HOW TO CURE ADDICTION
The book says just deciding to stop an addictive behaviour won't work since our emotions can be so strong they can easily overwhelm a decision we make when a craving comes upon us. But opposite emotions can help us much more, because they can be just as strong or stronger. We can help ourselves if instead of associating the wish to do an addictive behaviour with the promise of something good, we can come to associate it with guilt, fear of what it might be doing to us, and disgust and shame at what it has already done and what a bad habit it is. But not only that, we can at the same time come to associate thoughts of being free of the addiction with emotions of happiness, hope and confidence that we'll have got rid of it.
Once we realy come to think of our addiction as disgusting all those old memories that were fooling us by making us think we were getting more out of the addiction than we realy were will have to be updated in the brain to include the bad things, and we'll start thinking of the addiction as something harmful instead, so the cravings will lose their power.
So the book says we should programme into our memories thoughts of how revolting and harmful our addictions realy are, by often bringing to mind thoughts of the bad things they're doing in our lives, also, we have to often think thoughts about how much better things will be when we are not addicted anymore, like the things we can do with our money and time that we can't do now because our addiction takes up so much of it, how much more healthy we'll become, what we'll be able to do better than we can now and so on.
It says that when bad memories of our addiction become more of an influence on us than the good ones, our cravings will never reach the point where we can't resist them again. And soon we'll stop even wanting to do the addictive activity, because we wont be expecting it to fulfil our needs any- more, and our brains will stop thinking we're supposed to be doing it. So our withdrawel symptoms which could have been agonising if we thought we were withdrawing from something that was going to give us a lot of pleasure will be only mild.
