Drug Addiction

Managing an addiction can be incredibly hard, affecting all areas of your life, including work, relationships and both your mental and physical health. Hypnotherapy for drug addiction can form part of your recovery.

How addiction works

In most cases, drugs will trigger the brain’s reward system, releasing the feel-good hormone dopamine. The reward system controls the body’s ability to feel pleasure and so when it is triggered, it encourages you to trigger it again. When drugs are involved, the reward system is over stimulated, leading to a ‘high’. This high makes people want to take the drug again and again.

Over time, the brain adjusts itself to produce less dopamine and/or making the cells in the reward system less responsive. This means the drug user won’t get the same effect and will build a tolerance. This leads them wanting more of the drug to feel high again.

The lack of dopamine can also make it difficult for the person affected to feel enjoyment from other activities, like seeing friends, eating a good meal or previous hobbies.

If the drug is taken long-term it can lead to further changes in the brain’s chemistry, affecting memory, decision-making skills, judgement, learning ability and tolerance to stress. Depending on which drug is being taken, mental health can also be affected. This can lead users to experience various symptoms such as paranoia, aggression, anxiety, lack of energy and even hallucinations.

Hypnotherapy for drug addiction

Hypnotherapy is one approach that, especially when combined with other forms of treatment, can be incredibly helpful for those in recovery.

Hypnosis is a natural state we go into many times every day, somewhere between wide awake and fast asleep, but we only notice the deeper states, like those times we arrive at our destination and wonder how we got there!! The natural state happened spontaneously, but we can induce this natural state easily by following a simple relaxation technique. Hypnosis is in fact self hypnosis – you will be doing it to yourself, taking yourself into hypnosis following the instructions. So the closer you follow them, the more relaxed you will become.

In this state your subconscious, the part of your mind that runs without you knowing, is more open to positive suggestion. Our subconscious is responsible for a huge amount of our behaviours and habits; it’s thought to be responsible for around 90% of our functioning.

Using positive suggestions you can change the way you react to certain things. This program for drug addiction aims to help so that you don’t crave the drug anymore.