Have you ever noticed how your feelings and behaviors can be intertwined? Maybe when you’re bored you reach for your phone, load up on snacks when feeling stressed, or call a friend to hang out when feeling lonely. These may seem innocent enough, but for those struggling with addiction, emotions can become powerful triggers that lead to substance use. Understanding this connection is an important step in recovery.
The Emotional Rollercoaster of Addiction
Emotions are a part of everyday life, but when they become too overwhelming, some people may seek drugs and alcohol to help them cope. This isn’t just about “feeling good” – it’s often about not feeling bad. When stressful events come up, like a job interview or family conflict, the average person may bite their nails or play with their hair. For someone struggling with addiction though, similar anxieties can trigger substance use in a similar way, but with far more serious consequences.
Negative Emotions & Their Impact on Addiction
Negative emotions can be especially dangerous for those battling substance abuse. When we feel down, our brains naturally want to find relief. In more intense moments, even temporary relief can be enough. This is why substances like alcohol, drugs, or even behaviors like gambling can be common outlets for individuals trying to mask their feelings.
Having a drink here and there doesn’t always result in addiction, but unhealthy patterns can start to develop rather quickly. For example, you may drink alcohol at parties to loosen up and feel less anxious in a crowd. But over time, this repeated behavior sends a message to your brain making the connection that “feeling anxious” equals “need a drink.” This connection gets stronger each time, creating a cycle that’s hard to break.
The Science Behind Emotional Triggers
Our brains are wired to remember what makes us feel good. When we use substances, they flood our brains with dopamine – a chemical that makes us feel pleasure. Our brains remember this feeling and start to crave it, especially when we’re emotionally vulnerable.
This happens because of something scientists call “emotional memory.” Your brain doesn’t just remember events – it remembers how you felt during those events. If you used substances to feel better during tough times, your brain remembers that solution.
How Substance Use Gives You A False Sense of Relief
Substance use may first start out as a way to escape reality. It could be from a traumatic past experience, a stressful job, or worries of the future. These substances can give you a rush, make you feel like you’ve entered a secret door out of a room full of pain. In the short-term this feels good, but soon it becomes more like a trap than a relief. The positive feeling is temporary, but the underlying problems remain. Even worse, addiction creates new problems while making it harder to deal with the original ones.
Positive Emotions Have a Role in Addiction Too
It might not seem like it at first, but positive emotions can play a negative role in addiction as well. Special occasions, achievements, and happy times often spark drinking or using drugs as a means to celebrate. For someone in recovery, these celebrations are fun on the surface, but they can become dangerous triggers.
Common social situations very often incorporate alcohol, such as special events like birthdays, graduations or weddings. Having just one drink may not seem like a problem, but thoughts like these show how deeply emotions and substance use can become connected. These positive moments can give individuals a feeling of safety, when in reality it is far from it.
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Building Healthier Skills to Manage Emotions
Once you realize how emotions fuel addiction, you’re taking the first step toward breaking free. That’s because recovery goes beyond the sole act of stopping substance use – it requires you to rebuild new and healthier ways to handle emotions.
So what does this look like? Learning to manage your emotions involves:
- Paying attention to your emotional triggers. What feelings make you want to use substances? Stress, lloneliness, boredom or excitement?
- Developing new coping strategies. Find a replacement for substance use in times of emotional instability. Instead try calling a friend, exercising, going outside, writing about your thoughts, or practicing deep breathing.
- Implementing emotional regulation practices. People cling to what they know, and if they never learned healthy ways to process feelings, substance use can seem like an easier route. However, recognizing our emotions and finding ways to accept and work through them, is a crucial recovery skill.
- Seek and embrace support. Never attempt recovery alone. Talk about your feelings and experiences with those who understand addiction. It can not only give you new perspectives, but provide you with more emotional stability during recovery.
Understanding Trauma in Emotional Addiction
Addiction can happen for many different reasons, but for many, past trauma is a big contributor. The emotional scars of a traumatic experience can leave someone looking for a way out, a way to numb the pain. When they relive an intense memory and are overcome with dark feelings, it can trigger substance use even years after the trauma occurred.
Recovery often means addressing this underlying trauma with professional help. Therapies like cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and trauma-focused approaches can help heal these emotional wounds and reduce the need to self-medicate.
How Mental Health and Addiction Coexist
Many people with addiction also have mental health conditions like depression, anxiety, or bipolar disorder. These conditions can make emotions even more intense and harder to manage, increasing the risk of using substances as a way to cope.
Treating both addiction and mental health together – what professionals call “dual diagnosis treatment” – gives the best chance for lasting recovery. Medications, therapy, and support groups can all be part of this approach. Addiction treatment programs have this type of support available to patients and can truly make a big difference in your recovery success.
Learning to Navigate Intense Emotions Through Addiction
Addiction recovery doesn’t just happen once you decide to get clean. The emotional triggers that fuel the addiction can be challenging to control since our learned behaviors and thought patterns take time to be rewritten. An important step is to realize that your emotions, no matter how painful, won’t destroy you. They come, they go, they rise, and they fall. They are temporary and should be taken in waves with the mentality that you will ride them until they fizzle out. Using substances is like trying to stop the wave by diving under it, but you always have to come back up for air.
Sobriety is about learning to ride the waves without going underwater. It will take a lot of patience and practice, but over time, you will learn new and healthier ways to cope. Eventually, you discover that you can handle feelings without substances – and this realization is incredibly empowering.
Finding the right balance is vital for true recovery. It’s not something that can be copied from person to person, as your recovery journey is unique and specific to you. However, everyone needs to find their own way through their emotional struggles so in the end, you can see emotions as information rather than threats. Anger might tell you that a boundary has been crossed. Sadness might show you what you value. Anxiety might point to something that needs your attention. Instead of running from these messages, you learn to listen to them.
The Path To Recovery
For a genuine recovery, it means you need to focus on building a healthier relationship with your emotions. It means embracing vulnerability and learning to live with feelings, instead of trying to escape them. Your emotions are simply part of your life and aren’t your entire reality.
With the help of a supportive environment, plenty of practice, and patience, you can break the cycle of emotional addiction. Don’t let your feelings control you any longer, reclaim sobriety so you can live a richer, more authentic life.
Seeking out treatment professionals, support groups, trusted friends, and family members is vital to your success. Here at Apex Recovery in San Diego, we have trained professionals who understand the complex relationship between emotions and addiction and can provide the support needed to heal.
Take charge of your emotions and the addiction in your life. Contact us today and see how we can get you started on a new path.