Reward Circuits: Seeking Pleasure And Avoiding Pain
At its most basic level, the reward circuit allows us to seek pleasure and to avoid pain. Our very survival depends on the avoidance of pain and the repetition of pleasure. To this end, the reward circuit encourages us to engage in activities that either further our survival or the survival of our genes. These activities include sex, eating, bonding, achievement, play, novelty and taking risks.
We literally do not make a decision without consulting our reward circuit. The reward circuit emotionally justifies what we do like and what we dont like. When you are addicted to something, your reward circuit is out of balance. This affects your mood, your perception and your decision-making powers.
A Bad Solution To An Underlying Problem
While some are more prone to addictionbinge eating, gambling, substancesthan others due to genetics and brain chemistry, the initial driver for most folks is situationalthe addiction serving as a bad solution to another problem, such as depression, PTSD, or anxiety. Unfortunately, the addiction works: As soon as Jack clicks onto his favorite websites, he feels better. So, starts the downward spiral.
Sensitised Pathways Remain Even When You Quit Your Addiction
Thus, its really DeltaFosB that causes sensitisation and it does this by creating stronger and more powerful nerve connections in the brain. Long after an addict has quit using and DeltaFosB levels have returned to normal, these sensitised pathways remain. This explains why alcoholics who have been sober for many years may still suffer from strong cravings when they walk into a pub.
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What Is Samhsa’s National Helpline
SAMHSAs National Helpline, , or TTY: is a confidential, free, 24-hour-a-day, 365-day-a-year, information service, in English and Spanish, for individuals and family members facing mental and/or substance use disorders. This service provides referrals to local treatment facilities, support groups, and community-based organizations.
Also visit the online treatment locator, or send your zip code via text message: 435748 to find help near you. Read more about the HELP4U text messaging service.
Dont Beat Yourself Up If You Fall Off The Wagon
Trying to break a habit or recover from an addiction is a journey. Unfortunately, on that journey, you might find yourself slipping back into old habits. Whenever that happens, dont waste any time beating yourself up.
Do your research, try more coping mechanisms and treatment options and get back on the wagon.
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Are There Treatment Options Available
Many individuals benefit from who can help them overcome emotional difficulties and make positive changes in their lives. Usually, treatment incorporates:
- : This therapy focuses on challenging and changing unhelpful cognitive distortions and behaviors, improving emotional regulation, and developing coping strategies that target current problems.
- Individual therapy: One-on-one therapy sessions offer a unique and transparent space for those in recovery to express their challenges, emotions, and hopes.
- Couples therapy: When behavioral addictions break apart relationships, both romantic and family ones, couples counseling can help restore trust and rebuild relationships, which can be essential for support in long-term recovery.
- Group therapy: Speaking about challenges, emotions, and troubles in a group environment, can offer a sense of fellowship and support and provide a space to build sober relationships.
- Self-help groups: Usually, addiction is a lifelong journey self-help groups can offer aftercare support once someone ends treatment. Usually, these 12-step programs provide a sense of structure that can help with long-term sobriety.
How Desensitisation Occurs
To understand desensitisation, you must understand how individual nerve cells communicate. Dopamine-producing nerve cells affected by desensitisation originate from the beginning of the reward circuit and make connections with other nerve cells in the reward centre. Nerve cells send messages using chemicals such as dopamine. Nerve cells bond to each other to form a reward pathway.
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Meet The Coolidge Effect
Internet porns endless supply of sexual novelty is an unnatural stimulus exploiting something thats been termed the Coolidge effect. This effect is best explained by an example. When you drop a willing female rat into a males cage, the male will continuously mate with the rat until he becomes bored. However, when you drop a different female rat into the cage, the males sexual appetite is awoken once more. You may repeat this process over and over again until the male rat collapses in exhaustion.
Why do the males become bored with the same female? Well, because the brain excretes less and less dopamine in respect of the current female, but a surge in dopamine occurs in the males brain when a new female is introduced. This mechanism helps promote genetic diversity and ensures no female goes unfertilized.
Psychological And Emotional Needs
It is important to remember when working towards recovery that your addiction is routed in complex emotional and psychological causes.
You may need to alter your life in other ways to help you in your recovery. There may be certain relationships or habits in your life that jeopardize recovery.
It may also be necessary to consider how you process and express emotions and how you communicate with those around you. A professional treatment centre will help you to do this.
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Finding The Root Cause Of Compulsions In Treatment
- Acknowledging common contributors to intimacy disorders such as deep-rooted attachment, enmeshment, neglect and trauma` issues that typically begin in early childhood
- Exploring the fear of vulnerability that may have prevented you from being present in intimate relationships
- Owning up to problems in current relationships
- Recognizing how addiction has impacted your personal and work life
Breaking Addiction: A 7
Dr. Dodes 7-step approach to treating addiction is both empowering and refreshing, as it gives those struggling the knowledge and tools to take responsibility to improve their own lives. His book is more of a general guide to understanding addictive behavior, but it is useful nonetheless in addressing sex addiction. Dr. Dodes reinforces the notion that addicts of any kind, including sex addicts, can retake control of their lives from the grips of addiction.
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Do I Need Health Insurance To Receive This Service
The referral service is free of charge. If you have no insurance or are underinsured, we will refer you to your state office, which is responsible for state-funded treatment programs. In addition, we can often refer you to facilities that charge on a sliding fee scale or accept Medicare or Medicaid. If you have health insurance, you are encouraged to contact your insurer for a list of participating health care providers and facilities.
An Invitation To Recovery
We found in each other what we could find nowhere else: people who knew the depth of our pain. Together we found hope and the care of a loving Higher Power. Our commitment is to help others recover from sexual addiction, just as we have been helped.
Can I really be a sex addict?
Our recovery literature is available in the store: books, pamphlets, sobriety mementos , convention recordings… More
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The Reward Circuits Of The Brain
The reward circuit of the brain is also known as the limbic system or primitive brain. This refers to our evolutionary ancient structures contained in the brain. These structures are involved in almost all emotional and physical function you may think of. These structures essentially keep us alive.
Changes in the reward circuits may affect any aspect of behaviour and may even physiological functions. The reward circuit shapes are moods and colours our emotions. Fear, joy and rage all arise from these evolutionary ancient structures. Most of our desires and drives arise in the reward circuit, such as hunger for food, power or sex. The reward circuit also allows us to become addicted to certain behaviours.
Alterations to the reward circuits are responsible for most mental disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, depression and social anxiety.
Reward circuit structures such as the hypothalamus and the Amygdala influence or control major functions such as male sexual behaviours, erections, the autonomic nervous system and endocrine system. The bottom line is that chemical or structural alterations to the reward circuit may result in wide and varying effects.
Tips For Staging An Intervention
| 1. Dont Do It Alone. A professional interventionist is always the most qualified to guide a successful intervention. Also, rely on non-addict family and friends especially those who have a close relationship with you or the addict. |
| 2. Research Ahead of Time. Its best to do plenty of research ahead of time to gather insight on the addiction and how it affects the addict. Also, be prepared with local resources for getting help. |
| 3. Write Out Your Statement. During the actual intervention, emotions will likely be running high, so its best to have a statement of how the persons addiction has impacted you and your relationship with him or her. These statements should be honest, yet written from a place of love no personal attacks. |
| 4. Offer Help. Its important for everyone attending the intervention to offer tangible help and support as the person works through detox and rehabilitation. |
| 5. Set Boundaries. If the person refuses to seek help and take the next steps outlined, its important that they understand that everyone present will end codependent and enabling behaviors. |
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What Are The Consequences Of All This Dopamine
If you have managed to read this far, you may be wondering what damage all of this dopamine has on your brain. The consequences are mainly in the form of brain changes. These changes cause the symptoms and conditions listed earlier. These symptoms and conditions are physical and psychological in nature.
Seek More Than We Are Satisfied
However, our dopamine system is stronger than our opioid system. This means that we seek more than we are satisfied. Seeking is more likely to keep us a live compared to sitting around in a satisfied heap. In summary, dopamine compels animals into action. This is why scientists refer to dopamine as the seeking circuit. Dopamine provides the motivation for us to pursue our wants and desires.
We receive a bigger burst of dopamine when we look at foods containing a bigger proportion of sugars and fats. This is because these foods are most likely to keep us alive when we are threatened with starvation. This is why you believe you are full until the waiter offers you that chocolate pudding. The anticipation for that pudding is fuelled by dopamine. Dopamine surges thus override feelings of satiety.
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Install A Good Filter Or Accountability Program
Along this journey, youre going to need to gain some self-control in the face of sexualized images everywhere, but that doesnt mean you cant give yourself some reprieve when you can. Download a filter or accountability program such as Covenant Eyes on every device you use phone, tablet, laptop, work computer and dont forget to put some safety controls on your TV, as well.
These will help you avoid gateways to binge sessions, as well as find some space to focus on more important things. Like the next thing on the list.
Unsure Where To Start Take Our Substance Abuse Self
Take our free, 5-minute substance abuse self-assessment below if you think you or someone you love might be struggling with substance abuse. This evaluation consists of 11 yes or no questions that are designed to be used as an informational tool to assess the severity and probability of a substance use disorder. The test is free, confidential, and no personal information is needed to receive the result. Please be aware that this evaluation is not a substitute for advice from a medical doctor.
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Battling A Sex Addiction: How The Inner Child Impacts Your Sexual Addiction
Carlos Triblett gives a unique and rare perspective on sex addiction by focusing on how childhood can affect risk of sex addiction development. Triblett believes that if addicts can understand how their inner child affects their internal conflicts as adults, that will pave the way to solving those conflicts. One of the main issues in sex addiction recovery is understanding the problem. Tribletts book gives readers the ability to distinguish relevant patterns and events from their childhood that may be a contributing factor in their sex addiction.
Activities That Speed Up Your Reboot
Hypofrontality also reverses, but this takes time. You may speed up this process by engaging in activities such as meditation that are known to engage your frontal lobes. This will help reverse hypofrontality and thus strengthen your willpower. This will mean urges will become easier to ignore and healthy choices such as exercising and socialising will become far more appealing.
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Nerve Cells That Fire Together Will Wire Together
Sensitisation and learning are governed by this simple principle: nerve cells that fire together will wire together. When nerve cells experience pleasure, nerve cells carry that message to the reward centre by join together. Overtime, this pathway that carries this message becomes fixed. When a memory or cue activates memories related to this pleasure, a powerful craving arises because the pathways that allow this pleasurable cue to reach your reward centre are well established.
This is illustrated by the image below:
Samson And The Pirate Monks
With no-holds-barred honesty and poignant storytelling, Nate Larkin introduces a model of community and friendship that is reinvigorating mens ministry across the country, a model he calls The Samson Society. Too many men see the biblical hero Samson as their model for manhooda rugged individualist of the highest order. Yet, Samsons solitary successes were eventually overcome by moral weaknesses. Larkin, through the story of his own past and the stories of those in The Samson Society, offers a radical, refreshing alternative.=
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How Our Helpline Works
For those seeking addiction treatment for themselves or a loved one, the PsychGuides.com helpline is a private and convenient solution.
We are standing by 24/7 to discuss your treatment options. Our representatives work solely for AAC and will discuss whether an AAC facility may be an option for you.
Our helpline is offered at no cost to you and with no obligation to enter into treatment. Neither PsychGuides.com nor AAC receives any commission or other fee that is dependent upon which treatment provider a visitor may ultimately choose.
For more information on AACs commitment to ethical marketing and treatment practices, or to learn more about how to select a treatment provider, visit our About AAC page.
If you wish to explore additional treatment options or connect with a specific rehab center, you can browse top-rated listings or visit SAMHSA.
If Youre Concerned About A Loved One
It may be a problem if you notice that your loved one:
- watches while at work or at other inappropriate places and times
- is unable to keep up with their social, occupational, or other important obligations
- is experiencing relationship difficulties
- has tried to cut back or stop, but cant keep themselves away from it
If someone you care about shows signs of a compulsion or addiction, it may be time to open the lines of nonjudgmental communication.
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Deltafosb And Genetic Survival Via Memory And Repetition
Sensitisation begins with high levels of dopamine. This tells our primitive brain that this activity is really valuable and you should engage in this activity again and again. Dopamines goal is to have us remember and repeat behaviours that further our genetic survival. Dopamine achieves this by triggering a protein known as DeltaFosB. DeltaFosB remains in the brain for around eight weeks following your last binge.
DeltaFosB also activates certain genes that change the physical and chemical structure of the brain. As DeltaFosB levels rise, this protein begins to rewire the brain to crave for the substance or behaviour that led to a rise in DeltaFosB levels in the first place. This creates a circular process where wanting causes doing. This causes a surge in dopamine which leads to even more DeltaFosB being accumulated. As DeltaFosB accumulates, so does the urge to engage in the behaviour that created its accumulation in the first place. And so this cycle continues until you make a conscious effect to cease the addictive behaviour.
Neuroplasticity: How New Reward Pathways Arise
Forming new brain pathways in this manner is known as neuroplasticity. This is how we learn and how we become addicted. Overtime, old brain pathways weaken. This is known as forgetting or breaking a bad habit. Creating or weakening brain pathways is often known asrewiring the brain. Thus, neuroplasticity allows the brain to adapt as a result of experience.
Although they didnt know it, they had been seduced into pornographic training sessions that met all the conditions required for plastic change of brain maps.
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What Is Sensitisation
Sensitisation is a form of unique and powerful Pavlovian conditioning that alters the physical and chemical nature of your reward structure. Instead of salivating to the sound of a bell like Pavlovs dogs, your reward circuits are stimulated when you turn on a computer monitor or when you see a sidebar banner of a semi-naked women on a non-pornographic website.
