Category Archives: Addictions

Addictions

May 10

How to Change Habits: Five Books

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The following five nonfiction books about how to change habits, listed from newest to oldest, are recommended reading.

I. Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick (2019)

Author Adam Grant calls Wood, a long-time researcher on this subject, “the world’s leading expert” on this subject.

A key quote from Wood: “On average, it takes us sixty-six days of repeating a simple health behavior until it becomes automatic. In other words, identify a new behavior, do it repeatedly for two months and a week, and it will become a habit.”

The Kirkus Reviews summary states, Wood “notes that the same learning mechanisms responsible for bad habits also control good ones.” An example given: exercising and cigarette smoking. How one winds up choosing either activity and how one engages in either repeatedly is also the key to how to produce change.

II. BJ Fogg, Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything (2019)

Fogg professes that “only 3 things will change your behavior in the long term”:

Option A:  Have an epiphany
Option B:  Change your environment
Option C:  Take baby steps

However. Spoiler Alert! Epiphanies are extremely hard to come by, so B and C are really your options. It’s all spelled out in Tiny Habits, but he also offers a free five-day program on how to change habits; click on https://tinyhabits.com/join.

III. Sean D. Young, Stick With It: A Scientifically Proven Process for Changing Your Life–for Good (2017)

Young states, “Fortunately, you don’t need to change who you are as a person to make change last. You just need to understand the science behind lasting change and how to create a process that fits who you are.”

The Stages of Change Model developed in the 1970’s and 80’s by James O. Prochaska and Carlo DiClemente began with studying smokers’ attempts to give up their habit. The end result was the development of a tool to assess one’s readiness to work on change of any kind as well as one’s readiness to stick with it, or to persevere.

IV. Gretchen Rubin, Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives (2015)

According to her Four Tendencies framework, people generally fall into one of four groups. The key to these characterizations is how we respond to expectations. Per Rubin, a brief description of each:

  • Upholders want to know what should be done.
  • Questioners want justifications.
  • Obligers need accountability.
  • Rebels want freedom to do something their own way.

Selected quotes:

Habits are the invisible architecture of daily life. We repeat about 40 percent of our behavior almost daily, so our habits shape our existence, and our future. If we change our habits, we change our lives.

The desire to start something at the “right” time is usually just a justification for delay. In almost every case, the best time to start is now.

The most important step is the first step. All those old sayings are really true. Well begun is half done. Don’t get it perfect, get it going. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Nothing is more exhausting than the task that’s never started, and strangely, starting is often far harder than continuing.

V. Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business (2012)

According to Duhigg, any “habit loop” consists of a cue, a routine, and a reward. Taking alcoholism as an example of a habit/addiction, he states that groups like AA (or NA or GA, and so on) often provide a way to form new but similar habit loops.

Duhigg’s ideas about keystone habits, or “habits we develop that lead us to make better choices in other parts of our life,” are particularly important. David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, states, “His chapter on ‘keystone habits’ alone would justify the book.”

Apr 19

Intuitive Eating, Not Dieting: Health at Every Size

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The concepts of not dieting vs. dieting and/or intuitive eating and/or mindful eating are not new; nevertheless, because of the pervasive dieting culture, many find these hard to grasp.

Geneen Roth‘s Breaking Free From Compulsive Eating was groundbreaking in 1984. Her list of then-revolutionary Eating Guidelines designed to replace dieting:

1. Eat when you are hungry.
2. Eat sitting down in a calm environment. This does not include the car.
3. Eat without distractions. Distractions include radio, television, newspapers, books, intense or anxiety-producing conversations or music.
4. Eat what your body wants.
5. Eat until you are satisfied.
6. Eat (with the intention of being) in full view of others.
7. Eat with enjoyment, gusto, and pleasure.

Then there’s intuitive eating. As defined by expert Evelyn Tribole, author of multiple books, this approach is related but somewhat different. It “is a self-care eating framework, which integrates instinct, emotion, and rational thought.”

The philosophy of the Health at Every Size (HAES) community is another variation on a theme. In short, when it comes to changing your eating habits, do what makes you feel okay. Also, being in a larger body is not always unhealthy. (Conversely, being in a smaller one sometimes is.)

In addition to the resources noted above, the following books may be of help:

How Not to Diet: The Groundbreaking Science of Healthy, Permanent Weight Loss by Michael Greger (2019)

Dr. Michael Greger founded the Nutrition Facts website. His main emphasis: plant-based eating.

Ending the Diet Mindset by Becca Clegg (2018)

Clegg is a therapist with expertise in women’s issues and eating disorders. Check out her blog.

States the publisher: “By identifying the ten destructive Diet Mindsets, you can change your perspective on dieting and embrace a newfound respect for your body. Live a life free of obsession, and instead gain the courage to love yourself and find peace within.”

Big Girl: How I Gave Up Dieting and Got a Life by Kelsey Miller (2016)

The title says it all. But you can also read an article at Refinery 29 that gives some backstory to the author’s creation of her Anti-Diet Project.

Kirkus Reviews: “Miller does take a look at some of the deeper reasons behind her compulsive eating, and it’s in these passages that her vulnerability comes through and her story becomes truly compelling. Readers will cheer for Miller to succeed on her ‘anti-diet’ diet of intuitive eating, her quest to eat according to her mindfully mined needs and desires, not according to a rulebook. It takes a lot of work to change a mindset that radically, and it’s slow going for Miller, who tends to trade one obsession for another…”

Mindful Emotional Eating: Mindfulness Skills to Control Cravings, Eat in Moderation and Optimize Coping by Dr. Pavel Somov (2015)

This book expands on his previous writings to focus specifically on “legalizing” and/or depathologizing the inevitable bouts of emotional eating—as long as they’re mindful, that is. What he helps readers reduce is “emotional overeating” and “mindless emotional eating.”

Smart People Don’t Diet: How the Latest Science Can Help You Lose Weight Permanently by Charlotte N. Markey, Ph.D. (2014)

Psychologist Charlotte N. Markey synthesizes tons of pertinent research. Included is info about what doesn’t work. You can ignore tips, for instance, that advise skipping dessert, no eating after 8 PM, and no between-meal snacking, to name a few.

What about dieting? Markey advises the following, as told to A. Pawlowski, Today.com:

‘Dieting makes you miserable, it makes you cranky. It actually makes you more likely to overeat and to binge and fast,’ she said.
‘Don’t feel guilty about having good stuff in moderation. Don’t feel deprived, but don’t be over-indulgent either. There’s got to be some middle ground.’

Jan 02

New Year’s Resolutions? Or Just Set New Goals?

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New Year’s resolutions are made to be broken, goes the saying. Or was that rules are made to be broken? Well, whatever. The thing is, those things—things like that—usually do get broken. I’d quote some grim statistics on this, but I don’t really believe in those either.

Some of the most popular yearly New Year’s resolutions include drinking less or not at all, eating better and/or losing weight, exercising, quitting smoking, improving one’s job options, managing stress, making more money, and having more fun.

Issues regarding drinking, eating and exercise, weight loss, stress, smoking, etc….all familiar stuff to therapists and clients.

But if more thought doesn’t go into a resolution than just saying it, it’s just a wish, isn’t it—versus a real outcome that’s likely to happen. For example, you want to cut down your drinking? That’s a resolution. And…so…? Well, good luck with that.

Some things to actually consider: How much will you cut down? By when? Have you done this before? If so, how’d you do? Do you have people you can tell your resolution to and/or report to? Will they be supportive? How can you make the journey an enjoyable choice versus a self-assigned punishment?

Goal-setting can help change that too-broad-based resolution thingie into something more attainable. How to do this? As coined in the early 1980’s, make it SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.

Jen A. Miller‘s New York Times article offers details about how to do this. Excerpts follow:

  • Specific. “Your resolution should be absolutely clear…”
  • Measurable. And, “Logging progress into a journal or making notes on your phone or in an app designed to help you track behaviors can reinforce the progress, no matter what your resolution may be.”
  • Achievable. “This doesn’t mean that you can’t have big stretch goals. But trying to take too big a step too fast can leave you frustrated, or affect other areas of your life to the point that your resolution takes over your life — and both you and your friends and family flail…”
  • Relevant. “Is this a goal that really matters to you, and are you making it for the right reasons?”
  • Time-bound. “Like ‘achievable,’ the timeline toward reaching your goal should be realistic, too.”
Dec 07

Chronic Illness: Writings About Coping

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Chronic illness is the topic of three important works of writing by three different women.

I. Esmé Weijun Wang’s article “Chronic Uncertainty: Lessons for a global pandemic, from a permanently sick person” (The Cut).

Wang has suffered with chronic illness since 2013. “I half-joke,” says the writer, “that I’ve been preparing for a moment like this for years — remaining at home, in bed, for days or weeks at a time was my way of being. Often, I wouldn’t see my friends for months.”

Selected quote: “In the worst times, we can try to find stability in the smallest things. My therapist once advised me to search my body, when I was experiencing chronic pain, from head to toe. I was to look for one inch that was not hurting and focus on that.”

II. Porochista Khakpour‘s Sick: A Memoir (2018)

Sick is largely about the author’s many years of struggle to get appropriate diagnosis and treatment for chronic Lyme disease, otherwise known as Post-Treatment Lyme Disease Syndrome (PTLDS).

But there’s also so much more than chronic Lyme. “I have been sick my whole life. I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t in some sort of physical or mental pain, but usually both” (Nicole Clark, Vice).

Lidija Haas, New Yorker:

When doctors disbelieve her, or when her relapses reliably ‘coincide with global turmoil,’ she wonders whether her symptoms might indeed be psychosomatic, some form of P.T.S.D.; after she becomes addicted to the pills prescribed to treat her insomnia, she seems open to the suggestion that maybe her addiction is the main source of her problems. She cheerfully lists the ways in which she damages her own health, including by smoking cigarettes every day during the writing of her book.

A widely applauded memoir without a particularly uplifting ending, “…Sick is a bruising reminder and subtle revelation,” states Kiese Laymon, “that the lines between a sick human being and a sick nation are often not lines at all. The book boldly asserts that a nation wholly disinterested in what really constitutes ‘health’ will never tend the bodily and emotional needs of its sick and vulnerable.”

To read an excerpt, titled “Does My Disease Need a Name?,” click on this HuffPost link.

III. Sarah Ramey‘s The Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness: A Memoir (2020)

From her publisher: “The Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness is a memoir with a mission: to help the millions of (mostly) women who suffer from unnamed or misunderstood conditions–autoimmune illnesses, fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome, chronic Lyme disease, chronic pain, and many more.” She calls her community WOMIs, standing for women with mysterious illnesses.

The eventual diagnosis of her own chronic illness: complex regional pain syndrome.

Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon, states in her interview with Ramey, “There’s a phrase you use — ‘the marginalization of mystery illness.’ It becomes, ‘We can’t figure it out, so you’re wrong. The disappointment is not on us, it’s on you.’

Sep 21

Food Addiction: Includes Chocolate, Sugar, Carbs

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Is there such a thing as food addiction?

Dr. Nora Volkow, psychiatrist, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, believes there is. She’s made it clear that it’s still a controversial notion, however.

Additionally, Adi Jaffe, Ph.D., an addiction researcher, notes the following (Psychology Today):

When you think about it, the notion isn’t far-fetched: Drug addicts continue to take drugs, in increasing amounts, even though they’d often like to stop (at some point) and in the face of negative consequences and the common loss of other important life functions (like family, work, etc.). Obese individuals are quite the same, eating more and more food regardless of their desire to adopt a healthier diet and in-spite of ridicule, low self-esteem, and decreased functioning that often accompanies extreme weight gain.

Well-known nutritional specialist Dr. Joel Fuhrman also believes that food shares with drugs the ability to get us hooked. Whether it’s “chocoholism” or sugar addiction or carb addiction or the umbrella term encompassing all of the above, food addiction, Fuhrman explains in “‘Just One Bite” of Junk Food Fuels Food Addiction and Obesity” how our brains can succumb:

The science on food addiction has now established that highly palatable foods (low-nutrient, high-calorie, intensely sweet, salty, and/or fatty foods – those that make up the majority of the Standard American Diet) produces the exact biochemical effects in the brain that are characteristic of substance abuse.

Junk food is ubiquitously available, legal, cheap, and socially accepted; therefore, it becomes the drug of choice for many of us.

These concepts go way back. Dr. Andrew Weil co-authored From Chocolate to Morphine: Everything You Need to Know About Mind-Altering Drugs (1983; updated in 2004) with Winifred Rosen. The title says it all. Another book that addresses chocolate’s strong appeal is Dr. Neal D. Barnard‘s Breaking the Food Seduction: The Hidden Reasons Behind Food Cravings—And 7 Steps to End Them Naturally (2004). The Amazon.com Review capsulizes Barnard’s take: “…(C)hocolate triggers the release of natural opiates in the brain. It’s a drug ‘strong enough to keep us coming back for more’.”

Relatedly, the 2014 documentary Fed Up, directed by Stephanie Soechtig, found the culprit of obesity-related illness to be sugar. Adds Michael O’Sullivan, Washington Post: “…(T)he real problem isn’t sugar, but sugar education. If consumers only knew that the stuff is not just addictive, but poisonous — one of the film’s experts calls it a ‘chronic, dose-dependent’ liver toxin — they might make better choices at the checkout counter.”

Do you have issues with food addiction? Psychologist and nutritional expert Sherry Pagoto, Ph.D., outlines six possible signs to look for when considering whether or not you are addicted to food and then eight steps toward overcoming the addiction. Click on her Psychology Today article to assess your own eating tendencies.