Starving the tiger: Buddhism, addiction, and desire

I gave a talk on Buddhism at a drug and alcohol treatment center on a visit home this year (back to Pennsylvania).  I don't normally do that kind of speaking but my aunt helps manage it, and it was the subject of my past studies, and tied to my personal life now, so I did it.  The talk went well, and at the end I described on Buddhist teaching on eliminating addictive desire, an analogy to "starving the tiger," which I'll pass on here.

It goes like this:  eliminating a strong desire is like starving a tiger.  You can't will yourself not to want something, and can't quickly shift from having that desire to not having it.  I guess this works well for addictions as well, as a part of that.  The idea is that you simply don't "feed" the desire, and over time it ends naturally, like a tiger dying of not being fed.

Of course the central theme of Buddhism is about eliminating suffering, or changing perspective to be more fulfilled, maybe happier, by clearing up some perspective issues.  So not exactly about self-help for clearing addictions but it generally fits. 


Buddhism is a lot of things, an organized religion, semi-mystical scope about strange mental states and other realms, practical self-help advice, psychology--lots of ways to take it.  If there is just one central core of ideas, one scope that fits best, then for sure the Buddha also taught to lots of people in lots of ways to make the ideas more accessible.  I'd interpret that some of the more formal and mystical aspects are really not the point but that's just my take.

roughly the point

Further reading can take you further into the theory.  There are lots of general references out there, like this one.  Of course different sources would say somewhat different things, so best to read around and keep an open mind.  Eventually you might want to move past the relatively light and simple interpretations into the core teachings as presented in original concepts, like this one for attachment (upadana) in Wikipedia. 



Of course even the most uninterpreted, original core teachings still convert concepts from one language and one original context to another, so best to take any mix of ideas with a grain of salt as well, and not rely on any one source too much (especially Wikipedia, better as a starting point, but that goes without saying, right).

Related to quitting smoking

How well does this idea work, or how does it actually work?  I quit smoking once, so I'll use that as an example.

As a smoker I had practiced quitting; I finally did it the third or fourth time.  Those things really are addictive, and lots ends up acting as a trigger for wanting to smoke.  Stress is a main one; smoking seems to help offset stress.  Of course it really doesn't work, since it adds the stress of needing to smoke cigarettes, so after a couple hours without a cigarette any smoker is feeling way more stress than they would as a non-smoker.  But it feels like the nicotine and other chemicals reduce the feeling of stress, even if part is the stress of the addiction itself.  Meals tend to become related to smoking, or driving, waking up, drinking alcohol, kind of everything since a smoker smokes a cigarette at least once an hour, or all the time.

credit bear skin site

I talked to my grandfather about quitting and he essentially said he just did it.  He decided he would quit one day, without much reason for doing so (it was before they were as clear about health issues, but come on, they knew).  He said he and my grandmother both smoked and he went home and told her she could smoke the rest in the house and she was finished too.  And so she did, and he simply stopped right away.

So I tried that.  Not as simple as he said; the cravings were rough.  I used an herbal and tobacco blend for the first few weeks to help separate from the act of smoking, but essentially just never smoked cigarettes any more.  It helped I'd moved to a place where people didn't smoke much, to Hawaii, where it seemed unnatural to be lighting up.  The change also helped shift away from triggers, although it didn't change being addicted, and with triggers like meals that was going to travel with me. 

nothing about cravings though (attribution)

The cravings did diminish over time, as in the analogy, but it was a slow process.  After a month it wasn't quite as severe, but still bad enough, after a few less yet, but still in progress.  At about one year I was still craving them related to times of stress but it wasn't nearly the same experience.  So it was just as if it took the tiger a good long time to die. 


At about two years I never gave it much thought, although once in awhile related to being stressed.  Most people would've broke down and smoked while drinking at least, but I wasn't drinking much alcohol anyway, and my grandfather's advice pointed me in a different direction, to just letting it drop.  Maybe that added a little more pressure in one sense but it also made the approach clear enough.


I'm not so sure how it would work for other kinds of addictions.  I guess it would depend on the person and the circumstances and the drug they were addicted to.  Of course the analogy and staunch conviction alone wouldn't be enough for lots of it; changing habits would come into play, maybe some counseling.  I didn't have time in that talk to really get into their experiences much at all, just to answer questions.  They had some good ones; they were pretty open minded about the idea of a foreign religion, and pretty quick to pick up on how it wasn't necessarily same set of ideas they were familiar with as an organized religion, but with a lot of shared elements.

sort of an overview; see link for source

Related to ordinary desire

Really this is more the point of Buddhism; how can someone resolve a deeper level of dissatisfaction through a change in perspective, not so much about just quitting a vice.  Not so easy to give an example, although there are lots of potential examples.  No one issue would ever really get to the main point of a paradigm shift in thinking, and they would all tend to be trivial. 

For example, one might notice they are unhappy because they don't travel enough, or can't afford the type of car or clothing they would like, or electronics, etc., and then change expectations instead of buying a lot more stuff.  That's all good, very positive and pragmatic, but only part of the issue.  It's not really right to say it's not on a deep enough level, more that a general deeper understanding and adjustment at a broad level is more the main point.  But smaller individual shifts are potentially a good thing, and not unrelated.

One basic type of desire always come to mind when I consider these things, the attraction to the opposite sex.  In modern life that's used as a marketing tool, and related to entertainment, with related images more broadly available than ever before, to some extent unavoidable.  I can't really say I've somehow "got past" that, or that I deal with it a lot better than most, or as I did.  I suppose one could try the "starving the tiger" approach to move towards limiting it, but it would be hard to get too far with that.  The next thoughts that occur to me relate to how close it seems to causing suffering (that one particular type of desire), or dissatisfaction, whether unfulfilled related desire causes a problem or not.  Who knows; to some extent, sure, but it's not how that's taken in Western society or where I live now (Bangkok; within Western-influenced Thai culture).

To me I've had more success with some introspection and consideration limiting my mental noise a bit, by offsetting the tendency to always follow things mentally.  I guess maybe I've just said a woman in a short skirt is an exception, or even a universal exception, for guys.  But I don't stress much over waiting on things, problems that come up, other people not making sense, wanting to own something, etc.  It's not so hard to take it for what it's worth.  All of this shifts in meaning if you take Buddhism to be a context-relative form of self-improvement rather than a spiritual quest to be fundamentally different.  But I'm not saying that's how to take it, it's just one possibility.

I guess this is how Buddhism or any type of introspection and self-improvement goes, you start from where you are, work on what's relevant, and the degree of change and successes relate to how you end up applying it.  I'm not even close to enlightened, and I don't really clearly know what that means.  Meditation and unusual mental states are related subjects, and I have had some experience with both, but it's almost a different story. 

Different people apply Buddhism differently, take different paths, if you like, and for some the ideas are what it's about, others would go straight to meditation, for others deep religious semi-mystical experience would need to be a component, and so on.  To the extent any of these could help improve everyday experience it would still be functional Buddhism. 

About karma, who knows, maybe that's relevant, possibly more relevant, or maybe not something a lot of people wouldn't benefit from sorting through.  For Thais it's the most central concern in Buddhism, merit score-keeping, but they don't usually seem to completely know what to make of it, and when it's time to let all that drop and do normal things instead they do.

Those women in that treatment center might be better for saying how well the analogy really works related to desire as a component of addiction.  For me and quitting smoking it wasn't so helpful, but then the story about my grandfather just willing himself straight through it was.  It seems possible some abstract theory about desire might actually help some people, even without a lot of context about enlightenment and meditation and the rest.