The Drug Mis-Influence Tendency

How Substances (Legal and Otherwise) Keep You Stuck

There’s a concept I call the Drug Mis-Influence Tendency that distorts our perception of the world.

When this happens, we become vulnerable to harm, often without realising we’re at risk. Things like drugs and alcohol are the main culprits. You just need to witness the carnage in any big city Emergency Department on a typical Friday or Saturday night to see how taking illicit drugs or drinking too much can cause nothing short of disaster in people’s lives.

The Drug Mis-Influence Tendency is what happens when we’re influenced by drugs. We stop being safe. We start taking risks. Often with dire consequences.

Luckily, not all of us lead these kinds of lifestyles, taking drugs and partaking in clearly risky behaviour. Yet I also see people on other drugs too, and problems arise. Add up all the cigarettes you’ve smoked, start drinking a bit more heavily, and you can be building up harm for yourself in the future.

Even prescription drugs can have their problems. Antidepressants, for some people, have their role in bringing back a bit of balance into a person’s life. They can help prop a person back up until they can start building themselves back up and put their life back together. Too often, these drugs are the only things propping a person’s life up, and little real effort is put into making the life changes and cognitive changes that are also needed to get back to normality.

A life precariously propped up by drugs of whatever sort is not in a safe place. One thing I want to say clearly before I go any further: none of what follows in this lesson is a suggestion to stop or cut down any prescribed medication on your own. If anything I say here makes you want to change how you’re taking something a doctor has prescribed you, please talk to that doctor first. Stopping some medications abruptly, antidepressants included, can cause real problems of its own.

Some people take drugs needed for real medical conditions. Others take drugs for the wanton thrill of their effects. The problem lies between these two extremes, somewhere between need and want.

For most, the Drug Mis-Influence Tendency is not really noticeable, but side effects can add up. Drugs can sedate you, take away your motivation, numb you to the need to change. Drugs can keep you in your comfort zone. Despite making you feel better, feeling better by itself is not always safe. Drugs are there to help when you need them, but they’re not always going to give you the resources you need in your life, resources you often need to progress.

It’s often difficult to see the world clearly when under the effect of the Drug Mis-Influence Tendency. Drugs often take us from something painful towards something more comfortable. But there’s a big difference between making the bad bearable and something making you better.

I prescribe far too many drugs not to underestimate the value they can give people. The Drug Mis-Influence Tendency is a useful way of thinking about how you can be affected mentally, how your decision-making processes can be affected by what you put into your body. All I’m asking you to do is step back and look at your lifestyle. Talk to your doctor about your medication.

There is no medication that can make everything in your life better. There is not a pill for all ills.

I had a patient, call him James, who’d been on antidepressants for seven years. Every three months he’d come in for a review. Every time I’d ask, “How are things?”

“Same as always,” he’d say.

“Are you still feeling low?”

“Sometimes.”

“How’s work?”

“Hate it.”

“Relationships?”

“Non-existent.”

“What are you doing differently than seven years ago?”

Long pause. “Nothing really.”

“So the tablets are helping you feel just okay enough to keep doing the same things that were making you depressed in the first place?”

Another long pause. “I suppose so.”

That’s the Drug Mis-Influence Tendency in action. The medication was working well enough to take the edge off, to make the unbearable bearable, to allow him to keep functioning in a life that wasn’t working. But it wasn’t making him better. It was making him comfortable with being stuck. Maybe what he also needed was to start building his life back up, because what I see time and again is that when a person doesn’t do that, when the medication is doing all the work and the props holding that person up are ever taken away, that person can fall down flat.

Perhaps you need to start thinking coherently as well as thinking better. Often you need to actually deal with what you’re covering up. Eventually, the balance achieved by drugs, be it alcohol, sugar, prescription medication, or something else, is only ever going to be temporary and may never really answer the problem.

Perhaps if you’re really going to move forward and change, you need to look at some of the other things in your life, the effects of which are holding you back.

I’m not anti-medication. Far from it. I prescribe it every single day. But I’m also aware that medication is a tool, not a solution. It’s there to give you breathing room, to create space for you to make the changes you actually need to make. It’s not there to replace those changes.

The trouble is, once you’re comfortable, once the pain has eased enough, once things are bearable rather than unbearable, the motivation to change often disappears. You’re no longer in crisis, so you stop doing crisis things. You settle into a new normal, one where you’re medicated and stuck rather than suffering and stuck.

That’s more comfortable, certainly. But is it better?

Think about caffeine. Most people don’t think of it as a drug, but it is. You’re tired, you drink coffee, you feel more alert. Great. Except you’re tired because you didn’t sleep properly, and you didn’t sleep properly because you had too much caffeine yesterday, and you’re using caffeine to mask the problem that caffeine is causing.

That’s the Drug Mis-Influence Tendency on a smaller scale. You’re using a substance to feel normal when the substance is part of the reason you don’t feel normal in the first place.

Alcohol is another obvious one. You’re stressed, you have a drink, you relax. Perfect. Except the alcohol disrupts your sleep, increases your anxiety the next day, and you end up more stressed than when you started. But it felt like it was helping at the time, so you do it again. And again.

That’s the trap. The substance provides short-term relief from a problem, which makes you believe it’s helping, but over the long term it’s making things worse or at best maintaining them at a level that feels okay but isn’t actually good.

I’m not saying never take medication. I’m not saying never have a drink. I’m saying pay attention to whether what you’re taking is actually solving problems or just making them more bearable whilst keeping you stuck.

Ask yourself, are you taking something to feel normal, or are you taking something to avoid feeling what you need to feel to make the changes you need to make?

Are you numbing pain that’s trying to tell you something? Are you medicating symptoms of a life that needs changing? Are you using substances to stay comfortable in a situation you should be leaving?

The Drug Mis-Influence Tendency doesn’t just affect your thinking whilst you’re under the influence. It affects your decision-making about whether to take the substance in the first place. It affects your perception of whether it’s helping or hindering. It affects your ability to see clearly what’s actually going on.

So step back. Look at what you’re taking, why you’re taking it, what it’s actually doing for you. Talk to your doctor before changing anything. Be honest with yourself. Because there’s no pill that’ll make your life better on its own. There’s only pills that’ll give you space to make your life better, if you actually use that space.

And if you’re not using that space, if you’re just staying comfortable, then you’re not getting better. You’re just getting used to being stuck.

Further reading

• Volkow, N. D., & Li, T. K. (2004). Drug addiction: The neurobiology of behaviour gone awry. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 5(12), 963-970.
• Koob, G. F., & Volkow, N. D. (2010). Neurocircuitry of addiction. Neuropsychopharmacology, 35(1), 217-238.
• Nutt, D. J., King, L. A., & Phillips, L. D. (2010). Drug harms in the UK: A multicriteria decision analysis. The Lancet, 376(9752), 1558-1565.
• Kirsch, I. (2010). The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth. Basic Books.
• Satel, S., & Lilienfeld, S. O. (2013). Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience. Basic Books.