This is Annie Grace and you're listening to this naked mind podcast where without judgment,

pain or rules, we explore the role of alcohol in our lives and culture.

Hi friends, it's Annie Grace, I'm outside of a Starbucks answering questions, hopefully not going to get rained on.

Today's question is from Kaylee and she says, Annie, I have a question for you.

After any night of heavy drinking, I get severe anxiety the next day.

Sometimes it seems the last days or even weeks past the night of heavy drinking is the anxiety so related to drinking

and what's causing it, is it mental or chemical or what?

Thanks, your book has had a really positive influence on my life.

Awesome, so I think it is mental and I think it is chemical.

So let's talk about the chemical first.

First is your dynorphine cycle and I've talked about this before but it's so worth talking about because it's one of the things that's just not really known about alcohol and any addictive drug really.

But basically your body is always trying to maintain homeostatialist and you see this when you get too hot you sweat.

You know you're trying to maintain homeostasis, it's no different in your brain and when you introduce something in your brain that overstimulates certain parts of your brain especially artificially, alcohol artificially overstimulates your pleasure center.

That's one of the aspects that makes it addictive.

Your body tries to maintain homeostasis so what that is in effect is you're building a tolerance to alcohol and in essence, a tolerance means that you are more sober after drinking more alcohol.

So when you were first starting drinking you could drink one beer and feel it.

You'd be tipsy to have all those feelings of kind of lightheadedness.

Once you've been drinking for a long time you can drink two or three beers and still not feel that tipsy feeling.

That's because your body has actually counteracted the alcohol in order to maintain to build this tolerance.

It thinks it's protecting you. It thinks it doesn't have a choice in terms of the alcohol so what it's going to do like with any poison or anything that's harmful to you is it's going to actually counteract the effect of the alcohol.

It's basically an immunity to alcohol and it's because again your body doesn't think you have a choice so it's going to try to maintain homeostasis to any extent possible and it does that by building a tolerance.

And one aspect of tolerance is the release of this chemical called dinoirfen.

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