If you’ve followed me for any length of time you know I propose addiction can be seen as a habit; my Addiction is a Habit thesis is at the heart of and supported by my Cascading Model of Addiction. This article represents my latest thinking on this topic.
This paper defends the idea that viewing addiction as a habit has significant utility to apply effective interventions and well-established habit change techniques. Identifying habituated ways of reacting to triggers opens the door to breaking cycles of maladapted rituals, replacing them with adaptive routines.
While viewing addiction as a habit is useful, it’s important to acknowledge addiction is not only a habit. Addiction is complex, multi-faceted, and touches on almost every aspect of what it means to be human, whether thriving or surviving. While defending the habit thesis, this paper looks at the numerous facets of addiction, using the metaphor of a kaleidoscope to represent addiction’s integrated and intertwined compositions.
In addition to habit (from my Cascading Model), I’ve identified seven other major defensible perspectives on what addiction is. Addiction has been, and remains, credibly framed as: a disease (medical), a disorder of learning and memory (neurocognitive), a developmental adaptation (psychological), a disorder of choice (agency/behavioral economics), a social/cultural construct (sociological), a spiritual crisis (existential), and finally, a public health issue (systemic/environmental).
Instead of creating a new, separate and distinct perspective, my goal is to recognize the merits of each of the existing and integrate them, showing that the habit lens can act as a unifying mechanism that translates these different perspectives into behavior which can be modified.
Click HERE or click the image below to access this white paper.
