Dallas Bragg explains how meth hijacks the brain's reward system to crave intensity itself. Celebrations, promotions, breakups—any high-arousal event can trigger relapse because the nervous system learned to chase the dopamine spike, not the feeling. For people in recovery, intensity becomes the real enemy.
Meth does the amplification better than almost anything on earth, right? Which means for a man in chemsex recovery, a celebration is not a neutral event. A celebration can set off that reward loop. And why your brain does this is that there's this mechanism, as plainly as I can understand it, is that during active use, your brain learned a rule. Mm-hmm. Big feeling use. Not big bad feeling, but big feeling. So the nervous system doesn't file pleasure, pain, good, bad in separate cabinets. It just files intensity, emotion. So a promotion at work and a breakup are going to both spike arousal, both flood you with dopamine, both push you outside your normal operating parameters. And if the learned response to intensity is going to use— is for you to use, then intensity itself is going to be your trigger. So regardless of whether the intensity is good or if it's bad, it's just intensity.
