Abusing drugs can have a severely negative affect on a person’s mental health, physical health, family life, and social life.
Drug abuse can lead to feelings of depression, isolation, anxiety, and even feelings of hopelessness.
These negative repercussions from drug abuse will ultimately lead a user to feel as if they are incapable of managing their everyday life.
All of your physical actions stem from a poor mind so in this article we will focus on what drugs do to the brain, and how it negatively affects you.
Drugs and poor mental health are inevitably tied together, people often experience trauma or post traumatic stress disorder and resort to drug use.
Poor handling of stress will result in drug abuse and these things will lead the user to use more and more, people who abuse drugs use drugs as a crutch to escape the stresses of their everyday life.
People who never practiced effective coping mechanisms often turn to drug use which can then lead to permanent mental illnesses.
When using cocaine, this drug can cause psychosis or schizophrenia.
Drug use can also worsen mental health issues that already exist in a person such as anxiety and depression.
Someone who abuses drugs to cope with things like anxiety does not realize that this acts as a double edged sword and typically induces more intense feelings of anxiety, to add to that, a user who is experiencing withdrawals will feel extremely anxious especially if using opioids, during their withdrawal and what they experience will be completely opposite of how they feel when abusing their choice of drug.
With long term drug abuse, the brain physically changes, the brain shrinks and its ability to process information is damaged.
The part of your brain that is known as the limbic system supports emotions, behavior, long term memory, and motivation is affected by heavy drug abuse.
When someone uses drugs, the limbic system releases dopamine and this makes the user feel good temporarily but with prolonged abuse, the brain will stop making as much dopamine as it used to, as a result the brain will not receive rewarding input and the user will have a hard time experiencing pleasure or happiness.
This is a lot of the reason why people who abuse drugs do not enjoy or take interest in doing the things that once brought them joy.
The frontal lobe of your brain also shrinks.
This is the part of your brain that focuses on decision making and knowing right from wrong.
When the frontal part of your brain is not functioning properly, you can not control the impulses to abuse drugs.
Without proper care of the frontal lobe, the amygdala, the emotional center of you brain, will become over sensitive to stress causing extreme mood swings and constant thought of panic and worry.
Many addicts are constantly in a state of feeling unsafe.
The cellular structure of the brain will be affected as well
The gray cells control thinking and emotions and the white cells control communication and comprehension.
Persistent drug use will eventually kill all of the white cells in the brain, leading to information not being properly passed on through your brain.
The brain can fix this using the remaining white cells but this requires abstinence and time.
The brain will eventually heal on its own without drug use, new pathways can be made, and the brain will once again be able to function properly as it once did.
There is hope for full recovery in the brain and once your brain and mental health is recovered, it will begin to reflect in your everyday decisions and you will see a new, better, more productive life unfold right before your eyes.