Kitchen Buddhist Psychological Analysis

Addictions are one of the costliest human conditions, having significant effects on mental, physical l, and economic health. For example, the economic tolls of alcoholism typically range from 1% to 3% but can be as high as 6% of a country’s gross domestic product (Rehm at al., 2009). This is just one example of an addiction and how huge it is. I work and go to school for the hospitality major where addiction is always in the forefront, from selling alcohol, to the classic idea of a diner waitress smoking a cigarette, cigarette smoking is the leading cause of preventable morbidity and mortality in the United States, accounting for one in five deaths annually (Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, 2008), to the current stereotype of kitchen …show more content…
Buddhist texts offer a detailed analysis of the causal relationships between these differentiated processes, termed “dependent [co-]origination.” In this process, craving is said to result from a process based in automated affective reactions to perceptual stimuli. An example of this is given in the next paragraph, but briefly, when environmental cues are registered through the senses an “affective tone” automatically arises that is typically felt as pleasant or unpleasant. The valence of this affective tone is conditioned by associative memories that were formed from previous experiences. Subsequently, a desire or craving arises (definition: an intense, urgent, or abnormal desire or longing), as a psychological urge to act or perform a behavior. The craving is for the continuation of pleasant or the cessation of unpleasant feeling tones. This craving motivates action and fuels the “birth” of a self-identity around the sense object, creating a link between action and outcome that gets laid down in memory. When this pleasant affective tone (or absence of an unpleasant affective tone) passes, one is left with “pain, distress and despair” of its absence, thus completing one cycle and priming the individual for the next time they encounters a similar sensory stimulus (Paticca-samuppada-vibhanga Sutta: Analysis of Dependent Co-arising …show more content…
With the patch, nicotine gum and just plain quitting cold turkey don’t wouldn’t there be something for everyone? Yes we do and here is why. The multitude of cues that can be associated with positive and negative affective states and smoking creates tremendous challenges for successful quit attempts. Current pharmacotherapies have focused on the reduction of background craving as well as cue-induced. For example, nicotine patch therapy has shown benefits for nicotine withdrawal and background craving (Ferguson & Shiffman, 2009), but not for cue-induced craving. Further, neither nicotine gum, bupropion, nor varenicline have shown benefits for prevention of cue-induced craving it never has made since to cure something by adding more of it to your system. The substitution strategy (gum for cigarettes) may leave the addictive loop intact rather than extinguishing it, witch backs up the thought of having an oral fixation take over your addiction. Mainstay behavioral treatments for smoking cessation have focused on teaching individuals to avoid cues, foster positive affective states (e.g., practice relaxation or physical exercise), divert attention from cravings, substitute other activities for smoking, and develop social support mechanisms (Fiore et al., 2000). Unfortunately, these have shown only modest success, with abstinence rates for cognitively based treatments hovering between 20% and 30% for the past three decades. Not all