The Mechanics of Addiction
A Practical Tool To Expose The Hidden Forces Driving Addictive Behaviour
“I don’t know why I want to drink.”
That’s what a once-abstaining peer said to me as he was mid-relapse.
His words played on my mind because I couldn’t figure out why they made sense and didn’t at the same time.
His behaviour baffled even him, as if he were bypassing his own will.
I had to write those words down to turn them over.
After a while, it clicked.
He said ‘I’ twice, but each ‘I’ referred to a different aspect of him.
They both act through him, but really, it’s two systems running in parallel: the cognitive and the emotive; the aware and the automatic; the seen and the unseen.
The first I, his thinking self, or the narrator, was trying to make sense of the second I, the feeling self, or the relief-seeker, operating beneath his awareness. But the feeling self has no language; it operates through sensations, impulses, and emotional states. So when he feels the pull toward the drink, he cannot translate exactly what is happening into words. He only feels a strong desire to seek relief.
In the absence of a deeper understanding, people seek surface-level explanations for their behaviour: incurable disease, personality defect, neurotransmitter imbalance, inherited miswiring. These appear to be comforting conclusions when their feelings and actions feel like a mystery.
But these are not real answers. They are gap-filling pseudo-explanations, and profoundly disempowering ones, too. Not knowing why you drink doesn’t mean you are diseased or a lifelong alcoholic. It just means you haven’t uncovered the reasons beneath your behaviour, yet.
Part of The Work of recovery is learning to examine yourself honestly. That involves making invisible patterns visible and learning how to interpret the urges and behaviours you’ve previously acted on without knowing why. Without this, your behaviour remains a mystery, even to you.
One of the tools I found most useful for this kind of self-examination is pretty simple. It doesn’t require a lifelong label or a daily mantra.
It requires only that you are willing to face what’s actually there.
Mapping Out The Internal Conflict
SMART (Self-Management And Recovery Training) teaches a model called the Cost-Benefit Analysis of Addiction. Along with their concept of The Relapse Triangle, these powerful tools played a huge role in why I have not returned to alcohol, and never will.
The Cost-Benefit Analysis helps you to think about what you’re doing and why, with simple enough questions: what am I getting out of this, and what is it costing me? It divides addiction into four quadrants, each representing a tension in your behaviour: the pros and cons of using, and the pros and cons of sobriety.
This hands you a mirror and forces you to see the internal negotiations you’ve been making for years, maybe without realising it. In doing so, it strips addiction down to what it actually is: a learned behaviour that serves real emotional purposes.
Once you make your tensions visible, they become workable.
Let’s name the quadrants and put them in order of what I feel tends to be the most obvious, down to what tends to be most concealed.
The Freedom Quadrant: pros of sobriety
The Damage Quadrant: cons of using
The Bait Quadrant: pros of using
The Resistance Quadrant: cons of sobriety
First, let’s explore the more conscious aspects of the trade-off (Freedom and Damage), then descend into the hidden, emotional forces you might not know you’ve been living by (Bait and Resistance).
The Cost-Benefit Analysis
The Freedom Quadrant
Pros of stopping - the positives of why you want to quit / what you stand to gain
This is the obvious, logical quadrant most people could reel off without much deeper thought. The benefits of sobriety are not complicated, and the rewards begin almost immediately, simply because you stop poisoning yourself and start doing something different instead. Reasons include:
Physical healing: better health, improved sleep, skin, digestion, and cognition.
Emotional stability: fewer mood swings, anxiety, and crashes
No hangovers; no guilt
Restored self-respect, responsibility, and personal dignity
Saved time, money, and energy
Gaining full agency over your mind and choices
Repaired lost relationships or building new, healthier ones
Renewed focus on personal goals, growth, and direction
Freedom from dependency
Long-term inner peace and presence
The capacity to endure life’s pain without running away
The sober life is objectively better. Nothing addiction offers can match it, long-term.
For some, the pros of stopping are enough to quit. But millions of people are drawn into addiction over sobriety, and one of the reasons is fairly simple: addiction does not operate on logic. If logic alone decided behaviour, addiction wouldn’t exist at all.
What drives addiction is something far older and deeper than logic: emotion.
Unexamined emotion carries too much weight for surface-level logic to bear.
The Damage Quadrant
Cons of substance use - what it costs you to keep using
This is the price of the deal: the pain side of the addiction loop that many also recognise: the accumulating damage, ranging from physical to emotional to social, from past to present to future. This logically should outweigh continued use, but emotionally, it does not.
And so these are the costs you’re willing to tolerate to achieve the benefits of using. They don’t happen all at once: addiction works through a slow, invisible erosion, creeping insidiously and numbing you to its very consequences as they compound in the background:
Physical and mental deterioration, accelerated ageing
Increased tolerance, dependency, and loss of normal function
Emotional instability, anxiety, depression, cognitive fog
Increased personal isolation, secrecy, shame, and diminished self-worth
Eroding trust and relationships, losing friends and family
Financial struggle, legal trouble, and reputational damage
Wasted time, lost opportunities, dead before you died.
Loss of personal freedom, living inside a trap
Becoming someone you never meant to be
Inability to experience real joy or authentic reward
Eventual risk of hospitalisation and premature death
These are some of the consequences that friends and family can clearly see. They keep asking the obvious question, “How can you keep doing this when it’s destroying your life?”
Their question is perfectly valid, but they don’t see the unconscious negotiations, and neither does the user.
The emotional mind doesn’t weigh up costs and benefits; it only cares that relief arrives, right now. And so the substance serves a far deeper function that’s still worth the outward damage.
Until that hidden force is exposed, the behaviour continues. So now, let’s take a look at the dynamics that might act beneath someone’s full awareness.
The Bait Quadrant
Pros of using - the emotional payoff that keeps pulling you back.
Here lies the heart of addiction: not hedonism or destruction, but finding relief.
Some sobriety advocates might get squeamish here. They want to believe there are no benefits to using. I call bullshit. If they didn’t deliver something the user wanted, nobody would ever return. The bait is very real, and for many, it’s the only thing that has ever worked. Example benefits include:
Immediate relief: euphoria, sedation, excitement, or inner silence
Momentary pleasure, laughter, warmth, escape
Predictable effect in an unpredictable world
Temporary sense of power over mood, fear, and circumstance
Perceived immunity to consequence, for now
Disinhibition, social confidence, freedom from self-consciousness
Access to emotional states yet unreachable sober
Illusion of help when nothing else seems to work
Substitute reward system compensating for unmet needs and a life starved of genuine satisfaction
Addiction isn’t entirely irrational. It’s emotionally strategic. Substances offer a crude, fast-acting workaround to real, unresolved voids, like missing connection, competence, confidence, purpose, safety, intimacy, or peace. The internal trade here is: what I’m so desperate to feel now outweighs the price I know I’ll pay later, and when the debt arrives, I’ll numb myself to it in the same way.
This calculation enables users to somewhat tolerate the accumulating costs.
And crucially, not using, even though it brings some benefits, feels more internally punishing than using. The absence of emotional relief feels worse than the presence of outward damage.
To the emotional self, stopping substance use might feel threatening, empty, and fragile. The substance offers power and predictability; sobriety means trusting something that has not yet been built, in a world that has already proven itself untrustworthy.
This internal loop of doubt and ambivalence will continue until the final layer is confronted: The Resistance Quadrant.
The Resistance Quadrant
Cons of stopping - what makes sobriety feel unbearable
If the Bait Quadrant pulls you toward substance use, the Resistance Quadrant pushes you away from sobriety.
This quadrant’s repellent force is the absence of what makes sobriety feel safe, livable, and complete. Remedying this takes honest self-reflection and sustained willingness.
This absence is why, even when addiction has become disastrous, sobriety can feel like the less bearable option. The alcohol, the drug, or the craving itself is not the true stimulus: it’s a response to unmet needs. It’s those unmet needs that make the bait so convincing.
This resistance is uniquely yours. It’s your personal, often unexplored reasons why sobriety still feels like a difficult commitment. These might include:
Confronting the raw emotions, unresolved trauma, and the vulnerable self beneath the habit
Feeling exposed, emotionally unskilled, unworthy, or unlovable
Physically withdrawing from the substance and/or fearing withdrawal is what sobriety feels like forever
Becoming aware of the gravity of what you’ve caused
Feeling inadequate, empty, or incomplete without the substance; terrified of not knowing what will fill the gap instead
No known alternative to cope with stress, pain, or emptiness
Fear that sober life will be dull, joyless, flat, meaningless
Fear of disconnection, social rejection, or loss of belonging
Paralysis at the scale of rebuilding your sense of self from scratch
Not knowing what your unmet needs are, or how to begin meeting them
Fear of failing sobriety again and collapsing even further
Crushing guilt of a life unlived
This is why people relapse even when they are fully aware of the damage. They don’t relapse because they forget how bad addiction was. They relapse because, without addressing what’s missing, sobriety still feels like hell rather than home.
If resistance is left unexamined, the bait will keep pulling you back. But once you confront and resolve what sobriety was lacking, the bait dissolves. It’s not even bait any more. It’s just muck. When all you see is muck, the damage it causes assumes its full weight, and becomes something you can no longer justify returning to.
Until you build genuine satisfaction, safety, and meaning here in sobriety, until you find ways to authentically meet your needs, the reliable relief of using will keep knocking until you answer.
What stands between you and sobriety could be painful to face, but it is the final gateway to lasting freedom.
Spoiler alert: the SMART meeting closes with some powerful realisations they help you come to see for yourself:
The pros of using, and the cons of sobriety, are short-lived.
The cons of using, and the pros of sobriety, are long-lasting.
Therefore, it’s an obvious trade: either endure short-term discomfort for long-term freedom, or hold onto short-term comfort at the price of long-term downfall.
The Work Ahead
I don’t expect one article to change your life. All I’ve done here is pass on one of the tools I’ve used over to you.
This Cost-Benefit Analysis may help you better understand why you do what you do. More importantly, it might also help you see where your personal work lives.
And the work is twofold: first, deconstruction; then reconstruction.
This isn’t quick, and nor should it be, because you are not patching over a small problem. You are opening up what you’ve never seen before, facing it, and building new behaviours that better serve you. It will take as long as it takes— months to years of honest, no-excuses effort, and long-term commitment to maintaining your well-being thereafter.
Use the Bait Quadrant to understand what the substance delivers. What role is it playing for you? What need is it mimicking? How can you meet it authentically?
Use the Resistance Quadrant to expose why sobriety feels unsafe, meaningless, or unsustainable. What are you avoiding? Exactly what must be built here?
Once you truly see these tensions, you stop fighting shadows. You begin dismantling and addressing what’s been driving the behaviour all along.
I strongly recommend SMART. They helped equip me with some of the tools I used to rid myself of addiction. They are global, free, and offer group meetings both online and in-person.
And if you want 1:1 coaching to support your work and help you stay accountable, I’m here if you need me.
Thank you
You’ll notice I didn’t paywall this article. In fact, none of my articles are paywalled. You may freely browse everything in my archive.
I keep these articles open-access from a place of passion and contribution, but as you might imagine, this takes lots of time, study, and energy to produce.
To help keep these articles open-access, or to show support for the work you’ve already seen, or even to support my mission to turn Rehabitus into a full-time enterprise, then you can opt into a paid monthly subscription at £6, an annual at only £25, or simply a commitment-free Buy Me a Coffee.
Paid subscribers will be gifted my ebook when it’s complete.
If none of these are for you, then a like and a share go a long way in helping others discover this work.
Previous Articles
Newly Sober? Good. Now Let’s Cut the Bullshit.
The Problem Isn’t in Your Brain. It’s in How You Choose to Live.
Three Years Sober, One Thousand Subscribers, and Introducing Personalised Coaching
The Choice Journals #1: Mechanics of Choice
The Choice Journals #2: Finding Hidden Choices
The Choice Journals #3: On Becoming Agentic
Brilliant as usual. Not only are you an excellent writer but you go so deep. Peeling back layers to reveal truth. Bravo. Excellent. I will always read everything you write.
Brilliant article that gives all of us an amazing mental tool (The Cost Analysis) to understand what we do and why we do it. We’re all addicted to something because everybody runs away from pleasure, and so we all benefit from such an amazing tool.
Your words are both accessible and thought-provoking, making me reflect about my behaviors.
Amazing article Adam!