Emotions and Happiness (LESSON 17)
Today’s lesson is a selection of points from William Porter’s Alcohol Explained and Annie Grace’s The Alcohol Experiment, as it relates to alcohol’s impact on our emotions and happiness. From Chapter 10 of Alcohol Explained:
Porter explains that alcohol impacts the limbic system, which is believed to be the emotional center of the brain and affects our long-term memory and our emotional state.
“Any emotion can run unchecked when we are drinking. Drunks can become more teary, more sentimental, more introspective, more self-pitying.”
If you’re someone prone to anger in general, when drinking, you’re more prone to losing your temper over something you might consider a “minor annoyance” without alcohol in your system.
If you’re someone who is prone to sentimentality or tears in general, or you’re feeling unhappy when you start drinking, it’s more likely that these emotions would spiral out of control while drinking.
Essentially, this is because the alcohol inhibits our brain’s ability to process emotions properly.
Porter writes, “This aspect of drinking is also one of the many anomalies of alcohol consumption. Often a drinking session will be triggered by an unpleasant or negative emotion such as anger, upset, distress, sadness, etc. Being an anesthetic, alcohol will take the edge off this triggering emotion in the short term, so that the immediate effect of the drink is to make us feel better, as we will feel less angry, upset, or whatever. But of course as the reactors in the brain that put a brake on the emotions are themselves anesthetized, the original emotion that kicked off the drinking in the first place starts to run unchecked.
The result of this is that we end up more angry, upset or distressed (or whatever the triggering emotion was) even when we are in the middle of the drinking session, to say nothing of the following morning when we not only have the original problem but also the additional hangover, alcohol withdrawal, and disturbed sleep to contend with.
Each drink does provide us with an actual short-term boost, but this is outweighed entirely by the effect on the limbic system, with the effect that very soon, we are far angrier than we were to begin with, even while we are actually ‘enjoying’ the ‘relief’ provided by the drink.”
It is very important to also bear in mind that the subconscious will only recognize the effect of alcohol relieving our anger, stress, upset, etc., and will not recognize the overall increase in these emotions, as this accumulates far more slowly. This is how we can end up in this very strange situation where we all know that alcohol makes people far more emotionally unstable, yet we all still ‘instinctively’ reach for a drink to relieve our anger, stress, upset, etc.
The fact is, whoever you are as a drinker, it is not the real you. It is a poor quality you. It is a tired, irritable, and overly emotional you… It is also well work bearing in mind that it is very rarely a positive emotion that runs unchecked, particularly for long-term heavier drinkers. The tiredness and accumulated poisoning of the body can cause most drinkers to feel lethargic and tired, and this state of mind is much more conducive to negative emotions than positive ones.”
Regarding Alcohol and Happiness, as Annie Grace explains in The Alcohol Experiment, the long-term impact of regular drinking is that finding pleasure in the little things becomes more difficult. Because alcohol causes an artificially high release of dopamine, your brain gets accustomed to relying on this artificial stimulation for pleasure.
You don’t get the same level of dopamine you normally would from regular activities such as reading a good book, falling in love, or watching a good movie. Over time — she explains, that by the end stages of addiction (the right hand side of the graph below) — almost nothing can make people happy. Reading a good book stops registering as “pleasure.” Eventually, even the impact alcohol starts to ‘wear off’ and it doesn’t bring people back to what they once experienced as “normal,” much less happy.
Information above summarized from Day 11 of The Alcohol Experiment, ACT #5, Alcohol and Happiness.
FUN FACT! It takes about 75 days without alcohol for your brain’s dopamine levels to reset to where you start to find joy and happiness in the “little things” again, like reading a book or watching a good movie. (perhaps not such a “Fun” Fact, but just passing along the facts).
