If you have an addictive nature, the physical state of being alive is enough to make you feel stressed. The sky may be blue and the sun shining, but you’ll always be watching for something to come along and spoil things – and it can drive you nuts. I’ve worked with thousands of people who suffer from many different forms of addiction, but I’m convinced that the common way in which they react to life itself is always at the root of their problems.
Being human is a wonderful journey of highs and lows. We encounter things along the way that make us happy or sad, but our time on Earth is something we hopefully want to cherish. When we come up against stress or worries, there’s usually an implicit belief that these feelings are caused by real events or situations.
But addicts can feel stressed and worried even when there are no external events or situations to blame. This is best described as free-floating anxiety… it’s as if they’re allergic to life, and they react to it differently to other people, even though they’re not always aware of this fact.
If you have an addictive nature, just being on the planet means you’re constantly watching for danger – and the things that you stress over are just as likely to be imaginary as they’re to be real.
I believe that this state of mind – whereby you’re a watcher who is always on the lookout for problems – is something that has existed within a section of the population since primeval times. It can have a powerful hold over us, and it can dominate our behaviour in ways that we don’t always fully understand.
Imagine for a moment that you’re driving a car and are suddenly flashed by a speed camera. It’s a fairly ordinary event, one that takes place on the roads many thousands of times every day – but how do you react?
Well, let’s assume you have a clean driving licence, in which case you’re in no real danger of losing it over a single traffic violation. You’ll probably curse under your breath and hope for the best. It might cause you a little pang of worry, followed by a few moments of unease while you mull over the possibility of receiving penalty points and a small fine. But within a short period of time – certainly within an hour or two – you’ve forgotten all about it. If the speeding ticket arrives in the post you’ll deal with it then.
The event doesn’t cause you undue emotional distress, and your response is in proportion to the experience. When the speed camera flashed, your limbic system probably kicked in to alert your brain to the possibility of a threat to your wellbeing. This made you feel uneasy, but you soon realized there was no real danger of you suffering life-changing consequences, so you were able to keep your emotions in context.
This is how the majority of the population is likely to react (the normal people, who I call the Earth dwellers!) If you have an addictive nature, however, you’ll probably have reacted very differently. First of all, instead of feeling a little pang of unease when the camera flashed, you may have experienced something closer to a torrent of dread: one that went WHOOSH! Your limbic system would have gone into overdrive in superfast fashion and unleashed a range of complex emotions and thoughts: Oh, my God – I’m going to lose my licence! What am I going to do?
It doesn’t matter that the maximum punishment is just a few penalty points, you suddenly find yourself convinced you’re in major trouble. In your mind, you’ll soon be just a whisker away from being banned from the road… and if you lose your licence, maybe you’ll lose your job. Suddenly, you feel as if what started out as a minor setback now has the potential to make you penniless and destitute.
You might spend the rest of the afternoon with a feeling of dread in the pit of your stomach, while your mind continues to mull over the imaginary damage that the speed camera is going to cause to your life: Oh my God! If I lose my job, how can I afford my mortgage? These fears can go round and round in an addict’s head like a washing machine. The thoughts they experience might be imaginary and insane, but the negative feelings they create are very real.
The emotional distress addicts feel can be triggered by the smallest things: an off-the-cuff remark by the boss, or a routine letter from the bank manager. I have a friend who once mislaid his scarf and spent the rest of the day fretting that he was worthless.
This type of thinking – the tendency to catastrophize any minor event in the mind – can cause an enormous amount of anxiety.
Alternatively, it may sometimes manifest itself as a general feeling of unease, without the addict being fully aware of why they feel that way. Addicts are extremely sensitive to emotional pain – to the extent that they can catastrophize over almost anything.
But what is it that causes us to overact like this? Where does this hypersensitivity to distress come from? Well, I believe that some of us are actually hardwired by nature to behave in this way.
If you could travel back through time to when the first humans began to walk upright on the Earth – millions of years ago – you would meet a prehistoric being called homo erectus. This was a primitive creature who, compared with modern humans, had very little cognitive ability and no great verbal skills.
Nonetheless, in order to survive, early humans needed to be extremely sensitive to their surroundings, and very aware of danger. They were surrounded by predators and faced extreme physical threats during every waking moment. Living in this environment must have required a highly developed limbic system: one that was always sensitive to danger in order to govern survival instincts.
If you look at the skull shape of one of our prehistoric ancestors, you’ll see that instead of the upright forehead we have today, they had a head that was much flatter. In modern humans (who began to emerge much more recently), the skull shape is more rounded, and our foreheads are more pronounced at the front.
This is because we’ve evolved the front part of our brains – which is known as the pre-frontal cortex – in order to think our way around problems. But in our ancestors, the part of the brain that thinks logically was much smaller. Early man had very little ability to rationalize his way out of a dangerous situation. Instead, something other than logical thought helped him survive for millions of years, and that was the limbic system: the primitive part of the brain that controls our emotions and our visceral instincts.
For more than 95 per cent of mankind’s time on planet Earth, our survival has depended on the power of our emotions to protect us, rather than an ability to think logically.
The pre-frontal cortex – the logical part of the brain, where our cognitive ability resides – has existed in its current form only for a relatively recent period in our history. It evolved due to our need to use tools, to communicate, and to live together in a modern society.
The limbic system is much older and much more powerful. As we saw earlier in the book, it has the ability to override other parts of the brain. For early man it was the difference between life and death, and it had the power to create strong responses.
Typically, the limbic system causes humans to react to danger in one of three ways. These are the often-quoted responses of fight, flight or freeze, which developed to ensure our survival as a species. For example, when an early human encountered a ferocious predator, he’d react by trying to fight his way out of it, or attempting to escape by running away.
Sometimes the safest thing to do would have been to simply freeze and hope the animal ignored him (most predators are attracted by movement). The speed at which he responded would have been crucial. He didn’t have the luxury of time to think, so his limbic system needed to automatically take control.
These primitive survival instincts still exist within all of us, and they continue to make us sensitive to danger. If we face a serious threat, it will usually invoke a response of fight, flight or freeze.
As we know, in most of the population the limbic system doesn’t have an adverse effect on daily life, but in those of us with an addictive nature it can make us react in a way that’s out of all proportion to everyday events, and can leave us filled with emotional distress. I believe the reason for this lies in our ancestry.
An early human had three basic needs: to eat, to sleep and to procreate. Out in the wild, surrounded by predators, doing any one of these things had the potential to distract him from being aware of threats. To put it bluntly, if he was too busy making love to notice a wild beast creeping up, it would very quickly result in him being killed and eaten!
So, in addition to evolving a limbic system, early humans came together in social groups to meet the challenges they faced. Forming into small tribes was an effective survival strategy because it meant they could divide up tasks more efficiently – and they could eat, sleep and procreate in greater safety.
Within the tribe, humans began to cooperate with each other so that certain individuals could specialize in doing particular things in order to boost the collective chances of survival. For example, some members of the tribe became hunters, others raised the children, and some became skilled keepers of the fire.
Another early human characteristic that would have been highly prized for ensuring survival was the ability to stay alert to danger. Tribe members who were highly attuned to their surroundings would have been able to anticipate danger more quickly than their peers. These individuals would have needed to be extremely sensitive to noises, smells and movement. These individuals, or Watchers, as I call them, would have monitored the environment with all five senses for the subtlest signs of anything out of the ordinary that could have signalled a potential threat to the tribe.
This incoming data – sights, smells and sounds – combined in the primitive brain to create a sixth sense: instinct. It was this that helped keep humans going as a species. It was driven by raw emotions like fear and anxiety in order to trigger our responses of fight, flight or freeze.
Natural selection would have ensured that this ability was passed down through the generations. Is it possible that because of this, over the passage of time some humans evolved a limbic system that was hypersensitive?
Imagine what this would feel like: being fearful of everything, real or imagined, without respite. It would leave those affected struggling to cope with constant levels of background anxiety. They would be born worriers – those who find life itself stressful. What began as the gift of intuition would have evolved into a curse.
After many years of working in treatment centres, I’m convinced that this is what happened. Addictive behaviour is so automated in certain people that I believe the cause must lie, at least in part, in their DNA in the form of a ‘Watcher Gene’.
I believe that people born with an addictive nature are the descendants of ‘The Watchers’. In my view, they have a genetic predisposition towards being extremely sensitive, which makes it difficult for them to cope with emotional distress.
Although doctors are aware that genetic factors can contribute to alcohol abuse, scientists have so far failed to discover any specific gene that’s responsible. I suspect that this may well be because they’re looking in the wrong place.
What they should be looking for is a gene that makes people hypersensitive to emotional distress, rather than a gene that makes them addicted to a particular substance.
If this gene exists – and I strongly believe that one day we will find it – I suspect it will be common not only to alcoholics and drug addicts, but also to people who suffer from different forms of compulsive behaviour, such as gambling or overeating. I believe that addiction is one illness, but it has many different outlets.
If you’re an addict your limbic awareness is heightened all the time, so you’re susceptible to things to which other people may be completely oblivious. I know a lot of alcoholics who maintain that they’re always the first to sense when trouble is about to start in a pub. They can spot the early danger signals, just by being in the company of others. This isn’t something that they need to concentrate on – it happens automatically.
One of my friends is a recovering alcoholic who grew up in a violent part of Essex, just outside London. He used to drink with a group of mates who regularly got into confrontations with other people, and on some occasions it was so obvious to him that a fight was about to start that he’d feel it in his stomach. He told me: ‘I actually used to think that my mates were a bit thick because they could never see it coming, but now I realize they were just too busy enjoying themselves while I was fretting’.
There was nothing supernatural about his ability – his sixth sense was simply based on being able to correctly interpret things like other people’s moods based on their body language and other subtle signals. It’s an interesting thought that this drinker’s sixth sense for trouble may date back to millions of years ago!
Unfortunately, for an addict, the anxiety created by all this incoming data to the brain about possible threats feels untenable. They sense that they can’t cope with the constant levels of stress that it creates, so they have to go and medicate it. It’s as if they suffer from a ‘limbic overload’, which leads them to fall into addictive behaviour.
They don’t suddenly think, Bloody hell! I can’t stand this feeling. I’ll go and become an alcoholic. What they do instead is start to enjoy a substance or a behaviour that eases their inner feelings of anxiety.
This ‘medication’ could be booze, or cigarettes, or drugs, or shopping or sex – anything that distracts them. What happens is that they turn off their sensitivity by medicating it away. Ironically, this causes them to go to the opposite extreme and they become isolated and cut off from their feelings and emotions. In the long term this further adds to their discomfort and unease.
This process begins with an addict’s hypersensitivity to anything that might cause emotional distress. They perceive this to be a greater threat than it really is, and then project it forwards in their minds by imagining lots of horrible consequences. This can be summed up as follows:
They then seek to switch off this process by numbing the sensitivity in order to gain temporary respite, but this creates a new cycle when the medicating effect wears off. Withdrawal sets in, and the painful feelings are all the more pronounced, triggering more addictive behaviour. This can be represented like this:
which is followed by:
which is followed by:
Addicts go from painful feelings back to square one: more painful feelings. It’s easy to see how the whole cycle of addiction then goes on to repeat itself again and again.
So, are you doomed to become an addict if you suffer from oversensitivity? In a word, no – but it does make you more at risk. Having a sensitive nature doesn’t mean you’ll go on to become a suffering addict. This is because some people learn to cope with the stress far better than others, while some experience events in their lives that can aggravate it. These experiences can act as triggers that tip us over the edge into active addiction. This is particularly the case in people who experience trauma during childhood, which can be highly significant. If we suffer emotional damage as a child, then, as we shall see in future chapters, being a descendant of a Watcher can quickly become a curse.