Before we start using, we understand “enough”

Addiction sneaks up on us. By the time we begin to recognize that we are putting whatever it is that we must have before everyone and everything else, the people around us have been tired of the situation for quite some time. But how can something take possession of the mind without our awareness? Aren’t we paying attention to our awareness ?  Not really.

Addiction wears a mask.

There is more than one reason. One of the reasons we are so unprepared to recognize what is happening within us is that addiction goes against everything we know about satiety, or having enough. Even as newborns we instinctively knew when we had had enough. When we were hungry, we ate, then stopped when full. To deal with fatigue, we slept, and awoke when rested. We never questioned that any urge could and would be satisfied. We did not wish to challenge our feelings of satiety.
We never wanted to eat, or not eat, forever. We did not want to sleep forever. Small children resist sleep at times, as if they are certain interesting and wonderful things happen outside of their presence while they are shut away from the rest of the world having been coerced into bedtime. Yet we could no more resist sleep when we were tired enough, then we could force ourselves to slumber. There were times in life we would have loved to sleep through and wake up on the other side, untouched by a terrible event or circumstance. There was no hibernation through the lean, dark days of life’s deepest winters. Another  feature to our original  cyclical appetites was the prefictable inevitability of change. No matter how much we ate or slept we could not store rest or calories in an internal savings account available to us when, for whatever reason, we must endure food or sleep deprivation. When we do not get enough of what we need, our bodies our let us know immediately and we suffer. We were never stuck in a rut of constant craving.  Not were we able to delay, by a considerably measure, the onset of needing more in order to nr on
Let us examine addiction. The first time we feel the high, we want more. This craving sets off no alarm bells. Who wouldn’t want more. We have every reason to believe that if we obtain a sufficient amount, we will be satisfied. We are completely unprepared for a substance that creates a craving that is not only impossible to satisfy, but makes the user want even more. The more a person does, the more a person wants to do. And that desire is unending. What? That’s not what we learned before. Our minds operate on the original lifelong paradigm that satiety is possible if we can get enough
For some reason the mind gets glitchy after an unprecedented release of endorphins. We cannot recognize that we are on a never ending loop, like one of the programs says: getting, using, and finding ways and means to get more. And we almost never see that the old way of thinking is more than just inapplicable Our old way of thinking is non existent, gone because the brain has changed. However, one thing stays the same. We recognize the negative physical consequences of not feeding the addiction, known as withdrawal. Withdrawal, like starvation, is to be avoided at all costs. Unlike starvation, withdrawal is temporary and is often a reasonable sacrifice to obtain a life of sobriety. But the very thought of that suffering creates a terror akin to the fear of death because we need air and cannot breathe. Addiction piggy backs on our understanding of craving and deprivation, but the reality of ever feeling like “this is enough” simply doesn’t exist in this new world
What a clever, sneaky enemy our minds have in addiction. To date, no one has the answer about how to reverse the brain changes, but at least we know a bit more about the nature of these changes.