This Is Your Do-Over by Michael F. Roizen

Author:Michael F. Roizen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

#3 | Cold Turkey Often/Usually Doesn’t Work

If you want to know how trying to quit an addiction cold turkey usually works out, consider this story: a CEO of a company, a heavy drinker, did most of his drinking about four blocks from his home, so that he could navigate his way home in his SUV. Figuring that those four blocks were short enough to operate on autopilot, he never thought he’d have a problem, even after drinking too much.

Well, one day he finally realized that he had a drinking problem and decided to quit cold turkey. Didn’t tell anyone. Didn’t ask for help. Didn’t follow any formal program. He decided to go solo. Two days later, he woke up in a crashed SUV surrounded by police cars. It turns out he didn’t remember a thing: that he had relapsed after two days and went to his usual spot at the bar, that he paid the bill and got into his SUV, but this time he got on and off the freeway to his office and had weaved through traffic. Someone alerted the police about his erratic driving, and, in fact, he ended up smacking his car into something. (He doesn’t remember doing that but had done $15,000 worth of damage to his SUV.) He ended up spending the night in jail for drunk driving, and his family reached out to me to help with an intervention, so this story—as I write this—is a work in progress. Luckily, nobody was hurt, and things could have been much worse for him—and many other innocent people.

I tell you this story not to scare you or wag my finger in disapproval, but to reinforce the fact that this is the type of tale I hear all the time when people try to quit cold turkey. When our brains search for that addictive substance, it simply relapses to what it knows: the addiction. Cold turkey is as effective as a campfire in a rainstorm. It just doesn’t work.

Now, there are some outlier cases where quitting cold turkey succeeds because the addicted person makes it his or her mission to stop, and does have the willpower to overcome the brain circuitry. However, the fact is that most people who successfully break the chains of addictions over the long term (long term being the key word) can’t just stop abruptly—because of the wiring system that I explained in the last section. Your body and brain need time to drop the learned connections and build new ones. Not only is going cold turkey misunderstood, but it’s also misused. None of my addiction-breaking programs involves cold turkey. A couple of things have to be in place in order for the addiction to be broken—namely, that a new habit has to be started, as well as perhaps some chemical help. That’s why many antiaddiction programs include some kind of anticraving prescription drug, such as bupropion or a benzodiazepine. When you take those drugs, it helps mitigate the withdrawal symptoms that

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