Addiction

"Nicotine, Valium, Vicodin, Marijuana, Ecstasy, and Alcohol. C-c-c-c-cocaine!" (On addiction, dopamine and abstinence from alcohol)

Quote above from the song Feel Good Hit of the Summer by Queens of the Stone Age (2000)

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We, as in contemporary humans, live in a hyper-novel environment. A modern age of access to technology, resources and stimulants - uppers and downers and dopamine doublers - that our forebears could only dream of.

Humanity’s striving for, and ultimate attaining of the abundance we have access to (at least in the west) means one of the great challenges of our generation is to abstain from reaching for this lavishness now it is instantly accessible to us.  (The abundance at my local Coles regularly gives me panic attacks - sooo much brightly coloured choice). Sugar, salt, fat, orgasms, Instagram likes – these things were rarefied in the ancient world, so we spent most of our lives working hard to achieve them.

Now, we reach into the fridge, into the ‘ether’net and into the Dan Murphy’s shelf with ease to get whatever we want, whenever we want it.

Sounds great! We can have whatever makes us feel good! We (liberal democratic capitalist societies) won the game of life! *Insert Marge Simpson motherly groan*

Let’s add into this equation porn, booze, drugs, gambling, culture war outrage, conspiratorial thinking, social media attention - all things to be drawn into, dopamine modulators, compulsing us, and sometimes addicting us.

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My first true, deep love in this world was sugar.

Well, it was probably air. Thanks to my asthma, allergic sinus and inflamed respiratory that relationship has been more like a passive aggressive marriage - more love/hate than true love.

From the moment I discovered I was a being with free will and could make my own decisions (ignoring the coercive and predatory sugary cereal advertising infecting my world view during those 80s and 90s cartoons), many of the decisions I did make would involve secret rendezvous with my sweet lover.

Even now she’s like an ex who breezes into town and drops a do you want to catch up? WhatsApp. All my resolve to never cheat on my health goals evaporates in the face her seductive power.

Like John McClane in Nakatomi Plaza, old sugar habits don't simply die hard. They never. Fucking. Die.

Sure, I would find out decades after starting this ill-fated tryst that my faulty hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (say that 5 times fast whilst patting your head and rubbing your belly) was partially to blame, and the steroids I eventually took to suppress my inflamed carcass of a body would exert extreme pressure on my (non-existent) will power to just have one more Tim Tam. (Cortisol/steroids take glucose into the bloodstream, and if they don’t find any glucose to take, your body craves like crazy to consume some).

I would not discover these things in enough time to prevent putting my dentists’ kids through private school. I hope those kids learned about self control and will power.

Also, I’m not making excuses.

I am a creature who has struggled with delayed gratification. (Which, it turns out, is an important marker of potential lifetime success - the ability to take the longer view rather than the immediate hit of pleasure).

This is the most charitable rendition of self-labelling that I can muster when it comes to addiction. Let’s be more real:

I have been a scoundrel. I dopamine fiend. A limbic system hijacker. I’ve done it all. (Well, most of it.). I have drunk many times from the elixer of ‘good feelings’, sneaking back into the forbidden garden for another cup, hoping no one was looking. (Most of the fun ends when you realise no one IS looking, except your own sense of self hatred, peering down like an omnipotent god in judgement as you slide off the couch half drunk full of nachos cheese doritos).

Yet like the calm ocean stretching before me after navigating a large storm, I can now look back on these tempestuous addictions with some clarity and peace, understanding them as the coping mechanisms they were (and, in some cases, still are). Work in progress and all that. This essay does not seek atonement. Nor absolution! My continued faultiness apparently knows no bounds...

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I'm gonna live like tomorrow doesn't exist

Like it doesn't exist

From the song Chandelier by Sia (2014)

When I was growing up in our emerging middle-class Anglo family, it was always alcohol. Ethanol was our libation. As Al Green sang in ’71 “Whether times are good or bad, happy or sad”, booze was the soother.

My extended family has a history of alcoholism. Some of them were champions of A.A after getting on the wagon permanently. Some where addicted and abusive, the demon drink unlocking the rage within. Some battled largely solo until the end, never fully getting out from underneath. Some probably still battle, largely hidden.

I found alcohol when I was 15 or 16. It was a method I used to give me energy, be more fun, and hide from the darker parts of myself that I was yet to fully understand. I was a teen who lacked connection and was isolated by my chronic health battles, and booze was the perfect socially acceptable foil to that loneliness.

Once in the full swing of an ‘adult life’ (like, late teens early 20s) I had a tendency to want to 'keep the party going'. It wasn't necessarily a real party (sometimes it was), it was more the 'party' of feeling good or feeling free from myself for a brief time. Released, however briefly, from a tightly held nervous system by the suppressive nature of alcohol. Booze is, of course, a neuro toxin, and it mimics the GABA neurotransmitter in the brain, creating that soothing and calming effect that we all chase (as well as boosting dopamine and serotonin, other ‘feel good’ neurotransmitters).

I didn't want to let go of those feelings, despite knowing they would pass (they used to pass somewhere between the 2nd and 4th beer, but that wouldn't stop my continued chase), because they, the good feelings, seemed rare in a life filled with confusion and ill-health. As we all know, the buzz of booze (or sugar, or opioids) doesn’t last long.

This too shall pass, and all that. But not if I have another beer! Or take another pill! Haha – take that come down/anxiety/hangover, I’ve got your measure!!

But as Queens of the Stoneage sang in 2001 - first it giveth, then it taken away.  It’s all fun and games when you’re on the roller coaster - it’s when you step off that the nausea starts.

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About 5 years ago I had a very profound experience that altered my relationship with alcohol and I’m going to write more about that later. Someone with as ridiculous a body as mine – navigating multiple chronic health issues since I landed on this fine blue planet – should probably never have drunk alcohol. But I did, for 20 years no less.

The 5 years I’ve spent without drinking has been a revelation.

My sister stopped drinking about a year ago too. It’s not that she was a frequent or even heavy drinker, yet booze was something that, like me in the past, was always there. In recent conversations with her she has expressed a deep personal awakening and a sense of internal clarity and purpose in her life that feels revelatory. The simple freedoms of not having to track ‘how many have I had’, of never worrying about who’s going to drive home, of never feeling out of control or ‘did I say the wrong thing’ at that work catch up, have created a lightness in her mental scape and an increased ability to respond to life with a deeper sense of calm. Let’s not forget freedom of a double shot of dehydrating coffee on Sunday morning without needing to swig 2 litres of H2O to replenish what was lost the night before.

These kind of experiences, ‘freedom’ from the grasp of alcohol, are being well documented in various podcasts (like How I Quit Alcohol and Sober Awkward) and books and Substack posts as people share their stories of facing themselves and the breaking of some of the patterns of compulsion and addiction that they, like me, clung to for so long.

I don’t believe it’s possible to easily untangle the facing of lifelong compulsions and addictions like alcohol use without correlating that with personal ‘healing’ – which I would define as:

Increasing our awareness of ourselves, our past, and our patterns of behaviour (and the impact of those patterns on those around us) in the pursuit of being ‘better’ people.

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There is a house way down in New Orleans

They call the Rising Sun

And it's been the ruin of many a poor boy

And God I know I'm one

From the song House of the Rising Sun, The Animals, 1964

(Sure, the House of the Rising Sun may have been a symbolic rather than real place, and it was probably a brothel, but they definitely served booze there along with other hedonistic pleasures. Also, there is something in the name - we’ve all watched the sun rise after a big night and too much reaching for those pleasures. Sia again “I’m just holding on for tonight!”).

For many, myself included, the conscious regulating of our complex nervous system, after so much dysregulation, is a revelation. Shit-balls, it can be hard though.

Losing ourselves whilst finding ourselves.

When does desire for pleasure, or compulsion for coping turn into addiction? In her book Dopamine Nation, Anna Lembke defines addiction as “the sustained, compulsive use of a substance or behaviour even though it causes harm to you and those around you.”

You keep choosing it, despite the pain of the hangover.

She writes at length about how our pursuit of pleasure paradoxically leaves us in more pain.

“The pursuit of pleasure for its own sake leads to anhedonia, which is the inability to enjoy pleasure of any kind”.

We desensitise our ability for pleasure by sneaking into the forbidden garden of delights too many times. This tracks for my half decade journey of relative abstinence as I seek balance and self regulation - I feel my pain more, but am more able to feel joy, delight and wonder in smaller ways more frequently too. Not needing the sledgehammer of a bottle of wine to break through my previously dulled pleasure barrier.

Now, I certainly am in no position to judge anyone for their drinking or debauchery, my own soap box being stained with spilled bourbon, my high-horse doped up on pain killers and nerve system suppressants. Everybody is looking to alter their states, often to hide from the anxiety of living life and the complexity of being a modern person, I have much sympathy for this. As Gabor Mate puts it in his book about addiction In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts -

“Boredom, rooted in a fundamental discomfort with the self, is one of the least tolerable mental states. It is impossible to understand addiction without asking what relief the addict finds in the addictive behaviour.”

But we also do this to have fun and be silly. Everyone wants to ‘care less’, be more childlike and have more joy, and that’s often why we drink, chasing a less adult state. I get it. Personally I get much of my silliness out these days by playing with my kids - if you’ve ever spent any time with a 4 year old, most things are funny to them. and then challenging, and then funny again. Wild ride!

Also, I’ve been an insomniac / a light sleeper since before I was born, the fluttering of a moth landing on a wall 3 rooms over enough to tear me from my hard fought slumber. There is much research showing that alcohol has a detrimental affect on sleep (like this study and this one) and continual alcohol use literally reduces the amount of grey matter in your brain given deep sleep cycles are when the body rejuvenates our brain.

This reminds me of the Seinfeld bit where Jerry opines that we humans had to invent helmets due to an unwillingness to cease our ‘head cracking lifestyles’, but when people still didn’t wear them we had to legislate this in order to “preserve a brain whose judgement is so poor it doesn’t even try to stop the cracking of the head that it’s in!”

Even evidence of our literal shrivelling grey matter isn’t enough to ease the reaching/coping/consuming.

Reaffirming, however anecdotally, the grey matter findings; once I stopped drinking my own sense of rising intellect has been meteoric. Now, I’m not saying I am smart or an intellectual - I am saying compare ‘6 years ago’ me to now and it really is chalk and cheese regarding my memory, my reading habits and my ability to function on a Sunday morning.

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Crying to the heavens

Find me in the present

Baby I forgive ya

Angel in the mirror

From the song Saturn Returning by Angie McMahon, 2023

What is left when we look at, understand, regulate and even abstain from the cycle of hedonistic addiction? (Even if we can't fully escape it)

Ourselves. More of ourselves.

Some sort of raw truth about who we are and what we are doing here, hidden underneath all the ‘getting high’. Then, perhaps we can move to a place where the ‘more’ that we want now that the hollow sound of the empty wine glass rings out, can be more meaning or more connection. rather than simply more ‘feel good’.

Novelist David Foster Wallace put it this way – “Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”

Sure, he was talking spiritually, but I'm going to have the gall to apply this to other types of worships - like compulsively looking at our phones, being negative about our friends in our heads, stressing about the future, or reaching for another cold beer.  Whatever is it that takes up the most space in your mind, is what your life will become. That’s what you’re ‘worshipping’ with your most precious resource – your attention.

He goes on to say that “anything else you worship will eat you alive”, such as money and things, your body and beauty, sexual allure, it will never be enough.

Or as Renton from Trainspotting puts it “Choose your future. Choose life.”

Just, you know, don’t choose heroin.

Back to alcohol - your most glorious self (whoever that is!) isn’t one of slurred speech, the same old stories, shit sleep, limited mental capacity and hungover days. It’s a well-rested head (with rejuvenated grey-matter and balanced neurotransmitters!), a deep and truly honest conversation with a close friend, time and patience with your kids on a weekend morning, and a life more free from the nausea of the ‘dopamine hijack roller coaster ride’ (patent pending and coming to a theme park near you).

I’m genuinely not hard on myself about my previous misdeeds. Even John Butler ‘Used to get High’ for a living. Everyone is undergoing a (long) process of self discovery - even if we don’t know it, and part of my journey has been to understand, ever so slowly, my body and what it needs.

Don’t be scared - a more real version of yourself exists underneath all the highjacking. It can hurt more to feel more, and there will be pain (you’re alive after all), possibly more pain because you can’t numb it as readily, but trust me, it’s a more authentic version of yourself than you ever thought was possible, and authenticity is a value worth striving for.

Also, your most loving state* (*trademark pending) includes being kind to yourself, with an understanding and forgiveness of all that has come before and all the things you reached for to cope (atonement!).

You were just doing your best.

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Addendum: Plus, if the one wish of much loved Aussie super-actress Cate Blanchett - the immortal lady Galadriel herself - was a packet of Tim Tams that never runs out (which, let's face it, is my dream too) - how can the rest of us mere mortals navigate modernity and it's dopamine traps?!? No chance! 😎

But, we’ve gotta try.

Good luck out there. ❤️ Nick

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Links and References

Books

In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts : Close Encounters with Addiction – Dr Gabor Mate https://drgabormate.com/book/in-the-realm-of-hungry-ghosts/

Dopamine Nation : Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence – Anna Lembke, M.D

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/55723020

Podcasts

How I Quit Alcohol - Danni Carr

Sober Awkward - Victoria Vanstone and Hamish Adams-Cairns

Clips and Vids

Marge Simpson Mmm

Bruce Willis Die Hard

Seinfeld Helmets

Trainspotting Choose Life

Cate Blanchett Tim Tam Commercial

Lord of the Rings - Galadriel’s Vision Scene

Lord of the Rings Music - Galadriel

Music Quotes

Feel Good Hit of the Summer by Queens of the Stone Age (2000)

Chandelier by Sia (2014)

Let’s Stay Together by Al Green (1972)

First it Giveth by by Queens of the Stone Age (2001)

House of the Rising Sun by The Animals (1964)

Saturn Returning by Angie McMahon (2023)

Used to get High by John Butler Trio (2007)

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