If addiction were a willpower problem, the most disciplined people alive would be immune to it. Surgeons, soldiers, elite athletes, people who can get up at four thirty every morning for a decade. They are not immune. They turn up in counselling rooms at the same rate as everyone else, often more quietly, because their whole identity says this should not be possible.

That contradiction is worth sitting with, because it dismantles the most common and most useless theory people have about their own behaviour.

The behaviour is doing a job

Nothing repeats for years without paying for itself somehow. Whatever the behaviour is, drinking, pornography, gambling, scrolling until two in the morning, it is doing something for you, and it is doing it fast and reliably.

Usually it is regulating a feeling you have no other way to put down. Anxiety that will not switch off. Loneliness. Anger you are not allowed to have. Boredom, which people underrate badly, and which is unbearable to a nervous system that has been running hot for years.

Seen that way, the behaviour is not irrational. It is the most efficient tool you have found. The problem is not that it fails. The problem is that it works, immediately, every time, and everything else that might work takes weeks and effort.

Why stopping leaves a hole

This is where willpower alone comes unstuck. You can white knuckle a behaviour away for a while, and plenty of people manage weeks or months. But if nothing else has taken over the job the behaviour was doing, the pressure it was managing is still there, rising, with nowhere to go.

So people relapse and conclude they are weak. In fact they removed the tool without replacing the function. Anyone would go back.

This is also why the promise to yourself at two in the morning, the one made with total sincerity, does not survive Thursday. It was made in a state where the pressure was absent. Thursday will not be that state.

The decision is made earlier than you think

People describe the moment of relapse as if it arrived from nowhere. Traced backwards, it almost never did. There is a chain: a difficult phone call, a skipped meal, a row, an empty evening, a decision to take the long way home, a decision not to text anyone.

By the time you are standing in front of the thing, the outcome was settled a while ago. Which is good news, because there were half a dozen points earlier in the chain where there was genuine room to move, and almost none at the end.

Most of the practical work in addiction counselling happens in that chain rather than at the moment of use.

Shame makes it worse, reliably

The instinct is that feeling bad enough about it will eventually stop it. It does the opposite. Shame is a high pressure state, and high pressure states are exactly what the behaviour is there to relieve. So the shame from Tuesday becomes the fuel for Friday.

Nobody has ever shamed themselves out of a compulsive behaviour. Plenty of people have shamed themselves deeper into one, and then hidden it better, which is worse.

What actually helps

• Working out precisely what the behaviour regulates, in specific terms rather than general ones
• Mapping the chain, and intervening early in it where there is still room
• Building other ways to manage the same pressure, before removing the existing one
• Getting it out of secrecy, because the double life is usually more exhausting than the behaviour
• Treating relapse as information about a thin plan rather than as a verdict on you
• Fixing the boring structural things: sleep, food, daylight, other people, an evening with a shape to it

A safety note

If you are physically dependent on alcohol or benzodiazepines, stopping suddenly on your own can be dangerous and occasionally fatal. Talk to your GP about a safe withdrawal plan. The Alcohol Drug Helpline is free, confidential and open all hours on 0800 787 797.

Counselling for substance use and for pornography and sex addiction is available in Takapuna and online. You do not need to have stopped before you come. If people could reliably stop before getting help, very few would ever need it.