Week 6 emotion and addiction with hand out

Quiet Time
Check-in Review AOD Relationships
 Review
 Four Characteristics
 Continuum
Emotions & Addiction Presentation

 Name
 Feeling
 Last use
 12 step meetings? What happened?
 Who attended a meeting?
 If you did not attend both meetings
• Did you think about it?
• What prevented your attendance?
What can you do differently this week?
 Success with last week’s recovery tool

If you don’t manage your
emotions, they will manage you!

Understanding different types of
emotion is a tool for recovery

This is the feeling chart hand out
Women In Recovery

These seven basic feelings were
first introduced to the author by
staff at
the Meadows treatment center
in Wickenberg, Arizona.

The powerful connection with
emotion

Is the key to understanding
addiction…

A preventable and treatable
brain disease influenced by a
complex set of behaviors that
may be the result of genetic,
biological, psychosocial, and
environmental interactions

 Our emotions play a (big!) part in
why addictions are so powerful
Our body is wired with a reward
and punishment system to guide
our behavior
Drugs of abuse “hijack” this system,
confusing the drug’s reward &
punishment with our bodies own
chemicals

Our most basic drives
 Hunger and food seeking
Pleasure and reproduction
 Fight/Flight survival
 Cravings
 Based in the same part of the brain
affected by ALL drugs of abuse
 Addiction imitates our basic drives

 Which of the seven basic
emotions trigger cravings for you
most often?
 Does one emotion show up more
in your life than any other
feeling?
Which emotion is your primary
feeling?

There is an “emotional neural
network” implicated in human
drug abuse.

This system is concerned with
visceral and emotional behavior,
with primal urges and primal
moods.
 It causes the organism to
recognize a reward, and work for
it; to recognize punishment, and
try to avoid it.

Drugs can interact with systems
regulating these basic drive states
through effects on receptors in the brain
and neural circuitry
Drugs can capture control of brain
mechanisms that control motivations and
emotions (i.e., Basic drives, such as anger,
fear, anxiety, pain, and depression).

Dopamine, one example of a
neurotransmitter, is correlated with:
“highs” elicited by addictive drugs (i.e.
cocaine)
 cravings in withdrawal
 Dopamine is activated in a “reward
system”
 Drugs of abuse activate the same reward
system, - increasing or decreasing
dopamine
 Learned emotional reactions are created
contributing to drug addiction…

 Regulation of Emotion may be
implemented by certain brain
regions
 The pre-frontal cortex (PFC)
 • Orbitofrontal PFC
 • Dorsolateral PFC
 • Anterior cingulate cortex
 The limbic/para-limbic structures
 • Amygdala
 • Hypothalamus

Alcohol
dampens fear
and inhibits
response
By impairing
cognitive
processing
capacity

Can lead to changes in
behavior
and emotional reactions
Can inhibit
adaptive
behavior

The nicotine molecule is shaped like a
neurotransmitter called acetylcholine.
Acetylcholine and its receptors are
involved in many functions, including
mood, appetite, memory, and more.
Nicotine also activates areas of the brain
that are involved in producing feelings of
pleasure and reward.
 Recently, scientists discovered that
nicotine raises the levels of dopamine.

 The shape, size, and chemical structure of
methamphetamine and dopamine are similar.
 Dopamine is sometimes called the pleasure
neurotransmitter.
 Methamphetamine is able to fool neurons into taking it up
just like they would dopamine.
 Methamphetamine causes that neuron to release lots of
dopamine, creating an extra sense of pleasure.
 Eventually these pleasurable effects stop. They are
followed by unpleasant feelings called a "crash“ that often
leads a person to use more of the drug.
 If a person continues to use methamphetamine, he will
have a difficult time feeling pleasure from anything, and
this effect can last a long time

 One region of the brain that contains A lot of THC receptors is
The hippocampus, which processes memory.
 When THC attaches to receptors
In the hippocampus, it weakens
Short-term memory.
 The hippocampus also
Communicates with other brain
Regions that process new
Information into long-term
Memory.
 In the brain, under the influence of
Marijuana, new information may
Never register - and may be lost
From memory.
 THC also influences emotions,
Probably by acting on A region of
The brain called the limbic system.

Week 6 emotion and addiction with hand out

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