Your cycle and your addictions

More great news:

"Women may be uniquely vulnerable to substance abuse and its effects, because female sex hormones affect the brain’s reward circuitry, influencing women’s response to drugs....Scientists noticed that women more quickly escalate to heavy drug use and more readily succumb to the accompanying social and physical damage."

Women are more likely to succumb to the accompanying social and physical damage because we get more of a high from substances than men do. It's, again, all about the body chemistry. The article says that when progesterone levels are high in women it is easier for them to quit because the high is less than when our estrogen levels are up.

"...asked half of 202 female smokers to try to quit during the second part of their cycles—when progesterone levels are high—and the others to make the attempt earlier in their cycles. The results were stunning: 34 percent of the women in the first group had not smoked 30 days later as compared with only 14 percent of those who tried to stop smoking when progesterone levels were low. 'When women are smoking early in their cycle, they’re getting more of a kick from their nicotine, more pleasure maybe, so it might be harder to quit,'"

So a key to quitting may be to watch your cycle. Or, birth control has a lot of both hormones in it. I wonder if the heavy progesterone brands would also work as an aid to quitting substances. When I quit alcohol, I was in the part of the cycle where estrogen levels were low, which I assume is what made it easier to stop suddenly. When I tried to quit smoking, I was in the opposite end of the cycle, which is presumably what made it so hard. So watching where I am might be the key to quitting.