Your adrenal gland, which is responsible for releasing the stress hormone, becomes weak or sputters out. Then it doesn’t signal properly to help us cope. That, in turn, starts to affect us adversely - not just our biology, but also our emotional response. -- So then you are caught in a vicious cycle of quickly degenerating health because both the stress and the substances are working together to wear down your body systems—your stress axis, your liver, kidney, heart, blood pressure. -- Then you get a double whammy in terms of risk for heart disease and certain types of cancer.
Summary of the Mechanism and how it can be induced by intention repetitively to do physical and psychological harm: