Sugar, Beliefs, and Freedom: What Addiction Taught Me About the Brain

By Jackie Hudiburg

Addiction is so misunderstood. Most people who haven’t lived it assume it’s a willpower problem. I wish that were true — it would’ve been so much easier to fix. The reality is far messier: trauma, family patterns, brain chemistry, mental health, learned coping strategies — all of it can play a role. For me, the story started with something most people don’t take seriously: sugar.

When sugar went into my body it produced a craving I could never satisfy. I was told it was an allergy. My body had an abnormal reaction. So I removed it, and for months the craving was gone. I felt free. Then one holiday hot chocolate later, the familiar pattern returned. I binged, I cried, and I lay on my bed wishing I were dead. Same loop. Same shame. Same promises to myself — broken.

That relapse taught me a hard truth: sugar wasn’t the whole problem. If the substance alone were the issue, I wouldn’t have picked it back up knowing what I knew. I picked it up because it was familiar; because when I needed relief, it worked. Food soothed. Food buffered. Sugar offered comfort and ease when nothing else could. It served a purpose — until it didn’t.

The missing piece: my mind

What I didn’t see then was how much my mind had been practicing this pattern. Over years I had trained myself to respond to stress, pain, and emptiness in the same ways — and my thinking had become the script that directed those responses. I trusted my mind. I believed the stories it told me: This will make you feel better. This will bring you the relief you’re seeking.

Cleaning up my body cleared the fog enough to finally illuminate the unconscious beliefs running my life. That awareness was humbling — sometimes humiliating — because it meant admitting I’d been living by lies I didn’t even know I believed. But once you see the truth, you can’t unknow it. That’s where the real work begins.

What changed everything

Two shifts altered my path.

First, I stopped relying on awareness alone. Awareness felt good, but it didn’t change the old wiring. So I committed to true mindset work — honest, persistent practice of identifying and questioning the beliefs that had been steering me. Not airy platitudes or quick fixes, but the daily, sometimes ugly work of rewriting what I’d long accepted as true.

Second, I asked for a mentor — a coach, a spiritual guide— someone who could see what I couldn’t see in myself and who wouldn’t let me hide. Having another pair of eyes, another mind to mirror mine, made all the difference. It’s one thing to recognize a pattern; it’s another to be held accountable while you unlearn it.

Removing the substance was necessary, but not sufficient. You have to look at the brain patterns and the unconscious beliefs that reach for the substance in the first place. For me, cleaning the body opened a door. Coaching helped me step through it and start living differently.

You don’t have to do it alone

If you’ve been trying the same strategies and getting the same results, hear this: that is not failure — it’s feedback. The mind that built a habit and belief systems isn’t always the mind that can deconstruct it. That’s why coaching, consistent accountability, and mind-body approaches are powerful. They offer a different orientation to change: practical, relational, and action oriented.

You don’t have to be labeled an “addict” to relate to this — plenty of us are trapped in patterns that serve a purpose until they don’t. Scrolling until your shoulders ache. Eating to quiet an ache you can’t name. Over thinking, over-responsibility, numbing out. These behaviors offer comfort in the short term yet block us in the long term.

I tasted freedom. It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t quick. It was messy, slow, and humbling. But it was real — and sweeter than anything I’d chased in a binge.

If you’re ready to look honestly at what’s keeping you stuck, to see the stories that run under the surface, and to try something different with someone walking beside you, reach out. You don’t have to figure this out alone — and you don’t have to keep living the same loop. Freedom is possible. It’s waiting.