Stop Drinking Podcast by Soberclear

5 Ways Alcohol Destroys Your Brain (SCIENCE BREAKDOWN)

• Leon Sylvester

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Welcome to the Stop Drinking Podcast, where we help you make stopping drinking a simple, logical and easy decision. We help you with tips, tools and strategies to start living your best life when alcohol-free. If you want to learn more about stop drinking coaching, then head over to wwwsoberclearcom. Listen, each sip of alcohol isn't just poisoning your body. It's ripping neurons from your skull, and today we're going to be looking at five ways alcohol is quietly destroying your brain. Listen, this might make you feel uncomfortable, but stick around because by the end of the video, this information could get you to rethink your relationship with alcohol forever. Now a very quick introduction. My name is Leon Sylvester. I'm the founder of SoberClearcom. Now. I drank alcohol myself for close to a decade, but for the past six years I've not touched a drop and I've had no desire to drink. I've now helped hundreds of others achieve the same thing in my coaching program. Now, if you want more information on this, on how we do it, you can either head over to SoberClearcom or if you want to book a call to speak with my team, you can click the link in the description. What we'll do on that call is figure out if the program could work for you and we'll explain how it works in as little as 48 hours and how it gets a 92 to 97% success rate. The call is totally free, so you've really got nothing to lose. So again, definitely click the link in the description to book a call, or just go to SoberClearcom.

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And now let's dive in. So, and now let's dive in. So, to start, alcohol doesn't just affect your brain. It actually physically shrinks it, carving out empty spaces where healthy neurons once thrived. By the 1970s and 80s, scientists were starting to realize that chronic alcohol consumption literally eats away at the brain. Alcohol kills off the brain cells, the so-called neurons, and in the process it shrinks the brain mass. Some of the earliest hints were from autopsy studies of the brains of deceased heavy drinking men. These autopsies found that they weighed, on average, around 5% less than healthy controls. With the advances in imaging techniques like CT scans and MRIs, researchers were able to investigate these differences in further detail, and the phenomenon is now firmly established in the medical literature. You will find it variously referred to as brain shrinkage, brain atrophy or brain aging.

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The losses are generalized, affecting more or less every part of the brain. Our brains naturally have cavities in them, and these are filled with a fluid known as CSF. As a result of the loss in the brain mass, the brains of these heavy drinkers have unnaturally large cavities, with a corresponding increase in the volume of CSF. Having said that, certain brain regions are hit especially hard, especially in the frontal areas, which underlie our executive function, and we'll return to this shortly. Several structures that are involved in memory, like the hippocampus, are also hit hard. The good news is that after you stop drinking, your brain mass will recover relatively quickly and at the 12-month point it will largely be at your pre-drinking levels.

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On the flip side, this increase in volume is not due to the replacement of dead neurons. Most neurons in the brain are irreplaceable. Once they die, they are gone for good. The increase is due to the remaining neurons increasing their connections to compensate for the lost ones. Once that's set in motion, there's a second, more insidious assault the delicate chemical balance inside your head collapses, leaving your nerves buzzing with anxiety and chaos.

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So everything that goes on in our mind, all our thoughts, emotions, desires and actions, are the result of our neurons communicating with each other, and the way this happens is through specialised messenger molecules called neurotransmitters. One neuron pings a neurotransmitter to another one, who then pings another one and so on, and it makes a huge interconnected circuit. There's six major neurotransmitters, of which the most well-known is dopamine. We'll come back to dopamine in a minute, but for now, what I want to emphasise is that our psychological wellbeing is dependent on our various neurotransmitter systems being in balance, so-called homeostasis. Neurotransmitters are so important that most of modern psychiatry is more or less about regulating them through medications or other means, and many psychiatrists believe that conditions like major depression, anxiety disorders, schizophrenia and so on are caused by our neurotransmitters being out of whack.

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See, alcohol is virtually unique among recreational drugs in that it affects more or less every major neurotransmitter system in our brain, but the two neurotransmitters that it affects the most are GABA and glutamate. Gaba is the brain's major inhibitory neurotransmitter. In other words, it inhibits neurons from transmitting signals. Glutamate, on the other hand, is the exact opposite. It's an excitory neurotransmitter that stimulates the neurons to transmit more signals, thereby increasing brain activity. Now, alcohol artificially stimulates the activity of GABA while simultaneously suppressing that of glutamate. So you have a more active inhibitory neurotransmitter and a less active excitatory neurotransmitter. The result is decreased overall brain activity. This is why alcohol is classed as a central nervous system depressant. It literally slows down your brain.

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The problem is that over time, a drinker's brain adjusts to the alcohol constantly floating about and, in response, it changes the way that it responds to GABA and glutamate, a process scientists call neuroadaptation. In order to counterbalance alcohol's effects, it becomes less sensitive to GABA and more sensitive to glutamate, and this is the scientific reason why, when somebody hasn't had a drink for a while, they start to become anxious, restless. They can't sit, still, can't sleep, and so on. Their nervous system has become intrinsically overexcitable. The natural balance between GABA and glutamate, the homeostasis that all non-drinkers enjoy and take for granted, has been severely compromised. This is also why heavy drinkers are prone to all sorts of anxiety disorders, typically social phobia, panic attacks or generalized anxiety. These symptoms typically become even more severe when the person tries to quit drinking. Clinical studies find that up to 4 out of 5 of those suffering with heavy withdrawal also suffer with repetitive panic attacks. In severe and relatively rare cases of advanced alcoholism, the overexcitability can be so severe that it can lead to seizures, hallucinations and even death. This is why alcohol is one of the relatively few recreational drugs where the withdrawal process can kill you. Not even crack cocaine can do this.

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Digging even deeper, a third hidden cost emerges those circuits that make life feel pleasurable go dark, draining the world of its spark. So we touched on dopamine in the last section, and you've probably heard of the term dopamine addiction. Now, just to be clear, there is no such thing as dopamine addiction. This is a lay term, it's bro science. It's used in popular culture to describe repetitive, low-value behaviours that people engage in compulsively think gaming or gambling. What actually happens is that dopamine is the principal neurotransmitter involved in our so-called brain reward circuit. This circuit is activated when we experience rewarding stimuli like tasty food or sex. The reward circuit then creates a sense of euphoria and wellbeing, compelling us to seek out the same stimuli in the future. And it evolved because rewarding stimuli that we find in our natural environment, like food or sex, were crucial to our survival and reproduction.

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The problem is that once alcohol reaches the brain, it chemically stimulates the reward system, causing the release of the famous dopamine. Now some drugs, like cocaine or amphetamines, directly activate the system and release dopamine, and you can get addicted to these drugs super quick, sometimes after just a few uses. Alcohol causes dopamine release indirectly through its action on other brain circuits which then promote the release of dopamine. So it doesn't quite pack the reward punch of cocaine or speed and the addiction takes longer to develop. But the end result is the same the constant artificial activation of the reward system numbs it down, suppressing the natural release of dopamine, leading to a loss of interest for natural rewards. And, without sounding too offensive, this is largely the reason why heavy drinkers can be very sad people. Literally nothing gives them pleasure. All the activities and places and people that they used to enjoy now do nothing for them. Hopefully I pronounced this correctly, but the scientific term for this is anhedonia, a Greek word literally meaning lack of pleasure. Once the person sobers up, the now-fried reward system finds itself without the artificial support of booze, then the anhedonia becomes even more intense and in severe addiction this can persist for several months after the last drink.

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Now we kicked off today's video by discussing the generalized brain shrinkage that follows years of heavy drinking. As you can imagine, this massive dying off of our neurons has very real consequences for the person's everyday life. We saw earlier that parts of the brain involved with memory and executive function are especially affected. Now, in case you haven't heard of executive functioning before, it refers to the ability to plan, monitor and execute goals. It also involves the ability to respond dynamically to changes in the environment and incorporate these into decision making.

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When executive function is impaired, people may struggle with problem solving, adapting to new situations or controlling impulsive behaviours. This can lead to significant challenges in both their personal and professional life. All aspects of memory are also affected. So short-term memory, working memory, verbal and visual memory, the ability to recall past events, pretty much everything. But the decline extends far beyond just memory and executive function. Processing speed, attention, social intelligence, visual spatial ability and verbal skills are also affected. The person is basically dumbed down across the board. On a more positive note, researchers all agree that most of these impairments will start to reverse after sobriety, but they disagree as to the extent of recovery as well as how many months or years it may take.

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Now here's the bad thing. The end result of chronic heavy drinking is often a complete collapse of the brain in the form of full-blown dementia. So severe language problems, often to the point where the person can't string a sentence together, severe memory loss and severe motor impairment. The symptoms are basically very similar to Alzheimer's and it's often very difficult to distinguish the two. The person is basically unable to even do basic tasks and is completely dependent on others for survival.

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According to one proposal for dementia to qualify as alcohol-related, a man must have consumed at least 35 drinks a week over a period of five years. For women, the corresponding figure is 28 drinks a week. Scientists aren't sure if alcohol-related dementia is solely due to the neurotoxicity of ethanol or if other factors, like thiamine deficiency, are also involved. You see, heavy drinkers are particularly vulnerable to thiamine deficiency, not only because of their poor diet, but also because alcohol directly interferes with thiamine metabolism. Thiamine deficiency is also responsible for a related neurological condition called Wernick-Kosakov syndrome, which mostly affects heavy drinkers. Tragically, alcohol-related dementia can affect relatively young people, even in their 40s or 50s. Most researchers estimate that 1 out of 10 cases of dementia are linked to alcohol, while others suggest that this may be as high as 2 out of 10. Thanks for checking out the Stop Drinking Podcast by SoberClear. If you want to learn more about how we work with people to help them stop drinking effortlessly, then make sure to visit wwwsoberclearcom.

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Leon Sylvester

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