Addiction vs. Habit Formation

Every man is the maker of his own destiny, or so the saying goes. But what causes one to have a destiny brimming with success and glory, and another to be absorbed by failure and frustration? A straight-forward answer does not exist, though one response seems to reign over the rest: our habits. Whether we like it or not, our habits dictate us, they are created through us and by us, and will mold us into the person we grow up to become. Our habits hold such a strong influence on the trajectory of our life that one comes to wonder whether we possess them or if they have possession over us. 

What exactly is a habit? In short it is an action or thought that has been performed with such consistency that it is easier to abide to the habit than it is to refrain from it. In a sense, habits become the foundational structures of our life. They guide us through our day to day. And while positive habits create a solid foundation that can support us through both highs and lows, bad habits create unstable turf, too weak to maintain a fruitful life. 

When does a bad habit become an addiction? In loose terms, an addiction can be defined as the constant compulsive need for a habit-forming substance, behavior, or activity which has harmful effects. It can even change an individual’s brain structure and function. 

Back at university I did not know the difference between habit/routine and addiction. I used the former to excuse the latter. I felt anxious all the time, which, to an extent, was relatively normal. I was a university freshman in a foreign country, many kilometers from home. My only fault was that I did not know how to cope. I could not sleep, I pulled all-nighters at least once a week, and when I finally did get some rest, it was troubled by night sweats and nightmares. 

My existential dread was at an all time high. I felt a complete inability to deal with the human condition.  At the age of eighteen I thought about death more than my own grandmother, who was old and statistically much closer to dying than me. Not that I wanted to kill myself, quite the opposite. It was the seeming randomness of it all that taunted me, that kept me up at night and left me in a daze throughout the day. 

I was, in short, frantic. Thoughts like my own really could turn an atheist to religion. I prayed to God, any God, to help me. All I wanted was to get out of my head. He listened. A few days later I met a guy at a party, and because I hardly went out, I really did think God Himself put him on my path. We spoke for a while, he seemed personable, and for one reason or another, I told him about my sleeping problems. He said he had something that could help, and handed me my first dose of Restoril. A prescription drug, though of course, technically not prescribed to me.

The effects were immediate. At first everything improved. For the first time in as far as I could remember, I functioned without those incessant fears which used to plague my everyday. What more, I could go about my days without being found out. If I wanted to, I could even take a pill in broad day light, as everyone watched. And, anyway, I had friends who did things much worse than me. Who ingested, snorted things I would never touch. Of course, while they did it once, maybe twice a week, a month even, and for the most part could do without, I took the Restoril daily, sometimes twice, three times a day. Not just to fall asleep, but to temper my mind throughout the day. 

After a while my linear path became circular. Like a cold breeze I felt time pass me by. Everyday became a slightly pleasant, an almost tolerable, lukewarm day of a discontented woman. Weeks passed without significant pains or worries. With neither hurt nor happiness, as if I was wrapped in bubblewrap.  

Yet a part of me still wanted to make something of myself. My fears of dying made me want to create things so I could be survived by myself, feel a sense of pride about the course my life had taken. Still, everyday I continued to choose the path without ups and downs, only dimly lit, with well indicated alleyways that always led to the same places. I was an ant stuck in a mobius strip. There was no escaping, and after some time I wondered why and whether I wanted to escape at all. Once you find a path without divergences, without inexplicable turns and bumps, why follow another road? Though at times I was desperately miserable, I felt almost content within my despair. The demon had two faces. It was both the cause of my unhappiness, as well as the reason I continued to get up in the mornings, temporarily excited with anticipation. 

Those days of desensitization, wherein I felt neither pain nor pleasure, in which the hours tiptoed by, were enjoyable for a short while. They gave me a sense of order not entirely imagined. But with time it was just this comfort I could no longer bare. In desperation I tried to throw herself on the road towards feeling. Anything to steer me away from those just-tolerable, tepid days that made me want to punch a wall with the frustrations of a spoiled child.

Despite everything, I did not think I was addicted. In my mind I was taking medicine, not a drug. So when I boarded my flight back to Italy at the end of the school year, I did not think I would suffer the way I did on my arrival. My troubles started at the airport. I felt panicky, which made my fingers tremble, but my trembling fingers also made me anxious. After several minutes I could not control my breathing, it rasped against my throat like sandpaper. Then suddenly I found myself on the floor. At home my parents increased my overall anxiety. The changes to my appearance, which to me had been a gradual process, came on them all at once, like a defected umbrella in a heavy wind. I knew I had lost weight, but not to what extent. For several days my dad refused to look at me. 

I never told them about the Restoril. Not until much later. Instead they blamed my appearance on my eating disorder, and I let them believe it. In the end they were only partially wrong. Because I had only taken the Restoril for two months, the withdrawal symptoms were excruciating, but bearable. Ironically, the very reason I started taking the damn drug, for my sleeping issues, turned me into an insomniac. My anxiety triple-folded, I rarely found a moment of peace. Even today, over four years later, I have trouble sleeping and often find myself in the claws of a panic attack. 

Addiction lurks in dark corners. The distance between it and habit can sometimes be nothing more than a single moment. What I have learned from my short stint with Restoril is that psychological disorders are not necessarily the result of biochemical imbalances and cannot necessarily be treated with pharmaceutical medications. What more, the imbalances are not by definition the cause of suffering, but rather a symptom. The cause being our inability to deal with life. We want to find meaning in an otherwise meaningless world. Or is it meaningless? In reality, life is whatever we make of it. And though finding an absolute meaning to the world at large may be impossible, finding personal meaning is largely attainable, and entirely commendable. As Carl Jung said: “meaning makes a great many things endurable – perhaps everything.” 

Instead of dreading life, and so finding distraction from it, we ought to look within. Every man is, after all, the maker of his own destiny. We can make or break ourselves in whichever way we please.