Why Do We Get Addicted to Things?

It is hard to understand addiction unless you have experienced it.
- Ken Hensley

The word 'addiction' was coined from a Latin word 'addicere', that meant 'enslaved' or 'bound to'. To know the power of addiction, you have to ask someone who has tried to overcome it. Its effects are long-lasting and vigorous. It's not that every addiction is bad or detrimental for our health and well-being.

But even if it doesn't affect you health-wise, it is somehow going to dwindle either your bank balance or your perception towards happiness. People tend to opt for a particular thing or behave in a typical way when they are feeling low.

Some become glued to the television or video games, while others try to escape reality with alcohol or drugs. Some say (including me) that "I go shopping, or just read or start writing when I'm bummed out". These instances have become very common nowadays. Let's probe deeper, and understand why we love to do things that 'we love to do'.

But, before we realize, the thing or behavior which gives us an escape route becomes a habit, and then an addiction.

Since a long time, it was believed that only narcotics and alcohol could cause an addiction. But as neuroimaging techniques advanced, it was found that certain pleasure-giving acts like eating, shopping, gambling, playing video games, writing, etc., could also become addictions.

Unfortunately, we are left totally unaware of our advancement through these stages, because we don't start with the intention of developing an addiction, but unknowingly get stuck in the bait.

Whenever you experience any pleasure-giving activity, like graduating college, salary hike, promotion, delicious meal, romantic dinner, etc., the nerve cells release dopamine. When the nucleus accumbens becomes flooded with dopamine, the hippocampus registers this memory, and tags it with a sense of happiness and satisfaction.

The amygdala further helps by recreating the same response to the same stimuli every time. It's like a signature that gets encrypted into the brain. To make things easier to understand, here's an example. You eat some chocolate, like its taste, and feel happy.

The 'feel-good' chemical dopamine gets released in the brain, and that instance of eating chocolate gets associated with happiness, and is registered permanently. So, the next time you're trying to beat the blues, eating chocolate will strike your mind. You will eat chocolate, the same response will follow, and you will feel happy.

Over a span of time, you will start resorting to binging on not only chocolate, but also other food, that too without the slightest hint of when this casual chocolate-eating instance would become a habit, and eventually an addiction. Same is the case with narcotics. All drugs of abuse flood the brain with artificial dopamine.

This powerful surge of dopamine makes the hippocampus and amygdala tag it with happiness, and register it. Therefore, whenever a person takes drugs, he feels happy. But drug consumption is more harmful than any other addiction, because of the development of tolerance.

To keep an individual alive, the brain adapts to the onslaught of external dopamine by reducing the production of natural dopamine or eliminating the neuroreceptors of dopamine. Due to this process, the person develops tolerance. Eventually, the dose that previously used to give him a 'high', would no longer give as much pleasure.

Hence, the individual has to take more of it to get the same reeling feeling. The craving keeps increasing, and eventually compulsion takes over. Even with other types of addictions, where no external dopamine is involved, the body's natural dopamine makes us get addicted to a particular thing or a certain behavior.

Dopamine acts as a shortcut to happiness, and most of the time, it is forced.

The natural route to happiness is usually long and tiring. And in today's world, nobody wants to wait. Therefore, an alternative is sought. This alternative brings about an artificial sense of elation, thereby, explaining the quick addiction to things around us.