The length and severity of cocaine withdrawal depend largely on how much you’ve been using and for how long. Any mental health challenges and stressful home situations can make it worse. While everyone experiences withdrawal differently, there are certainly some commons signs you can look for if you suspect you have an addiction. To learn about the challenges of cocaine withdrawal, contact Serenity House Detox & Recovery Houston at 866.516.8356.
Signs of Cocaine Withdrawal
Cocaine withdrawal includes primarily mental withdrawal symptoms. Because so many people use cocaine to feel more productive, energetic, confident, and friendly, these can feel incredibly uncomfortable.
Some of the psychological signs of cocaine withdrawal include:
- Exhaustion from even minor physical exertion
- Slow thinking
- Trouble concentrating
- Inability to feel sexually aroused
- Unpleasant nightmares
- Agitation, anxiety, and depression
- Increased hunger
Some physical signs include chills, shaking, whole body aching, heart irregularities, and nerve pain.
Those who go through cocaine detox are at high risk of suicide. When you’re in the middle of these symptoms, it feels like they will never stop. Cocaine does have a longer than average withdrawal timeline.
You may have residual symptoms for months, even though most of it passed in 4-7 days.
What Causes Withdrawal Signs
Remember when you were a kid, and someone gave you a toy you really wanted, but you didn’t know you were going to get it? That ecstatic feeling of joy was the result of dopamine.
Dopamine is a natural chemical that sends messages between nerves when something good happens. It’s associated with joy, pleasure, arousal, and relaxation but also gives you energy.
Cocaine hijacks this feel-good system. It prevents your brain from recycling dopamine, so more stays in your system, and you stay in this ecstatic state for extended periods.
But the problem is we’re aren’t meant to stay in a state of prolonged euphoria. It makes your heart, brain, blood vessels, senses, and everything work harder. For this reason, you build up a tolerance for dopamine. As a result, you need more cocaine to try to feel that good feeling.
Unfortunately, many people never get back to that initial high. That’s because cocaine changes how the brain responds to dopamine, produces dopamine, and recycles it for re-use.
Now, take the cocaine away. The brain is now dopamine-deficient because it doesn’t respond to normal dopamine production. It suddenly feels starved of happiness, relaxation, and pleasure.
So you can’t think straight.
That’s what causes the cocaine withdrawal signs. But the brain does heal and begin to produce and use dopamine naturally with time and treatment.
How Medical Drug Detox Can Help
Medical detox provides you with both support and accountability. You know that using cocaine will stop the mental and physical pain during drug detox, so it takes more than an iron will to not give in.
In medical drug detox, you’re protected from these urges so that you can see it through to the other side in recovery.
Not only do professionals watch over you during those critical first few days when the cocaine withdrawal signs are often at their worst. Compassionate staff will work to ease the discomfort withdrawal causes. They can reassure you that this won’t last forever. With the right cocaine addiction treatment and support, you can begin to restore mental and physical health and wellbeing.
Within a couple of days, you’re ready to begin working on your individualized treatment plan. It may involve:
At the moment, the signs of withdrawal feel worse than the cocaine addiction itself. But once you start to turn that corner and start getting your life back, you’ll realize the victory of living in recovery. If you or a loved one is suffering from cocaine addiction, please gives us a call at 866.516.8356 to learn more about a cocaine detox program.
