We Are Thinking About Addiction All Wrong

When it comes to mental illness and addiction, we all tend to have some preconceptions and prejudices that are inherently there.

Did you know however that a lot of those biases are not based on fact and in reality we have been thinking about addiction all wrong for years?

Watch the video below to better understand how we can change our thinking on addiction today.

Thinking, Fast and Slow

In the highly anticipated book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical.

Daniel Kahneman, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his seminal work in psychology that challenged the rational model of judgment and decision making, is one of our most important thinkers. His ideas have had a profound and widely regarded impact on many fields—including economics, medicine, and politics

Environment as a Driving Factor

Our environment has a very strong influence on who we are, how we think, and how we behave. This may seem like common sense, but it's not something we really stop to think about often. Who is more likely to be involved in a violent gang, someone growing up in an affluent suburb, a rural area, or inner city Chicago? The answer is obvious. While a case can be made that this or that person naturally has some violent tendencies, gang membership is common (and often necessary for survival) in the inner city, while we'd be hard pressed to find a violent gang member living in a rural area or affluent suburb.

We can see this in physical characteristics where weight tends to be similar among friend groups and social circles with individuals losing or gaining weight based on the region of the country and friend group they associate with (as an interesting aside, this also translates to pets of individuals).

Mental health and addiction are very similar. We already know that addiction and mental health issues "run in families." The mistake often made here is that this then points to a genetic link being the primary contributing factor. This misattribution of genetics as the causal link goes back to the eugenics movement and the belief that people were poor and ignorant because they were born that way.

In much of the original research published around eugenics, researchers would point to a poor individual and then show how their family had been poor going back generations, citing this as evidence that is was a fixed genetic trait. While the idea sounds silly and unethical today, that logic has continued to the present in our views of addiction and mental health in slightly shifted form. If this subject is of interest to you, we recommend the book DNA Is Not Destiny as further reading into this history.

Below are three pieces of content that further explore the research around the importance of environment in addiction.

Article: Bruce Alexander's original research on Rat Park.

Article: The Impact of Adverse Childood Experiences

One last note before we end this section, while an individual's environment has a strong impact on their behavior, it is still one of many factors. Genetics, life experience, access to resources, and even expectation all affect one's behavior in complex ways that are unique to each individual. This is why it is not uncommon to see twins growing up in an alcoholic home where one twin becomes an alcoholic and the other never drinks at all. While it's more likely that both twins will become alcoholics due to their family upbringing, this will not necessarily be the case.

In this short research article, we see how one's expectations affect our behavior regardless of whether or not we're drinking Kool-aid or alcohol.

Loss of Control Drinking Experiment-page-001

Understanding Causal Factors in Addiction & Behavioral Health