Category: Connect

In comments following a recent post, many of you saw addiction and religion as different versions of a similar enslavement. Then last post we talked about the terrifying loss of meaning at the finish line. But today I want to show that these parallel prisons arise from the same fundamental longing — one that’s almost noble in character.

In your comments, many of you wrote that religion, like addiction, can be viewed as an extreme form of attachment, with all the bells and whistles: the narrowing of attention and emotion to a small range of rewards, rigid adherence to methods for getting more of what you need and rejecting anything that gets in the way, blind commitment to something that satisfies your needs, at least in part, and attempting to put all your needs into that basket and neglecting whatever doesn’t fit.

And then we got to the fear of meaninglessness that confronts the addict contemplating abstinence.

Well it seems that this implosion of meaninglessness is just as terrifying for a deeply religious person who no longer can believe in his/her religion (e.g., in God)  as it is for the addict staring into a life of total abstinence. James Joyce and Graham Greene wrote fine novels about the malignant anxiety facing priests who could no longer believe. And about their nihilistic attempts to keep going through the motions, living off the remains of a dying addiction to God.

For both the believer and the addict, that loss of meaning is terrifying. It’s a loss of everything that filled one’s thoughts, dreams, and hopes. In fact, I’d say it’s much more about loss than it is about meaning per se.

So what is it that we so greatly fear losing?

There’s a flip side to this ungainly partnership of religion and addiction. What we want so badly, and what both religion and addiction appear to offer, is a sense of connection that binds our lonely little selves to something else, something bigger, something that offers certainty in a world that is beyond control. This longing for connection and “ongoingness” is pretty fundamental. So much so that it embeds itself in the neural circuits responsible for desire and goal-pursuit — yes, the infamous striatum (including the nucleus accumbens) that I’ve referred to so often. We wish, and we seek, and we crave, and we long for that thing we seem to be missing, because our brains are made for seeking what we don’t have.

In the talk he’s preparing for the Dalai Lama, Kent Berridge emphasizes something very important about the brain. The neural machinery of desire is this rather extensive network of  brain matter — literally, it includes a large area in the middle of the brain, and its tentacles reach into the brain stem, the amygdala, and the prefrontal cortex — that’s a lot of territory. Whereas the neural machinery of pleasure is this little hunk of tissue about a square centimeter in size (e.g., a part of the ventral pallidum). In other words, desire is much more important than pleasure, when measured in terms of neural real estate. That’s how central it must be to our survival as a species. (And so, no, I wouldn’t call it “The Beast,” in the parlance of Rational Recovery.)

So it goes. We are built for wishing, for wanting, for craving. And the fact that what we sometimes crave is a sense of connection is why so many of us turn to religion, or addiction, or both. But the wish itself is not an evil thing. It’s a very human thing. It even seems noble, or courageous. It expresses a need we know intimately in ourselves and that brings out our compassion for the vulnerability we see in others.

We can respect the religious person, and we can respect the addict, not for the way they live their lives, but for appropriating the machinery of desire for the pursuit of connection. Not money, not power, not even pleasure — the paltry goals of everyday life — but something very special.

No one expresses that longing better than Eddie Vedder in this song. (Warning: you probably have to be extremely weird to like this song as much as I do). Here’s the first verse:

And I wished for so long… cannot stay.
All the precious moments… cannot stay.
It’s not like wings have fallen… cannot stay.
But I feel something’s missing… cannot say.

 

Hi all. I recently got an email from Jeff Skinner, a member of this blog community, who came up with the following synopsis. To me, this brief statement (lightly edited) perfectly sums up the existential trap that awaits the addict facing recovery, like some lurking monster that you simply cannot sneak past. You have to face it head-on.

A high functioning addict has many degrees of freedom [i.e., choices] in handling the proverbial monkey. The addict can take a night off from drinking or drugging (or fooding or gambling). He/she can take a week off. He/she can reduce intake temporarily, even for long periods. What doesn’t change is that the meaning of existence is measured relative to the next time. This kind of freedom certainly produces tensions, sometimes big ones, but they can be tolerated.

The crisis comes when “the next time” is moved out to infinity (abstinence). Now life becomes existentially meaningless. This causes an unbearable anxiety/panic — one that can only be alleviated by taking, or at least scheduling — [or at least imagining] — the next drink or drug.

I have thought about this problem many times, and I still do. But I think Jeff expressed it with unusual clarity. He and I are both interested in your comments and will respond to them…

I’ve written a lot about the battle between craving and self-control, as have others. I’ve pointed out the neurophysiological events that stack the deck: the role of dopamine in narrowing attention and boosting desire, the resultant “delay discounting” that makes it so hard to think outside the moment, the nonstarter of “ego depletion” — a fuel tank that reads EMPTY before you get to the top of the hill, and the growth of synaptic networks (in cortex and limbic system) that colonize your psychological world with too many associations, action tendencies, and feelings related to the thing you want so badly, so often.

But I’ve never quite figured out how to capture the loss of meaning that stares you down when you think about quitting — FOR GOOD. For sure it’s about the accumulated synaptic restructuring (network pattern) that has strangled half your forebrain like some crabgrass invasion. It’s about the weakening and dissolution of the other synapses — the ones you might have used if activation didn’t keep returning to the more familiar circuits. It’s about all the goals your striatum forgot how to strive for, or even notice, over those years of seeking one thing above everything else. I can explain it in brain terms fairly well. But what’s hard to put into words is the feeling — the deadly vertigo, the whoosh of the void suddenly opening right in front of you, as you contemplate giving it up FOR GOOD.

How can life possibly be meaningful without IT? — when it’s been the foundation of meaning, the hallmark of value — for such a long time? And not just “meaning” in the abstract, but the sense of being taken care of, however perverse that is; the sense of where you belong in the world; the sense of who you are; the sense of what it is you do…

How do you overcome that ultimate challenge? How do you cross that gulf? I guess the answer is to start building up other networks of meaning and value, before you’re able to quit, maybe even before you can seriously try. Or at least at the same time. (For me, returning to graduate school was a big deal.)

But what if you don’t know where to find another source of meaning? What if you don’t know where to start? What if there’s just nothing else in your world, because you have no resources, no real friends, you’ve burned up all your other opportunities? What if you look out at the universe and all you see is a featureless horizon?

When the degrees of freedom shift from some to none, when there are no other choices, when you pack up your home, sell your furniture, and drop off the key, there’d better be at least one other place to go. Or you’re probably not going to make it very far.

Since most of us seem to be in vacation mode, myself included, I’m stealing the following passage from Shaun Shelly (with his permission). He in turn took it from Richard Wilmot, author of “American Euphoria: Saying ‘Know’ to Drugs“. The passage compares religious commitments to the commitments made by drug addicts (deals with the devil?). Here I’m printing a shortened version. For the full passage, and for some intriguing reflections on its implications, please see Shaun’s blog. I’m sending you there, partly because this such an unusual idea, but also because Shaun’s blog/newsletter is definitely worth exploring more broadly.

“Today one of the main criteria for a diagnosis of drug addiction/alcoholism is: continuing to consume alcohol or another drug “despite unpleasant or adverse consequences” (DSM). For the Christian martyrs the same criteria would apply. People of that time and place—Rome, 2nd century A.D.—could also say that this new Christianity was like a drug that endangered lives and that being a Christian had all the adverse financial, social, psychological and physical consequences that we now see in the lives of drug addicts and alcoholics. And yet Christians, of all ages, in spite of the consequences, continued to profess their faith… and continued to be eaten by lions.

Obviously there was something to Christianity that prevented the Christian from being abstinent from Christianity. It was something internal… an internal euphoria. It was something that could not be seen but nevertheless was something that was felt… and felt as something awesomely significant. It was something that made all the pain and suffering worthwhile: it was a religious experience.

Likewise, given contemporary social policy, adverse consequences befall those who abuse drugs. They lose the respect of their peers; they violate the expectations of family, friends, and colleagues; they miss out on educational opportunities; they have poor work performance and lose their job. They make harmful decisions. They “burn their bridges”. Their health suffers; they have overdoses, and they die.

My initial reaction to this quote was one of bemusement more than anything else. Okay, very provocative, but is there a serious point here? Is the comparison between religion and addiction just a high-level play on words? Just a number of descriptors — dedication, single-mindedness, sacrifice, isolation — that make glib connections between two fundamentally different phenomena? That was my hunch. But then I looked briefly at Wilmot’s book. He makes the case (as do others) that the urge to get high is a natural proclivity, that we all seek what are often called “peak experiences.”  In fact, this idea is not much different from the idea of a God gene, as elaborated by Shaun. So not only might we be (at least partially) hard-wired to seek religious meaning, and to seek the sort of peak experiences that come through drugs, but maybe it’s the same urge, channelled in different ways.

Then more parallels came to mind. For me, people who are intensely religious are as scary as people who are intensely addicted. Both types are impossible to engage in any meaningful dialogue, they notice only what is of immediate relevance to their particular attraction, and they devalue others’ rights, opinions, and wellbeing in their pursuit of gratification. And here’s another parallel: religion and addiction look similar to one another at two different stages. Early on, religious zeal and drug attraction are exciting, often creative, and highly fulfilling. But twenty years later, both look like shit. The dogmatic, rigidified, perseverative ramblings of a long-term religious zealot are not much different in tone, quality, or relevance than those of the long-term addict. What was once an exhilarating journey of self-realization has become a bleary-eyed funeral march.

So, maybe the comparison is more enlightened than I first thought. But make sure you go and visit Shaun’s blog to see what he has to say about it.

By Margôt Tesch…

A note from me (Marc):

This self-trust thing….it’s like a hardy weed. It keeps spreading, and now it’s bursting out in all kinds of places. Margôt Tesch, a member of this blog community, trusted her future self to help her curb her drinking. And it worked. This post is her description of the process she used and the impact it’s having on her life. The only thing I can add is that it makes me very happy…that an idea that emerged from my reflections on my own life can become a method for helping others. The rest is Margôt’s account:

I read Marc’s blog on Self Trust some weeks ago. At the time I read it, it resonated profoundly and sparked some immediate actions and changes in my life. Marc talked about the need to let the future self take control. It seemed to be exactly what I needed to hear at just the right time.

I have been aware of my addiction to alcohol for many years now. I try to be honest in my self-talk, i.e. acknowledge that I do have an addiction even though I manage it by constraining my indulgence so that I do not behave anti-socially. But drinking is something I do every day. That’s an addiction.

I have wanted to change my dependence on alcohol for a very long time and had even been thinking recently about my lack of self-trust in this area. You know, how you have a big night and a hangover and you decide “That’s it” … until about 5 the next day. Many of you will know the cycle. It’s ridiculous, but we act it out over and over again. Just as Marc points out, it erodes our self-trust.

I lead quite a disciplined life. I eat well, exercise regularly etc. As well, I have created a habit of goal setting and know how to push myself through to achieve things; for example, challenging adventure hikes, long distance running — the list goes on. Further, many years ago I overcame a serious food addiction which lasted over a decade. I also gave up smoking, though that was some 30 years ago now. So I have reason to trust myself. I have a sense of confidence that I can do difficult things if I set my mind to it.

I’ve always known that I could stop drinking and actually believed that I would stop. I’ve just been waiting for the right impetus, the right motivation to give me the reason to stop. Knowing that drinking habitually has health implications has not been enough. I guess I’ve been waiting for the health crisis. But when you stop and think about it, that’s pretty crazy. Why wait for the health impact to eventuate. Why not stop now and prevent it?

These thoughts had been going around and around in my head, but still I persisted to drink daily. When I read Marc’s blog in preparation for his TED talk, all this thinking came together in a moment of clarity. Suddenly I perceived “my future self” as an identity that could take control…now! I had always believed that this was possible, that my “future self” would one day do it, but Marc’s words made me realise I didn’t need to wait. My future self was actually inside me. I already believed in her. So I was able to merge the perception of my future self with the perception of who I am now, today. I/we became one. This simple shift in thinking gave me the sense of self-trust I needed to take control in a matter-of-fact way.

It worked. I had my first drink-free night for a long time. My husband even poured me a drink; I accepted it but couldn’t drink it. My future self was in control and was able to think clearly about the benefits of stopping (short term pain for long term gain).

In a way it was a relief — no more cognitive dissonance.

It’s been several weeks now. My husband also read the post and decided to join me, and I have to admit, that’s made it easier. We have achieved what we set out to do so far, no drinking during the week, and we are working to limit our weekend consumption to “reasonable” amounts (which means no hangover). So far that has probably been the greatest challenge. The first night after a period of abstinence is high risk as there is some compulsion in giving yourself permission to drink again, to over-indulge. But we are working on it.

My plan is to make this behaviour part of our routine so that it just feels “normal” not to drink every day; let a new set of habits and behaviours emerge. Already we have noticed we are more alert in the early evening and able to use the regained time for more cognitive activities, rather than just watching the TV.

We aren’t there yet and a trip overseas visiting family has set us back a bit. But now that we are home, the work begins anew.

Here are some notes that I refer to when I need to regain the initial impetus:

• Future health gets sacrificed for immediate gratification (i.e. too much dopamine production).
• Believe in my capacity for self-control (reduces ego depletion).
• Maintain a dialogue between my future self and me.
• Things will get better.

I really appreciate Marc’s thinking and theory in this area. It has helped to change my life.

Note (from Marc): Please see the new blog by Ken Anderson in Psychology Today. Ken is the founder of HAMS, a group that supports “Harm Reduction” approaches. Margot’s self-styled method is a great example of Harm Reduction.

What I’ve called self-trust in recent posts can be paraphrased as compassion. Compassion for oneself. In the last couple of weeks I’ve been exposed to the Buddhist perspective, which clearly sees compassion for others and compassion for oneself as two sides of the same coin. Compassion, or love, or trust, is considered a kind of natural state once all the cognitive cobwebs get cleared away. But how do you achieve it?

Meditation, of course.

So while I’m cruising the canals of the Netherlands, the next four days, with a great horde of relatives (my wife’s family), quite likely to tip over and sink, either physically or emotionally, or both, I’ll leave you with a description of a great little study by David DeSteno, a professor at Northeastern University. Here’s the link, but I’m pasting most of the article below to save you the trouble of clicking on it. (Now, that’s compassion.)

This article was brought to my attention by someone whom I’d love to acknowledge, except that I can’t remember who it was. Very embarrassing. If you’d like to step forward and receive due credit, then please do.

One more thought before you read the article. I’ve recently been perusing a lot of the literature on the neuroscience of meditation. The state of the art amounts to what’s usually known as a dog’s breakfast, not to be confused with a god’s breakfast. It’s a mess of overlapping and sometimes discrepant findings. But there’s one bit of the brain that reliably lights up as a result of meditation training: a wee bit of cortex called the insula — a structure that is thought to mediate enteroception, the feelings one gets from one’s own body. When you are consciously feeling your feelings, whether sadness, anxiety, fatigue, or pain, it’s the insula that’s giving you the message. So, meditators seem to be able to switch on that conscious state of feeling more easily than controls.

Maybe that’s no big surprise. But here’s the cool part: insula activation is a reliable correlate of empathy, induced through various experimental protocols, like looking at pictures of people who are suffering. In other words, you have to be able to feel your own feelings in order to feel empathy. Meditation seems to improve that ability. And given the results of the following study, that can translate into being good to others as well as good to yourself.

MEDITATION is fast becoming a fashionable tool for improving your mind. With mounting scientific evidence that the practice can enhance creativity, memory and scores on standardized intelligence tests, interest in its practical benefits is growing. A number of “mindfulness” training programs, like that developed by the engineer Chade-Meng Tan at Google, and conferences like Wisdom 2.0 for business and tech leaders, promise attendees insight into how meditation can be used to augment individual performance, leadership and productivity.

This is all well and good, but if you stop to think about it, there’s a bit of a disconnect between the (perfectly commendable) pursuit of these benefits and the purpose for which meditation was originally intended. Gaining competitive advantage on exams and increasing creativity in business weren’t of the utmost concern to the Buddha and other early meditation teachers. As the Buddha himself said, “I teach one thing and one only: that is, suffering and the end of suffering.” For him, as for many modern spiritual leaders, the goal of meditation was as simple as that. The heightened focus on and insight into one’s own  mind, offered by meditation, plus the enhanced cognitive skills of clarity and self-regulation, were supposed to help practitioners see the world in a new way — in which  we are no longer the center of the universe. And that’s what allows for compassion — a genuine regard of other people and an intrinsic wish to end their suffering as well as our own. And a relaxation of the habitual categorizations (us/them, self/other) that commonly divide people from one another.

But does meditation work as promised? Is its originally intended effect — the reduction of suffering — empirically demonstrable?

To put the question to the test, my lab, led in this work by the psychologist Paul Condon, joined with the neuroscientist Gaëlle Desbordes and the Buddhist lama Willa Miller to conduct an experiment whose publication is forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science. We recruited 39 people from the Boston area who were willing to take part in an eight-week course on meditation (and who had never taken any such course before). We then randomly assigned 20 of them to take part in weekly meditation classes, which also required them to practice at home using guided recordings. The remaining 19 were told that they had been placed on a waiting list for a future course.

After the eight-week period of instruction, we invited the participants to the lab for an experiment that purported to examine their memory, attention and related cognitive abilities. But as you might anticipate, what actually interested us was whether those who had been meditating would exhibit greater compassion in the face of suffering. To find out, we staged a situation designed to test the participants’ behavior before they were aware that the experiment had begun.

WHEN a participant entered the waiting area for our lab, he (or she) found three chairs, two of which were already occupied. Naturally, he sat in the remaining chair. As he waited, a fourth person, using crutches and wearing a boot for a broken foot, entered the room and audibly sighed in pain as she leaned uncomfortably against a wall. The other two people in the room — who, like the woman on crutches, secretly worked for us — ignored the woman, thus confronting the participant with a moral quandary. Would he act compassionately, giving up his chair for her, or selfishly ignore her plight?

The results were striking. Although only 16 percent of the nonmeditators gave up their seats — an admittedly disheartening fact — the proportion rose to 50 percent among those who had meditated. This increase is impressive not solely because it occurred after only eight weeks of meditation, but also because it did so within the context of a situation known to inhibit considerate behavior: witnessing others ignoring a person in distress — what psychologists call the bystander effect — reduces the odds that any single individual will help. Nonetheless, the meditation increased the compassionate response threefold.

…recent findings by the neuroscientists Helen Weng, Richard Davidson and colleagues confirm that even relatively brief training in meditative techniques can alter neural functioning in brain areas associated with empathic understanding of others’ distress — areas whose responsiveness is also modulated by a person’s degree of felt associations with others. [see my comments on the insula!]

So take heart. The next time you meditate, know that you’re not just benefiting yourself, you’re also benefiting your neighbors, community members and as-yet-unknown strangers by increasing the odds that you’ll feel their pain when the time comes, and act to lessen it as well.