Imagine you're a rat.

You're all alone in a cage with no other rats to spend your time with.

In your cage, you have two choices.

You can either drink refreshing, clear water or a slightly sweet morphine solution.

All alone, just wanting the days to go by, you, the rat, inevitably latch onto the morphine.

Meanwhile, across the lab, there is another enclosure.

This is the mythic, heavenly cage known as Rat Park.

In this wonderful place, there are many other rats to socialize with and relate to.

But that is the extent of the differences between your cage and Rat Park.

In Rat Park, the choice remains.

Do you drink the water or the morphine?

After 65 days, you're finally moved to Rat Park and what do you find?

You no longer choose the morphine.

So what was it that made you so addicted?

What's the difference?

The difference is loneliness.

Today, we would like to take a close look at how loneliness can make you more addicted.

Addiction is common.

You may not realize it, but addiction is more common than you think.

While there are extremely addictive substances like hard drugs, cigarettes and alcohol, there are also addictive things like coffee and video games that are less destructive but still harmful in their own ways.

Not all addictions are made equal, but there is a common link between all these kinds of addictions.

A Lack of Purpose and Motivation When we have people around us, whether it's those who can help or those who help us, we are instilled with a sense of purpose.

In the digital age, it becomes more difficult to feel that love and connection to those around us because we may see them physically but interact with them far less.

Having love in our life encourages us to strive for more.

Giving love can be just as helpful as receiving love.

Helping people and sharing connections, even with strangers, through volunteering work or social hobbies, can also instill a sense of purpose into your life.

When we lack these things, addiction fills in the gaps.

Rather than change the things we don't like about our lives, we fight those feelings with drugs, porn, or any other addictive substance we can get our hands on.

Instead of changing our careers and pursuing something that doesn't feel like torture, our coffee and cigarettes keep us going.

Instead of looking for something we are truly excited to do on the weekend, we prefer to get high, drunk, or do certain addictive activities for an obsessive amount of time.

It numbs us from the brunt of tedium in our lives.

Would you still get high over the weekend if you stayed home all day, watching porn, and playing video games for hours and hours?

If you knew you were going on a hike with your family or a lunch date with a friend?

Let's be honest, many people still would.

But every day and for very long hours?

Perhaps not.

In the rat park study, rats still wanted the morphine from time to time, but they hardly relied on it like the caged rats.

So loneliness affects our sense of purpose, and an injured sense of purpose can make us susceptible to addiction.

Do addictions always form when you're lonely?

It would be naive to think that it's only lonely people who become addicts.

Recreational drugs, alcohol, and sex can all be addictive and are usually circulated in social situations.

But despite the number of people you surround yourself with, it's important to also examine the quality of these relationships.

Friends influence your habits.

If all your friends are smoking or drinking and you're the only one who's not, it can be very difficult to resist joining them to be a part of the group.

What's harder is if you want to quit an addiction but have friends who constantly undermine your efforts to be sober.

When trying to break an addiction, having people around you who understand your struggle is what you really need.

This is why programs like Alcoholics Anonymous and having sponsors are so important.

Social support, like having a sponsor, gives you an extremely important boon when it comes to recovery.

This person usually understands, supports, and encourages you when you need it.

The seemingly impossible task of recovery becomes a lot less scary when you have supportive family, friends, and a sponsor behind you.

Addictions don't always form when you're lonely, but it definitely helps them stick around.

You can still be lonely while surrounded by people if the connections you share with those people are entirely superficial.

Connection as the Cure According to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, we need love and belonging, which includes friendship, family, and a sense of connection.

There's no room for that addictive thing in your life anymore when those needs are being fulfilled.

But we must also be careful that we don't simply replace our addictions with a new addiction, such as an overbearing emotional reliance on others.

This can come about in many ways.

Where you may feel like a burden for your faults, that you constantly unload your emotions onto anyone who will have them and become needy, possessive, and infantilized around them.

This is why sponsors are so important, since they're equipped to expect and handle this, in order to not become overly dependent, addressing the dependency and the symptoms that prevent you from taking initiative.

For addicts, this means building emotional resilience and learning to trust yourself and those around you.

You can appreciate the people in your life who keep you from reaching for those addictions without feeling heavily indebted to them.

Whether it's drugs, food, or video game addiction, the connections we have should help us feel grounded and fulfilled rather than pushing us back to our addictions.

In every addict, there is someone who has a void to fill and for a lot of people, the void that craves porn, drugs, and alcohol is also the void that craves connection and understanding.

There are so many elements that we have to balance that make us more complex than the rats in the rat park.

Loneliness can shake our self-esteem and our sense of fulfillment and purpose, but the cure is up to us.

We need to reach out to the people we can rely on, but we also need to be reliable people.

You don't know how lonely your family members and friends really feel.

Have you ever dealt with an addiction or helped someone through an addiction?

Let us know in the comments below.

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