More Than Conquerors Health Evangelism Outreach Revival

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GYC Southwest

Earl Kapule

What are Addictions?

Last night I gave my testimony about how I lived around addictions.

I experienced addictions and by the grace of God I overcame them.

So this morning's message is what is addiction?

What kinds of addictions are there and why do people get addicted?

And so before I begin I'd like to open with a word of prayer.

Heavenly Father, we thank you for bringing us here this morning.

And we thank you for your mercies that are new every morning.

Father, we pray that your Holy Spirit abides in this place and within us as we come to worship you and to give you praise and honor.

We thank you for all your blessings and we thank you for the love that you give to us.

All right, so we know that In the world today, you know, addiction is taking over.

There's different kinds of addictions, and lives are lost, families are broken.

And so, when we see this problem, when we approach it, the first thing you want to ask is, what is it?

And so it's a primary chronic disease of the brain, of the brain reward system, motivation, memory, and related circuitry.

Another definition by Wikipedia, A continued use of a mood, altering substance or behavior, despite adverse consequences or a neurological impairment leading to such behaviors.

So you see it's a continued use of a substance or behavior.

Even though there be some effects to it, these people continue in these substances and behaviors.

People were asked on the streets, what is addiction to them?

When you can't say no to that substance or to that behavior, a constant need to engage in that activity or substance, And when the substance or behavior becomes the most important thing in their lives, more important than family, friends, work, food, and even God.

When a person does whatever it takes to get that substance or to participate in that behavior, no matter what it costs them or others.

When I thought about this, I was thinking about this this morning and it kind of sounds like a form of worship, you know, when people worship.

You know, these people look at this, this substance or behavior and it's everything to them.

They find happiness and peace or supposedly in this, but it's just a temporary fix.

So you kind of get the feel of what an addiction is.

It's a brain disease, and it happens mostly in the limbic system.

The limbic system is the reward system, it's where your brain, whenever you do something good, that's for survival.

The limbic system kicks in, sends out some neurotransmitters, and gives you that good feeling like when you eat something good, you get that good feeling.

And so dopamine and serotonin is 1 of the 2 main neurotransmitters or messengers that work in this system when it comes to addiction.

Dopamine, it gives you the good feeling whenever you do something good that's good for your survival.

And serotonin is what comes in afterwards to calm you down, to make sure you don't stay in that high and whatnot.

So, I have a short clip of what it looks like when someone's addicted in the brain.

So the purple is the dopamine coming out and it goes to receptors.

When you do something good, it goes to receptors and then you feel good.

And when it's done, it goes back into those little vacuums up there.

But when you take a drug, in this video it's cocaine, the molecules of cocaine blocks those receptors to take back the dopamine.

And dopamine is just floating around and you're in that high for a long period of time because it's blocked and it can't go back in.

So you feel that high for a long period of time.

So that's how cocaine works in addiction.

So an addictive substance either affects your brain by imitating neurotransmitters, imitating dopamine or other neurotransmitters, stimulating the increase of dopamine produced, so it produces more dopamine, or like we just saw, it hinders the reabsorption of dopamine.

2 types of neurotransmitters, inhibitors, excitatory neurotransmitters, so 2 types.

The first type, inhibitory, calms your brain down, makes sure everything stays nice and mellow, helps you get to bed, helps you stay asleep.

And then excitatory would do the opposite.

It fires up the brain, gets you excited, stimulates the brain.

So those are the 2 types of messengers in your brain.

There's a couple of examples, serotonin and GABA.

GABA we're going to talk about is found in alcoholics.

Dopamine, epinephrine, also known as adrenaline, in the fight or flight.

And endorphins, they're known as painkiller neurotransmitters.

And so we see here again, this is a few opiates, some of the strongest addictions in the world.

And they're so strong because their structure is like endorphins, the painkillers.

People take this and they feel the effects of painkillers.

And it says here that once a person tries it, they want to feel it again.

Right when it's done, they want to do it again and again and again.

Because there's no other feeling like that high that this gives you and so they want to take you more and more.

So here's a picture of how the cocaine, like the video we just saw, it comes out and it kind of gets reabsorbed again.

So you stay stuck in that high for a while.

Alcoholics take, they drink a lot and the GABA neurotransmitter tries to calm the brain down.

That's why you see alcoholics, they're mellow at times and they go to sleep right after they drink.

But when you see heavy drinkers trying to get off of drinking, because of the GABA receptors are desensitized, they get the shakes.

When they try to stop drinking, they can't stop, because they drink to calm down.

I know a lot of friends that drink after work every day because they're stressed.

We know there's 2 types of addiction, substances and behaviors.

We're going to talk about a few of them, a few examples how it's affecting the world.

Growing up, everyone in my family smoked.

I was just growing up around secondhand smoke, getting sick all the time.

About 2 years ago, I just overcame tobacco.

It can be just as addictive as cocaine and heroin, responsible for about 30% of all cancer deaths and 90% of lung cancer deaths.

About 5 million deaths per year caused by tobacco.

And they say by 2030 it's going to be 8 million unless something happens.

It really is a weapon of mass destruction.

So each day nearly 4, 000 people under 18 smoke their first cigarette And nearly a thousand become daily smokers every day.

And a lot of tobacco smokers today started under the age of 18.

And in that age, your brain is still growing.

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What are Addictions?

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