This is a guest post by Ryan Rivera.
Most of the discussion about the effects of drugs are related to the health issues that come from drug use. Indeed, this is easily the largest problem with alcohol and drug use. Drugs are dangerous to your health, cause addiction, and can in many cases be deadly.
Generally, one of the main reasons that people turn to drugs — and return to drugs — is because drugs are often used to self-medicate for stress. The high allows people to forget about their problems. Drug users depend on their high as a way to self-medicate for their anxieties.
Because of the health problems associated with drug abuse and the issues regarding regular drug use on things like financial and relationship stress, clearly using drugs to self-medicate is the wrong choice. But there is yet another reason that self-medicating is dangerous for your ability to cope with stress — a reason that causes many people to relapse when faced with a stressful situation. That reason is that drugs replace other coping strategies.
What is Stress Coping?
Many people give tips and strategies to cope with stress. There are ways to help your mind and body experience less overall anxiety and tension. Yet at its heart, stress coping is simply the mental ability to overcome your stress. Those that “cope with stress well” are simply those that don’t let tension overwhelm them. They improve their stress levels over time, even if they do nothing at all.
That’s what stress coping really is. Breathing exercises, journaling, and yoga — these are activities that make stress coping easier, but coping itself is still the mental strength to overcome anxiety and find happiness and relaxation over time.
How Do Drugs Affect Stress Coping?
Stress coping is something that you get used to, and something that you need to practice. Unfortunately, when people turn to drugs to self-medicate for stress, they’re essentially replacing their mind’s ability to cope with stress with something external. The high becomes their recovery option (if it can be considered a recovery at all), and their mind is no longer under any pressure to figure out how to deal with stress on its own.
Stress coping is a “use it or lose it” skill. It’s the type of ability that people can lose very quickly if they don’t have a chance to keep using it. It’s seen not only with drug users but also with those kept far too busy to experience any mental rest. Law students, for example, work and study nearly 18 hours a day, and because of that, they have a much higher likelihood of depression and anxiety because they haven’t had an opportunity to keep at their stress coping abilities.
This same problem occurs regularly in drug users. While on drugs, the drugs themselves simply replace the mind’s ability to cope, and eventually, the brain loses that ability.
Learning to Stress Cope and Avoiding Drugs and Relapse
That’s why one of the most important tools for controlling drug use is simply to learn to cope again. It’s to learn how to create a mindset that is able to get over anxiety with no external help. Activities like yoga and meditation can be beneficial, but the mind itself will always be the most important tool in stress coping. Those that are ready to overcome their drug addiction should make it a priority to find out how to gain back the ability to cope with stress without any drugs or alcohol. If they can do that, their chances of relapsing go down dramatically.
About the Author: Ryan Rivera needed to regain his own coping ability cure his anxiety, and has seen the way that coping with stress affects men and women addicted to drugs and alcohol. Now he writes about anxiety and other mental health issues at Calm Clinic.
How do you cope with stress without any drugs or alcohol? Leave a comment and let us know. If you liked this post, please share on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. Thank you.
