How Does Heroin Affect Your Everyday Life?
It’s no secret that heroin is one of the most addictive drugs on the planet. Heroin can ruin your future and your health. The effects aren’t just off on the horizon, though. Heroin affects your everyday life in countless ways starting on day one.
Heroin Makes You Unreliable and Untrustworthy
Heroin is not a substance that will increase your quality of life. In fact, using heroin can mean broken relationships with friends and family. Heroin addiction will change behavior, temperament, and personality. It makes people unreliable as well as untrustworthy.
When using heroin, other responsibilities and obligations are forgotten. Nothing is as important as finding and then using the next fix of heroin. That means plans to meet friends will be overlooked in favor of the upcoming high. Picking up children from school could be wiped from memory once heroin gets consumed.
Letting people down on a regular basis translates to those broken relationships. Even people who care about their loved ones don’t want to be let down again and again. Every day that a person continues using heroin is a choice to pick addiction over personal connections.
Confronting the disease and getting help is the only way to become a reliable friend and family member once again.
Heroin Addiction Typically Means Financial Ruin
For a number of reasons, heroin use, abuse, and addiction lead to financial ruin. It is rare to find a person with a heroin addiction that is able to make any kind of smart financial decisions. To start, the growing hunger for heroin takes more and more cash reserves. Plus, drug addiction overrules logical thought, and bringing in a steady income is virtually impossible.
A drug addiction is not cheap in other ways. Although heroin is far from the most expensive drug available, daily consumption will still add up quickly. Those with more money available often increase their consumption to increase the high. Over time, an increase in tolerance means a growing desire for more or stronger heroin.
Combined with the expense of drugs is the reduction in income. It is all but impossible to juggle a career and an addiction to heroin. Since heroin impacts the perception of the world, health, and psychology, few people are able to maintain their jobs for any meaningful length of time. Less or no income means any savings are depleted and loans go overdue.
Heroin can also lead to unwise financial choices. Individuals addicted to heroin might forgo mortgage payments in order to buy drugs. This can rapidly lead to people who have no assets, no savings, a lot of debt and even bankruptcy.
Using Heroin Means a Constant Risk of Overdose
Every day that a person uses heroin, they have to live with the risk of potential overdose. An overdose is not something that happens once in a blue moon. It is a regular occurrence, and it can be deadly.
Over 13,000 people die from heroin overdoses in the United States every year. Many, many more overdose and recover, but problems can persist. A heroin overdose can develop quickly, and signs include a weakened pulse, slowed breathing and blue lips or nails.
Many people mistakenly believe that they can avoid a heroin overdose through smart consumption. That, of course, is simply not true. Over time, tolerance for heroin increases, which means the daily consumption increases as well. Every increase in heroin consumption means a step toward an eventual overdose.
In addition, no two batches of heroin are the same. A person might consume heroin that is far stronger than normal, leading to an unintentional overdose.
Heroin Consumption Increases the Likelihood of Mental Health Conditions
There is a strong connection between drug use and mental illness. For some patients, mental illness leads to heroin use and even addiction. However, the opposite can also be true. Heroin consumption can lead to new mental health conditions, or it can worsen the symptoms of existing ones.
It is common for those with mental illnesses to turn to substance abuse. Unfortunately, untreated mental illnesses can be incredibly frustrating and debilitating. Some individuals feel that drug use is the only means of treatment. In reality, using a drug like heroin only makes matters worse.
Heroin use can change the way that the brain views the world, and it impacts response to stimuli. Something small can seem insurmountable, and mild discomfort can feel like unending pain. Heroin use can cause depression, anxiety, paranoia, panic attacks and even violent behavior in some individuals.
Withdrawal Symptoms are a Constant Source of Discomfort
Withdrawal isn’t just something that happens when a person decides to end heroin use once and for all. In fact, some people will experience mild withdrawal symptoms on a daily basis for months or even years, when the time between fixes is too long for the body. This makes daily life uncomfortable, and it results in a cycle of unhappiness.
Heroin’s high tends to last between two and five hours. Once that wears off, users can begin to crave the drug once again. A few hours later, and the cravings can become strong withdrawal symptoms. The body literally craves the next dose, and it can become unbearable.
Fighting withdrawal symptoms is a losing battle. The only way to combat them permanently is to begin addiction treatment for lasting recovery and sobriety.
Heroin Users Suffer From a Depressed Immune System
Heroin use leads to a number of lasting health problems. It changes the way the brain functions, increases sensitivity to pain, leads to lasting digestive issues and can cause heart failure. To top it all off, heroin can dampen the immune system.
A depressed immune system can’t function properly. When this happens, the body isn’t able to fight back against things like communicable diseases and even cancer. Immunodeficiency means that every day, there is an increased risk of catching a disease or succumbing to an illness. All of this is on top of an already weakened body fighting the stress of addiction.
Heroin affects more than just your health in the short term. It can ruin relationships and finances, devastate careers, obliterate mental health and lead to lasting problems that only complete recovery can begin to address.