·
Causes of Addiction:
1.
Any addiction occurs because that activity
releases dopamine in our brain cells, which causes in us a sensation of happiness.
This dopamine is responsible for any motivation of doing work, if dopamine is
completely removed from our body, we wouldn’t even be able to eat our food
which is kept in front of us, just because we lack motivation.
So, when one tries to resist an activity that causes addiction, the
amount of dopamine that our brain was previously getting from that activity is
stopped, as a result, our brain retaliates causing in us cravings.
2.
So, even if one consciously tries to resist
addiction, his subconscious mind causes in us cravings for that activity from
time to time in different forms, this makes it very difficult to leave an
activity.
·
How to overcome addiction?
1.
Period of Subconscious effect (21 days): To
changes the neural connections we must actively resist the activity, in
whatever ways possible.
2.
Goal: Choose a goal why do you want to leave the
habit. Our body is very lazy, it always wants to maintain stability, changing a
habit involves thousands of changes in the body, which body doesn’t want to do unnecessarily;
you have to thus give it enough reasons to consider that decision. Without a
proper goal, it’s impossible to leave an addiction
3.
Factors
involved in Addiction:
i. Trigger:
Any environment, or situation or time that particularly incites you to do the
activity of addiction
ii. Pre-Requisites:
Things that are required to complete your activity of addiction, in case of smoking it is the cigarette itself
4.
How to deal with factors of Addiction?
i. Associate
that trigger with some other activity, for e.g., let's say hanging out with
friends who smoke cigarette motivates you to smoke a cigarette, stop hanging
out with them, not for much long but continuous 21 Days. Or be stubborn about
not doing that continuous activity for 21 days at whatever cost.
ii. Increase
the cost of pre-requisites, let’s say you have an addiction to smoking, and
there is a shop, just out of your place. Make yourself a pledge that even if you
buy a cigarette, you will buy it from a shop which is at least 2 km away from
your place and that too just one, not a full packet of it. Why? Because this
increases the cost of activity, and our lazy brain will try resisting activities
that need hard work.
iii. Try
giving your brain some other source of dopamine, do or eat anything that makes
you happy except that activity, eat chocolates, do some dance, play some music,
or even reading a book, try doing anything but that activity for continuous 21
days.
