ADDICTS have trouble with emotions. What do they need to get better? Medications? Groups? A Life Coach? Family Counseling? Vocational Rehab? All are good. None deal directly with this problem. NEUROSCIENCE FINDING : EMOTIONS NOW KINDLE DRUG CRAVINGS DRUGS REWIRE EMOTIONS Anger used to produce anger. Now anger produces cravings. What happened? Drugs produce a massive change in the brain. Emotions get stuck in loops and connect to high arousal dopamine circuits. Rewired brains get stuck in hyper-aroused states called 'kindling.' . Kindling upsets brain circuits and sets the stage for conditioning. Kindling associated with anticipation quickly gets associated with strong emotions like fear, depression,anger and even excitement. Now when strong emotions occur, the brain is rewired to elicit these conditioned cravings and even conditioned withdrawal. What's the problem? To alter cravings, you must somehow extinguish this connection to emotions.
NEUROFEEDBACK-GUIDED EXPOSURE THERAPY UNWIRES EMOTION-INDUCED CRAVINGS IMAGINAL EXPOSURE THERAPY is a proven technique to reduce and extinguish fears and traumas. The problem is that these emotional connections occur in implicit memory, a pre-verbal pre-conscious part of the emotion processing system deep in the hippocampus. Researchers have found a reliable way of making sure this is assessable using neurofeedback technology. Neurofeedback is used to get an addiction-prone person more able to deal with changes in the implicit memory system. With guidance and repetition, this flavor of exposure therapy rewires the brain and builds resistence to relapse without negative side effects.
NEUROTHERAPY-BASED TREATMENT FOR ADDICTIONS REQUIRES SERIOUS BRAIN RETRAINING There are many ways to rewire your brain. Repeated social interaction with sober-seeking people is one way. Getting exercise is another. Meditating also helps. However many people white-knuckle sobriety.
Neurofeedback can help, as long as you also keep active with other supports. If you elect to start this treatment, you must go all in. We start by discovering ways of improving your resistance to relapse by short-circuiting your brain response to addiction triggers. This helps free brain networks to work normally again.
ADDICTIONS OUTLAST GETTING CLEAN AGAIN. DRUGS SENSITIZE CNS AROUSAL. The objects on this graph represent stimuli used to test for arousal related to drug and alcohol issues. Robert has been off all drugs for 15 years and is doing well. Yet he still shows significant arousal to pictures of alcohol and happy users. Why?
Robert's Arousal Reactivity and Robert's Subjective Ratings went up during videos involving specific drugs and alcohol ->
Scientists find common brain network for substance use disorders Nature Mental Health on September 25, 2023.. www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/scientists-find-common-brain-network.
The researchers ... focused on a subset of 45 studies that were part of a recent meta-analysis of brain abnormalities and substance use disorders. They analyzed imaging data from nearly 3,800 participants who had evidence of addiction linked to brain atrophy, a loss of neurons and the connections between them. The analysis included addiction to substances such as alcohol, nicotine, cocaine, opioids, and cannabis. The researchers found that 91% of the atrophy coordinates mapped to a common brain network. This network included brain regions such as the anterior cingulate, the insulae, prefrontal cortices, and the thalamus. These regions had previously been linked to human craving, emotion, and risky decision making. The network was different from that found for atrophy associated with normal aging and neurodegenerative disease.
