An act of pure will is pretty damn rare in my experience. Recognizing and maximizing those moments is pretty much the only control I understand in life.
this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2025
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This is a fascinating and very useful article to me. I work in the field of addiction recovery, and many of my participants scoff when I let them know that most of what we (as humans) do is not really a "decision". Now I can use this to show there's scientific merit to this claim.
I'm sure most of what I do per day in pure quantity is blinking, breathing, sleeping on the side I feel most comfortable, walking to the same toilet I always do, walking to the same store I always do etc. and yes these are driven by some degree of habituality, maybe that accounts for even 59% of things I do in total as they say.
But I highly doubt that taking drugs is like that. I used to take drugs and I was a full blown addict with multiple substances I had physical addictions to, and it is most definitely not like that at all.
Each time I took benzos or did a line of amph I was fully aware of the decisions I was making and the risks involved, and each time a decision was made and it was in retrospect even a pretty good one actually, as it's what kept me going through a rough time and there were no viable alternatives I knew of then, or even know of in hindsight that would have worked as well.
When the rough time ended, I tapered off and quit because I no longer needed or really benefitted from the substances. A few years later I even took some benzos, mixed with dihydrocodeine of all things, only to come away mostly disappointed with it and uninterested.
Maybe I'm just crazy and/or too dumb to comprehend, or too skeptical because of how poor the quality of some research in this field tends to be and how unprovable the concepts, but to me this study, or at least the way its framed in this article (which might be a big contributing factor also), highlights only the high level of logic lapses and general mental gymnastics required to reach this absurd conclusion from the starting point of a truism that "people have habits sometimes".
That's besides the fact that some people like those with ADHD can't even make psychological habits at all, not good ones and not bad ones, I could easily be doing something every day for weeks through incredible levels of commitment and force, only to then skip it once and never do it again.