Can Drugs Change Your Personality

25th May, 2018 Clear Treatment

PERSONALITY

Your personality is the way you think, feel and act. It’s ever-changing, and it influences how you feel about different people, how you perceive different situations and how you act and don’t act within your environment. In short, your personality is what makes you – you.

Drugs

If you’re taking drugs that alter your brain, they will inevitably change your personality. The clinical evidence suggests that drug use makes you vulnerable to stress, and susceptible to anger and depression as compared to never-drug-users.

We also know that chronic drug use leads to poor decision making, and in particular, high-risk low-reward decisions. It may also produce a loss of inhibitory control, including lowering the likelihood that you will “pause and check” in new surroundings. And it will likely lead to learning difficulties, including degrading your ability to concentrate and remember.

How Drugs Affect Your Personality?

We know now that chronic drug use may in fact be the most effective way to change your personality. There is hardly anything else you could do, short of a lesion to the brain, that would change your personality more. The evidence clearly indicates that drug abuse, alcohol abuse and prescription medication side effects are some of the more common causes of conspicuous personality change.

What’s more, many drug users need to consume their “drug of choice” every single day, and sometimes several times a day, just to feel normal. They are incapable of enjoying life unless they’re under the influence. And now the only thing that brings them joy is their drug-of-choice.

Clinical Data

Much of the clinical data indicates that drug related personality change is most affected by how long you use, i.e. duration of use. Yet how young you are when you start also plays an important role. The data indicates that brains experiencing cigarette, drug or alcohol use prior to 15 years of age are up to 5 times more likely to develop a substance use disorder (SUD) later in life.

Addict Behavior

When a drug addict talks about their negative emotions or risky behaviors they tend to minimize these issues. They may view them as insignificant problems or humorous anomalies. They are, in fact, warning signs of a growing mental health problem.