- Your consciousness is your awareness of yourself and your environment. Some chemicals known as
psychoactive drugs can alter your consciousness by affecting
your perceptions and moods. There are three main categories
of psychoactive drugs I want to tell you about
in the next few videos: Depressants, stimulants,
and hallucinogens. So let's start with depressants. Depressants are drugs that lower
your body's basic functions and neural activity, for
example, your heart rate, reaction time, processing
speed, that kind of thing. The most popular depressant,
one you might not even think of is a consciousness-altering
drug, is alcohol. Alcohol, like other depressants,
slows neural processing. It slows your sympathetic
nervous system down, which is the system that usually helps you respond to dangerous situations. That just means you think
and act more slowly. Alcohol can also disrupt
your regular sleep cycle, specifically disrupting REM sleep. When you don't get enough
REM sleep, then your ability to form memories and
new synapses is reduced. And because of that,
alcohol can have a negative impact on your memory
and learning processes. And finally, and what you
probably know about alcohol, is that it's a disinhibitor,
meaning it removes your inhibitions, people who've
been drinking are more likely to act on their impulses,
which often leads to impaired judgement and reduced
self-awareness and self-control. That mostly covers what we want
to talk about with alcohol. Another type of depressant
is a barbiturate, which used to be called a
tranquilizer, but that term isn't really used that much anymore. And clinically, barbiturates
are usually used to induce sleep or reduce anxiety,
and they work by depressing your central nervous system activity. Some side effects of
barbiturates are reduced memory, judgement, and concentration,
and when combined with alcohol they can lead to death. As a side note, combining
alcohol with drugs is generally a bad idea,
your body can only handle so many foreign substances
at one time, so take it easy. The most commonly prescribed
suppressant drugs are benzodiazepines which are
sometimes called benzos for short. Benzos, like most other
depressants, enhance your brain's response to GABA, which is an
inhibitory neurotransmitter. Basically how it works
is that benzos open up GABA-activated chloride
channels in your neurons which allows more chloride
ions to enter the neuron and make it more negatively
charged, which then makes it more resistant to excitation. And that's why these drugs
are often prescribed as sleep aids or anti-anxiety medications. There are three types
of benzos: short-acting, intermediate-acting, and long-acting. Short- and intermediate-acting
benzos are usually prescribed for insomnia,
whereas the long-acting benzos are preferred for anxiety. The last type of drug I'll
tell you about in this video is opiates, and opiates are
usually used to treat pain and they can also be
used to treat anxiety. Some examples of opiates you may have heard of are heroin and morphine. The reason opiates are used
to treat pain is because they act at your body's receptor
sites for endorphins, which are your body's
natural pain reducers. This mechanism is actually
what makes opiates a different class of
drugs than depressants. Although these drugs can be
used for some overlapping purposes, such as anxiety
reduction, depressants act on GABA receptors while opiates
act on endorphin receptors. High doses of opiates can
lead to euphoria, which is why people end up taking them recreationally. All these drugs can be very
addictive, so that's why doctors always have to be very careful when they prescribe painkillers,
sleep aids, or any other type of depressant drug or opiate.