Drinking impacts virtually every body organ, especially the brain, which performs several functions, including controlling memory and regulating emotions. Everyone leverages a spectrum of emotions that influence their actions and responses. Emotional response refers to the reaction resulting from exposure to a stimulus.
Alcohol consumption interferes with your emotional health. While drinking may help you avoid or forget undesirable emotions, excessive or prolonged alcohol consumption affects emotions negatively, worsening anger, stress, anxiety, or other conditions.
The Effects of Alcohol on the Brain
Alcohol, a nervous system depressant, slows messaging between the body and the brain, affecting coordination and concentration. It depresses the activity of several parts of the brain, including the cerebral cortex, cerebellum, frontal lobes, and hippocampus, making it hard to control judgment, memory, balance, and speech.
For instance, once alcohol reaches your cerebellum, you begin experiencing trouble with awareness, balance, and coordination. Moreover, drinking slackens your cerebral cortex, leading to thought process disorder and poor judgment. But worse still, it suppresses your ability to control alcohol use, leading to excessive drinking.
Alcohol alters the brain signal transmitters that control emotions, actions, and thinking processes throughout your body. This alteration either suppresses or increases these chemical messengers, slowing your brain activity or changing brain chemicals that enhance emotional stress.
Alcohol as a Mood Modifier
Although alcohol consumption can elevate your mood, the feeling is always temporary. At the onset of drinking, alcohol stimulates the release of an extra brain chemical that triggers mood elevation. As a result, you experience a good feeling and an urge to drink more to maintain the sensation.
However, excess alcohol in the body has a ripple effect. It modifies other brain chemicals, changing your emotional state from happiness to feelings of confusion, depression, dehydration, and clumsiness. Over time, you get looped in a cycle of emotional highs and lows caused by the mixed effects of alcohol in your brain.
When your brain function is compromised such that you drink uncontrollably, you eventually suffer from alcohol use disorder (AUD).
The Vulnerability of Emotions and Alcohol
Young adults, in particular, associate alcohol with partying, fun, relaxation, and socialization. Uncontrolled drinking causes depression, pain, anxiety, and other unfortunate outcomes. These and other impacts of drinking are often associated with significant emotional vulnerabilities.
If you get to a point where you cannot control or stop alcohol consumption, you will lead a stressful life characterized by emotional dysregulation. Dysregulated emotions involve heightened responsiveness and sensitivity to situations, while the ability to manage daily stressors becomes increasingly tricky.
You may drink to reduce depression, worry, fear, stress, or other unpleasant emotions. Although alcohol may seem to suppress your emotional distress, continuous excessive drinking worsens the situation and makes you more vulnerable to alcohol-related disorders.
Alcohol and Emotional Memory
Unfortunately, heavy drinking has far-reaching and widespread consequences on your brain, from slowed response to walking difficulties and impaired memory. It interferes mainly with the ability of your brain to develop long-term memories. Excess alcohol use disrupts your ability to recall memories or retain new information in short-term memory.
Thus, the quantity of alcohol you consume and your drinking frequency directly impact your level of memory impairment. Drinking excessively over time, for instance, can damage your brain, causing distorted emotional memories and difficulty in forming new memories. In addition, you can have brain deficits even after achieving sobriety.
Alcohol and Underlying Mental Health Issues
AUD often co-occurs with various mental conditions, either consecutively or concurrently. The occurrence of mental health disorders such as depressive disorders and anxiety has been proven to be more among individuals suffering from AUD than the general population.
Perhaps you often turn to alcohol to avoid feelings of worry, stress, or depression. In that case, you use drinking as a self-treatment strategy for feeling better, forgetting your troubles, or obtaining the courage to handle difficult situations. While alcohol may take away your emotional pain, the effect is temporary, with a high chance of increasing the pain over time. This underscores the importance of seeking professional help for dual diagnosis.
Strategies for Managing Emotions and Alcohol Use
The management of emotions and drinking is an effective option you can use to achieve sobriety and address related risks and disorders. It is worthwhile that you recognize the need to control alcohol use early. Don’t wait until you lose memory or experience other undesirable consequences of excessive alcohol consumption.
Notably, self-medication should not be an option when managing drinking. Instead, the first step should be recognizing triggers that lead to drinking, including underlying emotional distress such as stress, anxiety, fear, and worry. Next, come up with healthier coping strategies and emotional regulation skills.
Recovery training and self-management are proven strategies for managing emotions and treating alcohol-related disorders. If you are a victim of alcohol use, you must seek professional help to obtain expert guidance.
Learn Responsible Alcohol Habits
Alcoholism has far-reaching effects on your body organs, particularly the brain. While drinking can elevate your mood, the feeling is short-lived. Over time, heavy drinking produces undesirable effects, such as depression, confusion, and memory impairment. Thus, the need for awareness and responsible drinking cannot be overemphasized.
If you are a victim of alcoholism, do not suffer through depression, feelings of hopelessness, stress, mood swings, and other symptoms. At Summit Detox in Boynton Beach, FL, we offer specialized help and treatment to people with alcohol-related problems, including alcohol addiction and associated mental health disorders.
Summit Detox provides a safe and comfortable recovery program for those with alcoholism. Contact us today to get started.
