10 Ways Alcohol DESTROYS Your Brain (Science Explained)

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Transcript

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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 www.soberclear.com. The first way alcohol affects your brain is by shrinking your control center. You might have heard people joke around and say that alcohol kills brain cells. It's a common phrase, but the reality is much more specific and more serious than just eliminating cells. See, when you drink ethanol, you're introducing a neurotoxin into your body. Over time, this neurotoxin causes significant shrinkage in brain volume. Your brain literally gets smaller, but it doesn't shrink evenly. Certain areas are affected more, and one of the hardest hit areas is the prefrontal cortex. You want to think of this part of your brain as the CEO of your life. It's the part of the brain responsible for decision making, for planning the future, and for controlling your impulses. It's the part of you that decides to save money instead of spending it or eat healthy instead of ordering a pizza. And when you drink alcohol, you are targeting this specific area. And this is a part of the reason why so many drinkers, no matter how smart they are, feel so stuck in life. They've got big goals, they want to build businesses, be great parents, but the part of their brain that's required to actually execute these goals is being compromised by the drinking. Just imagine it for a second. You walk into a business meeting and the CEO is fast asleep. You would think that that company is on its way to fail. And listen, that's what's happening in your head when you drink alcohol. You're trying to run a high-performance life with a damaged CEO. But it's not just the prefrontal cortex. Drinking also shrinks the hippocampus. This is the part of the brain responsible for learning and memory. So not only are you making worse decisions, but you're also struggling to learn from your mistakes. The second way alcohol affects your brain is through the dopamine trap. And this is why willpower so often fails. Have you ever tried to stop drinking and life just feels kind of great? Feels like nothing's fun anymore. That would happen to me. I'd stop drinking and just feel a bit flat. And listen, this isn't just you being stuck in your head, it's a chemical imbalance caused by ethanol. So here's how it works your brain has a reward system. When you do something good for your survival, like eating calorie-dense food, sometimes exercising and achieving goals, various activities, your brain releases dopamine. Dopamine is the chemical of more. It tells you that was good. Do it again. And listen, alcohol disrupts this system completely. When you drink alcohol, you force a substantial but artificial spike of dopamine. It's a flood of feel-good chemicals that you didn't actually earn. You didn't run a marathon, you didn't make money, you didn't do anything as mundane as eating a healthy, delicious meal. You just swallowed a poisonous liquid. Because this spike is so high and so artificial, your brain panics. It thinks, this is too much dopamine. So if you keep on drinking, to protect itself, it turns down the volume and it lowers the baseline sensitivity of its dopamine system. So normal things that used to make you happy, like a walk in the park or hanging out with friends, they stop registering. It's almost like your happiness volume gets turned down and it gets so low that only the massive spike of alcohol can make you feel okay. And this creates the vicious cycle. You drink to feel good, the brain turns down the receptors, you feel worse, and you drink more to try and get the feeling back. The third way alcohol affects your brain is by erasing your memory. And we need to stop joking about this. Many of us have had that moment where we wake up, we check our phone, and we get that sinking feeling in the stomach, and you look at the text and you're like, I don't even remember sending that. Then you think back to the night and there's patchy spots. I've done this dozens of times. See, we joke about blackouts, but medically, a blackout is an extremely concerning event. It's not like falling asleep, because when you black out, you're still walking and talking. In fact, my mother, who has been to AA for over 20 years, said that she met somebody in a meeting who blacked out, who woke up in Spain. They went from England, where I'm born, all the way to Spain and had no recollection of getting there. That's not most people, but these kind of things can happen. See, when you black out, your brain stops recording. The hippocampus, which is the part of the brain we talked about earlier, temporarily stops creating new memories. It's a bit like recording a video on your phone, but not pressing record. The lens is open, the camera's on, but nothing's being saved. But you might be thinking, I've never had a blackout. Well, listen, you don't need to have a full blackout to suffer memory damage from alcohol, because alcohol affects all other aspects of your memory, including something called meter memory. Meta memory is your ability to know what you know. In other words, it's your self-awareness of your own memory. When this is impaired, you might think that you're functioning perfectly fine. You might think you're sharp, but objectively, you're forgetting names, you're maybe forgetting appointments, and you even start forgetting details of conversations. And imagine if you're trying to build a career or a family or a business. When you do this, you need to be able to synthesize information, recall facts, and learn from the past. If you start forgetting things that people are telling you, it can sour relationships. And if you're drinking heavily, you're constantly disrupting this process. You're trying to build a library of knowledge, but keep setting fire to the books. And one of the scariest parts of this is you don't often realize how much you've forgotten until you stop drinking. See, when the fog clears, you start to realize just how much of your life was disappearing into this black hole. Memory loss is dealing with the past. The next point is how alcohol is disrupting your future. The fourth way alcohol affects your brain is through the anxiety roller coaster, specifically with a hangover, and this exposures one of the biggest lies we tell ourselves. See, if you wake up at 3 o'clock in the morning with your heart racing, or if you feel that sense of impending doom on a Sunday morning, you're not going crazy. You're just experiencing a chemical rebound. So a lot of people have this idea that they drink to relax. It's probably the number one reason people drink. They want a glass of wine after that hard, stressful day. And unfortunately, this is a lie that we tell ourselves. If we look at the science, among its many effects on the brain, alcohol increases the activity of the neurotransmitter called GABA, which functions as the braking system of the nervous system. More GABA means more inhibition. When GABA is high, things slow down. You feel sedated, calm, and unbothered. At the same time, alcohol suppresses glutamate. This is the brain's major re excitatory transmitter. So when you drink alcohol, you end up with stronger brakes and a weaker gas pedal. That's why the first few drinks often feel like a relief. But the brain isn't passive. If you repeatedly flood it with a drug that boosts GABA and suppresses glutamate, it starts to adapt. Over time, the GABA system becomes less responsive and the glutamate system becomes upregulated to compensate. And this doesn't happen quickly, they're long-term neuroadaptations built over months or years of drinking. Now, whilst alcohol is actually inside your system, these changes stay mostly hidden because the drug is still forcing the brakes on. But when the alcohol level finally drops later that night or very often the next morning, you start to see the world with a brain that has this reduced braking power and an overreactive, excitement system. That's the real source of the rebound anxiety and racing thoughts that come sometimes in the middle of the night. See what's happening is the repeated drinking has left your brain in a hyper-excited state until it recalibrates. That's what we call this anxiety. You're not necessarily drinking to relax, you're borrowing relaxation from tomorrow at an extremely high interest rate, and you're simply paying the debt. And this creates another vicious cycle. You feel anxious because of the withdrawal, so you drink again to calm the nerves, which just sets you up for more anxiety the next day. See, you might not be an anxious person, but you're just poisoning your brain with a substance that causes anxiety. This can happen to anybody. So the fifth way alcohol affects your brain is by ending neuroplasticity. And this explains why you can often feel very stuck. Now, this idea of neuroplasticity is a bit of a buzzword, and it basically means the brain's ability to change and rewire itself and learn new skills and break old habits. It's what allows you to learn a new language and get good at a new sport. Sadly, alcohol slows down neuroplasticity. When you drink, you're cementing your brain in its current state. You're making it very rigid. Just think about how cement works. When cement is wet, you can mold it, you can change the shape, and that's just like a healthy brain. However, when you drink ethanol, it's like the cement dries up. You can't mold it anymore. And this is why people can often feel like they're stuck in a rut. They go through the motions, they do the same things every day, they have the same conversations, make the same mistakes. They say that they want to change, but their brain has lost the flexibility to form the new neural pathways required for change. If you want to grow and you want to evolve and become somebody better, you need a brain that's flexible. You need a brain that can build new bridges. And in fact, speaking of bridges, it brings us to the next point. Because alcohol doesn't just stop new bridges from being built, it actually physically destroys the ones that are already there. So the sixth way alcohol affects your brain is by destroying the white matter. And this is like degrading the wiring inside your head. Your brain is made up of two types of matter, grey matter and white matter. Grey matter is where the processing happens, and white matter is the cabling. It's the wiring that connects different parts of the brain together. It allows the left side to talk to the right side, which is the emotional center talking to the logical center. And alcohol damages white matter. Imagine a high-speed internet cable. Imagine information zipping back and forth. Now imagine that the cable slowly degrades, the insulation starts wearing down, and now it starts to become patchy and unreliable. That is exactly what happens inside your brain. When the white matter is damaged, your thinking becomes slower. You might find it harder to find the right word in a conversation. You might find that you're more clumsy, and you might find that multitasking becomes a struggle. If this happens, this is fundamentally a communication breakdown inside your own head. You're operating with a slow internet connection in a world that demands high-speed fiber optics. When the connections are frayed, the chemical balance of the entire system just gets thrown off. So the seventh way alcohol affects your brain is by destabilizing your mood. And this creates a trap that a lot of people don't recognize. See, depression and alcohol go hand in hand, but it's usually a chicken and egg situation. People say, I drink because I'm depressed. But the science suggests that for many people they are depressed because they drink. See, we already talked about dopamine, but alcohol also disrupts serotonin. Serotonin is the neurotransmitter responsible for mood stability. It helps you feel content and calm and emotionally balanced. Now alcohol upsets the delicate balance of neurotransmitters. It's like a bowl in a china shop. It just goes over and knocks everything down. When you drink regularly, you're constantly throwing your brain chemistry into chaos. You go up and down. You feel numb, then sad. And this is what creates mood swings. One minute you might be fine, and the next minute you feel irritable. See, if you took a perfectly healthy, happy person and gave them a depressant drug, what is exactly what alcohol is, every single day for a year, they would start to show signs of depression. And one of the insidious things here is that when you feel low, your instinct is to have a drink to numb out the feeling. You might spend years in therapy or taking medication when actually the mood disorder was fueled by that bottle of wine in your fridge. Now, up until this point, we have talked about things that are largely reversible. If you stop drinking, the brain can heal and a chemistry can rebalance. But if you do continue down this path for too long, it starts to become irreversible. And this next point is one that should probably scare you about your future. See, the eighth way alcohol affects your brain is by fast-tracking you towards dementia. And this should terrify you. We used to think of dementia was just something that happened to old people, largely due to genetics. But new research is showing a terrifying link between alcohol and early onset dementia. There's actually a specific medical term for this, alcohol-related dementia. And this isn't just getting a bit forgetful, it's a progressive decline in your ability to think and reason and function effectively. Alcohol abuse is actually one of the strongest modifiable risks for dementia. See, when you drink, you're accelerating the aging process of the brain. You're essentially pressing the fast forward button on cognitive decline. Why would you increase your risk of ending up in a state where you can't even recognize your own family? The upside of drinking, maybe a few moments of numbness, the downside is losing your mind. It is a terrible, terrible trade. However, there's a specific type of brain damage that's even more acute than general dementia. This is something that happens when the brain is starved of a very specific nutrient, which leads to something called Wernick-Korsakov syndrome. Now, this sounds like a heavy medical term, but just wait a second. Your brain runs on glucose or sugar, but it also needs plenty of theamine, which is vitamin B1, to process that fuel. Without enough theamine, your brain cells cannot produce energy. They starve, and when they starve, they start to die. Heavy, long-term drinking is one of the most common causes of severe theamine deficiency. It creates a double whammy. First, people who drink heavily often have poor nutrition, so they aren't eating enough B vitamins. Secondly, alcohol interferes with the gut's ability to absorb and use theamine, which can lead to something called Wernic-Korsakov syndrome. Doctors usually talk about a Wernic phase and a later Korsakov phase, and this is informally known as wet brain. This starts with confusion. Maybe your eyes start twitching and you feel off balance, and this is known as the Wernic phase. And if you catch it here and get medical help and stop drinking, it can be treated with high dose theamine. But if you ignore it, it can develop into Korsakov psychosis. This is often permanent brain damage. People with this condition develop severe amnesia, they struggle to form new memories, they might have a conversation with you and two minutes later have no idea who you are or what you even said. And to fill in the gaps, their brain starts confabulating. This means they make up stories. They're not necessarily lying, their reality is just broken. They believe their made-up memories are real. And the damage here exists on a spectrum. You don't necessarily need to have full-blown wet brain to be suffering from theamine deficiency. You might be in a state of mild cognitive impairment instead. And instead of operating at 100%, you're stuck at 80. Why settle for 80%? Why starve your brain of the fuel it needs just for a drink that tastes like crap? It makes no sense. Now, finally, we have one last thing to talk about, and this is what your brain needs more than anything else to repair itself. And alcohol robs you of this. The tenth way alcohol affects your brain is by stealing your REM sleep. And this is why drinkers often wake up feeling like trash. See, when people drink, they pass out and they think that they slept well because they didn't necessarily wake up. But there's a massive difference between passing out and having deep rest. See, sleep is when your brain takes out the trash. It clears toxins and consolidates memories, and it repairs the damage from the day. This happens in cycles. You have light sleep, deep sleep, and REM sleep. REM sleep is crucial for your emotional health and cognitive function. And alcohol is the enemy of REM sleep. See, when you have alcohol in your system, your body sedates you. You might fall into deep sleep quickly, but you skip the first cycles of REM sleep. Then, as the alcohol wears off in the middle of the night, your body starts waking you up. Your sleep becomes fragmented and you toss and turn. And even if you sleep for eight hours after drinking, the quality of your sleep is pretty bad. This is why you may feel groggy, you might have brain fog, and you may struggle focusing. You're basically sleep deprived. Just because your eyes were closed does not mean that you were getting rest. When you stop drinking, one of the first things that happens, usually after a week or two, is that REM sleep returns. And it feels like a superpower. I've got clients that say that they forgot what good sleep was like. They said it's been 10-20 years where they've never felt this good. And it's something you've got to look forward to. 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 www.soberclear.com.