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, it's Annie Grace at this naked mind. I am here today answering a question from Nina.

Nina asks, can you give an explanation of how we perceive alcohol relaxes us and does it actually relax us really?

It's a great question. Virginia Wolfe, she was actually quoted saying, you cannot find peace by avoiding life.

And I think that's kind of at the crux of what alcohol, you know, the relationship between alcohol and relaxation.

So I guess a good place to start is like, what is relaxation?

And you could say that being completely relaxed means having nothing to worry about, nothing to urges, nothing to annoy us, either physically or mentally.

And so how can alcohol actually do this for you? Because it doesn't fix your annoyances. It doesn't fix your stress.

It just temporarily dulls the symptoms of your stress. And guess what? As you build a tolerance, the effect of alcohol actually decreases over time and your need for alcohol increases.

So while you're dulling the symptoms, you're not actually fixing the problem.

So the things that are making you upset, you know, after you build a tolerance, they're barely even affected or muted by the alcohol.

And you can become addicted over time, which of course addiction is a much bigger stressor than anything you probably drink to relieve the stress of in the first place.

So, you know, there is this initial aspect of it dulling the symptom, but over time, clearly it's probably not the best choice because you end up creating this before.

And now you have this craving that you either have to feed with more alcohol or to prive. And, you know, for me specifically like wanting something that I can't have, does nothing to relax me.

That creates this mental divide inside my mind. It creates all sorts of thought and stress around the thing I want that I'm not allowing myself to have, which is for me like the definition of being annoyed and aggravated and agitated and frustrated.

So that's actually over time the opposite of relaxation. And you know further, drinking to treat your problems, it almost ensures that you won't actually address the true source of your discontent of whatever stressing you out in the first place.

So it ensures that you're going to remain stuck because you treat the symptoms rather than the causes of the symptoms.

And so things end up going for bad to worse. And that was definitely my experience when I was drinking to sort of self-medicate and relax myself over time the things that I was medicating were getting much more stressful and much worse in my life because I was not ever addressing the problem.

I was just glossing over it with another drink.

And you really have to dig into what is wrong and what is going on in my life that I need to be relaxed because of.

So the treatment in theory should address the source of the problem. And as an example, like you can just think about you just came back from a long run. It's of 80, 90 degree day, you're really hot.

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