Did the results help you learn how to properly read your stress compass—what types of rewards orient you toward or away from stress?

In any type of addictive behavior, reactivity builds its strength through repetition—resistance training. Each time we look for our “likes” on Facebook, we lift the barbell of “I am.” Each time we smoke a cigarette in reaction to a trigger, we do a push-up of “I smoke.” Each time we excitedly run off to a colleague to tell her about our latest and

single-celled organisms have simple, binary mechanisms for survival: move toward nutrient, move away from toxin. It turns out that the sea slug, which has one of the most basic nervous systems currently known, utilizes this same two-option approach to lay down memories, a discovery that earned Eric Kandel the Nobel Prize in Physiology in 2000. What

For the vast majority of my patients, the reward came from making something unpleasant go away (negative reinforcement).

The psychologist Roy Baumeister refers to this stress reaction, perhaps ironically, as “ego depletion.” Recent work has supported the idea that just like a car with only enough gas in the tank to keep going, we may have only enough gas in our self-control tank for any one day. Specifically, his group has found that across a number of different

You are already familiar with what we are doing when we listen to the angel—practicing good old-fashioned self-control. Scientists call this cognitive control: we use cognition to control our behavior. Treatments such as cognitive behavioral therapy apply this kind of control to a range of disorders, including depression and addiction. Some people,

Then I asked whether there ever had been times when he couldn’t smoke—on an airplane or a bus, for example. Yes, he replied. “What happened then?” I asked. He pondered for a few moments and said something to the effect of, “I guess it went away.” “Let me make sure I understand,” I said. “If you don’t smoke, your cravings go away on their own?” I

Someone with BPD may not have developed a stable sense of self, because there were no predictable rules of engagement.

“I would have a flashback [to some traumatic event]” (trigger), “get drunk” (behavior), “and this was better than reliving the experience” (reward).