September is National Recovery Month in the US. Recovery Month is a time dedicated to increasing awareness and understanding of substance use and mental disorders. It’s also a time to celebrate those who are in recovery and those who do recover. The goal of the observance month is to educate others that addiction treatment and mental health services are effective, and that people can recover. With respect for this time, we compiled some statistics on addiction disorders to support awareness of these issues and show that individuals are not alone.
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This past summer, the Atlanta suburb of Roswell, Georgia, banned use of e-cigarettes and vapor pens in public parks. Officials enacted the restriction not because of rampant use of the devices in the city but, as mayor Jere Wood said, to “get ahead of the curve. Smokeless device use is soaring. To fulfill demand, vapor shops are popping up all over.
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By Howard Rachlin
‘I know these will kill me, I’m just not convinced that this particular one will kill me.’
–Jonathan Miller to Dick Cavett on his lit cigarette, backstage at the 92nd Street Y in New York
Jonathan Miller’s problem is actually a practical form of the central problem of ancient Greek philosophy (a problem that continues to haunt philosophy up to the present day): the essential relationship between the abstract and the particular. Miller is right. No particular cigarette can harm a person, either now or later. Only what is essentially an abstraction (the relationship between rate of smoking and health) will harm him. Can it be that Miller is just not a very smart person incapable of understanding abstractions? No way. He is a “public intellectual,” a British theater and opera director, actor, author, humorist, and sculptor. And on top of that a medical doctor.
No matter how smart we are, we all tend to focus on the particular when it comes to our own behavior. Only when we observe someone else’s behavior or when circumstances compel us to experience the long-term consequences of our own behavior, are we able to feel their force.
How then can we use our brains to bring our behavior under the control of its wider consequences? First, and most obviously, to control our behavior we have to know what exactly that behavior is. That is, we must make ourselves experts on our own behavior. It is this step – self-monitoring – that is by far the most difficult part of self-control. Modern technology can make self-monitoring easier, but I myself prefer to just write things down. At points in my life where I need to control my weight I keep a calorie diary in which I write down everything I eat, its caloric content, and the sum of the calories I eat each day. Then I make summaries each week. If I were trying to control my smoking I would record each cigarette and the time of day I smoked it – or, each glass of scotch, each heroin injection, each cocaine snort, each hour spent watching television or doing crossword puzzles when I should be writing, etc. Every instance goes down in the book. There is no denying it – this is hard to do. For one thing, it is socially difficult. You don’t want to interrupt a dinner party by running into the bathroom every five minutes to write down that you’ve bitten your nails again. This is one reason it’s good to be married (I’m serious). Your spouse (whose objective view is necessarily better than your own subjective view) will remember until you get home. Or you can (and should) train yourself to remember over short periods.
You may say that by recording your behavior you are constricting your freedom, but in this regard it is good to remember the poet Valerie’s advice: “Be light like a bird and not like a feather.”
This first step – self-monitoring – is so important, and so difficult, that it should not be mixed up with actual efforts at habit change. First make yourself an expert on yourself. Make charts; make graphs, if that comes naturally. But at least write everything down and make weekly and monthly summaries. Sometimes this step alone, without further effort, will effect habit change. But do not at this point try in any way to change whatever habit you are trying to control. Once you become an expert on yourself, you will be 90% there. The rest is all downhill.
After you have gained self-observational skill, you are ready to proceed to the second step. For example, Jonathan Miller’s problem is that, so to speak, each particular cigarette weighs too little. How could he have given it more weight? Let us say that Miller has already completed Step 1 and is recording each cigarette smoked and the time it was smoked. (Note that this already gives the cigarette weight. It doesn’t just go up in smoke but is preserved in his log.) Let us say further that the day of his encounter with Cavett was a Monday. On that day Miller smokes as much as he wants to. He makes no effort to restrict his smoking in any way. (He is still recording each instance.) However, on Tuesday he must force himself to smoke exactly the same number of cigarettes as he did on Monday. If necessary he must sit up an extra hour on Tuesday to smoke those 2 or 3 cigarettes to make up the total. Then on Wednesday he is free again, and on Thursday he has to mimic Wednesday’s total. Now, when he lights a cigarette on Monday he is in effect lighting up two cigarettes – one for Monday, and one for Tuesday. As he keeps to this schedule, and organizes his behavior into 2-day patterns, it should be coming under control of the wider contingencies. Once this pattern is firmly established, he can extend the pattern to three days, duplicating his Monday smoking on Tuesday and Wednesday, then Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, etc., always continuing to record his behavior. Eventually, each cigarette he lights up on Monday will effectively be 7 cigarettes – one for each day of the week. The weight of each cigarette will thus increase to the point where he no longer can say, “I’m not convinced that this particular cigarette will kill me.”
At no point is he trying to reduce his smoking or exerting his willpower. Willpower is not a muscle inside the head that can be exerted. It is bringing behavior under the control of wider (and more abstract) contingencies. This is a power that anyone can do who has the intelligence and is willing to invest the effort and time. And the exercise of this power can make a smart person happy.
Note: There is yet a third step – or rather a flight of steps. I have not mentioned social support. I have not mentioned exercise. Both of these are economic substitutes for addictions of various kinds. If either is lacking in an addict’s life, programs need to be established for its institution. I am assuming that we’re talking about the happiness of someone who already has an active social life, who already is as physically active as conditions allow. Addiction is not an isolated thing. It has to be regarded in the context of a complete life.
Howard Rachlin was trained as an engineer at Cooper Union and as a psychologist at The New School University and Harvard University. He has taught at Harvard University and at Stony Brook University. His current research, supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, lies in the development of methods for fostering human self-control and social cooperation. He is the author of The Escape of the Mind.
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If you had told me a week ago that reading a book would cure me of my ten year smoking habit, I would have laughed in your face. Then I would have lit a cigarette. Just to console myself. But a week ago, I picked up Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Quit Smoking and four days ago, I smoked my last cigarette. Miraculously, I haven’t wanted to smoke since. I know what you’re thinking – that I probably was one of those smokers who could take it or leave it. Not true. I smoked about half a pack a day, which isn’t much to some, but I had been known to scale the school walls to get out of school property to get that nicotine hit. Though ultimately I did well on my exams because of the number of detentions I was given for getting caught smoking (in the end my head teacher gave up giving me detentions and begged me not to set fire to school property), I couldn’t shake off the guilt about doing something that was bad for me. I consoled myself that Gabriel Garcia Marquez smoked six packs a day while writing Love in the Time of Cholera. (He is still alive today at 81.)
As much as I loved smoking, the reason I couldn’t give up was because of my experiences of trauma in attempting to quit before: tears, tyranny, insomnia, weight gain, grey clouds, misery, misery, misery. Several people had mentioned that they had quit without experiencing any nasty withdrawal symptoms using the Allen Carr book. I treated these comments with cynicism and caution, but I thought I would give it a try. It was cheaper than hypnotherapy.
It turned out to be a bit of a page turner – I had to know what the secret formula was and was desperate to know if it would work for me.
Since finishing the book, not only have I kicked the habit, I’ve also been unusually cheerful and hyperactive. What I didn’t expect was the boredom. Having recently moved house, I have not yet installed broadband, got a phone line or a TV and I found myself pacing my living room.
We in the publishing industry are always worried about our competitors – the internet, TV, video games which vie for our readers’ attention. But had we missed something? Perhaps cigarettes have been a silent competitor for years. George Orwell wrote in 1946 that contrary to belief, people in the forties didn’t choose not to read because they couldn’t afford it, they just preferred to spend money on other things (cigarettes included) instead. I get it. Cigarettes sedate us, we can happily sit without doing anything other than smoking for hours. It is a form of entertainment in and of itself.
But following my miraculous feat, I’ve been reflecting on the relationship between books and cigarettes. Maybe we give our competitors too much credit. It is easy to forget that throughout history it has been ideas and not technology that have moved the world forward. After all, if a book can change this
wall-scaling, self-deceiving, emotionally unstable addict into a happy, confident non-smoker then we in publishing should spend less time worrying and try to carry on buying, editing, marketing and selling great books. Maybe, as Allen Carr promised, this optimism and happiness is the real side effect of giving up smoking. In any case, I have renewed faith that publishers are definitely in it for the long haul.
Hannah Michell, Online Marketing Executive
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