My Drinking Careen: September 2011

http://www.thefix.com/content/one-big-pain-brain

How long after you stop using do drugs remain in your system? Most doctors agree that a healthy body metabolizes most substances in a matter of days: coke, meth, and heroin rarely remain in the blood or urine longer than five days. While your body can burn off alcohol within 24 hours, the agonizing agitation, shaking and other symptoms of alcohol withdrawal can last for a week or more. The side-effects of prescription drugs, like benzodiazepines, can last even longer. Ditto for pot if you're a heavy smoker. But while the substances you're withdrawing from may escape your body in a matter of days, it often takes a lot longer than that for your mind to return to “normal.” Exactly how much longer depends on which substance you used, along with how much, how long, and how often. (Check outTime magazine’s “Addiction and the Brain” for some cool graphics depicting the science of addiction.)

“With opioids like heroin or methadone, there are two distinct withdrawal phases,” says Dr. Arnold Washton, the author of Willpower’s Not Enough: Recovering From Addictions of Every Kind and the director of Recovery Options, a private practice geared toward high-functioning addicts. “First there's the acute withdrawal—or cold-turkey phase—which is followed by a later, longer-lasting phase known as ‘protracted withdrawal.’” (Protracted withdrawal is also known in some recovery literature as PAWS, or Post–Acute Withdrawal Syndrome.) During protracted withdrawal for opioids, according to Washton, many addicts are still hampered by low energy, sleep problems, depression, hyperirritability, generalized apathy—and, of course, intense cravings for their drug of choice. “For anyone who has been using high-dose opioids, that period can easily go on for six months after the initial withdrawal phase,” Washton says. These symptoms take their own sweet time to leave. Most addicts don’t tell you they feel sick at this stage—instead they complain that “they just don’t feel like themselves,” he says.

That's the conventional wisdom, anyway. In fact, some researchers believe that it can take up to two years for certain chemically-compromised regions of the brain to return to normal. There is also growing evidence that on average, it takes about 90 days for the brain to break free of the immediate effects of the drug and reset itself. Researchers at Yale University call this 90-to-100 day period the “sleeper effect,” a time during which the brain’s proper analytical and decision-making functions gradually recover. That Alcoholics Anonymous recommends newbies to attend a meeting a day for the first 90 days of their recovery might just be a curious coincidence—or a precient prediction of much-later scientific studies.

My Drinking Careen

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Tuesday, September 27, 2011

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Thursday, September 15, 2011

You had a Hangover for how long?