Why do people cope with problems through destructive/compulsive behaviors?
Question by jewel: Why do people cope with problems through destructive/compulsive behaviors?
So I get the physiological aspects of drug and alcohol addiction, but I don’t understand why others compulsively engage in risky sex, look at porn, or overeat in order to cope.
I mean, I guess the easy answer is that they are escaping their problems, but why not through a healthier means? How do these behaviors become compulsive and why do these behaviors give the person a sense of relief, especially when the behaviors are risky, punished, or taboo? What would make these options?
Best answer:
Answer by Barla Kopofai
Because they are easy to do… I mean, would you climb a mountain or start on top and ski it down?
You can do snowboard too if you want
Give your answer to this question below!
Homo Erectus said,
Wrote on May 6, 2011 @ 6:07 pm
from my layperson’s understanding of neurology, it’s because all of those activities involve exactly the same chemical rewards to the brain. it doesn’t matter how you stimulate the release of those chemicals, the point is that it happens.
every comfort, every addiction, every drive for something that gives you that satisfied feeling when your brain is furnished with some luxury is because of the release of pleasure-causing chemicals. the more you engage in that behaviour, the more your brain associates that behaviour with the chemical pleasure, and the more you are impelled to repeat that behaviour. that is why addictions are so hard to break and possibly taboo urges can be so hard to resist. you are not addicted to the actual act, you are addicted to what it causes to happen in your brain.
Zen Zorba said,
Wrote on May 6, 2011 @ 6:48 pm
Basically they are trying to release whatever energy is inside them. For example take anger. Anger is energy, and if you suppress energy, it will condense. And sooner or later that energy will explode. You can’t get rid of it. It is there. If you fight with it or try to get rid of it by suppressing it, it will get worse. So the solution is in releasing that energy through over means. Releasing the anger doesn’t get rid of it, but it transforms it into some other form of energy. It is transformed into violence, or violent sex or violent eating.
It may not look obvious, but just through eating, your teeth, your mouth release anger. You crush the food as if this is the enemy.Eating more is violence, anger. And then this will move in every way, in every arena of your life: you will make love, but it will be more like violence than like love, it will have much aggression in it. Because you never observe one another making love, you don’t know what is happening, and you cannot know what is happening to you because you are almost always so much in aggression.
You can even see it in their face while making love. They will be doing the same movements as are done when you are aggressive. Watch the face of an angry person making love so you can see what is happening to their face! All the distortions of anger and aggression will be there.
In taking food, you become angry: look at a person eating. Look at a person making love – the anger has gone so deep that even love, an activity totally opposite to anger, even that is poisoned; eating, an activity absolutely neutral, even that is poisoned. Then you just open the door and there is anger, you put a book on the table and there is anger, you put off the shoes and there is anger, you shake hands and there is anger – because now their anger has become personified.