Types of Addiction

Types of Addiction

Addiction is a mental health disease and alters your brain chemistry, impairs your judgment, and impacts your decision-making process. What makes addiction so difficult to recover from is that it’s chronic, meaning that you will experience symptoms like cravings even after you stop using. That means recovery requires more than just avoiding drugs and alcohol, regardless of which types of addiction you are suffering from.

With addiction impacting more than 23 million Americans annually, while another 10% are actively recovering from a substance abuse disorder, addiction issues are common in the United States. All psychoactive substances, including alcohol and prescription medications, can result in dependency and various types of addiction.

The Stages and Types of Addiction

Addiction takes time to develop, although you can develop one of the two types of addiction within weeks or months of your first use. Addiction develops on a different timeline for everyone. The two types of addiction are psychological addictions and psychical addictions. All psychoactive substances have the potential to cause psychological dependence. However, only certain substances can lead to physical addiction, with the most common ones including:

• Prescription drugs
• Opiates
• Benzodiazepines, like Xanax
• Meth
• Amphetamines, such as Adderall
• Alcohol

Psychological addiction can involve both substances like marijuana and behaviors, like gambling. In both types of addiction, your brain’s pleasure and reward center changes and positively reinforces your negative behavior or substance use. Addictions to substances can also cause powerful and dangerous withdrawal symptoms, such as nausea, seizures, and disorientation.

With both types of addiction, your body and mind need to re-learn how to properly function without the use of drugs and alcohol. Since your brain associates people, places, and things that remind you of your substance of choice, whenever you’re exposed to triggers, you deal with intense cravings. These cravings make it hard to recover without treatment.

How Addiction is Treated

Both types of addiction can be treated in either an inpatient or outpatient setting. Both residential and outpatient programs utilize evidence-based and holistic therapies in order to help you recover from addiction. Evidence-based treatments are therapies that, following extensive studies and use on prior patients, are shown to effectively treat addiction.

Some examples of evidence-based treatments include:

• Cognitive-behavioral therapy
• Dialectical behavioral therapy
• Acceptance and commitment therapy
• Relapse prevention
• Psychotherapy

Evidence-based treatment can be used in combination with other evidence-based and holistic therapies, making them highly versatile and effective during substance abuse treatment. Holistic therapies are used to treat the body, mind, and soul in unison. Holistic therapies involve activities like meditation and stress-reduction, which can help improve cognition and provide you with healthy coping strategies.

Reaching Out for Help Today

When you are struggling with one, or both, types of addiction, early treatment is the best way to improve your chances of achieving lasting recovery. Treatment offers you the support, guidance, and tools you need to learn how to cope with symptoms and avoid relapsing. If you’re ready to start your recovery journey, reach out to us today at 717.969.9126.