What’s The Difference Between Bad Habits And Addiction?

What’s the difference between bad habits and addiction? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.

Bad habits, by definition, are things we wish we didn’t do. But not all bad habits are equal. Nail-biting is an annoying, embarrassing bad habit. Smoking is a habit that’s significantly worse for our health. Substance use disorders resemble bad habits gone amok. Addiction threatens the health of the individuals involved as well as those around them. Ultimately, its ill effects harm entire societies.

The National Institute on Drug Abuse defines addiction as a brain disorder involving compulsive drug seeking and use. The substances we most often use to supply our addictions are fiendishly successful. They get right to the source of our mental functioning.

With all drugs of abuse, our brains get a jolt that creates waves of neural changes, orienting our attention to the drug, creating initial feelings of pleasure, and motivating our continued use. We start to crave the addictive substance and need higher and higher doses to get the same effect. Our judgment and ability to make decisions become impaired. We find the drug difficult to resist, despite the fact that we may not like it or its long-term effect on us. Drug abuse thus resembles a bad habit in that it does not depend on our conscious desires and liking for the “high” we get through use. We intend to stop, but find ourselves continuing to use.

However, as I mention in my book, Good Habits, Bad Habits, addictions and habits ask different commitments from us. With a true habit, our commitments to its ongoing execution diminish over time. Habits settle in, and we can more or less forget about them.

An addiction settles in, and it takes over our lives. More and more of our waking day is spent in its thrall. Some of this can become quite ingenious. There are forums online to share and compile information for the committed cigarette smoker when he or she must travel by air: which terminals have smoking sections, which airports have areas set aside before and after security. It’s a whole community built around making the best decisions . . . for the health of the addiction.

The habit-like aspects of addiction may lead us into insights about its causes and possible preventive measures. This statement is not meant to replace or refute any current conceptions of addiction. It is clearly a complex and multifaceted issue. Addiction commandeers multiple learning systems in the brain. It’s neurological, but it’s also connected to our social circumstances. It’s linked to personality traits like impulsiveness. It’s even partly hereditary. But it also depends greatly on the contexts in which we live. Consider the experiences of soldiers in the Vietnam War.

The Vietnam War was an appalling natural experiment on drug addiction. Soldiers were suddenly surrounded by a generous supply of heroin so pure that they could smoke it in cigarettes. It’s a story that is sometimes overlooked, especially given the currently popular disease model of addiction.

Only about 5 percent of the soldiers who had been addicted to heroin or opium in Vietnam continued their addiction stateside in their first year home. It wasn’t because they were unable to locate a supply. About half of the formerly addicted soldiers did indeed try heroin or opium again in the States. But the vast majority did not continue as heavy users once they returned home.

You might say, well, the experience of these soldiers doesn’t tell us much about rehabilitation. What people go through during war has little to do with our regular lives. But that is the point. The Vietnam War context was what initially spurred most soldiers to use drugs. Once regularly using, they should have succumbed to the power of the drug. Instead, coming back home to different surroundings was a deterrent for 95 percent of users. When environments changed and imposed significant friction on drug use and promoted alternative actions, most soldiers quit.

From our habit perspective, the soldiers’ return home was a significant change of context—new surroundings with restraining forces that put the brakes on heroin use. The new actions encouraged at home yielded significant rewards (a paycheck, families!), and the soldiers acquired new habits. For them, drug abuse was history.

For drug treatment, new ideas are clearly needed. We’ve seen limited success from current treatments but much pain, wasted lives, and enormous costs from drug abuse. Maybe it’s time to put more emphasis on the behaviors and contexts of addiction and recovery.

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