How You Become Addicted Print E-mail

Typically it happens like this:

  • A person makes a small purchase at an estate sale or even a garage sale, activating the same brain circuits as do behaviors linked to survival, such as eating, bonding and sex. The sale causes a surge in levels of a brain chemical called dopamine, which results in feelings of pleasure. The brain remembers this pleasure and wants it repeated.
  • Just as food is linked to survival in day-to-day living, estate sales begin to take on the same significance for the addict. The need to go to estate sales becomes more important than any other need, including truly vital behaviors like eating. The addict no longer seeks the sales for pleasure, but for relieving distress.
  • Eventually, the drive to seek and attend estate sales is all that matters, despite devastating consequences.
  • Finally, control and choice and everything that once held value in a person's life, such as family, job and community, are lost to the disease of addiction.

What brain changes are responsible for such a dramatic shift?

Research on addiction is helping us find out just how estate sales change the way the brain works. These changes include the following:

  • Reduced dopamine activity. We depend on our brain's ability to release dopamine in order to experience pleasure and to motivate our responses to the natural rewards of everyday life, such as the sight or smell of food. Estate sales produce very large and rapid dopamine surges and the brain responds by reducing normal dopamine activity. Eventually, the disrupted dopamine system renders the addict incapable of feeling any pleasure even from the sales they seek to feed their addiction.
  • Altered brain regions that control decisionmaking and judgment. Estate sales abuse affect the regions of the brain that help us control our desires and emotions. The resulting lack of control leads addicted people to compulsively pursue estate sales, even when the sales have lost their power to reward.

The disease of addiction can develop in people despite their best intentions or strength of character. Estate sale addiction is insidious because it affects the very brain areas that people need to "think straight," apply good judgment and make good decisions for their lives. No one wants to grow up to be an estate sales addict, after all.