Addiction is not always obvious. It can be subtle, creeping up on a person over time – one day, they think they’re in total control. The next, they begin to doubt themselves, until eventually, the truth can’t be ignored.
The longer an addiction festers, the harder it is to reverse. Rather than being anything a person can just “snap out of”, addiction is a disease that takes hold in the brain and changes the way a person thinks. Months of abstinence, therapy, and concentrated will are necessary to help the mind heal and return to a healthy state. Until then, the symptoms of addiction get worse – from behavioral changes to physical ones.
An important tip for anyone with friends or family engaging in drug use – both the legal and illegal kind – is to watch out for potential symptoms of addiction. Hidden signs. Catching addictive behavior early on, staging an intervention and calling a professional for help can make the fight out of addiction much easier.
The trick is distinguishing between normal behavior and addictive behavior. Drinking a large amount of alcohol is not indicative of alcoholism, but frequent binge drinking and out-of-control behavior accompanied by a few other behavioral changes certainly point towards potential addiction. Similarly, many chronic pain sufferers need medication and take it often to relieve their pain – but it becomes a real issue when they begin to seek illegal alternatives to get their hands on more painkillers, or begin taking the drugs not against physical pain, but emotional pain as well, as rare as these cases are.
Addiction is an inability to stop using a substance or engaging in behavior despite clear consequences and severe self-destructive behavior. Someone with an addiction is dependent on the drug or drugs to some level, unable to stop using. Here are a few hidden signs of addiction to help you figure out whether you should be concerned about your friend or loved one.
Frequent Lying
Perhaps the simplest but most damning character change in someone with a developing addiction is the growing and consistent urge to continuously lie and cover up. As an addiction worsens, people tend to realize that their behavior is shameful or wrong, but they’re still battling internally with the idea of being unable to stop themselves – so they delay the inevitable by lying about their behavior, their drug use, and their whereabouts.
Part of an addiction is hiding your drug use while striving to function, but as the lies pile up, it becomes harder to keep up appearances and the façade begins to crumble. That can be very painful, especially for someone still going through the initial stages of denial – so much so that it drives them to further emotional depths. Addiction feeds on painful emotions, because they drive people to use to dull the pain. That, in turn, feeds things like shame and self-loathing, creating a vicious cycle that begins with a few excuses. If you find your partner or friend consistently lying about their whereabouts and activities, they may be hiding something as significant as an addiction.
It is important to note that addiction does not transform a person into a monster or make them lie pathologically. It is easier to lie, and most people do when confronted with reality. But once they accept their condition, addicts are just as honest or dishonest as anyone else. It’s not so much the addiction that is causing the lies, but the fact that there is something to hide, especially early on.
Rapid Weight Change
Addiction can savagely tear into the body over just a few months, depending on the drug of choice. Some drugs are far more poisonous than others, but many addictions sadly lead to overdose. Before that happens, a drug (or drugs) can have several negative impacts on a user’s body, including organ failure, lesions and scabs from habitual scratching, dental problems, and rapid weight loss or weight gain.
Not all drugs are recognizable through physical symptoms, but stimulants like cocaine and amphetamines often lead to weight loss due to lack of appetite, while excessive alcohol leads to obesity and fatty liver before causing serious liver damage.
Mood Swings
A drug’s domain is, first and foremost, the brain. Drugs are psychoactive substances that pass through the blood-brain barrier, interfering with natural neurotransmitters by hijacking the receptors on your neurons. This leads to the many different effects each drugs have, from hallucinations to slurred speech, slow thinking and staggering, euphoria, etc.
Yet as the brain develops a tolerance to the drug and dependence kicks in, kicking the habit becomes harder and harder – until it’s not a habit, but an addiction. Personality shifts can occur as drug use becomes progressively worse, and the periods between highs become less tolerable. Mood swings, including symptoms of depression, correlate with heavy drug use because of the severe mental impact of addiction. They become most frequent right after quitting, for several weeks.
Evading Responsibility
As an addiction progresses, more time and effort go towards securing the next high. Criminality is higher among people with addiction because drug use often impairs the brain’s ability for critical thinking and risk-assessment – people see point A and point B, but don’t fully recognize the dangers lying between these points.
But long, long before drug use can lead to crime, it first leads to evading responsibility. It’s common for people with addiction to skip out on work or school, miss appointments, become tardy, and lose their ability to manage time, risk, and life in general.
Relationship Problems
Addiction is a selfish disease, insofar that it can make someone more concerned with their next high than anything else. It begins slowly and insidiously but builds up over time. One way in which this manifests is by introducing relationship problems and tensions due to constant lying, trust issues, and an increasing distance between the drug user and their partner. If your partner is going through lengths to hide what looks like a drug habit, it’s important to find ways to discuss help.
The beginning of an addiction is often far from any recognizably bad behavior. It all starts with one slip up, one mistake, or one moment when you decide to let loose – from there, a slippery slope opens to another excuse, another reason, another step down a dark road.
Most people who end up struggling with addiction don’t see the path until it’s too late, and the people around them often have no way of stopping them. If you think your loved one may be well on they way towards developing an addiction, talking over with them, and consider finding the best approach to get them the help they need.