Lance Dodes, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and blogger for Psychology Today, discredits the popular belief that addiction is impulsive. Addictive behavior is not merely one sudden urge after another. Not only can cravings last days, but they are also derived heavily from the emotional factors that come from feeling and satisfying the addiction.
If this type of dependence truly did stem from impulse, then at the point of planning, the idea would die. This is because “impulse” is a word that suggests that a given action or feeling is stimulus-driven and not a factor of any thought processing. Because a craving can take hours to satisfy and the longing to act on it can continue to last throughout, it is clear that the person’s recognition of negativity within the action is not enough to shut down the willingness to proceed. If addiction was impulsive, then knowing that what causes is negative would be enough reason to inhibit oneself.
In reality, addiction is a product of compulsions. Compulsions are repeated actions that a person takes that are often triggered by emotional factors and represent the longing of an individual to temporarily feel control of an aspect within his or her life. These are deep seeded and far more complex than impulses, which is why the strong internal feeling to gratify it lasts over such a long delay. In a way, it relieves a person to think about performing the action, whether it is gambling, drugs, or drinking. Individuals who have problems with dependency should not necessarily be viewed as pleasure seeking or mentally weak but rather as people with good functioning who are troubled by a specific psychological ailment.
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