What an addiction really is and how it affects our brain

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 A few days ago, I found a really interesting article about the biology of addiction. Every one of us knows what addiction is, but we don't actually know how addiction really works from the biological point of view. Article published on the official National Institutes of Health page helps to understand this strange disease. Addiction is a really dangerous brain disease, which affects many people nowadays. It often ruins their whole life, families, relationships, health and can cause death. The biggest problem with addiction is that it's so hard to quit. The biological basis of addiction explains why it is so difficult.  It turns out that addiction isn't a moral problem like most of us think, it is a serious brain disease. Dr. George Koob, director of NIH’s National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism says: “The brain actually changes with addiction, and it takes a good deal of work to get it back to its normal state. The more drugs or alcohol you’ve taken, the more disruptive it is to the brain.” Actually, addiction can destroy the key brain regions that are meant to help us survive. A healthy brain rewards us for healthy behaviors when we exercise or eat some food, it makes us feel happy and satisfied. But in addiction, this process works against you. Some substances like alcohol and drugs or things like video games can hijack these pleasure circuits in your brain, which causes you to want it more and more. At the next stage of addiction, it stimulates your emotional danger-sensing circuits, making the addicted person stressed or anxious, without consuming the substance. At this moment, addicted people start to use substances to keep from feeling bad, not to feel pleasure. Repeated use of some substance also damages the essential decision-making center in our prefrontal cortex, which should help us recognize the consequences of using an addictive substance. That's why people in the deep stages of addiction, don't want to quit, they don't realize how harmful it is for them. Scientists are still learning about this disease to help people fight it. Unfortunately, the brain is so complex organ, that some parts of it will be incomprehensible to us for a long time to come. 


Link to the article:

https://newsinhealth.nih.gov/2015/10/biology-addiction

Komentarze

  1. englishdiary21 lutego 2022 09:27

    You've found a really good source but try to paraphrase what they write rather than just copy/rewrite it. Also, your post is supposed to be 150 words long, which is much less than what you've written.

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