[HN Gopher] Once an Addict, Always an Addict?
___________________________________________________________________
Once an Addict, Always an Addict?
Author : vitabenes
Score : 166 points
Date : 2021-08-08 08:31 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.deprocrastination.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.deprocrastination.co)
| ddtaylor wrote:
| Thats an ad.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I hate this idea that _addiction_ is someone just getting high so
| they don 't have to feel bad feelings, which seems to be the
| underlying assumption of most discussions.
|
| My dad drank heavily for a lot of years. I grew up hearing tales
| of his legendary drinking. Mom would buy him a case of beer on
| Sunday and if he ran out mid-week, he would drunkenly accuse her
| of drinking his beer -- which makes no sense because mom is a tea
| totaller. He would go on a bar crawl on nickel night and hit
| dozens of bars with his buddies. Etc.
|
| He was in the army and he fought in the front lines of two wars,
| WWII and Vietnam. He retired when I was three and apparently
| began tapering off.
|
| I don't recall him having the DTs. I don't recall him drinking
| heavy in my lifetime. I recall him having a beer as part of
| dinner when I was four or five.
|
| When I was seven, he was diagnosed with a heart condition. He
| blamed it on the alcohol and never touched the stuff again
| (except for a few sips when my brother hit drinking age while
| talking to him about what made for a good beer, I think).
|
| By then, he had been out of the army for four years or so. He had
| time to taper off for a few years before making his dramatic
| announcement that he wasn't drinking again.
|
| I think he drank to suppress his nightmares from serving in two
| wars. I think he didn't need to actively suppress his nightmares
| anymore after he dropped his retirement papers and no longer had
| to live in fear of being sent back.
|
| I think people drink and drug for a reason. We just mostly don't
| bother to try to figure out what the reason is for this specific
| person and we just act like "You are a badly behaved child who
| needs a spanking and you need to just try harder." And then blame
| them when that stupid idea consistently fails to be an effective
| solution to their problem.
|
| Edited. Cuz typos and auto-corrupt.
| dkersten wrote:
| Reminds me of this TED talk:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PY9DcIMGxMs _" Everything you
| think you know about addiction is wrong"_, where he asserts
| that addiction isn't caused by the things we typically
| correlate with it. I was going to try to summarize, but I don't
| think I can do it justice. Its not long.
|
| > I think people drink and drug for a reason. We just mostly
| don't bother to try to figure out what the reason is for this
| specific person
|
| Absolutely. This is totally in line with what that guy says in
| the video too.
|
| One thing he says: _" The opposite of addiction is
| connection."_
|
| I know that personally, when I have problems that I struggle
| with and don't feel like anyone in my life can help me with or
| talk to about them (sadly has happened once or twice in my
| life), I have a tendency to binge, with anything that provides
| a brief escape, be it alcohol, drugs, video games, TV series',
| chocolate. Of course, its never been too bad, severe or long
| lasting for me, so it hasn't been too much of a problem and I
| wouldn't claim it comes close to what an alcoholic or heroin
| addict goes through, but I can at least see how someone might
| slip into such things, as a distraction from reality. And its
| usually coupled with a feeling of isolation and loneliness,
| feeling like you're alone with problems you don't know how to
| solve. So you hide from them instead. That's the impression I
| got after thinking about my past situations at least.
| webmobdev wrote:
| > One thing he says: "The opposite of addiction is
| connection."
|
| Makes a lot of sense - I once read that a defining parameter
| to determine addiction is how it affects relationships.
| Addicted people often fight and eschew relationship in favour
| of their addiction. I am reminded of this often when I see
| kids fight with their parents about how much time the spend
| on their phones / tablets / computers instead of doing other
| activities.
| tacocataco wrote:
| "I am reminded of this often when I see kids fight with
| their parents about how much time the spend on their phones
| / tablets / computers instead of doing other activities."
|
| To be fair, some parents arent worth connecting with. I'm
| really happy for you if this isn't your personal
| experience.
| webmobdev wrote:
| Parental upbringing does obviously affect one's
| personality, and it is fair to say many addicts do come
| from dysfunctional families - https://www.healthyplace.co
| m/blogs/debunkingaddiction/2020/7... ...
| dkersten wrote:
| That's interesting and now that you mention it, yeah, that
| totally makes sense.
| unparagoned wrote:
| I used to like that video but it hasn't aged well. The whole
| opioid epidemic showed how you can make addicts out of lots
| of people through getting them physically addicted.
| phkahler wrote:
| I'm confused. You wrote both of these:
|
| >> I hate this idea that addiction is someone just getting high
| so they don't have to feel bad feelings...
|
| >> I think he drank to suppress his nightmares from serving in
| two wars.
|
| I mean... I thought the dad story was going to contradict that
| first thing.
|
| I agree with you (I think) that many people use addictions to
| sooth or avoid unpleasant feelings. I know some people who even
| admit that's why they do it.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I think my father needed his sleep. I think that was his main
| goal: Getting enough sleep so he could function.
|
| There likely were other benefits. As another comment here
| notes, alcohol is also a blood thinner. My father was on
| blood thinners for many years after being diagnosed with a
| heart condition and did have a large clot at one point that
| he could have lost his leg over.
|
| But I think the fact that he apparently began winding down
| his drinking when he left the military means his primary
| reason for drinking was likely to manage his fear of being
| sent back to the front lines. That's not the same thing as
| avoiding bad feelings per se. It's more like moving stage
| fright out of your way because your paycheck depends on your
| performance and you need to perform in the here and now
| regardless of how you feel.
| [deleted]
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I'm glad you shared this.
|
| A colleague early in my career was badly wounded in Vietnam and
| was a heavy drinker into the late 90s. It was an escape from
| physical and mental scars afaik. The experience out a heavy
| toll on his kids, his 4 wives, and coworkers who had to deal
| with some of the side effects.
|
| When I met him in the early 2000s, he had turned that aspect of
| his life around and moonlighted as an addiction counselor. His
| thought was that he could tell you within 2-3 days who would
| make it out of a group program -- they had to have a reason.
|
| For my friend, his granddaughter's birth was a wake up call
| that lit up his motivation. It sounds like for your dad,
| leaving the army was the trigger.
|
| Several members of my extended family struggled with alcohol -
| at the time growing up I saw it as a weakness or failure, which
| I regret. Growing older and gaining more understanding led me
| to a conclusion similar to yours in the subject.
| blakesley wrote:
| You say:
|
| > I hate this idea that addiction is someone just getting high
| so they don't have to feel bad feelings, which seems to be the
| underlying assumption of most discussions.
|
| But then the rest of your comment is a story about your father
| seemingly doing exactly that. What have I misunderstood here?
| Not trying to be flippant, I'm genuinely confused.
| edgyquant wrote:
| I struggled with addiction to alcohol and cocaine for a long
| time. I would not say, at least do feel it's the case, I was
| trying to escape. It was fun, and as time when on it was just
| a thing I did. Eventually my body started feeling it and it
| took me two years to get clean (I still drink about once a
| month.) But nowhere along that decade long road did I ever
| feel like I was escaping my life. I was amplifying it, I can
| write twice the code on cocaine (I'm already pretty fast) and
| alcohol is a social thing, I got hooked because it was cool
| to drink so I drank more than everyone else. I would be the
| last guy up at a party.
|
| I think the other poster, whether what he said was correct or
| not, is right that it is a disservice to chalk an addict up
| to someone escaping life. This removes the majority of drug
| addicts who got hooked from pain after surgery and now can't
| stop, or the ones who could stop but enjoy the feeling it
| creates. Not all drug addicts are homeless people sleeping on
| the streets. I have an ex who's sister runs a chain of stores
| and she's a legit meth head, you could never tell though
| because she does it in moderation and doesn't look like she
| takes anything at all.
| sitkack wrote:
| > write twice the code on cocaine
|
| HN dog whistle? Tell us more.
| jatins wrote:
| Yeah, I also found it slightly conflicting. I think the
| author is probably saying that those bad feels are probably
| not an answer in themselves but have an underlying cause that
| often gets overlooked.
| afarrell wrote:
| I believe the word people generally use is "trauma".
|
| - nightmares and insomnia
|
| - intense negative emotion
|
| both can be caused by trauma.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I have already clarified this detail:
|
| _I will also add that suppressing nightmares is about being
| able to sleep through the night so you can do your job the
| next day, not necessarily about avoiding negative feelings
| per se. Plenty of people take sleeping pills and are not
| characterized as addicts for trying to address their sleep
| issues so they can function._
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28106688
|
| My father worked long, hard hours for a lot of years. He
| needed his sleep to do so.
| deadalus wrote:
| suppressing nightmares = avoiding bad memories or past
| experiences
|
| being able to sleep through the night = experiencing peace
| artificially
|
| not necessarily about avoiding negative feelings per se =
| its about avoiding past experiences and not being able to
| face the 'issues' because you think they will break you or
| annoy you
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I have a serious medical condition that can seriously
| interfere with my sleep at times. I see absolutely no
| contradiction in saying "Addiction is not just about
| avoiding bad feelings" and saying "I think he drank to
| suppress his nightmares."
|
| Multiple people have told me that's a contradiction and
| I'm wrong to take that position. It's probably not worth
| arguing any further and needs to be filed under "We can
| just agree to disagree on this detail."
| al_coidineahol wrote:
| I really appreciate your comments on this site, this
| comment and all the other ones that I've seen over the
| years, because you give a much needed reality check and
| are articulate and honest.
|
| I do think though, that it is a contradiction to say
| that. Avoiding nightmares is exactly about avoiding bad
| feelings. Other people might end up doing it earlier in
| the day if they don't have anything around them.
|
| > I hate this idea that addiction is someone just getting
| high so they don't have to feel bad feelings
|
| That's exactly what addiction is. Getting high is just
| fun.
|
| > I think he didn't need to actively suppress his
| nightmares anymore after he dropped his retirement papers
| and no longer had to live in fear
|
| EDIT: There is a sibling comment.
| deadalus wrote:
| I empathize with you and I respect your opinion. You
| presented a new perspective on this topic.
| runawaybottle wrote:
| I think he drank from the pressure of having children and a
| family. Think about the reasons why he quit, his family, and he
| never showed much of it to his children. The reasons for
| quitting are often the reasons for starting.
|
| Sorry for getting all Freudian.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I think the opinion of a random stranger who never met my
| late father likely has less merit than my own.
| Vrondi wrote:
| We have nothing to go on except for the words you posted,
| and those words seem to contradict themselves. So,
| discussing them or asking for further clarification seems
| reasonable.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Certainly. And I have been perfectly happy to engage with
| such comments.
|
| That's not what the dead comment was doing.
| runawaybottle wrote:
| I agree, just a discussion.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Stick to discussing the _idea_ I 'm suggesting and don't
| tell me and the world what I should think of my own
| father.
|
| While I am making this follow up comment, I will add that
| no one ever once characterized him as an alcoholic, he
| never attended AA or any kind of treatment, and my mother
| did not care that he drank heavily because "he was never
| a mean drunk and there was always enough money."
|
| All the stories I heard growing up about his legendary
| drinking were told as humorous stories that my parents
| laughed about from the good old days. I'm the youngest of
| three children. My father never hid his drinking from
| anyone. I just didn't happen to personally witness it
| because he largely stopped after he left the military
| even before he officially announced that he was quitting.
| runawaybottle wrote:
| Again, I'm not here to fight you. I still struggle with
| addiction, so I'm seeing if I have any insight to offer.
| The reasons are often so damn simple, but the solutions
| are the slipperiest of slopes. That's how we slide into
| it, for literally the simplest reasons.
|
| Yeah, it could be the nightmares, or it could be
| something even simpler.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Alcohol is known to suppress dreams. It's a physical
| mechanism impacting brain function in that regard.
|
| I'm not suggesting "suppressing nightmares about the war"
| is the reason other people drink. Just that was the
| reason I believe my own father drank. It's a conclusion
| that took me a long time to make and it's based on an
| analysis of the facts of his life.
|
| If you are still struggling with addiction, maybe you
| don't yet have the answers you need. Maybe the pat
| answers you are parroting are part of the problem.
|
| They are answers that actively promote a sense of
| helplessness and actively discourage pinpointing a
| specific cause. I'm suggesting that's exactly the problem
| with our current mental models.
|
| Edit: I will also add that suppressing nightmares is
| about being able to sleep through the night so you can do
| your job the next day, not necessarily about avoiding
| negative feelings per se. Plenty of people take sleeping
| pills and are not characterized as _addicts_ for trying
| to address their sleep issues so they can function.
| touisteur wrote:
| With kids to feed, one does what he or she has to do to
| go through backbreaking or stressful work.
|
| Drinking suppresses nightmares but gives a less
| refreshing sleep. Must have been tough to make that
| choice... I wonder if he smiled less or had trouble
| enjoying things when he stopped... More stress or less
| patience. But you already shared so much about your
| father, you don't need to answer!
|
| As for the sleeping pills, after I've seen how they made
| my grandpa dependent, and now that I'm trying to taper
| off antidepressants, I'd like to moderate. They probably
| are addicts, just not with the negative connotations of
| _addict_ , if you see what I mean. I wished we'd help
| more people tapering off stuff.
|
| Kudos, though, to people doing what they can to give
| their children and spouse a life without money worries.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _no one ever once characterized him as an alcoholic, he
| never attended AA or any kind of treatment, and my mother
| did not care that he drank heavily because "he was never
| a mean drunk and there was always enough money."_
|
| I feel like whenever I read a description of alcoholism,
| an essential component of it is that you can't stop
| drinking _despite_ it negatively affecting your health,
| work, relationships, etc. If he was able to drink at that
| level without causing those negative consequences, then I
| think it makes sense that no one would have thought of
| him as an alcoholic.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| It was also a different world back then. Drinking and
| smoking weren't stigmatized like they are now and there
| were fewer OTC drugs to medicate aches and pains. People
| with physically demanding jobs routinely had a beer at
| the pub on the way home to ease their aches and help them
| sleep and it wasn't anything you needed to explain or
| justify.
| treeman79 wrote:
| I have a clotting disorder. Factor 5. My blood clots much to
| easily. Alcohol is a blood thinner. Think long term covid
| symptoms.
|
| My personal opinion is that many relatives in the family drink
| themselves to death in effort to feel normal.
|
| On Normal prescription blood thinners my symptoms go away
| quickly and come back whenever I stop them.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Not sure if it was an autocorrect, but teetotaling is unrelated
| to tea.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Nope, not autocorrect. My personal deficiency. Thanks for
| bringing that up. I love learning new things from the many
| pedants who hang here.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teetotalism
| gnicholas wrote:
| Yeah almost closed with a /pedantic tag for a lighter feel.
| I have enjoyed learning from you also!
| junon wrote:
| "Auto-corrupt" wow I'm somewhat upset I didn't think of that
| first.
|
| Unsurprisingly autocorrect tried to autocorrect it to
| "autocorrect".
| GordonS wrote:
| My grandfather was similar - he started drinking after he
| returned home from WW2. He kept the outward appearance of an
| old-school hard guy, but he was plagued by nightmares and was
| obviously very disturbed by some of the things he'd seen and
| done. As kids, we used to love listening to his war stories,
| but every now and then he had to stop and wouldn't finish a
| story. As kids, we didn't understand how this seemingly
| invincible man, who we basically idolised, could have such
| demons.
|
| He drank heavily for decades - vodka and super-strength lager.
| As a kid, I don't think I ever once saw him without a can of
| beer at his side.
|
| One day when I was 16 or so, he ended up in hospital because of
| his drinking. He decided he would stop drinking - and he just
| did, having only a single hiccup in the 10 years or so before
| he died. It was really quite incredible - that must have taken
| incredible strength and will power after decades of abuse.
|
| I've had my own brushes with drink a long time back, and I
| fully agree with your reasoning - I think most people that use
| drink and drugs are able to do so safely and responsibly, and
| most of those that don't sink into habitual drink or drugs for
| a _reason_ ; trying to ease pain (physical or psychological),
| make life more bearable, or to escape it altogether.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Someone once told me that just up and quitting alcohol or
| other things without treatment, drama, etc. was kind of the
| norm for the generation that fought in WWII. I have also read
| that Vietnam vets did a lot of drugs while in Vietnam but
| most of them quit when they returned to the US and did so
| without any kind of treatment.
|
| Vietnam was really ugly. Women and children were acting as
| suicide bombers and it was an unpopular war, so we did one-
| year tours and most people going were about 19 years old
| (compared to mid twenties for average soldier age in WWII)
| and you are most likely to die in your first battle. If you
| survive your first battle, your odds of surviving the war go
| up.
|
| So there were a lot of people seeing their first battle at a
| young age and it was a meat grinder. It was ugly even for a
| war.
| scns wrote:
| As these experiments have shown over 40 years ago, animals
| cease doing opiates when their needs are met.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
| bko wrote:
| The narrative is popular, but if you read the criticism
| and failure at replication, you'll see the study is far
| from conclusive.
| tartoran wrote:
| Not only that but animals can't fall off the wagon
| because they don't control the intake and even if they
| had the temptations you wouldn't know
| notdang wrote:
| > Women and children were acting as suicide bombers and it
| was an unpopular war.
|
| From my experience with the URSS Afgan war veterans, the
| problem is not when children and women are trying to hurt
| you. The post-war nightmares come from you deliberately
| hurting them in most unimaginable ways. Unimaginable even
| to the perpetrators after the war finishes.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| It was only intended to say in a nutshell "When you have
| a situation where people think it's appropriate to strap
| bombs to children, things are extremely ugly."
|
| I didn't really want to go into a whole lot of details.
| The ugliness of war is not really directly on topic and I
| try harder than I used to to make my point in a way that
| shouldn't require trigger warnings.
| RobertoG wrote:
| >>"I have also read that Vietnam vets did a lot of drugs
| while in Vietnam but most of them quit when they returned
| to the US and did so without any kind of treatment."
|
| I have read elsewhere that something that makes a big
| difference when quitting drugs is change your environment
| totally. That means, the group of people you spend time
| with, but maybe, also, work and even home. Moving away to
| another city or country probably helps.
|
| Frequently, we don't realize to what point we are our
| environment.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| "Change your people, your places and your things" is
| something I have heard as a recommended best practice for
| overcoming addiction. I suspect there is some element of
| psychology involved but probably also physical effects.
|
| It's more or a less a recipe I followed as part of my
| efforts to address a completely different health issue
| having nothing to do with addiction. I think we are in
| the infancy of our understanding of how germs, chemicals,
| etc. proliferate in our lives and shape them.
|
| And, yes, hopping a flight back to the US and making a
| clean break with Vietnam -- both the place and the war --
| likely helped them make a clean break from their
| addiction in this case.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| Yes but they are really talking about habits/triggers
| there. They have another saying: "Wherever you go, there
| you are." The core assumption of twelve-step programs is
| that the problem is defects of character in the
| individual.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| It's a known best practice. Best practices work well
| whether or not our ideas about why they work are
| accurate.
|
| I'm speculating that we don't fully understand _why_ it
| works and it may be effective for reasons beyond _habits
| /triggers._
| pnutjam wrote:
| Yup, and imagine seeing all the new people show up and get
| killed immediately. How that must have effected the way
| they interacted with people, and how it must have felt to
| be treated that way when you first show up.
|
| The new people would get you killed if they didn't learn
| how to avoid dying.
| [deleted]
| SerLava wrote:
| I think a bigger factor was that we were the good side in
| WWII and the bad side in Vietnam.
| papito wrote:
| There is truth to that. We abuse substances without
| understanding why. Getting to the root cause of that
| existential angst is not easy. And I say "abuse" to distinguish
| between that and physiological dependency. I think the word
| "addiction" is overused, as most addictive behavior is
| overindulging and a chronic, negative habit loop.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Alcoholism in one person isn't contained to just one person. It
| affects everybody around them as they need to live with the
| fallout. An alcoholic will do anything to get their next drink
| and restricting cash access leads to horrendous consequences
| sometimes.
|
| When you live with that in childhood then you make sure you
| don't get exposed to it in adulthood. I drink socially but made
| sure to marry somebody who hates alcohol. Living with an
| alcoholic as an adult isn't good for your mental health.
| harlanji wrote:
| Being an addict seems more social than anything. It's possible to
| go through a party phase and then years later go through an
| unrelated tough patch, having not touched drugs for years, and
| then hear whispers of addiction to explain the unrelated issue.
| Nobody dares broach the subject, and so a person clean for years
| and never really an addict can have their life ruined by others
| calling them one. Maybe they have real pictures from the phase or
| similar to circulate. It is slander even if the photos are real,
| and there's no recourse. That can happen to a non-addict who
| experimented; can only imagine how likely a true addict would be
| to relapse in such a hopeless situation. Addiction is a
| destructive habit or system that needs to be replaced.
| jl2718 wrote:
| "There are people who went through AA, recovered from their
| alcohol addiction, and are able to drink moderately."
|
| There are also people who have survived skydives without a
| parachute. This article seems like some kind of self-
| justification for returning to destructive behavior. I imagine
| their codependent somewhere rolling their eyes again at this
| mental gymnastics routine. Here we go again....
| kelnos wrote:
| I really want to believe this, because "once an addict, always an
| addict" has always sounded like an unsupported, junk-science,
| catchy thing to say, and not something based in reality. And I
| don't really want to believe (yes, I know this is an emotional
| take), that some people's brains are just fundamentally "broken"
| in a way that means they can't enjoy some nice things without
| destroying their health and relationships.
|
| I think also the idea of addiction (or an "addictive
| personality") as this inherent, unchangeable thing just doesn't
| pass the smell test for me. Our understanding of the human brain
| is still pretty limited, and making a blanket statement like that
| just doesn't make sense.
|
| I can certainly understand this attitude for practical reasons:
| if you can get an alcoholic to stop drinking, and stay sober for
| the rest of their life, yes, you've certainly solved that
| problem. But I also suspect you haven't solved some of the
| underlying issues (e.g. around anxiety, dealing with emotion,
| etc.) that probably led them to drink excessively and
| uncontrollably in the first place.
|
| But I know very few people who have (to my knowledge) gone
| through this sort of thing, so while I can intellectually spout
| off what I believe to be true, it's not coming from a position of
| experience.
|
| The only real data point I have that perhaps aligns with this
| article is my father, and this is only from what I was told (by
| him, decades later). In his teens and early 20s, he drank heavily
| (to the point of doing some pretty unsafe things), nearly every
| night of the week; he was friends with the bartenders at many of
| the local bars, and would stay after closing to continue
| drinking. But during my childhood, I'd only known him to have a
| beer or two at a family get-together or neighborhood block party,
| so I asked him what changed. He said that he wanted to marry my
| mom, and that required him to put all that behind him. She was ok
| with the occasional social drink, but binge drinking or any kind
| of drunkenness was not kosher. He told me all this when I was in
| my late 20s, while we were having dinner at a brewery... drinking
| beer, of course.
| imvetri wrote:
| "you are an addict, be addicted to something else" - movie quote
| SargeZT wrote:
| For anyone who wants a more evidence-based approach to addiction
| than 12-step programs, SMART recovery might do the trick for you.
| It helped me greatly with my alcohol addiction, and it doesn't
| treat addiction as a forever thing. I've been sober for 6 years
| or so now, and I haven't needed to attend a meeting since I beat
| the addiction.
|
| Meetings are free, there are online sessions all the time, and
| it's just a great community overall.
| vitabenes wrote:
| Interesting, I'll take a look at that. Congrats!
| toyg wrote:
| What is your experience about the following paragraph?
|
| _> you can go from being addicted to alcohol, to having a
| social drink once a week._
|
| That goes against pretty much everything I've ever been told by
| addicts to alcohol and drugs. Once you've been "in the tunnel",
| there just isn't "a social drink" - even a drop will get you
| off the wagon for good.
| SargeZT wrote:
| For alcohol that may be true, but the ultimate goal of SMART
| is sobriety. There is another (smaller) branch of REBT drug-
| based therapy called 'Rational Recovery' that uses naltrexone
| (an opiate blocker) before drinking to reduce the pleasurable
| feeling associated with drinking.
|
| I tried it, but it didn't work for me. It certainly makes
| drinking less pleasurable, but I was using it as a coping
| mechanism for my anxiety.
|
| I think for some people, that approach might work. Also, if a
| person solves their underlying psychological problem which
| led to the need of alcohol for a coping mechanism, I think it
| might work as well.
|
| I'm probably saddled with anxiety for life, but I've learned
| healthy coping mechanisms. Besides the taste of a cold beer
| after mowing the lawn, I don't miss it in the slightest.
| retrac wrote:
| It's not my experience. I do believe it's riskier than simply
| abstaining long-term. You are, in fact, reminding yourself of
| something you found so compelling once that it derailed your
| life. But personally, I have been addicted to amphetamine and
| alcohol/benzodiazepines badly enough in the past, that I
| could not discontinue them suddenly due to the severity of
| the withdrawal. Yet in recent years I have felt able to get
| drunk at a party for example, without serious cravings in the
| weeks that follow. And I'm back on amphetamines for ADHD
| which I take to schedule. I won't lie though; the thought of
| taking two pills instead of one does occur to me not
| infrequently. The temptation is probably always there once
| you know what it's like. But my experience is that no, it
| doesn't automatically derail necessarily.
| [deleted]
| runawaybottle wrote:
| That's not 100% true. _Exhaustion_ is real. Can you watch the
| same Marvel super hero movie for the n-th time, even though
| you loved the first few? You can't, you just get tired. Burn
| out is real even amongst addicts.
|
| You literally get _tired_ of this shit. Before I became an
| addict, another legitimate addict told me why he stopped - he
| just got tired. I'm talking years of daily drinking, and all
| the consequences that come with it (every bridge burnt, every
| path destroyed, credentialed as a true fuck-up). Exhausted.
|
| That's the thing about abuse. If you took one hit of cocaine,
| and you die, that's the end of your abuse. Addicts can take
| hit after hit after hit, and still live. That's scarier than
| death, and extremely tiring.
|
| I am tired of it, pure exhaustion is a way out. The
| implication of that is that you yourself are such a piece of
| shit that you didn't quit until you yourself got tired.
|
| It's shameful.
| sethjgore wrote:
| Check out the Sinclair method.
| BayAreaEscapee wrote:
| I'm going to second the Sinclair method, which involves
| taking naltrexone or nalmefene. I started with the
| Sinclair method at the same time I started participating
| in SMART recovery online meetings. I only drink alcohol
| about once a week now and only in moderate quantities.
|
| Here are some links for anyone interested:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Cure-Alcoholism-Medically-
| Eliminate-A...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EghiY_s2ts
| awaaythroow wrote:
| The author states that thinking that you have an addictive
| personality is unhelpful. Articulated that way, it could be true,
| but understanding that there is a predisposition towards
| addiction[1] is helpful to overcome it, and does not contradict
| the fact that one can recover from addiction.
|
| From Overcoming Sex Addiction by Thaddeus Birchard [2]:
|
| " _A predisposition towards addiction, be it genetic or a legacy
| from the historic family dynamic, is important to understand. It
| reduces shame to know that you are vulnerable to sexual addiction
| not because you are morally deficient but because you are
| predisposed towards addiction either through genetic inheritance
| or though interfamilial patterns. The more that shame is reduced,
| the more that the drive to act out sexually is lessened._ "
|
| " _Once you understand that this dysfunctional regulation was set
| up in childhood, there is a reduction in shame because you are
| not responsible for having the problem. However, you are
| responsible for what you do about it._ "
|
| [1] For example, because of childhood trauma. See
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=_-APGWvYupU and
| https://newyorkpathways.com/sexually-acting-out-as-response-...
|
| [2] I'm halfway through this book and found it very helpful. I
| recommend it for anyone dealing with addiction.
| YarickR2 wrote:
| Well, quit smoking cold turkey after doing so for 10 years. No
| addiction. Quit eating lots of sugar, after doing so for 30
| years, replaces with fruits and nuts. No addiction. Can't stop
| reading books, doing so for 40+ years; addictive as hell. I know
| iv drug users , they quit and do not look back, so , oaaa does
| not hold true in general
| rhyn00 wrote:
| Marc Lewis, a neuroscientist has a nice book on the topic, which
| to me makes complete sense (and is grounded in sound science).
| His view on the topic is that addiction is nothing special, just
| a learned behavior. Hebbian learning states that neurons that
| fire together wire together (corollary: neurons that don't, the
| connection weakens). The neurons in the limbic system control
| emotions, attention, desire, and fear. The prefrontal cortex
| (PFC) controls planning, expectation, and long term planning. We
| are motivated to do things that we desire, or avoid things we
| fear, which is controlled by the limbic system (also involving
| dopamine release).
|
| Let's take drugs for an example but this can apply to other
| behaviors like internet usage, eating, falling in love, becoming
| obsessed with a hobby, or cronic anxiety toward something
| (avoiding fear). When we take a drug (or do xyz behavior ) it
| gives us a positive feeling (pleasure, or comfort in avoiding
| fear) and probably a favorable outcome occurred, so we are likely
| to engage in the behavior again. Each time we engage in the
| behavior the connection between the limbic system and the
| stimulus that triggers it, strengthen. When the trigger happens
| the limbic system lights up and triggers the PFC to create a plan
| and imagine how good it will be (then a positive feedback will
| occur - this is craving). Over time more and more stimuli will
| become triggers. Also, if you don't use it you lose it, and the
| neurons responsible for long term planning will weaken their
| connection to the limbic system (also, shown in brain scans),
| making it harder for you to assert self control.
|
| However, your brain is plastic, and you can also unlearn the
| behavior over time (studies also support this). Meditation can
| help because you can stimulate these neural pathways in a
| controlled environment. For example you can imagine how a trigger
| leads to drugs, then you can imagine how drugs leads to bad
| things while meditating - over time you can strengthen the
| connection from the trigger to the emotion and imagery of bad
| things happening. Ofcourse meditation is not the only thing that
| can help, but the main idea is that you want to make your brain
| associate the bad behavior with bad outcome, and strengthen the
| association of good outcomes with fear/desire circuit.
|
| Book: The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease -
| https://www.amazon.com/Biology-Desire-Why-Addiction-Disease/...
|
| Youtube: The Neuroscience of addiction -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOSD9rTVuWc
|
| Edit: typos
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| A or B? Why does it have to be binary? It seems that a spectrum
| is in order.
|
| Our brains are all not exactly the same. So there's a case for A.
|
| Our lives are all not exactly the same.So there's a case for B.
|
| The best answer might be C, a spectrum. A spectrum that considers
| both and some combination of A and B.
| [deleted]
| cratermoon wrote:
| Addiction is a brain disease, and it matters:
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9311924/
| runawaybottle wrote:
| It's very hard to understand addiction. I know I had two distinct
| addictions for wildly different reasons. With certain games or
| porn, it's just, I loved it too much. Later, with alcohol and
| prescription meds, it just made me feel less shitty. The former I
| just enjoyed it too much, and the latter, I never found a better
| substitute for anxiety and self hatred.
|
| One was truly an insatiable desire, the other was truly self
| medication. If you suffered from this, it's very hard not to
| think you were born this way.
| lookalike74 wrote:
| > "Opinion A can make people feel powerless. I'm an addict and
| I'll be that way forever- it creates feelings of shame and being
| a victim. It also creates a stigma in society that addicts are
| somewhat broken and can't be fixed.
|
| Opinion A seems a little bit outdated. Abstinence isn't
| necessarily the goal."
|
| This isn't a very informed argument at all. One, abstinence isn't
| the goal of AA or 12-step ; recovery is the goal, and it starts
| with abstinence. Two, addiction is best defined as having lost
| the power of choice. So not only does this opinion ignore that,
| it propagates the very stigma it intends to diminish.
| sneak wrote:
| Reminder: AA and 12 step are faith-based, and aren't very
| effective when actually measured (roughly equal to the
| effectiveness of not using AA/12-step).
| lookalike74 wrote:
| Sorry, there are untold (but not unknown) millions more
| people around the world who've recovered from addiction with
| 12-step than anything medical. AA was founded in part by a
| doctor (himself an alcoholic) who recognized that medical
| science had no solution to alcoholism. Fast-forward to now
| and the 'medical solution' to addiction is usually another
| addictive substance. Can those help? Sure, and they do. But I
| don't think there's been any significant studies confirming
| medical science has a better solution than 12-step. If you
| have evidence that relapse rates are lower outside of 12-step
| than within, please share because I've never heard of it.
| sneak wrote:
| > _But I don 't think there's been any significant studies
| confirming medical science has a better solution than
| 12-step._
|
| This is false. 12-step is a faith-based system, and is
| approximately equal to other unscientific systems in terms
| of success rate.
|
| The AA book itself perpetuates the lie of its
| effectiveness:
|
| > _Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly
| followed our path. Those who do not recover are people who
| cannot or will not completely give themselves to this
| simple program, usually men and women who are
| constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves.
| There are such unfortunates. They are not at fault; they
| seem to have been born that way._
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| I went to AA when I was concerned about my drinking. A
| fair few people there seemed to have swapped alcohol
| dependence for AA meeting dependence.
|
| Definitely better to be reliant on a supportive group of
| peers than something that'll eventually kill you, but
| felt like swapping smoking for vaping - definitely better
| for you, but not solving the underlying cause.
|
| And their view that you're always going to be an
| alcoholic, for the rest of your life feels like a belief
| rather than scientific fact, and sometimes, a self-
| fulfilling prophecy when members relapse.
|
| But ultimately, it works for some people, so more power
| to them.
| janto wrote:
| Your dismissal of 12-steps system purely due to it being
| faith-based, is unscientific. Psilocybin (a religious
| experience inducing substance) appears to be a very
| promising treatment.
| danaris wrote:
| "This drug induces hallucinations. Some people interpret
| those hallucinations to be religious in nature.
| Therefore, this drug is faith-based."
|
| That's not a very strong chain of logic. The 12-step
| system is, at least based on my very limited
| understanding, founded with assumptions that the people
| using it will be either Christian or theistic and raised
| in a culturally Christian society, and thus have a
| similar notion of "faith in a higher power". That's what
| "faith-based" means.
| janto wrote:
| Psilocybin has a distinct spiritual phenomenology that
| not all hallucinogens have.
|
| While there is a difference between a faith and a
| spiritual experience, they both work within a religious
| framing of life, which might be helping the individual
| with addictive behavior here.
| [deleted]
| lotophage wrote:
| Here's an article from The Atlantic that you might want to
| read.
|
| > Its faith-based 12-step program dominates treatment in
| the United States. But researchers have debunked central
| tenets of AA doctrine and found dozens of other treatments
| more effective.
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/04/the-
| irr...
| lookalike74 wrote:
| "The 2020 Cochrane meta-study of Alcoholics Anonymous says
| that, based on randomized controlled trials, AA-oriented
| therapies have a 42% abstinent rate one year after treatment,
| compared to the 35% abstinence rate with other therapies." ht
| tps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effectiveness_of_Alcoholics_...
| darkerside wrote:
| The ironic thing, as a former smoker, is that we never lose the
| power of choice. We simply choose not to exercise it, and
| perhaps forget that we can. But it's always there. And the one
| weakness of many of these programs is that they never force the
| person to confront that uncomfortable reality within
| themselves. IMO.
| ChemSpider wrote:
| Just the other week I read in a medical textbook:
|
| If you are overweight (obese) at age 18, there is only a 15%(!)
| chance that you will manage to have a more healthy weight during
| your adult life. I found that number utterly depressing and
| shockingly low.
| watwut wrote:
| Through, while long term weight loss have unintuitively low
| success chances, it is possible to improve health results
| themselves.
|
| Things like moving regularly improve people's health even if
| they don't result in long term weight loss. The same with diet
| change - you can eat better and have better health even if you
| remain fat. You can lower your sugar consumption, stop to drink
| sweetened drinks and your chance of getting diabetes 2 will go
| down regardless if whether it moves your weight.
| heavenlyblue wrote:
| And if you're not obese at age 18, what is the chance you are
| obese when you're an adult? I have a feeling it's actually
| larger than 15%
| Barrin92 wrote:
| Relevant to the topic of personality and choice in the article.
| Robert Plomin in his book _Blueprint_ cites the pretty
| astonishing finding that the weight of adopted children is
| pretty much not at all correlated to the weight of the adopted
| parents, whereas the weight of the birth parents is a strong
| indicator for weight in adulthood, even if separated at birth.
|
| https://imgur.com/XIyvzFz
| darkerside wrote:
| Is that surprising? Weight is strongly correlated with
| height, which is absolutely genetic. I'm sure that BMI would
| be less correlated than pure weight, although I don't know by
| how much.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| It's worth remembering that only a portion of those people
| actually make losing weight a goal. It might be a high portion,
| but still a portion. Simply making the goal increases your
| chances.
| maccard wrote:
| That lines up with intuition; if you are obede at 18, chances
| are your parents have not prioritized a healthy relationship
| with food, meaning it has never been a priority for you or your
| family, and you are unlikely to change those entrenched habits.
| [deleted]
| dathinab wrote:
| That might depend a lot on the country you are in/from.
|
| The huge majority of (similar aged) people I had meet between
| 16-20 which had been obese where so because of "health
| issues" not directly related to them eating unhealthy being
| lazy.
|
| As such it's not surprising if you have problems changing it
| because "just" eating healthy and doing sports is far from
| enough to fix it. And trying to fix it with that is often a
| task needing far more discipline and self control then the
| large majority of humans (independent of weight) have.
|
| I mean let's be honest the difficulty many of this people
| face is way higher then the difficulty for a young(1) health
| male to get a black belt in Judo, Karate or similar.
|
| (1): Start training with ~14 or earlier, through not
| necessary with high commitment, then at some point later
| (e.g. 16,18,20) added commitment trying to get a black belt.
| maccard wrote:
| Are health issues unrelated to obesity the primary cause of
| obesity in under 18s?
|
| Also, I specifically never called anyone out as lazy. The
| majority of obesity is overeating (a single Starbucks
| muffin is a 10k run). Yes there are people with
| imbalances/medication that are outliers but most people
| aren't outliers.
|
| I specifically called out a relationship with food being
| something that's carried into adulthood as the cause of the
| relationship between those figures.
|
| An obese 14 year old may have some underlying health
| condition but is more likely to be a victim of
| socioeconomic problems; lack of access to healthier and
| more balanced foods, or to have obese parents (which
| appears to be a good indicator for childhood obesity).
| Neither of these are easy solves, and the blame doesn't lie
| with an individual, but it does explain that someone who is
| obese as a child is more likely to be obese as an adult.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| There was a recent article discussed here that made the
| case that our obesity epidemic was primarily caused by
| something environmental, not by individual eating
| choices. It seemed pretty convincing.
| dathinab wrote:
| > Are health issues unrelated to obesity the primary
| cause of obesity in under 18s?
|
| Idk, I can only speak about people in my environment.
|
| Where I can only remember one case which might have been
| because of overeating and I say might because I simple
| don't know.
|
| Multiple of the obese people I did know had a more
| controlled and some times far more healthy diet then most
| people I know.
|
| Many cases I know did slowly but continuously got bigger,
| i.e. something which can totally happen without
| overeating.
|
| I also had meet people the other way around, like needing
| to consume ~6000+ kcal a day when they don't do sports or
| they are at risk of becoming severely underweight...
|
| > called anyone out as lazy.
|
| The main reason I mentioned sport is because I know of a
| case where the person had a controlled diet and did more
| sport then most other people in class and still looked
| quite square, from what I learned this person slowly over
| multiple years got more and more weight without being
| able to lose any of it.
|
| > . The majority of obesity is overeating (a single
| Starbucks muffin is a 10k run).
|
| I'm not sure if it's the majority. It's definitely a
| thing, and very often a thing for extreme cases. It also
| might very well play a big role in countries with unusual
| many and many unusual extreme cases of obesity. But many
| of the cases I know did slowly accumulate weight over
| years without being able to lose weight starting from a
| very very young age on.
| zz865 wrote:
| I'm impressed 15% of people can lose weight. I'd expect 99% of
| people to weigh the same or more at 40 than 18.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| I want to know the attached caveats to that. Is it 15% lost
| weight at some point or the much more impressive, 15% lost
| weight and kept it off?
| float4 wrote:
| Someone on HN once made the comparison between obesity and the
| old attitude people had towards depression. When you were
| depressed, you "just" had to go out and do things. You "just"
| had to drive out the negative thoughts with positive ones. etc.
|
| When you're overweight, you "just" have to get into a caloric
| deficit. "Just" undereat 7700kcal and you've lost 1kg of
| bodyweight. It's that simple.
|
| Except it's actually hard.
| choeger wrote:
| That doesn't mean it's not true, though. Obese people _do_
| lose a lot of weight when they undereat and depressive people
| _do_ profit from outside activity, sports, etc.
|
| It's just that life often looks like you cannot do it for
| various reasons. The complicated thing is of course to find a
| tiny crack in that bubble of constraints where you can force
| a change.
|
| Just an example: For many people it would be beneficial to
| ride a bike to get to work. This alone won't change your body
| completely, but it is a great start, losing you a couple of
| hundreds of kcal per day _and_ encouraging more bike tours.
| But that 's obviously not possible for everyone and it is
| difficult to tell from the outside whether someone just
| rejects this approach because they are lazy or for valid
| reasons.
| elliekelly wrote:
| I would encourage you to track your steps for a week and
| then get two 50lb bags of sand from Home Depot and carry
| them around with you everywhere you go for a week. Compare
| the steps you took in week #1 to the steps you took in week
| #2 to see how "lazy" you've become from carrying around all
| the extra weight. It's hard work being fat. Literally.
|
| "Just ride your bike" is an easy solution for someone who
| is already normal weight but it's not nearly as easy for
| someone who's overweight.
| ben_w wrote:
| The problem is the word "just", not the rest of the advice.
| "'Just' eat less" has been straightforward for me when my
| scales tell me I needed to do that, but it clearly isn't
| for _most_ people else obesity wouldn't be one of the
| single biggest issues in western healthcare.
| andi999 wrote:
| Same with climbing everest without oxygen bottles, 'just'
| use less air.
| ekster wrote:
| Is choosing to eat less really analogous to choosing to
| be able to breathe without oxygen?
| ben_w wrote:
| Climbing Everest without _supplemental_ oxygen is
| possible and has been done[0], and isn't the same thing
| as "breathing without oxygen".
|
| [0] e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhold_Messner
| ekster wrote:
| Ok interesting, but I still wonder if that's really
| analogous to choosing to eat less food?
|
| That the person who did it has their own Wikipedia page
| makes me think it is probably harder.
| andi999 wrote:
| It seems 200 people did it so far, around 4% of all
| climbers (at some point of time)
| :https://www.mensjournal.com/adventure/climbing-everest-
| adria... probably more of the 5k could have done it if
| they wanted to do it (and prepare longer for it).
| ekster wrote:
| Also interesting! I am still unsure though how losing
| weight is like climbing mount everest without
| supplemental oxygen. Can you clarify that part?
| andi999 wrote:
| It is about the usage of 'just'. So while in the first
| case people think the just is justified, the before
| mentioned data indicates that only a few people manage to
| 'just' do it. The order of percentage of ppl beeing able
| to do it is the same as something which seems very hard
| to do (the everest thing). So while objectively they are
| comparable it shines light on that the usage of 'just' is
| bad in both cases while the subjective perception is very
| different. Not sure if I can make it clearer.
|
| Edit:maybe I was thinking to complicated in this reply.
| The analogy is: you have two different things which can
| be achieved through doing a specific thing, but doing
| this thing is hard in both cases so using the word 'just'
| is not appropriate which is easier to see in the example.
| tfigueroa wrote:
| Yes. The odds of someone climbing without supplemental
| oxygen vs achieving and maintaining weight loss are
| comparably low, presumably because they are very
| difficult, and cannot "just" be chosen so simply.
| [deleted]
| roenxi wrote:
| Changing habits is hard, making choices is hard, doing
| things that feel uncomfortable is really hard. I have a
| lot of sympathy, for the idea and we all struggle with
| stuff like that.
|
| But unfortunately this isn't a complicated subject.
| Weight is controlled by diet and standard healthy diets
| are very well known. Nearly everyone can keep their
| weight down. Even if people don't, it is objectively not
| that hard to do. A lot of people don't accept the rewards
| are worth the discomfort.
| balfirevic wrote:
| > doing things that feel uncomfortable is really hard
|
| > [keeping their weight down] is objectively not that
| hard to do
|
| Would you mind picking one?
| watwut wrote:
| It is bad advice, because if you just randomly restrict
| calories, you will run into other issues.
|
| One problem is that calorie restriction itself is modifying
| how your body works. So, the weight lost in diet is
| typically gained back super quickly. And if you repeat the
| cycle, your body also adjusts by spending less calories.
|
| The other problem is that it just lowering calories easily
| leads to nutritional deficiency of some sort. Which leads
| to feeling bad all the time, being tired and passive,
| unable to perform as previously. So the diet will
| eventually fail for that reason - because you will be more
| dysfunctional and breaking it will paradoxically make you
| more functional.
| xvilka wrote:
| Unless you follow the diet to the maximum - eat only
| compatible food and skip incompatible (according to the
| chosen diet), calculate calories every single day. In my
| case keto diet worked the miracle. Maybe other people
| could be successful with other, different diets. But it
| does work if done properly. Same with exercise. Random
| exercise can be just as bad as restricting calories.
| Exercise should be systematic and balanced, as well as a
| diet.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| Keeping track of macronutrients and carb counting sounds
| significantly harder than "just eat less" and I think
| bolsters the argument that it may in fact be hard to lose
| weight.
| loves_mangoes wrote:
| I don't like how people, still, treat lazyness as a root
| cause, not as an effect.
|
| Lazyness is a bug, it's a failure state, it's a medical
| condition. Much like depression, psychology cannot treat it
| in all cases, but taking the approach that people are just
| born lazy and iredeemable seems like the most unscientific,
| least promising, and most likely to annoy your devoted
| commenter.
| gmadsen wrote:
| in my personal experience, laziness is absolutely a
| thing. As an example, many friends in college would go
| party or hang out far more often than I did. Its not that
| I didn't like hanging out, its that I valued the long
| term payout of good grades more than my current
| suffering.
|
| I've also ran through the mountains until I literally
| couldn't stand from a pile of stress fractures. Even
| though very stupid, its an example of mind over matter.
|
| To me laziness is an inability to mentally force action
| over the brains signals to not incur distress or effort.
|
| I feel pretty confident that there is a large overlap of
| "lazy people" with people that would have a hard time
| taking cold showers in the morning for a month, if hot
| water was available.
| zamfi wrote:
| > in my personal experience, laziness is absolutely a
| thing. As an example, many friends in college would go
| party or hang out far more often than I did. Its not that
| I didn't like hanging out, its that I valued the long
| term payout of good grades more than my current
| suffering.
|
| This sounds more like you're trying to explain the
| behavior of your friends and are choosing the word
| "laziness", but that's a pretty reductive explanation for
| why some people like to party and others don't.
|
| Perhaps if you were willing to do the hard work of
| questioning your own assumptions and seeing life through
| your friends eyes a little more you could have more
| sympathy.
|
| But perhaps you aren't because that's hard work and
| causes distress you'd rather not incur, and it's much
| easier to describe human behavior as "laziness" than to
| understand it's causes.
| dri_ft wrote:
| broke: calling people lazy.
|
| woke: accusing people of being unwilling to do the hard
| work.
| gmadsen wrote:
| I do that plenty, I used that example because it seemed
| most appropriate for this forum. It was probably because
| they had a support system, so they felt there lives would
| be ok even if they did average in school, where I felt I
| would literally be homeless if I lost my scholarships.
|
| you know who wasn't lazy in school? All the immigrant
| friends I had.
|
| I could have instead, easily described the 100s of people
| I grew up around, that would skip work and get drunk
| instead, spend all their paycheck the day they get it.
| The obesity, the abuse, the drug addiction.
|
| I have zero sympathy for able bodied people that can't
| cope enough to feed their children. I don't care the
| causes, nor are they relevant.
|
| I have worked for $10 an hour doing construction in 100
| degree weather, and I have also work as a SWE at a FAANG.
| I have seen the complete lack of self awareness most
| professionals and/or those from upper class backgrounds
| have.
| loves_mangoes wrote:
| >I used that example because it seemed most appropriate
| for this forum
|
| Any example you pick is going to be complicated. Because
| they're people. They're doing their best.
|
| Assume good faith. It's not a law, but it helps.
| [deleted]
| webdog wrote:
| > I have zero sympathy for able bodied people that can't
| cope enough to feed their children.
|
| Growing up in generational poverty and finding myself out
| of it, I carried a similarly angry perspective about
| people for a while as an adult.
|
| I would suggest listening to the stories of people who
| you say can't cope and maybe be open to the idea of
| empathy.
|
| Zero sympathy costs more energy than you maybe might
| realize. Is it really worth it? It wasn't for me.
| NateEag wrote:
| In my experience, people who focus on laziness are NOT
| saying the lazy person is irredeemable - they're usually
| saying precisely "You're choosing to be lazy and you
| don't have to. Choose to be different!"
|
| Granted, they often don't think through how to do that,
| or why the person might be struggling to perform, but
| it's not usually a belief that the person is incapable of
| doing better.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" You're choosing to be lazy and you don't have to.
| Choose to be different!"_
|
| This gets to the very important question of how much
| choice do we really have.
|
| People are the way they are because of how they were
| raised, their genetics, where and among whom they were
| raised and their life experiences. There's arguably some
| choice mixed in there too, somewhere, but how much real
| choice people have is debatable.
|
| If people don't have much choice in the way they are, it
| explains why they have a really hard time changing, and
| there's no sense in blaming them for something they can't
| change.
|
| Of course some people _do_ change, but maybe that 's
| because they were the kind of person who could, and other
| people are the kinds of people who can't.
| loves_mangoes wrote:
| Thank you for trying to explain their thought process --
| I appreciate that, that's very kind!
|
| I appreciate that you're very empathetic, and I feel like
| not everyone else is. There's a whole lot of people who
| probably can't imagine what it's like to be somebody
| else. That's hard, isn't it?
|
| But when you tell lazy people not to be lazy, and they
| don't do it, then it almost sounds like you must either
| be calling them dumb, or defective.
|
| So that's why I feel like thinking of it as treatable is
| a nice and friendly middle ground. Which a lot of people
| don't seem to.
|
| That doesn't seem to be their impulse. Oh, they're lazy.
| Let's not fix that.
| RobertoG wrote:
| In my experience, people who focus on the laziness of
| others are trying to bring the focus at how they
| themselves are not lazy. There is something similar going
| on with overweight. What's so difficult? just eat less!
| look at me! It's a status game, instead of trying to
| help.
|
| Anyway, to say to somebody "don't procrastinate" is like
| given a guitar to somebody and tell them "just play!".
| Sure man, how?
| loves_mangoes wrote:
| That's hard to want to believe. The problem is if you
| assume they're not trying to help, then either they need
| help (too), or there's not much we can do about it.
|
| I feel like a whole lot of people are trying to help,
| they're just really bad at it and they need help
| themselves.
|
| .
|
| Thankfully, psychiatry!
|
| Read a book, boys & girls & enby friends.
| atoav wrote:
| The issue e.g. with obese people isn't that they didn't
| have the bright idea that they could "just" eat less or
| "just" move more -- the issue is that there are very often
| underlying paychological reasons for the way people take
| decisions. This is _not_ laziness, this is having a
| personality structure that makes it harder for you to stay
| healthy.
|
| We all want to be happy, if for some reason happiness for
| you is tied a lot more to eating than to being healthy and
| fit, you can try all you want _it just wont make you happy_
| if you do. That means tackling obesity means also asking
| yourself hard questions about what food does for you, how
| it got that way (e.g. having grandparents which nearly
| starved can have an severe effect on the food habits for a
| few generations down the line, sometimes parents can only
| express their affection through food which means now you
| equate food with existential parental love). Changing
| habits is hard, understanding your own psychological
| drivers and doing something about it against the resistance
| of your brain is way harder. Never underestimate the
| struggles other people have to take in order to do the
| thing that is easy for you.
| ekster wrote:
| Some people preferring being obese because they are happy
| about eating lots of food isn't really a counterargument
| to the fact that losing weight is as simple as eating
| less.
| danieldisu wrote:
| And getting rich is as simple as earning more and
| spending less, why are you not rich already?
| ekster wrote:
| Honestly I am doing quite well by following those simple
| practices. But creating wealth out of nothing is surely
| more difficult than eating less of what you already have
| access to.
|
| Anyway, the point was that being ok with being obese
| because you are happiest eating a lot doesn't make eating
| less any more complicated. It's just choosing to do
| something different, which everyone is free to do.
| atoav wrote:
| Sliding infinitly far on your socks is totally easy in a
| world where you ignore friction and the human need to
| eat/sleep/etc.
|
| Similarily it is totally easy to imagine getting fit/slim
| by ignoring the forces acting on someone who is obese. Of
| course one can do that if it fits with ones world image,
| but I tend to like my models closer to reality.
|
| Don't underestimate what it does to a kid if e.g. one
| parent has troubles expressing love through any other
| means than cooking. Suddenly love comes in the form of
| food. Similar with situation where ancestors nearly
| starved -- this can fuck up multiple generations. Both
| examples will take conscious effort to tackle one's
| psychological drivers, maybe therapy, but quite certainly
| a lot of time and effort.
|
| Think about a bad habbit you tried to loose and multiply
| it by a magnitude then you get a glimpse of what this
| would feel like for an actual obese person (note: I am
| not obese, neither have I ever been obese). This is why
| "just eat less and move more" as a statement is
| ridiculous: a bit like "have you just tried not to be
| poor" or "have you tried not being depressed all the
| time". While factually correct it displays ignorance of
| the forces at play.
| cinntaile wrote:
| If you ignore the psychological factors then it's just
| eating less, but the point is that it's not and you seem
| to not understand that.
| ekster wrote:
| If you are happy as you are and don't want to lose
| weight, why would you be eating less in the first place
| much less running into psychological problems preventing
| you from doing so?
|
| If the part I don't understand is that there is no such
| thing as being overweight and happy, and people who feel
| that way have psychological defects, then it's not that I
| don't understand your point but I do disagree.
| gmadsen wrote:
| the psychology was just described to you above. Not sure
| what foundation you have to "disagree" with. Human
| actions and thought patterns are not some libertarian
| utopia of perfect rational behavior based on an economics
| equation
| atoav wrote:
| Maybe you should have a serious dialogue with any obese
| person to figure out why it is hard for them if you care
| about forming a model of the world that represents actual
| reality.
|
| Most obese people are _not_ happy with their body or the
| ways their eating habits impact their live in many ways.
| Most obese people are also happy when they eat or worse:
| they are unhappy when they don 't eat.
|
| If eating gives you a short term improvement even if it
| makes you unhappy in the long term then you might just do
| it, like in any other addiction (btw. a well researched
| topic).
|
| The way out of this is _not_ to "just eat less", the way
| out of this is to tackle the reason why you only can be
| happy when eating _and then_ eat less.
| panta wrote:
| > We all want to be happy, if for some reason happiness
| for you is tied a lot more to eating than to being
| healthy and fit, you can try all you want it just wont
| make you happy if you do.
|
| The point is that overeating won't make us happy either.
| Maybe it will give some 15 seconds of gratification but
| then most of us will feel guilt, and the long term effect
| has terrible consequences. Maybe the problem lies also in
| the fact that our simple brains can't really understand
| the future. I've read somewhere that many asiatic
| languages don't have a future tense, hence people there
| when facing the choice of eating something think along
| the lines "if I eat this I AM fatter/less healthy" and
| this could be a factor in the way lower obesity
| prevalence.
| atoav wrote:
| > The point is that overeating won't make us happy
| either. Maybe it will give some 15 seconds of
| gratification but then most of us will feel guilt, and
| the long term effect has terrible consequences.
|
| I don't deny that. Some get unhappy enough to derive
| enough energy from this unhappiness to tackle this as a
| real problem. Of course the first box you need to tick to
| get better is to accept your behaviour is problematic and
| realize that it makes you unhappy in the long term.
|
| Some might never reach that step to begin with. Many
| however realize the problems and want to get better but
| they can't because they constantly fight the symptoms and
| not the cause, or because their lives give them enough
| excuses not to do it (whether they are valid excuses or
| not doesn't matter too much).
|
| I chose to believe that people are a product of both
| their environments and their own choices. So we are
| neither completely determined by the circumstances we
| grew up in nor are we completely free to decide to "just"
| do things 180deg different than we were lead to believe
| our whole lives. We can shape our environments and
| ourselves within certain boundaries and over given
| timescales, but for this we need to know the forces which
| act upon us. And everybody has forces acting upon them,
| the believes, rationalizations and stories we tell
| ourselves about our place in the world are partly a
| product of this: we try to be happy with ourselves in the
| place that we have within the universe. We try to
| establish meaning in the chaos.
|
| This is why explainations like "some people are just
| lazy" is less of a true statement about the world, but
| more of a true statement about the stories a certain type
| of person has to tell themselves in order to feel good.
| Because if the weren't "just lazy" suddenly one had to
| reflect upon the environment, the incentive structures
| that shaped them into the way they are. Suddenly one
| would feel the ethical need to change said environment
| and feel powerless confronted with the scale of the
| problem. Nah. Moar better to say they are "just lazy",
| then one can stop thinking.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| That still validates the statement that people who
| overeat also need to really consider the reasons they
| overeat and why. It's a real deep psychological study as
| to why this short term joy is apparently worth the guilt
| later and figuring out strategies to counteract it.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Have you ever been obese and lost a lot of weight and kept
| it off for a long period? I'm wondering if you are speaking
| from personal experience, or just repeating things you have
| heard from other people.
| qq4 wrote:
| What is the new attitude towards depression? I think that
| going out and doing things along with driving out the
| negative thoughts with positive ones tends to work. Yes it is
| hard, but that is besides the point. It's not insurmountable.
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| It's like how you can write perfect software by "just" not
| writing any bugs into it
| anothernewdude wrote:
| I don't buy calories in. Life forms are full of parts that
| encourage stability. Your body maintains blood pressure,
| temperature, oxygen etc. Why not weight as well?
|
| That the relationship of calories in to calories absorbed is
| linear needs some heavy proof before I'll believe it.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Agreed. Even simple things like your hunger level are under
| hormonal control.
|
| Calories out is equally suspect. Your body has mechanisms
| to adjust his many calories you burn, and those are not
| under conscious control.
| sethammons wrote:
| You are currently downvoted but I think there is something
| to homeostasis.
|
| My favorite counter point to calories in/out crowd is that
| the body is a dynamic system. The calories out portion
| doesn't stay constant. I have lost weight while eating more
| because my base metabolism increased. In "That Sugar Film,"
| the guy eats the same amount of calories and same activity
| level but starts to include "daily recommended sugar" and
| increased his weight. The body is a dynamic system and will
| change how it stores and processes energy. Yes, you can't
| violate thermodynamics and eating a calorie deficit will
| cause weight loss (and possibly other issues), but the
| system tries to adapt.
| wirrbel wrote:
| before you downvote this comment, consider
|
| (a) CICO (calories-in/calories out) is not the same as the
| energy conservation principle, you can claim that CICO
| model does not work while firmly believing in the energy
| conservation principle
|
| (b) CICO isn't untrue, its just too simple to model the
| bodies approach to managing the fat stores. Fat storage is
| very much controlled by insulin and cortisol. If one or
| both are high, your body is primed to increase your fat
| storage
|
| CICO crowd equates 7000kcal with 1kg of fat body mass and
| then you can do calculations that losing 10k of body mass
| in a year can be achieved by reducing caloric intake by
| 200kcal/day, or increasing expenditure by the same amount,
| or a mix of both.
|
| Experienced dieters know that this doesn't work as easily.
|
| I was trying to loose weight with CICO and hang out in the
| CICO-crowd forums for 2-3 years until I realised I couldn't
| lose more than 10kg that way until I plateaued. And in
| these forums, it seemed to be similar for many.
|
| Then, with fasting and/or keto forums I hang out in there
| are so many more credible reports of extreme weight loss.
| And that is because water fasting and/or keto reduce the
| amount of insulin your body emits, and thus allows your
| body to really tap into the fat reserves it has in store.
| Gauge_Irrahphe wrote:
| The inability to burn calories because of nutrient
| deficiencies is the biggest flaw of CICO. You just won't
| burn more than your metabolism is capable of burning no
| matter how hard you try. You can't will yourself to use
| energy that isn't available. Keto has nothing to do with
| insulin, it's just a backup mechanism that fails last.
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| Right.
|
| When you weigh a certain weight, you have a certain
| resting energy expenditure.
|
| Let's say the average 200lb(Sorry for the American units)
| man burns 2000 calories a day. If he then goes a week
| only eating 1500 calories, he will have burned a pound,
| and now only weighs 199lb, and his new resting energy
| expenditure will be slightly less. The next week when he
| is still eating 1500 calories, he will lose only 0.99
| pounds.
|
| So of course you will run into a time eventually when you
| plateau. At some point 1500 calories a day will be your
| new equilibrium weight and you will no longer lose weight
| without additional changes.
|
| This is typically an argument the other way, as when you
| do the math this way it's very clear that the energy when
| stored as fat is incredibly energy efficient. An extra
| 100 calories might mean that you gain a pound in slightly
| more than a month, but you won't settle on your new
| equilibrium until you gain more than 10 pounds. According
| to wolfram alpha, the basal metabolic rate of a 200lb
| male is 1997 calories. The basal metabolic rate of a
| 300lb male is 2465 calories. The daily energy expenditure
| of a 200 pound male, who runs daily for 3 miles over 30
| minutes, is equivalent to a 300 pound male. 100 pounds of
| fat is actually a shockingly small amount of daily
| calories difference.
|
| Anecdotal evidence: I've lost 70 pounds, then regained
| the 60 pounds, then lost the 60 pounds, and am currently
| up 30 pounds. Simple does not mean easy.
| vitabenes wrote:
| In principle, it's simple. In reality, it gets complex and
| hard.
| Gauge_Irrahphe wrote:
| Lead deficiency makes animals both sedentary and depressed.
| Somebody fucked up big time.
| blfr wrote:
| Simple and easy are not the same. It is simple if not always
| easy.
| RobertKerans wrote:
| This is the critical point, most sibling comments are
| conflating the two [when in fact they are completely
| different]
| float4 wrote:
| Yeah, I purposefully used the word "simple" when I meant
| straightforward and "hard" when I meant difficult, but I
| should've explained why I used those words. Either that,
| or I myself have gotten the meanings of the words mixed
| up.
| RobertKerans wrote:
| Meaning seems correct afaics? In particular any
| commenters who build software or engineer products should
| recognise this, making simple things is often very hard.
| jmull wrote:
| Hm. There _is_ a distinction between simple /complex and
| easy/hard, but it's a basic semantic one. Simple/complex
| refers to a system or problem, while easy/hard refers to
| the difficulty of controlling the system or solving the
| problem.
|
| The problem in this thread with making a distinction
| between simple/complex and easy/hard is that people are
| referring to different things. People are even talking
| past themselves so it's no wonder others don't understand
| what they mean.
|
| E.g., the energy model of weight gain/loss -- CICO, or
| calories in, calories out -- is simple. But CI depends on
| interactions between evolution, hormonal systems (a
| complex balancing feedback system all its own),
| psychology, age, money, society, culture, family, food
| supply, etc., which is complex. For a particular person
| at a particular point in their life, that bundle of
| factors may happen to be balanced "downward" so that CI
| is easy to control and weight loss is simple -- and
| easy). In other cases, a person may need to dig in to
| those factors and find a way to rebalance them, which is
| complex -- and hard.
|
| When you're actually referring to the same thing, simple
| and easy or complex and hard go together. It is easy to
| control simple system. It is hard to control complex
| ones.
| RobertKerans wrote:
| Yes you are right, and it is this:
|
| > Simple/complex refers to a system or problem, while
| easy/hard refers to the difficulty of controlling the
| system or solving the problem.
|
| I do think the distinction is important. I did realise as
| soon as I'd typed the last comment that it was just
| people talking past each other -- apologies to others in
| the thread, I should have edited. But what I mean: with
| specific exceptions (genetic, psychological, physical)
| _normally_ both the process and the solution is simple,
| because of the energy model. Eat less, eat sensibly,
| exercise very regularly, and the _majority_ of people
| will see positive results. That 's simple, not quite
| trivially so, but almost. Actually doing that is not,
| however, easy for the majority of people.
|
| A better example I think is: I smoke. This is clearly not
| good for a number of reasons. The solution, and the
| process to get to that solution is _comically_ simple: I
| just stop. But yet it is hard.
| Aerroon wrote:
| Maybe the underlying reason why you're overweight later in life
| is the same reason you're overweight by age 18?
|
| I think a lot of people upon seeing that statistic will assume
| that being overweight by 18 will lead to being overweight later
| in life, but that's not necessarily the case. Perhaps the
| body's self-regulation on food is 'inherently broken' and
| that's why they end up overweight in both cases?
| andreasha wrote:
| What's the name of the medical textbook?
| yonixw wrote:
| This research suggest even lower chanches:
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4539812/
| ChemSpider wrote:
| See for example here:
|
| https://resident360.nejm.org/from-pages-to-practice/will-
| ove...
|
| "Obese 2-year-olds had a 75% chance of still being obese at
| age 35 and obese 19-year-olds had an 88% risk."
| alpaca128 wrote:
| It's similarly bad with alcohol. The lower the age of the first
| super drunken state the higher the chance of alcoholism later
| in life. It really messes with the young brain.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I think all that suggests is that we do poor a job of helping
| specific individuals pinpoint the root cause of obesity _for
| them_.
|
| I have lost multiple dress sizes without trying to do so. I
| finally got the right diagnosis in my thirties, "a better name
| for my problem than _crazy_ ", and changed my diet in
| accordance with medical recommendations.
|
| I was 245 pounds for at least three years. I haven't weighed
| myself in upwards of a decade but I've likely finally dropped
| back below 180 pounds this year. I say that based on no longer
| feeling like "a beached whale" who has trouble getting up out
| of a chair and past experience with where that point occurs for
| me in terms of weight.
|
| I imagine the minority who do solve it likely don't really talk
| much about what actually worked for them and why they think it
| worked. I have gotten insane amounts of ugly pushback for
| trying to talk about what works for me and my opinions about my
| own life and body and medical condition.
|
| If you have any sense, you find what works for you and keep
| your trap shut so the "crabs" don't rip your arms off.
| Unfortunately that means the other 85 percent don't get to hear
| "calorie counting might just be a broken mental model and seems
| largely unrelated to what worked for me" and that leaves a
| whole lot of people stranded behind our current broken mental
| models because it's not socially acceptable to say "Well, that
| doesn't fit my experience. Here's what I think about my own
| life and maybe we can work out better mental models."
| strken wrote:
| I was obese[0] 3 months ago, and had been that way for about
| two years. Now I'm a healthy weight. It was easy to do with
| minimal lifestyle changes - calorie tracking, minor dietary
| changes, and couch to 5k running a couple of times a week.
|
| The way most studies of weight loss work is by recruiting a
| pool of obese applicants. This is intrinsically biased: someone
| who has had a lifelong struggle with obesity can be recruited
| across 100% of their lifespan, whereas someone who spent two
| years obese and then lost the weight and kept it off can only
| be recruited for that 2 year window, or 2.5%. There are
| probably other factors that come into play that bias the sample
| even further.
|
| The question these studies answer is "given a random obese
| person, how likely is this person to lose weight?" This is a
| relevant clinical question, and the answer is usually a pretty
| low percentage. For an individual who hasn't struggled with
| obesity their entire life, a more pertinent question is "given
| that I have just become obese, how likely am I to lose the
| weight again and keep it off?" The chances of that are much
| higher.
|
| [0] By BMI, which has a pretty big margin for error, but I was
| visibly overweight.
| rantwasp wrote:
| it depends how long you've been obese, how obese you were and
| if there were external factors that led there.
|
| glad getting back to a normal weight worked for you. This is
| awesome.
| graeme wrote:
| Did you grow up obese though? I think the statistic suggests
| there is something to having the body _grow_ under those
| conditions.
|
| I was athletic growing up and I'll always have that
| experience and know how it feels. Someone obese at 18 has no
| reference point and neither do any of their body systems.
| strken wrote:
| No, but I'm trying to explain the sampling bias, not
| talking about growing up obese. If you randomly sample
| obese people at any age, 18 or 81, your sample will still
| be biased by years-spent-obese.
|
| There probably is some effect from growing up obese, but
| the sampling bias is hugely relevant to interpreting the
| statistics, and it's not talked about much.
| graeme wrote:
| Fair point
| fitba72 wrote:
| The disease model of addiction is still hotly debated in the USA.
| It has been widely discredited and thrown out in other western
| nations. What's the difference in these nations? These other
| nations have some form of socialized medicine so you don't have
| to have a medical illness to have your treatment costs covered.
| On the contrary, the only way to get treatment costs paid for
| addictive behaviours in the USA, by a medical insurance company,
| is if you have a disease. Try asking your medical insurance to
| pay to stop you making bad choices or changing your habits. The
| work of Stanton Peele is seminal in this field for anyone
| interested. Also check out The Freedom Model. Completely
| heretical to AA types but to rational thinkers struggling with an
| addictive behaviour, it could be life changing.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > Try asking your medical insurance to pay to stop you making
| bad choices or changing your habits.
|
| If they found a way to scale monitoring to prove you changed,
| they absolutely would. The challenge is proving it.
| refurb wrote:
| This clearly isn't true since plenty of people get access to
| psychotherapy who have public and private insurance without
| being diagnosed with a specific illness.
| chillwaves wrote:
| Every time I look at a therapist while seeking treatment,
| they always put a disclaimer on their insurance page that a
| diagnosis is required to be paid for claims. Maybe it's just
| my state.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Will insurance really cover a psychiatrist without a
| diagnosis? I always assumed the doctor was reporting a
| diagnosis to the insurance company even if they weren't
| telling the patient.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| >On the contrary, the only way to get treatment costs paid for
| addictive behaviours in the USA, by a medical insurance
| company, is if you have a disease. Try asking your medical
| insurance to pay to stop you making bad choices or changing
| your habits.
|
| Bingo. In the late 80's there was an explosion of teenagers
| going into drug rehab centers which were usually setup in
| hospitals with unused bed spaces. It had no correlation with
| teen drug use increasing and everything to do with insurance
| paying for it.
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| There's physiological addiction, withdrawal alleviation, and
| psychological addiction too, to games or habits or anything.
| Then, I find where you live, who you know, and how you use drugs
| in patterns while also living in those patterns, this makes it
| harder to quit. Finally, there's the coping, the escapism, the
| alternate forms of consciousness, which help us get through the
| suffering of daily life.
|
| For me, only using legal "softcore" stuff, I have to think in
| terms of delay and moderation. I am fortunate, as Lincoln once
| said, to not have the urge and scourge of strong addiction to
| alcohol. I can't claim some magical fortitude or moral
| superiority, I was lucky enough to have a safe life and a "meh"
| feeling about alcohol and nicotine.
| rvn1045 wrote:
| Here is what helped me kick two major addictions in my life:
|
| I smoked 3 packs of cigarettes a day for 6 years straight. It
| started to take a huge hit on my health and I quit.
|
| I smoked marijuana every night for 4 years then quit and have
| just smoked it occasionally.
|
| I started doing vipassana several years ago, everyday a little
| bit of a good chemical balance accumulates in my brain and body
| to the point where a lot of cravings start to disappear and you
| feel good in your head and body even without drugs like caffeine.
|
| I wouldn't say I've beat all my cravings but they're 90% better
| ..
| float4 wrote:
| > Your brain can start functioning normally again in a span of a
| few months. It doesn't have to be the same, but it should work
| just fine.
|
| The two articles linked to at the bottom talk about multiple
| years, the third link points to a news article that refers to
| some research that uses one year as a minimum.
|
| This feels more believable than "a few months". My flat mate has
| ADD and has phases during which he's clearly addicted to alcohol.
| At one point he stopped drinking completely for over 6 months,
| but drank a small amount _once_ and things spiralled out of
| control again.
|
| He _does_ view addiction as a personality trait (in part because
| he knows that people with ADD develop addictions more often), and
| that attitue actually seems to help him. These days he abstains
| from addictive things because he "knows" that he'll get addicted
| to them once he starts.
|
| I believe in the thesis of this blogpost (that addiction is in
| fact an emotion regulation problem, and that it can therefore be
| cured), but the approach my flat mate takes these days works
| pretty well, at least for the first year.
| donatzsky wrote:
| Notice that they said _can_ , not _will_ start functioning
| normally in a few months. Basically it 's a lower bound, and
| elsewhere they do say it can take years.
| sethjgore wrote:
| I suggest you mention the Sinclair Method to him. It has worked
| wonders for thousands who were addicted to alcohol. It is a
| cheap prescription that you take before drinking and over time
| people actually drink normally again since the brain is
| rearranged (the medicine takes away pleasure from the
| drinking). It might save his life or reduce his cravings.
| loa_in_ wrote:
| Alcohol is a depressant - it gradually wanes your higher
| cognitive skills over the course of hours. Very convenient when
| one's thoughts are racing. I believe there's no causation in
| "drinking once" -> "drinking more". I believe there's causation
| in "trying to self medicate" -> "drinking".
| [deleted]
| bserge wrote:
| _being forced to self medicate by the healthcare industry_
| [deleted]
| dalu wrote:
| I quit nicotine. Because I had to. My lungs hurt. I tried to quit
| before but something always brought me back. Nicotine is the most
| addictive substance I ever took. I did take a lot of drugs.
| Different drugs.
|
| This article for me is just another on the trash heap. You have
| to differentiate. There is mental and body addiction. There are
| so many reasons.
|
| I know people who quit heroin. It's not all the same.
|
| Overcoming something is "easy" just stop taking it anymore and
| find other things to do instead.
| cupcake-unicorn wrote:
| Honestly I don't think putting it into sharp categories like A or
| B are useful.
|
| I don't have addiction but I suffer from chronic mental illness.
| Strangely despite being diagnosed at a young age and having dealt
| with it all through college and into my mid 20s people were still
| treating me like it was just something I could "get over". So I
| guess this is more in the B camp. For me this wasn't helpful and
| I felt just as helpless because the problems didn't go away.
|
| Now I embrace the fact that I have a chronic mental illness that
| is NOT going to go away. This is more in the A camp. But once you
| embrace that at least for me I felt less helpless. I knew it
| wasn't going away and I worked to put up supports because it
| wasn't just a passing thing. It never will be for me.
|
| You can change your response to things and that's maybe the
| "neuroplasticity" he's talking about? But your brain actually
| isn't that plastic after childhood. If addiction is anything like
| my mental illness you'll always have the same response in a
| situation. You can have years of learned behaviors and coping
| mechanisms but that doesn't mean that it doesn't destroy you
| initially when you run into a rough situation. It's accepting
| that and how to deal with it and the aftermath that you can
| change.
| scandox wrote:
| > This has some merit, for example, when it comes to alcohol -
| you can go from being addicted to alcohol, to having a social
| drink once a week.
|
| To anyone who has experience of alcoholism from any angle...this
| is absurd.
| vitabenes wrote:
| First, can is the important word here. The point is that if the
| rest of your life is okay, there's no need to run away by
| drinking yourself under the table. You seem to be implying that
| there are no people on Earth who went from addiction to
| moderation. There's nuance to it.
|
| To be fair, however, we're not encouraging people who've
| struggled with alcoholism (esp. severe) to have a drink.
| toyg wrote:
| _> if the rest of your life is okay, there 's no need to run
| away by drinking yourself under the table._
|
| That's... not how it works. One might have become an
| alcoholic because the rest of their life was shit; but
| _remaining_ an alcoholic is another matter. Highly-
| functioning addicts are still addicts. A lot of neurochemical
| processes don 't care for the social or psychological
| situation.
|
| It's a bit like saying that "people can sail the Atlantic in
| a kayak"; a few might make it, but the overwhelming majority
| will die under the waves, and telling them they can do it is
| just Bad.
| vitabenes wrote:
| Fair enough, given that the rest of the series is more
| about behavioral addictions that substance addictions, it
| might make sense to change that passage. Thank you for the
| feedback.
| [deleted]
| bunnyfoofoo wrote:
| Agreed, if you're in recovery, do not attempt moderation. That
| normalizes the behavior and is a slippery slope. Seriously
| thinking this may work for you is a probable sign you should
| talk to your sponsor or attend an AA meeting.
| throwawaycuriou wrote:
| The AA perspective on this can come across binary and
| tautological: if one is an alcoholic, moderation is
| impossible. But the reality is alcohol dependencies occur
| across a varied spectrum. Implying there is only one solution
| is theism.
| bunnyfoofoo wrote:
| Whatever works for you to keep you sober. If you're feeling
| tempted and want someone to talk to though, go to an AA
| meeting. You don't have to agree with any of the religious
| stuff they say to be around people that know what you're
| going through and can help.
| throwawaycuriou wrote:
| Depends on where we place the goalposts. Abstinence or
| agency? For some cases, full abstinence is the most
| effective means to a fruitful life of agency. For others,
| an appeal to our inherent agency (rather than submitting
| to the impossibility of control / higher power) is the
| path, possibly one that returns to moderate use.
| locusofself wrote:
| I have some strong, perhaps knee jerk feelings about the idea
| that addicts can come around to become healthy social drinkers,
| smokers, etc. I feel like some probably can, but most probably
| can't. As someone who had major addiction issues for about a
| decade and has been clean for 12 years, I have no desire to test
| those waters, and feel a bit offended at the notion that my life
| would be better if I figured out how to be a functional user. I
| have everything to lose and very little to gain.
| jkhdigital wrote:
| I know, right? My wife basically never drinks, and she's doing
| just fine. I'm really not missing anything by abstaining from
| alcohol for the rest of my life.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| This article seems weird to me, because I view non-substance
| addictions as a way of procrastination, which in turn is a way to
| fix a bad emotional state.
|
| When your environment is hostile and depressing, and it certainly
| is for many people now thanks to covid and the faceless megacorps
| we have to deal with to get through daily life, then it kind of
| makes sense to disassociate from reality and get lost in a good
| video game.
| the-dude wrote:
| I have always believed there must exist a reason I had
| addictions. Somehow after about 2 decades, a midlife crisis and
| starting all over again, and then some years : I seem to have
| come to terms with these reasons. I seem to understand them, and
| accept them and therefore accept myself.
|
| And then the urges just disappeared. I tapered off the substances
| and am clean for over a year now. Fingers crossed. YMMV.
| White_Wolf wrote:
| I don't know about drugs as such but 15 years after quitting
| smoking I still dream I'm smoking and wake up in the morning
| with the urge to light one. If I get a whiff of one when
| walking down the street... It hurts.
|
| For me: I think I'm still addicted to it or at least I have the
| neural pathways of one.
| the-dude wrote:
| Actually this was one of the first 'signs' for me. When I
| started to really relax, say a 1-2 hour walk in one of our
| parks, embracing the void as I like to call it : I noticed I
| didn't smoke. After a while I stopped carrying the
| cigarettes.
| darkerside wrote:
| Pain is mandatory, suffering is optional.
|
| Have you read easy way to quit smoking?
| White_Wolf wrote:
| Fo me it was not exactly easy. I self imposed a limit, in
| the beginning, of 1/h (used to smoke around 2x20 packs/day-
| chaining 2-3 at a time). When I was confortable with 1/h I
| went cold turkey with shivers and the full monty. I
| wouldn't do that a second time tbh.
|
| On the other hand: My wife had 0 issues and quit overnight.
| She said she only wanted a smoke a few times/year (maybe
| 3-5 times or so)
| projektfu wrote:
| I have a friend who has a similar experience to you. He
| quit years ago, around when I quit. I had been talking
| about the book, "The Easy Way to Stop Smoking", so I
| assumed when he quit he had read it. He had not. He
| continues to suffer when he thinks about cigarettes and
| when he smells it across the street or in a park.
|
| I recommended that he read it anyway, and that it is a
| really useful book for getting over that part of the
| addiction. He still has not read it. He reads 100 books a
| year and has not read this inexpensive little 240-page
| book. Well, some people choose to suffer.
| darkerside wrote:
| https://www.allencarr.com/easyway-stop-smoking/how-to-
| quit/
|
| Really, just buy the book. But don't worry about the
| ceremonies of having that final cigarette. What's
| important is the base idea. Your mind has been tricked
| and tricked you in return, and all you need to do is
| decide to stop playing its games.
| White_Wolf wrote:
| Sorry. My bad. I didn't start again. So far I managed to
| hold my ground and not touch ciggies.
|
| I meant - I wouldn't start smoking again to go through
| stopping.
| the-dude wrote:
| I think he is saying although you already stopped, the
| book might still be valuable.
| darkerside wrote:
| Yes, this :)
|
| I say this as a happy former smoker. Something I never
| thought I would say.
| dlkf wrote:
| That tracks. A few months after I quit, I asked my Dad (who
| quit in the late eighties) when the cravings go away for
| good. He laughed and said "they don't."
| elb2020 wrote:
| My dad says the same. But it's been five years since I quit
| tobacco, and I do not get the cravings anymore. I might get
| faintly reminded of it, still, connected to certain
| situations, but nowhere near what I'd call a craving.
| jethro_tell wrote:
| It's that post dinner smoke for me. Everything else is
| easy, but I have to have that battle every day.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| This is just an ancedata, but my 90 year old grandmother smoked
| like a chimney her whole life. Randomly woke up one morning and
| had zero desire for a cigarette. She's been tobacco free for
| nearly a decade.
| toyg wrote:
| Clarity of purpose makes all the difference for me. The periods
| where I know what I want and what to do, I have no need for any
| addiction. When that feeling of purpose and control goes away,
| I become a slave to them. In some perverse way, they make life
| endurable when my brain says it shouldn't be.
| rakejake wrote:
| This x1000. I wouldn't qualify as an "addict" by clinical
| definitions, but I have a set of bad habits. Over the last
| year or so I have been making journal entries . The journal
| entries made me realize exactly what you said - the odds of
| falling into bad habits multiply several fold during periods
| where I don't know what I should do.
|
| I realize now that maintaining a journal is a very important
| and fruitful habit. It is a valuable exercise to record your
| feelings and state of mind at regular intervals. It will help
| you figure out your failure modes and patterns (if any) to
| your successes and failures.
| vitabenes wrote:
| Congrats!
|
| Hm, why do you think the urges disappeared? Does it coincide
| with getting your life in order or not?
| the-dude wrote:
| Not so much _life in order_ , still working on that. The
| internal discrepancies, finally understanding why and what.
| Finding peace.
| vitabenes wrote:
| Yes, life in order is more of a work in progress in
| general. In any case, good work dude!
| throwawayapatra wrote:
| I smoked meth almost everyday for a few years, abruptly quit, and
| never relapsed. I've been trying to quit diet soda for more than
| a decade and I can't go longer than a week ..
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I have opinions and...more importantly... _skin in the game_ ,
| here. It's been my experience that most of this stuff is written
| by folks, to whom addiction is an intellectual exercise. Maybe
| they know someone that may or may not be an addict, and the
| chances are good, that what happens to that person won't really
| be life-changing to the person writing about their pet theory.
|
| Things are quite different, when it's _your_ ass, or someone that
| you _really care about_ , experiencing it.
|
| There's also a great deal of money to be made. Desperate people
| are easy marks.
|
| That's all I'll say.
| mikevin wrote:
| > That's all I'll say.
|
| I respect that but I'd wish you'd say more. I have no way to
| verify who's more knowledgeable about this, you or the person
| writing the article but as someone who knows a friend of a
| friend who might be dealing with this kind of problem I'm
| having trouble finding any real conversation about it. it seems
| like it's all advertising or armchair psychology when it comes
| to online resources about this.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Feel free to contact me offline. Most of the folks that have
| something to say, don't really do so in public.
| teach wrote:
| Agreed. This article, while interesting enough, is clearly
| written by someone who is not an addict and does not have
| close/intimate relationships with any addicts.
|
| "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice,
| while in practice there is." - Benjamin Brewster
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| > clearly written by someone who is not an addict and does
| not have close/intimate relationships with any addicts
|
| I have a disproportionately large number of addicts in my
| family as a percentage. I grew up around this. This article
| is written by someone working completely in theory.
|
| There is nuance in everything, and many people may actually
| beat addiction - but from what I've seen, to some degree it's
| always there somewhere, forever dormant or just napping, just
| takes the right conditions to come back.
| jkhdigital wrote:
| Nailed it. It's easy to pick apart the "official" writings of
| AA since they were mostly written in the 1930s, but the books
| don't do justice to the actual experience of someone recovering
| from alcoholism.
| [deleted]
| moonshinefe wrote:
| "to whom addiction is an intellectual exercise. Maybe they know
| someone that may or may not be an addict, and the chances are
| good, that what happens to that person won't really be life-
| changing to the person writing about their pet theory."
|
| Spot on. I also got a massive armchair amateurish feel reading
| it. They feel very comfortable emphasizing that certain lucky
| addicts can seem to recover and moderate, but don't really seem
| to put nearly as much emphasis on addicts that might die or
| ruin their lives if they read that advice and think they can
| moderate before relapsing again. No mention in the article
| about %s of addicts these facts apply to, no mention of the
| author's name or credentials. Just a crappy article that
| doesn't help the situation at all really.
| nicetryguy wrote:
| This article is at best naive and at worst dangerous and
| deadly. Addiction is visceral and affects the ancient parts of
| the brain, the best you can do with consciousness and reason is
| outsmart it at every turn. Can you rationalize being hungry or
| in love? It's more like a natural reflex that is described:
| That's what it addiction feels like. Unfortunately you never
| get to "eat" or "fall in love". It's at best annoying and at
| worst crippling, and such is the rest of your life to some
| degree. I wish you luck brother.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| I've perused Hacker News almost every single day for 5 years. How
| do I break that addiction?
| [deleted]
| polote wrote:
| To me, a lot of time addiction is a choice. I'm not saying all
| the time, but very often still. I've tried helping different
| people overcome an addiction, and even though at first they want
| to stop it, when they start to think more about it they don't
| really want it to stop.
|
| If you are not entirely convinced that the addiction is doing
| more harm than good, it is much more difficult to overcome it.
|
| Trying to think rationally is not going to be very helpful, most
| of people are not able to think that way, emotions and
| perceptions are much more important. I often say, life is much
| much easier when you are a rationalist
| post_break wrote:
| I think this is the dumbest take on addiction. I've seen normal
| upstanding people resort to stealing copper to get a fix
| because the drug has wired their brain to get that hit. Or food
| addiction causing people to binge eat because they can't
| function without it. This isn't "hey that feels good I need
| more" this is "my brain is telling me I need this at all
| costs". Are you the same type of person who thinks people just
| need to "get over it" when it comes to depression?
| polote wrote:
| Of course you can't control an addiction, because your brain,
| or body is asking for it. But when you are aware that you are
| addict, there are ways to overcome it.
|
| The fact that you don't have the energy, or motivation or
| anything else to fix it is that you either don't feel like it
| is going to be better without your addiction or you are not
| able to maintain the long term work needed. And both of those
| case are a choice. These are not easy choice, like choosing
| the color of your socks on the morning, they are difficult
| choices, but they are still choices you are making.
|
| And when I talk about addictions I dont only talk about big
| trauma, most of addictions are along the lines of people not
| being able to prevent themselves to eat chocolate everyday.
|
| People who think you just need to get over depression, have
| never been depressed.
| post_break wrote:
| I understand, I hope you know that my initial comment was
| curt, but I'm glad we're seemingly coming to the same
| conclusion. I guess the "choice" is just a little different
| in frame of mind.
| balfirevic wrote:
| > To me, a lot of time addiction is a choice.
|
| What does "to me" mean here? Do you mean that's how you
| perceived it in your own addiction?
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| Genuine question, have you ever recovered from addiction
| yourself?
|
| Because that phrasing is a bit odd, IMO.
|
| No-one chooses to become dependent, and there's a lot of
| optimism bias/hubris when people start dabbling in addictive
| substances - I won't get addicted like _those_ people, I'm
| different...
|
| But the hard bit, as you've noted, is making the choice to end
| your dependence. The choice to face whatever in life your vice
| of choice was numbing you to, to face it naked and vulnerable.
|
| ...that takes a lot of guts. And a lot of repeated attempts.
|
| And you're right about the need for intrinsic instead of
| external motivation.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| I think that's much harder to study whether or not it's a
| "choice" because the scales of choice are extremely biased. For
| example if someone is dealing with deep trauma, addiction may
| be a way of preventing extremely distressing or suicidal
| behavior by numbing or overwhelming the agony. If the choice is
| "I'm going to kill myself tonight" and "I'm going to drink
| until I don't feel anything anymore and will probably live to
| see tomorrow" then the choice is really stacked towards
| alcohol.
| polote wrote:
| That's what I meant by choice. I never said they made the
| choice to be unhappy. They just made the choice to be
| addicted. An addiction is not always something negative
| omnicognate wrote:
| I agree that it is, or can be, a matter of "choice", but that's
| a subtle thing. What does it mean to "choose" or "want"
| something when you have conflicting motives, when you both
| enjoy and hate the same thing, even at the same time? I think a
| large part of reaching emotional maturity (for some people at
| least, me included) is about resolving those conflicts and
| achieving a sort of unity of self. This often involves letting
| some parts of yourself go, deciding not to be a particular
| person any more, which the "addiction" may only be one aspect
| of.
|
| In my case I finally succeeded in quitting smoking, after 9
| years of 20-30 a day and innumerable failed attempts to stop,
| just after I got married, 18 years ago. It was easy.
| Osmose wrote:
| The premise of this article (that "Once an addict always an
| addict" is false when evaluated from a rational, scientific
| standpoint) is flawed from the start because the phrase isn't
| _meant_ to be a rational, scientific claim.
|
| The phrase is a contextual, emotional expression. Sometimes it's
| used to express frustration that even after years of work and/or
| progress, an addict might still _feel_ urges and have to deploy
| coping mechanisms against them. Other times it's a way of
| empathizing with someone who is a victim of a relapsed addict's
| maladaptive behavior. Still other times it's a mantra for
| recovered addicts to stay vigilant.
|
| The repeated references to "victimization" are a red flag to me
| that anything this author has to say about addiction isn't
| inclusive of everyone's (e.g. my own) lived experience of
| addiction. Admitting the difficulty and struggle of being an
| addict does not weaken me and prevent me from working towards
| recovery.
| peter-m80 wrote:
| I quit smoking 10 years ago. I still notice the addiction and I
| think it will never go away.
| satellite2 wrote:
| What can really help getting addictions under control is
| understanding how it is expressed in the brain.
|
| Delta FOSB seems to be associated with addiction
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOSB#Delta_FosB. And having a
| simple model of how it works helps in dealing with it.
|
| Contrary to popular depictions addiction is not bolean, it's a
| unbounded scale. And roughly each consumption of an addictive
| substance increase addiction and for each substance some time is
| required to go back to baseline. And if another take occurs
| before this period, then the addiction will grow.
|
| As a very simple model it's ovmbviously wrong but it's a very
| helpful proxy.
|
| Another euristic that is helpful in dealing with addiction is to
| avoid repeated use before 6-7 times the halflife of the
| substance. Such that > 99% of it has been eliminated.
|
| Finally looking for "harm reduction techniques" when dealing with
| a substance provides many helpful tips.
|
| I believe those advice can probably be translated in the case of
| an addictive behaviour instead of a substance but will obviously
| yield less precise recommendations.
| aaron695 wrote:
| This article is not a good summary on addiction and current
| understanding. It jumps around a lot between ideas that should
| not be linked and is factually wrong often.
|
| RE title - "Once an Addict, Always an Addict"
|
| This doesn't rule out moderation, and it is well known you don't
| use this wording or idea on some people.
|
| Addiction treatments fail around 90%+ of the time. That's why
| there are so many around, different ideas work on different
| people, and probably so people don't get bored or despondent as
| the churn through them multiple times.
|
| "Once an Addict, Always an Addict" might be someones win, someone
| else might just randomly stop.
| ransom1538 wrote:
| If you are out there struggling with addiction I would checkout:
| Naltrexone. Naltrexone binds to the endorphin receptors in the
| body, and blocks the effects and feelings of alcohol. IMHO: The
| addict brain needs to be reprogrammed with chemicals - not just
| 'understanding why' or making macaroni necklaces in rehab.
| Naltrexone can be used with both opioid and alcohol dependence
| and is extremely cheap. Once on Naltrexone you can still
| drink/opioid and you wont get the high. Drinking a beer would be
| like drinking a Coke on Naltrexone. Pounding down two liters of
| Coke is gross - and your brain will start to associate that
| drinking is terrible.
| cupcake-unicorn wrote:
| Low Dose Naltrexone is also a super interesting modality that's
| gaining more traction. The idea is that at low doses you are
| training your body to reset and produce its own endogenous
| opioids.
| tomhoward wrote:
| At least twice, I had doctors describe me as having an "addictive
| personality", and saying things like "that's just how you're
| wired". I never went back to those doctors, as I refused to
| accept that's what I was stuck with being.
|
| I'd been an excessive drinker from my late teens through to my
| early 30s. "Alcoholic", I'm not sure about; I've seen others who
| were formally diagnosed alcoholic, including one friend who
| ultimately died of it, and I wasn't that bad, but I was at least
| very socially dependent. I also smoked tobacco heavily and
| dabbled in some substances - not the most addictive ones, but it
| could have gone down that path if I hadn't seen the warning
| signs.
|
| At 33 I stopped drinking and smoking completely (I'd quit smoking
| a few years earlier but had started again that year). For two
| whole years I didn't have a drop or puff, and focused on eating a
| very healthy diet, cleaning up my body and getting my career and
| relationships in better shape.
|
| Along the way I found some deep emotional healing techniques. I
| started doing them regularly, and have continued doing them
| consistently for nearly 10 years since.
|
| These days I can drink regularly for pleasure, and I never have a
| problem with it. I barely ever get drunk unless it's a major
| celebration, but if I do, I bounce back fine and have no
| temptation to do it again any time soon. And I'm never remotely
| tempted to smoke or use other substances when drinking, even when
| around others who are.
|
| One of those doctors expressed shock that I'd gone to all the
| trouble of quitting my old ways, only to start drinking again. He
| couldn't believe that it would be possible to go from the way I
| was to having a healthy relationship with alcohol.
|
| The most significant factor that's made the difference has been
| the emotional healing work I've been doing. It's a practice that
| methodically finds and enables releasing all traumas, complexes
| and sabotaging beliefs/patterns from the earliest times in life.
|
| So maybe it's valid to say one can have an "addictive
| personality" and that I was one of those people. But we assume
| that "addictive personality" equals "hard wired", without
| realising that personality is very alterable if you work at it
| consistently over a long enough period of time, with a focus on
| the deep subconscious/unconscious aspects of personality.
|
| I think organisations like AA do great harm when they tell their
| patients that you're an "addict for life". It's such a
| disempowering belief to have about one's self, and it's little
| surprise that people relapse when they're given no hope of ever
| being completely free of their addiction and able to live like
| other healthy people.
|
| These days, I have a young child, a great relationship with my
| partner, family members and friends, my career is going fine, and
| my physiological health continues to improve. The doctor I see
| these days, on the infrequent occasions I need to see him, says
| "whatever you're doing, keep doing it".
| jkhdigital wrote:
| There are no "patients" in AA; just self-identifying
| alcoholics. And I understand where you're coming from, but for
| every story of someone who was "disempowered" by a belief that
| they are an addict for life I can give you a story of someone
| who started drinking again after decades of sobriety and
| completely destroyed the good life they had found.
|
| Alcoholism is what you might call a hard problem, in that every
| case is unique and there is no good way to know which "kind" of
| alcoholic you are dealing with, or which approach is going to
| have the most success, just by ticking off symptoms. AA clearly
| works, and works astonishingly well, for a non-negligible
| portion of the people who try it.
| webmobdev wrote:
| > I think organisations like AA do great harm when they tell
| their patients that you're an "addict for life".
|
| I really don't think you are the kind of "addict" that AA is
| designed. They are often for people who have hit rock-bottom
| due to their alcoholism.
| tomhoward wrote:
| I think I could have ended up at that kind of rock bottom had
| I not found the path I ended up on. And more importantly,
| there's no reason why the techniques I've found wouldn't work
| for people in AA; they're just not widely known about. I
| guess mainstream psychiatry and Christianity are the sources
| for AA's methods, and they're just not aware of what else is
| out there that could be more effective.
| jkhdigital wrote:
| My experience was that the AA "methods" are just a vehicle
| for the true healing, which comes from the people. The
| magic is not in the 12 steps, it is in the genuine
| companionship and selfless service of the other alcoholics
| who walk with you all along the way.
|
| > there's no reason why the techniques I've found wouldn't
| work for people in AA
|
| Respectfully, I don't think you have any idea what you're
| talking about. Spend some time in a few AA meetings, maybe
| a meeting in a prison, and reconsider your hypothesis.
| jorgesborges wrote:
| I can relate to this. Drank heavily through my twenties. But I
| went sober for two years during which time I identified
| privately as an alcoholic and addict. I did the emotional
| healing. I started to meditate daily and exercise and talk
| about my problems. I had to slowly learn who I was as I had
| drunkenly buried away and neglected so many aspects of myself.
| After those two years of cultivating a healthier life and mind
| I started to drink again. I can do so in moderation and with an
| awareness of why I'm doing it. The takeaway for me was that I
| wasn't an addict or alcoholic, although they served as helpful
| labels while I grew and healed. I just hadn't taken the time
| with myself to figure out why I was unhappy and I was
| subsequently stuck in a feedback pattern of bad, unhealthy
| behaviour.
|
| Edit: Just wanted to add that I understand this isn't
| everyone's experience and sometimes moderation isn't a
| possibility. Just sharing my experience.
| jethro_tell wrote:
| Had the same addictive personality. Latter diagnosed with ADHD
| which is a brain imbalance that has difficulty regulating
| dopamine.
|
| Unmedicated, I have a constant drive to find something that
| gives a little reward. Cigarette, beer, doom scrolling Twitter,
| unhealthy foods, other forms of unhealthy and impulsive
| behavior.
|
| Medicated, I don't have that feeling where I just need
| SOMETHING. And my 'addictive personality' is just none
| existent.
|
| I've also done some work on myself as far as identifying
| triggers and feeling and being able to identify where that
| drive is coming from.
|
| I think the addictive personality trope is really harmful and
| it's more likely untreated trama or feelings or untreated
| mental health.
|
| Mental health is so overlook at least in the US health System.
| It's a real bummer but I don't think any of us are beyond hope
| and I hope that we can start to recognize and address that.
| stevewodil wrote:
| What medication did you end up with? I started recently
| trying a few that haven't worked well for me.
|
| I started on Wellbutrin which had a bad side effect for me
| and had to stop, and now Vyvanse which doesn't seem to be
| helping my focus at all.
| rnjesus wrote:
| for me, ritalin helped most with my focus, adderall xr
| helped most with my motivation, adderall ir helps me
| currently with my energy + motivation. i'd say adderall xr
| is the best of the three, though i prefer vvyanse -- but
| vvyanse is prohibitively expensive, and adderall xr is 4x
| the price of the instant release. also, i had to take
| adderall xr twice a day; the "extended release" formulation
| only seems to add a few hours of duration over the instant
| release. i've yet to try dexedrine, but i've read good
| things about it.
|
| overall though, i'd not rely on anecdotes about add meds.
| people's experiences are vastly different in-practice, and
| the only things you'll really find in common with other's
| treatments are the more pronounced side effects. not to say
| that there's anything wrong with asking for advice, just be
| sure to temper your expectations a bit based on what you
| read and try not to get too discouraged.
|
| my advice is: if your doctor is willing, have them write
| you seven-day prescriptions for the different medications
| you'd like to try and see which one works best. keeping a
| short journal about sleep, eating/drinking, mood, energy,
| motivation, and productivity during this time also helps
| gather some perspective. when you find one that works, try
| it for a month, and then make a decision from there.
| ipython wrote:
| I'm curious about what works for you as well. I have to date
| been able to regulate this through other behaviors - overwork
| for one - that I can no longer do due to other constraints on
| my time. It's becoming unsustainable.
| missingrib wrote:
| Can you expand a bit on the "deep emotional healing
| techniques", or point me in the right direction to read more on
| the topic?
| simonccarter wrote:
| Any links you can share on the emotional healing work you do?
| jzig wrote:
| Also I interested in learning more
| tomhoward wrote:
| It's hard to answer without triggering backlash in places
| like this, as the whole world of this kind of healing is a
| minefield of quackery and woo. It's taken me a long time to
| work through it all and be able to winnow out the
| practitioners and practices that are solid. And it's tricky
| to recommend stuff online, as some of it is linked to
| chiropractic (which I'm still not generally a fan of), and
| there are big-selling authors who have written multiple books
| about these topics, some of which is great, but some of which
| would be a dealbreaker for many.
|
| Having said all that, if you're keen to research this stuff
| yourself, look up "Neuro Emotional Technique" and Psych-K,
| and look for books by Dr Bruce Lipton and Bradley Nelson.
|
| But I'm happy to share more about my own experiences and
| practices if you contact directly. Email address is in my
| profile.
| golemiprague wrote:
| I think the main way people get into some addictive behaviour is
| the social norm around them, if everybody around you are doing
| drugs or smoking or eating sugars or gambling there are good
| chances you will also do it, it has nothing to do with personal
| traumas. Maybe sometimes a certain personality traits can enhance
| the addiction but you don't always need those amplifiers to get
| addicted. It's true also for other bad behaviours which are not
| necessarily addictive, like getting knocked up in an early age
| for example.
|
| The interesting thing is that many people do overcome those
| addictions but many other struggle, so maybe we shouldn't try to
| figure out what caused it since it is not that relevant to
| rehabilitation but focus more on why some people succeed and try
| to replicate it. I know it is not a simple task as the diet
| industry shows very clearly, but some people do become thin, so
| what makes them do the switch and can it be replicated? this is
| the interesting question.
| max_ wrote:
| What exactly is an addiction? Am I a Hacker News addict?
| zafka wrote:
| Pretty much yes from my experience. Both personal and by
| observation of others. That being said I know many
| addicts/alcoholics who live happy productive lives- they avoid
| the chemicals that suck them in.
| throwawaycvid wrote:
| Really funny thing happened to me last year. I got COVID, luckily
| fairly mild but with some long lasting symptoms. The odd thing is
| that I no longer have appetite for drink or opiates/cocaine (on
| top of my maintenance medication) Surprising as I've been on that
| path for 15+ years. It's not much but at least something good has
| come out of (having) COVID...
| evv555 wrote:
| Dr. Drew had the opposite reaction where he started drinking
| wine and smoking cannabis. He compares the symptoms to
| suffering from head trauma.
| post_break wrote:
| I look at someone like Steve-o and say nah, people can change. If
| someone as addicted as him can pull out of the spiral, then no
| you can break the cycle. But not everyone can do that.
| 123pie123 wrote:
| I would probably class myself as someone with an addictive
| personality. not with drugs (except alcohol), but with anything -
| if I like something, I find it very hard to not have more, wether
| it's good or bad. eg going to the gym 6x week or getting
| takeaways every day
|
| I've analsysed this for sometime and the best (for me) way of
| dealing with it is to keep track of every thing I do or I like.
|
| "The power of habit" book helped a lot with my ability to control
| my addictions
| ndury wrote:
| It reads as if you don't consider alcohol a drug. Due to its
| social acceptance people tend to look at alcohol this way but
| when u give it a better look alcohol should be at least classed
| as a class 1 drug substance, especially if we're going to keep
| placing marijuana in the same class as heroine.
|
| edit: typo
| throwawaycuriou wrote:
| I read that the opposite. 'Not with drugs (except alcohol)'
| would include alcohol in the category of drugs.
| 123pie123 wrote:
| I would definately class alcohol as a drug,
|
| but I feel like almost anything food/ drink could be a drug
| (to me), since if I like it, it makes me want to crave it -
| for many days/ weeks after.
| EMM_386 wrote:
| > I would definately class alcohol as a drug
|
| I agree. It's incredible the lengths that people will go
| to separate drugs and alcohol.
|
| I always like to phrase it like this ...
|
| If you took alcohol in a pill form, are you drinking or
| taking drugs?
| mnahkies wrote:
| I'm somewhat surprised this hasn't been attempted as a
| product actually. Guess it would probably be dreadful for
| your stomach lining but would be a novel alternative to
| shots
| 123pie123 wrote:
| you may want to check out alcohol powder
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_powder
| wave_function wrote:
| I would suspect the volume is simply too large.
|
| The "haircut" where you pour a mixer into your mouth,
| someone pours liquor into your mouth, and then you
| swallow in a way such that the liquor doesn't touch your
| mouth or throat is the closest thing to an "alcohol pill"
| I can think of. Come to think of it, shots plus chasers
| are somewhat "pill like" too
| axiosgunnar wrote:
| Note that you could probably ,,weaponize" this addictive
| personality to achieve what normal people cannot (eg dedicate
| an extreme amount of time to a difficult task and achieve it)
| burade wrote:
| That's not where health is though...
|
| Health is balance.
| curiousllama wrote:
| I'm not who you're responding to, but I very much identify
| with what they wrote. I once accidentally trained for a
| marathon.
|
| Weaponizing this is unhealthy. It doesn't end well. The
| reason normal people can't do X and an addict can is because
| an addict is making egregious trade-offs.
|
| "I know I'm going to mess up my shoulder for the rest of my
| life, but I'm going to bench heavy anyway"
|
| "I know I haven't seen my kids in a month, but I'm going to
| shut myself away and work on my side business anyway"
|
| It's collapsing your entire life into a single, simplistic
| max/min function. It's a quick path to misery.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| I'm reminded of a quote from J. M. Barrie, the author of
| _Peter Pan_ : " _You can have anything in life if you will
| sacrifice everything else for it._ " I once thought it was,
| and have often seen it used as, an inspirational quote
| until I later read another opinion that it was a warning of
| the dangers of being too single focused.
| LanternLight83 wrote:
| Note that dedicating an extreme amount of time to a task can
| be unhealthy in it's own right, if it's to the detriment of
| other aspects of life. Depending on exactly what you're
| picturing, it may also be worth noting that hyper-fixation
| can lead to working past the point of productivity (sometime
| you just need to sleep on it, take a walk, etc.). It's not a
| clear-cut advantage.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| Same. I literally got addicted to exercise. Not trying to brag,
| I've also dealt with addictions to food, sleep, video games.
|
| I also have mild OCD. And I'm not depressed, but i get bored
| very easily and very fast.
|
| The key for me is also habits, diversion, and moderation. I
| have an easy time forming habits because of OCD so I just have
| to prune bad ones, easier said than done. I also keep track of
| how i feel, and just naturally feel bad if i eat too much or
| sleep late, which seems to subconsciously make me not want to
| do those things, so i don't have to use as much willpower.
| 123pie123 wrote:
| >just naturally feel bad if i eat too much or sleep late,
| which seems to subconsciously make me not want to do those
| things, so i don't have to use as much willpower.
|
| feeling bad works a little in reducing various cravings,
|
| but my brain seems to have a way of fading my bad memories
| somewhat
| matwood wrote:
| I have touches of OCD. It's not all bad (it got me through
| school and has made me decent at work), though when I was
| younger I used alcohol a bit to disconnect. Met a great girl,
| mostly quit alcohol, but that disconnect mechanism
| transferred to MMOs. Faster forward a year or so and I'm
| playing MMOs 8+ hours/day and girl leaves. I'm devastated and
| lost. Walk into work a few days later and give all my MMO
| accounts (yes, I had multiple accounts for the same game to
| bot, buff, etc...) to a co-worker, and never played again.
| Started back down the alcohol path, but this time caught
| myself and decided to try the gym one day.
|
| 20+ years later I still workout almost every single day. I
| think about how easy it could have been to take a far worse
| path, but exercise has been my savior. To paraphrase Henry
| Rollins, 225# is always 225# no matter what else is happening
| in your life. It is the great constant.
| trabant00 wrote:
| All the feel good theories in the world can't contradict the
| numerous examples of addicts who relapse after trying to moderate
| what they previosly used in excess.
|
| The article is basically a hook for buying the course. They can't
| accept the once always theory because it would make their product
| not attractive.
| dillondoyle wrote:
| I also thought their 2 ways only characterization was
| contrived. And I don't buy stock into the way they are founding
| their arguments on their definition of the word 'disease.'
|
| But I guess it's a good point that harm reduction is good and
| abstinence is not the goal for everyone.
| balfirevic wrote:
| > All the feel good theories in the world can't contradict the
| numerous examples of addicts who relapse after trying to
| moderate what they previosly used in excess
|
| How does it compare to the number of addicts who relapse after
| striving to be 100% clean?
| vitabenes wrote:
| As the saying goes: all models are false, but some are useful.
| Every theory has its limits, but that doesn't mean it can't be
| helpful. The opinion that once-always theory can be damaging is
| rejected by many people in the field, not just us. We're simply
| presenting it in a digestible format (without the need to dive
| into the sources for hours and hours). See the rest of the
| series for a better understanding of the subject matter.
|
| And yes, our blog is a part of our marketing, but that doesn't
| mean that we "just" want to make money from it. The aim of the
| whole project is to help people, in a sustainable way, with
| some free and some paid resources.
| moonshinefe wrote:
| "If enough time passes, you can start engaging in the behavior in
| a healthy way once again."
|
| Spoken like the author has never had someone close with
| addiction, imo. You'll notice that actual medical professionals
| never are like "oh just quit your massively health-ruining
| addiction for several years then you're good to go potentially!
| Happens all the time, look at these studies." It's because such
| advice or facts--while technically true in a % of cases--downplay
| how devastating the next relapse might be for the addict (often
| it means death, or at the very least, their life ruined). Framing
| these things to addicts and individuals properly given their
| situations is very important, but has been totally bypassed by
| this author "helpfully." They present the article without
| mentioning their intentions or target audience too, which hardly
| helps.
|
| "So I dove deep into the topic and looked at what science says
| about it."
|
| So what credentials if any do they have at evaluating scientific
| consensus on addiction? Oddly enough the article includes some
| sources but makes no mention of who the author is from what I can
| see. Is this some high schooler's opinion after Googling around
| for an evening? We can't be sure.
|
| "This has some merit, for example, when it comes to alcohol - you
| can go from being addicted to alcohol, to having a social drink
| once a week." "However, that doesn't mean you need to avoid the
| behavior forever."
|
| This author needs to like stop repeatedly emphasizing this stuff
| and muddying the waters--it HIGHLY depends. Again, this is spoken
| like someone who has never seen someone kill themselves young
| after that "one last relapse" because they thought they could
| control it finally. So this article comes off very poorly and I'm
| disappointed it got upvoted to be honest. Like, the lucky few
| addicts who recover and can moderate (& their loved ones)
| probably won't need this article. To the rest of the addicts and
| people who may be giving them advice, it seems to be a pretty
| irresponsible article to me.
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