Mental health problems >>>> How is dependence formed in a person?

How is dependence formed in a person?

A person can live life, organizing it in different ways or not organizing it at all. In the life of an organized person, almost everything is ordered: he knows what he is striving for, tries to direct life along the safest path and knows how to limit his spontaneous desires, evaluating them in terms of usefulness or uselessness for future prosperity.

But there is a certain category of people who live mostly by instincts, thoughtlessly satisfying all their desires, even those that are capable of harming health (despite the instinct of self-preservation laid down by nature!) and do not try to restrain themselves from various temptations. And life offers a person many temptations: drinks (or medicines), relaxing the nervous system; unlimited food intake, idle pastime that does not require either physical or psychological stress; entertainment of various kinds (card games, computer games, betting games), sexual entertainment and many more entertainment options that can lead a person away from the realities of life, sometimes not very pleasant.

The human body is always more comfortable in a relaxed state that does not cause nervous tension, but in human society there is also a struggle for life that ensures well-being, as in all living nature. And the struggle for life presupposes physical and mental stress, which sometimes the human body suffers painfully. And naturally, the choice of an easier way of living life is always more pleasant than volitional efforts to achieve certain goals.

The human brain always captures pleasant sensations from a certain pastime at the biochemical level and remembers the ways to achieve these pleasant sensations, each time directing the person's thoughts and desires to repeat actions, accompanied by a pleasant result. Someone succumbs to such a desire, and someone learns to refrain from many of them, redirecting their attention to other more useful and promising things. This is how habits are formed to follow a certain life plan.

People who are unable or unwilling to abstain from life's temptations become slaves to their desires, and after a certain period of time, desires already control a person, and not a person with their desires. A person develops the habit of “going with the flow”, controlled only by temptations, and the habit tends to transform into an instinct that is fixed at the level of the central nervous system, and you can't just part with it.

This is how dependence on alcohol, drugs, nicotine addiction, food addiction, gambling addiction, psychological dependence on another person is formed. Many seemingly harmless addictions can eventually turn into obsessive pathological addictions, which, in turn, create the prerequisites for the development of mania.

Medicine puts pathological addictions on a par with mental disorders, since addictions take root at the level of physiological processes of brain activity, and to overcome such addictions, the same methods are required as for the treatment of mental illnesses. Therefore, having been born a mentally healthy person, one should not step on the path of acquiring a mental illness, especially since many of the pathological addictions become insurmountable diseases from the point of view of medicine.