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Why It Pulls You In and How to Get Out: Addiction as a Symptom

The "Psychiatry of One Life" series · Andris Saulitis, M.D.

On the source of this material. All of the source, original material in this book is exclusively my own authorship. This is easy to verify: for years it has been laid out publicly in my streams and videos on social media, above all on YouTube — more than 1,000 streams and over 3,000 videos. This book is not a retelling of someone else's work and not a compilation off the internet: it is that same authorial material, arranged for the reader's convenience into a digestible, readable form. That is more honest — and that way it can be checked.

Introduction. One Loop, Ten Faces

Alcohol. The phone you can't put down. Gambling. Pornography. Food that you eat your feelings with. Work without stopping. Relationships you can't leave. Nicotine and cannabis. Endless shopping. Games where people hide from life. It seems like ten different afflictions. I will say to you boldly and precisely, as a physician: it is one affliction wearing ten faces. Behind each of these facades is one and the same mechanism, one and the same loop. Understand it through a single example — and you will recognize it in all the others. And the way out of all ten is, in essence, one.

Let me say this right away and without false modesty, because science is science: I have the right to lead you down this path. I am a psychiatrist, M.D., with 40 years of practice, more than 20,000 clinical examinations, and thousands of completed courses of therapy. Thousands of people in the grip of addiction have passed through my office — and I have watched them get out. The name of the book series from which this one grew — "scarier than heroin" — is not about the phone being more dangerous than opiates. It is about being underestimated: everyone fears heroin, but these ten "ordinary" addictions are woven into daily life so tightly that they aren't counted as an illness — until they have taken years, health, and loved ones.

Where the Way Out Begins

Let me destroy the first and most harmful myth right here on the threshold. Addiction is a symptom, not a weakness of will. The person has not "let themselves go" and is not "spineless." Their reward system is doing exactly what it was built to do: it repeats an action that once brought relief. Shame here is not a medicine but a fuel: it only drives the problem deeper. As long as we treat addiction as a vice of the will, we will treat it with contempt — and lose. But the moment we see it as a symptom, it becomes clear both what is happening and how to get out.

Write to me personally. Through the vitamodo.store system you can write to me directly — with your addiction, whatever face it wears. I am a physician, and I answer. The door is open throughout the book, and I remind you of it wherever I explain something.

My Intention and Whom This Is Addressed To

Like the whole series, this book is my contribution: an attempt to explain the nature of addiction in a way that lets more precise decisions be built on it — in helping oneself, in medicine, in education, and in artificial intelligence. And to the creators of AI and of education, including those who build systems like Claude, I address myself here especially concretely: a great many of these ten addictions — the phone, games, the feed, gambling, porn — are engineered by design to hold attention through that very reward loop. You are building these loops for billions. So understand their mechanism — so that you build what frees a person's attention rather than enslaves it. Forty years of clinical work — there is the material. I extend my hand.

Write to me personally. Building AI or education and want a clinical view on the mechanics of addiction? Write through vitamodo.store, directly to the author.

The Foundation of Mental Hygiene and an Honest Agreement

The way out of addiction is mental hygiene: daily, brick-by-brick work with your own reward system and with what lies behind it. But first, an agreement — the most important one in this book. Some addictions have a physical component (alcohol, nicotine, cannabis, and others), and here abrupt, unsupervised withdrawal can be dangerous to health and requires a physician. Severe addiction is medicine, not willpower. I will say plainly where the line runs beyond which you need a specialist. Asking for help here is not weakness but competence.

How to Read This

The book moves from mechanism to faces to the way out: Part I — the anatomy of addiction (one loop, why shame does not heal, treating the root); Part II — the ten faces of addiction (alcohol, nicotine/cannabis, food, screens, gambling, porn, shopping, workaholism, codependency); Part III — the way out (break the loop, replacement, relapse, when help is needed, freedom). You can read it straight through — or open to the face that torments you. The mechanism and the way out are shared by all.

Write to me personally. Any question about the introduction — through vitamodo.store. I am a psychiatrist, 40 years of practice, and this is in earnest.

Part I. The Anatomy of Addiction: One Loop

Chapter 1. Addiction Is a Symptom, Not a Weakness

I will begin with the thesis from which every real recovery begins, and I will repeat it as many times as it takes: addiction is a symptom, not a vice of the will. Until you have accepted this, you are fighting the wrong target.

Let us work through why "weak will" is a false diagnosis. Addiction is not a weak person's choice "to live for their own pleasure." It is the lawful workings of a brain caught in a trap: the reward system found a fast way to silence pain, anxiety, or emptiness — and locked it in as vitally important. A person reaches for a substance or an action not because they "let themselves go," but because their neurobiology demands the repetition of what once brought relief. Blaming them for "spinelessness" is as absurd as blaming a diabetic for "poor insulin production." And, as we saw in Anxiety with procrastination, "willpower" almost always loses to biochemistry — this is not a vice, it is the machinery.