Robert Lustig’s book, “The Hacking of the American Mind: The Science Behind the Corporate Takeover of our Bodies and Brains” was one of the first significant books on addiction and compulsive behavior that I read and digested (journaled my way through) in my early stages of recovery. I will write soon on the other ones that, apart from therapy and 12 step groups, launched me deeper into recovery: Gabor Mate’s In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward, The Big Book of AA and The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions and The Green Book of SAA. These and many more I will mention were particularly all a part of my “bibliotherapy” when I was incarcerated and had no access to therapy at a time when I needed it very much.
But when I got to Lustig’s book, I had begun to frame the four main “causes and cures” that my addictive path down, and my recovery path up, were illuminating. These are the Biological, The Psychological, The Cultural, and The Spiritual. My writing on this site will fall under those topics which, of course, are intertwined. And this is why I say “the causes are the cures.” There is no single magic pill or silver bullet that causes a downfall or opens a door back up to life and love. But it only makes sense that the way down provides the way back up. Just as I also think of addiction as having both a “mental and moral” health component, where the two are related and yet distinctive at times too.
Lustig, and to an important degree Mate, helped me to see the role of biology in the addictions and compulsions that bind and blind us. Perhaps it stood out for me fairly early in recovery and also in my incarceration time because during that time I was dwelling on the moral/spiritual and psychological/character defects and failings, as of course I needed to. But I needed to have that balanced by how the biology of the brain had played its part too.
The Hacking of the American Mind even got me thinking about how my brain had been formed. (Mate in his own personal story of generational trauma is helpful here too). Had I somehow developed a brain in utero that was slanted toward a kind of neediness, a kind of distractiveness, a scarcity, that was an element (not again THE element) of how my life fell into various but related forms of drivenness? My mother in the 1950s had had chicken pox while she was pregnant with me, and I believe had passed it on to me during that time. Was that something that primed my brain, and something which I or others hadn’t taken into account as the kind of red flag we might now along with our understanding of different forms of adverse childhood experiences?
Lustig’s first acclaimed book was on the epidemic and effects of sugar in the American, and
global, food systems. We become what we eat. I was raised both in an extended family that had a family garden, but also at a time when a rampant television commercial culture and
technological conveniences were being engrained into almost all socio-economic segments of the United States. Sugar, for example, was pushed everywhere as part of a child’s diet. Along with workaholism (in a student setting) as the validation of others, I think of sugar as perhaps my first addiction. Sugar and the need to be liked by others and the insatiable need for mental stimulation fed by both books and television all also helped shape my brain for what would come in puberty.
My brain and mind were being hacked, Lustig would say, before any of us had a clue.
Even those whose lives did not go down the more recognizable paths of addictions and
compulsions will be able to relate to the uber-influences Lustig explains. All of us face the pulls between our wants and our needs, the differences between rewards and true contentment, pleasure and happiness, gratification and satisfaction, and how the confusion and confluence of them can cause pain. It is helpful to see how the brain chemistry feeds into our mental state and has an affect (again, not the only one) on our choices. I will go into his main points in the next post on the book. Remember, the causes of the problem point us to the cures. How am I feeding brain health and not sickness in my recovery? And how do I still struggle?