Amber Hollingsworth maps how addiction rewires the brain's decision-making. The survival and emotional layers overpower the thinking cortex, while damage to the anterior cingulate and orbitofrontal cortex weakens conflict monitoring and self-control. The result: stronger drive circuits, weaker brakes, and a brain that overvalues the substance and ignores everything else.
Chapters
Okay, so now that we've talked about the issue on a microscopic neurochemical level, let's back up and talk about it on a slightly bigger, more brain part function level. Now, the simplest way I know how to explain it to you is to talk about the fact that you have three major parts to your brain. You have in the core, in the very center, down by your spinal cord, you have the part of your brain that keeps you alive, like makes your heart beat, makes you breathe and all that kind of stuff. And it happens automatically. There's no consciousness, thought there. There are some reflexes that live there, like survival reflexes, but it's not cognition, choice based. The next part of your brain. In mammals, we have this emotional part of our brain called the limbic system, and it's sort of the next layer over top of that basic automatic part. It's what allows us to connect to one another, to bond, and to have all those emotional responses to things. And then lastly, humans have this big front part of the brain called your cerebral cortex, and that's where the thinking part occurs. Now, I want you to think about each of those three brain parts and understand that they have different power levels. Okay? So the survival part is the strongest naturally because it's got to keep you alive. The emotional part is the second strongest naturally because it keeps you connected and engaged. And if you're a human, that's a really important part of your survival. So. So it has the next strongest level of power. And lastly is the thinking part of your brain, which is really big in humans and allows us to do all of that critical thinking and decision making. But it is literally the weakest part of your brain. Now, normally the automatic part, it just happens on autopilot, and it's all cool. And the emotional part, if you keep yourself emotionally regulated, it's normalized out. And once when those two parts of your brain are just rocking along and everything's smooth, then the thinking part of your brain works really good. If you get really upset or triggered by something, then the emotional part takes over and it overrides the thinking part. If the survival part of your brain gets upset or triggered, it will override the emotional and the thinking part. Well, guess where addiction lives. It lives down there in the deep survival part of your brain, which is why you'll find yourself doing things that override your judgment and your thinking and mess up your relationships. Let's look at that even a little bit closer. There's a part of your brain called the anterior cingulate cortex, and that part of your brain is responsible for conflict monitoring, self monitoring, inhibition and goal directed behavior, appreciation and valuation of social cues, emotional processes and expected pain. Now, addiction causes damage to this part of your brain, which is why when you're in active addiction, you either have the inflexibility or the inability in some cases to respond to errors from your past. And that's just a fancy way of saying you don't learn from past mistakes because this part of the brain is damaged. You have an inability to appropriately evaluate reward versus consequence. And part of that is because of all that dopamine. You have the tendency to overvalue the possible reward for the addictive behavior and undervalue all the other possible rewards that you could get from other things. Like for example, drugs versus money. You overvalue the drug and undervalue the money. When if you could access your thinking brain and you're like, oh my gosh, look how much money I'm spending. You see that it doesn't really make much sense, but that part of the brain isn't working properly. It'll also cause you to have a deficit in social responding. Basically, it's a decreased awareness of social cues. All this basically culminates into increased impulsiveness, perseverance. It's like, I need to get the substance. It's like a one track thinking. And that's pretty much that obsessive part of your brain. It's eventually, it's almost all that you can think about. Now the other part of your brain that has some significant problems when it comes to addiction is your orbital frontal cortex. Now, damage to this part of the brain results in a loss of crucial behavioral guidance, decreased self regulation abilities, more inability to properly assign value and rewards, and ultimately leads to a tendency to seek the small immediate reward instead of the much bigger and longer lasting reward that can come in the future. Now I know that was a lot of fancy brain talk, but basically, just if you walk away with nothing else, walk away with this. It affects your ability to properly evaluate situations and consequences, and it negatively affects your ability to properly predict possible rewards and or consequences. And lastly, you lose more and more ability to regulate yourself and appropriately respond to social situations. Now I think after learning all that brain science, the picture of how addiction works is probably coming together for you. Ultimately, addiction turns the volume up on the go part of your brain and turns the volume way down on the brakes or stop part of your brain.
