Use Your Brain to Beat Addiction: The Complete Guide to Understanding and Tackling Addiction - Softcover

The third in an all-new series exploring how to cope with problems of the mind What we know about the workings of the human brain has increased immeasurably in recent times. We now know exactly which parts of the brain react when we feel panicked, depressed, or overwhelmed emotionally. It is this new science which can help us to understand how our brain generates the feelings we experience and, in turn, how we can control those feelings. Addiction is a wide-ranging condition where sufferers are compulsively occupied with an activity, habit or substance. Shopping addiction, for example, has been recognised as one of the fastest growing addictions, currently affecting 1 in 30 adults. This book explains the physiological basis of all forms of addiction, helping us to understand what lies at the root of a specific compulsion. Advice on drugs and cognitive therapy exercises are included to help sufferers tackle their addictions as fully and independently as possible.

John Illman is the former Health Editor of The Guardian and health correspondent for The Observer. He is a lecturer in medical journalism at the University of Westminster and has written two books, 'The Expert Patient' and 'The Body Machine'. Rita Carter is a medical and science writer specialising in neuropsychology and mental health. She writes regularly for The Times, Telegraph, New Scientist, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror and writes the health pages for SHE magazine. She has won numerous awards for her writing including two for outstanding contribution to medical journalism, and is the bestselling author of Mapping The Mind (Weidenfeld 1998).