Virtology GlobalAn initiative of Instituto Virtudes · Brazil
The cigarette you barely taste, the bet that is no fun, the glass of wine that no longer lifts you. The brain has one system for wanting and another for liking. With repetition they come apart, and you end up wanting more and more of something you enjoy less and less.
English edition of Isabella Becker’s Portuguese essay, adapted for international readers. The article presents Virtology’s interpretation; its specific theoretical mechanisms should be distinguished from independently established clinical findings.
You light the cigarette and barely taste it. You open the betting app with no real wish to win. You pour the evening glass and, by the second sip, you already know it is not good. You scroll until one in the morning without laughing at anything. And when someone asks, “if it doesn’t even give you pleasure anymore, why do you keep doing it?”, you have no answer. Sometimes the one asking is you, in front of the mirror.
The question is fair. The answer comes from one of the most important findings in the neuroscience of addiction, and one of the least known outside it: wanting and liking are two different things in the brain. With repetition, they come apart. Wanting grows. Liking stays the same or shrinks. You end up wanting more and more of something you like less and less.
Before going on, a caveat, because this article may reach someone who already blames themselves plenty. Repeating something that has lost its appeal is not, in itself, an illness. Using a substance, being at risk from that use and having a disorder are different situations, and only a health assessment can tell them apart. What I describe here is a mechanism that shows up in everyone, to different degrees: in cigarettes, drink, betting, food, screens. And when I speak of pride and selfishness, I am not name-calling. In Eduardo Casarotto’s Virtology, these are two systems in the brain that every human being has. Addiction is not a flaw of character, nor a lack of love. It is something else, and it has an address.
Here I want to show the machinery from the inside: how the brain learns to want what no longer pleases it, and at which points in that machinery virtue comes in.
There is a set of regions in the brain that weighs the value of things. Neuroscience calls it the valuation network. Its center sits just behind the forehead: the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the orbitofrontal cortex, two regions so closely linked that they are sometimes treated as one. They work together with the ventral striatum, a deeper area at the base of the brain, where the nucleus accumbens is found.
The mesolimbic pathway, the dopamine route, reaches the accumbens. It starts in the ventral tegmental area, in the middle of the brain, and ends there. This is the reward circuit. Everyone has it, and it is good. It is what makes you want to eat, want the hug, want to go home. Without it, nobody would get out of bed.
One neuroimaging finding helps explain the rest. These regions measure the value of very different things on a single scale: money, food, approval, a consumer object, a drug. The brain converts things that cannot be compared into a single measure so that it can choose. Levy and Glimcher (2012) called this the common currency of value.
That leads to an idea that changes how we see someone who cannot stop. The brain of a person with an addiction does not have a separate circuit for the drug. It has the same circuit as everyone else, weighing everything in the same currency. What changed was the weight. Each substance reaches that circuit through a different door, but all of them release dopamine in the accumbens faster and more strongly than almost any natural pleasure, as Volkow, Koob and McLellan (2016) describe. The accumbens takes note: this is worth it. Repeated a few dozen times, the record is written. When the brain weighs its options, the scale already arrives tilted.
Casarotto lists what this circuit records when a substance or a behavior enters someone’s life. It records pleasure, which is the direct effect. It records comfort, which is relief from anxiety, the switching-off of a tense body, sleep for someone who could not sleep. It records approval, which is the group that accepts you. And it records recognition, which is the feeling of being someone. Keep that list in mind. Further on it explains why stopping on your own leaves four holes, not one.
The neuroscientists Kent Berridge and Terry Robinson spent decades showing something that goes against common sense: the dopamine of this pathway is not the substance of pleasure. It is the substance of wanting. They call it incentive salience, the force with which something pulls your behavior towards it (Berridge and Robinson, 2016). Liking is another system, with a different chemistry, and much smaller.
At the beginning, the two travel together. You want and you like. With repetition, the wanting system becomes sensitized: more reactive, stronger, easier to trigger. Liking does not keep up. It stays the same, or drops. That is how you reach the point that gives this article its title.
Two details help you recognize this in yourself.
The first is that wanting is triggered by cues. The place, the time of day, the smell, the person, the argument, the end of the day, Friday. Each person has their own cues, and sensitized wanting responds to them faster and faster. That is why the urge shows up strongly just when the pleasure has already gone. It is not measuring pleasure. It is answering the signal.
The second is that this wanting can move the body without you feeling that you decided. Anyone who lives alongside addiction knows the sentence “before I knew it, I was already there.” It is neither a lie nor an excuse. It is the wanting system, sensitized, operating beneath the decision.
If wanting has grown, why isn’t knowing the consequences enough to hold back? The researchers Rita Goldstein and Nora Volkow (2002) proposed a model that answers this, and it says two things at once.
The first is about the brake. In studies of groups of people with addiction, there are difficulties with inhibition and changes in the networks that evaluate and control responses. The second is about the cue. Everything that recalls the substance stands out more than it should. The cue glows too brightly.
A weak brake and an overvalued cue. Casarotto uses an image I find exact: a car with no brakes on a downhill slope, with a lit sign pointing towards the cliff. Shouting at the driver to pay attention is useless. He is paying attention. It is the car that does not respond.
An honest caveat. These data come from groups. They help us understand why knowing is not always enough. They do not allow us to say what a particular person’s brain is like just because they keep using.
The model also points to what care needs to do: work on both sides. Reduce exposure to cues, learn strategies for moments of risk, medical and psychological treatment, a support group. Virtology adds what strengthens the brake from within and lowers the value of the cue at the root, which is virtue trained until it becomes part of the person.
The third piece comes from George Koob and Michel Le Moal (2001; 2008), and it may be the one that best explains what families see.
At the beginning, use is impulsive and works through positive reinforcement: the person uses to get pleasure. It is the “I use because I like it, I’ll stop when I want to” phase. At that point they are not lying. That is still how the system works.
With repetition, use can increasingly serve to relieve a bad state. Koob and Le Moal describe this through allostasis: the reward and stress systems adapt, and those adaptations take part in the anxiety, irritability and malaise that come with addiction. The substance brings relief for a while, and the relief reinforces the repetition. This is called negative reinforcement, a behavior that grows stronger because it removes a discomfort. It does not mean that everyone goes through the same sequence, nor that this is the only possible relief. But when this is the path, the question “why do you keep doing it?” gets a different answer.
Flávia Fontana, scientific director of the Instituto Virtudes, puts it this way: “The substance relieves anguish, emotional pain and lack, even if only for a short time, and the brain records this solution as a valid path.”
That sentence explains why stopping by force is so hard. When the person stops, the bad state does not go away. It stays there for weeks, sometimes months, without the one thing that used to relieve it. We ask someone to endure a body in permanent alarm on willpower alone. Some manage. Most do not, and not because they are weak. That is why medical treatment of withdrawal matters so much: it lowers that malaise and gives the person room to breathe while the rest is built.
Up to here, this has been neuroscience, from outside Virtology. Now Casarotto’s reading comes in, which joins these pieces into a cycle of six stations. People who live this usually recognize each one.
First: Lack. This is Virtology’s name for the underlying hole that moves a person. It has three forms. The Lack of Unity, a basic sense of not being whole that comes before any personal history. The poorly lived experience, something that marked the body and fires again in front of anything that resembles it. And the unlived experience, the competency that never formed: tolerating frustration, waiting, hearing a no, being alone, feeling important without an audience. Lack is a Virtology concept, not an energy stored in one spot of the brain. On top of it, a bad state appears: anxiety, emptiness, shame, boredom, anger.
Second: the cue. Something outside or inside lights up the record. It does not have to be big. A Friday is enough.
Third: wanting. The sensitized system fires. It is not desire, it is a pull. And the brake, being weak, does not hold.
Fourth: use, and relief. For a few hours the body returns to its set point, Lack is covered, and the record notes it one more time: this works.
Fifth: shame. Once the effect wears off, the person looks at themselves: “again.” Shame is a wound to the need for importance. It hurts in the same place where being excluded hurts. And what hurts asks for anaesthesia.
Sixth: Lack, bigger. Now, besides the old hole, there is the hole that use opened: the money that ran out, the trust that broke, the promise that was not kept. The body, in allostasis, is worse than before. Faced with a bigger hole, the brain reaches for what it knows to fill holes with.
And the cycle returns to the first station, deeper.
Notice two of the stations. The fifth is pride. And the fourth, in my reading in light of Virtology, is selfishness at work. Selfishness, which Virtology calls the SNE, the Selfishness Neurofunctional System (the Portuguese acronyms are kept in the English editions), puts my relief right now above everything. Pride, the SNO, the Pride Neurofunctional System, feels the loss of importance as a threat and wants it to stop hurting. I explained the two side by side in Pride is not what you think. Neither is a defect of bad people. They are the two oldest ways the brain has of answering an emptiness it reads as a risk.
Every cycle of this kind has one feature: there is no exit through the middle. Attacking only the fourth station, the use, while the other five keep running is like removing one carriage and leaving the train moving on the same tracks.
Remember the list of what the accumbens records? When the person stops, they do not lose one thing. They lose four. They lose the pleasure. They lose the comfort. They lose the group. And they lose the feeling of being someone. If care replaces only abstinence, it replaces none of the four. And the brain, which still carries the high record, goes looking again.
That is why, in Virtology, the treatment question is not “how do we switch the circuit off?” It does not switch off, and it should not, because it is the same circuit that makes you want the hug and the meal. The question is a different one: what else can enter that record with a value high enough to compete with the substance?
That question also applies to people who use no drug at all. The glass, the bet, the screen and the late-night sweet all run through the same circuit. Removing the object without putting anything in its place leaves the record waiting for the next cue.
People who live alongside addiction often carry a silent question: “what did I do for him to like this more than me?” Nothing. When the person chooses the substance over you, they are choosing with a tilted scale. In that moment, the altered record weighs more. This does not oblige you to accept the behavior, and boundaries are still necessary. But it frees you from a question built on a false premise: that he loves you less.
When he says, “I don’t feel pleasure anymore, I use because I need to,” it is worth believing him. It is the exact description of the shift from pleasure to relief.
And there is a point in the cycle where your words come in. Casarotto draws attention to the relapse that comes right after a humiliation: a scolding, a “you’ll never change,” a look of contempt. That is the fifth station turning into the sixth. This does not make the family the cause of the addiction. It only means there is a place in the cycle where your words land, and you can choose what to put there. Shame calls for being received, not punished. Receiving is not approving. It is stating the fact without diminishing the person.
If the cycle has six stations, it has six points of intervention. Virtology chooses to work at four: Lack, wanting and cues, shame, and the bigger Lack. At each of them a virtue works, and none works alone. The order follows the Pyramid of Virtues.
Humility comes first. It works directly on pride, and it is what disarms the fifth station. Making a mistake, relapsing, having lost standing does not make the person worth less. Without Humility, shame becomes fuel, and the promise made the next day is already born looking like the next relapse.
Selflessness comes paired with it. It works directly on selfishness: my relief stops being the only thing that carries weight. Casarotto sees here the other side of the common currency of value. If the circuit records pleasure, comfort, approval and recognition, the satisfaction of taking the other person into account can also enter that record and gain weight. Studies of compassion training found changes in behavior and in brain measures in healthy adults (Weng and colleagues, 2013; Klimecki and colleagues, 2013). The limit needs marking: they studied those practices and those people, not addiction and not the work of the virtues. The bridge to addiction is Virtology’s proposal.
Then comes the rest of the foundation level. Forgiveness, starting with oneself, keeps guilt from becoming fuel for the next use. At the sixth station, Acceptance and Responsibility come in: accepting the damage without drowning in it, taking on what is yours without carrying what is not, and moving on. More than anything else, the cycle feeds on the despair of someone who looks at the bigger hole and concludes there is no way out. The foundation also holds Perseverance, which shortens the gap between falling and trying again, Individuation, which takes the audience out of command, and the State of Certainty, which lets the person act before having any guarantee of the result.
Only then comes the Development level. Virtology’s canonical combination for addiction, compulsion, impulse and immediacy is Humility, Selflessness, Truth, Gentleness, Patience, Responsibility and Acceptance. Truth, to stop hiding the use from yourself and from others. Gentleness, to put time between the pull and the act. Patience, to bear the record changing slowly. All three belong to the Development level and need the foundation first. Gentleness, for example, only holds where there is already Humility, Acceptance, Selflessness, Responsibility and Individuation. Without them, it becomes a façade of calm.
For wanting and cues, Casarotto seeks to widen the other sources of value: connection, Usefulness, Care for the Body, Honoring Family. These also belong to the Development level, and they also need what comes before. Usefulness requires Selflessness, Responsibility and Perseverance. Care for the Body requires Humility, Acceptance and Individuation. Honoring Family requires Acceptance, Forgiveness and Individuation. On the horizon, at the top of the Pyramid, is Helping Others, which is Usefulness carried to the top.
And at Lack, the first station, the work is to build the competency that was missing and to bring the empty needs out of deficiency. So that the hole underneath really shrinks, instead of just being covered.
Sensitized wanting hides because it looks like pleasure. This week’s practice is to give two different numbers to two things you have always treated as one.
A note on step two. The cue does not always come from outside. Often it is a state: the emptiness of a Sunday, the argument that never ended, the message that arrived. Note it anyway. What has a name stops deciding on its own.
None of this promises that wanting will disappear. The cue still exists, Friday still comes. What changes, when the work is done, is the weight. The record that grew high because it was written many times is rewritten the same way: many times, with attention, every day. Not through a speech, nor a New Year’s resolution. Through repetition.
Perhaps that is the most concrete gain of separating wanting from liking. As long as it looks like pleasure, you fight an urge you believe is yours. Once you see that it is a learned pull answering cues, you can work on the cues, on the brake and, underneath them, on the hole the use was covering.
If what you recognized here involves alcohol, medication or other drugs, do not stop suddenly and on your own: withdrawal from some substances can be dangerous and needs medical supervision. Contact your doctor or your local addiction services, and consider a support group. If there are signs of overdose, seizures or severe confusion, call your local emergency services. If the urge to use comes together with a wish to disappear or to die, contact emergency services or a crisis line in your country right away. Asking for help is part of treatment.
Continue with SNO and SNE: two systems at the root of neurosis, Pride is not what you think, or the 12-Step guided trail.
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Explore the Professional Formation →Translated and edited from the Portuguese essay.