Drinking To Forget: A Healthy Way To Cope With Emotions?

Alcohol is a nervous system depressant that slows messaging between the body and the brain, affecting coordination and concentration. It can make you feel relaxed and cheerful, but it can also negatively impact your emotions, worsening anxiety, depression, stress, and even suicidal thoughts. While drinking may help you avoid or forget undesirable emotions, excessive or prolonged alcohol consumption can have far-reaching consequences on your brain, from slowed response to walking difficulties and impaired memory. It is not a solution to a high-stress season of life.

Alcohol can worsen anxiety, depression, stress, and suicidal thoughts

Alcohol can have a temporary positive impact on your mood, but it can also worsen anxiety, depression, stress, and suicidal thoughts. While drinking may help you avoid or forget undesirable emotions, excessive or prolonged alcohol consumption can negatively affect your emotions.

Alcohol is a nervous system depressant that slows messaging between the body and the brain, affecting coordination and concentration. It impairs activity in several parts of the brain, such as the cerebral cortex, cerebellum, frontal lobes, and hippocampus, making it difficult to control judgment, memory, balance, and speech. Drinking also slackens the cerebral cortex, leading to poor judgment and impaired decision-making skills.

Additionally, alcohol alters the brain's signal transmitters that control emotions, actions, and thinking processes. This alteration can either suppress or increase these chemical messengers, slowing brain activity or changing brain chemicals that enhance emotional stress. Alcohol can also disrupt the balance of neurotransmitters (chemical messengers) in the brain, affecting feelings, thoughts, and behavior. It specifically affects the part of the brain that controls inhibition, so you may feel more relaxed, less anxious, and more confident after a drink. However, these effects are short-lived, and the chemical changes in the brain can soon lead to more negative feelings.

Alcohol can worsen anxiety by disrupting the balance of neurotransmitters in the brain. A 2012 study concluded that anxiety and alcohol use disorders often occur together. If you have an anxiety disorder, drinking alcohol can be risky as it puts you at a higher risk of developing an alcohol use disorder.

Drinking can also make depression worse. As a depressant, alcohol changes the chemical makeup in the brain, altering mood, thoughts, and feelings. It interferes with how brain cells signal to each other, initially making you feel relaxed. However, alcohol use promotes depression, and drinking seems to be the cause rather than the effect of major depressive disorder. A study found that those diagnosed with alcohol dependence were at a higher risk for depression.

Heavy drinking is linked to an increased risk of suicidal thoughts, attempts, and death. Alcohol suppresses activity in brain areas associated with inhibition, lowering inhibitions enough for individuals to act on suicidal thoughts. Warning signals and second thoughts are less likely to occur after drinking, increasing the likelihood of self-harm or suicide. Additionally, there is a clear link between suicide or suicidal thoughts and individuals who have previously self-harmed.

Drinking to forget your emotions is a temporary solution

Drinking to forget your emotions can lead to a vicious cycle of emotional highs and lows. Initially, alcohol stimulates the release of extra brain chemicals that trigger mood elevation. However, as the alcohol wears off, you may experience a rebound effect, with negative emotions rushing back even stronger than before. This can lead to a pattern of drinking to escape your feelings, resulting in alcohol dependence and worsening emotional regulation.

Emotions are messengers that provide valuable information about our lives. When we drink to forget our emotions, we mute these messengers and miss out on the opportunity to learn and grow from them. Instead of addressing the underlying causes of our emotions, drinking only provides a temporary escape, and the issues remain unresolved.

The negative impact of drinking to forget your emotions can extend beyond the individual. Alcohol misuse can lead to adverse interactions among couples and family members, straining relationships and causing further emotional distress. Additionally, drinking to forget your emotions can impair your problem-solving skills, making it more challenging to find constructive solutions to the issues that triggered those emotions in the first place.

While drinking to forget your emotions may provide temporary relief, it is essential to recognize that this approach does not address the underlying causes of those emotions. Seeking healthier coping mechanisms, such as therapy, exercise, or spending time outdoors, can help manage emotions more effectively and promote long-term emotional well-being.

Alcohol impairs your ability to regulate emotions

Alcohol alters the brain's 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 also affects your emotional memory. 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.

Alcohol also affects your ability to regulate fear responses. For people at risk of PTSD or other trauma-related disorders, frequently drinking over time can chemically impair the ability to regulate fear responses. In these cases, the emotional impact of fear is magnified due to the long-term effects of alcohol, increasing the risk for trauma disorders.

Alcohol also impairs your ability to distinguish discrete emotions. People in early alcohol abuse recovery have trouble distinguishing between negative emotions, and this inability is one reason why relapse is so common in the few months immediately after getting sober.

Alcohol can cause emotional dysregulation, making you more vulnerable to alcohol-related disorders

Alcohol can cause emotional dysregulation, making those who drink excessively more vulnerable to alcohol-related disorders. Emotional dysregulation is a mental health symptom that involves trouble controlling your emotions and how you act on those feelings. To those around you, your emotions and reactions will seem disproportionate to what you are reacting to.

Drinking alcohol can negatively impact your emotions, worsening anxiety, depression, stress, and even suicidal thoughts. While drinking may help you avoid or forget undesirable emotions, excessive or prolonged alcohol consumption will negatively affect your emotions. Alcohol is a nervous system depressant that slows messaging between the body and the brain, affecting coordination and concentration. It suppresses your ability to control alcohol use, leading to excessive drinking.

Alcohol alters the brain's 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. As a result, you can get stuck in a cycle of emotional highs and lows caused by the mixed effects of alcohol in your brain.

Heavy drinking can make your ability to emotionally regulate so fragile that it can compromise your ability to feel and respond to regular life stressors. This can lead to a stressful life characterized by emotional dysregulation, where you have heightened responsiveness and sensitivity to situations, and the ability to manage daily stressors becomes increasingly difficult.

Alcohol can distort emotional memories and impair the formation of new memories

Alcohol can have a detrimental impact on emotional health. While drinking may help you forget undesirable emotions, excessive or prolonged alcohol consumption can negatively affect emotions, exacerbating anger, stress, anxiety, and other conditions. Alcohol is a nervous system depressant that slows down communication between the body and the brain, affecting coordination and concentration. It also impairs the brain's ability to form new memories and recall old ones.

The hippocampus, a part of the brain that plays a significant role in memory formation and maintenance, is particularly affected by alcohol. When normal nerve activity in the hippocampus slows down, short-term memory loss can occur. Additionally, heavy alcohol use can damage the hippocampus and destroy nerve cells, affecting both short-term and long-term memory.

Research has shown that acute doses of alcohol can impair memory when administered before encoding emotionally neutral stimuli but enhance memory when administered immediately after encoding. A study by Jessica Weafer, Ph.D., and colleagues examined the effects of alcohol on memory for emotional stimuli. They found that alcohol administered before encoding impaired memory accuracy, while alcohol administered after encoding enhanced memory accuracy. These effects were more pronounced for emotional stimuli than for neutral stimuli.

The vulnerability of emotions to alcohol is especially evident in young adults, who often associate alcohol with partying, fun, relaxation, and socialization. Uncontrolled drinking can lead to depression, pain, anxiety, and other negative outcomes. Continuous excessive drinking worsens emotional distress and increases the risk of alcohol-related disorders.

In conclusion, while alcohol may provide temporary relief from negative emotions, it is not a sustainable solution. The negative impact of alcohol on emotional health and memory formation and recall underscores the importance of seeking professional help and developing healthier coping strategies for managing emotions and drinking.

Frequently asked questions