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Great Expectations

innate needs met). That's what worrying does to us. And worrying, when it doesn't lead to solving a problem, leads to excessive, intense dreaming
and all the symptoms of exhaustion and loss of motivation.

Nonetheless, some people will say that, when they were prescribed Prozac and came out of their depression, they started to dream more. Non-depressed people do most of their dreaming in the last 30 minutes before waking up, and these are the dreams we most often remember. But, in depression, the intense dreaming occurs much earlier in the night (as the reliable sleep laboratory measurement of amounts and intensity of PGO waves fired off in depressed people has confirmed). So dreams aren't remembered, unless waking from a nightmare. As people come out of depression, the balance between REM sleep and non-REM sleep corrects itself and most dreaming again occurs just before waking in the morning. So, although people can recall more dreams when they're coming out of depression, it doesn't necessarily mean that they are dreaming more dreams. That is a misunderstanding.

Expectation and addiction

Now I want to concentrate on the connection between expectation and addiction. Two distinct neurochemical systems mediate motivation and reward: the opiate system, which is the heroin system; and the dopamine system, which is the cocaine system. The dopamine system generates motivation; it creates an appetite — you want to do something when you've got cocaine in you. The opiate system rewards us for satisfying biological urges, such as eating food or having sex. It is always triggered off when satisfying a biological urge.

These two pathways work beautifully together, and I've been testing out the implications of this on myself over recent months. I wanted to do this because anything I have learned about psychology over the last 25 years has come from studying the bits of my life that are not working, rather than the bits that are. So it is because I haven't been able to fully understand my own proneness to addiction that I've been fascinated by addiction all my life. As a young Irishman living and working within the Irish building community in London during the 60s, I belonged to a tribe that had a highly alcoholic culture. In those days, I would have met most of the criteria for alcoholic drinking. The two things that saved me from full-blown alcoholism were that I wanted to do something with my life, and I married an English woman who had little tolerance for so much drinking.

So addiction fascinates me. Here I am, 56 years of age, hopefully approaching the foothills of maturity, yet, although I can drink a half a bottle of wine two or three times a week and enjoy it, every so often I can still get caught up in a heavy drinking session. Moreover, these occasions are entirely predictable: weddings, funerals, a dinner party with some heavy-drinking friends. In that kind of ambience, despite my good intentions not to drink too much, I would sometimes end up with a hangover that would leave me out of sorts for days. Granted, this binge-drinking didn't stop me from doing my work, but it irritated the hell out of me. Why couldn't I understand it or deal with it more effectively?

Then, one day, I came across a description of alcohol-drinking behaviour in research rats, and found a clear connection between theirs and my own. Research findings show that the standard drinking behaviour in reasonably contented laboratory rats is as follows. They often have an alcoholic drink before dinner; they also take a drink when it's freely available to them before they retire to bed at night; and, every few weeks, they get together with their mates at the drinking fountain, and have a binge-drinking party. So, all the time that I had been reading sophisticated psychological explanations in textbooks as to why I end up inebriated after a wedding party, my behaviour was, in fact, no different from a rodent's!

It wasn't until I started thinking about expectations travelling up the dopamine pathway that I could see how the process worked. I soon found, once I got my mind around this insight, that it was actually easy to stop an addictive behaviour. And I believe that may be proved true for anyone whose brain is not too damaged. The only difficult part in overcoming an addiction is creating enough space inside oneself to receive the insight and give it emotional commitment — a strong expectation — because addiction hijacks the expectation circuitry, so it has to be captured back again using a different expectation. That's all it takes.

On the face of it, the fact that our brains encourage us to increase our intake of the very substance that's poisoning us, by giving us withdrawal symptoms if we don't, seems like a major design flaw. But the expectation circuitry has to work in this way, to keep our behaviour flexible. This is the mechanism by which we learn. Whenever we are motivated to master something new, the dopamine circuit is activated, and we experience pleasure. But when that new way of doing something is mastered and the new learning becomes unconscious, automatic (like riding a bike or driving a car), the pleasure dial has to be turned down so that the pleasure reward system can be kept ready to encourage us to make new efforts to challenge ourselves, or meet challenges, and keep our behaviour flexible. Without it, we would be stuck with a limited, fixed range of responses to the environment, which would keep us inappropriately locked into ineffective ways of dealing with life and unable to adapt in the face of changing circumstances.

Carrot and stick

In addiction, however, this mechanism is hijacked. It can be understood in terms of the carrot and the stick. A person who is not succeeding in getting needs met finds an artificial way to activate the dopamine motivation circuit (carrot) in the brain. When the hypothalamus and the amygdala send, in the form of withdrawal symptoms (stick), a signal to the anterior cingulate that more of the addictive substance or behaviour is expected, the person quickly becomes trapped in the delusion that that is what is needed. This is because the anterior cingulate has called up relevant past memories to try and make an evaluation of how important the signal is.

Because the most immediate memories concern past indulgence in the behaviour, the anterior cingulate uses its own supply of dopamine to add to the strength of these memories before they even reach consciousness. So addictive behaviour repeats with little or no conscious interference. Even if the anterior cingulate does involve consciousness, by passing on the signal to the frontal lobes, the signal has been given additional emotional saliency (by the adding of dopamine), thus reducing the choices available for the conscious mind to make.

Examining assumptions

If we want to stop an addiction (or make any other changes in our behaviour), we have to examine our assumptions first and realise that there is always a broader set of parameters that our subconscious circuitry is not allowing us to access. That requires discipline and a deliberate calming down of the emotional responses. In a calmed state, people in withdrawal from cigarettes, for example, can inhibit the additional emotional charges (of the pleasant memories and associations of smoking) put on by the anterior cingulate, and can choose to let all the other relevant data (the carcinogenic, body polluting, accelerated ageing, smelly facts about smoking) come to mind. They can also remind themselves that they can enjoy life much more when they are in control, rather than the poisonous, addictive drug they used to smoke. It is then easy to give up the smoking habit.

Dopamine, the motivational hormone, motivates behaviour to bring about something that is expected. Those who smoke expect to experience satisfaction, but it is temporary — and is more often a brief assuaging of the discomfort caused by expecting to smoke, rather than pleasurable in itself. Those who take illegal drugs feel motivated to take more of the stuff because they are not doing anything more rewarding with their lives at the time. But all the time they are being led by an illusion that something wonderful will happen, a state of frenzied expectation that never actually completes itself. When people have glass of wine after glass of wine at a social occasion, it is because one, two or any number of glasses of wine is never actually satisfying and so they continue until they reach their personal tolerance levels and the toxic side effects of the alcohol make them ill enough to stop. That is the huge illusion built into addiction: something wonderful or satisfying is about to happen! But the expectation is never fulfilled.

The reason we are blinded by this con trick is that, when the anterior cingulate calls up previous memories connected to the addiction, the further dose of 'cocaine' (dopamine) it adds to them means we are not recalling the feelings and experiences accurately but, rather, distorting, 'cocaine-soaked' memories. The psychological name for this is 'euphoric recall'. Heroin users call it 'chasing the dragon' — chasing something that never existed.

Any behaviour that gives pleasure has the potential to get out of control and become harmful. Shopping occasionally can be fun, but consumerism can turn people into mindless shopaholics, spending money they can't afford, buying things they don't need. The task of a psychotherapist or counsellor working with anxious, depressed, angry, greedy or addicted people is to help them calm down and replace their current expectations with more useful new ones that will address their needs more successfully. Cognitive therapists try to do this but focus too much on thinking: they do not get to the part of the brain where the action is — where emotionally charged anticipations narrow down options.

Referring to the diagram of the brain again, when the amygdala is highly active, as when we dream, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex — the observing self — is switched off. When we are wide awake and conscious, the amygdala switches off and the observing self is switched on. There is an inverse relationship. The amygdala has the power to switch off objective intelligence and trigger the process of emotional arousal, but, unless it is an instant, life or death matter, it doesn't have the emotional intelligence to instigate strong emotional signals by itself. That is done, as we saw, by the boss's secretary, the anterior cingulate. So here is the important point: with its partner in crime, the hypothalamus, which is parked alongside, the amygdala stores the associations about any addictive behaviour.

"We want our fix"

The hypothalamus is the vital little organ that maintains homoeostasis in all the major systems of the body and brain. It monitors appetites and works hand in glove with the amygdala. In a smoker, if the hypothalamus signals to the amygdala that nicotine levels have gone down, the amygdala exerts its influence by sending up a little signal to the boss's secretary, saying, "Get to work, we want nicotine". It does exactly the same, whether it wants a substance, such as food, water, sex, cocaine or alcohol or an action, for instance, getting angry. But at this stage the signal is weak because the amygdala can't make things happen on its own. All it can do is produce a small physiological withdrawal symptom, a teeny-weeny bit of arousal if giving up smoking, or an alcohol-withdrawal signal if trying to turn down a drink someone is offering. At this point the signal is unbelievably mild.

I know this because I decided to look at how these patterns operate in myself. I was shortly to be a guest at my nephew's wedding and, in Ireland, it is often expected that one will drink to excess at such an occasion. I thought to myself, "Now, Joe, before you go on this binge, which will upset you for days, let's take a look at it. If I'm right about the amygdala, the withdrawal symptoms must be very mild, and it's only the boss's secretary, drawing up memories of past Irish weddings and boozing — sprinkling them with big doses of 'cocaine' and urging your observing self to let go and get drunk."

Setting up expectations

So I simply said to myself, 'Well, if I want not to have a drink at this wedding party, I need to have an expectation within myself that not drinking will actually be more enjoyable than drinking." I reminded myself of what drinking does for me in that situation. I get an easy way to forget worries, in expectation that the drink will make something wonderful and significant happen — but that never does actually happen. That expectation is an illusion that is always just one more drink away. And that's the positive part of the drinking! When we drink to excess, we also get a progressive deactivation of our intelligence system: we reverse several millions of years of evolution if we let the amygdala's message through! Indeed, with the addictive impulse totally in control, we are reduced to having no more discriminatory power than a maggot, and wake up with a painful hangover that we bitterly resent.

So this was the negative expectation I set up of what would be likely to come from drinking. Not very desirable. But then I needed positive expectations of how wonderful it could be to be at that party and not take a drink. What a powerful sense of control I would have, to be there at the party and know that I am not going to allow the amygdala to switch on the compulsion to drink alcohol; to know that I can be totally in command of my senses; to know that I can choose what to focus on; to know that I can discriminate between conversations that are worth listening to or not; to know that I can choose to give somebody my attention or not. I thought about children at their birthday parties. Do they need cocaine or alcohol to enjoy themselves? Of course not! The human brain, the most intelligent, refined organ in the universe, so far as we know, doesn't need puny, crude manmade drugs to make it happy. It doesn't need this sledgehammer to overcome a little shyness and enjoy itself.

So, the answer to addiction is the same as for depression: revise expectations, understand how the mind-body system works and realise there is choice and volition. As I revised my expectations in this way, I realised this was something that would have been inconceivable to me half an hour earlier. This party, after all, was one of the big events of my extended family's history and not to join in the ritualised, alcoholic indulgence that accompanied such occasions was unusual, to say the least. But when I said to myself, "Joe, that's it! You are not going to take a drink today," one of the most fascinating things I've ever experienced occurred. My amygdala started acting up. It made my mouth go dry, my lips go thin. I realised it was giving me the symptoms of withdrawal — and the party hadn't even started yet.

"Wow!" I thought. "You clever little devil!"

And because I was looking at the situation from my observing self, I immediately thought, "If that's all you can do, you're pathetic." And then it went away in embarrassment. At that moment, I realised that there is no greater human happiness than to have volition. It is liberating to have the free will to choose how to respond in a situation, rather than to act mechanically from mindless, primitive conditioned patterns in our brain, no different from those of a rat or a maggot. A maggot has only eight dopamine-producing cells and, when four of them are knocked out, researchers have found that it will crawl right past a pile of its favourite, staple food of bacteria as if it didn't exist.

What I am talking about is something very different from willpower. Will power involves desiring something and desiring not to have it, both at the same time. Suppression of desire eventually leads to relapse. But if, every time an urge for a drink or a cigarette or even a positive thought about an addiction arises, we remind ourselves that one won't be enough and it is just a never to be fulfilled expectation that leads us to take the next one and to end up with a headache or be sick, the file that the boss’s secretary calls up will eventually contain that information, instead of expectations of pleasure. Then she will bin it straight away and not even send it to the boss. In other words, a desire no longer reaches consciousness at all.

Separating fact from fantasy

When we increase our ability to choose, we gain spare capacity. That is the essence of what it is to be human. We can, of course, do nothing without emotions. They fuel our every act. But we need to be in control of them, not dragged about in all directions by them. However, this does place a huge responsibility on us because, to liberate ourselves, we have to operate from the observing self. We need our conscious awareness to be in the driving seat, so that we can take a cool look at the fantasies that the boss's secretary generates from the information she receives from the hippocampus, liberally sprinkled with 'cocaine' to try and focus our attention on them.

This is the key insight: to realise that, moment by moment, we are being driven by a drug and, to be free, we must step back into the observing self and say, "No, I am not going to respond to this particular 'cocaine-driven' fantasy". For the human species to wake up from its 'cocaine-drive' fantasies, it must increase its volition.

Of course, this doesn't happen automatically. It takes discipline to draw out from the hippocampus more realistic expectations of how we want to be, and the things we want to do, and bring that process under our volition. But it is within our power to have our emotions serve us rather than dominate us. We can make good things happen when we choose to refine our expectations — our emotional responses — and thereby stop reacting to primitive emotions conditioned into us. And it is a lot easier than our conditioned, illusory expectations want us to realise.

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References

© Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell 2006

This article first appeared in Volume 11, No, 1 (2004) of the Human Givens journal.

JOE GRIFFIN is a psychologist and psychotherapist. He is co-founder with Ivan Tyrrell of the human givens approach.

> More information on the human givens approach can be found in the following book, by Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell

Human Givens: A new approach to emotional health and clear thinking

> You can find out more on the issues raised in this article at the following MindFields College workshops:

Brief therapy skills for stopping addictions

How to lift depression

Return to top

> More information on the human givens approach can be found in the following book, by Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell

Human Givens: A new approach to emotional health and clear thinking

> You can find out more on the issues raised in this article at the following MindFields College workshops:

Brief therapy skills for stopping addictions

How to lift depression

Return to top

> More information on the human givens approach can be found in the following book, by Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell

Human Givens: A new approach to emotional health and clear thinking

> You can find out more on the issues raised in this article at the following MindFields College workshops:

Brief therapy skills for stopping addictions

How to lift depression

Return to top

> More information on the human givens approach can be found in the following book, by Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell

Human Givens: A new approach to emotional health and clear thinking

> You can find out more on the issues raised in this article at the following MindFields College workshops:

Brief therapy skills for stopping addictions

How to lift depression

Return to top