Reinterpretation and remediation of Addiction

How to overcome any Addiction? Of any type? In order to find the answer we need to understand what an addiction is.

Basically when we consciously start doing something on regular basis, it transforms into our habits. Addiction is a habit out of your control .now this transformation greatly depends on the nature of the things we are doing, what does we think nature is? In this case nature means, does it gives us pleasure? Pain? Or does it cause irritation? the nature of the act decides whether it become a habit sooner or later. basically things that gives us pleasure requiring minimum effort, are more likely to become a habit , much faster than things that take a lot of effort and give less to zero pleasure. Let’s divide it into short term happiness and long term happiness, short term happiness is achieved by doing things that gives us short burst of pleasure and happiness, like a joke, hanging out with friends, having a lover, watching TV , comedy on YouTube, eating , drinking, smoking , masturbation, lazing around , Face-booking, Instagram, and much more.

So do we need to avoid them? No, because we need relaxation, we can’t entirely avoid them , instead we can keep a check on them , focus on the word relaxation and use the amount of short term pleasure needed to relax yourselves , but don’t start abusing them because they are too easy to abuse , we all want to be a winner , so instead of short term pleasure , focus on long term pleasure , choose hard things in your life, because at the end ,the pain , struggle , unknowingly will change your life completely ,and understanding this also helps to keep us away from depression , which is basically a lack of understanding , a common example is the theory people called true love , in which a person make there partner the prime source pleasure, by spending time with that person and wanting to spend all the time, somehow people become addict to their partner , and when they cut off from that endless supply of pleasure they try to fill that vacuum of pleasure with another short term pleasure , and at the same place , people who see relation as only one aspect of their lives and are focused , take very less time to move on . You might be thinking, why doesn’t our brain warn us? Well, because we are its owner, it works for us, its job is to process anything we are introducing in the system. second reason why it’s hard to undo an addiction is that we usually deny their existence , not only to others but to ourselves, here is an example , let suppose I strongly maintains that I hate drinking, but once I went to a club and actually enjoyed it, but consciously I will still believe on a high level that I hate drinking , but whenever I am asked by my friends to do so , all I need is a little bit convincing , it happens because subconsciously that one memory is attached to happiness , so consciously I might believe that I didn’t want to go , but I went , and to explain that I will most probably blame on others . I am not anybody slave, I did that because of the happy association of short term pleasure. Third, lack of understanding which leads us to think that we are a victim, and the worst about it is the feeling that it has now become a part of our life which is unchangeable, it happens because we don’t understand how it works, and the truth is that it’s just a routine which we have built. But because there is nobody to tell us that we are getting forced by our own brain for the dose of pleasure, we think there is no solution, if there wasn’t any solution then how come so many people have quit their addiction. let’s take an example to understand this , suppose I had a breakup with my partner and after trying a lot I am unable to move on and for that reason I start convincing myself that may be she is the one, and the thing which I don’t understand is that I only control one part of my brain : the conscious and it knows and understand that the relation is over, but the other two parts are out of my control, and they have their own place and existence, so to overcome any addiction all we need to do is to focus on new routine and to make a new timetable and wait for our subconscious and unconscious brain and our body in case its physical, to make the necessary adjustments, it takes 20–28 days to build a habit, so whatever you want to overcome, just leave it for a month, and it is also true that we can’t quit any addiction until we work for it and convey our own brain that you are not completely quitting them You are just taking a break from them for a month , it will be hard , but after quitting your addiction , you will experience a emptiness , and now you can replace , your so called addiction by other habits , and try to keep yourself busy because most of the addiction take place when we have free time to ourselves, instead of sitting idle , go out and busy yourself in your hobbies , built new skills .

Try to implement order, discipline in your life, try to introduce moderation in life, we all need fun, relation, friends in our life, but they should be done by choice and not by any random selection, because extremes of anything is harmful, so it must be avoided for better mental and physical health, and make yourselves understand that the idea of fun comes with a responsibility of self -control.

In this blog, I was talking about our physical and mental addiction. So if you are addicted to any type of chemical drug, contact to a doctor.

– Naman Bhatnagar

Sources*- www.who.int , www.un.org , (PAHO) Pan American Health Organization , (ICRC) INTERNATIONAL COMNITE OF THE RED CROSS .