunately only in German, no subs available
Seems the criterion for 'enjoying' food is focussed on taste. Isn't there an opposing force that stops one from eating 20 potato chips or 10 squares of chocolate, namely the "mouthfeel"?. I hate the feeling of my mouth being full of the residual debris of foodstuffs, especially chocolate or chip-dust. The moment I feel that coating start to accumulate, I'm done, which is usually after 1 square of chocolate or a handful of chips.
Is there a relationship between disgust-sensitivity and binge-eating? Can't tell if highly disgust-sensitive people are inherently resistant to binge-eating because of the mouthfeel effect; or if - conversely - binge eating is a shame-response to disgust for sensitive people.
"Everyone always says you should “eat mindfully”. I tried this once and it was weird. For example, I noticed that only the first few bites of a tasty food actually tasted good. After that I habituated and lost it. Not only that, but there was a brief period when I finished eating the food which was below hedonic baseline."
I really can't imagine having this experience with food.
> Instead, I think of addiction as what happens when you become hyper-aware of one particular facet of your normal motivation system.
This is a (the?) standard definition of addiction in the literature, right? "Hypersensitization of incentive-salience attribution" is what I recall from, e.g., The Mind of an Addicted Brain: Neural Sensitization of Wanting versus Liking, by Kent C. Berridge and Terry E. Robinson, in Current Directions in Psychological Science , Jun., 1995, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Jun., 1995), pp. 71-76
Not only can tolerance develop over the course of multiple uses of the same drug, but it also develops rapidly within a single use of a drug in a process called "tachyphylaxis". How long does Adderall IR last, experientially? About 5 hours. What's its elimination half-life? About 10 hours. So 10 hours after the dose you're no longer feeling the effects (or you're experiencing a rebound / "come down") and yet you're still at 50% of the peak plasma levels! AFAICT this is true for a lot of psychoactive drugs (though sometimes this happens due to protein binding).
Another relevant concept is "substance use disorder", which I assumed meant something along the lines of "has a serious tolerance to illegal drugs" but in fact means an individual is persisting in their drug use despite serious negative consequences in other areas of their life. Similarly for addiction, which is often used colloquially to mean "experiences negative effects without" but actually means "compulsive engagement in rewarding stimuli despite adverse consequences".
So if I'm drinking a fairly consistent amount of coffee every day and would have trouble living my normal life without it, I'm dependent but not addicted. Similarly one might argue that many of the early examples in this article are more akin to temporary dependences than temporary addictions.
But the article settles on the right conception of addiction, IMO. You're not addicted when it's hard to stop; heck, it's hard to change any habit. You're addicted when you start to sacrifice the rest of your life in pursuit of one source of pleasure.
I've encountered many addictive things in my life, and the strongest was World of Warcraft. It doesn't just hit the pleasure button in your brain (which drugs can certainly do _much_ more effectively). It gives you goals, it makes it easy to become part of a community, and to take on an important role in that community. It rewards your work with permanent incremental progress. I recall being frustrated not only with having to go to class, but also by normal social interactions - hanging out with friends - that were previously the highlight of my week. A few more hours and I could gain a level; what could friends offer me that would compare?
This certainly sounds like addiction / substance use disorder to me, though the DSM probably doesn't consider World of Warcraft to be a substance.
I'm a little bit surprised that this should be a new thing - especially with Scott's background as a trained and practicing clinical psychiatrist. My own model of addiction is like this since decades: you do something which feels nice, this produces dopamine and you want to do it again. And again. And again. No need for external chemicals playing with your brain, just nearly a billion years of evolution of life on earth. Some chemicals can speed up the addiction process because they emulate chemicals of our inner reward system. People call these chemicals literally 'dope'. But they call activities which do the same 'dope' as well. I just remember a lot of skiers and snowboarders wearing clothes from an brand called 'dope' these days and totally can understand this. I'm totally addicted to skiing recently, spending a lot of money on that, gave it higher priority then family and work the past months. Same with playing computer games (not me but a kid), reading all day (kids), Smartphones (the whole family) and so forth.
So I'm buffled that all this should be a new thing. Maybe I had learned a general truth by myself which ist not yet common wisdom? Can't believe that...