Why is Candy Crush so addictive?

My name is Jeanne, and I am an addict.  That's why I feel entitled to write about this.

This is not the first time I've been addicted.  It runs in the family, actually.  Everyone else in my family was addicted to alcohol; I was the one addicted to alcoholics.  Before and during that, to cigarettes.  Had a doughnut addiction at one time, too - I'm not kidding.  I had to diet off 30 pounds when I woke up to that one.

But enough about me.  I want to talk more abstractly about addiction, which is a form of craving that gets itself lodged in you as a habit.  In the case of substances, like nicotine, your body's chemistry gets involved.  Smoking anything is a really fast delivery system; inhale the substance and

in seven seconds it hits your brain.  This makes me very glad I never tried a lot of not-so-legal drugs that nobody seems able to quit (and knowing that, I just can't enjoy "Breaking Bad").

Getting off cigarettes after smoking for thirty years was a slow, tortured process.  Many many recovering alcoholics can't quit smoking.  It is addictive psychologically and behaviorally, but the chemical thing is also real.  About fifteen minutes after you finish a cigarette, the nicotine level in your blood starts to fall.  And fall.  Lower, lower, until you are positively uncomfortable.  Your body craves it, to get back in balance.  When you light up again, reward!

Candy Crush isn't actual candy or I would weigh 400 pounds.  It doesn't have to be.  The horse races aren't substances, slot machines aren't, romance isn't - things just have to be exciting and promise a reward.  And occasionally deliver.  Not too often.  And never be completely fulfilling.

A big piece of the fundamental message of Buddhism is that you're unhappy because you desire.  Big things, like being Someone Special and staying young, little things like potato chips.  A lot of what American Buddhists practice is controlling our impulses, both sitting in meditation and making nice after sitting on hold for fifteen minutes.

In Candy Crush, you are rewarded for every move, more so if you have the sound on.  And when you win!  OMG!  Lights, bells, whistles, fish swarming across the page.  It's great, for five seconds.  Then you want to move to the next level: winning doesn't satisfy you. This is actually true about everything, up to the Nobel Prize.  Whatever you do, if you do it to get somewhere it won't make you happy.

Recently I met a guy who does extreme sports.  He told me sports jumpers are the ones who die in parachute jumps - not the rank amateurs who just want to try it once.  Because the extreme sport addict always wants to dare a little bit more.  "Waiting till you're 1,000 feet from the ground, before you open the chute," he said, "what a rush!  Now you want to try 950 next time.  It's the danger that's the rush, the adrenaline.  And I'm addicted to that."  He does a lot of those sports, he told me - a man with a wife and children.  Go figure.

But isn't it just the same when you have that restless desire to shop for new shoes?  When you keep trying new restaurants?  When you work for a bigger more pixels more power flat screen/vehicle/salary/kitchen/house?  I think that's why you'll see people get divorced after they remodel.  It didn't work.

The sad/funny thing about the human animal is that we are pretty slow to figure these things out.  That's partly because a lot of people get very rich by building those cravings.  This is why I don't enjoy "Mad Men" either.  It's too true - the people at the top earn big money devising commercials to make people believe that a lustrous new car will make you the person you want to be in the world over the rainbow.  Maybe it does for a few hours or weeks.  Or until the next model comes out.  Compared to that, Candy Crush is harmless.

Change the Energy Day

A while back I was able to train with Roshi Daniel Terragno, whose words had a way of being clear and penetrating for me. Once we were talking on the phone and I brought to him the problem I had with my work. I believed I should be sending manuscripts out, and I couldn't make myself do it. I had a sense of being an engine at the starting line, huffing and puffing, but not able to get traction and move forward.

He said (I could hear the shrug), "Why don't you just send something out - that will change the energy around it."

I loved that. I have a mystical streak a yard wide, my grandmother would have said, and have experienced energy in many contexts, enough to know it's real. Change the energy around it is a principle of feng shui, for instance. I've read the advice that to recover from a spouse's death you should immediately change the bedclothes, and if possible, the position of the bed in the room. I experience energy every week when I get acupuncture.

Yesterday this particular concept popped up for me when my friend Gini called. We usually have lunch on Wednesday, but neither of us had any ideas. "Do you want to do lunch or breakfast?" she asked.

"Breakfast!" I said. What a good idea! Get me out of the house, something different. I asked her, "White Castle or Waffle House?"A change from our usual quiet sort of place.

I swear I could see her eyes light up. "Waffle House!"

Well, we had a good time, and ate as you can there, terrifically enjoying the grits, hashbrowns smothered and covered, a full midwestern breakfast and really good service with the coffee. It turned out to be a good place to talk after a meal, too, not too busy, they don't bug you. Then, coming home we got lost, you might say, and enjoyed a leaf tour of the neighborhood we have lived in for much of our adult lives.

Different is refreshing. When we choose it, I guess. Maybe we could look at all change that way. This morning I got up to a storm of falling oak leaves. It wasn't very windy out there, but it was as if all eleven oaks out back decided it was time. My impulse was not to like it - fall is hurrying away faster, too fast. Don't like winter. I didn't like yesterday either, when I got up to black sticks. So many leaves had fallen overnight that the woods had a new aspect, was no longer about foliage but about the black lines of trunks and branches.

Not liking reality - Daniel calls that stuff "preference." I'd prefer Indian summer forever. I'd prefer to live in northern California, only not to lose the roots I have here. When the sun shines, as it is right now, I grasp at it - how do you do that? I don't know. Inside me that engine is saying Stay, stay, stay, like a child trying to make something happen through sheer intensity of wishing. I prefer sunshine. Beyond "prefer."

Tonight is Trick or Treat here, so yesterday Gini and I stopped at Giant Eagle to get some candy. Lord, they have a great candy shop. We got foil-wrapped eyeballs for the kids and authentic Reese's peanut butter cups, and various old-fashioned penny candies for ourselves. Checking out we found ourselves in the cigarette aisle and my craving peeked up. I think craving is preference with chemistry added. We both quit smoking years ago, and had to work very hard at it, too. We agreed that we would love a cigarette just then, and were going to let that impulse pass.