Why Addiction is an Adaptive Response, Not a Moral Failing

Richard Zwicky: Hi everyone, it's Richard Zwicky with High on Healthy, the show where we know there's no one path to healthy, so we explore them all. If you haven't subscribed yet, please do so on your favorite podcast listening tool. Today, we're going to talk about a reality check. We're all hooked on something. And joining us, we've got Dr. Addy Jaffy who's challenging and has challenged a common misconception that addiction affects only a small troubled minority of individuals. The conversation we're going to have poses a tougher question. Are we all trying to avoid feeling something and we all addicted to something in some way to help us do so? That would imply addiction isn't a moral failing or a lack of willpower but actually a normal human response to emotional pain, stress, and unmet needs. Welcome to the show, Addie. So,

Adi Jaffe: Thank you so much for having me,

Richard Zwicky: When I was looking at your bio, I noticed you taught teach at UCLA. Do you know Mark Kaplan by chance?

Adi Jaffe: I know of him. We didn't really interact much while there.

Richard Zwicky: I'm actually having coffee with him in about 3 hours. He's on the advisory board of my predictive analytics company, and so we're getting together. He's visiting. So that's like to brilliant fellow. So there's a lot of hidden emotional hooks that feed compulsive behavior and shame is an incredible driver for people in sustaining that dependency life cycle. But today we have so many things that are not just people think of addictions as being drugs and alcohol and the like, but we're in an achievement culture and

Adi Jaffe: I mean the short answer is I think yes they absolutely are.

Richard Zwicky: Digital environments where everybody is trying to show off or show what they're doing and present themselves. Are these really just new forms of addictions that are assuaging an emotional need?

Adi Jaffe: Look, let's just define, and I think you hit this on the head when you were doing the intro. Let's define what we think of as addiction, right? So, as you pointed out, most people, if you ask them what does it mean when somebody's addicted, it's drug use or alcohol use. Maybe gambling enters into some people's conversation but that's about what it entails. Just to be fair, just so everybody knows, even if you only include those three, you've got about 50 million Americans who struggle every year. So even then, it's not a small sliver of society that is struggling with this. It's about one6th of the adults in this country. But here's a thing that I think is important for everybody to understand. It goes far beyond that, Think about the people who Think about the people who are addicted to technology use, which is rampant. I mean, I'm not even talking about adolescence and teens. We blame the teens all the time, but we're all connected to these little devices on a regular basis. Think about p\*\*\* and addiction use of kind of compulsive addictive behaviors in that sense. You bring all those and we're getting closer to the 100 million mark now out of 300 million adults. Right? So now a third of adults struggle. But I want to take it to one level beyond and I'll get to the shame piece here in a second. But we all know somebody who's addicted to work. What do I mean by addicted to work? I mean that one of the ways they deal with discomfort, one of the ways that they deal with things being uneasy or difficult in their everyday regular traditional outside of work life is they double down on their work,

Richard Zwicky: What?

Adi Jaffe: They don't make it to dinner or they work through dinner. They go back after dinner, continue working. There are two elements of that, avoidance and also the addiction to success and money and the idea of what that is going to get you. Then the last piece I want to add on top of that is there are a lot of people that we know who struggle with compulsive behaviors. It can go all the way from procrastination to that person who gets angry in work meetings all the time and yells at others and they know it's troubling, right? It's been under 360 review or their boss has talked to them or maybe they're the boss, right? Everybody knows it's a problem and they can't stop themselves from doing it. I think all of those things, and I've worked with all of them, they all meet criteria for addiction. Why? Because what is addiction? It's a behavior that you engage in over and over and over. You understand that it's damaging to you other people, and yet you are unable to stop or slow it down to the point where it's no longer damaging, Over time, that's addiction. So, I would argue that u a boss who has anger tantrums or somebody who keeps putting their foot in their mouth in the middle of work over and over and over because of improper statements also qualifies just like the person who can't stop themselves from gambling or drinking. Yeah.

Richard Zwicky: It's interesting when you cited the 50 million people, I immediately went to the CDC's number of 61% of adults have dealt with an adverse childhood experience. And

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Richard Zwicky: We look as addiction as often being an expression of somebody trying to cope with those experiences where they're unresolved. But at 61% that would mean there's 200 million. Is the 150 million the silent majority who were not looking at how they're dealing with things in the same way?

Adi Jaffe: I mean I love that you brought ACES into the equation. And I think by the way when you think of adverse childhood experiences even some of those early surveys and you look at the things they use as adverse experiences I think even that is dated right we use a version of that on our ignited platform online and we've expanded it there are substantially greater online bullying things of that nature can certainly qualify there are a lot of different ways in which people can have adverse experiences at an early point and I'll bring us back to what you talked about which is shame or these underlying emotional hooks. We look at people who struggle with compulsive behavior either substance addiction and things of that nature or some of those other things we talked about before. We look at them as people who are damaged, whose brains don't work appropriately, who are sick. But I'm going to make the argument and this is what I talk about in my book Unhooked that it's actually the complete opposite. Those behaviors became what we call adaptive behaviors that serve these people at an earlier point in time to protect them against other things. I'll give you an example, if you grew up in an environment where you were beaten at home, I'm going to go for an extreme example. If you grew up in a home where you were beaten, the ability to detach emotionally, the ability to escape physically or psychologically from the scenario, the tendency to not trust others because even the people closest to you may damage you physically and emotionally. Those are all very natural responses to that experience growing up. They may look damaging. They may look maladaptive. There may be something wrong in some of the other behaviors that they bring on 40 years later, but it's pretty hard to judge somebody over here who's trying to cope with severe trauma from the age of 8 to 15. Based on our experience and shame, which we were getting to before, is actually the feeling that I'm separate, I'm not worthy of the people around me. I don't align by their values. They don't accept me. And as people, we're social animals, And so we require fitting into a social group. And shame is the distancing of ourselves. It's a separation of ourselves from that group. If you've had and I give an extreme example, it doesn't have to be that extreme, but if you had negative experiences like that at an early age, it just makes sense that you would have negative self-concepts,

Richard Zwicky: Of course you do. Of course you do.

Adi Jaffe: Negative beliefs about the world. And so you have to find ways to cope with them. And all those things I talked about earlier, including, by the way, procrastination, micromanaging, and an anger bombing at work, are all coping strategy to deal with internal pain.

Richard Zwicky: They are although procrastination is often also associated with ADHD.

Adi Jaffe: It's I mean, but even associated with ADHD, so I struggle with ADHD and always have. And there's an ironic thing for me with ADHD, right? People with ADHD have a really hard time following through on things focusing, attention drifts. In a way, there's also a huge silver lining to that, right? You can connect dots and think in creative ways that other people are unable to. But ironically, for a lot of people with ADHD, structure, ongoing dependencies, predictability is actually a really, really good thing. It's just that early on in life, we have a pretty hard time establishing those for ourselves, right? Things that are pre Procrastination to me, even with an ADHD, comes from an internal belief, which is I've got to make this as good as it can be. I've got to make it perfect before I show it to others. And since I struggle with focus, getting it perfect is difficult. And so, it becomes that kicking the can down the road problem where I'll look at it tomorrow or I'll make it better tomorrow. And then, tomorrow never really comes. And so I think even with ADHD, and by the way, I'm not a huge fan of psychological labels because they change so often. But even with ADHD, I've seen it over and over in my own life and the life of others where the belief about what that means for your performance still impacts how you actually do in the world.

Richard Zwicky: If you govern yourself based on that you are ADHD or have ADHD, you limit yourself. And the reality is it gives you incredible ability to connect the dots that others wouldn't see, to think outside the box and to create things.

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Adi Jaffe: And I'll go even one level beyond that. Right. We're comparing ourselves. We talk about neurode divergent. We talk about different learning styles. We have all these subtle ways of discussing this topic nowadays. But in reality, normal is a myth anyway.

Richard Zwicky: My statement on the show often is I'm the only normal person in the universe and

Adi Jaffe: There is Yeah.

Richard Zwicky: You're the only normal person in your own universe,

Adi Jaffe: For yourself.

Richard Zwicky: And so we're all divergent from that.

Adi Jaffe: For yourself, you surely are. Yeah. And here's the thing, I mean, if you really carry the notion of normal to its logical conclusion and what it would actually mean, does that mean normal on every aspect of personality? Because no matter what school of thought you adhere to there, the smallest number are about five different characteristics, right? The ocean kind of personality trait framework but you take that farther and you've got, 16 different personality types. You've got all these different ways of breaking people down. So, are we talking about a single normal for all humans? Are we talking about a single normal within each one of those factors? Or are we talking about some kind of ballpark of normal functioning? And then my argument is what you would mean by normal, Richard, could be completely different than what I would mean by normal.

Richard Zwicky: And that should be embraced,

Adi Jaffe: Amen. I mean imagine for a moment if Henry Ford was normal, if Albert Einstein was normal, if Elon Musk was normal if pick anybody has ever looked up to in the world and imagine them being normal and then tell me if you'd still look up to them. I think the short answer is no.

Richard Zwicky: No, it's very true. You mentioned something earlier. Tell me about the ignited platform. Right.

Adi Jaffe: So, I'll tell a tiny bit about my story. I ended up struggling with pretty severe addiction for about seven years of my life all the way through after college. Started drug dealing, went to jail behind it. It was a nightmare scenario for a different talk. My latest book opens up with the SWAT team arrest that kind of brought that to an end. When I got out on the other side of that, I had a bachelor's degree but pretty much nothing else. And so I had to start from maybe not even zero, underground to some extent. And I had to kind of build back up from the hole that I dug in myself. And so I went from being a drug dealer and making money and living a insane, absurd life where I was high every moment of every day to sitting in a class again. And it turned out I got when I didn't have drugs and I was focused on something, I became a really, really good student. So got my masters, then went and got my PhD at UCLA. And what dawned on me as I was cycling through that was that there's a ton of information in behavioral neuroscience, motivation, cognitive neuroscience, abnormal social psychology that are parts of how we understand human behavior and they essentially never made it. I graduated from school 15, 20 years ago. So,

Richard Zwicky: And the most in need can't afford it. Mhm.

Adi Jaffe: They never made it to the recovery mental health world. They sat there in books and academics talked about mental health in one way and then the people that practiced it talked about it totally different The way I went about it initially was I started a treatment center with a partner and it was great. I mean we helped a few hundred people every year. It was really nice but it made me feel like it didn't make a dent. And the problem is that operating a real treatment center is really expensive. So that means you have to charge people a ton of money. And it's not that I have a hard time Exactly. And I love helping I help people who have money all the time. They have problems just like everybody else and it's required. But I wanted to help a lot of other people who couldn't. So what I did about five years into that is I started gnited. And so IGNTD.com Ignited is a website where we have essentially now it's an app and you can get help for dollars a day instead of hundreds of dollars a day and it's 247. So, we invented this in 2018 before AI became a run-of-the-mill household word like it is now. But the idea was personalizing care. And so I everything I learned in the past. I bring all my friends and all the experts that I know to lead workshops. And you get it for, I think it's 20 bucks a week at our lowest program 30 bucks a week or something. And it's like having your own portal to be able to get ongoing 247 support for mental health and addiction struggles.

Richard Zwicky: And I mean that's powerful and I know I understand the challenge you're dealing with on a few fronts. One of the challenges for people as they're trying to go through this and come out the other side is, as mentioned the addictions you went through and we're talking about the silent addictions that people don't recognize is shame.

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Richard Zwicky: And shame plays, from what you described, it's central to your model, but why does shame deepen compulsive behaviors rather than interrupt that? I'm ashamed of doing this. I won't do it again as opposed to, I'm just going to keep doing it, doubling down, right? Mhm. Sure.

Adi Jaffe: I think one of the things that's underlying the entire concept of shame is the idea that I can't do it that I'm not strong enough to do it. And so, one of our models that I ignited is f shame. It came from my first TEDex talk. And look, many of us, I mean, you talked about ADHD, and I think it's a good parallel to some of the people who struggle with heavier duty mental health and addiction struggles. One of the things you're told about when you have ADHD is what you can't do. And you start developing these really limiting beliefs about what is possible for you. Henry Ford said this, you're right. You talked about you are the normal for yourself. That's a very adult way of looking at it. When you're 13 years old and you're told, hey, you can't focus, you're going to do really poorly in school, some of you don't graduate, etc., you start building the self-concept that you're limited. And first of all, I'd argue now 20 years in the field, a of it is just A lot of it is, again, ADHD is Addiction is a Bipolar, depressed, they are labels, but in reality, they're a huge ballpark, a huge arena of possibilities. And some people with depression can't get out of bed and have a hard time succeeding. Some people with depression need a little bit more motivation and need to lock into something that is full of purpose. Some people have depression because of environmental and temporary specific events that are happening in their lives, when my dad was sick and then died of cancer, I was temporarily depressed. Now I've struggled with clinical depression for a longer period of time before but in that period the depression was explicable and relevant. If there's one thing they get out of this I want people to understand that what makes you unique is not necessarily going to fit neatly into a specific label and a specific book and a specific page on somebody else's bookshelf. Right? You may have to do the hard work of discovering what makes you unique, the negatives and the areas you can grow in and the positives in the areas that you're so special and so strong in that other people will not understand it until you water it, until you make it the best that it can be. I mean, you're talking to a guy with, ninetime convicted felon. I gradu I was talking to my kids about this the other day. I am smart. And what that means technically is, give me a little bit of information, I can do really well on a test, right? So I graduated from UCLA with an undergrad arguably attending less than 15% of my classes. I was that kid, this is back in the day when you get a paper syllabus. I would go the first day, get the syllabus, I'd never be in class again except for the tests.

Richard Zwicky: Myself was included. I was like that.

Adi Jaffe: But I graduated under a 3.0 GPA. I had a 291 GPA. Right? That's a C plus B minus. So, you can think to yourself, if you really didn't attend college and you got a B minus, are you smart? I don't know. I didn't feel that smart, but it's not bad considering how little work I put into it. But what ended up happening later for me in life is what I realized that when I targeted on things that I care about, I became a 4.0 student. And so, I wasn't any smarter or any dumber between those two points. It's identifying what are the things that I cared enough about to put in the work and have the dedication. And for some people like me, it's school and then I became blogger and then a podcaster and I wrote books. For some people, all the things that I've done are they sound horrible. They sound like the worst possible way of spending your life. And that's fine and okay for you, but you better go out there and find what makes you flourish, what makes you feel content, what makes you feel strong, because that's what's going to drive the next stage of your life. Amen.

Richard Zwicky: And that's the thing. So many people don't ever really spend the time to discover what drives them forward, what makes them special, what makes them not just unique, but also creates that value for them in themselves and

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Adi Jaffe: And by the way, they run, this is a conversation literally last night with my children or two nights ago with my children. They run on the concepts fed to them by their culture, their environment, their parents in terms of where they should look. And so I have this drawing in unhooked where, you look at what are the possibility, what can I do, and it looks like, here's the bubble of what I can do. But in reality, that bubble sits in a huge universe of other potentials that you have never looked at, you have never considered, or you think of as ill-fitting, is bad, as inappropriate because of your upbringing.

Richard Zwicky: And parents make that mistake all the time, and I've not been free of making it myself, where you look at your children, you see the things they can do, and you try and give them advice about try this, and they hear it as do this or you should do this as opposed to try this because it may suit you. And that's the sort of thing we do. And it's always a balance between guidance and forcing. It's parenting is

Adi Jaffe: Toughest thing about parenting or one of the toughest Amen to that.

Richard Zwicky: How do you make enough mistakes and have somebody turn out that's been loan to you or you're renting for 18 to 24 years. But that also brings me to lived experience and academic psychology. You've deep into both. You've got the experience, which a lot of people will never face and you've emerged so much stronger than most would ever hope to. But where do live experience of getting through it and the academic psychology most strongly disagree about how and where change actually happens?

Adi Jaffe: That's a great question. I would say one of the places where, most strongly disagree, it's hard. There's so many schools of thought. But you ask people, I think most people still believe that addiction is primarily a biological disorder. And I actually wrote an article for psychology today about this man maybe 12 years ago. So I studied behavioral neuroscience at within the psychology department.

Richard Zwicky: You drunk the Kool-Aid.

Adi Jaffe: And people would always, so I got a lot of the genetics and the epigenetics and the neuroscience of it. So when I walked out, I was pretty heavily genetics leaning, but people would always ask me this question. Yeah. You drink the Kool-Aid you have in front of you,

Richard Zwicky: You do? Yeah.

Adi Jaffe: Get thirsty. And so people would always ask me, they would say, what is it?" So, is it biology or is it psychology? Is it nature or nurture? And initially, I would try to give them some rough estimates. And what I realized over time is that answer is completely different for different people What do I mean by that? You could have people who don't have a lot of the genetic predisposition but grew up in an environment where they were almost spoonfed all the reasons, all that stuff that you talked about, a lot of drinking around them, and they are traumatized and there's no support from their family or other people close to them in the community. And so the risk factors are so great that even though they have no genetic and biological predisposition, they go in that space. Then you have people who are biologically predisposed like Everybody in their family is addicted etc. But through some conflated mix of synergistic protective factors in the universe they never end up developing an addictive problem. There is no clear-cut answer as far as I know given everything I've looked at. First of all to the question is it nature or nurture? Here's what I can tell a lot of people look for the genetic like what is the addictive gene? It doesn't exist. A lot of people try to describe an addictive personality. I don't believe one exists. The disagreement sometimes is about the severity. So Gabbor Mate falls on the side of it's all about trauma, right? That's kind of his writing. I have another friend Stanton Peele who's very viciferously against that notion. He and Carl Hart are two amazing researchers that anybody who cares about this should read. They're very much on the environmental influence. They lean heavily on the environmental influence. I think those things are all true and then you got a lot of other people talk about psychology or biology like the Norah Vulco and Naida NAA kind of world.

Richard Zwicky: They want people like the easy button.

Adi Jaffe: I think we have to get comfortable with the fact that it's not a single answer for any given person. They are all factors that differ. And I think that's actually weirdly where people disagree, right? People want to pick a camp. And my whole notion is you actually can't pick a camp. They do. Everybody, by the way I like the easy button. I love the easy button.

Richard Zwicky: Everybody does. It doesn't work all the time. There's m sometimes multiple easy buttons.

Adi Jaffe: You said it doesn't work all the time. The way I think about it is most hacks,

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Adi Jaffe: And I'm not saying an easy button is a hack, but most shortcuts prove false pretty quickly. By the way, drugs and alcohol and gambling and p\*\*\* are hacks, right? I don't feel great, but when all I can solve the problems in my life or I can just drink a bunch right now and not care about them. The easy button is to drink.

Richard Zwicky: And that's for the ones who are obvious and they have the symptom they can see. But what about the body symptoms or symptoms in the people's behavior that people don't realize are part of that sustaining addictive cycle? People are walking around don't realize I'm addicted.

Adi Jaffe: I love that. So I think that's why I wrote the book Most people only look at the really big signs. So I'll give it just in the last few minutes here a little summary. So in unhooked I give people other than all the history and all the citations and all the research I give people two really easy frameworks. Number one the sparrow behavioral chain sp a r o stimulus perception activation response outcome. That's just a way to understand why you do what you do. So something happens you have a specific belief or perception of it. That perception creates an activation physiological and psychological in you. And based on that physiological activation you choose an action. That action produces an outcome. So whenever something happens, it doesn't have to be an addictive behavior at all, but whenever you go through an event, you can analyze it using that framework and it'll give you a lot of information. The mistake most people make is if they get a negative outcome, if something bad happens, they actually try to sweep it under the rug and ignore it. Go to sleep, binge watch TV, get a couple drinks in, you smoke something just so you don't care. My whole point is whenever a negative outcome happens, it doesn't have to be massive. Your first responsibility actually to pause and understand what just went wrong. Analyze Don't run away from it. And in order to do that, I give people the eat loop. And so that's explore, transform. You've got to sit down with the discomfort before you fix it. And you've got to understand where along the sparrow loop did something just go wrong. Then we go through acceptance. That's where the shame work happens. That's about acknowledging self and other compassion and self and other forgiveness. You've got to sit with the fact that you're doing your best even if the result is not exactly what you wanted. You were doing your best and you can get better and it's okay and then transform is how you start shifting those behaviors. But Richard, if people start looking at negative outcomes, at results they don't like in their life early, instead of waiting till your wife threatens to leave you or you lose the job your kids never want to talk to you or you have a heart attack. Instead of waiting for that,

Richard Zwicky: And when somebody actually begins to unhook,

Adi Jaffe: The first time you and your wife have a fight, instead of trying to defend yourself, you go, "Hold on, where did things just go wrong?" And you analyze. The first time you have a screaming match at work and you go, that's not how I wanted that meeting to go." Pause. Analyze what happened. If you do that earlier, you'll never have to get to a place where things break down.

Richard Zwicky: What sort of identity disruption surprises people the most?

Adi Jaffe: I didn't invent what I'm about to talk about and

Richard Zwicky: Start. Mhm.

Adi Jaffe: I talked about it without being able to give credit for it when I wrote my first book the absence smmith because I never read the book. Carol Dwek talks about a growth mindset or a fixed mindset. If you haven't read that book, please do it. Whether you get it after my book, I care about less. You need to read this book. Most people have a fixed mindset about a lot of things. They say, this is just who I am. I've always been angry. Don't bother me. That's just who I am." That's a fixed mindset. It's the idea of I am who I've always been. I will always be that. A growth mindset is the idea that I'm changeable. I'm always changeable. And I would actually argue that's probably the best identity to take on for two reasons. Even if you think you're really smart in a fixed mindset sort of part of what you're saying is, "I'm smart and it'll never go away." But that's not true. If you don't continue challenging yourself, you will suffer. Your cognitive abilities will degrade over time. If you think you're quoteunquote dumb, let's say bad at math, You may just have a lot of work to do in order to get better at math. But if you don't believe that doing work will improve, if the identity is fixed, you can't change it. So I think the number one improvement in the identity that anybody could take on is just the idea that their identity is changeable and that they can adopt a growth mindset.

Richard Zwicky: And that's the big thing is I can grow. I can change. And people have to that is the first step. And I can do better. Right? I mean,

Adi Jaffe: I've adopted this growth mindset.

Richard Zwicky: We all have moments where we're sick,

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Adi Jaffe: Of course, and we always will.

Richard Zwicky: And always will and accept it because there's other areas where we have brilliance. Mhm.

Adi Jaffe: We always do change. It's whether we perceive it or not. Richard, you're not the same person you were 15 years ago. I didn't know you back then, but I guarantee you're not the same person. Are there elements of you?

Richard Zwicky: I know I'm not right,

Adi Jaffe: Are there elements of you that are commonly threaded throughout? Of course. But the Richard of now is not the Richard of 15 years ago. And the Richard of now is not the Richard of 15 years from now. And so we do change. It's just the acknowledgement of it that will actually allow us to not be reactive to the change, but be proactive and planned about how we want to change.

Richard Zwicky: This has been a great discussion. I know we're out of time for the day but people who want to read your book, where should they look? Title, description for all of them and ignited Unhooked on Amazon and wonderful.

Adi Jaffe: So, Unhooked all over Amazon on Barnes & Nobles, all those other places you buy books. It's available everywhere. On all social media, I am Dr. Adjaffy. D R A D I A F E. And there's also a website called Adjaffy.com if you want to go check me out there.

Richard Zwicky: And ignited.com's the other one. Thanks so much for joining us today on High on Healthy and

Adi Jaffe: Thank you so much for having me. This has been great, Richard.

Richard Zwicky: Thanks to everybody for listening. I'm Richard Zswicki with High on Healthy and we'll be back again with you soon.