Why are there withdrawal symptoms, what is the difference in bodily reactions when for instance an alcoholic and a non-alcoholic person drinks?
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It depends on the drug, but basically you have been feeding your brain a chemical it likes and has gotten used to, so when you stop taking it your brain and body gets kinda pissy about it.
So nicotine, the reason people smoke, is a stimulant. When you smoke you get a little bit of feel-good, and your body and mind becomes used to it. When you stop your body sends out signals saying “hey, I want my feel-good! I should be feeling different! Something is wrong!”
Some drugs can become such an important part of your life that stopping them too quickly will literally kill you. Alcohol withdrawals, for example, can kill you if it’s severe enough. Heroin withdrawals, ironically, will not. Weed is fat soluble so you basically wean yourself off when you quit, and that’s why you might hear people say it isn’t addictive.
You also have psychological addictions as well. That basically just means it is all mental and there isn’t a physical component to it.
Probably not what you are looking for, but this has always stuck with me
I once saw a documentary a long time ago that talked about what addiction is at a cellular level. And it was fascinating.
My memory could be way off. But what u remember is. Your cells have receptors that accept chemicals in your body. The more a receptor is used the more of them the cell will grow. To the point where the cell has no room for the receptors for the chemicals it needs to survive and do its job in your body.
So the act of becoming addicted to something is your cells growing too many receptors for whatever you are addicted to.
Hopefully someone with more knowledge than me on this can chime in. Because I would love to know more about this concept
Your body and brain have a bunch of locks/keyholes waiting to be filled by certain chemical “keys.” For example, there are keyholes in your brain responsible for making you feel happy when certain keys fill them.
Say you have 10 such keyholes naturally. On an average day, depending on what happens, you may fill 3-7 of them, and feel relatively sad or happy, accordingly.
But now someone gives you a substance that dumps 30 of those keys into your system. Suddenly you feel *real* good because all 10 keyholes are instantly filled. But your body also goes “Woah, I have 20 extra keys. Let’s make more keyholes so we can use all of them!”
So now you have 30 keyholes. As long as you keep using the drug that provides 30 keys, you feel pretty great. But say you stop using, all at once. You still have 30 keyholes, but are back to making only say… 3-7 keys. Now your body sees both cases as a *massive* deficit, and freaks out accordingly.
Depending on the keyhole being filled, this deficit can either make you super depressed, or feel massive pain. Or, if it’s a keyhole critical for normal biological function, it can even kill you.
With long-term heavy alcohol use, there is an affect on the production of a chemical called GABA in the brain. The brain likes to keep in balance, so produces more glutamate, which has excitatory effects on brain activity. Suddenly removing the alcohol takes away the depressive effects of GABA, leaving the glumate to have an unchallenged effect, leading to the brain sometimes going haywire, including seizures and death in the worst situations.
One distinction is PHYSICAL addiction versus PSYCHOLOGICAL addition. The physical addiction reasons are well-explained in other posts.
Things like heroine, meth, and cocaine are extremely physically addictive. They rewire your brain to expect the high amounts of the drug, and it’s a shock when it stops. The user will have varying degrees of health issues, all the way up to death, if they stop cold turkey. That’s why you see so many detox clinics giving controlled portions of the drug. Users need to be stepped down.
Other drugs don’t rewire the brain as hard. Like if I stopped smoking weed, I’d probably be grumpy about it, but you don’t see people going to the hospital with weed withdrawals.
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