How trauma rewires your brain’s reward system

Trauma doesn’t just change how you feel—it changes how your brain works.

After trauma, your brain is on fire. Your past hijacks your here and now so you feel bad. It starts to affect things that used to feel good—like hobbies, social time, or rest—it all starts to feel bad because of trauma and the brain’s negativity bias, the default setting of your brain is negativity.

This is why numbing behaviors like substances, shopping, or sex can give you a little bit of relief, but over time, they have negative side effects and add extra weight to everything else you’re dealing with.

Why quick hits feel more powerful after trauma

Your brain’s feel good system gets disrupted by prolonged stress. Your brain wants relief from emotional pain and bad feelings and it wants it NOW.

Alcohol, marijuana, or compulsive spending light up that reward system much faster than working on trauma recovery at the core—at least at first.

It’s survival mode looking a shortcuts but what I have seen in many clients is that there is a long term hidden costs that weighs down heavy on your original issues because the shortcut starts to

The hidden setback of quick fixes

Fast relief doesn’t last. And every time you reach for a quick fix, your brain wants more. It starts to cloud the path to real trauma recovery.

This makes it harder to enjoy the quieter, steadier rewards that support long-term healing. Over time, quick relief creates more problems—guilt, shame, debt, conflict, anxiety—stacked on top of the load of unprocessed trauma.

Marijuana, anxiety, and the stuck cycle

Some clients think marijuana is harmless because it’s legal in some states or relatively easy to get and helps them relax. But for some trauma survivors and especially young men, marijuana actually increases anxiety, restlessness, and even intrusive thoughts over time.

This creates a loop that can trap you from a young age—it slowly turns into the cause of anxiety. Additional issues the harmful effect of weed on motivation keep so many of these young men stuck.