What Heroin Addiction Tells Us About Changing Bad Habits

I watched a confident person struggle to emerge, only to recede every time lift dealt a blow, and end up trying to find things to remove the pain he felt in life.

I am glad that his story actually helped stop one more life being lost - I worked with someone who though life was all about experiences, after blissful weed, there was the high of cocaine, and finally he considered opiates. A trip to the grave, to the family left behind, to the doctors who actually tried to save my friend's life, worked. Sobered him up, so to speak.

I don't know why you were prescribed Oxycontin, but there is definitely a problem with the way doctors prescribe drugs these days... prescription drugs kill more people than illegal drugs. And your kind of story is very common (my brother has / had a heroin addiction).

When we feel stress, we tend to act irrationally, in a way that comforts us or puts us into a more comfortable situation. If someone is irritating you, you yell at them, not because yelling initially comforts you, but because when you yell at them, maybe they go away. That behavior though starts to change your perception, and soon just yelling at people on its own starts to make you feel more comfortable. Even if yelling at people doesn't make them go away or reduce your stress, you're not acting rationally, your brain is basically taking the shortcut to what it has learned long ago will make it go away.

Drug addiction works similarly, except especially with something like heroin, it gets special teeth. You stop, and not only does stress trigger your compulsion to seek that comfort, even if you're not otherwise feeling stress, you now start to feel pain, or fear feeling pain from withdrawal symptoms.

The article talks about changing environments, and I absolutely agree, but I think a big thing that's overlooked is that these people have been taken out of one of the most horrible warzones, and brought back home. There's a big relief of stress from that. Adding back the fact that you're no longer around the people who used, the places you got your drugs, and the things that made you think about wanting to do it definitely helps. But if you come back to a more or less safe and stable life from being in a hellish situation, you would be less driven to take it up again.

On the other hand, had they transferred you to a different unit in Afghanistan instead of sending you home, even if you lost all of those environmental cues, I bet you would see more relapse just because you're in a highly stressful situation.

Congratulations on getting clean. I agree there's no excuse, but I also don't think you need to worry about whether there is an excuse. Stressful situations like you had to endure do make it more likely. It happened to you. It's a cycle that is hard to break. You got help and managed to break it. The fact that you became addicted isn't a failing, it's just an incident. It's more like you can say "I saw that side of the world, and I have to be careful to stay away from it." instead of being naive and thinking it couldn't happen to you.

It's a part of your life now. It's not good or bad, but you've seen a part of how our mind works that some other people haven't, and maybe hope they never have to.

     There is, of course, no excuse.

The people who end up wanting to keep using heroin are typically those who don't have their life in order due to heavy stress, sadness or something similar. The thing that heroin does is that it makes even the shitty moments feel not-shitty, and doesn't really get you wasted like many other drugs.

I'm not surprised that soldiers in a war might seek comfort from heroine, but once they return to their normal lives they no longer need heroine to help make life feel okay again.

Habits are about frequency and ritual. Thus I can use the same process to start good habits that make me a better more effective person.

This is a powerful thought and could be used to make a very interesting video game.

By changing your environment you can dramatically change your behavior to the point where it can literally kick a heroin habit.

Glib suggestion: perhaps replacing that addiction with the addiction of exercise might be worth exploring?

Based on other things I've read about heroin, the change of environment is the only thing that mattered here. Heroin is in a class of drugs that create strong links with experience so that, even years later, a reminder of the experience immediately brings back the craving. A sample anecdote from one book I read on drugs and addiction was a person who had kicked heroin, been clean for 10-15 years, and had become a successful executive. He then made the mistake of going to a movie with a scene of someone seeking his next hit in a drug den. Simply seeing the drug den was enough to trigger a relapse - he walked out of the movie to find some and several days later realized how much trouble he was in.

Examples like this have convinced drug researchers to conclude that long term treatment (eg taking methadone to block heroin) is the only reliable way to keep an ex-addict from being one unexpected environmental cue from becoming a current addict.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Globalization-Addiction-Poverty-Sp...

Also why meditation and mindfulness work, because then the environment is no longer an issue. You can create your own environment, inside you, and this becomes the way to handle every situation, with inner reflection, instead of external reflection on what surrounds you.

Assuming: 1 pack/day, $10 a pack (this is close in my province), 5% interest, over 30 years, has a present value of $55k. I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers for alcoholism or heroin addiction are similar. Addiction is hugely expensive to the people afflicted and society at large (barring the usual discussion of smokers saving health care dollars by dying early).

If flying across the world/country and making other drastic changes really does stop the cycle with a high rate of success, we should consider funding it.

Ironically, the high price of cigarettes means they can't afford to go out very often.

There were a lot of positive habits associated with smoking. I got to go outside, clear my head of of work for a few minutes, and take regular breaks.

So I took those things and did something in place of smoking that would let me get the same benefits. When I would normally take smoke breaks I would go outside (through a different exit) and take a walk. Or I'd stay inside and stretch or do simple exercises.

When it's not possible to change surroundings, it's important to replace bad habits with good ones.

I quit whilst working by avoiding places that were part of that "ritual": the cafeteria, fire escape/stairwell & pedestrian entry to the garage.

Disclosure: I've long since started again, I work from home now :-P

If you're an alcoholic and you move from one town to another, that other town is going to have bars and liquor stores just like the one you left. Your location may have changed, but there are so many things that are effectively the same, I can't see it having quite the same impact when compared to returning from 'nam.

It's certainly one way to clean up, and I didn't see this possibility addressed in the article.

First, most people don't like or can move far away.

Second, if your habits revolve around more abstract stuff than "seeing the office entrance where you smoke every day", you can end up changing some concrete circumstances and end up with the same abstract ones.