Anna Lembke

It's sometimes referred to as cross addiction.

There are lots of animal studies showing that an animal who gets addicted to one drug will more easily get addicted to another drug when that first drug is made unavailable.

So, or even if the first drug isn't made unavailable, like once we become addicted, we sort of are primed then for that kind of behavior, or we can be primed for that kind of behavior.

So my answer to this caller would be the first step is just being aware of the problem of cross-addiction.

In clinical work, what we say to patients is something like, well, now you're going to try to give up cannabis for this month.

Be really careful that you don't now increase consumption of sugary foods, which you've also talked about as something that's reinforcing for you.

So just sort of openly talking about it and acknowledging it.

And then again, I think psychological and spiritual practices around learning to sit with the craving and the urges, to recognize the tendency to want to switch that urge from one reinforcer to another.

I do think it's really fascinating the way in which we organize time in the modern world around our rewards.

So our entire day for many of us, including myself on some level, is structured around this idea of, well, when am I going to be done with this thing that I don't want to be doing so that I can do the thing that I want to be doing?

It's just the way we live now.

So a couple of things that I think are really helpful here is to just recognize that our desire is infinite and that on some level we will never be satisfied no matter how much of those good rewards we get.

And then just sort of learning to sit with that.

Sometimes I also think that in certain thought experiments,

Like imagine going through your whole day and not rewarding yourself with any of your usual rewards.

And what I find that does when I engage in that thought experiment is that it really allows me to be much more present in the moment because I'm not in the moment looking forward to the moment when I'm going to get my reward.

Yeah, I think there's a lot you can do.

First of all, I think just being open about it, like Andrea has done, and naming it can be really helpful.

It can bring it into our awareness in a new way that it's not necessarily going to be if it's just sort of pinging around in the dark recesses of our minds.

So