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, this is Annie Grace and I am answering readers questions and today I have a question for Mary. Mary says,

hi Annie, I just listened to your podcast, it's great, I love your book. I was on an episode two and you talk about anxiety the next day.

I actually have the reverse. I feel down and stuck before I drink and then I drink on stick myself and I feel better,

not only while I'm drinking but also the next day I feel energized. Then as the days go on the declines are to happen again and by the fourth or fifth day I feel like I need to drink to unstick myself again.

Why is this? And this is such a good question because there are so many facets to alcohol and the more research I do, the more interesting kind of the alcohol puzzle becomes.

But first of all let's talk about the anxiety the day after drinking and in a nutshell what that is is that when you drink alcohol,

your body releases kind of counter chemicals to deal with the alcohol things like adrenaline and cortisol.

So when you have your blood alcohol content rising for about a half an hour for one drink, it falls for two to three hours from that one drink.

And those the rising feels you for it, those are the nice feelings and the falling feels quite bad because your body is counteracted the alcohol with all sorts of stress hormones in order to counteract what the alcohol is doing in your brain.

Your brain is adaptive that means it just continues to adapt when you feel the I'm at a I'm at a conference when you feel the next day.

Bad it's because that blood alcohol is falling and things are sort of falling down and this is if you have a few drinks right on occasion so you're going to feel up and then down and and then kicker as you feel your blood alcohol rising you try to keep it rising keep it rising keep it rising keep it rising so you might be able to keep it rising for two or three drinks.

But then it's going to fall most of the time when your blood alcohol level is falling we're asleep and so you don't notice these nasty feelings and then sometimes obviously wake up the hangover the next day you don't feel good.

Now Mary what's going on with you is the same but when you're drinking every single day for years and years and years it becomes so much more pronounced.

And so what's happened in essence and I'm going to post a link below to a video that I interview the behavioral neuroscientist and he goes into this in more detail than I can.

But he calls alcohol a dirty drug and that's because so many different things happen inside your brain when you drink alcohol and your brain is just trying to claw back normalcy or homie of stasis trying to protect itself and so it develops tolerance and all sorts of things and Andrea says circle game that's exactly right it's a circle game and so what happens with you feeling better the next day is that over time you have told your brain.

So your brain will naturally when you feel anxiety when you feel stressed it will release counter chemicals for that like GABA for instance that's a chemical that makes you calm it makes you feel better alcohol provides GABA artificially so if we take the GABA example and if you can imagine this happens for all sorts of neuro chemicals inside your brain the GABA example our alcohol has been providing it artificially for lots and lots of lots of time and so your brain has forgot doesn't provide itself it actually puts the brakes on it and so it will counteract it.

So where alcohol used to be where your brain used to naturally calm down stressful situation stressful hormones anxiety alcohol has been doing that for you for a very very long time and so your brain no longer is putting the brakes so when you stop drinking it's like taking your foot off the brake and so your brain has to naturally adapt back to normal and that can take you know some studies say it takes seven to 10 days for alcohol to leave your system well guess what it's longer than that for your brain to realize okay we're going to do that.

Well you're not putting artificial GABA into the system I need to start producing my own and so what happens is you drink that first day and your brain says oh okay I no longer need to produce any GABA that next day same thing and for a little while those few days that's why it feels like a decline your brain is like a wait a second there isn't any GABA being artificially given to me I need to start kind of producing my own and it starts to claw its way back to being normal and feeling normal and feeling good you drinking again signals okay well back off.

Again and so you start the entire cycle over again and you go through it over and over again and so it's like this you're the you're feeling better is because your brain is like okay well here's alcohol again and yes it's going to make you feel better but you've never ever allowed it to heal and so it's the exact same thing is feeling worse the next day you're just feeling worse four or five days later I suspect because you've been drinking every day for quite some time and that's just how it's extended so I'm going to post a link to someone who's going to explain this concept much better than I can below

and it's a great question and thank you so much if you have any follow up questions please let me know but it's a great question thank you Mary

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