(Sorry for the long post, I tend to ramble when I write )

From what I remember now that I'm struggling with it more: compulsory* addictions are more of a symptom of a deeper problem rather than an illness themselves. It's definitely not a choice as it becomes so habitual that you might not even realize you're doing it. Usually the core problem stems from a deep seated depression, isolation, or a lack of needs being met. Once you start to meet those needs, in my own experience, the addictive behavior diminishes over time. This also explains why such addictions or maladaptive behaviors come and go, depending on if your needs are being met.

This view also takes away the negative bias we have towards addictions and lets us focus on the underlining issues. Much like having a fever, you don’t get angry with someone when they are too hot, you look to the underlying virus which the body is trying to cope with. To keep with this narrative, if the person is way too hot, you may need to help cool them down, similar to going ‘cold turkey.’ But, unless the underlying issue is resolved, going cold turkey alone, much like just trying to keep a sick person cooler, won’t do anything.

On the more extreme end, maybe the body is getting too hot due to an issue that isn’t there, much like an autoimmune disorder. Again, this is just your body trying a solution that appeared to work in the past. In some regard, these maladaptive behaviors do meet that need, otherwise you wouldn’t do it. But again, they are still maladaptive, and usually further interfere with your ability to meet these needs properly. So, with reoccurring addictions, your mind is just trying a method it believes helps with the situation (or worse, maybe it actually did resolve the situation in the past, like winning when gambling to pay off a debt, further re-enforcing the cognitive bias. Those suck). It's up to everyone to ask how can I best meet my needs?

So no, there isn't a way to "Man up and quit." What may have happened during these events were people 'miraculously' got over their compulsory addiction is when that core problem was finally addressed and solved. But, instead of saying that a long series of small good events, choices, environments, and support groups is what actually helped; we just say "I pulled myself up from my bootstraps,' because it sounds great to think that we were able to solve our own problems without anyone else... . Inner Strength and Self-reliance are big ideals for our culture and do be fair, it can be extremely difficult to see the effect of millions of tiny insignificant events. It's much easier to point at one instance where we said we were going to fix ourselves and have it actually happen. Even though we easily forget the thousands of other times we say we will, but nothing happens.

TL;DR: Cognitive Bias is extremely powerful. If you say you’re going to do something and it happens, your brain will point to when you said you will do it and believe that is the exact reason why it happened. Otherwise, you’re more likely to forget you said anything at all.

*Drug additions are much different as they can be easily shown to create actual addiction pathways in the brain similar to an illness. (Unless of course those 'findings' are in fact scare tactics to push an agenda rather than any real scientific research. Either way: choice is removed and always remember to keep moderation in everything.)