The Horrible Psychological Effects of Drinking Alcohol

So many people drink alcohol to feel good, to become more social, and to have more courage. Alcohol suppresses the communication between certain parts of the brain, and as a result, a person might find himself uninhibited and braver during social interactions.

Alcohol also forces the brain to release dopamine in large amounts. Dopamine is the chemical that results in feelings of pleasure and motivation. This is why people say that alcohol makes everyone seem attractive. It’s just the fact that the dopamine surge makes everything seem more exciting than it’s truly is.

So for the first instance drinking alcohol might seem like a good idea, right?
After all, who doesn’t want to be brave, care less about his own looks or be more social?

While that short-term effect can be useful, long-term devastating damage will happen to you. Let’s see how this happens.

Liquid Destruction of your self-confidence

So many people say that alcohol makes them care less about their own looks. In other words, a person who has a self-image problem usually stops caring about his own looks when he uses alcohol.

The serious situation that can happen here is that if that person didn’t think negatively of his own looks, he would never care about finding a long-term solution for his self-image problem.

In other words, alcohol motivates people to seek very short-term temporary solutions instead of letting them take a long-term approach to their serious issues. As alcohol allows people to temporarily escape the negative thoughts they get, because certain parts of their brains are now sedated, they never give themselves the chance to develop serious coping abilities.

True self-confidence is only built when you manage to find out your flaws than to build the needed skills to overcome those flaws.

Now, what if each time you were about to think about those flaws, you just had a drink?
It’s the same thing as taking a drug to forget about a work problem that you, sooner or later, will have to face.

As a person keeps running away from his problems using alcohol, those problems keep getting bigger. But because the person won’t really care as he will always rush to alcohol to forget about them, he usually ends up with a seriously messed up personality, a lack of self-confidence, and a serious lack of coping skills.

In other words, this person just became 10 times more vulnerable to new life problems, and as soon as another problem hits, he can get shattered into pieces as his coping abilities became too weak to handle life stresses.

This is not everything. Alcohol suppresses your brain’s ability to interpret the information you are receiving through your senses. In other words, after drinking, you start getting much less information about the world. This lack of information can, in the long term, lead to serious impairment in your social and life skills as you will always analyze situations without having enough data to judge them correctly.

Long term brain changes

As a person gets used to alcohol, his brain chemistry changes. He gets used to the surge of dopamine he gets from alcohol, and suddenly all life activities become boring as they don’t allow his brain to produce that same amount of dopamine that alcohol produces.

This leads to serious mood changes, anxiety, and ultimately depression. In addition, chronic alcohol use can permanently affect the way the brain neurotransmitters work and reduce the amount of serotonin produced, the happiness hormone.

This is why alcoholics are usually depressed and isolated people. As they drank more and more alcohol, they changed their brain chemistry so that they became sad people.

Yes, you can get some courage in the concise term, for few hours, but you will become a coward in the long term as you will fail to develop the life skills needed to face your problems or your personal concerns.