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Addiction


Desire can, of course, be healthy. But what if desire takes over, and becomes compulsive, to leave us one-track minded and tunnel-visioned, and driven to distraction, perhaps even obsessed?

This website - and accompanying book - identifies stress - like "compulsive" desire - as a compulsive influence that leads us in an unhealthy direction - so we become "stuck in the wrong gear", whether in our mind, our relationships or our very self.

Addiction relates to the "stress force" of compulsive desire.

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Compulsive desire offers us only the most shallow and brief satisfaction: think of the novelty of a new toy that wears off. Very quickly we lose interest, and a new toy/ car/ other acquisition leaves us restless and in search of the next big excitement. This is exactly how compulsive desire lets us down again and again, this being a little tease concerned only with hooking us onto a string of latest fascinations (or "doses" of some addictive habit).

Here's the biological purpose to compulsive desire : it plays the basic function of keeping us hooked on things (or persons) that can give us a survival advantage (like money or status). Accordingly, this kind of desire is "housed" in a part of our brain - the limbic system - that's perfectly located for taking control of us even without our consciously knowing it.

Key to the workings of compulsive desire is the so-called mesolimbic dopamine system, that supplies the brain's pleasure centre, the nucleus accumbens (NAc), with a pleasure-giving brain chemical dopamine. Crucially, the pleasure and reward that's made available to us from this source comes only in return for our "scoring" whatever goals compulsive desire sets us, whether in terms of buying that latest branded item, perhaps, or - for a sufferer of drug addiction - taking the next dose of addictive chemical.

Yet when it comes to pleasure, the mesolimbic dopamine system is not the only biological source. Instead we can rely on the prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain that also supplies dopamine to the NAc "pleasure centre". It's thanks to this "guardian of creativity" that we have no need to be at the mercy of stress biology's manipulations and control-by-bribery.