Understanding Addiction

The relationship between addiction and emotional anguish — primarily anxiety and depression — is well known. When we look for root causes of addiction, we inevitably ask why so many people are suffering. Here I reflect a bit, and link to a mind-blowing video, on suffering and evolution. Why is it so hard? Why is […] (Read the rest.)

…by Hanna Pickard… Hanna is one of several addiction researchers who wrote commentaries about my book and my theory of addiction. Here she explains how we can view addiction as guided by choice without the extra baggage of blame, shame, and stigma. Following are segments of her revised commentary, which can be seen in full […] (Read the rest.)

…by Matt Robert… We interrupt this broadcast for an important announcement from the fake news channel.  If you haven’t already heard, you are a worthless piece of shit who doesn’t have any business having a happy life, so you should just give up, say fuck it and use. You should just give up and settle […] (Read the rest.)

As neuroscience explodes with new ideas, new technologies, and new findings, ordinary people have a hard time absorbing the information that emerges. We are learning more details about networks in the cortex responsible for different kinds of thinking, reflecting, observing, and we know about regions lying beneath the cortex responsible for emotion and motivation. What […] (Read the rest.)

I’ve written about the benefits of stretching your sense of yourself outward, freeing it from the repetitive, stagnant “now” of addiction, extending it all the way from a distant but familiar past to a wished-for future. But how can we turn this abstract idea into an exercise, a therapeutic method, for recovery, for whatever you […] (Read the rest.)