Nicotine, Caffeine, and Alcohol… Oh My!
By Aífe Kearns-McHugh | Sep 13 2016
The word “drug” usually conjures up images of so called “hard drugs”. But what about the common ones you ingest every day? Aífe McHugh looks at the effects everyday drugs have on the mind and body.Drug n.“A substance which causes a physiological reaction when ingested or otherwise introduced to the body.”You know what drugs are. You know what drugs do. There’s a high, maybe a crash. Your body becomes tolerant; you grow dependant. This is how addiction develops. Between the highs and the lows you need the drug just to hit neutral. All very dramatic and tragic and nothing at all to do with how you’re not yourself before your morning coffee.Drugs are cheat codes for our bodies. What we have here is a carefully engineered, highly sensitive biochemical machine. Its entire aim is to keep you breathing until you’re breeding. That means having an emotional regulation system which rewards you for things that keep you alive and replicating (Food! Friendship! F-exercise!) and punishes you for things that don’t (Danger! Disease! Dead things!). But we, the contrary species we are, have found the masturbatory cheat codes that give all of the pleasure with none of the increased survival fitness. Dopamine is the brain’s DO IT AGAIN button and it doesn’t care what presses it.Millennia of evolution undermined. Classic humanity.And, of course, soft drugs do the same thing as hard drugs. Just, well, softer. Nicotine, alcohol, caffeine; these little chemical fairies help us on our day to day business. Maybe some of us rely on them too heavily, but sure you know yourself.Be it caffeine or cocaine, the mechanism for addiction is the same. For softer drugs which produce a negligible high, users are more likely to tell you that the only reason they regularly use is to postpone withdrawal symptoms. This is particularly true for nicotine. Although it causes a slight dopamine rush, the body quickly adapts by producing less dopamine of its own. At that point the effects of nicotine withdrawal are a lot more salient and less pleasant than nicotine dependence itself. Nausea, irritability, disordered sleep … it’s not worth the hassle.Even more socially acceptable than nicotine is caffeine, the most widely used psychoactive drug in the world. It increases metabolism, and wreaks havoc on your sleep cycle. As a mild stimulant, caffeine increases concentration and alertness, but also anxiety. There is evidence that the increased concentration associated with caffeine only applies for those already hooked. Caffeine doesn’t make its users sharper, but only brings users up to the baseline they would be at if they didn’t use caffeine at all.Although alcohol might boost your mood, it’s classified as a depressant. In the short term, it reduces your inhibitions and messes with your memory, along with a plethora of other effects generally classified as “being drunk”. In the long term … it’s depressing. Alcoholics and heavy drinkers face long-term damage to pretty much every organ in the body.“There is evidence that the increased concentration associated with caffeine only applies for those already hooked.”
But addiction is tricky with substances like these. Alcoholism is acknowledged as a serious problem in today’s society. But caffeine dependence is not yet a diagnosable mental disorder, despite mounting evidence. As lines go, this one is hard to draw. People become addicted to everything from technology to tanning. Psychoactive drugs are usually put in their own little category with barbed wire around it, but when it comes to addictive behaviour, the hard lines wave and blur.One could advocate going drug free, or imbibing only as prescribed. Drugs cause significant changes to body and brain chemistry. Addiction is unpredictable. Such self-tinkering can’t be good.But on the other hand, everything you have ever known, done, or experienced has changed your brain some way or another. Maybe don’t go hitting the hard stuff, but all things in moderation, yeah?