Several posts ago I started a discussion of “the pivot point” — the moment when we give in to our cravings and dive for the drugs or the booze. I emphasized a few things about this event, many of which resonated with readers’ experiences — in fact many of which came from readers:
-it can begin with a change in your internal dialogue, like my humming to myself in the rat lab, when you already know, without full consciousness, that you’re going to do it
-at the final moment, it feels like you are throwing off control, not just surrender but also triumph
-there is often a feeling of great relief, abandon, or escape from suffocating self-control — one reader called it the sense of free fall
We then discussed the pivot point in more detail, getting into the psychology of ego fatigue and the underlying brain dynamics: the weakening of the will as the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) runs out of fuel, and the final snapping of the branch. The dialogue concluded with the notion of an 11th commandment: Avoid Temptation. Because you can’t inhibit your impulses, actively, for a very long time. Your brain can’t take the strain.
In this post I want to go a step further and explore the relief that comes at the pivot point. There is still an untapped mystery here. Sure, you’ve been craving, and now you allow yourself to get the thing you’ve been craving. Dopamine feels like desperate desire when the goal is out of reach. But it feels like a headlong rush when you’re suddenly “allowed” to go get it. That’s a part of the relief.
Yet there’s a lot more to it. During periods of self-restraint, there can be an ongoing struggle that often takes the form of an internal dialogue: Don’t do it. No, just stop. But it would be so nice… Stop thinking about it. But I want… Shut up! Just stop! And it can get quite a bit more vicious than that: Stop, you self-indulgent baby. But it’s just one last time. That’s what you always say, you hopeless cretin. So? Everyone’s got their problems. You don’t deserve sympathy. But I’m so depressed… No wonder you disgust people. Etc, etc. If you’ve ever heard a (usually unspoken) dialogue like this, going on in your head, then you’ve probably gotten to the point of saying “Fuck it.” And you know that the relief you get is not only from the drug/drink, or the anticipation of the drug/drink. It’s also the blissful shutting off of that nasty voice of self-rebuke.
Think about it this way: When are you more likely to yell at your kid? When she is playing safely in the playground, or when she’s wandering out into the street? When your kid is approaching an oncoming truck, or a cliff edge, is when you lose it and scream: Stop! Go back! I told you NEVER to do that!
So what’s going on in the brain during this state? Picture your ACC, sitting near the top of the brain, trying to keep control, but finding it slipping, slipping. Two floors down there’s the amygdala, the organ of emotional colouring. As your ACC starts losing it, your amygdala begins to panic. Not only because of the longterm suffering you’re about to contract, but also because the internal “parent-like” voice is getting more and more harsh, nasty, and punitive.
With the ACC losing control and the amygdala responding with waves of anxiety, the two voices in your head, the childish self and the scolding parent, become more desperate, and more desperately at odds with each other. There is no consensus on where internal voices are generated in the brain, but we do know that anger is associated with the left prefrontal cortex (PFC) and fear with the right. The left PFC, being involved in planning, logic, and making sense, has also been associated with moral judgment. The right PFC is more “childish” — it develops rapidly in infancy, before the left — and it’s more closely connected with raw emotion. In fact, some neuroscientists claim that an important job of the left PFC is to regulate the right. That often means inhibiting impulses. So now you’re losing control, the amygdala is blaring anxiety, and the “childish” right hemisphere is being suffocated by the moral authority of the left. This is no picnic. It’s a major family argument in the privacy of your own brain!
And then comes the pivot point. The ACC is finally too “fatigued” to keep controlling impulses. So here’s what I think happens next:
Without the ACC to help keep the ship on course, the left-based punitive “voice” loses its authority. The right PFC is suddenly free to take the emotional path of least resistance. Left-hemisphere reasoning now switches over to become allied with its old friend, the ventral striatum (the engine of goal-pursuit), which has silently toppled the ACC in terms of cortical supremacy. In fact the whole frontal brain becomes unified behind one exalted goal: LET’S GET HIGH. And the left PFC does its part by planning (its specialty) — how to get it, how to pay for it, how to hide it. The amygdala is suddenly passing along waves of excitement rather than anxiety, and you are cruising, rudderless, in a tide of pure intention.
This kind of brain modelling needs to be verified by research, and we’re just starting to acquire the tools to go there. For example, recent research (in a related model) shows that, when the inner voice of restraint is coming from brain regions that represent other people (not oneself), we stop listening, and we stop acting responsibly.
So there it is: a (speculative) brain-based model of the relief that comes from escaping self-restraint. But I’m not recommending it! (Don’t try this at home, kids.) That relief is real, both psychologically and neurologically, but it is a temporary flash of positive emotion at the start of a long dive into negative emotion. This is part of the siren song, the fool’s gold, of substance use. It doesn’t last long, and it leaves you empty and gasping when it’s gone.
I know this post is a little dense. I wanted to get these ideas down before leaving for the US book tour — in less than two days. But please post your comments or questions, I’ll check in while I’m on the road, and I hope to unpack some of these themes in the near future.
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