The Disease Model
This type of disease requires ongoing management and doesn't resolve with short-term willpower alone.
What is a chronic disease?
This chemical messenger in the brain teaches your brain what is important to repeat.
What is dopamine?
This term describes how the brain decides what deserves your attention, energy, and urgency.
What is salience?
The Jellinek Curve shows that movement through addiction and recovery follows this type of path — not a straight line.
What is nonlinear?
In recovery, acceptance means recognizing addiction as a disease rather than this type of failing.
What is a moral failing (character flaw)?
Relapse rates for addiction are similar to those for diabetes, hypertension, and this breathing condition.
What is asthma?
This part of the brain acts as a "brake" for impulse control and decision-making.
What is the frontal cortex (prefrontal cortex)?
Your brain's baseline level needed to feel pleasure is called this type of "set-point."
What is the hedonic set-point?
In the early phase of the curve, substance use often serves as this — temporarily reducing anxiety or depression.
What is emotional regulation (self-medication)?
Genetic factors account for approximately this percentage of a person's risk for developing addiction.
What is 50%?
Like other chronic diseases, addiction has predictable symptoms, periods of remission, and risk of this.
What is relapse?
Also called the "survival brain," this brain region drives fight-or-flight responses and compulsive urges.
What is the midbrain?
This condition — common in early recovery — is the reduced ability to feel pleasure from everyday activities.
What is anhedonia?
During the middle phase, the individual becomes increasingly preoccupied with obtaining, hiding, or doing this about their use.
What is rationalizing?
ACEs are adverse childhood experiences occurring before this age that can reshape brain development and stress response.
What is 18?
The progressive nature of addiction means this increases over time, requiring more of the substance for the same effect.
What is tolerance?
When the midbrain perceives survival is threatened, it overrides this higher brain function.
What is logic (reasoning/judgment)?
Recovery retrains salience through repetition, emotional safety, and this.
What is new learning?
At the bottom of the curve, individuals often experience overwhelming shame, hopelessness, and loss of this.
What is identity?
Each recovery attempt builds insight, skills, and this — even if abstinence is interrupted.
What is awareness?
Co-occurring mental health symptoms increase disease activity and require this type of treatment to stabilize recovery.
What is parallel (or integrated) treatment?
Impairment in the frontal cortex explains behavior that feels inconsistent with a person's values and fuels this intense emotion.
What is shame?
When the brain raises the hedonic set-point to maintain balance, everyday experiences lose this.
What is emotional payoff (pleasure)?
In the chronic phase, cognitive impairment, emotional dysregulation, and this type of health decline become clear.
What is physical health?
Children adapt to unsafe environments through hypervigilance, emotional shutdown, or this — and these adaptations often persist into adulthood.
What is dissociation?