Hacker News Reader

Comment by joenot443 | Hacker News Reader

>Alcohol promises a great time. Alcohol delivers a hangover and regrets.

The level of simplicity being applied here suggests to me you've never been an alcoholic nor spent much time with alcoholics. This advice is at the same level of "just think positively" when addressing depression; it's almost laughably out of touch and unhelpful.

It's great that you find it easy to exhibit such control over your behaviors, but it's important to remember that the reason alcohol is the most widely abused drug in history is because to the vast, vast majority of people, an 'easy' internal examination isn't enough to permanently change one's behavior.

View on HN

I've quit addictions.

It's important to understand that resolve is something you need to practice, it's like a muscle. Every time you give in to a temptation, your resolve weakens. Every time you resist, it gets stronger.

Practicing like this quite literally rewires your brain. Strengthens the ability of the amygdala to regulate behavior. If you give in to every impulse, you teach your brain to exercise less impulse control.

This type of advice does work, but only for some people. I would hazard that "some" isn't even a majority of alcoholics or other kinds of addicts. So, it's an interesting perspective to share, but please don't assume that what worked for you is universally good advice for everyone.

You may as well be a patient in a drug trial, one of the let's say 30% that responded well to the drug, but afterwards you go out and claim that it's a cure for everyone... well no, it didn't work for 70% of people.

I'm not assuming anything. I'm sharing my experiences, which are the only experiences I've had, and the basis for my knowledge and understanding of the world.

I will also share the experience that addicts in general are experts at self-deception. They'll have long lists of reasons why their addiction is uniquely impossible to break, and most will dismiss trying anything as a waste of time, not from reflection but as a reflex.

what the comment describes is actually a central point of the "Easy Way" book mentioned many other places in this thread.

What an arrogant reply. Of course a ~ten line comment about a complex subject is simplistic. It is also accurate to a first approximation. If you want an in-depth study or treatise, buy a book.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com