There’s a moment that happens before every relapse, a split second where you know what you’re about to do and you do it anyway. If you’ve been there, you understand exactly what I’m talking about. Your mind is screaming one thing, your body is doing another, and somewhere in between, your emotions have taken the wheel entirely.
Let me be direct: if you find yourself unable to control your emotions to the point where they’re driving you to get high, you’re in danger. Not theoretical danger, not future danger, but immediate, present-tense danger. This isn’t about being weak or lacking willpower. It’s about recognizing that you’ve crossed a threshold where your emotional state has become the primary decision-maker in your life, overriding your rational mind, your goals, your promises to yourself and others, and even your survival instinct.
Think about what that actually means. Emotions are meant to inform us, to give us valuable data about our internal state and our environment. They’re supposed to work in concert with our reasoning, helping us navigate complex situations. But when they’re completely in charge, when a wave of anxiety or depression or anger or loneliness can sweep away every intention you’ve set for yourself, you’re operating without brakes. You’re a car careening down a hill with no way to slow down.
The real danger here isn’t just the immediate harm of using again. It’s what this pattern reveals about your current state. If emotions are consistently overpowering your ability to choose differently, it means several systems that should be helping you stay safe have broken down. Maybe your coping mechanisms have eroded. Maybe your support network has weakened. Maybe the underlying issues that contributed to substance use in the first place have intensified without you fully realizing it. Whatever the specifics, the result is the same: you’re vulnerable in a way that puts you at serious risk.
Here’s what people often misunderstand about this dynamic. They think it’s about “just saying no” or having enough determination. But when your emotions are running the show to this degree, determination doesn’t enter the equation. It’s not that you’re choosing to get high over staying sober. It’s that the part of you capable of making that choice has been temporarily overridden. The emotional brain, the limbic system, is essentially hijacking the prefrontal cortex where executive function lives. You’re not making a decision at all in any meaningful sense.
This is why the stakes are so high. When you can’t access your own decision-making capacity because your emotional state has completely taken over, you’re at the mercy of whatever that emotional state demands. And if what it’s demanding is the temporary relief or escape that getting high provides, you’re going to end up using. Not because you want to in any deep sense, but because in that moment, the want has become so overwhelming that it crowds out everything else.
The pattern typically looks something like this: something triggers a difficult emotion, whether it’s stress, grief, shame, fear, or just a deep, aching emptiness. That emotion intensifies quickly, sometimes within minutes. Your body starts responding with physical sensations: tension, restlessness, a kind of crawling anxiety under your skin. Your thoughts begin to narrow, focusing more and more on the one thing you know will make these feelings stop. Alternative coping strategies, if you even remember them, seem laughable, inadequate, like bringing a water pistol to a forest fire. And then, almost inevitably, you find yourself using, sometimes barely remembering the transition between thinking about it and actually doing it.
If this describes your experience with any regularity, you need to understand something crucial: this will get worse before it gets better on its own, which is to say it won’t get better on its own at all. The neural pathways that connect emotional distress to substance use get stronger every time they’re activated. Your brain is literally learning that this is how you handle overwhelming feelings. Meanwhile, other coping pathways, the ones you’re not using, are weakening. The longer this continues, the more automatic the pattern becomes, and the harder it is to interrupt.
What makes this particularly insidious is that getting high does work, at least temporarily. It does provide relief from whatever unbearable emotional state was driving you toward it. This creates a reinforcement cycle that your brain learns deeply and quickly. You’re training yourself, essentially, to respond to emotional overwhelm with substance use. And because it works in the short term, your brain prioritizes this solution over anything else, even though you know intellectually that it’s destroying your life in the long term.
The risk here extends beyond just relapse. When you’re in this state of emotional dysregulation, where feelings can completely override your judgment and decision-making, you’re at risk for all sorts of dangerous situations. You might use more than you intended because the emotional relief becomes the only goal. You might combine substances in ways you normally wouldn’t. You might put yourself in unsafe environments or with unsafe people because your decision-making capacity is compromised. You might isolate yourself further, cutting off from the people who could help, because shame and despair feel insurmountable.
There’s also the cumulative toll this takes on your sense of self. Every time you experience that helpless feeling of watching yourself do something you don’t want to do, it damages your confidence in your own agency. You start to believe, on some level, that you simply can’t control yourself. This belief becomes self-fulfilling. If you genuinely don’t believe you can choose differently, you’re far less likely to try, and the pattern entrenches itself even deeper.
So what do you do with this information? First, recognize it for the red flag it is. If you’re regularly experiencing moments where your emotions are so overwhelming that they’re driving you to use despite your intentions not to, you need more support than you currently have. This might mean intensive outpatient treatment, it might mean inpatient rehab, it might mean medication to help stabilize your mood, it might mean trauma therapy to address the root causes of the emotional overwhelm. But it definitely means you can’t keep doing what you’re doing and expect different results.
Second, understand that this isn’t a moral failing. Your brain is doing exactly what brains do when they’re overwhelmed and have learned a particular solution to that overwhelm. But understanding the mechanism doesn’t make you less responsible for getting help. If anything, it makes getting help more urgent because you now understand that willpower alone isn’t going to cut it.
Third, start building or rebuilding the support systems and skills you need to handle emotions differently. This is hard work and it takes time, which is exactly why you need to start now. You need to learn and practice emotion regulation skills, whether that’s through dialectical behavior therapy, mindfulness practices, or other evidence-based approaches. You need people in your life who can help you when you’re struggling, who you can reach out to before the emotional wave becomes a tsunami. You need to identify your triggers and develop specific plans for handling them.
The bottom line is this: if your emotions have become so powerful that they’re consistently overriding your ability to choose not to get high, you’re in a dangerous place. The risk is real, it’s immediate, and it requires action. This isn’t about beating yourself up or drowning in shame. It’s about looking clearly at what’s happening and recognizing that you need help to change it. The good news is that help exists, that these patterns can be changed, and that you don’t have to keep living this way. But none of that happens without first acknowledging the reality of where you are right now.