Concept in Definition ABC

Abstinence is the voluntary decision that an individual will make to completely renounce the satisfaction of a desire or appetite for certain bodily activities such as sex, feeding, alcohol and other drugs, which are incorporated and experienced as widely pleasurable, as a consequence of some imposition, religious prohibition or for any practical reason.

While abstinence can observe various forms. On the one hand we can find the temporary or partial abstinence, that is, one that is carried out only for a specific period of time in order to give compliance capable of some promise that has been made within a religious framework. For example, a person who promises to fast for three days because he promised it to the Virgin of the which is devoted to the objective that her son who was suffering from a complicated condition cure. This type of withdrawal is very common in religious contexts.

On the other hand, religions also have some commitments that require the abstinence of their faithful

. Christianity, for example, abstains from eating meat on Friday in chance of the celebration of the Feast of Easter and obliges the religious who decide to consecrate their lives to the movement that they fulfill the celibacy that is simply that the absolute sexual abstinence during all their life. Or for Muslims that the time of fasting during the month of the celebration of Ramadan extends from dawn to dusk.

And it is also very common to meet those abstinences resulting from the untimely interruption in the consumption of drugs such as alcohol, cocaine, heroin, among others.

In medical terms, abstinence of this type is called syndrome abstinence and is characterized by manifestation that the addict makes of a set of physical or bodily reactions because he is no longer consuming the drug that he used to consume.

There is no universality of withdrawal symptoms, rather each drug observes its own symptoms. For example, in the case of alcohol withdrawal, this will be characterized by trembling, chills, weakness, headache, dehydration and nausea, whereas in smokers there is an irrepressible need to lighting a cigarette, tension, irritability, difficulty concentrating, insomnia, increased appetite and weight.

Although to a lesser extent, this type of withdrawal instead of being due to the lack of consumption of a drug can occur due to the absence or disappearance of a person on whom you were absolutely dependent and become abstinence emotional, common among psychic pathologies.

Issues in Abstinence