Addictions are anesthesia

Chris Lakin

Addictions are anesthesia — LessWrong

80 Addictions are anesthesia

by Chris Lakin

26th Sep 2026

2 min read

80

This is a linkpost for https://chrislakin.blog/anesthesia

Many people I respect misunderstand addictions: they believe they’re addicted “to” scrolling, vaping, overworking, etc.—instead of recognizing addictions as strategies.

Because of this, they’re surprised when their attempts to curb addictions don’t work: they either fail, and come to believe that the “lack willpower”, or they succeed at dropping one addiction, but find themselves picking up new ones:

The Locally Optimal view of addictions is that addictions function as anesthesia. As strategies for managing suffering.

Like, if you’re in pain, it’s often wise to employ some method of anesthesia.

…which also means that if you’re in pain and you forcibly remove your addictions (anesthesia), either you’re going to get overwhelmed, or you’re going to find another way to numb.

Addictions help with suffering because anesthesia helps with suffering.

Therefore, the way to unlearn all addictions simultaneously is to remove the underlying suffering. With suffering, there is a sort of “addiction whac-a-mole” that happens. Without suffering, there is no need for any kind of anesthesia.

Addictions are one of my preferred measures of suffering and internal conflict. If you have addictions you dislike, there’s probably suffering in your system. It’s common not to realize that addictions are present to anesthetize deeper pain. (I’m sorry.)

But this is a good thing.

In my research, I’ve specialized in working 1:1 with people who are situated such that they can remove underlying suffering without risking terrible consequences. But many people aren’t in this position yet. For these people, addictions often are the best they can do to manage the current suffering.

This is why I get concerned when I see advice that blindly recommends people tear down their addictions. Hey, Chesterton’s Fence! All things considered, addictions like scrolling can be some of the best copes for many people!

(Note: The most virtuous copes are community and relationships. The problem is that they’re also the least convenient.)

Meanwhile, when underlying suffering disappears, you’ll see addictions disappear without using willpower:

“On an average day [before our work together] I might do around six to eight hours of work and then five to six hours of just going home and vegging out in some form... watching YouTube... And [since then] I do it a lot less. A lot more of it is just talking to friends or having thoughtful conversations.” —alignment researcher

(Until our 3mo follow-up, I didn’t even know he’d *had* addictions.)

Have you ever noticed that you didn’t get addictive urges during the times you were happiest? — in a past role, in a past relationship, around people you love, while on vacation, after meditation or psychedelics, when younger, when life was more stable, when you felt differently about yourself… Perhaps it was because there was no suffering for which you needed anesthesia.

Addictions are anesthesia

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[-]Trinley Goldenberg18d121

My model of addictions is that they usually go like this:

You create an avoidance/anesthetic behavior that serves a certain purpose.
The behavior becomes an addiction - there's some sort of dopamine hit from the addiction itself, such that simply NOT doing the behavior is unpleasant, regardless of the original thing you were trying to avoid.
You then further justify this behavior rationally, coming up with all sorts of other purposes that weren't the original anesthetic.

When I work with clients who have addictive behaviors, we try to address both #1 and #2 simultaneously. There's both the aspect of unlearning the addictive behavior as a solution and replacing it with more functional behaviors, and SIMULTANEOUSLY there's just a chemical loop that has arisen, similar to an itch that needs to be scratched, that must be addressed on it's own terms. The addiction has created a self-sustaining loop where simply not doing the behavior creates it's own suffering, so the playbook described in the post is necessary but not sufficient.

[-]cubefox19d*124

I don't find the suffering theory convincing. For example, a while ago I was severely addicted to energy drinks. They did not treat any discernible suffering. Now I stopped, and again there is no increased suffering or other new addictions.

[-]Chris Lakin17d2-1

How's this hypothesis seem to you https://x.com/stedmanhalliday/status/2104501295302529053 ?

[-]cubefox16d30

As far as I can tell, "grogginess for hours after waking daily" is caused by caffeine addiction. Caffeine does treat grogginess, but that grogginess was created by the caffeine addiction in the first place. I got rid of my addiction and I no longer feel groggy for no good reason. As an addict, you tend to only attribute the relief of the "treatment" to the addictive substance; you don't recognize the withdrawal symptom (like grogginess) for what it is.

[-]mako yass18d20

We could say that an energy drink addiction is like an addiction to water, which is to say, it's not an addiction, your body/brain actually needs it, but it's different from an addiction to water in that if you stop consuming it the need goes away.

[-]Huera18d20

I think the comparison misses the mark. An addiction to energy drinks seems like most addictions (cocaine, twitter, porn &c)—a behavior gets positively reinforced so that you begin to engage in it more often than you'd endorse on reflection. The habit/compulsion is also hard to break. There can, but needn't be,withdrawal symptoms after stopping.
An "addiction" to water seems different both from the inside and from the outside.

[-]df fd18d10

I agree with your addition to the post,

I think addictions are just behaviours that are reinforced

either it is reinforced directly by some chemical reward [e.g. opiod] or the reinforcement is simply the removal of the on going pain which is where the [anaesthsia framing of the post coming from]

[-]Hastings19d10

There’s at least one more component, chemical homeostasis- like, a dependence on stimulant laxatives has no emotional anasthesia component. But emotional anasthesia is a pretty good model for some addictions that aren’t that.

[-]mxbutterfree19d101

See also Silence by alkjash.

Living consciously and intentionally was too effortful, facing my problems head-on too painful, and what I wanted more than anything was to shut down my own thoughts and fast-forward through life. Read a thousand-page novel, watch a six-season TV show, scroll through a hundred life stories on AskReddit. These were all ways to forfeit my agency and become a medium for someone else’s narrative force.

I will not pretend to know how to solve the problem in general, but this is what worked for me. An insightful friend of mine asked me one question which shook me out of the will to nothingness:
“What if every time you wanted to play video games you just introspected instead?”
It had never occurred to me, despite the fact that I love to write, despite the hours I daydream and doodle at every opportunity, that I could make room for these inner voices by silencing the world completely.
For weeks after that day, I took many long walks, muttering gibberish under my breath. I lay in bed and daydreamed. I wrote for hours without stop. In that time I learned that my will to nothingness was unjustified. I learned that my inner voices would never stop having things to say. Later, I also learned that the world deserves everything I can give it, and more.

[-]alkjash19d62

See also this comment thread between Valentine and myself discussing the phrase "addiction from" which I think crystallizes the same anesthesia point: you are not addicted to your phone, you're addicted from being present.

[-]momom217d10

I've already introspected. I know what I'll find, and I won't like it.

[-]Huera18d*80

While I think the frame of "addictions as anesthesia" is useful, I'd still like to keep the more standard "addictions as reinforcement learning" frame.
You write:
"Many people I respect misunderstand addictions: they believe they’re addicted “to” scrolling, vaping, overworking, etc.—instead of recognizing addictions as strategies."

Again, it's important to recognize that “addiction whac-a-mole”, as you call it, is possible. But do you mean to claim that being addicted "to" something is some rare obscure phenomenon?
To use an especially clear-cut example: if one develops a heroin problem due to an underlying Suffering problem, then getting rid of Suffering might be a useful first step, but not come close to even curbing use much.
"when underlying suffering disappears, you’ll see addictions disappear without using willpower" is a very extraordinary claim indeed.

Also, how often, in practice, do addictions arise from Suffering vs not?
You might start smoking at 16 to be "one of the cool kids"—a decade later you have decided many times over that the original reason was very stupid. All the same—you're addicted. I don't think it's reasonable to describe this as having arisen from Suffering.
Or, your doc prescribes you some stimulant for ADHD in high school and you get addicted. Many such cases.

[-]Nick_Tarleton18d43

Anecdotally, addictions sometimes do disappear without (or with anomalously little) willpower, e.g. after psychedelic experiences or religious epiphanies. These instances may or may not fit the anesthesia frame, but they seem like a problem for (simple versions of) the reinforcement learning frame.

Heroin adds physical dependence/withdrawal as a factor, but even there I suspect underlying suffering has a large effect on psychological tolerance for withdrawal / whether it feels like a problem that needs to be immediately solved by using.

[-]Chris Lakin18d2-1

I'm not sure I have experience with heroine-like additions but they might be similar actually: https://x.com/seventhmeal/status/2082525083554161135

[-]XelaP16d50

This post feels kinda alien to me. I don't doubt that it describes some people's experiences, but it doesn't describe mine and I think it probably misses a main cause for most.

As an example, when I was ~13 I independently came up with the phrase "my brain is rotting" to describe the feeling of scrolling memes on reddit, and basically from then on stopped doing so.

Obviously I replaced my 'addiction' with various 'something elses' - but that was the whole point, even my time flitting about the internet became much better after I quit reddit. There was no suffering being numbed or whatever, and I find it strange to characterize it that way. It was just a convenient form of content, with a low entry and continuation barrier despite being not worth it.

As another example, recently I decided to read more books. This process looks like me cajoling myself into getting past the first few minutes, and then if I succeed a couple enjoyable hours will pass without me noticing. I have successfully used this process to read 5 books (plus some webfiction) this month, as compared to my annual amount of 5-10 (depending on how you count webfiction).

By my understanding, while it's not this easy for most people, it's still basically that they are shirking the upfront cost of doing something more pleasant than scrolling.

[-]Joey Yudelson17d52

I think this is sometimes, but not always, true. I highly recommend the incredible book What would *you* do alone in a cage with nothing but cocaine? It talks mainly about how heterogenous addiction is, and how despite that, like you say, most addictions are locally optimal. It spends some time debunking philosophical or neurological accounts of addiction that don't take this into account, like "infinitely strong craving" models, and then talks about some of the many many reasons why drug addiction is often the best of many bad options.

Very highly recommended.

[-]plex17d10

True and important, good post.

[-]frmsaul19d00

This feels very accurat!

[-]avturchin19d0-4

I have a friend psychologist and she always told me that addictions are masking trauma (PTSD).

[-]sudo-nym17d00

This seems like a case of One True Approach.

(My guess is that the base rate of trauma is already so high in the population she serves that it's safer to assume there is trauma than that there isn't.)

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