Our choices reflect in actions, and these actions craft the story of our lives. When we allow addiction to dictate us, we not only lose happiness and health, but we lose our lives to it. Addictions or abuse keep us from being ourselves and loots us of our true potential. (more…)
Adron Harris, director of the Waggoner Center for Alcoholism and Addiction Research, and his team mapped the differences in gene expression between an alcoholic’s brain and a non-alcoholic’s brain. They found that, as a person becomes dependent on alcohol, thousands of genes in their brains are turned up or down, like a dimmer switch on a lightbulb, compared to the same genes in a healthy person’s brain. (more…)
In a study that followed thousands of veterans over a decade, initiating non-medical use of opioid painkillers was associated with a more than 5-fold risk of also beginning to use heroin. (more…)
Addiction to drugs or alcohol can have many devastating effects–not just on the lives of the user, but for their families and friends as well. Not only does addiction damage relationships, jobs, education prospects, and self-esteem, it can have irreparable effects on the body and mind. Worse, alarming studies over the past several years have shown that people who are addicted to substances also have the weight of death by suicide hanging over their heads.
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Social anxiety can be a crippling disability to live with. It can interfere with your ability to make friends, find romantic connections, and even leave your home. Learning to cope properly is important because many people resort to self-medication, which leads to addiction. Healthy ways to manage anxiety come in many forms, and each person needs to find what works for them. With that in mind, we share a few options for people to cope with social anxiety in healthy ways. (more…)
Bringing pleasure into recovery is the key to turning over a new leaf
People in the midst of alcohol or drug addiction tend to imagine life without those substances as one of deprivation, which can make kicking the habit seem like a joyless and dreary prospect. But recovery from addiction has at least as much to do with rewarding oneself as it does with depriving oneself, according to a new book by a UCLA expert in addiction treatment. (more…)
Yale Stress Center head promotes healing of the body, mind, and brain
Rajita Sinha, Ph.D., says that the emotional expressiveness of the Indian classical dance studies of her youth laid the foundation for a lifelong interest in the brain-body tango that regulates mood and behavior. As an undergraduate in her native Delhi, she studied biopsychology, conducting research on the effects of marijuana and working at a counseling center. For her graduate work at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, she studied how emotion is manifested physiologically, a thread that she has carried through her subsequent work on the brain-altering effects of drugs and alcohol.
Throughout, Sinha has observed and studied how people cope with stress and with wanting—“The abundance of choices available in the world, and easy access to commodities, including drugs, challenges the body’s motivational systems in novel ways,” she says. (more…)
In 2009, while investigating a sudden influx of illnesses caused by food contamination, journalist Michael Moss learned that there was another, and arguably more severe, public health crisis at hand: the disproportionate use of salt, sugar, and fat in a variety of everyday foods.
Moreover, Moss said in his recent Poynter Lecture at Yale, he came to the frightening conclusion that this was not accidental on the food companies’ part, but intentional — that the these unhealthy ingredients were added to attract consumers and make them dependent on products. (more…)
