Addiction

Do you or someone you love have an addiction?  Dealing with this problem is hard enough without having a good understanding as to how it could happen to you or the one you’re close to.  What exactly contributes to someone becoming addicted? So many people today find themselves addicted to one substance or another and the key to understanding and perhaps preventing this in the future is to understand what the key addiction factors are.

After many years of research, the medical community has developed a list of these factors that help contribute to addiction.  One of these factors revolves around the events in a persons’ life that may have lead them to use addictive substances.  Perhaps the person grew up in a home where their family or friends used illegal substances.  Or maybe they grew up in a neighborhood where drug use and criminality were common and accepted.  However, these are just some of the examples of how events in a persons’ life can become contributing addiction factors.

Because children are so impressionable, when you include being raised by parents that withhold love, warmth, and guidance, a child becomes a hundred times more susceptible to outside influences.  Such external addiction factors could include poor living conditions like poverty, poor housing, frequent changes in residences and/or schools.  What’s more, failure of any kind starting at a young age can also be a huge contributing factor.

What may start as failure in school and in other earlier events in life could contribute to feeling the need to use substances to relieve the pressures and depression that follow.  Perhaps the person was unable to even cope with schooling or never learned to assimilate peer to peer relationships.  These issues bring on a great feeling of isolation and can be major addiction factors.  However, it is not always life events as children that contribute to substance abuse.

What people tend to forget is that there are many legal substances out there that are highly addictive.  The addiction factors in this case have nothing to do with how strong you are or how well your life has been.  A perfectly adjusted person can quickly become addicted to pain killers or other such prescription drugs.  However, people who have to take such medication should be careful to only do so as prescribed to help decrease the risk of addiction and other addiction factors.

These other factors have to do with a persons’ body chemistry.  Most commonly you will see an addiction grow stronger over time.  One reason for this is that the longer you use something the more your body becomes dependant on it.  This psychologically dependant reaction could include the feeling of being violently ill, body shakes, and stomach cramps to name a few.  But addiction factors like these are directly caused by the substance.

There are other factors that are caused by the persons’ general make-up.  You see, there are some people that need to have a climactic even to be happy.  Such events may be winning the lottery, beating someone at an event, or other seemingly big life events.  These types of people become dependant on needing to be stimulated in order to be happy, and can become psychologically dependant more easily than others.

Regardless of the contributing addiction factors, counseling is almost always needed in order to help overcome these addictions.  And what’s more, often times there are programs or both group and individual counseling.  If you or someone you love has an addiction, help them overcome this by getting help.