Analyzing Addictive Behaviors Essay

1380 words - 6 pages

Addiction in todays society is becoming a worldwide epidemic. Whether the person is relying on a daily pack of cigarettes or feels the urge to steal something every time they walk into a retail store. “Addiction is the continued repetition of a behavior despite adverse consequences, or a neurological impairment leading to such behaviors.”(wikipedia) Addiction can ruin your life, whether its a substance abuse problem or an act that has rewarded you short term.
Picture yourself waking up in the morning and for all the years you have been alive you have ate some sort of a breakfast. Well on this particular day you aren't allowed to eat in the morning and have to wait for lunch to come around. No matter how bad your stomach is growling you are not allowed to eat. But when you walk to the kitchen there is a buffet amazing food sitting right on your counter. I dont know about you but I know if it was me I would be grabbing a plate and scarfing the food down like I won’t have another meal for a week.
Its pretty hard to compare eating food and not starving yourself with picking up a five dollar pack of Marlboros, but that is the urge and sense of need that an addicted cigarette smoker feels every time they wake up, get stressed, eat, or need a break at work.
When I think about someone that is addicted to cigarettes, I instantly think of my father that had been smoking for 36 years since the age of 16. When something is so harmful to you and the people around you with basically no synthetic feeling of euphoria and is just smoking to smoke, it’s hard to think why these people can’t quit this habit with such bad repercussions that follow.
Addiction is far more than just on the surface. Its a Psychological dependency that occurs when the person uses the substance often by incorporating it in their daily lives. This creates tolerance and withdrawal.
Tolerance is the process by which the body adapts to having the substance in their system and requires increasingly larger amounts to gain the full effects. Withdrawal refers to physical and psychological symptoms experienced when the substance that the body has become dependent on is no longer being used.
Symptoms of withdrawal generally include anxiety, irritability, intense cravings for the substance, nausea, hallucinations, headaches, cold sweats, and tremors. Making drugs with extreme addictive levels like nicotine found in cigarettes, heroin, methamphetamines, pharmaceutical drugs, and cocaine an enduring process to quit.
Those that try to quit these drugs experience dramatic withdrawals that make it that much more troubling to quit because the second they get that drug in their system all withdrawals stop.
Substance Abuse in Depth
Obtaining a substance abuse issues isn’t as hard as you think, most every abuser starts off the same way by taking the drug. Those that stay away from using multiple times in a period of time often escape scotch free. Those that turn into substance users will more than...

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