Self-Control Matters in Addiction

Seeking a middle way...

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Every day is peppered with tiny self-control battles. From hitting the snooze button in the morning, to powering down screens at night, to countless temptations in between, our lives are laden with self-control tests. That kind of self-control might seem trivial compared to proper addiction. I’m not so sure. I think self-control matters more than we might think.

The word “control” often provokes strong reactions when discussing addiction, and understandably so. Along with "choice," it's become something of a lightning rod—and not without cause, as sometimes skeptics use terms like these to argue that addiction is no more than a failure of effort or will. There was a book called Addiction is a Choice not too long ago, after all.

The very notion of control in addiction sounds like a paradox. For most of us—myself included, during the worst of my drinking—control was not really the point. I was trying to change, but I felt completely out of control. And yet, I have to admit that there was also an element of choice, of deliberation. I did make plans to use, conceal my use, etc—I was the one choosing to walk to the liquor store, after all.

I’m becoming convinced that if we want to get a better handle on addiction and flourishing, we need to find ways to transcend the false dichotomy between seeing addiction as choice versus compulsion, to better describe this landscape of diminished control—and ultimately, to find a way of discussing self-control in addiction more sensibly. By this I mean discussing the role of self-control in everyday addictions (e.g., milder behavioral addictions), as well as how self-control is relevant even in severe addictions. I think most people with addiction can recognize this territory—most of us, I’ve found, have an experience of addiction that involved something like choice, even at our worst, as provocative as that might sound.

I’ve been thinking about these questions recently, since reading a very useful new book by the sociologist Darin Weinberg, On Addiction. While this post isn’t a book review, I was struck by one set of fresh reflections he offers on an old polarization in addiction science: between biomechanistic disease concepts on one hand, versus addiction as indistinguishable from any other form of voluntary activity (aka, “choice theorists”).

The division between compulsion and choice is an “antinomy,” according to Weinberg: a paradoxical contradiction between two beliefs that are each in themselves reasonable. The biomechanical disease folks are right that there is a there there, that when people with addiction say they feel powerless, we should take them (us) seriously. The choice folks are right that even in severe cases of addiction, we are not choiceless zombies but retain some human agency.

This is well-trod ground, but Weinberg covers it well. In particular, he suggests a key observation that seems a concrete and useful step forward: this seeming contradiction between freedom and determinism “stems from the fact that both disease and choice theorists seek to provide generic models of addiction.” In trying to overgeneralize, folks on both sides are prevented from making sense of the dynamic and personal movements people make into and out of self-control; how we can be at odds with ourselves; how we are in constant shifting relationships with our environments. The result is that disease theorists are often “blocked from taking freedom seriously,” while choice theorists struggle to explain how addiction might modify our usual ideas about personal responsibility.

I think Weinberg is right to offer this critique. Personally, I have fallen afoul of this polarization: in 2022, I wrote an op-ed in the NY Times asking whether it was misleading to call addiction a disease. A lot of people who liked the disease framing were mad! I was assumed to be on the “wrong side” by many. Really, what I was trying to do was transcend the polarization, to say that “disease” talk isn’t right or wrong but at best incomplete. It’s overused, doing too much work, an impossible stand-in for too many different messy concepts. Perhaps I was not successful in this; perhaps it was a fool’s errand to tackle it in a short op-ed; perhaps I lost that portion of the audience with the title (as I hope you know, opinion writers rarely choose their own titles…). Still, though, I think it’s worth trying to raise these points. Like Weinberg, I was searching for a way to describe that murky space where choice and compulsion are each insufficient words to describe what goes on in addiction.

As Weinberg and many others point out,¹ our understanding of self-control shapes fundamental social and political questions. Legally and ethically, we generally expect others to exercise something like self-control. (This highlights another important critique of “control” language: it also implies self-control, which puts the onus on the individual in a troubled society.) Both our moral instincts and our social systems assume people can control themselves. Currently, we are stuck between two extremes that seem not to allow for a spectrum of human agency.

What we need is a third way—one that acknowledges both our agency and our limitations. Recovery, then, in all its forms, becomes not about achieving perfect control—it’s about skillfully working with whatever degree of choice we have. The path forward is not about “winning the day” or disciplining the self, as endless wellness/hustle culture influencers would have us believe, but rather about understanding our capacities and aligning our actions with our deepest values

Self-control matters—both in the sense that it's crucial to understanding addiction, and in the sense that there are so many matters to explore here: questions of agency, responsibility, capacity, and change.

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1. Another book I’ve been enjoying on this topic, which strongly foregrounds the everyday nature of self-control challenges, is the recent Cambridge UP book Self-Control, by W. L. Tiemeijer (h/t Owen Flanagan, who will be on the podcast soon!)