Why Can’t I Stop?

Addiction is so much more than just the act of consumption. Most people can willpower themselves sober and stop drinking for a few days or weeks. Maybe sobriety lasts until that wedding you’ve got coming up or whatever the event might be (there’s always something). But staying sober for the long term is completely different. The reason it’s different is that long-term behaviour is almost entirely dictated by internal mechanisms that are separate from—and far more powerful than—conscious intention (thought). Not only does alcohol degrade your ability to resist these mechanisms, but it also empowers them. Right now, they have a stranglehold on everything you do. And without fully understanding them, they shall continue to do so.

You can consciously think to yourself, ‘I’m quitting forever, and I really mean it,’ or ‘From now on, I’m only going to drink at the weekends,’ but these underlying mechanisms care not unless they have been firmly aligned with alternative behaviours. Anything other than drinking is completely foreign to them, so they simply can’t ‘be’ that way. It’s not who or what they are. Despite your best intentions, these mechanisms eventually take over and return you to the misery that they know and feel safe with, even if that’s destroying you in the long term. The alternative behaviours you aspire to are relegated to the realms of the wishful.

What your conscious mind can do, though, is begin the process of realigning these underlying mechanisms with what you actually want. And that, essentially, is the key to recovery: convince the underlying drivers of your behaviour to do something else.

Before you can do that, you need to understand exactly what is going on. You can’t change the things you do when you don’t know why you do them. So why do you do the things you do? The reasons are many. Some are unknowable. But for our purposes, we can simplify and reduce these factors into three overlapping and intertwined topics: the subconscious mind, the dopamine system, and the higher brain.

To complicate things further, each aspect is complex and not entirely understood. Our understanding of each is improving constantly, but much of their workings remain a mystery. So long as we remain mindful that these models are simplified tools rather than precise explanations, we can combine them with practical experience to develop solutions.