Are All Addictions The Same
Is addiction to shopping or texting the same as being hooked on drugs or alcohol? We know these things can affect your brain in many of the same ways. But experts don’t yet agree about how far those similarities go. If you feel you have a habit that’s out of control, talk to your doctor or a therapist.
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How Does Compulsive Checking Of Social Media Affect Your Mental Health
Compulsive checking of social media can have a negative effect on your mental health. For example, spending time on social media and addiction to social media are risk factors for anxiety and depression.
Researchers are still trying to understand the link between social media and mental health, but some theories have already been proposed. One explanation is that people who spend long amounts of time on social media and the internet have less time for face-to-face interactions. This negatively affects their mental health. Another explanation is that social media can cause pressure to fit in, which can be stressful and lead to poor mental health.
Dos When Discussing Addiction With A Loved One
Dos: Allow Them Time to Respond
Dont put too much pressure on your loved one to answer immediately to what youre saying. You can offer to assist them and explain how youll do so, but if you try to force them to make a decision on the spot, youll almost certainly face opposition.
Nobody enjoys being reminded that their actions are incorrect. Their sentiments of betrayal and hurt may fade over time, and theyll reflect on what youve said. Allow them the time and space they need to arrive at this conclusion on their own.
Dos: Educate Yourself
Addiction is a medical condition. You will have a better understanding of why your loved one is struggling if you educate yourself. The more you know about addiction and how it affects your loved one, the simpler it will be to communicate with them from a position of understanding and support.
You wont entirely get what its like to walk in their shoes, but you may demonstrate that you have some knowledge of their situation. Simply because you took the effort to learn about their condition, they may feel appreciative and supported. The ultimate goal is to make the other person feel less isolated.
Dos: Be Straightforward and Honest
In general, the greatest approach to communicate with others is to be open and honest. When speaking with someone who has an addiction, the same is true. Be specific about what you want to say to them, and dont be afraid to express your own views about the matter in a calm manner.
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Youth Experiencing Homelessness Are Often Not On The Streets
Alison pushes back on the usual image of homelessness when it comes to youth. Most people arent aware that a huge proportion of the youth homeless population arent necessarily on the street, she says. as in many other cities in Canada, homelessness is such a visible issuethe average person here encounters someone experiencing homelessness daily.
Lots of folks are staying with friends, theyre couch surfing, staying with other family members. They are homelessthey dont have a safe and consistent place to staybut theyre not the people you see on the street. They could be working at Starbucks or the grocery store.
Alcohol Dependence Can Contribute To Mental Health Problems
Anxiety, depression, or suicidality are common symptoms if you drink too much. Because drinking is harmful to basic brain functions, it can even affect the functioning of our erectile organs. Taking alcohol may affect your relationships with friends, partners, or family. Poorly performing on jobs could lead to your career-ending for good or even worse. Several factors in alcoholism contribute to depression and psychiatric disorders. Alcohol is an effective defense mechanism against aggression. But, when drinking alcohol for pleasure you may start an addictive cycle.
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Youre My Obsession: How To Recover From An Addictive Relationship
Are you in an addictive relationship with someone? Would you like to break free from your bondage and feel inner peace? Do you want to stop the obsessions, break the cycle of seeming insanity, and take back your life?
Then read on.
Addictions come in many forms. An addiction to a person involves obsessive thoughts about the relationship, feelings of hope, anticipation, waiting, confusion, and desperation. Addictive relationships are toxic and very powerful.
Healthy relationships do not involve constant drama and continual feelings of longing. Healthy relationships just are. When in a nonaddictive relationship, you simply know your loved one is available to you. You do not have to wonder, wait, or live in turmoil over your last or next encounter.
The first step in recovery is to face the truth. Identify your toxic person as the drug of sorts you are addicted to. Before you can break any addiction, you need to own the reality you have one. Acknowledgment is the beginning of your journey toward recovery.
To help you face the truth, get out your writing pad and begin the process. Start by writing the following:
Once you have faced the truth, commit to yourself to live in the truthto live in reality, no matter the cost. Recovery requires living in truth over living in fantasy. Addictive relationships are fantasies. You are in love with what you wish the person was, not what they are.
It is a vicious cycle.
Can A Bad Relationship Cause Mental Illness
I think that certain unhealthy relationships, such as codependent relationships or relationships that involve domestic violence, can cause secondary mental health issues such as low self esteem, anxiety, and post traumatic stress disorder. She also notes that unhealthy relationships are likely to increase stressors, …16 . 2017 .
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What It Means To Be Addicted To Someone
Although the word addiction is commonly used to describe intense craving, the clinical use of the term only applies if something is becoming destructive. As stated in my article, When Does Something Become an Addiction?
Something becomes an addiction if it begins to have significant harmful impacts on other areas of your life. In addition, the individual experiences craving, loss of control over the substance or behavior, and is unable to stop despite these harms.
Although strong healthy relationships often involve a high level of desire for the other person, the word addiction would only apply if this desire becomes destructive.
For example, codependent relationships often consist of one person focused on helping another person at the expense of meeting their own needs.
A common codependent scenario may consist of a spouse of a person with an addiction who feels the need to continually hold everything together. They take care of the household, make excuses for the other persons irresponsible behavior while neglecting their own needs, and losing a sense of their own identity.
This behavior may look like helping, but it is actually a form of enabling. As described in my article, When Does Helping Become Enabling?:
Helping becomes enabling when you diminish someone elses responsibility by not allowing them to experience the natural consequences of their behavior.
Lets take a look at what the research says about the origins of this unique form of addiction.
What Kinds Of Things Can Be Addictive
Addiction is a mental illness that involves the reward pathways of your brain. Anything that activates these reward pathways can become addictive. Some things, like sex and gambling, are more likely to do this than others. But really, pretty much anything that feels good can become addictive. It depends less on the behavior itself, and more on how that behavior makes you feel.
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What Causes Addiction To A Person
Since this form of addiction is so centered on seeking external validation, it is closely related to early childhood attachment experiences.
In a study titled, Psychological Correlates of Codependency in Women, they state:
An association was demonstrated between codependency and parental alcoholism, or history of childhood abuse, or both.
These early childhood experiences may increase a persons likelihood of developing codependent relationships. Early turmoil can instill a deep sense of distrust and relational insecurity.
Psychologists refer to this relational style as anxious attachment. Inconsistent displays of affection in childhood may result in a child being generally anxious, fearing potential abandonment. In adulthood, this results in distrusting others while simultaneously craving intimacy.
The lack of secure attachment can result in persons being highly dependent on relationships, often concerned about abandonment from a romantic partner. Rather than getting to the root of the issue, persons with this type of relational addiction seek short-term reassurance at the expense of long-term relational health and security.
Some of these short-term behaviors include the following:
- Trying to impress others to get their approval
- Trying to fix others
- Doing things to be perceived as the hero
- Excessive gift-giving
- Constantly adapting to fit in
Love Addiction And Well
There are three main theories of well-beingor classes of theoriesdiscussed throughout the literature . How one relates love addiction to well-being, and therefore to treatment, will depend upon the theory of well-being one finds most convincing.
The first class of theories concerning well-being are hedonistic theories, which are defined in terms of mental states. The simplest account of this type of view is that happiness, or pleasure is the only intrinsic good, whereas unhappiness or pain is the only intrinsic bad. More complex hedonistic views include a greater plurality of states of mind as possibly contributing to well being: for example, Freud is reputed to have refused analgesia when dying of canceralthough he was in great physical painon the grounds that he preferred to be able to think clearly in a state of torment than foggedly in a state of drug-induced comfort .
Yet however one construes this hedonistic mental-state view, it is clearly possible that a person could prefer to exist in a rapturous state of love, even though it might yield a number of adverse consequences in other areas of her life, due to its irrefutably high, intrinsic hedonic value. Indeed, in Western societies, being in love is widely considered to be an extremely valuable state, and possibly constitutive of a good life all on its own. This notion is captured in the ideal of dying for love with the implication that such a love might even be the very meaning of life.
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You Just Never Feel Your Best Self In Your Relationship
This is a very obvious sign of being addicted to a person. A relationship is supposed to make you feel better, to make you grow as a person, and to evolve. However, if you find yourself being anxious, feeling depressed, or having a nervous feeling in your stomach all the time, its really not good enough for you. You might not know what that feeling is but it keeps nagging you all the time and bothering you which leads to even more insecurities and fights.
Its odd, as you are usually so funny/ warm/ kind/ laid back, but in this relationship, its like you are someone else. You are uptight, sour, criticizing, you cant relax and you dont know why. In fact, sometimes you might not feel like yourself at all. And if you do try to be yourself, you are criticized or teased. So you find yourself instead of working to be someone or something else.
A good relationship strengthens your values and helps you move forward towards your goals. An addictive relationship tends to throw off your inner compass because it does not support who you are. Identifying addictive relationships becomes very difficult. When you are used to one, any signs of being addicted to a person that might be obvious to others might not be obvious to you. This more often than not leads to denial.
Your first step is identifying the signs of being addicted to a person. Now that youve done that, what will be your next?
Ending Codependency With Someone Who Is Addicted
If you are in a relationship with someone who struggles with addiction and find yourself covering up for them, making excuses, and trying to control their use, it can take a toll on you emotionally. Codependency does come from a place of love and a desire to protect, care for, and help your loved one. However, it is important to understand that you may think you are doing a person a favor by covering up for them and helping them to avoid the negative consequences of their substance use, but you are actually reinforcing their substance use. If you want to treat your codependency, there are things you can try, even though these may be difficult for you to do:
- Let your loved one face the consequences of their actions, no matter how hard this may be.
- Let them handle the things that they are responsible for.
- Do not feel guilty for your loved ones substance use, as this is their problem to solve.
- Tell them that you are concerned and that their substance use is a serious problem.
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What To Expect In Rehab
If your loved one has decided to enter a treatment program for their addiction, they can expect to first check-in and complete an intake interview. This will allow the program to create a plan tailored to their needs.
The next step involves detoxing to remove any substances from their body. This process can take anywhere from three to 14 days and can be aided by medications to ease withdrawal symptoms.
After detox, the next step involves therapy to help them adjust and develop new thought and behavior patterns that will support their long-term recovery.
Ways To Avoid Dopamine Dependence
Although it’s important to perform activities that release dopamine, for the sake of feeling good regularly, it is also vital that you don’t become dependent on that release.
It might be a shorter journey than you’d think to go from simply enjoying a pleasurable act on occasion and being hooked on it in a way that is harmful to your life .
Below are some ideas to help you have a healthy relationship with dopamine and help avoid dependence.
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How To Break Your Addiction To A Person
This article was co-authored by Samantha Fox, MS, LMFT. Samantha Fox is a Marriage & Family Therapist in private practice in New York, New York. With over a decade of experience, Samantha specializes in relationship, sexuality, identity, and family conflicts. She also advises on life transitions for individuals, couples, and families. She holds both a Masters degree and a Marriage and Family Therapy License. Samantha is trained in Internal Family Systems , Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy , Emotion Focused Couples Therapy , and Narrative Therapy.There are 15 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page.wikiHow marks an article as reader-approved once it receives enough positive feedback. In this case, 90% of readers who voted found the article helpful, earning it our reader-approved status. This article has been viewed 295,836 times.
An addictive relationship is characterized by the need to continue to engage with or ‘keep’ the person despite obvious negative consequences. This can happen in both romantic relationships and friendships. In these relationships, you may feel as if you give all you have to this person, while getting little fulfillment in return. If you’re struggling with an unhealthy attachment, you can start by analyzing what’s going on in the relationship, and then take some steps to break that obsessive attachment.
What Are Substance Abuse And Addiction
The difference between substance abuse and addiction is very slight. Substance abuse means using an illegal substance or using a legal substance in the wrong way. Addiction begins as abuse, or using a substance like marijuana or cocaine.
You can abuse a drug without having an addiction. For example, just because Sara smoked pot a few times doesn’t mean that she has an addiction, but it does mean that she’s abusing a drug and that could lead to an addiction.
People can get addicted to all sorts of substances. When we think of addiction, we usually think of alcohol or illegal drugs. But people become addicted to medicines, cigarettes, even glue.
Some substances are more addictive than others: Drugs like crack or heroin are so addictive that they might only be used once or twice before the user loses control.
Addiction means a person has no control over whether he or she uses a drug or drinks. Someone who’s addicted to cocaine has grown so used to the drug that he or she has to have it. Addiction can be physical, psychological, or both.
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Its Consumes Too Much Of Your Time
Self-help programs require you to devote your time toward pursuing a goal. In many cases, this can actually be a good thing. Focusing on yourself, your health, your self-care, and your emotional well-being are all things that are good for both your mind and body.
But if it feels like all of your time is consumed by your self-help pursuits, it might be a sign of a problem. Do you feel like you only have time to practice self-help? Have you given up other hobbies or are you avoiding friends, family, and work so you can work on self-help?
Drug Addiction Recovery Quote
Addiction recovery is one of the most challenging journeys of a persons life. Someone struggling with drug or alcohol abuse may wake up to tough days with no desire to get better.
Powerful quotes can save someone from the temptation of going down the relapse road. Addiction recovery sayings and quotes reinforce your focus on the recovery path. They ignite a desire to be better and promote the will to stay strong. By reading and digesting inspirational addiction recovery quotes, you increase your chances of staying on track. Their short but compelling message is the reason why they are passed for generations.
It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop. Confucius
Im not telling you it is going to be easy Im telling you its going to be worth it. Art Williams
Recovery is an acceptance that your life is in shambles, and you have to change. Jamie Lee Curtis
Recovery is about progression, not perfection. Unknown
Recovery didnt open the gates of heaven and let me in. Recovery opened the gates of hell and let me out! Anonymous
Your best days are ahead of you. The movie starts when the guy gets sober and puts his life back together it doesnt end there. Bucky Sinister
I think that power is the principle. The principle of moving forward, as though you have the confidence to move forward, eventually gives you confidence when you look back and see what youve done. Robert Downey, Jr.
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