Drink in moderation
Good Times? How does alcohol affect your mental well-being?
Many of us drink to celebrate happy events and think of drink as being a key part of having a ‘good time’, and alcohol certainly can play a role in relaxing and socialising. We tend to feel less inhibited after a drink and this can make us more ‘friendly’ and outgoing.
However, we know that after a few drinks, our social skills and awareness are reduced by alcohol, and this can lead to all sorts of problems. We may simply say or do something we later regret and feel embarrassed about, but alcohol is also linked with increased risk of being involved in incidents of violence or sexual assault, either as perpetrator or as victim. These incidents of course can have major emotional, physical and social impacts on our lives.
In fact, while alcohol may at first make us feel more relaxed and happy, this effect is often short-lived. Further drinking can bring underlying emotions of anger or unhappiness to the surface, and in any case, as the effect of alcohol wears off, it leaves us feeling more depressed, or anxious. This may be partly because we have not dealt with the underlying cause of our anxiety or depression, and drinking may even worsen existing social and relationship problems.
However, there is evidence that alcohol also acts directly on our brains to increase feelings of anxiety and depression, by reducing levels of the ‘brain chemicals’, such as serotonin, that naturally reduce anxiety and generate feelings of happiness. This leads to a danger of people drinking more in response to such feelings, and entering into a ‘vicious cycle’ of increasing alcohol use with increasing anxiety and depression.
As many as 65% of suicides have been linked to excessive drinking, and 70% of men who kill themselves have drunk alcohol before doing so.
Alcohol misuse is also often associated with severe mental illness, such as schizophrenia. Many people with such illnesses use alcohol in an attempt to alleviate the symptoms, but alcohol dependency is common as a result, and such a ‘dual diagnosis’ can make both health problems harder to treat.
for more informtion about the realtionship between alcohol and mental health read Cheers from The Mental Health Foundation.