Nothing else is really pulling them in in the way that their video games or sex or pornography or alcohol , pick your substance or you know , behavior that you see out there or uh hopefully not , but that you might suffer from an addiction to . So what's happening in addiction ? Well , addiction involves dopamine among other things , often the opioid system , et cetera .
And so this sets in motion , a vicious loop where people start pursuing peaks in dopamine that can come very fast without much effort . And that's one of the ways in which addictions start to take hold . Uh , there's a simple way to think about this and to remember if you want to avoid this whole thing .
Let's just think about addiction because in biology and in psychology frankly , it really often pays to think about the extremes first and then work our way towards more typical circumstances . And with that said addiction unfortunately is very common . Nowadays , I just heard a statistic in fact that there is an 88 0% increase in alcohol use disorder among women in the last 30 years , I talked a little bit about this in the episode that I did about alcohol and health .
And then what happens after that peak ? It all becomes very clear as to why addiction happens and why it's so pernicious . So for instance , let's take cocaine .
But that engages this progressive narrowing of the things that bring someone pleasure such that nothing else is really salient . Nothing else is really pulling them in in the way that their video games or sex or pornography or alcohol , pick your substance or you know , behavior that you see out there or uh hopefully not , but that you might suffer from an addiction to . So what's happening in addiction ?
