We’ve all heard of addiction, tolerance and withdrawal syndrome, but what exactly do these terms mean?
Generically, substance abuse disorder is understood to apply to all substances that when introduced into the body affect or alter mood and behavior, including legal drugs such as alcohol or tobacco, or illegal substances such as marijuana, cocaine, LSD, etc. .
- Today.
- We have surprising data on the prevalence of psychoactive substance use: more than 15 years.
- 91% of the population has ever consumed alcohol and 64% have used tobacco.
- Which is even more worrying when looking at substance use between the ages of 14 and 18: 66% used alcohol last month and 37% used tobacco.
Some of the fundamental aspects to understand why addiction occurs are the processes of tolerance and withdrawal, the two are intimately related to each other, since they appear through the compensatory response of the body, but before explaining this, we need to understand what happens in our brain when we use a drug.
Most psychoactive substances are closely related to the brain’s reward system and dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that is released when we perform desirable behaviors, and its function is that they are strengthened to repeat them in the future. Price, that body gives us fun to do something that looks great.
Drugs cause or even simulate the release of dopamine into our reward system; some, such as alcohol, do so through indirect mechanisms, and others, such as amphetamines, have a similar chemical composition and act like dopamine.
This false release during drug use causes the activation of our reward system, a set of mechanisms that allows to associate certain situations with a sense of pleasure, in this way our brain thinks that consumption is beneficial for the body, although in reality it is very harmful.
Now, these large dumps of?Fake dopamine?also cause a strong imbalance in the homeostasis of the individual. This leads the body to activate its regulatory mechanisms to fill this void. This situation causes tolerance and withdrawal syndrome, a process explained below.
Our body’s regulatory mechanisms modulate brain chemistry to prevent the appearance of an internal imbalance, such as substance use. Let’s see what it’s all about.
Imagine that every Saturday you go out to a party and drink a few glasses of alcohol, like alcohol is a drug that simulates endorphins, its endogenous opioid system becomes overactive generating dopamine release and a sense of satisfaction, which happens is that if this behavior repeats itself, your body learns what will happen and generates a compensatory response.
This is when drug tolerance kicks in. The next Saturday you go out, your brain, since it already knows that you are going to consume alcohol and that it will cause an imbalance, will lower your basal levels. ‘endorphins. This will make your endogenous opioid system depressed, but after drinking alcohol it will return to normal. Your subjective feeling will be that alcohol does not affect you and that you will have to drink more to compensate for the compensatory drop due to tolerance.
Now look, what if you suddenly quit alcohol, what about that compensatory answer?Even if you’ve reduced or eliminated consumption, the compensatory response still appears, if we go back to the example above, when you go out on a Saturday with no intention of drinking alcohol, your brain will think about it, as that’s what it had. As a result, your endorphin levels will decrease significantly and if you are not compensated for your alcohol consumption, it will cause a lot of anxiety. This is called withdrawal syndrome.
Tolerance and withdrawal syndrome are obvious symptoms of an addiction disorder. When tolerance begins to appear, there will also be withdrawal when you stop consuming the substance. In addition, the onset of withdrawal syndrome usually lead to the use of the substance, to reduce the anxiety it causes We need to consider these biological mechanisms to understand the processes of addiction.
Addiction disorder is a global health problem, it needs to be understood that this causes a variety of social, professional, personal and health problems, and if we want to improve people’s quality of life, it is essential to know the mechanisms of action. to raise awareness of the risks of their use.