TED talk: Everything you think you know about addiction is wrong


jts

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6 hours ago, jts said:

I have no major experience with addiction and no comment about this video.

 

 

 

This is a comment....   But you knew that, didn't you?

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On 10/16/2016 at 10:18 PM, jts said:

I have no major experience with addiction and no comment about this video.

 

 

What is this guy selling?

If you don't get your heroin you go get it even if you have to steal for it--or worse. If you don't get your methadone you'll get even sicker than if you don't get your heroin. 20% of US soldiers in Vietnam used heroin and 95% weren't subsequently addicted? No references, just blab, blab, blab. And it's not "chemical hooks"--which he tries incessantly to deride, but the displacement by heroin of what the body provides naturally. The withdrawal period is the time the body needs to get that back on line. (Be careful if you're diagnosed with adult onset diabetes and start shooting up insulin. The pancreas may totally and permanently shut down.)

We are all addicted to food. Try not eating for two days and get a small sense of what I am talking about. (Fasters--this is not for you.) I understand the hunger pains go into remission after a few days, but that's beyond my personal experience.

--Brant

edit: he's disreputable

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1 hour ago, Brant Gaede said:

What is this guy selling?

Brant,

He's selling group hugs as a cure for addiction.

He's not wrong up to a point and his thoughts should be looked at by people interested in addiction, but man does big pharma love him. 

People addicted to big pharma stuff (like Oxytocin, a form of legal heroin on steroids) are just like normal junkies. And all you need to do is give them a group hug and keep them hooked while telling them they are not.

This is a drug pusher's dream of heaven on earth.

:) 

If anyone wants to see what really goes on in your brain at the cell and synapses level, there is an excellent course on The Great Courses:

The Addictive Brain by Dr. Thad Polk

Note, I am not saying Hari's work is worthless. It's valuable. It's just not the be all and end all he's selling it as. In fact, from my experience, it's only one component--and not a very big one at that--among several.

btw - I got his book, but I haven't even cracked it open yet. So I'm basing my comments on this TED Talk and several long lectures I saw by him on video.

Michael

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3 hours ago, Brant Gaede said:

We are all addicted to food. Try not eating for two days and get a small sense of what I am talking about. (Fasters--this is not for you.) I understand the hunger pains go into remission after a few days, but that's beyond my personal experience.

--Brant

 

"We are all addicted to food":  I make a distinction between need and addiction. Every doctor who supervises fasts makes this distinction. It may be true that most people have food addictions but this is not hunger.

"hunger pains":  True hunger is not a pain.

I don't claim to be an expert on addiction. From the little I know about addiction, it can be a multifaceted subject. It can be physical. It can be emotional. Perhaps even habit. Perhaps the closest you can come to a theory that explains all addictions is it's a failure of self awareness. For example people can eat for many reasons other than a need for food, thinking that they have a need for food and not being aware of what they really need.

For example a person might be fatigued and need to rest and then eat a stimulating food to not feel the fatigue and mistake fatigue for hunger. The fatigue is still there but the person is not aware of it and he goes deeper into fatigue. With better self awareness this person might come to understand that what he needs is rest, not food.

Another person might be depressed or bored and eat to relieve the depression or boredom, thinking this is hunger.

The nervous system might be in a state of distress and the person might eat (or smoke or whatever) to narcotize the nervous system to not feel the distress, thinking this is satisfaction of a need. Narcotizing the nervous system adds stress to it and after the narcotic wears off he again feels the distress. What is needed is rest of the nervous system.

In Loren Lockman's youtube interviews with his fasting patients, the subject of emotional healing comes up. During a fast (living on air and water and sleep and nothing else) one cannot bury emotions with food so sometimes they experience emotions that were buried for years.

It is possible to have a real hunger for nutrients and then to eat foods that have empty calories that don't satisfy the hunger and might even increase the hunger. The thing to do here is to develop an awareness of what one is hungry for, what foods will satisfy the hunger.

But I am not convinced that the 'failure of self awareness theory' explains all addictions, just some. As much as possible and practical, avoid all substances that are contrary to your physiological adaptation (example: poisons of all kinds and Goldhamer's list). These affect your brain and have the potential to lead to addiction no matter how self aware you are. Check out Dr. Alan Goldhamer's theory of the pleasure trap.

The wrong substances also can corrupt the sense of taste, so we develop a taste for bad things and a distaste for good things, thereby making our sense of taste unable to perform its natural function which is to tell us what is good for us and what is bad for us. Some substances can deceive our sense of taste, making foods taste better than they deserve to taste (better than their health and nutrition merits justify). For example maybe you can make dogshit taste good if you put enough unbound glutamic acid on it. Any food that does not taste good on its own is not fit to eat. I don't see anything wrong with the right kind of hedonism. This last summer about 50-75% of my diet was fruit, simply because it tastes good. I don't give a rat's ass about all the experts who say fruit is bad.

The wild chimp diet is about 60% fruit, 25% leaves, 15% misc. By coincidence that almost describes my diet this last summer. Maybe I'm turning into a chimp.

This is the end of my lecture about addiction, something I don't know much about.

 

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A lot of "noshing"   is for comfort  and to be doing something rather than nothing.  Much of our eating is not driven by a nutritional need.  Americans can eat half of what they do eat and still be in good bodily health.

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