Cocaine is a drug that amps up your attention, energy, and alertness. It’s a highly addictive stimulant that speeds up the central nervous system, producing a euphoric high followed by a devastating crash.
So effective is cocaine that it can change your personality both in the short and long term.
Before going into that, we need to understand how cocaine works. Once you inject or snort the drug, it gets to the brain where it stimulates the release of dopamine. This triggers feelings of euphoria while your breathing, heart rate, body temperature, and blood pressure all increase. This in turn increases your mental alertness while boosting your physical stamina and energy levels.
When you start crashing from the high, you end up experiencing the exact opposite where the rush of energy turns to sluggishness and fatigue and the euphoria becomes depression and paranoia. These negative effects are often accompanied by an intense craving for the drug.
How Does Your Personality Change?
Now that we know how cocaine works, let’s see how it can change your personality. Cocaine abuse can make you:
- Emotionally volatile. The stimulating effect cocaine has can affect your moods, making you seem like an entirely different person. If you’re bored, the drug can make you happy and excited and if you’re a shy person you can get a surge in confidence, becoming more talkative and outgoing. As the high wears off, the opposite happens and you may become mean, hostile, and irritable.
- Paranoid, depressed, and anxious. Crashing from a cocaine high is unpleasant and can trigger or worsen mental health issues. It can turn you into a more paranoid, anxious, and depressed version of yourself.
- Secretive, isolated, and dishonest. As cocaine addiction takes hold, you may go to great lengths to hide the habit from those who are close to you. You end up lying about your habit or becoming more secretive and isolated from others as a result.
- Lose interest in activities. Cocaine addiction can be all-encompassing, making you obsessed with getting the next hit to the point where you lose interest in activities you previously enjoyed. You may lose interest not only in your hobbies but also in keeping up with your hygiene or even your job.
Get Help Today
Cocaine addiction can quickly take over your life, destroying your relationships. You don’t have to let things get to that point.
We at the Robert Alexander Center can help you break free from cocaine addiction. Upon admission to our drug abuse treatment center in Kentucky, we’ll conduct an evaluation to help determine the best course of treatment. In most cases, we’ll start clients off with our medically assisted detox program to help them safely detox. After that, you can transition to the intensive outpatient or the outpatient treatment program. We also offer a family therapy program to assist families that have been devastated by addiction.
Don’t let cocaine ruin your life. Reach out to us to get started on your recovery journey.