De-addiction and Policy Making
<2nd Nov 2012, 1144 am, Versova, Mumbai>
Long time no see! I think this datestamp thing of mentioning when a particular article was being written is something that I might be skipping soon. There have been multiple posts that I started in between the last published one which for whatever reasons (like losing interest in the topic I was writing about or wanting to write down something more urgent and important) I've not completed. And, this practice of maintaining a datestamp of each of these things tends to psychologically make me want to complete an older incomplete article than to start writing about my latest fascination. But, I am digressing from what I intended to write in this particular post.
I've always maintained that the human mind is among the strongest and most fascinating things (self-serving/narcissistic statement made by my human mind, yes I know). So, whenever people seek other people's advice (and I do too, obviously) there is this part of my brain which wants to tell them to stop doing that because all they really want is either an external 'objective' viewer validating the answer they want to be true or it is just being their minds being weak to search within for the answer. While there is nothing wrong with seeking advice, the point I tend to argue in favour of is basically that the rational and objective part of your brain knows you and your emotions the best. In a line, 'all answers (pertaining to the emotional indecisions and not to the rules governing the universe, i.e. The latter continues to remain in the real world, probably since Galileo and Newton) lie within one's own brain'. Now this search for answers to one's own dilemmas within yields two benefits - a more introspective you; and an increased will power. Also, please note that 'seeking advice' is distinctly different from 'seeking suggestions' - according to me the former invariably involves validating one's opinions while the latter involves seeking for an option that hadn't entered one's mind and according to me is usually pertaining more to the business-scenarios.
"That is all fine, but you've just used the word 'and' from your title till now. Do you plan to come to the point anytime soon?", you ask? Err, I ramble! Get used to it.
Okay, so I've been trying to quit smoking for a while now. I tend to reduce for a day or two and then get back to my normal levels (of around 7-8 cigarettes/day - and for the non-smokers there, it is not that high. Anything above 20/day would be counted as high, I think). With respect to tobacco, there are two kinds of addiction - psychological and medical. I am still at the psychological stage for now.
Now my intent of writing this post was not to exclusively deal with just tobacco de-addiction. It was to talk about the idea of de-addiction in itself. A lot of us tend to think that we/our friends are addicted only to tobacco/alcohol/marijuana/narcotics, but I think a lot more of us deal with addiction of a different kind. Addiction to our smartphones, the internet, a couch, acquiring of material possessions for social gratification, or being with that 'special' friend are just some kinds of addictions. Essentially anything that we think is something we can't live without - things that if we are cut-off from would make our mind a whole lot uncomfortable not for medical reasons but purely for psychological reasons - are things that I invariably tend to classify as an addiction. I know that we even think we can't live without water, but the difference is that water is actually needed for medical reasons, i.e. it is something we actually cannot live without. So, the idea is to understand the difference between what we think we cannot live without and what we actually cannot live without - clearly asking for a certain external perspective/objectivity on one's behalf.
So, I like to think that microeconomics offers us solutions to a whole wide variety of fields and is especially relevant to our day-to-day lives in ways we tend to ignore. My suggestion (to myself more than anybody else, actually) is to deal with it in the traditional reward-punishment method instead of just self-flagellating your moral core by telling it to just go cold-turkey on that addiction. This holier-than-thou approach (of just deciding upon quitting smoking and then feeling infinite guilt/remorse everytime one gives in) requires a higher threshold of will power than what we give our will power a chance to.
So, I've been considering some options for my own de-addiction and I list them as below:
1) I thought storing, say, 100 bucks/cigarette I smoke each day could be a financial method. The idea being that the money collected over a week should be given away and not be used for spending on self. The downside is that given that I don't want to resort to use the help of a friend in the process of de-addiction itself (as against the process choosing a method) and thus there is a very high chance of a relapse on this.
2) If I smoke a single cigarette in a day, I don't get to drink - quite useless on weekdays but during weekends there is alcohol and this can be effective. Given the fact that the weekend is here, this might be a temp fix.
3) At any given point of time there are about 20 tabs on my browser (and I have 4 browsers with separate session history!) that are open and waiting to be read. There are few things that sink my heart more than when the comp/browser crashes. What's worse? When the browser crashed so bad that it doesn't restore and I go to the history and individually try to recreate that session. Everytime I smoke a cigarette, I have to close the entire session and delete the history. Works in a system where I 'relapse' around twice in a day. But, after that, given that I wouldn't have stumbled upon more than, say, 5 things to be read in any given time period of half-a-day, I would lose the disincentive against smoking.
4) For each cigarette, the comp time gets reduced by 3 hours - really, I am not 8 years old.
5) Every cigarette I smoke - I delete a movie from the comp. I know this isn't permanent damage but this might be effective. I am not sure what would hurt more - deleting a movie that I haven't seen but have been wanting to (Gangs of Wasseypur 2, Frost/Nixon e.g.) or deleting a much loved movie that I'd always want on my comp (Fight Club, Annie Hall). This seems most effective, because after smoking a given cigarette, all I need is 1 second of an impulse of wanting to get back to the resolution for this to punish me (by deleting the movie). As against the other methods which either require a consistent resolve over sustained period for the punishment to be effective (case 1, 2, 4) or lose efficacy (case 3) over time.
I din't expect to ramble for this long and have already lost interest in talking about how all of this related to policy making but my intent was to explain the clear conflict of interest that I have in choosing an appropriately high intensity punishment which have a higher chance of being effective (I am thinking of methods from Anurag Kashyap's 'No Smoking'!) to trading with methods that I can still afford to relapse from. The original intent was to extend this analogy onto the concept of politicians attempting (or not) to formulate laws that might especially affect them and possible solutions for that problem. But, some other day probably.
That said, I would be most eager to hear any other solutions/suggestions on de-addiction. Would try to update on the efficacy of my method too.
<1259 hours>
Edit: Due credits to a friend for sparking this post after a discussion on the same. Also, due to credits to the same friend for making me give due credits to her :P.
Long time no see! I think this datestamp thing of mentioning when a particular article was being written is something that I might be skipping soon. There have been multiple posts that I started in between the last published one which for whatever reasons (like losing interest in the topic I was writing about or wanting to write down something more urgent and important) I've not completed. And, this practice of maintaining a datestamp of each of these things tends to psychologically make me want to complete an older incomplete article than to start writing about my latest fascination. But, I am digressing from what I intended to write in this particular post.
I've always maintained that the human mind is among the strongest and most fascinating things (self-serving/narcissistic statement made by my human mind, yes I know). So, whenever people seek other people's advice (and I do too, obviously) there is this part of my brain which wants to tell them to stop doing that because all they really want is either an external 'objective' viewer validating the answer they want to be true or it is just being their minds being weak to search within for the answer. While there is nothing wrong with seeking advice, the point I tend to argue in favour of is basically that the rational and objective part of your brain knows you and your emotions the best. In a line, 'all answers (pertaining to the emotional indecisions and not to the rules governing the universe, i.e. The latter continues to remain in the real world, probably since Galileo and Newton) lie within one's own brain'. Now this search for answers to one's own dilemmas within yields two benefits - a more introspective you; and an increased will power. Also, please note that 'seeking advice' is distinctly different from 'seeking suggestions' - according to me the former invariably involves validating one's opinions while the latter involves seeking for an option that hadn't entered one's mind and according to me is usually pertaining more to the business-scenarios.
"That is all fine, but you've just used the word 'and' from your title till now. Do you plan to come to the point anytime soon?", you ask? Err, I ramble! Get used to it.
Okay, so I've been trying to quit smoking for a while now. I tend to reduce for a day or two and then get back to my normal levels (of around 7-8 cigarettes/day - and for the non-smokers there, it is not that high. Anything above 20/day would be counted as high, I think). With respect to tobacco, there are two kinds of addiction - psychological and medical. I am still at the psychological stage for now.
Now my intent of writing this post was not to exclusively deal with just tobacco de-addiction. It was to talk about the idea of de-addiction in itself. A lot of us tend to think that we/our friends are addicted only to tobacco/alcohol/marijuana/narcotics, but I think a lot more of us deal with addiction of a different kind. Addiction to our smartphones, the internet, a couch, acquiring of material possessions for social gratification, or being with that 'special' friend are just some kinds of addictions. Essentially anything that we think is something we can't live without - things that if we are cut-off from would make our mind a whole lot uncomfortable not for medical reasons but purely for psychological reasons - are things that I invariably tend to classify as an addiction. I know that we even think we can't live without water, but the difference is that water is actually needed for medical reasons, i.e. it is something we actually cannot live without. So, the idea is to understand the difference between what we think we cannot live without and what we actually cannot live without - clearly asking for a certain external perspective/objectivity on one's behalf.
So, I like to think that microeconomics offers us solutions to a whole wide variety of fields and is especially relevant to our day-to-day lives in ways we tend to ignore. My suggestion (to myself more than anybody else, actually) is to deal with it in the traditional reward-punishment method instead of just self-flagellating your moral core by telling it to just go cold-turkey on that addiction. This holier-than-thou approach (of just deciding upon quitting smoking and then feeling infinite guilt/remorse everytime one gives in) requires a higher threshold of will power than what we give our will power a chance to.
So, I've been considering some options for my own de-addiction and I list them as below:
1) I thought storing, say, 100 bucks/cigarette I smoke each day could be a financial method. The idea being that the money collected over a week should be given away and not be used for spending on self. The downside is that given that I don't want to resort to use the help of a friend in the process of de-addiction itself (as against the process choosing a method) and thus there is a very high chance of a relapse on this.
2) If I smoke a single cigarette in a day, I don't get to drink - quite useless on weekdays but during weekends there is alcohol and this can be effective. Given the fact that the weekend is here, this might be a temp fix.
3) At any given point of time there are about 20 tabs on my browser (and I have 4 browsers with separate session history!) that are open and waiting to be read. There are few things that sink my heart more than when the comp/browser crashes. What's worse? When the browser crashed so bad that it doesn't restore and I go to the history and individually try to recreate that session. Everytime I smoke a cigarette, I have to close the entire session and delete the history. Works in a system where I 'relapse' around twice in a day. But, after that, given that I wouldn't have stumbled upon more than, say, 5 things to be read in any given time period of half-a-day, I would lose the disincentive against smoking.
4) For each cigarette, the comp time gets reduced by 3 hours - really, I am not 8 years old.
5) Every cigarette I smoke - I delete a movie from the comp. I know this isn't permanent damage but this might be effective. I am not sure what would hurt more - deleting a movie that I haven't seen but have been wanting to (Gangs of Wasseypur 2, Frost/Nixon e.g.) or deleting a much loved movie that I'd always want on my comp (Fight Club, Annie Hall). This seems most effective, because after smoking a given cigarette, all I need is 1 second of an impulse of wanting to get back to the resolution for this to punish me (by deleting the movie). As against the other methods which either require a consistent resolve over sustained period for the punishment to be effective (case 1, 2, 4) or lose efficacy (case 3) over time.
I din't expect to ramble for this long and have already lost interest in talking about how all of this related to policy making but my intent was to explain the clear conflict of interest that I have in choosing an appropriately high intensity punishment which have a higher chance of being effective (I am thinking of methods from Anurag Kashyap's 'No Smoking'!) to trading with methods that I can still afford to relapse from. The original intent was to extend this analogy onto the concept of politicians attempting (or not) to formulate laws that might especially affect them and possible solutions for that problem. But, some other day probably.
That said, I would be most eager to hear any other solutions/suggestions on de-addiction. Would try to update on the efficacy of my method too.
<1259 hours>
Edit: Due credits to a friend for sparking this post after a discussion on the same. Also, due to credits to the same friend for making me give due credits to her :P.
don't smoke for a few days. smoke a cig after few days, it hits you much harder. Convince yourself that it is a battle b/w quantity and quality of hits. Gradually increase the time-period between hits ( thus increasing the quality ). Profit.
ReplyDeleteDon't try to quit , the addicted brain fights back.Offer it a 'higher quality hit' and it caves in. At least that is what worked for me.
Yeah, it is just a temp thing. Not quitting *completely*. Just trying to see if I can stay absolutely clean for a while (couple of weeks, maybe). I reckon would help reduce the count once I get back to it later.
DeletePromise yourself that you won't get to watch Fight Club, Pulp Fiction, No Smoking, the films of Terry Gilliam and Chris Nolan, Gulzar songs, Nayakan etc. until you stop smoking. You'll stop immediately.
ReplyDeleteWeirdly (or not so) I don't rewatch them with that regularity. Just when a random urge comes in - and it is easier to fight that urge to watch those movies than to get over the regret of knowing that I can't watch them without a lot of effort (the latter being the case when I've deleted the movie).
DeleteAlso, I forgot that I don't have Nayakan on the comp - thanks for reminding that I should get it asap :D.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteCan't think of some alternatives right now...may be a little later....
ReplyDeletejust want to point out that technically there is no such difference between psychological need and medical need (Ref. Freud) [basically a bunch of electro-chemical circuits and neurons]