The SEEKING system, dopamine, and addictive disorders.
Humans have a wide variety of natural emotional dispositions. Similarly, there are many factors in the development of an addiction — one person might learn to self-medicate for anxiety, depression, or the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder while another addicted person is naturally born with an overactive dopamine-fueled SEEKING system. SEEKING is the first of the primary-process emotions (this is the third in a series of posts about the life-process learning disorder model of addiction, which takes an affective neuroscience perspective on addiction rather than the typical cognitive-behavioral perspective. For earlier posts, click https://lonniejay.medium.com/what-is-addiction-a-new-paradigm-355ffb3d993d and https://lonniejay.medium.com/emotions-come-first-an-affective-neuroscience-perspective-on-addiction-b8d793c2c009)
All animals, including humans, are emotionally driven to SEEK rewards in the environment, like food, sexual mates, and survival-bestowing plant medications. The SEEKING system is modulated by dopamine and is commonly called the ‘reward’ system, which is a misnomer based on an outdated understanding of the function that dopamine has in the brain.
When this dopamine-based ‘reward’/SEEKING system is stimulated electrically or chemically, mammals energetically engage with their environment in an exploratory manner; the dopaminergic SEEKING system fills us with euphoric excitement and anticipation of rewards in the environment — think of a dog excitedly bouncing around as we walk towards him with his food bowl in our hands.
Those of us who have studied addiction might have heard of experiments in which a rat sits in a cage with an electrical probe implanted in his brain and a lever in front of him. When the rat presses the lever, he triggers an electrical stimulation of the ‘reward’/SEEKING system via the probe. Rats will continuously press the lever to stimulate this dopamine system until they die.
When I first heard of this experiment, I pictured the rat sitting in his cage in a drug-like, electrically-stimulated stupor, completely ignoring his surroundings in favor of repeatedly stimulating the ‘reward’ system, high on pure pleasure from the constant dopamine release. On the contrary, rats don’t act doped up; they actually excitedly explore their environment while the ‘reward’/SEEKING system is being stimulated — they even seem to try to search behind the lever (Panksepp, 2012).
Although Panksepp’s work has been largely marginalized, and many of us have probably never heard the dopamine system called the SEEKING system, the rest of the neuroscientific community is coming around to the perspective of affective neuroscience, and it is now well accepted that the massive dopaminergic system that we previously called the ‘reward’ system is associated with an emotional-motivational state of ‘wanting’ and that entirely different, much smaller neural systems are involved in the actual feelings of pleasure that lead us to ‘liking’ (Berridge, 2016).
Panksepp postulated that animals self-stimulate the SEEKING system not because it feels pleasurable in the way that a wonderful meal is delightful, but because it promotes a powerful internal state of SEEKING that also produces a very special positive feeling that closely resembles how we humans feel when we are full of positive excitement about the good things that are around us in the environment.
Testing and experiments consistently indicate that the SEEKING system first gets mammals excited about newly found rewards, and then learns rapidly to anticipate further rewards, if more rewards are coming. Animals that are having their SEEKING systems stimulated simply do not behave as if they are consuming a delightful treat and experiencing a sensory-affective reward, like we would assume, given that some people still call this system the ‘reward’ system. There are other regions, including the septal region, that produce behavior that is closer to what we would expect from self-stimulation of a ‘reward’ system (Panksepp, 2012).
Thus, the old idea that addicted people are just dopamine junkies chasing the next ‘reward’ of a pleasurable high is rooted in a misunderstanding. We now understand why addictions can exist divorced of all pleasurable rewards, as they often do. Addictive disorders are rooted in a dysfunction of constant desire; addictive disorders are disorders of an emotional ‘wanting’ or SEEKING state that becomes all-encompassing, even when these emotional SEEKING states lead to behaviors that are negative or maladaptive.
Addictive disorders are disorders of desire, not disorders of consummatory pleasure. On some level, we know that addictive disorders aren’t disorders of pleasure, because addicted people often report being absolutely miserable. On a neuroscientific level, the problem isn’t that the addicted person ‘likes’ drugs too much; the problem is often that the person is in a constant state of deep, emotionally-driven wanting or SEEKING but doesn’t have anything much else that they ‘like’ — except, maybe, the escape from painful realities that drugs can bring, if we can even call that something that we can ‘like’. No one has illustrated this truth better than the quintessential ‘junky’ himself, William Burroughs:
“The questions, of course, could be asked: Why did you ever try narcotics? Why did you continue using it long enough to become an addict? You become a narcotics addict because you do not have strong motivations in the other direction. Junk wins by default.”
Addicted people might not have strong motivations towards things that they ‘like’, but as humans, they have no choice but to SEEK something. In other words, addictive disorders are disorders of pathological wanting; addicted people are on a treadmill of emotional SEEKING behaviors that lead to drug use, despite the fact that they might not even ‘like’ drugs anymore. The SEEKING system is extremely fundamental, and it energizes the other 6 primary-process emotional systems: FEAR, RAGE, LUST, CARE, GRIEF, and PLAY.
In the case of FEAR, we can see how the dopamine-dependent SEEKING system would assist us in finding safety, by generating the energy we need to SEEK a comfortable environment. When we are SEEKING an environmental reward like food, and we are thwarted in some way, the RAGE system might be triggered, which would further engage the SEEKING system and drive us to overcome the barrier to food attainment, which would lead to reward attainment and therefore survival. Separation from loved ones will trigger the emotional GRIEF circuit, which will drive us to cry out in distress and also energize the SEEKING system, which will aid us in exploring the environment in order to re-connect to our social group, which, again, will allow us to survive, as mammals are highly social animals.
The SEEKING system, like all primary-process emotional systems, is a valuation system. Our emotions have evolved to get us to quickly assign values to various environmental risks and rewards, while also triggering behaviors that will get us away from the painful risks and close to the pleasurable rewards that can be found all around us. These primary-process emotional systems also drive the secondary-processes of learning and memory; in the case of addictive disorders, learning that self-medication can lead to feelings of emotional regulation and relief can become a deeply learned, highly-maladaptive behavioral trap for the dopamine system that powers our natural SEEKING urges.
This is how addicted people get stuck on the SEEKING treadmill; we are emotionally driven to SEEK the relief that we have learned can be found in the environment and that we remember as a reward due to our past experiences — despite the fact that, often, the ‘reward’ is no longer likable or pleasurable. The SEEKING system, when activated while a person is in a safe environment, will trigger feelings of euphoric expectancy that generate exploratory behaviors and anticipatory feelings of impending reward, but it also powerfully drives us to SEEK safety from pain, including personal, subjective emotional pain.
As previously mentioned, the SEEKING system also causes us to learn and remember our previous emotional survival-valuations. These learned behaviors can be thought of as a kind of subconscious software program. We place predictive emotional valuations upon different possible risks and rewards, and the pleasure or pain that results causes us to learn how to behave adaptively and ensure survival.
Thus, this dopamine-driven SEEKING system also has deeper components that trigger the learning and memory systems and seem evolutionarily designed to completely automate previous behaviors that led to the attainment of environmental reward and survival in the past. Ideally, the SEEKING system causes us to engage excitedly with our environment, it causes us to remember our previous emotional survival-valuations and whether they were accurate or not, and it causes us to seek previous rewards instinctively, impulsively, habitually, and eventually compulsively in order to streamline survival processes.
When a person is developing an addictive disorder, that person’s brain is learning to assign a high emotional survival-valuation to a specific drug or behavior. As addictive behavior progresses, the process of learning deepens, and the SEEKING behaviors that led to the attainment of previously highly-valued rewards begins to become automated, initially in a way that we might call impulsive, because impulsivity implies an estimation of pleasurable attainment, even if it turns out to be a mis-estimation that was made in poor judgement.
At the same time, these drugs or behaviors leave emotional voids behind when their ‘pleasurable’ feelings — which might just be the avoidance of even deeper emotional pain — inevitably slip away from us. So, it isn’t just that we deeply learn to subconsciously value these drugs or behaviors more than what they’re worth; we are also left in a negative emotional state when we find ourselves sitting alone and thinking to ourselves again.
Feelings of loneliness, pain, stress, or discomfort can energize the SEEKING system to get us away from the feelings of painful discomfort, and a brain is evolutionarily driven to get away from pain by attaining survival rewards. However, our perception of what is rewarding or pleasurable is based on past experiences, which means we might ‘remember’ that drugs feel good, even if they really don’t. Emotional dysregulation causes us to remember a mis-valued reward, faulty learned behaviors take over, and back on the addictive SEEKING treadmill we go.
It is worth noting that more natural and typical survival rewards like human connection, sex, and food pale in comparison to perceived hyper-rewards like externally-dosed opioids. Feeling driven to SEEK the reward of social connection in the form of a friend when we are lonely and feel GRIEF coming on is a process that happens naturally for many of us, but the ‘reward’ of the companionship of a friend pales in comparison to the ‘reward’ of a high dose of opioids in the brain.
These emotional circuits are mediated by chemicals that drive learning, and external opioids like oxycontin and fentanyl mimic the neurotransmitters that help us feel connected, safe, and secure, while also directly causing the secondary-process of learning. This causes us to deeply ‘mis-learn’ that external opioids are more valuable to us than social connections, which is maladaptive in and of itself, and explains why addicted people often behave the way that they do.
Chemical reactions in the brain cause us to feel specific emotions, these emotions drive the process of learning, and drugs release massive amounts of chemicals that cause us to feel powerful emotional states that automatically lead to the process of learning and can also lead to the eventual deep learning that drives compulsive behavior. This includes the deeply-learned automation of SEEKING behaviors that puts us on the proverbial treadmill of addictive disorders, which is characterized by impulsive and/or compulsive SEEKING behaviors related to reward attainment despite the negative consequences of engaging in such behavior.
The ‘rewards’ that we are wired to compulsively SEEK are mis-valued, and the behaviors that we learn to automate in order to attain the mis-valued rewards are maladaptive in the real world, so we are on safe ground when we say that addictive disorders are fundamentally disorders of emotional dysregulation, emotional mis-valuation, and finally, mis-learning.
Addicted people aren’t ‘hijacked’ by ‘evil’ drugs into a zombie-like chase for pleasure; these processes are completely natural. The process of developing an addiction is the natural process of deeply learning to automate behaviors that comes about as a result of our previous emotional survival-valuations. Learning and development go hand in hand; this is a natural process even if it has gone awry in addicted people. Addicted people are also capable of re-evaluating and re-learning these connections, which they do, every day.
We are mammals, and mammals are evolutionarily driven to deeply learn and automate the behaviors that led to us to feeling safe, connected, and alive in the past. This happens below the level of conscious awareness, and our sub-cortical, subconscious brain circuits cannot tell the difference between endogenous opioids released during a bout of laughter with a friend and externally-dosed opioids like oxycontin; we learn to place a high subconscious emotional value on these rewards all the same.
Pleasurable experiences trigger the release of a flurry of various neurotransmitters that cause powerful emotional feeling states that seem designed by Mother Nature to ‘imprint’ the reward and how to attain it into our memories. This powerful, emotionally-driven ‘imprint’ into our memory ensures that we never forget what gave us that pleasure and we never forget how to get it, which will help us in finding that pleasurable survival-reward again in the future.
It makes sense that we would evolve to deeply learn and eventually automate behaviors that allow us to attain the survival-related rewards that give us pleasure: if we have to take a complicated path to get to a hidden tree that is laden with delicious survival-bestowing fruit, the sooner and more deeply we can learn exactly how to get to that tree, the greater our chances for survival and the successful continuation of our genetics.
As primary-process SEEKING gives way to survival-reward attainment and the emotionally pleasurable feelings that come with it, our secondary-process associative learning expands. We learn to become impulsive: we see the fruit-laden tree and the process of neuroception kicks in. Neuroception refers to the process by which we constantly evaluate risks and rewards in the environment, which happens below the level of conscious awareness (Porges, 2011).
These are automatic evaluative processes that are undertaken in the deep brain structures that make up our emotional survival-valuation circuits; once we detect a potential risk or reward via neuroception, our physiological state shifts automatically to maximize our chances of survival.
We see the fruit tree — or the dope dealer — and our subconscious emotional survival-valuation systems kick into gear. Our primary-process emotional circuits are instantly triggered, which release chemicals that alter our physiology, which will drive us to approach what we have learned to perceive as a pleasurable survival-reward or drive us to avoid what we perceive to be a painful punishment based on past experience. However, as we can imagine, these emotional survival-valuation systems and the process of neuroception upon which they lie can be faulty, and we see this in people who have addictive disorders.
The impulsivity that characterizes mild addictive disorders implies a pleasure association, which implies an activation of our emotional SEEKING system upon neuroception of the environmental cue. Let’s say the environmental cue is a trigger for drug use, and the addicted person has previously learned to mis-value the drug reward that the cue signals.
Upon neuroception of the cue, the consciousness of the addicted person becomes colored with energetic anticipation, an affective ‘feeling-tone’ that is evolutionarily designed to drive approach behaviors on an extremely fundamental and powerful level. The addicted person feels an impulse to approach the cue, even if they ‘know better’. Impulsivity implies a pleasure association, though it also implies poor planning or judgement, which would be the perfect way to describe the behavior of a person that has developed a mild addictive disorder. Beyond impulsivity and mild brain disorder lies compulsion, which is what characterizes severe addictive disorders.
Once severe enough, our addictive disorders drive us to behavioral patterns that go beyond impulsive acts. Our ‘reward’ SEEKING behaviors become compulsive; they become an automated end in themselves, regardless of any experiences of pleasure in the past or pain in the present. Going beyond impulsivity and into compulsivity is underscored by observable changes in the connections of the motivational engine of the brain (striatum).
It’s worth noting that these automating functions of the SEEKING system are completely natural and not pathological or ‘diseased’ in and of themselves: animal brains survived, grew, developed, and evolved by quickly and deeply learning what is important for survival (sugar, fatty foods, sex, social connections, painkilling plant medicines) and automating the SEEKING behaviors that end with the attainment of these survival-bestowing rewards. It only makes sense that surviving feels good. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t be here.
Thanks for reading thus far. My next post will be about the evolutionary advantages of ADHD-HI, which is a subtype of ADHD that causes hyperactivity and impulsivity, and the links between ADHD-HI, SEEKING behaviors, substance use disorders, and other disorders of mental and emotional dysregulation.
Follow me on medium, and check out my book series, ‘epidemic’, which can be found on Amazon. Also, please reach out if you have something to add, contest, or contribute. I’m very passionate about updating our understanding of addictive disorders and revolutionizing the treatment of addictive and other mental health disorders.
