One mechanism behind many diagnoses

Paper 8 · Pressure, Hysteresis, and Experience · Read on Zenodo

Addiction, rumination, ADHD, PTSD, phobias, ageing. In the clinic they are treated separately, each with its own theory. This paper proposes that they share one underlying machinery: the brain runs races, repeated choices dig tracks, and pressure decides which route wins. It is a theoretical framework and an invitation to test it. It is not medical advice, and it does not tell any particular patient what to do.

A field without a shared map

If you look at how mental disorders are understood and treated, it resembles a landscape without a shared map. Addiction has its own research tradition and its own treatments. Depression has another. ADHD a third. PTSD a fourth. They rarely talk to each other, and a treatment that works in one corner is rarely tried in another.

This paper asks whether some of that division is artificial. Not whether the diagnoses are wrong, but whether the same few mechanisms recur beneath them all, and whether we miss treatments because we sort by tradition instead of by mechanism.

One mechanism under it all

The framework builds on the same picture as the rest of the site, the one I describe through learning. The brain is full of small races: several possible responses run at the same time, and the one that reaches the finish first wins. Every time a route wins, it digs its track a little deeper, so it wins more easily next time. Physicists call this hysteresis: a system that carries traces of its own history. It is what we ordinarily call a habit.

The new piece in Paper 8 is pressure. How quickly a race is settled depends on how worked up the system is. When you are calm, there is time for several routes to compete, and you can manage to choose. As the pressure rises (stress, a triggering cue, withdrawal), the race is settled faster, and then the route with the deepest track wins before the alternatives even get going.

Why willpower loses to addiction

That explains something that is otherwise hard to understand. A person with a deep addiction can, in calm moments, genuinely mean it when they say no. The problem arises when the pressure rises. Then the race is settled too fast for what we call choosing to happen at all.

Willpower is itself just a route in the race: an intention to abstain that has to win out over a route with decades of deep track. Under high pressure it is the slower one. It loses, not because the person is weak, but because the machinery settles the matter before the intention can gather enough to win. That makes addiction a mechanical problem, not a moral one.

Treat at the base, not at the top

The most important practical idea in the paper is a way of thinking about friction as a column. Picture pressure running upward through layers: at the bottom the biological (sleep, diet, inflammation, the autonomic nervous system), in the middle the emotions, at the top the thoughts and the behaviour. The pressure a clinician sees at the top is not only the top's own. It is the sum of everything welling up from below, plus the top's own contribution.

That gives a clear difference between two kinds of intervention. If you treat at the top (for example medication that dampens a particular thought or emotional response), you lower only that one layer, while the base keeps sending pressure upward. If you treat at the base (sleep, movement, nutrition, calm in the nervous system), the whole column above it drops, because what was welling up becomes smaller at the source.

This is also why the framework places what we often call "lifestyle" or "support" (sleep, movement, diet, community) as mechanically important interventions in their own right, not just as something alongside the real treatment. They hit the base of the column, and so they have a reach that a single intervention higher up does not. These are established findings, gathered under one picture, not new claims.

You can only add, never subtract

One last point ties it together. You cannot subtract anything from a human system. You can only add. A track that has been dug cannot be dug away again. That means some interventions that sound intuitive are in fact mechanically impossible: to "stop the craving" in the middle of a race, or to "remove the track". Those routes do not exist.

What works is always something added: a lower base (so the race is not settled so fast), competing routes (new experience that can in time win instead), or preventing the race from starting at all. The last one is decisive, because once the pressure has crossed the threshold and the race is running, it is mechanically too late. That is why prevention is stronger than cure. The reason is purely mechanical: the machinery is built that way.

Established practice discovered this long ago without putting words to why: removing triggering cues from the surroundings, starting the good habit before you can think against it (BJ Fogg: "you have won once you have your shoes on"). The framework's contribution is to explain why it works.

Seven conditions, the same mechanism

The paper works through seven clinical patterns as different settings of the same machinery:

• Addiction: a route with an extremely deep track that wins under pressure before the alternatives can keep up.
• Rumination: tracks dug deeper and deeper on negative interpretations, until they win on their own.
• ADHD: a base that is oversensitive to pressure on several axes at once.
• The autism spectrum: a substrate configuration with a different balance between the routes, not a fault in the machinery.
• PTSD and OCD: tracks laid down wrong after the race has been settled.
• Severe phobias: a largely innate setting of the same knobs.
• Ageing and dementia: what happens when the substrate itself slowly breaks down, and the tracks are no longer renewed as well.

The point is not to erase the differences. It is that if the same machinery lies underneath, then a mechanism that works in one corner ought to be worth trying in another. That is the kind of prediction the framework exists to make testable.

What it means (and does not mean)

This is a hypothesis and an invitation, not a treatment manual. The paper offers 28 testable predictions, several of which can be examined on already-collected, publicly available data without gathering new data. That is how a framework like this is meant to be used: it says what can be tested, not what a particular person should do.

And it should explicitly be read as a theoretical framework, not as a new diagnostic manual or as medical advice. It stands alongside a professional assessment of the individual person and does not replace one. If something here rings true about you or someone you care about, then it is a conversation to have with a professional, not a conclusion to draw from a website.

What I don't know

There is no clinical co-author on the paper yet, and that is a real limitation: the framework is built by a theorist, not tested in a clinic. No new data was collected for it either. It is a gathering of existing findings, set together under one mechanism.

The most concrete biological claims (for example about vitamins and cofactors at the base of the column) are framed as predictions, not as something that has been proven. And the maths in the paper is deliberately simplified. It shows the shape of the mechanism, but it is not calibrated to give numbers you can compute further from. The next step is collaboration with people who can test the predictions properly.

Read the paper

The full article is freely available on Zenodo (concept DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20059865):

Read on Zenodo → · Technical version · Dansk version

Related on this site:

• Paper 1 (Friction Theory) — the framework behind races and tracks, which this paper applies in the clinic.
• The Learning page — the same mechanics from the opposite end: how tracks get built.
• The Memory page — why a dug track fades, and what keeps it alive.

The family of clinical papers (same framework, different angles):

• Paper 8b — Compound Race Pathology: how several weak links in the same chain add up to disease over time.
• Paper 8c — Research Program: concrete study designs that can test the framework against reality.
• Paper 8d — Treating the Base: the preventive side, on cofactors below the diagnostic threshold.