It’s safe to say that we all know that drinking alcohol to excess isn’t recommended as part of a healthy lifestyle, and that drinking more than the recommended guidelines can put you at serious risk of developing illness that can impact both your physical and mental health.
We’ve all heard about alcohol poisoning, liver disease and brain damage caused by alcohol. However, the team at wellness coaching brand www.totiuss.com have shared some of the lesser-known effects of alcohol that we might not be as aware of.
Alcohol lowers your quality of sleep
Have you ever noticed that when you have a night of drinking you fall into a deep sleep only to find yourself wide awake a few hours later?
Although alcohol can initially cause drowsiness making you sleepy, it actually causes a number of physiological effects which lead to poor sleep quality.
Alcohol suppresses the production of the hormone melatonin which helps to promote sleep. It disrupts your circadian rhythm (internal body clock) which aids your ability to fall, and stay asleep. Although we quickly fall into deep sleep, our REM sleep is interrupted, this is important for memory function and learning and lack of REM is linked to depression and anxiety and even dementia.
Whilst we are asleep our bodies are metabolising the alcohol. Once that leaves the system (normally after a few hours) it triggers chemicals in our brain which wakes us up, known as a rebound alertness and more often than not, after a night’s drinking we are left feeling tired, groggy and less than our best!
Alcohol can cause anxiety
People are generally familiar with the term ‘hungover’. As we have become a society more open around mental health, the term ‘hangxiety’ is now well recognised and describes the feelings some of us experience in the day/s following a few, or many drinks! Feelings such as dread, uneasiness, anxiety and even panic.
To suffer hangxiety doesn’t mean you suffer with anxiety necessarily and there are varying factors, emotional, mental and physiological which can aid hangxiety; including an increase in noradrenaline (fight or flight hormone) which, when withdrawing from alcohol can surge, causing severe anxiety in some cases.
Alcohol will stop you from creating memories
A lot of people will have experienced an alcohol induced black-out at some point in their lives, where you wake up the next morning not really remembering what happened to you the night before. However, the alcohol you consumed didn’t make your brain forget the memories, it stops your brain from creating new memories.
When we drink, our glutamate levels are compromised. We need glutamate to make memories. Once we’re a good few drinks in, the glutamate release slows right down and it’s why we sometimes struggle to put together our patchy recollections of the night before or in worse cases has caused a blackout.
Prolonged, heavy alcohol use can result in memory lapses and has been linked to permanent memory loss known as dementia.
Alcohol makes you cold
You might feel warm when you’ve been drinking, because more of your blood has come to the surface of your body, but alcohol works as a ‘vasodilator’ which means it opens your blood vessels and brings them to the surface of your skin. So, even though you might feel warm, your body’s core temperature will drop as the warm blood moves away.
Drinking in particularly cold weather, in some cases can be quite dangerous, even resulting in hypothermia.
Alcohol can cause your stomach lining to become inflamed
If you’ve ever had diarrhoea with your hangover, you can go ahead and blame the alcohol. Alcohol makes your stomach produce more acid, which can lead to your stomach lining becoming inflamed, and can also damage your oesophagus if the acid travels upwards when you cough or are sick.
