What clicks in addiction?

Even people who never drink alcohol, such as myself, know the overwhelming power of addiction. I personally have quite few such consuming habits that parallel indulgence and absorption in a single state of mind that overshadows all other states. Fortunately, due to my multiple addictions to few diverse habits, I was able to substitute one for the other. From heavy weightlifting addiction, to heavy reading and consuming analysis, to heavy movie watching, to heavy traveling and roaming the earth, and to heavy social reforming and debating. All habits were heavy and overwhelming to which I have very little ability but to steer from one habit to another habit. As such, the following facts are not new to alcoholics, even more alcoholics than non-alcoholics are experts on those facts to extraordinary extent. When weakness of will lingers, self deception flourishes.

Stages of Alcohol Dependence: From the book "Clinical Pharmacology" by D. R. Laurence, et al.

Stages of Alcohol Dependence From the book "Clinical Pharmacology" by D. R. Laurence, et al. [ ALCOHOLIC INEBRIETY ]

Worst Enemy Close to Home

Slippery Slope:  From occasional social drinking to total defeat of alcohol dependence is a well traveled road where millions of poor people had their lives ending in ruins.

Incompatibility with Fitness Training:

1) Fitness training requires clear mind, not just for the few hours of training but for many months of tackling the complexity of planning a healthy life.

2) Training involves solving ongoing problems relating to imbalanced muscular strength, shortening ligaments due to lengthy neglect and lack of activity, and ever reacting cardiovascular system.  The numbness of mind due to alcohol skews one's thinking ability in dealing with such complex challenges and instead substitutes the concrete reasoning with the escape from reality of boozing.

3) Alcohol impairs the tiniest of the nerve fibers and negatively hinders the coordination of  muscles in performing complex exercise.  As months pass by, you find yourself favoring exercises that are easy to execute rather than performing the ones you should execute for progressing in fitness training.

4) Alcohol impairs the response of the heart and the pressure sensors to the rapid changes in circulation due to exercise.  Such hemodynamics is crucial for enduring any fitness training.  Alcohol, even consumed many weeks prior to exercise, would cause fainting, nausea, and sudden loss of strength during vigorous exercise.  A good friend of mine collapsed in a training session two days after his birthday party for the first time in years. 

5) The cells have good memory.  The red blood cells have a half life time of 120 days, that of  platelets is about 7 days, the neutrophils of few hours.  But the brain cells have much longer life time.  So today's consumption of alcohol might last for, God knows, how long.  As far as exercise is concerned, alcohol defeats its purpose.

From occasional social drinking to total defeat of alcohol dependence is a well traveled road where millions of poor people had their lives ending in ruins.

• Occasional relief drinking.  I know how to quit.  Alcohol is not controlling my life.
• Constant relief drinking begins.  Alcohol is too good to quit.
• Surreptitious drinking.  Do not let them know that I got sucked into that habit.
• Feeling of guilt.  Many things are going bad in life because of the numbing effect of alcohol.
• Unable to discuss problems.  Willingly or not.
• Driving under the influence (DUI).  Legal mess.
• Chaos.  Every thing is out of control.  Alcohol is consuming all aspects of life.
• Denial.  It is not alcohol! it must be a curse of unknown nature.
• Broken promises.  Cannot even fulfill basic social obligations. 
• Whole world is abandoning.  The spouse is gone, the friends are gone, the relatives are gone.  Only the booze is in my company.
• Unemployed, bankrupt, Homeless.
• Irrational resentment. The whole world must be on the wrong side.
• Personal neglect of food and hygiene.
• Increased sexual desire while decreased sexual performance.  
• Illogical reasoning.
• Lack of assertiveness.  Wishy-washy.
• Wishful thinking dominates all plans.
• Total surrender to defeat.
• Vicious circuit.  Overwhelmingly complex world without boozing.

JAMA 100 Years Ago

September 15, 1888

ALCOHOLIC INEBRIETY, AS RELATED TO RESPONSIBILITY, AND CRIMINAL JURISPRUDENCE.

BY T. L. WRIGHT, M.D....

The anaesthetic, the benumbing, the paralyzing influence of alcohol upon the nervous system, and especially upon common sensation, always darkens knowledge and misleads the judgment. This follows from the fact that accurate perceptions are wholly dependent upon definite and normal sensations. When the senses are disturbed and impaired, perceptions are correspondingly disturbed and impaired; and they are unable to present to the mind facts as they truly are, as they really exist in the surroundings. The fine shadows, and uncertainties and doubts, which invariably attend all human transactions, escape the notice of a man who is intoxicated; and being unperceived by him, he imagines they do not exist. Every thing has, to his mind, the quality and energy of absolute demonstration. He never hesitates, never doubts....

Not only is the rational faculty injured by the influence of alcohol, producing confused, incoherent, and inconsequent ideas and beliefs, but the moral attributes are debased in an equal degree. The paralysis of alcohol, although incomplete, fails not to overcome the finer and more etherial sensibilities, while it leaves the coarser ones comparatively unaffected....

Nothing is more common than that men, after drunkenness, are amazed at the shocking things they have done, or said, or thought, while in a state of intoxication-indicating the latent state of the moral nature in drunkenness. But if the inebriation is continuous or nearly so, that is, if it is habitual, the shooting thoughts do not become the subjects of rational review; and thus the latency of the moral sense becomes fixed, and congenial to an unsound and deformed reason. The mind may seem to know the nature of morality perfectly, but if morality is wanted, 'it will not come at the call." It is therefore not surprising that steady drinking, even when not excessive, is more disastrous in the final outcome than the convulsive sprees of the neurotic inebriate. In the latter, the intervening seasons of total abstinence prevent the establishment of habitual disability in the nervous powers; while in the habitual drunkard, nervous disabilities, latencies and inhibitions be- come perpetual, insurmountable, in a word, constitutional.

. . . A gentleman of my acquaintance has been a steady drinker of ardent spirits for nearly thirty years. His moral nature is latent, if, indeed, he has any. He is not vicious or malignant, but he is an incessant and shameless, because motiveless, liar. With great coolness he will invent stories totally without foundation and on the most trifling subjects,-all the attendant circumstances and details being of the utmost exactness. And so he cackles on, and will continue so to do till the end of life.

Now this seems very foolish indeed, and likewise very inoffensive. But this man is, in truth, on the verge of insanity. Not only is he morally bankrupt, but his intellect is both sterile and disordered. Amongst the great army of the unrecognized insane there are none more common, or more really dangerous, than the chronic and steady drinkers of ardent spirits. These men in early life acquired the usual habits, both of thought and action, that belong to the average citizen. Automatically, with the guide and hints of the examples of others in their midst, they manage, without much effort, to keep in the ordinary grooves of daily life.... But let some supreme crisis intervene, so as suddenly to throw him upon his own unaided powers; let instant rage or, what is more consonant with his nerve defect, jealousy, come over his mind and disposition, he will then be thrown out of the grooves of automatic life and, acting upon his own true nature, he will herald to the world his real condition. Then desperation, murder, suicide, true representatives of his actual mental state, will burst unexpectedly upon the scene. To the great body of chronic inebriates this crucial test of insanity is never applied; they live without recognition, and die with their dreadful infirmity unknown and unsuspected....

(JAMA 1888;1 1:371-374)

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Edited by Elizabeth Knoll, PhD, and Micaela Sullivan-Fowler, Research Associate, AMA Division of Library and Information Management.