The Human Addictions (ePub)

What is pleasure? You certainly know what pleasure is, since pleasure means everything to everybody. You know what hormones and neurotransmitters induce pleasure, and you know how to get pleasure at will, whenever you desire. Pleasure relates to drugs, social encounters, fulfillments and desires, and it relates to entertainment too. Pleasure, along with all your good feelings is induced by endorphin, serotonin, oxytocin, cortisone, adrenaline, and dopamine, among other hormones and neurotransmitters. What we want throughout this book, is to model pleasure and addictions entirely in all their encounters throughout life and Society, in order to make you better prepared in case that you ever have difficulties with… pleasure. …As suffering of lack of pleasure and happiness for example, or being addicted, or seeking to help others with their addictions, or seeking to learn more about yourself from your most important cognitive perspectives, or seeking ways to withdraw, etc. Pleasure, among all your feelings, good and bad, along with your entire punishment-reward mechanism, does not only feel good, but it helps you understand yourself, your needs and reasoning, your behavior, and your entire meaning in the world, inner and outer.
You might be reading this book in order to find a way to withdraw, or to help your loved ones withdraw, or to learn more about your mind, needs, feelings, and reasoning. …And if you are not addicted now, and if you believe that you would never be, since you are always careful with your dosage, just look around, because all problems that people have around you will be your problems too. …Because addictions are not caused by chance, lack of attention, or errors of judgment, but addictions are integral part of the natural procedures of your cognitive system. …And as long as you focus on feeling good only, as you see on TV, you will have problems of addictions too. Your only choice is to start managing your feelings by now, exactly the way you do with your time, money, affairs, electricity, family and social relations, etc., since you have to use your reasoning continuously throughout life, even with your own feelings. …And as stated above, you will end up feeling significantly better than you had ever felt before, without even focusing on good feelings particularly, but on reasoning, needs, intelligences, development, learning, etc., since these determine directly your inner feelings, and not the artificial sources of pleasure that are all around, as drugs and entertainment for example.
Throughout this book, we study what causes addictions in the world, from all perspectives: cognitive, empiric, behavioral, social, scientific, and ideological. We also study each type of drug along with all addictive activities, in order to understand them and be able to find ways to withdraw and to avoid them in all circumstances. …And since your life in this world along with your entire behavior have higher meanings, we are going to integrate drugs, pleasure, and addictions within the human behavior, and also within the human higher meanings in the world. This book is not only about drugs and addictions, but this book helps you understand your mind, needs, feelings, intelligence, society, behavior, development, rewards, punishments, health, stress, and relaxation, all leading to a better understanding of who you are, how you reason, how you feel, and how you interconnect with those around throughout life.
This book teaches you everything about yourself and about drugs and how they work, about pleasure and how it works on you, and about the world and what it does to you. …And in this manner, this book creates an entire model of the human addictions, which is easy to understand and integrate throughout your reasoning.