eli5 I’m looking for a visual on what happens inside your body during opiate withdrawal. So far I picture my brain screaming at me wanting food.
In: Chemistry
Our bodies are basically computers controlled by chemicals. There’s two things happening with this addiction, and one of them is the most dangerous.
Part of how we learn “good” things is our brain’s supposed to release a chemical when we do something like eating a meal or having sex. The chemical makes us feel good, but also changes behavioral parts of our brain to make us want to do the things that released that chemical again. But because it’s not good to just eat or just have sex, there’s some safety measures where if you keep doing that thing too much the brain’s supposed to stop paying attention to the “good” chemical. So we stop feeling good if we do the thing and seek something else. It’s pretty complex.
Opioids cause the brain to release a lot of that “good” chemical. Then your brain gets used to “when I take this drug I feel good”. But because it keeps happening, the brain starts ignoring some of that chemical. But the drug was making the brain release *so much* of it that nothing else presents itself as “do this to feel good again” but “take more of the drug”.
Think of it if like, eating a good pizza released 10 points of happy chemicals. Taking one pill could release *50* points. So your brain gets “numbed” to the point that it ignores 50 points. Now you’d have to eat 6 pizzas to feel happy. But clearly you can’t eat 6 pizzas, so instead you take 2 pills to get 100 points of happy chemicals. This escalates fast.
The second part is more dangerous. Opioids mess with part of your brain that releases a chemical that means we’re awake. That chemical governs our heart rate, breathing, and a lot of other important processes. Opioid addicts end up with a brain that only produces that chemical if they’re on the opioid. That means if they quit, the chemical isn’t produced and their body starts behaving like it’s asleep. The heart rate will slow, breathing will slow, etc. The problem is the body isn’t a great computer, and even when we’re asleep the amount of that chemical isn’t supposed to get lower than a certain amount or else you could stop breathing or the heart could beat TOO slowly. For an addict, being off of opioids can easily cause the brain to make so little of that chemical they basically sleep to death.
So yes, your body’s screaming at you, but it’s not screaming at you to eat food or play video games. It wants you to take more pills, and it tells you that taking more pills is the only thing that could possibly make you happy, and when you take them it tells you no, that wasn’t *enough*, you’re not going to be happy if you don’t take *more*. The brain in this case can only move from “it’s about lunchtime” to “I’M STARVING TO DEATH I GUESS I’LL JUST DIE” and there’s nothing in between anymore, because these drugs CHANGE how the brain’s physical ‘machinery’ produces the chemicals that regulate your body.
That’s why it’s so hard to get people off. They *need* something that tricks the brain into making the right chemicals, but it *also* has to be something that changes the brain back to how it was.
Latest Answers