Are You Wired for Addiction?
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another one of these ten minute Mondays. Today, I want to talk about a question that I bet most of you have asked yourself at some point. Maybe it came late at night. Maybe it was after a long weekend.
Speaker 1:Maybe it was after drinking more than you planned. Do I have an addictive personality? Am I just wired this way? It's one of those phrases kind of everybody uses and nobody really questions. Maybe everybody says your uncle has an addictive personality.
Speaker 1:Maybe your friend can't keep chips in the house because of hers. Maybe you've said it half joking to yourself or with a friend while you were pouring a second glass of wine. Here's why it matters. Because if you answered yes, it might change everything. The problem now sits deeper than your habits.
Speaker 1:It's built into who you are. You're now a certain type of person, and that person maybe can't be trusted around alcohol. That is a heavy thing to believe about yourself. So today, I want to look at what the science actually says. And I'm going tell you upfront, the more research I did on this, the more it surprised me.
Speaker 1:The idea, it has its history. Early on, addiction, it was kind of treated as this character defect, something wrong with a person. So researchers went looking for that profile, figuring if they could find that type of person, then they could spot ahead of time before trouble would get there first. Guess what? They never found it.
Speaker 1:After decades of study, there is no personality test that can tell whether you'll develop a problem with alcohol or not. Nobody ever produced a profile that separates the people who struggle from the people who don't. And in fact, two researchers who spent their careers on this, a guy named Andrew Littlefield and Ken Share, said the idea has basically been abandoned in their field. And an author, Maya Zalesovich, she wrote a book on the neuroscience of addiction, and she puts it more bluntly. The addictive personality is a myth.
Speaker 1:Now I want to say personality isn't irrelevant here. The real picture is just a little bit more interesting. Certain traits do show up more often in people who do struggle with alcohol. Things like impulsivity, sensation seeking, a high sensitivity to stress. But here's the part that kind of changed my thinking a little bit on this.
Speaker 1:None of those traits is good or bad on its own. Sensation seeking can help somebody chase where the night goes, but it also can put them on a plane, for example, in another country that they've never seen. Impulsivity can maybe cause havoc on somebody's life and then in another person it can barely register. The trait, it kind of supplies that energy. It doesn't pick the destination.
Speaker 1:Let's go a step further. When researchers followed people for years to see who develops addiction, they don't just find one path in. They find a few and two of them point in opposite directions. One runs through boldness. You have impulsive, hungry for novelty, hard to talk out of anything, and this trait shows up more often in men.
Speaker 1:The other runs through anxiety, sad, inhibited, cautious, kind of drinking to quiet something down inside. And this one shows up more often in women. A third group swings between the two. The bold kid who couldn't wait to try everything and the anxious kid who was scared of it all can end up in the exact same place. Now if two opposite people arrive at the same destination, no single personality is doing all the driving here.
Speaker 1:There's also a little bit that turns the whole thing around. A lot of what we point to as proof of an addictive personality looks a lot like the effects of heavy drinking. The secrecy, the defensiveness, the short fuse. We read those as the personality that caused the drinking, when in plenty of those cases, the drinking produced that personality. And this can kind of go both ways, which is a little bit of a hopeful part.
Speaker 1:Researchers tracked drinkers from their late teens into their thirties. And as the drinking problem came down, so did the impulsivity, so did the anxiety. The traits moved with the behavior. The personality that people thought they were stuck with turned out to be part of the downstream of their drinking. Certain traits can tilt the odds towards one direction.
Speaker 1:An identity though sounds more like a verdict and these are not the same thing. The whole myth lives in the gap between them. And that sort of turns into my own story here. I had this all or nothing nature that I thought was proof that I had an addictive personality. You know, when I wanted to have a drink, I didn't want to just have one beer.
Speaker 1:I wanted to go get a six pack of beer. And the same intensity that I had there, though, is the same intensity that I brought to building businesses, to writing books, to getting on planes and living in other countries and things that completely changed direction when something in my life was no longer working. That doesn't make my drinking a strength. It just means that intensity, that really wasn't the whole story there. What mattered was where I aimed that intensity and what I kept repeating.
Speaker 1:And this is where the myth does real damage in both directions. If you believe you have an addictive personality, you basically handed yourself this life sentence, and maybe it's for a crime called being a certain kind of person. And that can raise why try to change a pattern if the pattern is just who you are. And I hear this from listeners all the time. Some where along the way, they just accepted that's just how I am.
Speaker 1:And once something feels like that's identity, you stop believing that change is possible. Now I wanna flip this to the other side. If you believe you do not have an addictive personality, you risk maybe handing yourself a free pass. Addiction is for those people, the ones with that personality trait. You're safe, so you never have to look at your own pattern.
Speaker 1:Some of the heaviest drinkers I know are protected by this exact belief. Either way, the label does the same job. It is a verdict to explain away behaviors. Now since I'm talking about research and transparency here, we can't skip over genetics because genetics are real. Family history does matter.
Speaker 1:And in fact, twin and adoption studies put an inherited vulnerability to addiction somewhere between half and sixty percent of the risk. That means if addiction runs in your family, you're not imagining maybe that it might run with you too. But risk is not destiny. I firmly believe in nurture over nature. There is no single alcohol gene the same way that there's no single addictive personality.
Speaker 1:It's hundreds of small genetic nudges, each one with a sliver interacting with your environment, your stress, and the life that you've lived. And the half that isn't inherited lives in experience, lives in access, in relationships, and learned behavior. Not all of that is chosen, but the patterns built on top of it, they can change. So what's actually going on when somebody feels that they can't do anything in moderation? I feel this at times too.
Speaker 1:Usually, it's in pattern. A learned pattern and behavior that alcohol handles things like stress and boredom or that awkward twenty minutes when you come into a party. And we already know that your brain is super efficient at finding the easiest things, so it keeps prescribing what worked before. So if you do that a few thousand times, it starts to feel like who you are. Or better said, this is just how I am.
Speaker 1:I have an addictive personality. But a pattern with a long history, it's still a pattern. Changing your whole personality, now that's a tall order. I mean, go ask married couples of twenty plus years. Totally changing a personality, I don't think they're gonna buy that.
Speaker 1:Now changing one pattern, that is gonna give you somewhere to start. Okay. That is the whole refirm. I have an addicted personality. That's a statement about who you are.
Speaker 1:Here's the thing. There's really nothing you can do except for carrying that around. I have a very well known and established pattern with alcohol. That's a statement, but it's about what you practice. And you practice things to get good at them.
Speaker 1:You can also unpractice those. So here's what I'd leave you with this week. Catch yourself the next time that label shows up, whether it's I just have an addictive personality or it's the other way. I'm fine. I don't have that personality.
Speaker 1:Both are ways of not looking at the actual pattern. So look at the actual pattern instead. You're not a type. Nobody is. I already checked the research.
Speaker 1:You're a person with a history. And the thing about history is it's the one thing that's guaranteed that you can keep writing. Thanks for hanging out with me this week. If you got anything out of this episode, please rate and review. Send me an email, [email protected].
Speaker 1:Thanks to all of you who wrote me last week. I love getting those. And until next time, cheers to your mindful drinking journey.
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