January has come and gone and so have many New Year’s Resolutions. The promise to lose weight, exercise more, and get one’s health back are all popular resolutions. So is the promise to find sobriety by stopping how much you drink or use drugs. And by February many find that their desired sobriety is more difficult to obtain on their own than they realized. It leaves many wondering, why is it so hard to change? And asking when to seek professional help?
It’s important to stress that being unable to stop drug or alcohol use on one’s own is not because of a lack of willpower or moral failing. To understand what you’re up against, you have to realize what drugs and alcohol do to your brain. They hijack the reward center of your brain, the part that controls motivation, desire, pleasure, memory, impulse. All of the things you need working for you, are working against you because of an imbalance in your brain chemistry caused by chronic use of drugs or alcohol.
