Dual Diagnosis Treatment Center in Pullman
Additionally, addiction and physical dependence can be different. If you suddenly stop using the substance after becoming physically dependent, you may experience withdrawal symptoms. Tolerance happens when a certain dose of medicine loses some effectiveness over time.
To put it another way, if opioids are used to manage pain regularly, you may develop a tolerance or become dependent upon them. This does not necessarily mean you have an addiction. Only a few people are able to become addicted to opioids even though they have been prescribed properly and under the direction of a physician.
As a person keeps using drugs, their brain changes by making it harder for cells in the reward circuit to respond. This makes the person feel less high than they did when they took the drug for the first time. This is called tolerance. They might try to get the same high by taking more of the drug. These changes in the brain often make the person less and less able to get pleasure from things like food, sex, or social activities that they used to enjoy.
Long-term use also causes changes in other chemical systems and circuits in the brain, which can affect learning, judgement, decision-making, stress, memory, and behaviour, among other things. Even though many drug users know these bad things will happen, they still take drugs. This is the nature of addiction.
Why do some people get hooked on drugs but not others? No one thing can tell if someone will become dependent on drugs. Risk for addiction is affected by a number of things. The more risk factors a person has, the more likely it is that they will become addicted to drugs.
Biology. About half of a person's risk for addiction comes from the genes they were born with. Drug use and addiction risk may also depend on a person's gender, race, and whether or not they have other mental disorders.