Addiction

the following statements are not meant to diagnose or treat any illness. Anyone with any illness or disease should consult their heath care provider. The following is meant for educational and entertainment purposes only.

We can tell if we are suffering additions if we can answer yes to any of these questions.

1. Do you feel compelled to eat, drink or smoke something that we find we can't go without for several days?

2. Do you ask your self why the world hates you. Why can't I get the good things I want in life.

3. No matter what you do you always get involved with bad business deals, abusive significant others, family members don't respect or listen to you

4. Always have bad health, can't lose weight, can't gain weight, or have no control over your health.

5. No energy, lazy or nothing in life interest us

6. Do you have difficulties in starting and finishing new projects.

7. Don't feel attracted to people who admire you and treat you with respect. Always find those close to you abusive and unavailable.

8. Can't make plans for the future.

We can become addicted to anything. Substances like food or drugs. Or feelings.

Your body produces chemicals from emotions like anger, shame, fear, or joy. These proteins travel to every cell in our body which has receptor sites for these proteins. When the same one gets produced over and over it affects how our cell functions. It may eventually cause the cell not to be able to absorb food or get rid of waste.

When the cells do not receive their daily dose of chemicals they send signals to the brain to make decisions in your life that will produce these chemicals. If you are not being victimized you will seek out situations or events that will make you a victim. If you have no reason to become angry you will find yourself creating things in you life to be angry over.

We will insist that all the events in our lives are being forced upon us. That we have no control over what is going on. But the absence of events that don't reinforce or addiction will cause us to start think of all the past food, drug, or events in which we were victimized, angered or upset over. We will start talking to others about all these things. We will go over all the events in our lives when we were mistreated, ripped off, or abused. We will seek our new people and events to get the same treatment.

In order to break the habit of addiction we have to deal with it in an correct manner. All addictions have a physical and a mental or spiritual side. In my opinion all things are 90% mental and 10% physical. You can have the most expensive car in the world but if there is no gas in the tank then you will go nowhere.

We have two neurotransmitters in our brain that act like the gas pedal in a car and we have two that act like the brakes.

If you are going down the road and the gas pedal is stuck to the floor and you have no brakes, what are you? Out of control.....schizophrenic. If you have the brakes locked up and the gas pedal does not work then you are going nowhere.....stuck.....depressed.

The best thing in my opinion if you are going down the freeway of life it is best to have gas and brakes when you need them. Sometime you must pick up speed to keep up with others or avoid accidents. Other times you need to slow down with traffic or avoid a parked car.

The gas or energy neurotransmitters are Dopamine and Acetylcholine

The brakes or calming neurotransmitters are Serotonin and GABA(gama-amino-butric acit) . Also Melatonin.

Dopamine is mimicked by coffee, cocaine, and doughnuts.

Acetylcholine by nicotine.

Serotonin by marijuana, ecstasy and alcohol

GABA by Valium and the receptors sites are made more sensitive by alcohol.

This is why people who are addicted to drugs usually have a drug of choice. They are deficient in one of these neurotransmitters.

D-L Phenylalanine and Tyrosine are pre-cursors or building blocks for Dopamine

B complex, b12 and choline are precursors for Acetylcholine.

5-htp(5 hydroxy tryptophan) is a precursor for Serotonin.

Inositol makes the receptor sites for serotonin more sensative

GABA can be obtained as a supplement from a vitamin store.

But it usually is not absorbed well from the intestines as the liver cleans neurotransmitters from your blood before it goes to rest of your body. GABA is better taken in a sublingual.

The next thing we must work on is the mental or spiritual. As we had discussed earlier that the brain produces chemicals in response to the thoughts and feeling that we have. To break the cycle of addiction it is necessary to change the way and what we think of. You must experience different thoughts and feelings which will become uncomfortable at first. This requires great Self-Control.

Self control is making a decision and sticking to it. When there is a glass of water in front of you and you decide to drink it and you do that is self control. When you make a choice not to drink it and don't, that is self control. When you tell your children there will be consequences for their actions and there aren't any you are out of control. When you say you will go to bed by 12.00 pm and don't you are out of control. When you say you will diet or take care of your health and don't, you are out of control.

When you are more worried about what others are doing or constantly criticizing them and deciding what they should be working on in their lives then you are out of control.

It will take great power to take charge of your life and make new choices for thought and action. Only by new way of thinking and recognizing the old bad habits we want to change can we produce new peptide chains that will evoke new responses in our body at the cellular level.

Some things that we can do to use our mental powers to change our minds is to use meditation to shut out the noise of our lives and to focus on the things that we want in our lives.

By increasing the power of our frontal lobe we can create a future on our minds of where we want to be. When we see and feel the new experiences that we want to feel is will change the whole direction of our progress and the direction we want to go in life.

One of the most powerful emotions we can feel in life is when we are in love. These endorphin can have a extreme effect on the rest of our bodies. Once when I first met this girl that I was falling in love with I was talking to her under a tree. A branch of the tree was within my reach and not paying a whole lot of what was going on I reached up with one hand and pulled my self up into the tree and sat down on the branch. A feat that even amazed me at the time. I was able to forget that it was impossible to do this, a feat beyond my normal strength.

We can learn to evoke this by falling in love with ourselves and those around us. By constantly admiring the wonder of others and ourselves we can learn to fall in love every day. Have you ever noticed that when you fall in love with a subject at school it is much easier to learn the new information. Look for reason to fall in love with the things that we feel are a must in life. If you must work for a living then find something to do that you can enjoy doing. Study things that bring us enjoyment.

Another thing that we can do to change the habits we are accustomed to is to expose ourselves to rejection. Ask for things we feel are impossible. New job, new relationship, new experiences, cold shower. When we force new things into our lives then the adjustment must be made by our brain and hypo-thalamus. This new way of functioning for our brain may be unpleasant but it will eventually lead us to new thoughts and events in our lives.

All of the information in the world will do us no good if we don't know how to apply it.

There are three things that will change our lives. Knowledge, understanding and wisdom.

You may be standing on a set of rail road tracks and see a train coming. That is knowledge. You realize that if the train keeps coming and hits you, that you will be killed. That is understanding. When you get off the tracks. That is wisdom.

Many 12 step programs work on giving people knowledge and understanding. The hard part for us all is the wisdom part. Only by changing our situations and outlook on life can we stop the addictions from over whelming us. It is said you can't teach an old dog new tricks. But are we more animal or human? That is for us to decide. A dog who has not eaten for a week and is walking down the street and finds a piece of meat on the ground will run over and eat is with no thought of who it belongs to or if it is poisonous. Or if a female dog is in heat the male dog will run over an impregnate it with no thought to producing new offspring or other consequences. You can act like a animal or you can be a human being and make choices based on knowledge and understanding. The wisdom comes in when we make choices that we want to have in our lives. Then take the appropriate action to attain the desired consequences.

We can complain about the things that life is forcing on us or we can overcome our addictions to food, drugs, material things, or emotional turmoil and get on with a new plan. Only by changing our minds and the way we think will get us the new and different plan we want in our lives. Overcoming addictions will give as bright and beautiful future.