Internal and External Thinking

There was a certain thought process I would notice in myself when I was trying to quit a drug, in particular nicotine. In fact, there were two different and mutually exclusive thought processes. One would mean I was having an easy time of quitting. The other meant I was struggling.

The best way I can describe them is ‘internal’ and ‘external’.

Internal thinking was when I was thinking about how I was feeling, what would make me feel better or worse, how I would feel if I had a drink or a cigarette or some codeine or whatever.

External thinking was when I was thinking about anything external to myself. This might be something obvious, like being out for a walk and looking at the buildings and wondering about when they were built and who had lived there, what hopes and dreams they may have harboured, and what happened to them, what ends they faced and if anything of them is still remembered. But it also included thinking about myself, as long as it wasn’t the immediate here and now me.

This is probably getting confusing, so let me explain. External thinking would include thinking about or discussing a future version of myself. So my hopes and dreams, my plans over the next few months, and /or a future version of myself that I was aiming to be.

Just to be clear, when I say ‘thinking’ I am referring to what was occupying my mind. It might not have been me sat, arms folded, a frown on my face, staring at a spot on the floor. I may have been (for example) talking to a friend or at work. I am referring to what was occupying my conscious mind.

I found that internal thinking would lead to my struggling, whereas external thinking would not.

One of the reasons for this is that it is closely linked with the craving process. I have dealt with the process in all of my books so will not rehash it here. If you are not familiar with this then you can read into it for free by going to the ‘First Five Chapters’ where you can find the first 5 chapter of Alcohol Explained. Chapter 4 deals with cravings. Alternatively (and having just checked), Nicotine Explained seems to have the most complete and detailed breakdown of craving. Suffice to say that cravings are a conscious thought process whereby we obsess, fantasise, and tease ourselves with the object of our desire.

It is probably very easy to see that if you are thinking ‘internally’ you are far more likely to get sucked into the craving spiral. If you are thinking ‘externally’, looking at the view, lost in a book or film, planning a house move or a holiday or a visit to friends, you aren’t very likely to start obsessing about a cigarette or a drink. On the other hand, if you are thinking about how you feel, you’re a very short distance away from thinking about how wonderful it would be to have that thing you are trying to quit.

There is another aspect to ‘internal’ and ‘external’ that is worth mentioning. I found that I was far more likely to be thinking ‘externally’ when I was feeling pretty good. Again, that may be pretty obvious. If you’re making a car journey there are a lot of things that might be occupying your mind. You might be chatting to a passenger, listening to music or an audio book, admiring the view and just lost in your own thoughts, cursing the traffic and worrying about how late you’re going to be, or frustratingly trying to find your way. But if a loud bang suddenly came from the engine, and the vehicle started making a grinding sound and the speed dropped dramatically, and smoke started pouring out of the bonnet, suddenly whatever had been occupying your mind would be gone. The conversation would be immediately forgotten, the song would be unheard, the view unseen. Suddenly all your attention would be on the car.

The same is true of our body and consciousness. If you are feeling ok in yourself, then you will be able to concentrate on and enjoy external things. But if something isn’t right, if we feel miserable or anxious, then we forget the external things and start looking internally. This is a basic survival mechanism; our own health and safety comes first, because without it there is no future us. The priority has to be our immediate survival.

The problem is that withdrawal from a drug makes us feel wrong so there is a natural tendency to start internal thinking. Why don’t I feel right? What is going on? What can I do to remedy it?

This mindset is one of the reasons people consider addicts to be selfish. Internal thinking Is focussed on looking in, not out. When we’re doing this, we pay less attention on what is going on around us; we appear forgetful, withdrawn, introspective, because that’s exactly what we are! The addict is self-absorbed, but this is not a character defect, it’s a defence mechanism. Something is wrong with the car, it’s suddenly making a horrible grinding sound, there’s a strong smell of electrical burning, and it has lost power. The human equivalent of this is not feeling right. It may not be so obvious as having something wrong with our body (like throwing up the day after a hangover), no, it is much more insidious than that. It is something wrong with our mind, with how we feel mentally. We feel nervous, anxious, apprehensive. It’s like suddenly all our problems just doubled in size. They’re exactly the same problems, only now they look insurmountable, whereas before we could happily just bat them away without a second thought.

In light of this/ Therefore, our defence mechanism kicks in and we start internally thinking (looking inwards) to work out what is wrong. The trouble is that internal thinking is short term thinking. What would make me feel better? Not next month, or next week, or even tomorrow, what would make me feel better right here and now! What will fix the car so I can carry on my journey? We’re not thinking externally, of some future version of ourselves, we are thinking in the here and now.

The trouble is that when we feel off kilter because of a chemical imbalance that is caused by the previous dose of our drug of choice wearing off, then the quickest (if entirely superficial) way to get rid of that process is another dose of the drug. I have dealt with the mechanics of this process time and again: in Alcohol Explained, Alcohol Explained 2, Nicotine Explained, and TNM Nicotine. I am not going to rehash it here. If you aren’t familiar with it,  you can find it on the website under the ‘First 5 Chapters’ in Chapter 2. Having said this I have come up with a new analogy to illustrate the physical withdrawal process that is only in the latest rewrite of Nicotine Explained, so for those who haven’t read that book I will explain it here.

Imagine a memory foam mattress. For anyone who is not familiar with these, they are mattresses that are made of a certain type of foam that slowly moulds to the shape of your body. When you lay down and t first it feel quite hard, but it slowly melds to the shape of your body and you sink into it. As you would expect, when you get up there is a ‘you’ shaped indentation in the mattress that slowly fades as the mattress goes back to its original shape.

Imagine that that mattress is your brain, and further imagine that when it is in its original shape (i.e.  straight sides, flat surfaced, cuboid) then that is when you feel at your best: confident, energetic, resilient, and generally fairly happy. When it starts to get out of shape, you start to feel bent out of shape.

When you first take a drug, be it alcohol or nicotine or opium or whatever, you are putting a drink, or a cigarette or vape, or a pill or syringe, onto that mind / mattress. When you do that, the object/drug slowly starts to sink into the mattress. Some sink quicker than others, but they all do sink in eventually, so that when the drug wears off, when the alcohol or nicotine or opioid is gone, there is an indentation in the mattress, there is a void, a void that it just crying out to be filled. But this indentation is in a very specific shape and so requires a very specific object to fill it. This void is the exact shape of a drink, or a cigarette or vape, or a pill or syringe, and that is the only thing that can fill that void precisely.

In fact, just like a memory foam mattress, that void will disappear in time if you just leave it. Just as the memory foam mattress will always revert back to its original form, so your brain chemistry will get back to normal in a just a few days and you will no longer need chemical interference to feel normal. But the trouble is that internal thinking is immediate thinking; we want results now. So what is the quickest way to fill that void?

It’s to take another dose of the drug. When you do you are filling that void, or correcting the chemical imbalance, relieving the withdrawal, or however you like to think about it.

This is my experience of the nature of my addiction; I would take the drug because of curiosity or a desire to feel good or to alleviate an unhappy feeling (or a mixture of the above) and over time the physiological addiction would take effect (think memory foam mattress). As the withdrawal kicked in, as the engine started to grind and belch smoke, so I would look internally with one obsessive thought; how do I fix the car / feel better again? The answer was obvious: take another dose of the drug, and so the craving and obsession would start.

So much for this tendency, what can you do about it? Well now you’re aware of it you can look out for it and take conscious steps to counter it. Remember the old adage: the mind is a good servant but a poor master. It can be hard to direct your thoughts because there is such a pronounced tendency, when you don’t feel good, to start thinking about a solution.

Something I found incredibly powerful was to imagine a future version of myself after a week or two off the drug. I would imagine myself calmer, more confident, more relaxed, with more energy and strength. As my brains chemistry got back to normal, as my heart rate and blood pressure dropped, as I started racking up consecutive nights good quality sleep, I knew I would feel increasingly confident, capable and positive.

I think that this worked so very well because it was on topic enough to be a viable thought process; if I’d tried to distract myself with something too off topic it wouldn’t have worked, but this was enough to keep my thoughts external whilst still dealing with the overriding urge to analyse why I didn’t feel good and to come up with an immediate solution to that.

So if anyone reading this is struggling with endless day ones: either waking up promising to quit and going straight back into it when lunchtime / evening comes round (alcohol), or going to be vowing never to take another dose of the drug, but ending up back on it shortly after waking (nicotine) then try this tactic and let me know if it works or not. Whenever you start that internal thinking, that obsessing / craving / making any old excuse to take just one more dose of the drug, stop. Take a breath and clear your mind. Then think of yourself in a week or two, when the physical withdrawal is out the way. Imagine yourself stronger, fitter, more confident, more resilient, more positive. That’s where you’re going with this; you feel a bit under par at the moment but that’s because of the previous doses of the drug and very soon that memory foam mattress will be back to its original, unaltered shape and this will mean you are at your best. Then move on.

This last bit is crucial; having lifted yourself out of internal thinking, stay out of it. Get on with work, or getting the kids sorted out, or cleaning the house, or going for a walk, or whatever else it is you need or want to do that day. And if you find yourself falling back into internal / craving thinking, do the whole thing again. Even if you have to do it a thousand times a day, just keep on with it. Get excited and invested in how good you’ll be feeling with you rid yourself of this joy draining horror that you’ve been tricked into taking for so long. In this way, when you start to get sucked into internal thinking, you will be able to pull yourself out of it but it will also be a moment of pleasure: to get excited about this new version of yourself that you are transitioning into.

If you do this and it works, please do let me know (either by commenting or emailing me at william@alocholexplained.com), and most importantly please share the link to this article with as many people as you can. Writing these sorts of pieces is always a bit of a leap of faith for me. What I do is to think about my own experience of addiction and to write about it, in the hope that I am not unique and that others will be able to relate to it and benefit from it. It always feels like a gamble in case what I write is, to coin a phrase, ‘not relatable content’. I am always very appreciative of feedback (good or bad) for this reason.