The Heart of Addiction

How psychology drives addictive behavior.

by Lance Dodes, M.D.

Why There Is Lunacy, Literally, In 28-day Rehabs

A recent television show, “Nurse Jackie," portrayed the main character as foolish for leaving an addiction rehabilitation program before the 28 days were up. That idea is lunacy – literally. Read More

Don’t Judge People for Not Trying

"You could stop if you really tried!" We have all heard this idea. It contains two assumptions: that making an effort - trying - can stop addiction, and that trying is a matter of conscious choice, a decision to exert willpower. Both these assumptions are dead wrong. Read More

The Worst Addiction Advice You Can Get

"Go away and stop drinking, then I'll treat you." Incredibly enough, there are therapists who say just that. Read More

Do Not Suppress Addictive Thoughts!

Recently, a man suffering with alcoholism told me how he approached his problem: when he had thoughts of drinking, he tried to push them out of his mind. This didn't always work of course, and even when it did he regularly drank later. But he was still pleased that he was "putting up a good fight" against his enemy — his terrible drive to drink. Read More

Is Addiction Really a Disease?

For many decades it's been widely accepted that alcoholism (or addiction) is a disease. The "disease concept" is taught in addiction training programs and told to patients in treatment programs. It is unquestioned by public figures and the media. But is it true? And if it is not true, is there a better and more helpful way to define addiction? Read More

How to Tell Who Is Right about Addiction

Anyone who looks at the Addiction blogs on the Psychology Today website recognizes there are widely disseminated but vastly different views about the very nature of addiction. When I give lectures about addiction, I am sometimes asked, "With all these opinions, how can I tell who is right?" It turns out that there is a surprisingly straightforward way to figure this out. Read More

Failures to Understand Addiction Are Everywhere

Jonathan Rhys Meyers, star of Bend It Like Beckham and The Tudors, was hospitalized recently due to an alleged incident involving alcohol, possibly mixed with prescription drugs. It didn't take long before speculation began to focus on the question of whether this was a "relapse" or even a suicide attempt. Read More

Is Anthony Weiner a Sex Addict?

As the author of two books about addiction as well as a number of professional journal articles, I get a lot of questions from patients and colleagues alike about the nature of compulsive behavior -- what drives it, what gives it its power, and especially why so many people repeat destructive behaviors in the face of overwhelmingly bad consequences. Read More

The myth of impulsiveness in addiction

The often-stated notion that people with addictions are "impulsive" goes right along with the myth that addiction is pleasure-seeking or the result of some weakness of the mind. If you believed those myths then you would be willing to believe that addictive behavior is an unthinking, sudden act simply expressing an urge to instantly have what you want. Read More

If you do something too much, is it an addiction?

This week millions of families will gather together to celebrate a holiday, Easter or Passover. At some of these gatherings an uncle or cousin will talk too loud, interrupt too much or turn an innocent conversation about the state of the local baseball team into an ugly argument. He or she has had too much to drink. Do these people have alcoholism? Read More

Breaking Addiction

Let's face it; addiction treatment has not been very successful. But there is a clear reason for this: we haven't understood how it works. Once you do understand it, though, there are some critical steps you can take to break it. In my new book, Breaking Addiction: A 7-Step Handbook for Ending Any Addiction (HarperCollins, 2011), I describe those steps. Read More

Does addiction have to destroy love?

Phyllis and Peter had been married a few years when he started hiding "nip" bottles of vodka in the house. After Phyllis discovered them he lied, saying he had stopped drinking and she'd found the last of them. When a week later she found more bottles, she threw Peter out. "If it had only been his drinking," she said, "I could have stood it. But lying is different. Read More

Are people with addictions any “sicker” than anyone else?

For the past few thousand years people have thought "addicts" were self-indulgent hedonists, lacking in the self-control present in healthy people. More recently people with addictions have been seen as psychologically "primitive," their addiction a sign of early developmental issues or a major personality disorder. None of this is true. Read More

The Myth of “Addictiveness”

How common it is for people to say that things are "addictive"! Scratch lottery tickets, pornographic videos, foods, even exercising have all been said to be addictive. But none of them is. In fact, "addictiveness" of any object or activity is a myth. Perhaps surprisingly, that's true even if the object is a drug. Read More

Treating Addiction a New Way

In my last post I briefly summarized the psychology of addiction. I said that treatment of addiction has had generally poor results because its very nature, its psychology, has not been well understood. Of course, this raises the next question: How does understanding its psychology allow people to control their addictive behaviors? Read More

The Psychology of Addiction

Marion put down the phone after hearing her husband's command to prepare dinner for him and a group of business guests that evening. Now she would have to shop and prepare instead of go to the gym. As she stood there she felt the familiar, nearly overwhelming, urge to take some of her Percodans. The question is: Why? Read More

Blowing Up a Myth

Addiction has been poorly understood for a long time, and recently the problem has become worse with the popularization of the notion that addiction is a "brain disease."

Supporters of this fallacy point to the fact that pleasure centers of the brain "light up" when people use certain drugs. They conclude this must be important to understanding addiction. Read More