ADDICTIVE PERSONALITY? Brain Chemistry & Addiction

In this episode, we discuss addictive personality and various forms of addiction, particularly focusing on comfort eating. I talk about the concept of addictive personality, stating that it oversimplifies the reality of addiction.  

 Addiction can manifest in different forms, not just related to substances but also behaviours like internet scrolling, binge-watching, and overworking. This podcast delves into the brain's chemistry, explaining how dopamine and endorphins are involved in addiction, leading to changes in brain structure and impulse control.

Shelley emphasises the importance of understanding addiction to make informed choices and regain control over your life.

This is the first of a 3 part series.

Your next podcast episode: How to Stop Procrastinating

Citations
Gabor Maté - 'In The Realm Of Hungry Ghosts'
Nora Volkow - ​​Drug addiction: the neurobiology of behaviour gone awry: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15550951/
Richard Rawson UCLA https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/myncbi/richard.rawson.1/bibliography/44043452/public/?sort=date&direction=ascending
Rare or Little Known Behavioral Addictions - Northpoint Washington: https://www.northpointwashington.com/blog/rare-little-known-behavioral-addictions/
The Challenge of Cross Addiction - Sherry Gaba:  https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/addiction-and-recovery/201904/the-challenge-cross-addiction

Transcript

0:00

Today I'm talking about addictive personality. Hi, I'm Shelley Treacher from Underground Confidence. I help people with various lesser talked about addictions, mainly comfort eating recovery, but I also work with love addiction and toxic relationship. Before I talk about addictive personality... This is one of the responses I've had on one of my forms. And the question was, what are the main thoughts before you binge or before you overeat? And so she says, I might as well get rid of this bad food in the house. If I just eat this I'll feel better. Why am I doing this to myself? I'm a rubbish mum. I haven't paid my husband enough attention. I'm really angry that he didn't listen to me I'm not a good enough mum or wife. Can you identify with any of those statements? In my experience, this sums up a lot of the thoughts that people do have, right before they comfort eat. Which ones did you identify with? On to today's subject, a few years ago, the National Survey on Drug Use and Health reported that there were about 20 million people over the age of 12 who had an addiction problem in the United States. The world is a challenging and stressful place. Especially since COVID. I want to talk about this subject today because often what I see people come in for comfort eating recovery or for recovering from toxic relationships or being addicted to difficult people, and what we end up realising is that they have a whole range of addictive behaviours. There are specific things that are going to be helpful in recovery from specific addictions. But fundamentally, the same things apply to all of them. My clients often use this phrase, they often say, I just have a really addictive personality. But what does this mean? So I wanted to address what this phrase means to me. And I'll say right off the bat, I don't really believe in it. Because this phrase indicates that there is a type of personality, as if there's something about your personality that inclines you towards different addictions and you could skip to any addiction. This is far too simple and glosses over the reality. So today I'm going to explain what addiction actually is. Something I hear a lot in comfort eating recovery is frustration, that people are addicted to something that they have to use, three or four times a day at least. I'm not dismissing that frustration, and I really do feel for you. Because this does make it a challenge that's triggering all day long. But it's not the substance that's making you addicted, It may be your main drug of choice, But inherently, it's not exactly the food that's the problem. Because addiction requires some kind of precondition. In a nutshell, putting it as simply as possible, stress seems to cause addiction. That's not to say that there aren't things about the substance that can set up a physiological craving inside you, and I will explain that in a minute. But these two things, stress and the substance together, mean there's susceptibility to addiction. Addiction is an over reliance on something outside of you to make you feel better. And there are so many different kinds of addiction. A lot of people are self medicating, and this has become an addiction. Many cross addictions, where cross addiction is skipping from one, to another Are not really to substances, they're more to behaviours. Like scrolling the internet, ebay shopping, binge watching Netflix series, watching internet porn, over work. and over productivity or obsessing over a particular person. Less talked about ones like being addicted to exercise or being exposed to UV rays and sun tanning, cosmetic surgery addiction and pulling hair. All ones that I've seen in the last few years. They all serve to boost your mood by giving you that dopamine hit. And that sensation is highly addictive. There are more unusual ones like eating dirt, chewing ice. All of them give you the same dopamine or endorphin hit, one way or another. Or you might be using a substance to give you an energy boost because you're not sleeping enough or you're working too hard. Cross addiction means replacing one drug or one addiction for another. And sometimes I see a lot more than one at a time. It's not really my intention here to diagnose whether you have any addictions or not, whether these things are addictions for you. But here's five signs you can check off your list. One, you really feel a deep need to keep doing this behaviour. 2. If you don't do this, you feel like something's missing. 3. You go through some kind of withdrawal if you don't do this for a period of time. 4. You think about doing this all the time. 5. You arrange your life around this. It's likely that if you can identify a few of these signs, You're using this substance or this behaviour to comfort you and to avoid something. But I challenge you to find someone who isn't doing this. As I've said, there's much more to it than chemical addiction, but let's start with that first. So there's several things going on in our brains. There's something in our brains called the white matter that protects our brains. In addiction, we start to lose this matter. What that means is we lose our learning capability. What that looks like is we have difficulty adapting to any changes. We find it harder to make choices. And it takes longer for us to register new information. That's bad enough, right, that your brain degenerates in addiction. But also, between the white matter and the brain is something called the grey matter. Sadly, this also degenerates. What this means is that we have fewer brain cells and our brains shrink. What this looks like is not being able to make rational decisions and finding it more difficult to regulate our impulses and emotions. Our energy utilisation is also diminished. Put simply, our brains just do less work. One of the chemicals most responsible for this is dopamine. I've talked about dopamine a few times in my podcasts, but today I'm bringing it all together. Another thing that people often come to me saying is, Isn't it just a habit? It's just a habit that I need to kick. And this is partly true. As I say, like with addiction, There's a lot more to it. But habits are routines that shape our lives in profound ways. They can lead us to succeed or failure, to health or to sickness, to fulfilment or to dissatisfaction. On the back of the groundbreaking work by Charles Duhigg, we know that habits revolve around a cue and reward system. A cue triggers a certain response, which then makes us seek a reward. Understanding this cycle as well as the cycle that happens with cravings and with addiction provides a valuable insight into how we can replace harmful habits with perhaps good ones or beneficial ones. Cravings are also triggered by the anticipation of a reward. With each reward we get a dopamine hit. This reward system, when it's abused, when it's repeated too much, leads to addiction. Addiction really means carrying on a behaviour or a substance, repeatedly, despite its harmful effects. And it's here that the psychology and the emotional cause is involved. And also where the challenge lies in breaking the habit. Even the formation of mental images can form a craving. Maybe you can relate to that. Dopamine is a feel good chemical. You get a dopamine hit every time you go for that drug, that substance, or the behavior. Each time we're using a substance, we get a fake dopamine hit. But because the natural source is getting tired and lazy, this one takes over pretty quickly. And then it takes months to regrow the natural system. The way this works is we often become more confident when we have a dopamine hit, fake or real. And if we felt inadequate before, this is going to be really attractive. The brain loves the intake of dopamine. Whether it comes from something outside of you, a chemical, a drug, a substance, or something that somebody's giving you. Attention. admiration, pleasure. I'm not 100% sure which of this is fake and which of this is real, but a lot of it is going to be a fake dopamine hit because it's just come from outside of you. So we get a fake elation, especially at the beginning of using a new substance or drug. and the brain learns to recognize that this is something it wants. And so the natural source of dopamine starts to decline. As we rely on the fake supply. What this looks like is we have less stamina. And less motivation. Natural dopamine is what's responsible for getting us excited about life. And then of course this is a vicious cycle. You're feeling a lack of motivation and energy. So what are you gonna do? You're gonna look for a boost. And so here comes more fake dopamine. And so you're going to have less receptors in your brain for the real stuff. So the brain starts to offload these receptors. This explains tolerance, where we need more of the substance, more of the fake dopamine hit, because we can't produce the real stuff anymore. This also explains why withdrawal is so uncomfortable. As you might know, withdrawal can cause irritation, sadness, upset, fatigue, isolation. And it can take months before your receptors, your natural dopamine receptors, are up and running again. According to a study, our dopamine receptors go up by 50% when we start eating comfort food, junk food. With something like nicotine or sexual arousal, it goes up by 100%. With speed or crystal meth, 1, 200%. So that puts food in perspective a little. The withdrawal is also less with food. And the brain recovers more quickly. So that's how dopamine gets involved. But we haven't just got dopamine to deal with. There are also the endorphins, the opioid apparatus. Endorphins are natural narcotics that soothe us. They soothe physical and emotional pain. They regulate our nervous system. They affect our organs, our sleep, our bowel movements, our immune system, our breathing, our body temperature, and our bonding with our mothers. When we expect relief from pain, this area in our brain lights up. This also explains placebo. This area in our brain is also where the imagination lives. And it's also where our attachment instinct lives. Drugs severely interfere with this area. If we haven't been cared for or soothed in our earlier lives, left to our own devices, we're much more likely to seek soothing from something outside of ourselves. Because we just didn't learn how to soothe ourselves as children. Endorphins are also responsible for pleasure and joy. For euphoria, risk taking, and for feeling loving. Putting it really bluntly, if you're not happy, you're going to turn to a chemical for happiness. Dopamine raises that elation. So it raises the endorphin area. So here we have a system that can be re triggered and re triggered over and over again. Till it becomes much more important than anything else to us. A question you could be asking yourself to bring this all together is when do you get excited about using your drug or your thing that you're addicted to? For comfort eaters, how does it switch from one biscuit, one cookie, one piece of chocolate, to the whole bar? The best example in my life I can give you at the moment is an addiction to Facebook Reels. This one's doing my head in. Every time I open Facebook to do something for work, this usually is. Somehow those reels pull me in. And before I know it, I'm looking at cats making me laugh. This is the dopamine and endorphin system at its finest. And I can see it, can't you? There's this numbed out feeling that happens really quickly. It kind of feels good. And I can hear parts of my brain saying, I need more of this. I'll just scroll another one. I'll just look at another one. This is making me happy. This is fun. This is funny. This is cute. And then somewhere, if I'm honest, in the background is, Cause I have to do this miserable thing today. Or I'm feeling miserable about this today. This will make me feel better. It's like a little reward and I can almost hear the thought process. The reason I've explained it in this way is because usually there's some kind of negativity behind it. So ask yourself, when do you get excited about your addiction? When do you feel like you know this is wrong, but you do it anyway? My point here today is to show you that partly there's an apparatus in your brain that's making you do that.

Shelley: 13:24

What we're talking about here is literally having the ability to make good choices and to have good decision making being taken away from you. As I've been saying, research shows that long term use leads to long lasting changes in the brain that undermine voluntary control. As I've been saying about the opioids, the endorphins, and dopamine, the self regulation process is affected. Which of course means we're in another vicious cycle that makes us scared to give up the thing that we're dependent on to self regulate. These emotions help us to survive. That's why they exist. They modulate attachment and aversion. They modulate whether we should go towards someone and embrace them or something and when you should run a mile. This impairment is a huge problem, you can see that. And of course, our impulse control is also affected. But like I said at the beginning, I challenge you to find anyone who's not a little bit compulsive. And put this together with the fact that we also live in a society that demonises poor impulse control. It calls you crazy or lazy. With poor impulse control, we also have diminished social capacity. If you just think about that logically, of course that follows. I mean, who wants to hang out with someone who's really impulsive and unpredictable? And this whole system is also responsible for smells, for taste. And for what we touch, which means that if we smell something or taste something or touch something that feels good to us, feels positive, we're going to go towards that again. You can see how this extends to evaluating what has personal meaning for you. Addiction, of course, affects all of these functions. and can inhibit an inappropriate response, which can be anything from betrayal of yourself, betrayal of someone else, to violence. Traditionally, addiction has been seen as a biological problem. But we're a little bit more complex than that. What this fails to acknowledge is the complexity of the influence of the community and environments. Another way of looking at this is that we're not all addicts. Yes, we might all have compulsions, but it's true to say that some people have much more of a compulsion or more compulsions than others. We just don't all get hooked. to the same degree. There is research to suggest that stress produces addiction. So this is what I'll be talking about next week. Today I talked about addictive personality. I talked about what that means to me. I also talked about cross addiction, and I mentioned various different types of addiction. Explaining that there are substance addictions and behavioural addictions. I listed five ways that you might identify whether your obsession, your compulsion, has become an addiction. And then I talked about the chemicals in the brain that contribute to addiction. I talked about the white matter and the grey matter in the brain, and how this decreases. Leading to losses of capacity in our brains. Then I talked about dopamine and the cue and reward system. I talked about habits, about cravings, and how they're both developed on this cue and reward system. I then talked about how addictions produce fake dopamine, and how this reduces our production of natural dopamine, which also takes a long time to regenerate. I mentioned how tolerance develops and I talked about all the different functions in the brain that are affected by this fake dopamine and the cue and reward system. Then I talked about endorphins and how addiction affects the opioid apparatus in the brain. I encouraged you to ask yourself, when is it in your daily life? that you start to get excited about your addiction? I mentioned that our environments have a huge input on whether we develop an addiction or not, and this is what I'll be talking about next week. My practice is constantly evolving with self regulation exercises with ways to Build up a person and strategies to help build resilience and inner emotional strength. In fact, recently I asked on the counseling directory, which is a massive directory in England, what strategies counselor using this is still being answered with so many different responses. I'll tell you about this in a couple of weeks, when I talk about resourcing from addiction. But it's important to understand what you're up against here. With this chemical apparatus in the brain. Once you know this, you might have a clearer choice about it. So that's why I've told you about the chemicals in the brain today. I set out to dispel the myth that we have addictive personalities. Perhaps you can see a little bit more what's actually involved now. Sometimes, when I'm feeling a craving, I can tell myself, oh, that's just this fake chemical surge in my brain. And sometimes it gives me enormous pride to ignore that, knowing that I'm actually much more interested in reality, and engaging in sorting this problem out in a different way. My hope here is to inspire you to want to take control too. Why should these substances, and the psychology that goes behind the marketing of these substances, take a hold of us? This is all I have to say for today. I think it's dense information, so I'm cutting it to a shorter podcast today. If you want help understanding what's going on with you with addiction, I would love to help. I can help you in various different ways. You can find a lot of my free stuff on social media at the moment, but it's also been put together in one place under my app, Which you'll find a link for in the show notes. You can find everything I have to offer if you look up Underground Confidence. Thank you so much for listening to the end. This is Underground Confidence with Shelley Treacher. I'll see you next Wednesday.