We know different drugs make us experience the world around us in very different ways — and their aftereffects are often nowhere near as pleasant as the immediate results they produce.
2016-03-30
Alcohol, which two teams of addiction experts recently ranked as one of the five most addictive substances, can be especially dangerous when consumed in excess.
Here are some of the surprising ways alcohol affects our body and mind:
As a depressant, alcohol puts the brakes on our brain’s "excitatory" messengers and amplifies our "inhibitory" ones, making us feel sluggish.
While these effects can be a pleasant and temporary side effect of moderate drinking, which is defined by the NIAAA as up to two drinks a day for men and one for women, they can be devastating if you binge drink, or have five or more drinks (if you're a man) in two hours or four or more drinks in that time period (if you're a woman).
Since alcohol slows down our breathing and heart rate, repeatedly drinking too much, too fast — and even in some rare cases overdoing it in one sitting — can kill.
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But moderate drinking also has other pleasant side effects. For example, it raises the level of an important chemical called dopamine in our brain’s reward center, which makes us feel good.
And while a drink or two might make you feel more relaxed (and even more creative), more than that can has been linked with less brain activity in regions of the brain like the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for rational thinking and decision-making.
Your brain also has trouble producing long-term memories when you're wasted, which is one of the reasons you might have trouble remembering things from the night before. Another brain area alcohol affects is the temporal cortex, which includes the hippocampus. That region is key for making new memories.
And while you may begin to feel the effects of a drink nearly as soon as you swallow, the amount of alcohol in your blood won’t peak for another 40 to 90 minutes.
REUTERS/Javier Galeano
Plus, if you're drinking bubbly, the level of alcohol in your blood will rise faster — all that increased pressure on your stomach from the carbonation pushes alcohol into your blood quicker.
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Speaking of stomachs — drinking on an empty one can be dangerous, since food slows down your body's processing of alcohol, meaning that if you haven't eaten in hours, your blood alcohol content will rise faster.
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In general, the liver can only process an ounce of liquor each hour. Drinking more than that can dangerously and swiftly raise your the amount of alcohol in your blood.
Studies suggest that repeated bouts of heavy drinking — when continued over several years — may damage the links between brain cells and interfere with how we process information.
Erin was a senior health and tech reporter at Business Insider based in San Francisco, where she focused on startups and Silicon Valley.She's broken news on a variety of life science and health-tech stories, including:
Before joining BI, Erin worked as a freelance health and science reporter for outlets including Newsweek, Popular Science, and Scientific American.Erin graduated summa cum laude from the University of California, San Diego and received her master's from the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism in New York, where she spent an extra semester completing her degree after breaking both wrists in a snowboarding accident.
