"It's not locked, you know..." 🏁 ON ANY SUNDAYS

"The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection."

– Johann Hari

There was a study on addiction in the 1980s...

At first, the doctors used isolated rats and gave them two beverage choices. Each subject had a cage with one bottle of pure drinking water and one bottle of water laced with heroin.

In almost 100% of the cases, the rats chose the heroin water, became addicted, and eventually died of an overdose.

Bruce Alexander, a professor of Psychology in Vancouver, noted that perhaps the rats resorted to the drug because they are alone in a cage with no other stimulation. He later tried putting rats in cages with the same water choices, and this time included other rats, toys, tunnels, and food, and noted a very different reaction.

Although some of the rats in the social simulation did try the heroin water, none of them became consistent users and none of them died from an overdose.

Alexander then carried out an additional study and discovered that if he took the solitary, drug-addicted rats and placed them in the social cage, nearly all of them stopped using the drug-laced water altogether.

We started the On Any Sundays email series because we wanted a deeper connect and a more intentional channel to communicate.

What are some channels you rely on for community?

Are they working? Or are they wasting your most valuable asset - time.

Do you have any habits that you prefer you didn’t?

What if habits have less to do with the chemical hooks?

What if habits have more to do with the cage?

Community > Everything.
-GFDD

PS. We're no experts on addiction, we're purveyors of words that inspire and actions that speak 🙏🏽🏴. Today's questions were inspired by Johann Hari's talk about behavior and beating addiction.