A drug addiction is strongly desiring to take a drug that makes you feel good. For example, snorting cocaine makes you energetic, alert, euphoric, with increased mental clarity. Once you’re addicted to a drug, abstaining from it becomes a nightmare. For example, abstaining from cocaine can cause agitation, depression, extreme fatigue, anxiety, angry outbursts, lack of motivation, vomiting, shaking, irritability, muscle pain, and disturbed sleep.
Thorndike’s Law of Effect
Simply put, what keeps you addicted is that taking the drug makes you feel good, and avoiding it makes you feel awful. This coincides with Thorndike’s Law of Effect: If a reward follows a particular behavior, that behavior probably will be repeated; if a punishment follows a particular behavior, that behavior probably won’t be repeated.
For example, feeling good is your reward for snorting cocaine; feeling awful is your punishment for avoiding cocaine. So what are you going to do? This is why it’s so difficult to abstain from an addiction.
You have a drug addiction and can’t quit. Now what? Don’t despair; there’s a way out. The trick is seeing your addiction differently – seeing it for what it really is.
Unemployable, Lonely, and Sick
Though taking your drug makes you feel good immediately, it makes you feel awful in the long run. For example, snorting cocaine will eventually cause health problems such as heart disease, heart attacks, respiratory failure, strokes, seizures, gastrointestinal problems, convulsions, nausea, blurred vision, chest pain, fever, muscle spasms, and coma. If you think that these health problems are bad, long-term cocaine snorting causes social problems such as lying, stealing, absenteeism at work, and sometimes even prostitution.
So basically, long-term cocaine use causes you unemployment due to your work absenteeism, loss of friends and family due to your lying and stealing, and sickness due to cocaine’s damaging effects on your body. Cocaine ultimately transforms you into a loser – unemployable, lonely, and sick!
Other popular recreational drugs such as crack, heroin, crystal meth, Vicodin, ecstasy, and OxyContin also ultimately transform you into a loser – unemployable, lonely, and sick!
Thorndike’s Law of Effect Revisited
Now let’s revisit Thorndike’s Law of Effect: If a reward follows a particular behavior, that behavior probably will be repeated; if a punishment follows a particular behavior, that behavior probably won’t be repeated.
Being unemployable, lonely, and sick is your punishment for taking your desired drug over time; being employed, loved, and healthy is your reward for avoiding your desired drug over time. So what are you going to do?
Classical Conditioning
Wait a minute! Reading this article won’t help you! Once done reading, you’ll go back to snorting cocaine, smoking crack, shooting heroin, popping OxyContin, or whatever it is you do.
That’s why I’m introducing a powerfully effective self-help intervention that you must do regularly. This self-help intervention is called Classical Conditioning. Simply put, Classical Conditioning consists of pairing a particular feeling with a particular event over and over again until they become automatically associated with each other.
Let’s say that you have a cocaine addiction and want to quit. So instead of feeling good after snorting cocaine, you want to feel awful. What makes you feel awful? Electric shock? Okay, we’ll use this.
So each time you snort cocaine, you give yourself a severe electric shock. You feel awful each time. Eventually, you’ll automatically associate snorting cocaine with feeling awful – without the electric shock! Thus, curing yourself of cocaine addiction.
Nevertheless, electrically shocking yourself isn’t socially acceptable and will attract unwanted attention. We need something more discreet. What’s more discreet than the hidden thoughts inside your head? Can you use your thoughts to make yourself feel awful? Let’s see.
You just snorted cocaine and want to make yourself feel awful for doing it. So you think, “By using cocaine, I’m making myself into a complete loser. I’m now becoming totally unemployable, lonely, and sick. Worthless. Useless. A hopeless piece of crap. Good for nothing.” How do you feel? Awful, right?
So if you think along these lines each time you snort cocaine, you’ll eventually learn to associate snorting cocaine with feeling awful – without using your thoughts to make yourself feel awful! Thus, curing yourself of cocaine addiction.
Points to Ponder
This article is tailored to those addicted to hard drugs such as cocaine, crack, heroin, crystal meth, Vicodin, ecstasy, and OxyContin. Nevertheless, the intervention discussed here can be used, with some minor adjustments, to overcome addictions to the softer drugs.
For example, smoking cigarettes doesn’t necessarily cause unemployment or loneliness. But it does cause health problems such as emphysema, heart disease, stroke, cancer, birth defects, green teeth, and spider veins. So rather than thinking of yourself as becoming unemployable, lonely, and sick each time you smoke a cigarette, you just simply think of yourself as becoming sick.
Conclusion
In the past, drug addiction was seen as an overpowering and unmanageable disease. And the addict, using his own willpower, was seen as powerless against this disease. Therefore the addict was encouraged to join a support group that might lead him to a spiritual awakening.
Currently, drug addiction is seen as self-destructive behavior maintained by the reward of taking a drug (feeling good) and the punishment of abstaining from it (withdrawal symptoms). Given this, a scientific intervention such as Classical Conditioning can effectively cure it.
Though I’m scientifically inclined, I do believe in the power of prayer; since I’ve seen it work in my own life. So by all means, pray to be free from your addiction; then go forth and free yourself with Classical Conditioning.
