Tip: Cure the root of Addiction by Understanding & Finding Ways to Manage Stress

We have chemical and hormonal changes to deal with stress. A well know chemical is the stress hormone cortisol which is increased and it leads to an increase of another chemical, adrenaline. The body gears up immediately in the face of stressful stimuli. It goes to our energy stores, and releases glucose and insulin so that our muscles have the energy to deal with the stress. These body chemicals are sustained at high rates to compensate for the stress, and as such, they can impact the body adversely over time. Additionally, the choices we make to handle this stress can influence how those stress hormones affect us. Drugs like alcohol, nicotine and cocaine, and also high-fat, high-calorie comfort foods, are powerful modifiers of the stress system. They will change our stress pathways and affect the way your body is able to control our stress response. And so, after a period of bingeing, our body’s stress response system eventually wears out. However, folks will continue to take those drugs and alcohol to compensate a weakened system. This is often what we see in addiction."

'via Blog this'Healthy Living: Holiday Stress - WABI TV5:Does that mean we cannot revitalize our stress responses such as the adrenals? In fact, our body is forgiving and they can recover when we take away those toxins. What is not clear is how long that process takes. The problem, though, is that while your adrenals are still recovering, you are more likely to be stressed. And stress affects abstinence and increases chances of a relapse. So then we are caught in a vicious cycle of quickly degenerating health because both the stress and the substances are working together to wear down our body systems and our stress axis, our liver, kidney, heart, blood pressure. All this can also lead to certain types of cancer. We don’t really know which comes first, but we do know that these are all complex multi-factoral diseases. That means they don’t have one single factor that leads to the disease state. And there are factors that can make a person even more vulnerable to stress-related diseases and addiction: early trauma suffered in childhood, cumulative adversity, socio-economic status, education and also things like genetics and personality traits.