The first time you use drugs or drink alcohol can be voluntary. However, continued and frequent substance use can cause adverse changes in your brain. As a result, you may experience uncontrollable cravings and compulsively use drugs or alcohol despite their harmful effects on every aspect of your life. It’s critical to seek professional help if you can’t control your substance use.
At Purpose Healing Center, we know that overcoming your addiction is more likely when you join our Arizona detox center. We want nothing more than to see you win the fight against addiction and live a purposeful, healthy, substance-free life.
What Is Drug And Alcohol Addiction?
Addiction to drugs or alcohol is a chronic disease. It happens when you lose control over your substance use and can’t stop drinking alcohol or using drugs, even when it harms you or others. Addiction might involve taking illegal drugs or even prescription medications more often and in higher doses than prescribed. How quickly you become addicted depends on different factors, such as your drug choice.
You can drink alcohol or use marijuana for years without developing an addiction. However, some drugs cause addiction pretty fast. You can easily become addicted to drugs like heroin after only using it several times.
At the same time, you can become addicted to a substance without abusing it. For instance, some prescription medications like opioid painkillers are highly addictive, so you can get addicted even when taking them as instructed by the doctor.
When you’re addicted, you’ll actively seek your substance of choice, no matter the adverse consequences. But the more you abuse drugs or alcohol, the more severe your addiction becomes.
How Addiction Affects Your Brain
Your brain releases the feel-good hormone dopamine, which gives you feelings of pleasure whenever you do something you truly enjoy. This is what encourages you to repeat the activity. When you have an addiction, using alcohol or drugs makes your brain release an excessive amount of dopamine, exaggerating the pleasurable feelings. Your brain quickly learns to connect substance use with this euphoria and sends out signals in the form of intense cravings for you to use drugs or alcohol again.
Continuous exposure to these abnormally high amounts of drug or alcohol-induced dopamine release makes your brain try to bring this stimulation down to a more manageable level. One way it does this is by decreasing the amount of dopamine produced and reducing the number of dopamine receptors. These changes desensitize your brain to alcohol or drugs and also reduce your brain’s response to natural rewards like social interactions and food.
So when you’re addicted, you lose the ability to enjoy the activities that used to bring you pleasure, experience severe cravings for drugs or alcohol, and require more of the substance the next time you want to get high.
You Can Beat Your Addiction
At Purpose Healing Center, our Arizona detox center has what you need to fight and overcome addiction. We have a team of supportive, experienced, and caring addiction experts who will be with you every step of your sobriety journey. Our goal is to help you get your life back on track. Ready to seek help for your addiction? Contact us today to get started: https://purposehealingcenter.com/contact/.
