Alcohol
Your body has a stress axis, it runs on a strict daily rhythm, and alcohol is one of the few things that can reach every stage of it at once.
It works in three steps. The hypothalamus releases a signalling hormone, that tells the pituitary to release another, and that one tells the adrenal glands to release cortisol. Cortisol then feeds back to the first two stages to switch the whole thing off again, which is what keeps the response proportionate. Physiologists call it the HPA axis, and in a healthy system it is self-limiting.
WHERE THE AXIS GETS DISRUPTED
01 Alcohol activates it directly. It stimulates the first stage of the axis, so cortisol rises even though nothing stressful has happened. The body produces a stress response to a chemical rather than to an event.
02 The off switch gets less sensitive. With repetition, the feedback that normally shuts the axis down becomes blunted. The response runs longer than it needs to, because the signal telling it to stop carries less weight than it used to.
03 The daily curve flattens. Cortisol normally spikes within half an hour of waking and falls through the day to a low near midnight. When the axis is disrupted, the morning rise is smaller and the evening level is higher, which is the flat-in-the-morning and wired-at-night pattern people describe.
04 It changes the response to real stress. An axis already running is a worse starting point for an actual demand. Ordinary pressures land harder because the system meant to handle them is partly spent before the day begins.
05 It resets faster than people expect. Studies measuring cortisol rhythms find the morning rise steepens and the daily curve recovers over several weeks. It is a regulatory change rather than damage, and regulation returns when the input stops.
Cannabis
Nothing Is Fucked, Dude
The Dude's Guide to Getting Off Weed
Most people who use cannabis will never become psychotic, and alarm is not a treatment. But cannabis use can become a disorder — that is a clinical fact, not a moral one — and for the person whose use is daily, escalating, and tangled up with anxiety, flatness, or frightening experiences, the way out is not willpower speeches. It is understanding what the drug has been doing, and building a life the drug is no longer holding together. That is the work I do.
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Start with a free 15-minute consultation. No commitment, no pressure — a short conversation about where you are and whether this work fits. Consultation clients receive the password to the client library: the cannabis detox supplement battery I use in practice — the vitamin regimen, free — and my research database on cannabis and the mind, the studies themselves, kept current. Call 802-397-1239 or write l.roen@snowcreek.info, and we will set the fifteen minutes.
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