Why Some People Get Addicted and Others Don’t

While addiction is fairly common there are some people who seem to be able to use addictive substances without ever getting hooked. The reasons for this are hard to explain and unfortunately there is no way to know ahead of time whether you are likely to become addicted or not. While there are certainly people who don’t become addicts it is important that you realize that if you use addictive substances frequently enough you are going to become an addict.

Explaining why some people get addicted and others don’t is a lot easier when it comes to behavioral based addictions like gambling. This is largely to do with your personality, some people have an addictive personality and they will tend to do things in a compulsive way. Unfortunately it is not easy to determine who is likely to become addicted and who is not before they actually become an addict. However it is safe to say that if you are addicted to one thing there is a pretty good chance that you will become addicted to other things as well.

The reason that people become addicted to psychoactive substances while others don’t is a lot harder to explain. Clearly there is some sort of biological component here as some people are more prone than others. The drugs will normally affect your brain and alter its chemistry and this is what causes the addiction. Clearly some people will see this happen faster than others and that does tend to make them more likely to become addicted. However it is also clear that eventually everybody who uses drugs will become addicted if they use them enough.

The other factor when it comes to who gets addicted and who doesn’t probably comes down to will power as well. In the early days of using a psychoactive substance the cravings will be fairly mild, the people who give in and continue to use the drug are going to become addicts. The people who are able to overcome the cravings in the early days so that they limit their use of drugs are far less likely to become addicted. This is simply because the more often you use drugs the more it will affect your brain chemistry and the stronger your cravings will become.

While some people are clearly more likely to get addicted than others it is important to realize that anybody can become an addict if they are not careful. If you use drugs often enough you are going to become an addict whether you believe it or not. This is why you have to make sure that you limit your contact with addictive substances. If you are already addicted to something it is important that you get treatment as soon as possible because the longer you are addicted the stronger your addiction is going to become.