Our Lost Generation: 3 Phases of child addiction: A teacher's perspective

This week’s post is on the topic of addiction. There’s a rhythmic element to addiction, which is why it’s always interested me from a research point of view. There’s lot of information available online, mainly from experiments involving rodents, but also postmortem studies of human brains.

Today I’m not talking about the rhythm of addiction. I’m here to talk about addiction in young people and why as educators we must wade in and advocate for parents and children. When for example I’m teaching a diligent ten year old, who enjoys learning, but repeatedly ‘spaces out’ in a completely uncharacteristic way, I take notice. When after reminders to stay focused, the problem persists, and I might then ask,

Are you any good at video games?

The primal smile gives it all away as does the reply:

I’m quite good and I’m getting better with practice.

Oh yes, So you are.

It’s obvious to me that something fundamental has changed.

On asking the child’s mother about this, I learn that there’s a time limit on using screens on weekdays, but a chance to do more at weekends. This might sound very reasonable, but I am confident that 30 minutes per day building a skill is going to result in a change not only in their progress but also in their neural wiring. How can I say this with so much confidence? Because I’ve read all about the changes in neural wiring following 30 minutes a day of piano practice in the psychology of music literature.

But there’s more to this than building skills and learning new techniques. As we all know, many young people have become addicted to screens and I have spoken to many parents who are struggling with the spiral of aggressive behaviours associated with addiction in teenagers.

Emotional intensity + repetition = stronger neural connectivity.

We can see this form of cumulative learning play out in sport, music, dance and any other activities involving playful, repeated input. Imagine doing 30 minutes of weight training every day - you would see a physical change very quickly. When persuading children to practice reading we tell them that 10 minutes of daily reading practice will make a difference - and it’s true: 10 minutes of daily practice will result in a change in a child’s reading attainment.

What is changing? If we practise the same activity with the same level of intention and commitment, we send our brain a memo that we are adopting a new way of living and need to adapt. Learning is one of the ways that we can deliberately choose to adapt or aspire to a new environment. If our new activities are rewarded with points, social prestige or praise or food or some other form of affirmation, then the learning is reinforced.

Natural motivation and reward

Our brains also provide reinforcements through ‘feel good’ chemicals called beta endorphins and opioids. These are released during and after exercise, usually referred to as a ‘runners’ high’.

In large scale music festivals involving lots of people, beta endorphins, mu-opioids and oxytocin bring everyone together into a sense of ‘community’. Oxytocin of course is the so-called ‘love hormone’. Humans have enjoyed the inherently motivating positive rewards of staying active and socializing together using music, singing and dance and food to build social bonds for millennia, but these special events came and went with the changes and midpoints in the seasons and were certainly not a part of mundane everyday life.

It takes a long time to achieve a natural ‘high’ through exercise, music or dance, and following the event, people need to ‘come down again’ to regulate the nervous system and to return to a balanced state. Artificial stimulants, which come in so many different forms, are now available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They hijack the brain’s internal pharmacy and this disrupts the balance of the regulatory system. With daily use, there is no time to recover and this is how a spiral into addiction begins.

Some people are more susceptible to addiction than others and researchers have seen that people with an allostatic load, usually defined as chronic deviation of the regulatory system are more likely to become addicted to artificial stimulants.

Let’s look at the three stages associated with addiction (as explained by Koob et al., 2014).

Three phases associated with addiction

In phase one there is no real addiction: This phase involves binge and intoxication.The overactive reward circuit is affected by intense arousal, emotion, expectation and particular behaviours that become associated with pleasure also known as hedonic activation.

A longer, more intense period of exposure to the stimulus produces a more positive hedonic response at first, but tolerance builds quickly. When this happens the reward loses its initial impact and the user needs to ramp up the effort to reach the same high once tolerance has built up.

At this precarious stage, the reward system has an important role to play. It prioritizes homeostasis and seeks to redress the imbalance of over activated reward.

It does this through withdrawal. The effects of withdrawal are to depress the intensity of the reward by flattening the emotional experience through a slower build up and a lingering, but dull decay, which makes it seem very boring and very disappointing.

Let’s move into phase two. This is the point at which the person enters a transition to real addiction: This is the withdrawal and negative affect stage Once the withdrawal process is established, the addictive behaviour is wanted, but it no longer gives pleasure because the withdrawal system pushed the threshold up so high that the experience of reward cannot be reached, unless the person escalates their intake.

In this stage, natural rewards no longer motivate the person - so they might lose interest in friends, food, being in nature, family, even their pets. This is because the brain circuits have been rewired. The reward system has become hypoactive. The anti-reward system comes online and produces stress-like states, which are fear-based and originate in the now, hyperactive amygdala. Acute withdrawal results in anxiety, irritability and place aversion. These are the depressive and dysphoric symptoms associated with withdrawal to drugs of abuse such as cocaine.

Let’s move into Phase three. - In this phase we have the preoccupation and anticipation stage of addiction.A person in the third phase experiences constant cravings. The wiring of the brain has adapted to the addiction once again. The prefrontal cortex is hypo functioning, meaning that the person has lost most if not all of their capacity to make choices and to suppress unwanted behaviour.

They are unable to access the cognitive control and inhibition needed for school work or for interacting with others as they would have done before their addiction began. As well as losing access to the decision making functions of the brain, their loss of inhibitive control allows the subconscious to dominate this person’s behaviour. This is the stage when the addiction becomes compulsive - because the subconscious is no longer inhibited, and the frontal cortex has become impaired.

This is so sad. The part of the brain associated with planning (for example a future career), performance in working memory (such as calculations in STEM subjects), foresight (for instance mitigating, preventing and avoiding risks) cognitive flexibility (for example using creativity in problem solving), task-switching (such as toggling between languages) and inhibition (for instance suppressing inappropriate impulses).

All of these skills which are known as executive functions first started to appear at the beginning of schooling and mature at about 24 years of age are unavailable. According to the studies I’ve read, those with addiction cannot recover the altered circuitry once the phase three damage has been done.

Looking ahead

Leading voices in education are talking openly about the changes that they are seeing in teenagers’ learning and behaviour. Even on BBC Question Time, the topic of addiction in school aged children was discussed.

Addiction is not a new problem and experts, such as the authors of the paper I’m referencing here, have known for at least a decade, that unless addiction is addressed and reversed in phase one, structural changes to the brain’s limbic system and frontal areas become permanent.

It’s wishful thinking to assume that someone will appear with a marvelous cure to reverse the damage that has been done but I think our best course of action as educators is to really push hard for prevention.

Support

We need to circulate information that empowers parents. They need to know about the real harm that addiction brings. I have spoken to parents who are living with teenagers in phase two and three and they say the children need urgent help. So, I decided to speak up and put a stake in the ground for prevention.

My own conversations with parents who have children in phase one have ranged from them telling me to ‘Mind my own business’ to thanking me and then letting me know that certain apps have been deleted from the device that their child uses.

Every time we have a conversation about preventing addiction, we seize the opportunity to inspire parents to keep their child safe. We can also offer them reassurance and when we do this we will encourage positive action and limit the potential for longterm harm.

Thank you so much for staying with me to the end of this post on such a heavy subject. If you’d like further information, contact me here. If you need help for your child, contact your GP as soon as possible. Join the live webinar here.

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REFERENCE

Koob GF, Buck CL, Cohen A, Edwards S, Park PE, Schlosburg JE, Schmeichel B, Vendruscolo LF, Wade CL, Whitfield TW Jr, George O. Addiction as a stress surfeit disorder. Neuropharmacology. 2014 Jan;76 Pt B(0 0):370-82. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropharm.2013.05.024. Epub 2013 Jun 6. PMID: 23747571; PMCID: PMC3830720.