The Extinction Burst

[HoldingPattern]

I thought members here might be interested in this article on the "extinction burst", or what happens when you attempt to change habitual behavior.

I have personally experienced this several times in relation to AL. The initial ones were quite bad/binge-y, but the last two were far less intense. I'm optimistically interpreting this as a sign of positive progress on my part, but I guess we'll see if that holds any water. Anybody else have experience here?

Another interesting topic the article mentions is the difference between classical and operant behavioral conditioning. From my point of view, classical conditioning largely responsible for typical drinking "triggers", while operant conditioning shapes your overall approach to and relationship with AL. Getting a grip on the former is usually the initial focus when trying to become AL-free, while the later is what really shapes your long-term results. At least this is how it occurs to me in my current situation.

[one2many]

The Extinction Burst

This is a very interesting article, thank you for posting..off to read!

[Sunnyvalenting]

The Extinction Burst

Excellent article! One of the most helpful comments was the advice to create other positive reward situations and celebrate the success.
Interestingly extinction of the reward is how naltrexone is suppose to work. In other words the person on nal does not experience the reward portion of the drink and slowly or quickly stops "pressing the button" (drinking).
Sunny

[techie]

The Extinction Burst

This is very interesting. I can see how this could function directly applicable to alcoholics only if the reinforcing stimulus can be omitted completely. Alcohol. However, I do see how one could view the use of anti-cravings medications, i.e., Baclofen, Topamax, et al, as an attempt to artificially cause extinction of the operant behavior. Thoughts??

[Sunnyvalenting]

The Extinction Burst

I don't know about topa, but bac gives one the "calm" without the high by increasing the GABA (no go) function of the brain when challenged with a given stimulus or cue to drink. It allows one to use their best judgment to stop drinking in the person choosing abstinence. There may be an extinction as well. That would make sense
In a different fashion it is the naltrexone which actually blocks the mu receptor and therefore part of the high of alcohol so the reward just isn't reinforced and so becomes extinct. Subtle but significant differences. Some clinics are using both for the 2 different effects. Somewhere here there is a study on rats? that show an enhanced effect of both on rat drinking behavior.
It all fits together somehow and I am glad some people are finally studying these things scientifically.
sunny

[mama bear]

The Extinction Burst

good read..thanks!!

[HoldingPattern]

The Extinction Burst

techie;969289 wrote: This is very interesting. I can see how this could function directly applicable to alcoholics only if the reinforcing stimulus can be omitted completely. Alcohol. However, I do see how one could view the use of anti-cravings medications, i.e., Baclofen, Topamax, et al, as an attempt to artificially cause extinction of the operant behavior. Thoughts??
Yeah, that is along the lines of what I was thinking. It also seems to me that all of the advice given here about "working on your life" is all about changing operant-conditioned behavior. If you just "only" (in quotes because I'm not trying to trivialize how difficult it is) just stop ingesting AL but don't change anything else, you'll essentially be eternally white-knuckling because you haven't addressed the layers and layers of behavioral patterns and thoughts built up around drinking.

Sunnyvalenting;969378 wrote: I don't know about topa, but bac gives one the "calm" without the high by increasing the GABA (no go) function of the brain when challenged with a given stimulus or cue to drink. It allows one to use their best judgment to stop drinking in the person choosing abstinence. There may be an extinction as well. That would make sense
In a different fashion it is the naltrexone which actually blocks the mu receptor and therefore part of the high of alcohol so the reward just isn't reinforced and so becomes extinct. Subtle but significant differences. Some clinics are using both for the 2 different effects. Somewhere here there is a study on rats? that show an enhanced effect of both on rat drinking behavior.
It all fits together somehow and I am glad some people are finally studying these things scientifically.
sunny

Sure makes baclofen and naltrexone seem like a killer one-two punch, eh? Except for the side-effects, of course. Originally I thought I was going to try TSM, but I've been having moderate success with only supps so far, and I'm sticking with that for now. But there very well might be bac and/or nal in my future. We'll see.

The interesting thing is that I'm finding that just even being conscious of and thinking about these psychological phenomena is helping me change my perception/experience related to drinking. One more tool to help get off the drinking "autopilot", so to speak.

[Sunnyvalenting]

The Extinction Burst

I so agree. It was sort of a relief that my feelings represented a "normal" response to an abnormal situation. I wasn't spiritually flawed. I was poorly wired! That was something I could work with once I knew about it in this model. I now look at any temptation as a normal craving of the once addicted brain. It is not nearly as overwhelming since I recognize it for what it is and what it isn't . It is just the old pattern trying to reassert itself and it will go away in time. The bac sure helps. The side effects were hard at first but nowhere near as bad as AL. The nal made me quite dizz and nauseated tho so i stuck with just baclofen. It seemed to work just fine on my own. If I had been able to cure without the bac I would have done so. I agree with your stepping stone approach. Just don't ever give up. There is something for each of us who keep after it.
Sunny

[Luvwins]

The Extinction Burst

Thanks for the article. I'm not sure I can explain why, but it reminded me of one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite posters here, Boss man. I would post a link to it but I can't find the original post, but I copied it at time and will paste it here. I just think it's an eloquent piece of writing and the images are wonderful:

"I'll never know why, kittens, Audrey II

I never had a problem drinking back when I drank. I don?t know really why my habits changed or my body changed. I guess I?ll never know.

I?d have a cocktail or two, or five, and go to bed, and get up fine in the morning.

That went on for years. But as I grew older, my body became less tolerant. I cut back a bit, and then a bit more. I had to get up for work. I had to buy a house, and get married, and have a family. Every step seemed just fine at the time. Nothing big. Everything normal.

Of course there were bumps in the road. I had a business problem and almost lost my second house ten years ago. One day the stock market dropped and I lost as much money in a day as I made in my first year of full-time work. I got audited by the IRS. I got sued, and that took four years to resolve. I landed once on a flight in a 70 mph cross wind and it blew out one of the tires on the plane. Nothing big. Nothing lasting. After a few weeks things get back to normal.

But over time, it was four or five drinks every night. I never really counted the drinks. But I could count the bottles in the trash. For me, a bottle is an American style 1.5 liter booze bottle, two fifths, of 40% alcohol liquor. I once read there are 40 1.25oz shots in a bottle. But I never poured 1.25 oz shots. When I poured a measured shot the shot glass always overflowed so it became useless to use it.

I figured if a bottle appears in my trash once a week, I know that?s 40 divided by seven. You can do the math. Some weeks the bottle was gone in five days. I realized there were too many bottles in my trash. Maybe my neighbors were putting them there. In my local liquor store is a choice of 400 kinds of bottles. The chance my neighbors drinking the same brand is 1/400th or 0.25% even if they did drink booze, which I?ve never seen them do. I started hiding bottles. Here I was, on the higher side of my 40s, playing hide-and-seek with empty bottles.

I tried to cut back. But the more I tried to cut back on the more I turned into a binge drinker. A few cocktails would turn into half a bottle of liquor in one sitting. I didn?t do it often at first. Just once a month or so. Then it was every Friday. Somewhere in there I learned that weekend mornings got more comfortable if I had a shot in the morning. I had lost the ability to sleep except with a drink, so if I woke up at 2am, I had another drink. And suddenly the 2am drink turned into five drinks and I started calling in sick with ?Flu? or ?Something with my stomach? to avoid going to work.

My brain has a whole lot of voices. It?s like one of those Sunday political news talk shows. Normally the voices work together and I?m a normal whole person. Sometimes there is disagreement in my head. I can?t think logically, or my intuition says what my logic doesn?t think. Sometimes the disagreement exhibits itself as fear in my stomach despite logical reasoning. It exhibits as anxiety. It exhibits as physical signs, not being hungry, or needing more sleep than normal, or being crabby and bitter.

I think of the emotional part of my brain as a box of kittens. I know that emotions are in the primitive part of my brain. This part has no voice, no language, and no ability to reason. It can only communicate by sending emotional signals to the modern logical part of the brain to act as an interpreter, or to various body parts that display emotions. Most of the time my logical brain can translate the emotions fine, and I can understand them and talk about them. I might say to my spouse: ?My kittens are a bit angry you ignored me at dinner tonight?, or maybe ?My kittens are ashamed because I accidentally hurt someone today?.

My box of kittens love alcohol. It feeds them. It?s not like they become more mature, or well fed. They are not real kittens, they are emotional kittens. Feeding them makes them emotionally stronger. They are like the plant in ?Little Shop of Horrors? named Audrey II where it starts out just needing a little blood. Then more blood. Then as it grows strong, Audrey II has an insatiable appetite ?FEED ME SEYMOUR? says the plant.

So are my kittens are like Audrey II. Normally they are a non-verbal part of my head that just kind of sits there. But if I feed them, they overcome their box and start rambling my brain paths, looking for more food.

The brain has many paths. From what I understand, they are real. They are connectors that pass signals from one part to another part. It?s hard to think the brain is like the blinking computer lights of Star Trek. But to me that?s a good image of it. It is a bunch of cells that use electricity and chemicals, and neural pathways to form thoughts, hold memories, and apply logic. The brain has different parts, which use different types of cells and different chemicals. My kittens are just a type of brain cell. This part is an old part, specializing in emotions. The chemicals for the kittens are fed and stimulated by alcohol. The higher part of my brain, the logical and rational part is relatively new. It uses different chemical transmitters. These transmitters have the opposite reaction to alcohol. The newer brain cells are suppressed, their messages go dark, they get sleepy and go off-line. So the twin effect of alcohol is to feed my emotions and turn off my logic.

So in my brain, the more I use a pathway, the bigger it becomes. This is real. The real neural cells get bigger, and more connected. It?s like when I drive, every time you take a given route, the road gets a bit wider and smoother every trip. When I type on a keyboard, at first I found the motion is very strange, and I missed keys all the time. But the more I typed, the more my brain cells used in typing became enlarged like bigger roads, and better attached to other cells. Now, I only need to think a word, and sometimes not even that, and it appears here right in front of me. This is because after decades of typing I have these nice big road associations between the language part of my brain that generates words, and the muscle action part that pushes my fingers up and down in order to create the words.

So when I drank, for all those years, I made some habits. My habits are nothing more than big roadways in my brain. Longstanding habits act like big open freeways with big onramps. All I have to do is to drive near the ramp, and I look at it, and the possibility exists I can go on that ramp and get on the freeway.

The kittens know this. They can?t talk. But they can steer. So when they are strong, and need to be fed, they turn my steering wheel. They drive my car up onto the freeway. Suddenly I?m free and things are wonderful, speeding down the road on a sunny day. It?s like Thelma and Louise in the classic convertible flying down the freeway on a sunny day. I feel sexy and powerful and fast and sleek. And like Thelma and Louise the freeway has its limits and there are consequences when the road ends.

The road inevitably ends. Thelma and Louise go flying off and the closing credits go by. Suddenly I?m awake, with a pounding headache, lying in bed where I?ve been for hours, bathed in sweat, reeking of alcohol chemicals, with a full bladder and horror that I have no idea what damage I did while my logic was out.

Now I have the Sunday talk show from hell in my head. There is no agreement from anyone. The Kittens are yelling FEED ME SEYMOUR; my logic is like some TV Newscaster ?There will be consequences for this?. My stomach is full of acid, tied in knots and barfing up. Thelma and Louise is a movie that conveniently ends in the sky. My personal journey keeps going because life isn?t a movie or a convertible, it?s a demolition derby and you have no way out. In Little Shop of Horrors, Audrey II gets blown up in the end. Life is not a show.

I thought about that. Can?t you just end it while you feel good?

I can?t figure out how to do it. I could try flying and getting drunk and the plane will crash. But planes hardly ever crash any more. I can get drunk and run around in traffic. But with my luck, I would only be injured, land in the hospital for three weeks, and the hospital does NOT feed SEYMOUR so I?d have to detox anyway. I can make a mistake so bad I go to jail. Jail has the same detox problem as the hospital.

Life is like an endless demolition derby. No matter how banged up you get, you have to keep going, and hope you can get better and stop getting banged up.

So then I got this talk show going. I?m getting pretty good at understanding the parts. After all, they talk inside me all the time. The first thing is to STOP FEEDING THE KITTENS. That means no alcohol, no moderation. What Seymour needed to do is to stop feeding Audrey II. I know that. I have dead plants all over my house. They died while I was in the convertible on the freeway while being incoherent on my bed.

The emotional kittens may not have language ability, but they are not without a voice. They have a huge ability to retaliate. Their retaliation comes in the form of emotions and physical symptoms. First they give me incredible anxiety. They make my heart race. They raise my blood pressure by 40-50 points. They tie up my stomach so I can?t eat. Without food my blood sugar crashes. I become depressed. My headache, which started out as a simple brain dehydration headache, becomes a full bore sugar crash ?I?m going to die? headache. They become desperate, and they communicate this by making me desperate.

The most amazing thing happens at this point. My kitchen has a ghost which can make objects move and liquids disappear. I?m still clearly in control of the TV commentator, and keeps saying serious things like ?I have to stop? and ?there will be consequences?. Then these otherworldly hands float up right in front of my eyes. They are someone else?s hands. They grab a glass out of the cabinet. They grab a bottle of booze. Sometimes, my hands that are someone else?s even drives out to the store to buy more booze. And all the time the TV guy is saying, ?I?m not going to do this. This is wrong. Yes I?m in control?.

It almost seems like a movie because the hands that aren?t my hands pour alcohol into this floating glass. And the floating glass rises all by itself to my lips. And I think this is ridiculous because glasses don?t float except in Disneyland?s Haunted House, but here there is a floating glass right in front of me in my house. Maybe I should call America?s Most Haunted and tell them of the ghosts in my kitchen. Then the kittens turn the wheel, car goes up the ramp and I drink the glass in one swallow. And after that I?m back on the freeway, sleek and strong and sexy, in the convertible on a sunny day.

Crash. Back to the demolition derby. Back to the talk show from hell. Ok. This time get everyone calm and STOP FEEDING THE KITTENS. Oh! Those kittens are strong. Starving them is like walking a tightrope over Niagra falls. I have to stay balanced while the whole world spins under me. It?s smiling at the IRS Auditor and saying ?Good morning, shall we get started?? It?s like staring at the lady across the aisle and saying ?These planes lose tires while landing all the time, it?s nothing to worry about?.

A lot of alcohol treatments are simply symptom relief for this process. They moderate the moods. The settle the kittens so a person can detox without interference from there emotions. For me, my kittens fights back with anxiety, depression, and high emotionalism. They say IT?S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT?, and they are right. For my emotional brain, my primitive brain, ceasing alcohol use is indeed the end of the kittens? world as they know it.

As I age this process takes longer and longer. For me now the anxiety takes 3-4 days, and the third day is usually the worst. The emotionalism lingers for a week to 10 days or maybe 50 days or 100. During that time, I?m upset by things that don?t affect me like news stories, I get angry for silly reasons, and I overthink small problems as if by sheer thinking they will get better, and they get worse instead.

Walking the tightrope works. I?ve done it enough times that I never want to do it again. After a time, my kittens lose their power, and slowly settle down in their little box. They go back to being cute and loveable, and rarely voicing their displeasure. I have to steer my car past many big onramps, and avoid the temptation to give in to those habits. I have to avoid the ghostly hands and the floating drink glass. I have to turn the car around before it gets to the store, and pour the glass in the sink, or drop $20 on the bar and walk out on a full drink without waiting for change.

I?ve never seen minutes creep so slowly as when the kittens are losing their power. No overlong sermon, or obnoxious relative, or academic test was ever as long, or had the minutes tick so slowly, as when I detox.

It ends. Slowly or not, the minutes tick by and my body and brain become rebalanced. I?m getting better now at understand my internal TV talk show, knowing who is sitting at my table, and how to mediate them, and control them, and insure they keep their proper place. My demolition derby car heals and straightens out and stops banging into stuff.

The world doesn?t get so bright as it was with the sexy ladies in the classic convertible flying down the freeway on a sunny day. I think my world is more like a pudgy gray haired guy driving a ten year old Toyota to the supermarket to buy cat litter. But pudgy old guys drive slow so they don?t crash, and so the old sedan isn?t dented, and maybe I can get some flowers for the table and win some points with the spouse.

No wine for me. If I keep going down the right roads, my new brain cells will get bigger and more connected,. My habits will get connected right past all those old onramps and my kittens will forget that they ever drove up there, or that they felt that way. My kittens will do their proper job of making me laugh at comedy, feel positive emotion, and even cry yet again when I see Love Story. No retaliation, the TV guy in my head just becomes another quiet voice, a quiet little talk show that no one would watch because it would be far too boring.

I never had a problem drinking back when I drank. I don?t know really why my habits changed or my body changed. I guess I?ll never know.
Boss man"

[rubywillow]

The Extinction Burst

Holding, VEDDY thought provoking. I'm glad it brought out comments from many I'm not familiar with.
Yes, IMHO, we HAVE to change, and THAT'S the big sticker. Like the familiar saying 'Insanity is making the same mistake over and over and expecting different results', so is just going dry. WE haven't changed at all, nor the parts of our lives that led us to the issues we've had.
I've been here a while, and it's been a learning process for me the whole time, even today. I read once the phrase 'arrested development' refers especially to addicts of any kind, because we quit actually experiencing real life when we pick up anything that alters it. Does that mean if we started abusing at 17, continued for 30 years, our social/mental/psychological develop was 'arrested'? I'm not sure, but I've seen traits in people who lead me to believe it.
Anyway, thanks for the subject. All education is good as long as our minds can process it and form individual opinions.
Rubes

[HoldingPattern]

The Extinction Burst

Luvwins, great read, thanks for saving that and reposting it here!

rubywillow wrote: Yes, IMHO, we HAVE to change, and THAT'S the big sticker. Like the familiar saying 'Insanity is making the same mistake over and over and expecting different results', so is just going dry. WE haven't changed at all, nor the parts of our lives that led us to the issues we've had.

I agree, and this is the part that I think I'm really struggling with. My initial detox was relatively "easy" compared to others: the physical symptoms were quite manageable, and I had been working my way up mentally for literally the past year (or more). Since then, my "slips" have really been more planned out / on-purpose, as opposed to uncontrollable cravings, anxiety, etc. But even though I have dramatically cut back on the amount of AL I'm ingesting it's still too much, it's still taking up too much mental space, and ultimately, I think is holding me back from really moving on.

I'm happy with my progress from a harm-reduction standpoint, but that's really just a first small step will hopefully help enable more fundamental change.