Is it related to the effect certain drugs have on your body or is there some other reason?
In: Culture
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Drive up a mountain pass (>3km up), get out of the car and take a few deep breaths. Compare the experience with your drug of choice. Drive back down very carefully.
“Getting high” is always subjective. It can be a lot of things. For one, the euphoric feeling a drug gives can lead the user to feel an elevated sense of happiness, among other things. An elevated sense of certain perceptions is a “high”.
Also, if you look at the drugs uptake by the body as a linear graph, it looks somewhat like a mountain. You start at the bottom, then rocket to the top concentration of the drug in your blood (peak), then plateau there for a while. On a linear graph, your plateau is the “highest” you get. Then you come down on the other side.
TLDR: Think of how people feel when at the “high” point in their life. High is associated with positive feelings.
Occams razoring this one: We call being sad “feeling low”. So being happy would be synonymous with feeling “high” or “floating above the clouds” etc. etc.
Drugs make you happy, thus they make you “high”.
Plus, saying “Hey bro wanna go get happy?” doesn’t have the same ring to it.
tl;dr: Its slang.
I’m from Amsterdam, and see people get high all the time.
Wanted to add there’s a difference between high (euphoric, excited) and stoned (slow, but happy). Hollywood movies just use these terms and their effects interchangeably, even though they’re complete opposites and caused by different kinds of marijuana.
Probably the worst offender is Afroman in his song “because I got high” even though he’s acting stoned.
I like this question 🙂
We all seem to agree that a “high” is an euphoric and/or rush-like feeling. But I think “high” should not be confused with “happy”, you can be very happy when you’re high, but you can of course also be high without being happy, or at least without being more happy compared to your mood before you got high. Also, you can of course get high without using drugs, think of an adrenaline rush or the so-called “runners high”.
Now, why is it called “getting” high? Why don’t we “become” high or “rise” high, or “achieve” a high? Well… I think it is because of the fact that we as humans will never be able to “achieve” this kind of mindset (or rather: mind setting) without the help of certain substances, or without running a couple of miles, or without jumping of a mountain with a wingsuit or something. So a “high” is a thing you “get” from something. And once you “got” it, you “are” high 🙂
In case this makes no sense at all, in my defense I will say this: I am completely high right now 😀
TL;DR: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1_CkgWT7Uw)
It’s pretty much related to feeling in a better or *higher* state compared to how you feel normally.
Serotonin is the neurotransmitter that keeps you at that normal/calm state. A deficiency in serotonin can lead to symptoms of depression. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter that makes you high/happy. A deficiency in dopamine can lead to symptoms of Parkinson’s.
**(this is wrong, I’m leaving it in for those reading)** Because dopamine is the how you feel “high”, it’s also contributed to the slang “dope” and “doped up”.
Hope this helped!
**EDIT:** Didn’t realize the dopamine/dope slang was wrong. That was something I’ve heard all of my life and I didn’t ever reconsider it.
I know dopamine isn’t the prime reason for feeling high in all situations, there are way more chemicals and substances involved in feeling different things. I was mainly thinking about how dopamine is usually the activator.
Sorry for the false information! Read Earl’s comment for the accurate answer.
Sadly I don’t have the time to do the research necessary to answer this question properly, but I think it’s interesting. How did the word for “tall” come to mean “intoxicated”?
Here’s what I found: The Online Etymological Dictionary says that “high”, meaning “euphoric or exhilarated from alcohol” is first attested 1620s, and of drugs, 1932. And it says this sense of “high” shares the same etymology as “high” meaning both “physically elevated” and “exalted” (one root, dual meanings). Compare a “high mountain”, a “high priest”.
From there I can only speculate. Given the historical connection between religion and alcohol, my guess would be that this sense of “high” comes from the religious meaning rather than the geographical, but I can’t say for certain.
Most of the everyday ways we talk about our personal feelings use *metaphors*. This means that we describe things that don’t really have a size, or weight, or color, or location, as if they did. It makes things like ideas and feelings easier to describe and compare.
“Being high”, “getting high”, “feeling high” use positions in space as a symbol for an emotion and a state of mind. It matches with the “up and down” way we talk about other ideas/feelings, like happiness (“I’m feeling *up*. My spirits *rose*. She always gives me a *lift*.”), wakefulness (“I got *up*. I woke *up*. I *fell* asleep.”), intensity (“*High* drama. The *height* of passion. *High* activity. *High* winds and *high* seas.”), and general positivity (“Things are looking *up*. We hit a *peak*.”)
“Being high”, describing a feeling you get from taking certain chemicals, was first used a few hundred years ago, when “high” could also mean “violent, loud” and “uncontrollable”. A good description for someone roaring drunk on gin.
Nowadays, “getting high” is related to orientational metaphors about fantasizing and day-dreaming like “head in the clouds”, “spaced out”, and “down-to-earth”. But it’s also connected to spiritual metaphors about awareness like “higher consciousness”.
TLDR: We symbolically describe good moods, intense experiences, uncontrollable activity, the world of fantasy and imagination, and spiritual awareness as “up”. “Getting high” sits nicely among these metaphors and connects these concepts.
– A lot of these examples, and the general ideas, are from [“Metaphors We Live By”](https://books.google.com/books/about/Metaphors_We_Live_By.html?id=r6nOYYtxzUoC) by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.
This might be a good question for /r/etymology, because it asks how a certain phrase with certain words came to be used to mean something more metaphorical. I have a feeling it has to do with using a metaphor to describe how it feels to be intoxicated like that.
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