Alcohol Explained

by William Porter

on the nights I drank I would wake up in the middle of the night and be unable to get back to sleep,

hyponatremia

The more we drink, the more pronounced this feeling of nervousness and worry is when the alcohol wears off, and it is quite usual for it to cause full-blown depression.

All we need to know is that the relaxing effect of a drink is soon replaced by a corresponding feeling of anxiety.

alcoholism is a factor in about 30% of all completed suicides and approximately 7% of those with alcohol dependence will die by suicide.

The depression isn’t just caused by the chemical imbalance resulting from the previous drinks, it is also exacerbated by the physical side effects such as lack of sleep (which is dealt with in detail in a later chapter) and nausea, and the physical degradation generally.

If we drink again the alcohol depresses the physical side effects, so we immediately feel better. However, when that alcohol wears off, the depression and anxiety return.

This is one of the key strands to understanding alcohol. It relieves the depression and anxiety caused by the effects of the previous drinks.

The only permanent and complete cure is for them to stop drinking. The irony is that problem drinkers often spend thousands of pounds on expensive counselling to work out why they are so unhappy so they can in turn stop drinking, but in fact they need to go about things in exactly the opposite way: stop drinking, allow the effects to wear off, then take stock of their lives. They will find that the things they were getting depressed about when they were drinking either cease to worry them or at least become much more manageable and less overpowering.

You may want it to relieve your anxiety and depression if you suffer from it again, but if someone explained that the substance was actually a poison, that if you took it you would lose your job, your house, your friends, your family, your self-respect, and your very life, and in any event it was this substance that was causing the depression, you would most likely stop taking it with little or no problem.

In this way, the subconscious mind misses out this key piece of information: that it was the alcohol that caused the feeling of anxiety in the first place.

it is one of the drugs that takes longest to become addicted to.

when people start to become dependent on alcohol they often tend to eat less

However, when you have that amount in your system from the night before (or even a considerably larger amount), you will feel stone cold sober in that there is no feeling of relaxation.

So, if we are drinking for the relaxing mental effect, we have to keep the drinks coming faster than the wearing off of the physical intoxication.

This is important.

coffee,

Yes - we become acclimatised to drinking coffee and it loses sokme of its effect, just like alcohol. This also happens with chilli...

You need to get this straight in your mind: alcohol ruins sleep. If you are tired the next day, this is as a direct result of the previous night’s drinking. Even one drink will interrupt the natural sleeping pattern, and there is no safe amount to drink which will allow you to escape the ill effects of drinking as it impacts sleep.

Those of us who drink caffeinated drinks will find we tend to consume more of them when we are tired, and those who smoke will find they smoke more.

If the substance we are eating or drinking is very cold we will be able to actually taste it less than if it were warm or hot, as the molecules which it is made up of will collide less with the receptors in our mouths.

characteristic

characteristics

when you wake up at four in the morning your heart will be going at such a rate that it will feel like it is about to burst out of your chest, and that increased heart rate will follow you around for the following 24–48 hours until the stimulants are finally dispersed.

It was obviously equally unacceptable for MPs to remain sober for any length of time,

The generally accepted theory on alcohol and memory is that alcohol can prevent memories from passing from the short-term memory into the long-term memory, and that this is caused not by the degree of drunkenness on any particular occasion, but the accumulation of drinking over time.

They don’t cause us to be particularly happy because they are the norm.

If you are in an unpleasant situation for any length of time, such as being in prison or being in the military on active service,

Botb of these are the results of choices, rather than things that are due to external forces.

We simply reinforce the belief that without alcohol we simply cannot enjoy or even get through social occasions.

any drinker worth their salt will),

Bad phraseology.

if you regularly drink at social occasions, alcohol gets the credit for this happy feeling that you would have had anyway.

The body does this by turning them into heat, which is why we tend to get warm when we drink.

ethanol

ethyl

when we drink we tend to eat high-calorie junk food rather than choose healthier options,

A drinker at this level is constantly strung out as tight as a drum skin and constantly drinking ever-increasing amounts to depress these stimulating effects, which in turn increases the stimulating physiological reaction. They are incapable of eating all but the sparsest of meals.

It’s not that we’re not ill during the evening; it’s just that we can’t feel it!

However, if you marry them and stay with them until you are sick to the back teeth of them, you will be more inclined to be glad to see the back of them!

sit in front of the TV watching rubbish that would otherwise bore them stiff.

Alcohol doesn’t make things interesting; it makes your mind stupid so that things that would otherwise have bored it are suddenly enough to occupy it.

You start to need several drinks to obtain the feeling of relaxation and calmness that used to be obtained from one drink.

The constant poisoning of the body creates a general feeling of illness.

That is why people who lead stressful lives, and/or who tend to smoke too much or drink a lot of caffeine, tend to drink more.

Again we take a drink, again it makes us feel better and covers the unpleasant feeling caused by the previous drink.

Hair of the dog.

Instead our mind, both conscious and subconscious, will know that a drink will remove the unpleasant sensations, and the more hung over we are, the more we will need another drink to get rid of the hangover.

Essentially, that is what alcoholism is. It is when we get to the stage that we instinctively or subconsciously know that the ill effects

Many people are genuinely perplexed as to why the chronic alcoholic drinks the way they do, and why they are prepared to sacrifice their friends, family, job, home, and indeed their very life for another drink.

I certainly am.

(if there is a difference between the two).

‘he’ could just as easily be a ‘she’.

He will have relationship problems, health problems, employment problems, and housing problems.

The alcoholic is not a bad person.

I always considered an alcoholic to be someone who spent every waking hour consuming as much alcohol as they possibly could, someone who could not go a single day or even a waking hour without a drink.

Later stage drinkers, however, will wake up feeling very awake, tense, and anxious (usually in the middle of the night), and are often up at the crack of dawn and are incapable of having a lie-in the morning after drinking.

Over time, and with repetition, we change from being repulsed by alcohol when we have drunk too much, to being able to drink through a hangover when we have to, to being happy to drink through a hangover, to wanting to drink when we are hung over, to having to drink when we are hung over.