You Booze you Lose!
This one could get a bit technical, but bear with me! I'm looking today at the effect alcohol has on our anxiety levels, and it's all a bit scientific, but worth educating yourself on. Whilst working for a charity supporting people with addiction, I learned so much I never knew about the impact of alcohol on our body and our wellbeing. I knew that alcohol caused damage to your liver if used excessively, but what I didn't know is that alcohol is more damaging to our body and our brain than Heroin! It's actually amazing it's legal.
I'm no tee-total alcohol basher; I enjoy having some drinks on a night out and the occasional glass of wine at home, and I've personally never had a problem controlling my alcohol intake. But many people do, and a lot of people become addicted to alcohol in order to manage stress or anxiety.
This year new guidelines came into effect outlining that the recommended maximum alcohol intake per week for men and women is 14 units. That's the eqivalent of 6 pints of beer over the course of a week, or 6 175ml glasses of wine. Click here for more information. They have recommended that if you have 14 units, these are not all in one go! Spacing out the units over the week has been proven to reduce the impact on the risk of cancer, heart attack, stroke and liver damage.
If you drink more than the recommended limit regularly, it is proven to massively increase your risk of developing cancer, suffering a heart attack or stroke, and causing irreversible damage to your liver. If you used Heroin at the same rate, you'd be highly unlikely to suffer many of these side effects! I'm not condoning Heroin use here, but it shocked me to learn that Alcohol is significantly more damaging to your health.
So here's the technical bit! Alcohol works as a drug in your brain, much like illegal substances do, by causing changes to the levels of 'neurotransmitters' in the brain. You may be familiar with some neurotransmitters already, like Adrenaline, which gets you pumped up for fight or flight, or Dopamine, which gives us a feeling of reward, and Serotonin which helps us feel happy and contented . Our brain naturally produces many kinds of neurotransmitters which we need to function, and are released in response to different situations to prompt an appropriate reaction. Alcohol, and drugs (including some prescribed drugs) forces our brain to create neurotransmitters unnaturally, like in the case of anti-depressant medication which helps our brain create and absorb more serotonin in the brain.
Alcohol works predominantly on two particular neurotransmitters in the brain, called GABA and Glutamate. GABA is responsible for helping our central nervous system to calm down, sending messages in the brain to help our body relax. It's why people often use alcohol abusively, because it essentially (initially) creates a feeling of unwinding and calming down, even inducing sleep. If you're stressed and anxious, alcohol seems like the perfect way to help alleviate these feelings. The problem with this is, if there is excess GABA in our brain, and our body relaxes too much, our brain releases excess Glutamate when the alcohol starts wearing off, to speed us back up again, exciting our central nervous system so that we can continue to function. This speeding up of our central nervous system after a feeling of calm can feel pretty uncomfortable, and is essentially an increased feeling of anxiety to what you were experiencing before. You will likely find that you fall asleep quickly with lots of alcohol, but wake up in the night unable to get back to sleep. That is the GABA wearing off and the Glutamate kicking in. It is sometimes recommended that someone who has been drinking heavily for a long period of time NOT STOP DRINKING completely as the glutamate rush can cause serious seizures and possibly death, but instead cut down slowly.
If we use an unnatural way of prompting a neurotransmitter response, like alcohol to increase calming GABA, for a period of time, our brain stops producing it naturally for a while, and relys on the alcohol or drug to do it instead. It can take weeks or months sometimes for our brain to realise that it needs to produce these neurotransmitters itself after stopping using, and this can be a pretty awful experience, with sweats, shakes, inability to sleep, severe anxiety and nausea. But it does sort itself out eventually. You just have to get through the tough time in between, which is why many people relapse back to using pretty soon after giving up. It's also why a prescribed drug must be gradually reduced rather than stopping cold turkey.
I hope I haven't blown your mind! I've tried to keep this as basic as possible! If you're experiencing stress or anxiety, alcohol use (or any substance use) can feel like the answer, but as you can see it's not. Most, if not all, of the people I've worked with who are struggling with an addiction never imagined that it would get that bad. If you find it's hard to stop, get some support. There are wonderful charities out there who provide clinical and psychological support for free, and here at Boost we offer sessions and support in moving on from an addiction in the long term, and also help you learn new ways of managing stress and anxiety. Is it finally time to do something about it?
