According to Winnicott, the false self is a self-constructed persona in defense against intolerable external demands and stressors. Winnicott postulated that the creation of the false self can lead to feelings of profound emptiness. No there there.

This striking difference illustrates how “temporal horizons” shrink when we’re under the sway of an addictive

Global deaths from addiction have risen in all age groups between 1990 and 2017, with more than half the deaths occurring in people younger than fifty years of age.

The truth is, I am anxious and fearful, although few would guess those things about me. I maintain a rigid schedule, a predictable routine, and a slavish adherence to my to-do list, as a way to manage my anxiety. This means that others are often forced to bend to my will and the exigencies of my goals.

In an attempt to find a less addictive opioid painkiller to replace morphine, chemists came up with a brand-new compound, which they named “heroin” for heroisch, the German word for “courageous.” Heroin turned out to be two to five times more potent than morphine and gave way to the narcomania of the early 1900s.

Beyond extreme examples of running from pain, we’ve lost the ability to tolerate even minor forms of discomfort. We’re constantly seeking to distract ourselves from the present moment, to be entertained.

The paradox is that hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, leads to anhedonia, which is the inability to enjoy pleasure of any kind.

We’re all running from pain. Some of us take pills. Some of us couch surf while binge-watching Netflix. Some of us read romance novels. We’ll do almost anything to distract ourselves from ourselves. Yet all this trying to insulate ourselves from pain seems only to have made our pain worse.

I explained to her that any drug that stimulates our reward pathway the way cannabis does has the potential to change our brain’s baseline anxiety. What feels like cannabis treating anxiety may in fact be cannabis relieving withdrawal from our last dose. Cannabis becomes the cause of our anxiety rather than the cure. The only way to know for sure