Addictions: Stopping – Rewiring Brian Part.2

If you recall from Stopping Addictions pt 1, which reviewed current research on addictions, your brain has used its thousands of years of evolution to rewire itself  to all of those “rewarding” things that you have been feeding it. Its’ capacity to learn has developed it in a way that is really unhelpful to you leaving you with faulty wiring and a “Brian” instead of a brain. Your brain has developed strong neural connections between brain cells based upon your feelings, thinking and behaviour. It is these patterns that are the basis of your addiction and why it is hard to stop.

One picture that may help is to imagine a sheep track in the hills. Sheep follow the same paths over and over again and, if you look, you can see these deep grooves where the sheep have been walking. It is also true that every now and again a solitary sheep runs off in a different direction but, by and large, they do follow the same paths. Thoughts are like sheep in that they often follow familiar paths in your mind because those paths have been well used.

To get new habits you have to rewire your brain. Because of the depth and strength of the connections of the brain you have unconsciously learnt to respond to triggers – which may be either internal feelings (like sadness or frustration etc.) or things we see/hear/feel. These triggers are linked to your addictive behaviour. You need to help you brain to make new connections.

Reboot Your Brain?

Perhaps the ideal is to go “cold turkey” and to reboot your brain and teach it a new programme. Gambling addiction or pornography addiction seem to respond to “turning the tap off”, stopping and rebooting. Unfortunately, with substance misuse because of physical withdrawal you may well need to taper your addictive behaviour for medical reasons or might need medical supervision in rehab.

Three of the Best

This brings us to some techniques which you can use to help you to rewire.

1. Surf It

The good news is that we cannot maintain the intensity of our feeling for all that long. The first tactic is to surf the feeling. Notice the feeling and identify it and look at it in your mind. What is the specific feeling? Then surf it towards the shore. It will break on the beach if you just hang in there. You cannot maintain an intense feeling for a long period. Try it.

2. Incompatibility

To give you a clear idea of this in practice, if it was smoking go take a shower. Your job is to work out beforehand what the alternative activities are (write a list!) so that you can immediately put the alternative activity in place.

3. Distract Yourself

As above but any activity that you enjoy that takes your mind away from the thoughts of addiction. In order to work effectively, this needs to be something you really enjoy, ideally something which occupies your thoughts/makes you concentrate. You also need to do it immediately. When you have found an activity that works stick to it repetitively.

Distraction tends to be harder than doing something incompatible. Writing a journal, making a favourite snack, playing chess, having a deep conversation are examples. Progressive Muscular Relaxation or meditation are also great but require some practice.

When you first start these alternative activities it will require lots and lots of will power. As you practice turning your attention to these alternatives they will get easier and easier as you begin to “rewire your brain” and your addiction becomes less powerful. The more you do this, the stronger the connections get and the weaker your automatic responses will become. You will, however, still get your addictive cravings/ images or other things for a long time, they do however, change and become easier to manage.

Ken McLeish is Principal Therapist at Reflexions Counselling and Therapy in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. Reflexions provides counselling and therapy for a range of issues including addictions. He can be contacted through the website: https://counselling-newcastle.co.uk .

Information contained in this blog is not a substitute for face-to-face therapy. It can only every be one view of a situation and may not be applicable to your situation. You are advised to seek specialist support for treatment for addictions. The work here is a personal view which may change over time and should not be taken as representative of Reflexions Counselling and Psychotherapy.

Addiction: What is a Plastic Brian ?

New research shows that addictive behaviour although initially voluntary can spiral out of control as the brain’s neural circuitry becomes overloaded and then rewires. Your brain control function then becomes weakened and you have difficulty in controlling your urges and your addictive behaviour becomes compulsive.

How does this sorry state of affairs come to pass? After all, we have had thousands of years of evolution to get this sorted. The very problem appears to be with evolution itself as our brain has been designed to be very adept at responding to stimuli. However, our brain wasn’t well prepared for the intense stimulus overload of the modern world.

Plasticity is a function of the ability of your brain to make new connections: As thoughts flow through your brain, networks of neurons join your brain cells together. The more you do something the stronger the connections become. All well and good, until those connections are the wrong ones. So your brain becomes a “Brian” having wired itself up incorrectly.

The brain works by making connections between brain cells and the more these connections are made the stronger they become. Similarly, you could think about patterns of thought as working in the same way, flowing along these connections. So we do something, get a good feeling, and we are more likely to repeat that behaviour which will then result in a release of “feel good potion” /(chemical neurotransmitters) etc. . Addictive behaviour of all types is a learned behaviour. This learned behaviour becomes automatic – so automatic in fact, that we no longer pay it very much conscious attention, it just happens.

Your behaviour will have been learnt well: your brain will have been busy rewiring itself to your addictive habit. It won’t just have learnt the behaviour but will have cleverly made connections to moods, feelings, situations, people, visual cues (triggers) and so on. A simple example is that you might have a trigger of a bookies sign or the paper dropping through the letterbox (racing pages). This complex network of connections is one reason why addictive behaviour is quite difficult to stop.

200 Women before Dawn?

What about if you could get the same fix but twice as intense? Well in today’s society you nearly always can. Food, porn and gambling are particularly problematic as they are all available “on-tap” and are difficult to avoid. Why not get your fix of gambling by betting on televised racing which you can play back later at high speed? Internet porn allows you to have 200 women before breakfast. These activities give a buzz at the time and your behaviour is reinforced. It is easy step to do this to feel the buzz when you feel down or depressed. And it is here that your problems really start as you learn addictive, automatic responses to such things as anxiety, stress, loneliness, boredom and so on.

Unfortunately, your brain adapts to this high level of stimulus and “damps down” its response. You crave more stimulus to get the same fix and you get trapped inside this vicious circle. Not only that, but you end up feeling bad about yourself as you find you cannot get yourself out of this. Which then makes you repeat your addictive behaviour, which makes you feel bad and so on. The changes in brain chemicals bought about by the addictive behaviour also affect the frontal brain and impairs the executive function. This means that you become more impulsive. You neural pathways have created a “Brian”.

Your challenge is to unlearn these maladaptive responses and rewire. See part II which will come as soon as I’ve written it…

Ken McLeish is Principal Therapist at Reflexions Counselling and Therapy in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. Reflexions provides counselling and therapy for a range of issues including addictions. He can be contacted through the website: https://counselling-newcastle.co.uk .

Information contained in this blog is not a substitute for face-to-face therapy. It can only every be one view of a situation and may not be applicable to your situation. You are advised to seek specialist support for treatment for addictions. The work here is a personal view which may change over time and should not be taken as representative of Reflexions Counselling and Psychotherapy.