Despite all your rage…..

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Photo Credit: @chriswindus

Hello Sobertown,

You are still just a rat in a cage. Or are we?

Billy Corgan said it all in this short sentence and within this lies the answer to a pertinent question.

What is the meaning of it all?

A beautiful thing to realise can be this…. The answer to this question may be. Very little.

Why? Because, and do not take this as pessimism it is not, but, our lives truly are a grain of sand on a giant beach, our entire life is a tiny blip in time and it can be humbling and helpful to realise this, to centre us, to be humbled by this. We are a rat in a cage and in this realisation we can see that in-fact this is ok. We can see that we have been held down and told what is and is not correct within our cage, what we should or should not consume, we are drip fed but this is the good news. Unlike the rat stuck in a cage in a lab, prisoner to their circumstances we have the ability to improve our cage, to enhance it, to enlarge it, to enrich its contents, to select who does or does not enter it. We are rats, but we are rats with options, whether we opt to put in the work to improve our environment is largely up to us.

Bruce Alexander is a Canadian psychologist, during the 70’s and 80’s Bruce and a team conducted multiple studies using rats in the area of addiction. The studies have collectively come to be knows as the Rat Park Experiments.

The team set out to explore the effects environment has on addiction. During the Rat Park Experiments the lab rats were provided two drinking options, one was a drop feeder with a sweetened morphine solution and the other was one with plain water.

The researchers created a unique environment accounting for the name “Rat Park” where the standard plain and small laboratory rat cage was altered. The Rat Park cage was 200 times the floor size of a standard cage, it included both sexes of rats free to interact, the space included food, balls and wheels and plenty of space for mating. Rat Park from the perspective of a lab rat was rat heaven.

Groups of rats of the same condition and age were placed within different environments in the studies, some placed in the standard small and undesirable lab cage, some placed in rat park and some were rotated from one to the other after set periods of time within their original setting depending on the study in question.

The caged rats in the small lab cages took very quickly to consuming morphine and in some cases consumed almost 20 times more morphine than the rats within rat park. The rat park rats within the happy and spacious environment would try the morphine water at times and occasionally go back to it, but showed a strong preference for plain water over the morphine. When the researchers added a drug to the water which blocked the opioid action of the morphine, rendering the fluid closer to sweet water than morphine, then the rat park rats were more inclined to consume it suggesting that within the improved environment of rat park the test animals were opting for plain water over sweetened morphine and to not consume the substance which altered their state and their colony seemingly due to their more optimal living conditions and physical space.

The researchers demonstrated that consideration in addiction studies should be placed on the test animal environment as important factors in results. The rat park experiments also show us what a difference environment can have on the process of addiction whereby progress of the addiction and even participation may be greatly affected by the direct environment in which we live. They even conducted a variation whereby the researchers forced consumption of morphine water for a period of time within standard cages and then after dependence was established the rats were introduced to rat park and even when established addiction environments were forced on them, the rats opted to return back to the plain water when placed into rat park, in the superior environment. There has been some criticism of the rat park studies over time, however the results stand and prove to be a very useful example of the need to consider environment when we talk about addiction and indeed many other topics of research. (1)

My argument is that we are very similar to these rats in our cages. You might argue that no, we are superior in intelligence and consciousness, we have freedom, we are not forced into a cage by scientists as these rats were, we travel, we choose where we go, we chose our home if lucky enough to be able to do so, we chose what we eat, drink and where we go, where we work and all else.

I would argue that ever since the agricultural and the industrial revolutions when we as a species moved away from any form of nomadic lifestyle and we moved gradually away from being spread out across the lands and when we were once isolated to smaller and close knit communities that we have in a way now created a cage of sorts for ourselves, more and more we urbanise and compress and compound this change.

Cities, concrete, offices, apartments, supermarkets resulting in simplicity but also our world shrinking and leading to increased social isolation. We created these things through development and gradual removal from the lifestyle we evolved to live many thousands of years ago when we hunted, foraged, lived alongside friends and family, slept and rose to the sunshine and moved our bodies in a functional way. We see this current life as normal and for the current time it is, it’s what we know, however, our DNA does not recognise this necessarily as normal. In a way, these factors are our cage, our captors are simply the society and situation we were born into and so we can hack into our innate human requirements and feed our body and mind in the same way the creators of rat park provided the lab rats with everything they need. No, I am not suggesting that the answer is to go off grid, mountain man or woman style, the benefits of our compression are huge, the conveniences and the efficiencies of our lives have become epic in nature to the point that we, if even on a regular income are reasonable with our choices then we can eat and live literally better than kings and queens might have expected to only hundreds of years ago.

Further to this, some of us live in a cage of our own making. Our cage is made up of many things. Our home and its location, safety and cleanliness. Our friends or our family and their demeanour and influence on us. Our place of work and its culture or demands. Our decisions in the food we eat, the substances we consume and the way we move our bodies.

We very much have control over our environment, yes, some more than others, this is true, but most of us have control over at least a significant portion of our life and our environment and we often neglect to realise this. It is us who create our environment, it is you who makes your own rat park, or opts for the tiny lab cage. When we quit alcohol, we do not simply quit alcohol, we engage in a large and complicated process. If this were not the case then medication alone with no other intervention would be adequate and highly effective, but statistically this is not the case because, we must address our environment among other factors.

Keep it simple. Put on your lab coat and take stock of your cage. Figure out what works, figure out what serves you, figure out who adds to your environment and who subtracts from it. Figure out what it takes to change these factors which are not working for you, if not now, put in the steps for this change to occur. If you move too little, change this and reach for the running wheel and place that wheel back in your own version of rat park. If you have poisonous people around you, rats who bully you or make you question your worth amongst the other rats, rats who leave you feeling drained and not energised by their presence then move away from them in an appropriate way. If the other rats have crapped everywhere in your section of the park, clean it up and move them on. If your park lacks order, tidy it up. If your park lacks the right toys, where possible with resources available to you, place them in the park. You see what I mean with my ratty metaphors. We are in an environment of our own making and we can choose to optimise our own rat park to help ourselves in our addictions and to help us see that we can live without the sweet morphine water, we need not drink it. When we begin to tidy up our cage while we choose to consume the plain old water we set ourselves up for a darn good life in our own rat park.

Many of us have a past, a past which torments us, a past involving trauma or abuse or pain or unhappiness. These are our standard tiny lab cage. These occurrences set some of us up to feel like our environment is too small, cramped and devoid of pleasure even if this occurrence is within our mind alone, and so we may opt for an out, alcohol is the addictive substance for some, not morphine as was for the rats, but it would not matter, it is the same to reach for one addictive option removing us briefly from our thoughts and lives vs another, the difference is merely the substance and our overlord researchers have ensured that we have ample access to our poison, they even tried to tell us it tastes good, they packaged it attractively and told us it is abnormal not to use it. The alcohol is our own human version of the sweetened morphine water from rat park, we can choose not to drink it and improving our environment in any way we can will definitely help us to make this choice. I can not see your park, but you can, take stock and make note of what might be shrinking your cage.

You are the architect of your life, you write the study. The sweetened morphine to the rat and the alcohol to us is the wrong choice, the other rats have not realised it yet, but you can and you have.

You are not just a rat in a cage. Optimise your rat park and improve your chances of a life of freedom from alcohol.

REFERENCE

(1): Petrie, B. F (2016). "Environment is not the Most Important Variable in Determining Oral Morphine Consumption in Wistar Rats". Psychological Reports. 78 (2): 391–400.