Making Addiction Manageable
The CRAVE Cycle: The Echo Stage
Imagine a time when you are able to eat half a donut and move on with the rest of your day. It probably feels like a dream, right? When you participate in a habit the reward from the habit can be very stimulating and exciting. Online shopping, doing drugs, and eating sweets all provide high stimulus that make your brain very excited. Your dopamine peaks. After the behavior is completed our dopamine dips far below baseline. When dopamine falls below baseline you start to feel the Echo.
The CRAVE Cycle is a powerful habit model that has been adapted from common habit frameworks to include the influence of super stimulating behaviors.
This is the fifth and final blog post in the CRAVE cycle series by Mito Coaching.
You’re standing at the edge of a canyon, you whisper and hear nothing. You then decide to take a deep breath and scream at the top of your lungs. You smile as the sound bounces off the canyon and you hear your voice calling back to you, quieter and quieter with each echo. The habit Echo is most noticeable with high stimulus behaviors, a loud yell. It’s very hard to stop yourself from eating a second donut, or playing another round of Fortnite. When you participate in a high stimulus behavior it results in a similar reaction to when you shout really loudly in a cave. There are echoes. Echoes are the same behavior occurring again and again because our brain does not want to be below dopamine baseline. It can be very painful and our brains are masters of relieving pain. Our brain relieves this pain by restarting the behavior, which brings our dopamine levels back up above baseline, but only momentarily.
The Start of Addiction
Similar to how an echo’s call becomes quieter and quieter, the reward for doing a can become less and less. The second win in Fortnite doesn’t feel like the first. The second bong hit doesn’t hit as hard as the first. Porn gets increasingly boring and you search for more and more extreme alternatives. Getting the same level of satisfaction that you got the first time becomes basically impossible.
When you spend long periods of time doing highly stimulating behaviors, your baseline dopamine begins to decrease. This increases the reward needed to go over the satisfaction line for you to gain any pleasure from the activity. it also means that other behaviors no longer satisfy you. Things like going to the gym, working on your business, and spending time with family will no longer get over the reward threshold for you to experience any satisfaction. Eventually, it gets to the point you no longer have interest in anything but super stimulating behavior, making your life dull and lifeless. This leads to anxiety, depression, and in extreme cases: suicide.
When dopamine baseline levels are decreased, your satisfaction line becomes harder to cross. Even something that can give you a huge spike of dopamine has a hard time getting over to satisfaction line. When nothing can get over the satisfaction line, addiction begins. Addiction is the result of high stimulus behaviors because they become the only thing that brings you any bit of pleasure. The rest of your life seems dull and disappointing in comparison. This is a condition called Anhedonia.
The bright side is that the effects are reversible. It does not take a pill, a wizard, or a god (although it can help).
“Habit is either the best of servants or the worst of masters.”
-Nathaniel Emmons
Making Addictions Easier
Create strong character association with good habits: When a habit is part of who you are, it becomes very easy for you to continue with a habit. Healthy and fit people workout, so working out is a daily habit. Writers write, so writing each day becomes a habit. You become what you believe you are and your habits associate strongly with who you are. Even if you’re not yet healthy and fit, knowing that is the end goal makes habit decisions easier.
Accept bad habits: Your bad habits were created with good intentions. Binge eating keeps you out of the dark corners of your mind. Porn makes disappointment disappear. Your bad habits were formed to protect you from harsh things but they no longer serve you. You need to accept that these habits exist and were formed to help you. The allowing of the behaviors can help break their grip on you. This helps take away the shame and guilt that shackles you to the behavior.
Practice Mindfulness: You don’t need to meditate or spend an hour every morning doing breathing exercises. All the power to you if you can but sometimes that can be too large of an ask for your lifestyle. Mindfulness is the ability to stop for a second and understand what is going on around you and inside you.
When you feel disappointment, what is your go to habit? Is it alcohol? Porn? Working out? Calling a friend? If you can take a second to realize your habit response to that emotion then you can start seeing the pattern. If you like your response then there’s no work to do. If you don’t like your response then it’s time to change.
Talk to someone: Coach, Therapist, Friend, Family Member. Find someone who you trust and be willing to share what you are going through. This is particularly helpful with negative emotions and connections with behavior. Sharing your guilt with a friend will make the guilt disappear. This is what makes confession so powerful in the Catholic religion. I am not a religious individual but this practice is a very powerful one. Guilt exists when we do not share our emotions with others and becomes the root cause of negative thoughts and addiction. So find someone you trust and share your losses as much as your successes.
Be patient: Habits do not change overnight. It takes anywhere from 18 to 256 days to change a habit. That means you may have to put in direct effort into something for over 8 months before it becomes a part of who you are. Once you have the habit it will stick for a long time but it takes a lot of effort to get it off the ground.
Ending the Addiction Feedback Loop
Super stimulating activities give you the biggest pleasure hit of any other behavior. It also gives you the highest chance of becoming addicted.
Super stimulating activities have an emotional piece to them as well. When you are embarrassed by the behavior there is shame and guilt mixed in. Shame and guilt are very difficult and painful emotions. When you feel them, you want to relieve them. The best way to relieve them is by doing super stimulating behavior. This results in a negative feedback loop that causes you to continue doing the thing you are ashamed of.
When managing addiction it is important that you stop this negative feedback loop. Your shame and guilt can keep you attached to a behavior you are ready to quit. Accept that you are addicted and make small steps toward getting yourself out. Over time, those small steps will lead to major life changes.
