How Addiction Changes The Brain

Okay, we've got a good one for you. Today we are going to be talking about the science of addiction. We're gonna really nerd out here, and we're gonna take some deep look at how the brain is impacted when it comes to addiction. And the reason why this is so helpful is because I'm gonna help you understand on a scientific level how or why the most frustrating symptoms of addiction happen. Like, for example, why does someone who has an addiction make the same mistake over and over again? Or why can't they see how their addiction is hurting the people around them? Or the question, the one we all want to know, right, which is why can't people with addiction just stop? We're going to take. Take a look and try to answer those questions for you. And I think by the end of this video, you're going to have an understanding about why those things happen, because it seems so perplexing. The thing about dealing with addiction is it doesn't follow any of the normal human rules. Like, it's. It's almost like you're in a different universe. I call it the upside down world, like from Stranger Things. It's like all of a sudden, you're in the upside down world, and the same rules do not apply. And if you don't understand what the new rules of the game are, you're just going to spin around and around in the same circles and get more and more frustrated. So I really feel like when you understand the brain science of the issue, you're going to understand why it is the way it is, and that's going to help you make better, more strategic decisions, which, you guys know is the whole goal of these videos is 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. All right, now, most people know that there's a brain chemical called dopamine, which is a reward brain chemical, which basically means it makes you feel good, that is involved with addiction. And I feel like most people know that or have heard of that. And I do have other videos on that. So I'm not going to cover that particular part of it today. What I'm going to take a look at today is more on a sort of. If you backed up the camera a little bit and looked on a larger scale at the brain and the areas of the brain and how that's being impacted, not necessarily the dopamine issue. Like I said, there are other videos on that. Okay. So the base Piece of information you really have to understand. And some of you probably heard this particular piece, is that the human brain can really be broken down into three brains. You have the really more primitive, most people call it like your lizard brain, which is the part of your brain that's connected here to your, your spine. And that part of the brain houses your automatic body functions, like your heartbeat and your respiration and some really important like reflexes. It is the survival part. It keeps you alive. And so that is at the basic brain. And then the next part of a mammals, mammals have this part is you have a limbic system which is the emotional part of your brain. And that is important for survival because it keeps you connected to other people and things, which is important for mammals to connect to other mammals. And then lastly you have this, what you probably think of when you think of the brain, which is all this front matter just called your frontal cortex. Now that part of the brain is responsible for critical thinking and decision making. The best, easiest way to understand what goes on here is to really understand that different parts of your brain have different power levels. Like if you think about like an old school video game, you know, they're different parts have different amount of power. The part that keeps you alive has the most power, which is kind of a good thing, right? Because it's the part keeping you alive. And then the second most powerful part is the emotional part. And the third but least most powerful part is the thinking part. Well, what happens when you get addiction is it turns up the volume, it activates your lizard brain, your survival part of your brain, which once you activate that because it's more powerful, it can kind of like override the other parts of the brain, the emotional part and the thinking part. And that from a really sort of backed up perspective is how and why someone keeps making, keeps doing things despite the consequence. Because that's a real simple definition of addiction, right? A person continues to do something over and over, even though it's causing them a lot of consequences. And it doesn't make sense. And that's why it's that survival part of the brain which is controlling. It can override, overpower the rest of the brain function because it's keeping you alive. So that's why it's the strongest. And it can, it can sort of run the show if it wants to or needs to. And that's what happens with addiction. But the other really, really important part to understand here is that the volume or the strength level, decision making part of your brain is turned way down. So let's take a look at some of the functions of this decision making part of your brain. Here's some things that happen in that part. Now, the frontal part of the brain can be broken down into all these other little parts. And I started to give you all those technical terms, but to be honest, I was looking, I was like, oh, my gosh, this overwhelms me. It's going to overwhelm y'. All. So let's not get that far into it because that just makes you. That just makes your head hurt. But one of the parts of your frontal lobe helps you to evaluate, make evaluations in shifting conditions. Let me give you an example. If you were at an amusement park and it was pouring down rain, the cost of an umbrella might go way up, or the value of an umbrella might go way up, or a rain jacket or something like that. But if you're at an amusement park and it's like sunn hot, the value of a raincoat probably goes way down. So it's that ability to reevaluate situations on an ongoing basis based on the environmental factors at the time. Now, I know that seems kind of complicated, but if your evaluation system is either turned off or like, turned down to like, a bare minimum, then you can imagine that a person with an addiction doesn't have the ability to evaluate things accurately. For example, like evaluate the value of a $30 pain pill versus that I need to take three times a day, which is not, you know, 90 bucks a day, bare minimum, versus, you know, what it takes to make that money, right? Or what you need to pay your bills, to pay your rent or your electric or your child support. The ability to evaluate those things gets dampened or turned down. That's one of the things that this frontal lobe does for you. The other thing that it does is it gives you the ability to read, pay attention to and evaluate social cues. Now, this one is really important. Family members listen to this, because I hear family members say all the time, right? Like, it's like, why can't they see how their behavior is hurting me or us or, you know, their family? And there's a specific part of the brain that allows you to do that, to pay attention to the social cues, to pay attention to the relational factors that are going on in your life. In this part of the brain, the volume is turned way down so that. So when you're in active addiction, you physically, biologically, like, don't have a good ability to do this. And it can maybe sometimes it's a little More, sometimes a little less. But as a whole, it's just helpful to think about the power of that part of the brain being dialed way back to a bare minimum. Think about when your Internet's running slow and you get that like circle and it's like loading, loading, loading. Think about that with these parts of the brain. It's like it's there, but it's not quite getting up to speed. It's like you got a slow connection happening there. The other thing that the frontal lobe does is it detects errors, right? This frontal lobe is, the whole thing is about decision making. It's about weighing what is going on in the world so you can make good decisions. And these are just the different parts of those kinds of decisions. And the part that allows you to see mistakes and errors, that part is dialed way down. And lastly, the part that allows you to inhibit behavior, that's like impulse control. All that comes right here in that frontal lobe. And that part is turned down. So what all that means is your ability to say stop or that's not a good choice or you know, damaging my relationships. Your ability to see those things and to respond to those things is very much damaged. Now, it's not permanently damaged, but while you're in active addiction, that's just not working appropriately. And I think that's why dealing with someone who it, who's in denial, it's just so frustrating. It's like, how can you not see this? Like, oh my gosh, it's so obvious. How can you not see that this is destroying your life and, and everyone else's life around you? And the reason is because they literally can't see it. And in the moments when they can see it, their ability to evaluate how important those things are versus getting the next hit, drink or whatever, even if they can see it, their ability to evaluate the importance of the situation isn't working right? So on a deep down brain level, this is how addiction works. Addiction is an illness related to pleasure and addiction is an illness related to choice. I'm not saying addiction is a choice. What I'm saying is when you are in active addiction, your choice making abilities gets turned down because your choice making organ gets turned down. And so that's why you get, you see people get stuck in these cycles of making the same mistake over and over and over again. Now take all that information and then if you even layered on top of that the fact that some substances turn off the frontal lobe more than other substances, then you've got like a real issue, right Those substances would be like alcohol or benzodiazepines, any of the depressants. So no matter what drug you use, it will increase that survival part of the brain which overrides the rest of it. Right, but you've already got that other part overriding everything over powerful. But. But then if you use a depressant drug, you. You literally help turn down the volume on this frontal part of your brain. And that's why you can end up having complete blackouts. You don't remember what's happening. You're in kind of this autopilot, auto function place. Because in those kind of situations, it's literally like that can be turned almost all the way off. And so it's very difficult for people that struggle with alcoholism or people that struggle with benzodiazepine abuse or something like that. It's even harder, I think, for those people to see the problem because the drug itself is turning down or turning off their ability to recognize those things even more than some of the other substances. Now, have you guys, have y' all seen any of these symptoms? Have you witnessed what I'm talking about, either in yourself and your family member? This. You know, have you ever had those moments where you're thinking to yourself, why? You know, I don't get it. Like, why would you do that? You know, why would you risk failing your drug test at your probation officer when you know you're going to be on pro violation and literally could go to jail for 10 years because you failed your test? That's that valuation in ability, right? It's that it's the reason why people get sort of stuck in that instant gratification cycle. They lose some ability for choice. Now, that's not me saying that people that have addictions don't have any choice. I think you have some choices about whether you continue to activate that addictive part of your brain. Once you've activated it, then your ability to have choice goes further and further and further away. You lose that more and more and more. For the super chat, I appreciate that that helps us to continue to make these videos. When talking to family members who I've introduced to your channel, I catch myself saying, what does Amber always say? You need a strategic plan to stay five steps ahead. That's right, Paige. Five steps ahead. And one of the ways you do that is you understand the rules of the upside down world. In order to do that, you got to understand why things that motivate people in a regular situation do not motivate people who have an addiction. And there's reasons why that happens, like biological reasons why that happens. And so if you, once you understand that and you quit trying to interact with a person who has an addiction, like you're playing by the normal rules, you get the new rule book under your belt, then you can get ahead of it. But until then, you. You are going to keep making the same mistake because you're going to keep thinking, well, if I threaten them with a big enough consequence, they're going to stop, right? If I can just make them see how bad they're behaving and how they're impacting us, as in their family, and they're gonna stop. See, that's what your instinct tells you to do. Because that would work in a normal situation. That will not work when it comes to addiction because of these brain reasons. I'm just scrolling along, looking for some questions. Here we go. Here's a good one. Kerosene 1022 says, how long after they get sober does the brain rebalance to a healthy place? That is a good question. Someone usually is in some amount of active withdrawal for the first, at least week, right? And that's like just trying to not feel terrible, right? And then I usually say that second week is pretty emotional. So I feel like that's when that emotional part of your brain begins to turn back on. And when it does, it's like on full charge, right? It's like everything you've not been dealing with, now you're dealing with it all at one time. And I'll just add this in there. I always say emotional coping is like a muscle, right? Like, if you don't use your leg muscles, if you sit on the couch all day, you eventually lose the ability to walk. If you don't use your coping muscles, you eventually lose the ability to cope with the emotional stressors of life. And so that's one of the reasons why you see people in early recovery. When you're in early recovery, everything feels really harder. Everything emotionally hits you heavier. It's because it's almost like you're retraining that muscle which has been sort of weakened from the addiction. And not only is that muscle weakened, but the amount of stress and the amount of problems that you're dealing with is way up there because of the addiction. So you can see it like it jacks up the stress because it makes all these problems around you. You know, maybe you've lost your or you messed up relationships or you can't see your kids or something like that. And it decreases your ability to Cope. So that emotional part of the brain, it starts to reactivate. I feel like a few. A couple weeks in, but it's not going to stabilize out. It can take several weeks for that to feel stable. So when I'm talking to people who are thinking about getting sober, like abstinence over, I always say you got to do it longer than bare minimum, longer than two weeks, because you don't even start to feel better until two weeks. And somebody made this comment on one of the videos the other day, which I thought was really smart. This person said, and the negative emotions come back before the positive ones. So it's like when that part turns back on, it's you dealing with the difficult ones before the good ones. And so if you get sober, I always say you got to get sober past that because you. Because up until then, that's just really hard. And the good stuff starts to come back two or three weeks in, you start to see, you know, the person's brain heal. The good news is, you know, we used to think that if you kill brain cells, you hurt your brain. It didn't fix. But that's not what science really shows. For the most part, people's brain recovers. Your brain does recover. It takes longer for some, and it takes longer for some substances. And yes, there are a few conditions where a person's brain doesn't recover. Like, for example, there's an illness sometimes that really severe late stage people with alcoholism get called Korskoff's disease. And it is. It's almost like a permanent memory issue. It's a pretty severe permanent memory issue. And some people that use. If meth is the drug that I find or not just I find, but science finds it takes the brain a little, takes the brain longer to come back from that. But it does come back. Lily says, I heard it was 28 days, but good to hear it from Amber. Yeah. And you know what's funny when I see you say that, Lily, is I HEAR it takes 28 days for your brain to work. Right. You know, used to. You put people in treatment for 28 days, and then on day 29, right. You put them out. It's like, okay, your brain's back on immediately, day one, you're back out there, there. That doesn't make any sense, does it? So understanding all this brain stuff can also help you understand what it's going to take to get better. Understanding that it's going to take more than a couple weeks. It's definitely going to take more than a week of detox. 100%. So, you know, people go into detox all the time and they're there. I used to work in detox. You know, they're there seven days. They get put on a medicine to help them medically come off. They get tapered down each day. And then the day they take the last dose medicine, the day that their brain has to kick in and start making decisions, they say you're good and they let you go. Isn't that the craziest thing you ever heard? That is not a good strategic five steps ahead decision, if you ask me. Most of the reason for that, though, is because of insurance companies. Because you're not. Medically, you're not going to die after that, but your brain is not functioning properly enough to help you to be able to make good choices to keep yourself clean and sober after that. At least not according to the addiction science. Anna says was dating someone and his addiction got worse over time. He started doing harder stuff too. And his personality totally changed. And it seemed like he didn't care about anything anymore. That's right, Anna. That's what it seems like. And I'll tell you, it is like mind blowing to see somebody's personality change. And to me, when it's like the most in your face is when I've seen somebody in recovery, like have been doing really good, go back and they're. And their active addiction reactivates. It's like an immediate. It's like yesterday I saw you and you were this person, and today I'm seeing you and you're not even that person anymore. And it is mind blowing. To me, that's the most mind blowing because it happens so quickly. Watching people go from active addiction into sobriety or into recovery or whatever, their personality changes. But it's kind of like this slow, gradual change just like a little at a time as these brain systems begin to sort of move back into like the regular functionality of how they work. But once you. So it's like it takes a take slowly, the brain turns back on, but it turn off really quick. Rita says. So the only way for them to get out of the reptilian brain is to stop taking toxic substances. Or is there a way to help them start making good choices leading to moving out of addiction? That's really. That's really good question, Rita. So I usually say you. You almost have to get someone in recovery for them to make the decision to be in recovery. And that's why you guys hear me say all the time, y' all hear me say you don't have to want it. You just have to be willing to. When you're waiting for someone to want to stop doing it or want to stop drinking or stop doing drugs or whatever, that's how it just doesn't work. Because these brain systems can't work like they can't want to stop. That's just not how it biologically works. So I feel like you have to. Once you get them sober and their brain kicks back into working the way it normally would and their regular personality comes through, then a lot of times people do decide, so what does that mean? You know, I think what Rita's asking here is, does that mean there's nothing we can do? No, I think that there are these little moments where you see some brain activation and they're thinking clearly. And what you can try to do as a family member is help the person when they're in that good thinking state of mind to make a decision or to agree to take some steps that would help this other process. They're probably not going to be able to make a decision to get clean and sober and then stay in that state of mind long term. But they might be able to make a decision to change their situation to some degree or to try something else, which would then give a little bit more time for the brain, the brain systems to come back to full function. It's like getting back up to the high speed Internet at that point. Karen says, why is the sleep pattern so difficult to regain? That's another good question. And you're right, Karen, like most anyone I've ever seen who was in those early stages of addiction, no matter what the substance was, had a sleep problem. And that's usually because of some of the other neurochemicals involved with the substance use. Having to level out what I will say about a sleep problem is old school recovery. They would say to you, they would say, lack of sleep never killed anybody. Well, that's true. But if you're already dealing with a decision making part of your brain that's compromised and then you put lack of sleep on it, now you have like a no go situation. So no, it won't kill you to have lack of sleep, but it may diminish your ability even further to make a good choice. So I usually tell people in early recovery, if you're having trouble sleeping, you know, give it a little bit, it usually gets better. But if it feels like it's just not getting better and not getting better and not getting better, I really do feel like that compromises your ability to make continued good choices. And so I usually recommend that they talk to a physician or something about that. Maybe there's something could be done temporarily to help them sleep. Because having at least seven good hours of sleep and early recovery is probably like the number one best thing you can do for yourself to help your recovery. Your decision making ability goes way up when you have those seven hours. Geraldine says how does methadone treatment help or interfere with restoring the brain? Well, I think what any kind of opioid replacement treatment does, whether it's methadone or Suboxone or whatever it is, is it, it gives a continual supply of the substance and it stabilizes it out. So the difference is, is like particularly with Suboxone, it's a more longer term opiate, which means if someone's addicted to opiates or heroin, they're probably like using a lot several times a day because it doesn't last long enough and they're in withdrawal every few hours. And these other like opiate replacement medicines are just more steady and stable. So it can stabilize out that need and they can get out of that survival thinking for a bit. Right. Because if you're constantly, every few hours, you have to go get it. You have to go get it. That's what's keeping that survival lizard part of the brain activated. So if you can calm that sucker down and say, settle down for a minute, that will also allow for a little bit better decision making. Topic was recommended by several of you and that's why we're talking about the brain stuff today. So let me know what you want to hear next week. Bye everybody.