Dealing With Anxiety And Depression By Self-Medicating

Are you or someone, you know, stuck in a cycle of self medicating some kind of uncomfortable feeling or maybe even an underlying mental health problem? Well, if so, this video is made especially for you. For those of you who are new here, welcome to Put the shovel down. This YouTube channel is designed to help you understand the science and psychology of addiction so that you can get five steps ahead of it and get back to living the life that you want to live. And hey, if you are new, introduce yourself in the comments. We just want to welcome you to our little community. So I know you've heard this concept before about self medicating. Maybe you've done this yourself. Maybe you've even said this before, or you may even be currently right now trapped in the cycle of self medicating. Now, the most common things that people tend to self medicate would be things like depression, anxiety, mood disorders, heartbreak, grief, all those really uncomfortable emotions. And to be honest, I can really relate to that. In fact, I think most people can really relate to that. When you're uncomfortable, you just want it to go away. When you don't feel good, you just want to feel better. That is a natural human response. There is nothing wrong with feeling that way. However, if you have found yourself in a pattern of using substances and medicate those uncomfortable feelings, you are going to quickly find yourself in a really bad situation. Let me explain why, okay? First and foremost, all feelings, even the uncomfortable ones, serve a purpose. It's like your body's warning system. Just like you have a physical pain response that is there for a purpose, it's there to tell you, hey, you're hurt somewhere, get some attention or take your hand off the stove or your leg is broken. You need that kind of warning system in order to be able to keep yourself safe and take care of yourself. Well, the uncomfortable emotions are also a warning system. It's like emotional pain. It is there to tell you something. Sadness serves a purpose. Sadness makes us withdraw inside of ourselves, really sort of step back from our everyday life, reflect on what's going on. Because maybe there's something happening in our life that shouldn't be and we need to stop moving forward for a period of time so we can figure that out. Even shame and guilt, those really nasty emotions, right? Even those serve a purpose. They're there to tell us when we've done something that's not consistent with our value system. We kind of feel bad about ourselves because we're acting in a way that we kind of know inside we really shouldn't be acting it's kind of like your moral compass. And that feeling is there to keep us on track and acting with integrity. Now, I know you could be thinking, okay, Amber, but what if you have like an anxiety disorder or a mood disorder where you have this big feeling that's not just a feeling that's trying to tell you something, but it's a full out disorder and it won't stop. Like a serious anxiety disorder. Well, here's the deal. Even in those situations, you've got to remember that that signal that you're just trying to turn off and make go away, it's still there to tell you something. It's there to tell you something is broken. Like if your leg were broken and if you use substances to cover it up, then you're actually in jeopardy of causing a lot more harm. And, and I'll explain in a minute. You are going to make it worse. Using substances only ever make these uncomfortable feelings worse. I'm gonna come back to that in just one second. Let's say you're hiking through the woods and you fall and you break your ankle. Now, in a temporary situation, you may have to do something that helps you get through that and you may have to walk on that for a little while. And you may need medicine for that to get to safety or maybe even get to a hospital and get some help for your broken ankle. But what would not be helpful is if you just took a bunch of pain medicine and then kept walking on your broken ankle. And then when it hurt, you just took more pain medicine and you kept walking on your broken ankle. You're already starting to imagine the kind of damage and destruction that's going to cause. Your ankle is going to be completely busted. Because yes, the pain medicine takes care of the symptom, but does not fix the problem. And when we just keep trying to push forward, even though something's broken or there's a problem, it tends to make it worse and worse and worse. Now this next reason, this one might be the most important reason why self medicating is really kind of like a bad idea. Now, people can self medicate with all kinds of substances. These right here are the top two substances that people tend to self medicate with. But you can swap those out and put any other addictive substance in there as well. All of the addictive substances. When you start using them regularly, your body starts trying to fight back from those addictive substances to kind of put you back in your homeostasis or put you back in your normal status place by producing neurochemicals that are the opposite, that cause the opposite effect of whatever the substance does. So for example, let's say you're using stimulants to help you fight through long stressful days at work or huge school workload or test or something like that. Well, if you abuse stimulants long enough, your body starts to fight back against that by producing like, more like calm you down chemicals. This is actually how tolerance begins to build, which is why at the end of a stimulant binge, you have a big giant crash. And so what happens to people who are abusing stimulants is they become more and more and more tired and unmotivated and lethargic. So you actually, the problem that you're trying to fight becomes worse and worse and worse. And let me tell you what, you see this happening really significantly when you're trying to use a substance to fight anxiety. And this is probably the most common thing that people try to self medicate because it's really uncomfortable feeling. Maybe you're trying to use alcohol or some kind of benzo or something like that. Well, as you use those depressant drugs, trying to calm yourself down, you know, make yourself feel more comfortable and less worried, your brain is producing more anxious brain chemicals, which in turn is making your anxiety go up, up and up. So what happens is you get in this cycle of needing the substance to give you the short term relief. But in the long run, the problem is getting bigger and bigger and bigger as this whole cycle goes on. Another example of this that I see really regularly is when people use alcohol to medicate some kind of grief or loss. Maybe you lost a loved one or you lost a relationship that was important to you. That feeling of heartbreak is excrucia. I don't want to minimize it in any kind of way, but the surefire way to make sure you do not get over a heartbreak, grief, loss, whatever is to be drinking in order to make that happen. Drinking alcohol actually keeps you stuck in that heartbreak. It will make sure that you don't get past it. And alcohol will make you relive that loss over and over and over. So not only are you not getting past it, but the loss becomes bigger and bigger and bigger in your mind. And on top of all that, your anxiety is getting more and more and more. I think you're probably starting to see the pattern now. So where you started out using this substance to help medicate something initially, eventually whatever that thing was you were trying to fix is now worse and worse and worse. And you get to the point where you have to use that substance, because now that problem is so big that you have to use the substance, or you might go into some kind of withdrawal or feel sick. This is exactly how you can get stuck in the cycle of addiction. In fact, if you are using substances to self medicate, you are at such a higher, major, higher risk for developing an addiction problem. Because whatever that thing is that you're medicating, you're kind of like needing it all the time. And so you're gonna be using more and more often. You build tolerance. You need more and more of that substance. The problem just keeps getting bigger and bigger till eventually you find yourself trapped. Now, I know it is really scary to think about letting go of that substance, because it eventually gets to the point where you feel like it's the only thing that's allowing you to hang on to your sanity or function at all. But just remember, at the same time, it's the thing that's causing you to lose your sanity and not be able to function. And there's only one way out of this trap. And I have the perfect person to tell you all about that. Up next, I want you to listen to Andrew's story, who absolutely found himself in a cycle of medicating depression. So let's listen to what Andrew has to say about how that worked for him and how he eventually broke out of that cycle.