What You May Not See When You Think You Are in Control
Addiction does not always feel like losing control. Very often, it feels like repeatedly explaining to yourself why you are still in control.
There is a particular image of addiction that remains deeply embedded in the public imagination. It is usually visible, chaotic and unmistakable. Someone has lost a job, damaged important relationships, developed serious health problems, run into financial difficulty or reached a point where alcohol or drug use has become impossible for other people to ignore.
Against that picture, it can be remarkably easy to look at your own life and conclude that addiction cannot possibly apply to you.
You may still be working, raising children, maintaining a marriage, managing a business or carrying considerable professional responsibility. You may exercise, travel, eat well, maintain friendships and appear entirely functional from the outside. Perhaps you do not drink every day. Perhaps you never use before work. You may have stopped successfully for several weeks or months at a time.
All of this is meaningful information. It can also become evident in an internal argument: I am functioning. I have responsibilities. I can stop when I choose. Therefore, I am still in control.
The difficulty is that substance use disorders do not begin only when life collapses. Clinically, they exist across a spectrum of severity. Features can include using more than intended, unsuccessful attempts to reduce use, craving, increasing amounts of time devoted to obtaining, using or recovering, continued use despite physical or psychological consequences, tolerance and withdrawal. None of these requires someone first to lose a career, marriage or home.
This is why some of the most important questions about addiction need to be asked while life still appears relatively intact.
The early story is often not one of dramatic loss. It is one of gradual accommodation. A boundary moves. An exception is made. A physical symptom receives an explanation. A promise is postponed. A behaviour that once felt unusual becomes familiar. As these changes accumulate, the mind becomes increasingly skilled at explaining why each one does not really mean very much.
That is where the deception of addiction often begins.
Why Addiction Can Feel Like You Are Still in Control?
We often imagine control as a switch: either you possess it or you have lost it. Human behaviour is considerably more complicated.
At first, drinking or using may genuinely be one choice among many. Over time, however, that choice can acquire greater motivational weight. It becomes something anticipated, planned for and associated with reward, relief or escape. What was once optional may become strongly preferred. What was strongly preferred may begin to feel necessary under certain circumstances.
The person may still make deliberate decisions. What changes is the landscape in which those decisions are made.
Consider the statement: Nobody forced me to drink last night. I chose to. That may be completely true. But it does not answer the more clinically interesting question: How free did the alternative feel?
Could you return home after an exhausting day and feel genuinely equally able to drink or not drink? Could you go to a social event without needing to know whether alcohol would be available? Could you experience anxiety, loneliness, boredom or anger without immediately wanting to change the feeling? If the opportunity to drink or use unexpectedly disappeared, would you simply adapt, or would the evening suddenly feel incomplete?
Contemporary neuroscience does not suggest that addiction removes all choice or turns a person into a passive machine. A more useful understanding is that repeated substance use can affect systems involved in reward, stress, motivation, learning and behavioural control, making some choices increasingly salient and difficult to resist. The National Institute on Drug Abuse describes addiction as involving functional changes in brain circuits concerned with reward, stress and self-control.
One of the most helpful theories for understanding this shift comes from the work of Terry Robinson and Kent Berridge. Their incentive-sensitisation model distinguishes between liking – the pleasure something actually produces – and wanting – the motivational pull that draws us toward it.
These two processes are not necessarily identical.
In addiction, drug-related cues can acquire unusually powerful motivational significance. Berridge and colleagues describe an amplification of psychological “wanting” that does not necessarily involve a corresponding increase in liking.
This helps explain an experience that can be deeply confusing: I don’t even enjoy it as much as I used to, but I still want it.
The first drink may no longer feel remarkable. The drug may no longer produce the experience it once did. The behaviour may have become repetitive, exhausting or disappointing. Yet anticipation can remain powerful. Friday evening, the end of a working day, a hotel room, being alone, receiving difficult news, seeing certain people or passing a familiar location can all become cues associated with use.
The person may therefore understand intellectually that the substance is providing less pleasure while still experiencing a strong pull toward it.
This is one of the first important truths about addiction: you can begin wanting something more than you actually like it. And because wanting still feels like a desire arising from within you, it can easily be interpreted as proof of choice.
From Pleasure to Relief: How Addiction Changes Over Time
Another important shift concerns what the substance is being asked to do.
Many addictive behaviours begin through positive reinforcement. Something feels good, so there is a desire to repeat it. Alcohol may create relaxation or sociability. A stimulant may provide energy or confidence. An opioid may produce warmth or relief. A sedative may quiet an anxious mind. Gambling may create excitement and absorption.
With repeated use and the development of addiction, motivation can change. Increasingly, the substance may be used not only to produce pleasure but to remove discomfort.
George Koob and Nora Volkow have described addiction through three interacting stages: binge/intoxication, withdrawal/negative affect and preoccupation/anticipation. Reward, stress and executive-control systems are involved across this cycle.
In everyday life, this may begin as drinking because it is enjoyable, then drinking because it helps you unwind, later because you feel anxious or cannot sleep, and eventually because you no longer feel quite right without it.
This transition from seeking pleasure toward seeking relief is one reason addiction can become extraordinarily convincing from inside the experience.
If you feel anxious and alcohol reduces the anxiety, your experience appears to provide obvious evidence: Alcohol helps my anxiety. If you cannot sleep and a substance allows you to fall asleep, the conclusion seems equally obvious: I need this to sleep.
The complication is that repeated exposure and neuroadaptation can sometimes contribute to the very discomfort the substance appears to relieve. With alcohol dependence, for example, withdrawal can involve sleep disturbance, anxiety, irritability, dysphoria and physical symptoms. Taking alcohol again may temporarily relieve some of those symptoms, reinforcing further drinking.
The relief is real. What has become difficult to see is how the baseline may have changed.
This creates one of addiction’s most persuasive internal arguments: See how much better you feel after drinking? You clearly needed it.
A more revealing question is: Why was I feeling so uncomfortable before I drank?
The same principle has an emotional dimension. Over time, one substance or behaviour can begin to answer remarkably different needs. A difficult day leads to drinking. A successful day leads to drinking. An argument leads to drinking. Celebration leads to drinking. Loneliness leads to drinking. Boredom leads to drinking. Anxiety leads to drinking.
Different emotional roads begin arriving at the same destination.
At this point, the substance is no longer serving one limited function. It is becoming a general strategy for regulating experience. This does not mean the person has somehow failed to cope. In fact, the opposite can be true: they have discovered something remarkably effective in the short term. The problem is that a highly effective short-term coping strategy can become progressively expensive over the longer term.
Denial and Rationalisation in Addiction: When the Mind Becomes Part of the Defence
It is a mistake to imagine that intelligence disappears when addiction develops.
A person may remain highly intelligent, professionally capable and psychologically sophisticated. They can continue solving complex problems, caring for other people and making excellent decisions in many areas of life.
That same intelligence can also become remarkably useful in protecting continued use. Imagine holding two realities simultaneously. The first is: Something I repeatedly do is beginning to conflict with my health, intentions, relationships or values. The second is: I do not particularly want to stop doing it.
Those positions create psychological tension. One way of reducing that tension is through explanation.
Everyone in my profession drinks. Work has been unusually stressful. I never drink spirits. Cannabis is natural. It is prescribed. I only use socially. My partner is too controlling. I have never missed a day of work. I exercise. I can afford it. I went a month without drinking last year. Other people are much worse.
What makes these explanations particularly powerful is that many of them may be true.
Self-deception is rarely constructed entirely from falsehoods. It is often built from facts that are selectively arranged to protect a preferred conclusion.
Work may genuinely be stressful. Your partner may genuinely overreact. Your friends may genuinely drink more than you. You may genuinely exercise five times a week and have successfully stopped drinking for a month.
The important question is therefore not, Is this explanation false? It is: What does this explanation allow me not to examine?
The concept of denial deserves similar care. In addiction treatment, the word is sometimes used too casually, as though a person who cannot see the extent of a problem is simply being dishonest or stubborn.
Deliberate concealment certainly occurs, but research suggests that impaired insight may sometimes be more complicated. Moeller and Goldstein have reviewed evidence of impaired self-awareness in addiction, including discrepancies between behaviour and self-report, heightened personal relevance of drug-related information and reduced responsiveness to some negative outcomes.
A study of 58 people with methamphetamine dependence who were not seeking treatment found that greater denial of drug-related problems was associated with poorer overall cognitive performance, particularly in memory and executive functions. The authors concluded that the cognitive and neural pattern they observed may impede the development of insight into behaviour.
That finding needs to be interpreted cautiously. It does not mean that every person who minimises their drinking has neurologically impaired self-awareness, nor does it justify dismissing disagreement as denial.
What it does suggest is that the phenomenon can be more complex than simply refusing to admit an obvious truth.
Sometimes the very person trying to judge whether their use is becoming problematic may also be experiencing psychological and neurocognitive processes that make that judgement harder.
This is why external information can become valuable. A partner notices. A colleague notices. A child notices. A doctor notices. Sleep changes. Finances change. Behaviour repeatedly contradicts intention. The body begins providing information that the internal narrative keeps explaining away. The helpful response is usually not to declare, You are in denial. A better question is: What happens if we examine the discrepancy without deciding in advance what it means?
Can You Have an Addiction and Still Be Functioning?
Yes. Outward functioning and the absence of obvious catastrophe do not, by themselves, rule out a substance use disorder. Clinical criteria concern the pattern of use, impaired control, consequences, craving, tolerance, withdrawal and related features rather than requiring complete occupational or social collapse.
This matters because functioning can become one of the strongest defences against self-examination.
A person may point to their job, family, income, achievements or social standing and ask: How could someone like me possibly have an addiction?
But functioning answers only one question: Can I still perform important roles? It does not answer another: What is this costing me?
People can remain employed while becoming physically or psychologically unwell. A marriage can remain intact while emotional intimacy deteriorates. A professional can continue performing at a high level while devoting increasing amounts of mental energy to planning, using, recovering and concealing.
In some circumstances, resources can actually delay visible consequences. Money can absorb costs that would expose a problem earlier in somebody else’s life. Flexible work can accommodate late mornings or recovery days. A partner may quietly assume additional responsibilities. Staff may compensate for errors. Privacy may hide deterioration.
Success is not protection from addiction. Occasionally, it can provide camouflage for it.
Another way addiction remains hidden is through the moving definition of normal.
There may once have been a time when drinking alone would have concerned you. Once drinking alone becomes familiar, the definition of problematic drinking may shift to drinking every day. If drinking then becomes more frequent, the line moves again: the real problem would be drinking in the morning.
If there is eventually a morning drink after an unusually difficult night, another distinction appears: at least it has never affected my work. If work begins to suffer slightly but nobody has formally confronted you, the standard moves again: if it were genuinely serious, somebody at work would have said something.
There is nearly always another boundary, another person who is worse, another consequence that has not happened, another line that remains intact.
The psychological manoeuvre is subtle: every boundary you have not crossed is used to discount the significance of the boundaries that have already moved.
This is why asking Have I completely lost control? can be surprisingly unhelpful. It sets the threshold so high that almost everything short of catastrophe can be interpreted as success.
A better question is: Has my definition of control changed in order to accommodate what I am doing?
The Physical, Mental, Emotional and Spiritual Effects of Addiction
Addiction does not affect every person or every substance in the same way. Looking across several dimensions at once, however, can reveal patterns that remain invisible when every difficulty receives its own separate explanation.
Physical decline: when the body notices first
Physical changes are not always dramatic. Sleep may become less restorative. Mornings may become harder. Energy becomes less predictable and recovery takes longer. Appetite, weight, gastrointestinal comfort or sexual functioning may change. With some substances and patterns of use, tolerance can develop, and withdrawal or rebound symptoms may emerge as the nervous system adapts.
The deceptive part is that each problem can easily be assigned to something else. Poor sleep belongs to stress. Anxiety belongs to work. Fatigue belongs to ageing. Gastrointestinal discomfort belongs to diet. Memory problems belong to being busy. Drinking remains classified as relaxation.
Every symptom has an explanation, so nothing is allowed to become a pattern.
A more useful question is not Why was I tired this Tuesday? but: What direction has my physical wellbeing been moving over the last two or three years?
Mental decline: the loss of cognitive freedom
Mental decline in addiction does not necessarily mean becoming less intelligent. It may be better understood as the gradual recruitment of attention.
When will I drink? Do I have enough? Should I buy more? Will there be alcohol there? Did anyone notice? What did I say last night? How much did I spend? Can I take something tonight if I have a meeting tomorrow? Should I take a break? How long would I need to stop to prove that I am fine?
The substance may be consumed for two hours, yet anticipating it, obtaining it, using it, recovering from it, remembering it, regretting it, concealing it and negotiating around it can occupy much more of the day.
Sometimes the amount consumed tells only part of the story. Another useful measure is: How much of my attention has this recruited? Models of addiction involving salience and prefrontal control help explain why drug-related information and rewards can acquire disproportionate importance while inhibitory control becomes more difficult.
Emotional decline: when coping becomes increasingly narrow
One of the most deceptive aspects of addiction is that the substance may continue to work.
It may reduce anxiety for an hour. It may make socialising easier. It may temporarily numb grief, anger or loneliness. It may help someone fall asleep. It may make a difficult evening feel bearable.
If substances never provided anything useful, addiction would be much easier to understand.
The difficulty appears when more and more emotional states begin requiring the same solution. Emotional flexibility narrows. Instead of having many ways to respond to distress, one becomes increasingly dominant.
The important question is not simply whether alcohol or drugs make you feel better in the short term. It is whether you are becoming less confident in your ability to experience life without changing your internal state first.
Relational decline: privacy slowly becomes secrecy
Relationships also rarely collapse in a single moment.
Sometimes addiction changes them through small distortions. Four drinks are reported as two. A bottle is replaced. A message is deleted. An expenditure is omitted. A partner is not told exactly what happened. Questions that once seemed reasonable begin to feel intrusive.
Eventually, a relationship can contain two realities: what actually happened and what the other person is permitted to know happened.
That gap can erode intimacy long before anyone threatens to leave.
The familiar explanation may be: There is no point telling them. They will only overreact. Perhaps they will. But another question deserves consideration: Why has the truth become something I need to manage?
Spiritual decline: the distance between your behaviour and who you believe yourself to be
By spiritual decline, I do not necessarily mean religion. I mean a person’s relationship with meaning, values, integrity and identity.
Most of us carry an internal understanding of who we are: I am honest. I can be trusted. I am a good parent. I keep promises. I take responsibility. I care for my body. I treat people well.
Addiction can gradually place these values under negotiation.
A promise is broken and explained. A responsibility is avoided and justified. Something is hidden. Someone is hurt. A line that once felt absolute becomes negotiable.
The discomfort that follows is not always simply I drank too much. It can become Why am I behaving like this? or I don’t recognise this version of myself.
This is where shame can make matters worse. If acknowledging harmful behaviour feels equivalent to declaring oneself a bad person, the mind has a powerful incentive not to acknowledge the behaviour.
A healthier position allows two truths to coexist: you remain deserving of dignity, and something you are doing may still require honest attention. Recovery is therefore not necessarily only about removing a substance. It can also involve restoring physical health, emotional range, relationships, meaning, honesty and psychological freedom.
The Arguments That Keep Addiction Hidden
Certain explanations recur because they are particularly effective: I still work. I pay my bills. My family is still together. I don’t drink every day. I never drink in the morning. I only use at weekends. I only drink wine. It is prescribed. Cannabis is natural. I exercise. I eat well. My friends drink more than I do. Nobody at work knows. My partner worries too much. I stopped for a month before. I know people who are much worse. Nothing terrible has happened. If it ever genuinely became a problem, I would stop.
Some of those statements may be entirely accurate. But notice what they actually demonstrate.
They do not necessarily show that your relationship with alcohol, drugs or another compulsive behaviour is healthy. They demonstrate that particular consequences have not happened.
There is a substantial difference between This is healthy and This has not destroyed my life.
Comparison is especially effective. There is nearly always somebody who drinks more, uses more dangerous drugs, has lost a relationship, has been arrested or appears visibly unwell. Looking at that person provides immediate reassurance: I am nothing like them.
Perhaps you are not. But another person’s deterioration tells you very little about your own relationship with a substance.
The useful question is not Am I worse than somebody else? It is: Is this costing me more than I am willing to acknowledge?
Temporary abstinence can become another reassurance. Going several weeks or months without drinking or using is meaningful, but the most important information may be what happens afterwards.
Sometimes abstinence becomes a courtroom test: I will stop for a month and prove that I am fine. The month is completed. The case is considered closed. Use resumes, and the earlier pattern gradually returns. The question is therefore not only Can I stop? It is also What happens when I start again? And perhaps: Why has proving that I can stop become so important?
Addiction Self-Assessment: Has Your Definition of Control Changed?
This self-assessment is not a diagnostic instrument and deliberately has no numerical score. Validated screening measures and a clinical assessment are more appropriate when determining whether a substance use disorder may be present. The purpose here is different: to help you compare the explanations you give yourself with observable changes in your life.
For each question, consider whether your answer is No, Occasionally, Increasingly, Yes, or I am not sure. More importantly, notice what you immediately feel the need to explain.
1. The moving boundary: Are you doing anything now – how much you use, when you use, where you use or what you hide – that an earlier version of you would have regarded as concerning?
2. The rules: Have you created rules about quantity, frequency, timing or circumstances? Have those rules been changed after you broke them?
3. The negotiations: How much internal bargaining takes place around whether, when or how much you will drink or use?
4. The return: Have you stopped successfully for periods of time but repeatedly returned to approximately the same pattern?
5. The mental space: How much time is spent anticipating, obtaining, using, recovering, remembering, regretting, hiding or explaining?
6. The body: Compared with a few years ago, what has happened to your sleep, energy, recovery, appetite, physical comfort, sexual functioning and general wellbeing?
7. Tolerance or adaptation: Do you need more than you once did to achieve the effect you want, or do you notice discomfort when you reduce or stop?
8. Relief: Are you increasingly using not mainly to feel good, but to stop feeling anxious, restless, lonely, low, irritable, overwhelmed or unable to sleep?
9. Emotional range: How many different emotional states now lead you toward the same substance or behaviour?
10. Ordinary pleasure: Do activities that once felt enjoyable increasingly feel flat unless alcohol, drugs or another intense reward is added?
11. Presence: Are you as emotionally available to the people you care about as you used to be?
12. Secrecy: Is there a meaningful difference between what actually happens and what the people closest to you believe happens?
13. Defensiveness: When somebody expresses concern, is your first impulse to understand what they are seeing, or immediately to assemble evidence that they are wrong?
14. Comparison: Do you assess your own behaviour mainly by identifying somebody whose behaviour seems worse?
15. Values: Have you behaved in ways that conflict with your standards of honesty, reliability, responsibility, kindness or self-respect?
16. The shrinking life: What has become smaller so that this can remain – health, sleep, interests, relationships, ambition, money, curiosity, emotional availability or peace of mind?
17. Control: When you tell yourself I could stop if I really wanted to, when was the last time you genuinely wanted to stop, and what happened?
18. The future: If nothing dramatic happens and your present pattern simply continues for another two years, are you comfortable with where it is likely to take you?
The Second Answer
There is another part of this exercise that may reveal more than any individual question.
Return to the questions that made you uncomfortable and listen not only to your initial response, but to what came immediately afterwards.
Perhaps the answer was No, followed by Well, except when… Perhaps it was Yes, but that happened because… Or Only because work has been incredibly stressful. Or My situation is different. Or Anybody dealing with what I deal with would do the same.
The explanation may be entirely valid. There is no reason to automatically reject it.
Instead, become interested in the function it performs.
Does the explanation help you understand your behaviour more accurately, or does it help you return as quickly as possible to the conclusion you wanted before asking the question?
This is the second answer. It is not proof of addiction. Human beings naturally explain and contextualise behaviour. But when similar explanations repeatedly allow changes in health, relationships, behaviour or values to be dismissed, the pattern deserves attention. Sometimes the first answer tells us what we believe. The second answer may reveal what we are protecting.
You Do Not Need to Hit Rock Bottom to Question Your Drinking or Drug Use
The idea of rock bottom has become so closely associated with addiction that people can begin to believe deterioration must become sufficiently dramatic before change is justified.
That is an unusual standard to apply to health.
We do not generally wait for hypertension to cause a stroke before taking it seriously. We do not wait for an infection to become life-threatening before intervening. We do not advise somebody to keep damaging a relationship until divorce proves there was a problem.
Why should substance use be different?
Early recognition matters precisely because there is still so much left to protect.
Having concerns about drinking or drug use does not automatically mean you require residential rehabilitation. Nor do you need to begin by deciding whether you are an addict. Depending on severity, circumstances and individual needs, effective support can range from assessment and brief intervention to counselling, psychotherapy, medical treatment, mutual-aid approaches, outpatient care, structured programmes or residential treatment.
The question Am I addicted? is emotionally loaded and can immediately create an internal courtroom in which the task becomes proving guilt or innocence.
There may be more useful starting questions. Is my relationship with this still where I want it to be? Do I still mainly enjoy it, or do I increasingly need it? Can I comfortably leave it alone? Does it occupy more mental space than I want to give it? Is my life becoming larger or smaller? Am I becoming more emotionally resilient or increasingly dependent on changing how I feel? Am I becoming more honest or more secretive, more connected or more isolated, more physically well or increasingly occupied with managing the consequences, more aligned with my values or gradually negotiating them away?
These questions do not require a label. They require observation.
Now imagine that nothing catastrophic happens. You keep your job. Your relationship survives. Nobody is arrested. Your finances remain manageable. There is no dramatic medical crisis or intervention.
Life simply continues, and so does the pattern: another evening of drinking or using, another morning of recovery, another promise to reduce, another exception to the rule, another convincing explanation for why this particular occasion does not count, and then another year.
Addiction does not always destroy a life in one spectacular event. Sometimes it erodes parts of life in increments small enough to explain: a little less energy, a little less honesty, a little less intimacy, a little less curiosity, a little less freedom and a little less peace of mind.
Each change remains individually understandable. The cumulative direction is harder to see.
This may be the deeper question beneath all the others: Have you gradually changed your definition of normal so that you no longer have to acknowledge how much has changed?
The idea of addiction whispering in your ear is, of course, a metaphor. There is no separate voice living inside the person. What feels like a whisper can arise from overlapping processes involving learning, reinforcement, craving, habit, cue-triggered wanting, relief-seeking, altered salience, psychological defence, shame, cognitive bias and, in some people with established substance use disorders, impairments in executive function or self-awareness. Contemporary models increasingly recognise the need to integrate neurobiological, behavioural, psychological and social perspectives rather than reduce addiction to any single mechanism.
That is why compassion and accountability need to coexist.
Shame rarely helps somebody look clearly at themselves. But endless reassurance can be equally unhelpful.
A person can remain intelligent while recognising that intelligence has sometimes been recruited to defend continued use. They can remain a loving parent while acknowledging that they have become less emotionally available. They can remain professionally successful while recognising that success has hidden some of the cost. They can remain worthy of dignity while acknowledging that something in their life needs to change.
Recovery does not necessarily begin with the declaration, I have lost control. Sometimes it begins with something quieter: Something has changed. I want to understand it. For a moment, I am willing to look at what is happening without immediately explaining it away.
Addiction does not always feel like losing control. Very often, it feels like repeatedly explaining to yourself why you are still in control.
And sometimes the first sign of genuine freedom is no longer needing to win that argument.
Clinical Note: Do Not Assume Stopping Suddenly Is Always Safe
If you have been drinking heavily and regularly, suddenly stopping alcohol can be medically dangerous. Alcohol withdrawal can, in some circumstances, be life-threatening and may include seizures or delirium. Appropriate medical assessment may therefore be necessary before abruptly stopping.
Physical dependence on certain other drugs or medications can also require medically informed withdrawal planning. If you are uncertain about withdrawal risk, seek appropriate medical advice rather than assuming abrupt cessation is safe.
About This Self-Assessment
The reflection questions in this article are not a validated screening or diagnostic instrument and cannot diagnose or exclude a substance use disorder.
Where formal screening is appropriate, recognised measures and qualified clinical assessment should be used. For alcohol, assessment considers patterns such as impaired control, craving, continued use despite harm, tolerance, withdrawal and effects on major areas of life.
References
- Berridge, K. C., & Robinson, T. E. (2016). Liking, wanting, and the incentive-sensitization theory of addiction. American Psychologist, 71(8), 670-679.
- Koob, G. F., & Volkow, N. D. (2016). Neurobiology of addiction: a neurocircuitry analysis. The Lancet Psychiatry, 3(8), 760-773.
- Goldstein, R. Z., & Volkow, N. D. (2011). Dysfunction of the prefrontal cortex in addiction: neuroimaging findings and clinical implications. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 12, 652-669.
- Moeller, S. J., & Goldstein, R. Z. (2014). Impaired self-awareness in human addiction: deficient attribution of personal relevance. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 18(12), 635-641.
- Dean, A. C., et al. (2015). Denial in methamphetamine users: Associations with cognition and functional connectivity in brain. Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 151, 84-91.
- Heilig, M., et al. (2021). Addiction as a brain disease revised: why it still matters, and the need for consilience. Neuropsychopharmacology, 46, 1715-1723.
- National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Alcohol Use Disorder: From Risk to Diagnosis to Recovery. Clinical resource covering alcohol use disorder, assessment, withdrawal, treatment and recovery.
- National Institute on Drug Abuse. Drugs, Brains, and Behavior: The Science of Addiction. Overview of the roles of reward, stress, learning and self-control systems in addiction.