Addiction and mental health disorders are strongly linked because of the psychological and chemical changes that happen in the brain and the body. Healing the brain and the heart in treatment is essential because of this relationship. The right treatment center will help you with your detox and provide reliable holistic care to overcome the emotional and psychological strain.
Healing the Brain
The most profound impact that addiction has on the brain has to do with rewiring the circuits in the brain and changing the brain’s chemistry, size, and function.
Basal Ganglia
The basal ganglia is the part of your brain that encourages you to take positive action. It’s this part of the brain that helps you form healthy routines and develop good habits like healthy eating, exercise, and socializing.
It’s this part of the brain that is often referred to as the reward circuit or the reward center. When you participate in healthy behaviors like exercise or socialization, you get a flood of pleasurable neurotransmitters such as serotonin or dopamine. This is designed to reward good behavior and encourage you to repeat it.
However, healing the brain in addiction recovery becomes a priority because this area is hijacked with addiction. When addiction takes over this circuit, it stimulates overactivity, which means you get a flood of positive rewards for addiction instead of healthy behaviors. Moreover, you get an increased dose, something you wouldn’t get from normal activities, and that’s where you get the “high” of drug use.
However, regular use of any drug will diminish your sensitivity and make it difficult to feel anything pleasurable, not just from the drug itself, which is what leads to addiction, but from any other activity.
Amygdala
Healing the brain is important because you have the ability to reset your reward system and tackle the other parts of the brain that have been changed due to addiction. The amygdala tends to get bigger, and this is the part of the brain that focuses on your basic needs. It also plays a role in creating stressful feelings that characterize your withdrawal and motivate you to keep using drugs or alcohol.
Prefrontal Cortex
The prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that is supposed to balance what comes out of the amygdala, but it gets smaller with regular drug use. As it shrinks, it diminishes your ability to control your impulsivity and to make good choices.
But healing the brain, though it takes time, can be done to such a degree that your prefrontal cortex goes back to the way it was, your amygdala isn’t in control anymore, and your basal ganglia gives you rewards for the right types of behaviors.
Healing the Heart
Substance abuse doesn’t just have a direct link to your physical well-being. It can cause psychological problems and emotional damage.
The same changes to your brain can result in mood swings, insomnia, and tension. The more you struggle with certain drugs, the more likely you are to develop depressive disorders or anxiety disorders.
Similarly, addiction brings with it feelings of shame and guilt, social stigma, and the feeling that you’ve always done something wrong and may never be able to do it correctly. The right type of treatment can help you overcome this negative feedback loop, tackle things like depression or anxiety disorders, and navigate your way toward healing your heart as well.
Healing the Brain with Sequoia Recovery Centers
At Sequoia Recovery Centers, we want you to heal your brain as quickly and effectively as possible. With our addiction treatment services, we understand that detox is just the first step. After detox, our focus becomes helping you with the rest of your individualized treatment. Healing the brain becomes a priority. To achieve this, we utilize different substance abuse treatment modalities that help you achieve success.
At Sequoia Recovery Centers, we believe that each of our clients should have some control over their treatment plan and be able to select aftercare from providers they feel comfortable with. Just as it takes a long time for addiction to alter the brain, healing the brain takes just as long and it’s a process that we encourage our clients to continue with long after leaving our drug and alcohol detox center.
Overall, healing the brain and the heart takes time. If you or anyone else has struggled with addiction, the changes to your emotional, neurological, and psychological well-being took several weeks or months to manifest, and it will likely take the same to undo the damage. However, the good news is that it can be undone, and you can get back to a healthy reward system and emotional regulation.
Contact our team today to see which level of care is best for you.