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Something you did you felt good. It was a bet, a hit, a sip, a jerk, a puff, a jog, a click. You did it, and the reward came like a ghost that only you could sense, a feeling that you could talk about if you wanted to, but not one that could actually be seen.
Yet that good feeling was in a major sense solid and mechanical, like an automobile, or a train, a mechanism that moves because of a series of real, chemical events cause it to.
There was an actual mechanism at work in your brain that was at the root of your feeling, the release of the hormones Serotonin, Epinephrine, and Dopamine. It was the elevated levels of one or more of these hormones that was the hidden ghostly projector, the cause of the feeling you experienced.
The fundamental evolutionary mechanism of life is adaptation, and your brain does this mechanically, outside of your approval, like breathing or maintaining your body temperature. It always adapts to the last stimulus. If you climb the stairs rapidly, your breathing rate increases and your temperature rises all by itself, it happens without your conscious volition. The train just heads off down the track.
So once a certain amount of these stimulating hormones are released while engaging in an activity that triggers the release, your brain cells adapt to having the elevated levels present.
The hormones stimulate your brain, and your brain responds by resetting itself to the new level of stimulation as its new baseline for ‘normal’. But the new ‘normal’ is actually elevated above what used to be your experience of you, and the place where the old ‘normal you’ existed seems lowered in comparison.
But if it’s the high that you crave, that rise above the ‘normal’ position, it will now take a bit more of whatever you originally did to get the same effect, since as your brain gets accustomed to the stimulation, it requires more and more hormones to achieve the same effect, the same rise.
If you decide to stop, your brain isn’t used to the lowered hormone levels, and your new ‘lowered normal’ sucks, big time.
I Can’t Remember Putting That Up
It’s completely private, this thing you do. Whether it happens in public or not doesn’t matter, because it belongs to you. The accepted wisdom is that addiction “harms those you love”, but it is in what it does to your self where the effects cut most deeply.
If you wake up next to a loser, you could always choose to leave, but if you wake up as a loser, you’re not going anywhere, really, fast.
The biggest mistake too many make is thinking they can return to a time before they were changed by whatever it is; Alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, cigarettes, pornography, eating, staring at a screen.
Trying to get back to the earlier, non-addicted you is actually impossible. You’ve changed. It’s over. You can not go back. Your brain and body are different and all you can do is be a different, post-addicted version of you.
Once you accept the basic fact that you are changed, you’re ready to go somewhere positive.
stormcrossing 