I spent many years as an addict. I was pathetically addicted to alcohol between the ages of 18 and 32. It took me a long time to acknowledge the fact, though – to realise that the act of getting drunk delighted and obsessed me to a degree that set me apart from most of my friends and colleagues. My doctor tells me I’m still an addict. I’m not exactly happy to wear that label after spending such a long time avoiding so much as a sip of alcohol, but the evidence is compelling. Since giving up drinking, my addictive desires have attached themselves to one thing, person or experience after another. I can’t swallow a Nurofen Plus for a headache without hoping that I’ll enjoy a little codeine buzz. I can obsess for ten minutes in front of a display of confectionery in a newsagent’s. And my CD-buying habit has nearly bankrupted me. Trivial stuff compared with my drinking, but my over-reactions to these stimulations don’t feel normal, exactly.
Perhaps the crucial feature of addiction is the progressive replacement of people by things. That deceptively simple statement is a brilliant insight, though I can’t claim credit for it. It comes from Craig Nakken, author of a bestselling book called The Addictive Personality, who argues that addicts form primary relationships with objects and events, not with people.
He writes: ‘Normally, we manipulate objects for our own pleasure, to make life easier. Addicts slowly transfer this style of relating to objects to their interactions with people, treating them as one-dimensional objects to manipulate as well.’
What begins as an attempt to find emotional fulfilment ends up turning in on itself. Why? Because the addict comes to judge other people simply in terms of how useful they are in delivering a fix. And, at some stage, everybody lets you down. Therefore the addict concludes that objects are more dependable than people. Objects have no wants or needs. ‘In a relationship with an object the addict can always come first,’ says Nakken.2
I felt a shiver of recognition when I first read those words. But it wasn’t just my own behaviour that came to mind, or that of people whom society can conveniently label ‘addicts’. This may come across as a presumptuous thing to say, but over the last decade I’ve been struck by the way friends and colleagues, most of them psychologically far healthier than me, have begun to display aspects of the process Nakken describes. Lifestyle accessories exert an ever greater power over them, disrupting relationships, nurturing obsessions and – as I’ve noticed in the office – dominating conversation.
Does that mean that the people around me are turning into addicts? That’s never an easy question to answer, because ‘addict’ is such a loaded term. It’s a good word to describe people whose problems are obviously out of control, as mine were, but it has to be used carefully. Not only does it carry misleading overtones of disease, but it also implies that there’s a clear dividing line between ‘addicts’ and ‘non-addicts’. That’s not true. In my experience, addiction is something that people do – to themselves and other people – rather than something that just happens to them; it’s not like developing cancer.
Addiction is easier to understand as a concept if we focus on clearly observable behaviour – that is, the search for a fix and its consequences. Almost anyone can indulge in addictive behaviour, but some of us are more prone to it than others, for reasons that scientists don’t fully understand.
In fact, let’s get this point out of the way right at the beginning of this book. In the past couple of decades, countless scientific studies have attempted to pinpoint what it is about either the brains or the upbringings of addicts that leads them to adopt self-destructive lifestyles. They have failed to do so.
No one is immune from developing addictive behaviour. If there’s a history of addiction in your family, you’re more at risk. Likewise, if you have an impulsive personality – that is, score highly for ‘impulsivity’ in psychological tests – you’re more likely to do something impulsive, such as try a new drug or drink that fatal last glass of whisky before jumping into your car. Indeed, a fashionable term for various addictions is ‘impulse control disorders’.3
For me these findings fall into the ‘No shit, Sherlock’ category of scientific discoveries. They tell us nothing very surprising. The consensus at the moment is that addiction seems to be the product of genetic inheritance and environment. In other words, the nature versus nurture question is no closer to being settled in this area of human biology than it is in any other. To repeat: we’re all at risk. That’s why the contents of this book apply to everyone, not just coke-snorting hedge fund managers, bulimic receptionists and absent fathers glued to World of Warcraft.
Psychologists talk about addictive behaviours in the plural, recognising the many different impulses that tempt people. What these behaviours tend to have in common is the replacement of people by things and events. We all develop these habits to a certain degree; the people we call addicts are those people who can’t or won’t give them up even when they cause harm to themselves and others. Again, that’s a loose definition, fuzzy at the edges. Never mind; addiction isn’t an easy phenomenon to pin down.
This isn’t to deny that addictive behaviour has important consequences for the brain. It does. Indeed, it can partly be explained by the overstimulation of the brain’s fearsomely complex reward circuitry.
Different parts of the human brain govern what some scientists call the Stop and Go impulses. More primitive sections of the brain – parts that we share with other animals – tell us to consume as much as possible in order to increase our chances of survival. They say: Go. More highly developed parts of the brain, capable of reasoning and not found in other animals, hold up a Stop sign when we’re consuming too much of something for our own good. Classic addicts keep ignoring the Stop instruction, despite the high cost to themselves and others. They require instant gratification, whatever the consequences. Indeed, they’ll often seize any opportunity to indulge in addictive behaviour even when there’s no real gratification to be extracted from it. We’ll discuss this puzzling paradox later.
The Stop and Go imagery helps us understand the growing appeal of the fix. As technologies develop and converge, the speed of delivery increases. So does the speed of our expectations. We now live in a world filled with life-enhancing objects and substances that promise ever faster and more effective gratification. It’s as if everything that tumbles off a production line is stamped with the word Go.
Temptation peeks out at us from the strangest places. Who would have guessed, 40 years ago, that a piece of electronic office equipment – the personal computer – would morph into something so desirable that people would sacrifice huge chunks of their spare time (and income) in order to play with it? Or that modifications to a telephone would generate global excitement?
Changes to our appetites don’t come about by accident. The manager of your local Starbucks didn’t wake up one morning and think: ‘I know what would brighten up my customers’ afternoons – an ice-blended cappuccino!’ As we’ll see, the Frappuccino was invented when Starbucks employed food technology to solve a specific business challenge. As a result, hundreds of thousands of their customers (including me) developed a near-obsessive relationship with something they had previously lived happily without.
The pace of technological change means we need to revise our concept of addiction. Our cultural history provides us with images of stereotypical addicts, some of them dating back centuries: the grinning harridan dropping her baby down a staircase in Hogarth’s Gin Lane; the American Indians crazed with ‘firewater’; the hollow-eyed Chinese sailor propped against the wall of an opium den; the junkie shivering in an alleyway surrounded by needles. Also, anyone who lives in a city is used to the sight of spectacular drunks and morbidly obese people whose addictions are so grotesquely out of control that we avert our eyes.
These are powerful images, but if we pay too much attention to them then we can end up with a dangerous sense of immunity. We overlook our own eagerness to self-administer fixes, those sensory experiences that temporarily lift the mood while subtly detaching us from traditional human relationships. The fix can take any number of forms. Some toy very obviously with the chemistry of the brain. Anyone with a rolled banknote up their nose knows that