Despite the “Just Say No” antidrug sentiments voiced by former First Lady Nancy Reagan in the 1980s, it’s not that simple for addicts. They can’t just say no, at least not without help. It’s clear that as a species we are rewiring our brains, making ourselves vulnerable to addictive behaviors at an ever-faster pace and in an ever-widening range of ways. The repercussions extend to everyone on the planet.
Though we don’t have a fix yet on the number of people who meet the criteria for technology addiction, we get a hint of how extensive the problem could be by looking at how many of us already actively wrestle with other toxic compulsions that negatively affect our health and lives. As I pointed out in my previous book Recover to Live, the following well-documented statistics for the United States are stark and revealing:
• 17 million alcoholics
• 19.9 million drug abusers
• 4 million with eating disorders
• 10 million problem gamblers
• 12 million with sexual compulsions
• 43 million cigarette smokers
To complete the picture, we must add in those who also admit to being in recovery from an addiction. At least 10 percent of US adults aged eighteen and older are recovering from drug and alcohol abuse, according to the results of an October 2012 survey by The Partnership at Drugfree.org. Add in those folks recovering from sexual compulsions, gambling addiction, smoking, and food-related issues, and we’re probably talking about one in five of all adults, maybe even one in four.
Has addiction become the new normal? I don’t know, but we do seem to have become a world of addicts. The toxic compulsions affecting so many people in the United States can be found spreading like a metastatic cancer to practically every culture on earth. To repeat, it’s not a crisis of moral weakness and lax discipline. It’s a brain disease. Medical science has now conclusively proven that.
Having this disease doesn’t necessarily mean the end of your quality of life. As the history of drug and alcohol treatment and recovery demonstrates, people can and do recover—and do so magnificently—emerging from the ordeal far stronger and better prepared for life’s many and varied challenges. The ways they do this offer a recovery plan for humanity itself, a plan outlined in the ten lessons in these pages.
TAKE ME TO YOUR ADDICT
While conducting interviews for Recover to Live, several treatment experts emphasized how our culture still tries to overlook addicts’ contributions to society and the common good. Stigmatized and marginalized, people in recovery from toxic compulsions are too often defined by their problems and not by their accomplishments, such as mastery of the life skills necessary to remain in recovery—a feat made even more remarkable because it occurs within that more is better cultural conditioning and overreliance on brain-altering technologies.
What can any one of us, regardless of culture or upbringing, learn from people in recovery from addiction? This book reveals the often inspiring and amazing gifts that addicts must summon and master to maintain the recovery life. But these gifts are usually overlooked by society because of the stigma still attached to the addiction itself.
If you are a non-addict, or “normie,” you may be asking, Where does addiction lead except to jail, a rehab center or hospital, the gutter, or an early grave, right? Not so fast. Consider what it takes to be a successful addict. You’ve got to function halfway decently to keep feeding your addiction. You need to summon the inner resources to survive one of the most punishing and treatment-resistant brain diseases known to man, and you must manage to survive long enough to get into recovery and become a productive citizen again.
Addiction is a full-time job that requires a lot of overtime. You’re an addict all day, every day, evenings, weekends, and holidays. If your addiction is to illegal drugs, your job is even harder because you need to stay out of jail so you can continue to feed your addiction. To constantly hunt down the drugs and get the money necessary to purchase the drugs, and to do this without losing your freedom, takes a lot of focus and skill. Believe it or not, these skills can become genuine assets when applied to pursuing a healthy lifestyle.
Even if your addiction is to something legal, such as alcohol or the human need for food or sex, feeding that compulsion requires the skill to prevent the rest of the world from knowing about the world you inhabit. So you hide and cover up, make constant excuses, and manipulate other people. To be a successful addict you have to work at it like your life depends on it. And often it does.
People recovering from toxic compulsions confront and surmount enormous traumas and challenges in their lives, much like cancer survivors or disaster survivors. And they have more than just their war stories to give us. They’ve mastered coping and wellness skills we all can strive to develop for healthier and happier lives of our own.
Moreover, many personality traits of addicts are the very qualities we admire and need in our leaders. This isn’t just a random theory or an addict’s wishful thinking, nor is it based on simply reviewing the long list of addicts throughout history who have had extraordinary lives and monumental achievements. In fact, a growing body of neuroscience research into the dopamine-using circuitry of the brain supports the contention that there is something special about the addict’s mental makeup.
“What we seek in leaders is often the same kind of personality type that is found in addicts, whether they are dependent on gambling, alcohol, sex, or drugs,” observed Dr. David J. Linden, a professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, writing in 2011 for the New York Times. “How can this be? We typically see addicts as weak-willed losers, while chief executives and entrepreneurs are the people with discipline and fortitude. To understand this apparent contradiction we need to look under the hood of the brain . . . the risk-taking, novelty-seeking, and obsessive personality traits often found in addicts can be harnessed to make them very effective in the workplace. For many leaders, it’s not the case that they succeed in spite of their addiction; rather, the same brain wiring and chemistry that make them addicts also confer on them behavioral traits that serve them well.”
This idea of beneficial traits lurking in what otherwise looks like unbridled misery is gaining a research foothold in other fields of mental disorders. An October 2012 study in the Journal of Psychiatric Research found that creativity is “closely entwined with mental illness.”2
It’s never been a secret in the creative professions that, as a group, they are more likely to suffer from the full range of psychiatric disorders, including addiction, compared to people in other less creative professions. Creatives have felt or seen the flameouts firsthand. But what is new is a growing professional psychiatric acceptance that these disorders “should be viewed in a new light and that certain traits might be beneficial or desirable,” noted Dr. Simon Kyaga, in an interview with the BBC. He and five Swedish colleagues at the Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Karolinska Institute of Stockholm surveyed more than 1.1 million people, evaluating their psychiatric diagnoses and occupational data over a forty-year period, and found definite evidence of that link between creativity and mental disorders. “If one takes the view that certain phenomena associated with the patient’s illness are beneficial, it opens the way for a new approach to treatment,” said Dr. Kyaga. This would be a big step forward from the traditional black-and-white view of these diseases, meaning we can therefore “endeavor to treat the patient by removing everything regarded as morbid.”
While we shouldn’t romanticize people with mental disorders any more than we should people burdened with toxic compulsions, it’s now possible to see the potential benefits of these afflictions without,
