to drink or not to drink? a breakdown of how alcohol impacts us

Photo by John Fornander on Unsplash

Like many others, I’ve always enjoyed a good drink. Not because it tastes good (let’s be real), but because of the effects—it serves as a social balm, making me feel closer to people, faster. It helps me feel more open and connected in ways that can feel soothing. Especially as the negative effects of loneliness are becoming more well known, it can be easy to justify drinking alcohol as a way to promote connection.

For many others, it’s a way to unwind or relax at night. It may not be a full-blown dependency, but it’s hard to deny that many of us have an alcohol habit.

Although we all know “alcohol is bad” for your body and mind, I’ve only recently been faced with how bad it can be, according to the science.

Dr. Andrew Huberman, a Stanford researcher and professor, released an episode on the negative effects of alcohol on the body and brain. After listening to it, the evidence is hard to ignore. According to Huberman’s survey of the science, even drinking 1-7 drinks a week can lead to lasting negative effects on the body and brain. Yes, that means even having one glass of wine a night can shrink your brain and make you more stressed (more on this in a bit).

It’s a long episode filled with nerdy biology stuff you may not care about, but I’d highly recommend giving it a listen if you’d like to learn more about the effects of alcohol on the body and brain.

Here are some top learnings from the episode.

Drinking alcohol can actually give you the opposite of what you want.

With stress management: Drinking alcohol upsets the balance of hormones your body releases—specifically, the hormones your hypothalamus, pituitary gland, and adrenals release. This axis is known as the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, and it controls what you perceive as stressful or not.

When you drink alcohol, it screws up this balance in your HPA axis and makes you release more cortisol at baseline even when you aren’t drinking. If you drink alcohol to relax, this means it can actually give you the opposite of what you’re looking for.

You may feel relaxed briefly after you drink, but it negatively impacts your body’s capability to handle stress at baseline.

With feeling good: Alcohol initially increases feel-good molecules like dopamine and serotonin. Ironically, this increase then triggers a long & slow reduction. This means people will reach for more drinks throughout the night to get back to feeling great but, unfortunately, will never return back to that initial sense of well-being. (Note: Those with alcohol use disorder may feel prolonged feel-good effects—think the guy who wants to keep going after being five drinks deep. This response is not typical.)

Over time, the more you drink (i.e., the more tolerance you develop), the shorter this feel-good window becomes.

With confidence: A meaningful life involves change—being better today than you were yesterday. However, studies have shown that alcohol increases habitual & impulsive behavior—not just the night when you’re drinking, but over time as well.

Drinking alcohol even once a week can reduce the number of synapses in your brain controlling behavior.

In other words, you may feel free & fun on the night of drinking, but do you really want to be that person when you’re sober? When reality sets in, do you really want a decreased capacity for executive functioning and changing for the better?

Alcohol has nearly no positive health effects.

Let’s start with the fact that alcohol in its drinkable form, ethanol, is a water and fat-soluble poison. Not only is it a poison, the byproduct of it is an even worse poison called acetylaldehyde. Eventually, it gets converted to acetate, which your body can use to generate ATP.

However, in the process of converting ethanol –> acetylaldehyde –> acetate, it wreaks havoc on your body. This includes your liver cells, which handle the conversion process. One key thing to note is that because alcohol is water and fat-soluble, it can pass freely into cells and even your blood-brain barrier.

Other key effects:

• Drinking alcohol kills the good bacteria in your gut and allows bad bacteria to pass in your bloodstream. (Having a healthy gut microbiome supports your immune system and helps regulate mood.)
• Drinking alcohol disrupts your sleep, electrolytes, and depletes epinephrine and dopamine in your body
• Toxic metabolites of alcohol lead to the increase conversion of testosterone to estrogen in both females and males. In females, this leads to an increase in estrogen-related cancers. In males, it can lead to diminished sex drive and altered fat storage.
• Drinking alcohol can alter DNA methylation & gene expression, leading to a significant increase in cancer (especially breast cancer). Not only does alcohol increase tumor growth, it also suppresses molecules that combat tumor growth, what Huberman calls a “two-hit model”.

Other scary stats:

• There’s a 4-13% increase for breast cancer risk for every 16g of alcohol per night consumed—for reference, an American beer is about 10-12g of alcohol.
• Experts indicate that ingesting 10-15g of alcohol per day is equivalent to smoking 10 cigarettes a day 🤯.

There are things you can do to recover faster from alcohol and mitigate some negative effects.

With hangovers: Hangovers are a multi-organ, multi-tissue, multi-chemical phenomenon, so it has to be treated that way.

Some quick tips from the episode:

• Taking a cold shower can potentially accelerate recovery from hangover (leads to an increase in adrenaline, dopamine, and epinephrine)
• Replenish your gut microbiota with pre-biotics or fermented foods like kimchee, low-sugar yogurts, sauerkraut, etc.
• Hydrate before, during, and after drinking alcohol. A good rule of thumb is 2 glasses of water for every drink you have.
• Consuming folate, B vitains, or B12 can decrease cancer risk but won’t completely offset it

Huberman mentions it can take 2-6 months for your brain to recover from the damaging effects of alcohol.

Many (but not all) of alcohol’s detrimental effects can be reversed if given enough time. All of this depends on how long you have been drinking and how much.

What does this all mean?

The conclusion of all this is to make the decision to not drink at all.

For many of us, that’s easier said than done. Alcohol has been around for a very long time, and has been heavily intertwined with cultural, social, and even spiritual gatherings for centuries.

Here’s the bottom line: Huberman believes the “center of mass” of scientific literature indicates no consumption is better for your health than low to moderate consumption. And low to moderate consumption is better than high consumption.

In other words, it’s not all-or-nothing.

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Here are practical ways I’m putting this information to use, and I hope it helps you make positive changes in your life as well.

Mainly:

As an experiment, I’m quitting alcohol for at least 2 months to see how much better I feel. My interest is mainly in how it affects my mental health, stress levels, and productivity as my brain begins to heal. My goal here is to get out of habitual consumption so I become an “every once in a while” drinker instead of a “several-drinks-per-week” kinda gal. I’ll keep you all updated on my progress.

In addition:

• If I feel the urge to drink, I try to ask myself what purpose it’s serving and what itch I’m trying to scratch.
• If I end up drinking when I said I wouldn’t, I try not to beat myself up.
• If I do drink, I’m going to much more careful in healing my body to mitigate some of the damages of drinking alcohol.
• I’ll try to find ways to replace alcohol with alternatives like Katy Perry’s “sparkling non-alcoholic aperitifs”

Quitting alcohol is not easy, for a variety of reasons, and our reliance on it comes from a multitude of factors.

Reducing our reliance means we have to be honest with ourselves, from questioning our desire for quick hits, to asking ourselves what purpose drinking serves at our core. Does it make us feel more loved or powerful? Is it a crutch or a tool?

Only you have the answer for yourself to those questions. If drinking is your jam and it makes you the person you want to be, then fuck what anyone else has to say about it. But if you know, deep down, that it’s holding you back, then make changes.

Either way, it’s your choice to make, and it’s important to make it intentionally instead of just “going with the flow” and regretting it later.

Did you like this post? Stay up to date with all my health experiments and learnings so you can make the most of your body and mind.