The brain doesn’t care how you please it, as long as you do.
As long as the levels of a certain substance get to the point where the brain feels truly pleased… Well that’s about that. So, needless to say, really, if you would find the same pleasure in eatin’ a bucket of popcorn as you do in riding a roller coaster, the brain wouldn’t care which of the two you’re doing.
I laughed my bum off a few days ago when I realized yet again, through a personal experience, that the brain really doesn’t care. It’s like a kid, really. I’m not trying to be cynical and say everything is strictly chemical. It’s probably not. But when you just sit and observe how chemical things send you from O to hero in a matter of minutes… Well… Yeah. And when you know that there are certain diseases which can make you go from joy to sorrow (for real) and from laughter to tears, in another matter of minutes. I mean, no, really… Ha!
The bigger the addiction, the bigger the pleasure, the harder they are to replace, of course.
Why can’t you have an addiction that won’t affect you when you lose the stimuli?
(This will be a long one, so bear with me).
Because, as I have previously explained, it’s in our nature to be addicted.
There might be addictive personalities, with certain chemical traits in their systems, but, bottom line is…
We are supposed to be addicted. That’s how we’re designed.
We’re even addicted to water. Through its definition, the body is addicted to things in order to keep its quality of being alive. So saying addiction is wrong is just as correct as saying breathing is wrong.
I lately started to believe that all things, except for death and illness (although they’re questionable too, as you can bring yer own death and so on) depend on our decision. What happens to you is your decision. If you decide to work or hunt so you don’t die, that’s your decision. If you drink water so you don’t die nor hurt, that’s your decision. And if you avoid pain in other fields, it’s still your decision, just as much as it is when you chose to take the pain for the advantages are worth it.
It’s hard, I know, to believe that everything is your decision, but I believe it is.
The only rule is… There are no rules. Ha! There’s no control. No, I haven’t discovered hot water, but I feel the need to write this down as most of us know it, but don’t apply it.
All you have control on is the present moment and not even that. As I have said before about the water pouring from my hand. That’s all you get.
Going back to addiction… To elaborate a bit, not that I’m the first one to do it, yet again…
You can’t replace addiction easily, that’s why it hurts. Some parameters have to be present, to replace one’s addiction. They do not need to be equal in form or characteristics of the stimuli you’re addicted to, but they have to be equal in the matter of pleasure intensity and type the addicted one gets from the stimuli.
The brain is often satisfied with being focused on a goal. Or obtaining a certain dose of a substance, regardless of how that happens.
What sometimes stops us from giving the brain a certain dosage of a substance are personal priorities. Such as the priority of avoiding pain, or the fact that it’s just not worth it when you draw the line.
Have you noticed that when someone you love dies, when you’re in love or when you’ve lost everything, nothing else matters? That should reveal yet again how powerful the brain is when it’s focused on only one thing. I’ve always believed that if you want to do something well, you should focus on that and only that (well maybe except for the basic needs pyramid thing) until you’ve completed it. It always works like charm.
When addictions aren’t chemically induced in artificial ways, they’re mostly created on pleasures you can’t easily get somewhere else. That’s regarding to what Allen Carr was wondering about the “20 crabs”. Now I’m not trying to vulgarise the subject, nor find the key to everything, jus’ tryin’ to shed some light.
The key words to addiction are: Habit and lack of painless control. If there’s no habit and you control it without pain, then it surely ain’t an addiction.
And now… There are artificial chemical substances which can activate certain substances, such as Prozac, and some may have an extreme brain power so they can fool themselves into believing they’re getting the pleasure somewhere else. And by that I come to the conclusion that addiction cannot be stopped without pain, unless you replace it.
I have recently found that there might, just might, be a possiblity for one to replace addiction with a boom, instead of another addiction. As in… You find the same pleasure somewhere else, but just once, not as a habit. That’s very interesting and I wonder to what extent it works and if it does so without other aids, as on a first thought it does seem to fool the brain. It perhaps works in the sense that you discover you can find the same pleasure elsewhere, with the same ease, so they cancel each other. Funny, huh?
Addiction is only created through habit and pleasure. Therefore, the earlier you break the habit, the easier it is to get rid of the addiction, even if you don’t replace the pleasure.
I mean… I love amusement parks, but I don’t feel the need to go to one every single day. And even if I’d like it, it’s not a habit. If it were, I might indeed become an adrenaline junkie.
In general, habit’s got a habit of transforming itself into addiction. And addiction appears only through habit. Any sort of habit. Pain however is directly proportional to the pleasure and the advantages obtained from the stimuli.
Also, if the stimuli isn’t unstable (like, par example, a human being), you’ll never feel pain whilst having the addiction. You’ll only feel it when you’ve lost it, obviously.
To conclude, I’d like to note two options, for decreasing the pain when having an unstable stimuli addiction:
1. You can embrace the pain and become imune to it (by accepting it), as TUZIO would say (although I’d say that if you become imune to the pain, the pleasure might not have the same intensity, as the two are extraordinary only in contrast, and, after all, we’re trying to escape pain, not get used to it, well some of us anyway lol).
2. You can embrace the craving and concentrate on the current advantages and pleasure, not on the pain.
I must note that one good key to the whole shabang is dettachment. Dettaching yourself into a fine observer. The body and the observer as two separate things, as liberatedself would put it – I think. The body who’s living it, into substances and all sorts of things, and the observer who’s just watching the whole thing and entering the body just when they desire to do so. That’s how you get a better perspective on everything…
So… Dettachment is key.
And an excellent article on how dopamine and addiction go together can be found here.
And another one here.
Hope I haven’t been too foggy today. 
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