As a Psychologist I have seen the effects of alcohol first hand on my client’s health, relationships, careers, and finances.  For many people alcohol use creeps up on them over time.  In many cases, the negative impact it is having on their health and wellbeing only becomes apparent over months or years.  In other situations, my clients have not had a problem with alcohol themselves but have been impacted by a parent, partner or other family member with an alcohol problem.  Alcohol misuse affects people from all walks of life. Many people come to see a Psychologist because they may feel depressed, anxious, or they are having relationship problems not realising their alcohol consumptions is a significant maintaining factor for these other challenges.  Alcohol misuse does not come out of the blue and there are always underlying reasons people drink too much or too often.   

I advise all my clients to reduce their alcohol intake or cease alcohol altogether during therapy. Cutting back on your alcohol intake can be a really important first step towards feeling happier and healthier. It is particularly important to reduce your alcohol intake if you are considering therapy.  Therapy involves reflection and learning both of which require brain power.  If you misuse alcohol during therapy, it will have a negative impact on your progress.  In most cases your PsychHelp Psychologist will suggest that you reduce your alcohol intake early in the therapy process .  This can help ensure you are able to give therapy the best chance possible of helping you feel better.  Your PsychHelp Psychologist can help you work through how to reduce your alcohol intake and teach you healthier strategies to relax and manage stress.

But everyone drinks and the research says it’s good for you?

From time to time newspapers make reference to new research which suggests drinking alcohol may have health benefits. There is some research which suggests a small amount of alcohol may be good for your heart, but the majority of the research shows that even moderate drinking is not good for your brain and increases your risk of cancer.  Most studies which support alcohol for health are small and not supported by the larger and more comprehensive studies.

Does drinking damage your brain?

Alcohol has been shown to damage the brain. At the extreme end is Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome which occurs when alcohol use leads to thiamine deficiency.  This condition leads to Wernicke’s encephalopathy and Korsakoff’s psychosis. These are brain disorders and involve a range of problems with mental confusion, paralysis, problems with coordination, psychosis, learning, and memory problems.  This is a serious and ongoing condition which requires medical treatment.

A fetus that has been exposed to alcohol in the womb can develop Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD). This condition can lead to long term problems with learning and behaviour, impaired growth and developmental as well as distinctive facial features.  As it is unknown when or how much alcohol needs to be consumed in order for FASD to occur the advice is to drink no alcohol at any time during pregnancy.

So, is moderate drinking okay?

Research has shown that even moderate alcohol consumption is associated with adverse brain outcomes.  This was not a small poorly designed study. This was a study of 550 men and women over a 30-year period using magnetic resonance brain imaging (MRI).  They found higher alcohol consumption is associated with hippocampal atrophy and differences in corpus callosum microstructure.  What does this mean?  Your hippocampus helps with long term memory and enables spatial memory which helps us to navigate.  It is also part of our limbic system which is involved inregulation of emotions. So, your hippocampus is pretty important and having a well-functioning hippocampus is important for memory and wellbeing.  Our corpus callosum connects the left and right hemispheres of our brains. This structure allows for communication between the two sides of your brain.  Remember these two important structures were changed by moderate drinking so that means between 14 and 21 units of alcohol a week or between 4 and 6 pints of high strength beer or 5 and 9 glasses of wine.  These are not huge amounts of alcohol.  The Australian Government Guidelines recommend drinking no more than 2 standard drinks on any day which if you drink a few days a week could easily add up to the amounts found harmful in this research.

The Lancet, which is one of the leading research publication journals in the world reported on a study which looked at the global disease burden from alcohol.  They found that “the risk of all-cause mortality, and of cancers specifically, rises with increasing levels of consumption, and the level of consumption that minimised health loss is zero”.  What this means is they are saying unless you drink no alcohol you are increasing your chances of death particularly from cancer.   The risk of death also increases with the amount of alcohol you drink. 

You may be thinking “I don’t drink that much so it won’t affect me”.  Actually, every time you drink alcohol is affecting your brain even if those effects are only for a short time.  After only two drinks alcohol can make walking more difficult, blur your vision, slur your speech, slow your reaction times, and impair your memory.  These affects occur because alcohol is a small molecule which can easily cross membrane barriers.  In the brain alcohol has a range of effects on our neurotransmitters (See table 1 for an outline of these effects).  One important effect of alcohol on the brain is that it is a depressant which means it reduces the effect of excitatory neurotransmitters and increases the effect of inhibitory neurotransmitters.  So, if you experience low mood or anxiety alcohol can make these feelings worse.

Not only does alcohol affect us while we are drinking, we can also experience a hangover the next day. A hangover generally involves feeling tired, having a head and/or stomach ache, feeling dizzy or shaky, and having mood fluctuations which may include feeling sad or stressed.  There are a variety of factors that contribute to a hangover which include:

• alcohol is a diuretic which means it makes you urinate. This can lead to dehydration;
• alcohol triggers an inflammatory response in your immune system by causing hormonal alterations in the cytokine pathways;
• alcohol makes you produce more stomach acid which can irritate the stomach lining;
• alcohol can potentiate GABA in the central nervous system, and this can lead to you feeling sleepy;
• alcohol makes your blood vessels expand or vasodilation which leads to headaches;
• alcohol decreases the availability of glucose i.e. it makes your blood sugar to fall. In extreme cases this can lead to hypoglycaemia which is a potentially fatal condition;
• In the case of binge drinking alcohol induces the CYP2E1 enzyme which makes parts of alcohol into reactive toxins which can cause oxidative stress leading to cell death.

So, alcohol is literally poisoning you to the point of being physically sick.  Imagine if a food had those effects it would be banned immediately.  However, you would not be alone in finding these effects funny or dismissing them because a lot of people experience hangovers. In an Australian study it was found that 11.5 million sick days were related to alcohol and drug use.  Physical illness from alcohol use is a common occurrence.

Not only does alcohol negatively affect health it is also expensive.  In 2016 Australian’s spent $14.9 billion dollars on alcohol.  That’s an average household spend of $31.95 a week or $1661.40 a year.  This does not take into account the added health and other costs associated with alcohol use.  That’s one overseas holiday a year or a small fortune if put into your superfund over a lifetime.

Some of the most interesting research around addiction examines the potentially healing effects of relationships and touch.  I will cover this in more detail in a future post.  However, this research is proposing that people who have an under developed oxytocin system in their brain are more vulnerable to addiction.  Oxytocin is considered to be the “love hormone” and is involved in social bonding and maternal behaviour.   So maybe with more touch and “love” in our lives we would feel less desire to drink alcohol.

If you drink alcohol this post may be grim reading.  If you made it to this point, I commend you as many people do not want to know about the effects of alcohol. In summary, the research recommends no amount of alcohol as safe not even moderate drinking.  Any research findings which suggest there are health benefits from alcohol use are outweighed by the majority of the research finding which point to a large number of harmful effects.

As a Psychologist I have seen first-hand the problems alcohol can cause in people’s lives. I think it is a problem many people have but either do not recognise it as a problem or do not know where to get help. Our PsychHelp Psychologist can help you work towards reducing your alcohol intake or abstaining from alcohol.  Your PsychHelp Psychologist will work with you at your stage of readiness and helping you get to a point where you have the knowledge to reach the next stage.  If you are ready to reduce your alcohol use, make an appointment today.