Restoring a Mismatched Brain: Hypnotherapy’s Role in Addiction Recovery
What came first, the shame or the addiction?
If you identify as an addict, you might find shame and guilt feature strongly in your life. Two different emotions that often stay hand in hand, side by side. Shame refers to how you feel about yourself and has more concern with future behaviour. Whereas guilt is how you feel about your behaviour and refers to feelings about things already done.
Shame tends to evoke a lack of worth and feeling unlovable. If you’ve spent your life struggling with these feelings, it can be a relief when you find something which makes you feel a bit lighter. Whenever you feel a bit down, you have a thing to bring you back up. But soon the better feeling is less noticeable, and you need to do more of it. Then when you’re not doing the thing, you feel even worse than before. This is the beginning of addiction. It starts as a crutch, a form of self-medication to help you feel better. A coping mechanism that over time does more harm than good, then the source of shame changes and becomes about the thing.
Mismatch Theory & Evolutionary Framing
Your hormones are one of the main communication systems you have. They continually send messages between your brain and body to activate and control your basic behavioural activities. Your brain is highly malleable and changes in response to how you use it. When people talk about seeing a hypnotherapist to rewire their brain, they aren’t so far from the truth. However, it also has some core processes and expectations that developed through evolution, and are remarkably like the brains of the earliest humans living on this planet 300,000 years ago. Yet we live such vastly different lives now to then. We live completely differently to how the brain expects and relies upon.
Your brain expects nourishment, movement, connection, ritual, belonging, sleep and purpose. We live in a world of isolation, overstimulation, and unmet needs. Addictive behaviours can fill a gap historically met through survival. Addiction is not a character flaw, but rather a response to your environment.
The Brain & Nervous System – The Science of Addiction
Put simply, you have four motivator hormones and four gratifying hormones. When your brain senses a need to act to survive, it will release the motivator hormones. The survival instinct is about more than running away from a woolly mammoth. Your primitive brain “knows” you need connection to survive. This starts from birth, when we depend on our mothers for longer than many other mammals, and continues into adulthood, when survival is at threat without the support of the tribe. A “lone wolf” on the savanna is likely to find themselves prey. It is also too much to hunt, forage, build shelter, create fire, etc alone. This requires the support of a community. I use hypnotherapy for addiction to help clients meet their survival needs in healthier ways.
When the brain senses isolation, it releases a motivator hormone to nudge you back onto the path of survival. When you meet the need, the brain will release a gratifier hormone. You’ll feel good for a short amount of time. This helps your brain store the behaviour, so it knows how to respond next time, and rewards you for doing the thing that kept you alive.
When your brain senses unmet survival needs, it will keep dripping the motivator hormone. There is an important purpose to this process, so I prefer to keep away from labelling the feelings as bad or good. However, it’s useful to understand that their design is to feel uncomfortable, to prompt action and end the feeling.
The Role of Hypnotherapy for Addiction
When I use hypnotherapy for addiction and work with clients in addiction recovery, I want to know what the addiction brings them. One of the body’s gratifying hormones – the pat on the back from the brain – is dopamine. Most addictions, whether to cocaine, casinos, or even to love, exploit your brain’s dopamine-based reinforcement learning. Your primitive brain continually scans the world for survival-based reward – berries on a bush for example. When it finds something, it releases dopamine, which motivates you to continue seeking and finding.
Dopamine is a release of energy in response to meeting a survival need – it gives you the little burst you need to get to the berries at the top of the tree. As previously mentioned, your brain is highly malleable. The result of the dopamine surge is a circuit that triggers the release of dopamine every time you see something similar in the future.
The purpose of this has become the problem in our world today. Dopamine release gives you a last burst of energy to get to the “finish line”. When you have something in abundance, you don’t need the surge of energy, so your brain doesn’t waste dopamine on it. Another problem is that your body only ever releases a small amount of dopamine and metabolises it quickly. Whether you find one berry on a bush or a million, your brain will release the same amount of dopamine and metabolise it at the same speed. And just for luck – another problem is that a core purpose of dopamine is to store the survival behaviour. If you now know where to find the biggest berry bush, you don’t need more dopamine every time you go there. In the modern world, familiar is less exciting.
Addictive drugs and rewarding activities hijack this natural reward circuit. All addictive drugs – stimulants, opioids, alcohol, nicotine, etc. – flood the reward circuit with dopamine. A drug cue to an addict, for example, the sight of a syringe or drinking glass causes the dopamine system to light up, giving energy to craving and compulsive use.
Rather than trying to suppress or fight the craving with hypnotherapy, we explore what the behaviour is trying to do for you. By working with your brain’s natural plasticity, we can use hypnosis to help you find healthier ways to meet your human needs for connection, relief, safety and stimulation. You brain doesn’t expect excitement all the time, but it does need purpose. Biologically, that purpose is survival. Today survival is different, you don’t need to forage and hunt. Neither do you need to live in a community or exercise each day. However, your brain expects this and struggles without it. Hypnotherapy for addiction helps change the brain’s response to unmet needs. Rather than looking for willpower, hypnotherapy for addiction focuses on the root cause. We need to understand the purpose beneath the pattern and give your brain a better option.
Resources
Batchelder AW, Glynn TR, Moskowitz JT, Neilands TB, Dilworth S, Rodriguez SL, et al. (2022) The shame spiral of addiction: Negative self-conscious emotion and substance use. PLoS ONE17(3): e0265480. https://doi.org/10.1371/ journal.pone.0265480
Volkow ND, Michaelides M, Baler R. The Neuroscience of Drug Reward and Addiction. Physiol Rev. 2019 Oct 1;99(4):2115-2140. doi: 10.1152/physrev.00014.2018. PMID: 31507244; PMCID: PMC6890985.