What is our answer as Christians to the problem of addiction? Before I even attempt to provide an answer, I find it very helpful to start with providing a solid understanding of what happens in the brain of an addicted person. As human beings, we experience pleasure from what keeps us alive: we eat a meal and feel good; we sleep and feel good; we work out and feel a rush of goodness. We are rewarded in our bodies, so we continue certain behaviors, which is how God designed our bodies to work. He understood that we needed rewards to complete behaviors and achieve goals.
We “feel good” because of a chemical called dopamine. When dopamine is released, we feel pleasure—that’s the role of dopamine. In the media, dopamine is often referred to as a chemical in the brain closely associated with pleasure and reward. Therefore, it follows that when one repeatedly does something that results in the feelings of pleasure and reward—habits in this case—addictions are formed.
But dopamine has a much larger role than merely rewarding people. It lays down new neural networks in the brain: new nerves, neurons, and fibers that are specific to the experience that created them—that meal you ate or even the music that was playing while you ate the meal. The dopamine released and the emotions associated with the dopamine release are specific to your personal experience of the situation and memory.
For example, think of this scenario: A woman says to her husband, “Honey, let’s go to that restaurant we love. Oh, the music and the food—it’s such a great experience!” This desire to recreate enjoyable moments in our lives comes from the dopamine release from those experiences. There are neural networks created specifically for each moment of pleasure.
“Dopamine lays down new neural networks in the brain: new nerves, neurons, and fibers that are specific to the experience that created them.”
Dopamine pushes us to find ways to repeat experiences that release it again because it wants the pleasure specific to certain experiences or substances. The pathways in our brain created by dopamine stem from what’s called neuroplasticity. We sometimes say in neuroscience that the brain is “plastic,” meaning that it is constantly changing shape.
Those in our field once believed that neuroplasticity only occurred in the first three years of life, but this is not true. Neural imaging and neuroscience have shown that the brain is constantly changing shape throughout the course of one’s entire life through neuroplastic changes. This means the growth of neurons throughout the course of one’s life is based on feelings, emotions, senses, physical activities, and substances we take in day to day. All of this information is stored in our memory in the section of the brain known as the hippocampus.
Here’s the problem: When you introduce things like drugs, alcohol, pornography, and even an excess of food, your brain will release up to thousands of times more dopamine than during basic habits. We’re designed to have some dopamine, even high levels of it! But bad habits come from looking for this release in unhealthy ways.
“Bad habits come from looking for this release in unhealthy ways.”
Hijacking the Brain Through Addiction
Imagine that dopamine is like Miracle Grow, causing the brain’s “pleasure activities” to grow more quickly than normal. It creates neural networks specific to the drugs you’ve ingested, for example. You’ve now created specific neural pathways that support the lies that you’ve created in seeking dopamine-releasing drugs, alcohol, food, or whatever habits in which you’ve indulged. You think, How am I going to lie about getting this? How am I going to live this double life? The double life that is created is literally mapped out in your brain in a neural network associated with your habit of choice.
The brain becomes hijacked and you actually believe you need that drug, the alcohol, the nicotine, the gambling, the gaming, or the food binge to survive. You’ve turned the essential physical rewards that God created for us to have into sinful habits. The brain has been hijacked to believe that it needs these substances or addictive behaviors, which we weren’t designed to need in the first place.
When we look at the natural rewards of our bodies, we can eat a meal and have a baseline level of dopamine. We’ve been created to release some dopamine in order to feel good, to wake up, to go about our day, and to have good feelings and energy. You eat a meal, and your dopamine level shoots up about 50 percent. But consider what happens to this dopamine baseline when drugs like morphine, cocaine, nicotine, and alcohol are introduced.
“We’ve been created to release some dopamine in order to feel good, to wake up, to go about our day, and to have good feelings and energy.”
For example, as doses of morphine go up, we see that the amount of dopamine that’s released over time stays up really high. This is the problem. Imagine all that neuroplasticity occurring in your brain after five hours, all that dopamine on “Miracle Grow” from the morphine, which in turn lays down new, even stronger, longer-lasting neurons. This is why it becomes an even larger challenge to try to defeat certain addictive habits: because the neuroplasticity is deeply ingrained with these occasions where the exposure to the addictive substance is longer lasting or the substance is stronger. 
An example is the husband who looks at pornography the second his wife leaves the house. When his wife returns home, he has to pretend to live a normal life again. The problem is this, though: all that dopamine from viewing pornography is released over time. In one minute he was in a life of fantasy watching porn, and now he’s all of a sudden having to make an effort to jump back into reality when she gets home. But the dopamine slowly releases, making it impossible for him to truly be “present.” How can he manage both lives then? Lies—that’s how. His fantasy world forces him to create an alternative reality of lies, cover-ups, and denials. He’s now created not only a web of lies but also a matrix of neuropathways that reinforce his sinful habits.
Now that you’ve got an introduction to how the brain works with regard to dopamine, let’s take a closer look at the “imprints” made on the brain correlated to the release of dopamine. Let’s look more closely at “neuroplasticity.”
How Neuroplasticity Works
What is neuroplasticity? It’s the formation of new neural pathways through repetitive behaviors caused by the release of dopamine. Your brain is going to choose the pathway that produces the most dopamine. Simply stated, the brain will always choose more over less dopamine because it always seeks the highest reward. In one sense, you are unconsciously being hijacked.
Imagine with me, if you will, you’re a young child and your parents buy you a tricycle. You get on that tricycle at a very young age and ride around until your heart is content. Then, your parents give you training wheels, then a five-speed bicycle, a ten-speed bike, and that banana-seat Schwinn bike that every adult born before 1970 probably owned at some point. You’re zipping all around your neighborhood, jumping curbs, and loving life. You create all these good memories around riding a bike.
Five years go by, ten years go by, and fifteen years pass. You see a bike again after so long and think, I haven’t ridden a bike in a long time! You get up on that bike, sit down, and start to pedal. Before you know it, you’re gone, cruising around as though you were 10 years old again. You experience the truth of the old saying, “It’s like riding a bike.” Your body remembers the turns, the depth perception necessary to keep riding, and everything else necessary for riding a bike.
“Neuroplasticity is the formation of new neural pathways through repetitive behaviors caused by the release of dopamine.”
Most people would call this “muscle memory,” but it’s not muscle memory at all. In fact, there is no such thing as “muscle memory”! That’s a term with no scientific backing at all. It’s all neuroplasticity.
Muscles are simply fibers, and the brain’s “hippocampus” is responsible for the memory. Your body learns how to ride a bike, but the hippocampus stores this memory of riding a bike. When it needs to be recalled, the brain recalls the memory and fires up the muscles, reminding them to act the way they learned to when you first rode the bike.
Over time, your practice of riding the bike becomes more advanced. You start with the tricycle, then move to the Schwinn ten-speed, and then eventually an adult road bike. All this time, your brain is building and increasing the neuroplasticity and memory of the physical act of riding the bike. It takes a lot of time and effort to learn balance and to ride the bike. The repetitive practice of riding the bike over time builds neurons and neural pathways (that is, memories) over time. The more you practice the act of riding the bike, the more neural pathways are laid down. This comes from the release of dopamine and the reward—aka, the good feeling—of riding a bike.
“The more you practice the act of riding the bike, the more neural pathways are laid down.”
This is why you can learn to ride a bike as a child, step away from bike riding for many years, yet still know how to ride the same bike many years later. Imagine you’re on a family vacation twenty years later, and you are offered a bike for the beach bike tour. You hop on that bike, and it’s as if you never stopped riding when you were a child—all because of the neural pathways created from the continual release of dopamine over your childhood. Once you’ve created these neuroplastic memories, they never go away. The more you do something over time (good or bad) the better your brain gets at recalling the neuron (that is, the memory) and repeating it.
