There is a reason that nearly 12 million women in the United States alone qualify for an alcohol use disorder. The way that alcohol affects the mind, body, and mood is addictive, generating the phenomena of craving, tolerance, and withdrawal.
But how does alcohol affect our feelings? Any woman who has wrested her life back from the octopus arms of addiction will tell you: that alcohol starts out friendly, helping us feel more social, open, and relaxed. But before too long, alcohol amplifies shame, guilt, anger, stress, trauma, depression, and anxiety. For those who don’t get out of alcoholism’s grip in time, their last days are spent in pure insanity.
Read on for Villa Kali Ma’s exploration of how alcoholism takes away a woman’s ability to feel her feelings. All the more reason to devote ourselves, once again, to the bright, true path of recovery.
What are the emotional effects of alcohol?
Here are a few of the ways that alcohol makes us feel bad.
How Alcohol Affects Women with PTSD
There is a strong connection between traumatization and addiction. The link goes in both directions; women who drink are more likely to develop post-traumatic stress disorder than women who don’t, and women who already have PTSD or complex trauma are more likely to become addicted to substances, including alcohol.
Alcohol, like all addictive substances, has a negative interaction with trauma, causing greater levels of dissociation, intensity of traumatic memory, flashbacks, and reenactment compulsion. This is because alcohol further prevents the processing and release of traumatic memories, so the distress coming from damage to survival instincts, which people with PTSD must learn how to release, is doubly locked inside the body.
How Alcohol Interacts with Stress
For the same reasons that alcohol interacts negatively with traumatic stress, it also interacts negatively with everyday life stress, such as the stress associated with parenting and work. The body’s stress processing pathways – heart, stomach, breath, and nervous system – are deteriorated by alcohol. The consequences of alcoholism also bring more stressful events into a woman’s life, in the form of legal, financial, and relationship problems.
How Alcohol Interacts with Depression
Alcohol generates depression as a side effect, even though many women also use it to self-medicate their pre-existing depression. The longer-term impact on physiology is to reduce levels of happiness and good mood, through disrupting neurotransmitter and hormone production and circulation in the body, as well as re-routing patterns of brain and nervous system functioning.
Alcohol also depletes the body of vitamins, minerals, and nutrients, which are vital to the maintenance of positive mood. Alcohol gradually poisons the liver and sickens the body, such that the body’s ability to eliminate toxins is impaired.
Feeling ill in the body and having a heavy load of toxins and inflammation are both correlated with depression.
How Alcohol Interacts with Anxiety
Anxiety is a side effect of alcohol and a withdrawal symptom from alcohol. Women who turn to alcohol for its calming, relaxant, and socially lubricating effects have to eventually face the reverse impact when the body no longer has enough of the substance to recreate the effect.
The pattern of chronic anxiety is deepened through the repetitive use of alcohol, and alcohol gets in the way of the body’s ability to find nervous system healing through positive methods like exercise, nutrition, and meditation.
How Alcohol Interacts with Anger
We need boundaries that protect ourselves and others, and healthy anger can be part of recognizing a boundary. A temporary emotional state of anger can be used as a signal to take action to protect ourselves and other vulnerable who are counting on us to defend them, such as our children or pets.
Rage, on the other hand, is out of control, explosive anger that hurts ourselves and others. Rage is not helpful for resolving conflicts or getting our needs addressed. Rage is adversely affected by alcohol abuse. Women who abuse alcohol gradually become more and more rageful over time.
How Alcohol Affects a Woman’s Self-Esteem
Alcohol reinforces shame severely. Shame is the feeling that you don’t deserve to be loved or to belong in the group. It is one of the most difficult emotions to endure.
When you’re already depressed, angry, and anxious, the chronic and relentless shame that people with addiction feel can be a killer. Many women with substance use disorders take their own lives.
There is a stigma associated with addiction, and the life consequences of alcoholism, such as health problems, physical ravages, job loss, financial trouble, DUIs, loss of custody, and so on, are also stigmatized.
How Alcohol Affects Social Interactions
Alcoholism leads to social isolation. Due to the changes in personality that take place with alcoholism, sober people and moderate drinkers don’t want to be around us and we don’t want to be around them. It is hard for caring people to witness our self-destruction and not be able to do anything about it. All of these reasons, and more, lead to a loss of family, friends, and social belonging.
How Alcohol Affects Intimate Relationships
Alcohol corrodes intimacy. In addition to psychological impacts that generate more rage, stress, depression, and anxiety, alcoholics make bad choices, bringing on financial and legal trouble.
Alcohol is linked to domestic violence (for victims too), emotional volatility, fights, and reckless behavior, like crashing cars, infidelity, and spending sprees. People who love us may eventually leave for their own well-being. The people who stay with us get sick with codependency, which harms them considerably.
How does alcohol affect the human brain?
Alcohol is first absorbed into the blood and then transmitted to the brain. Once in the brain, alcohol affects our supply of neurotransmitters and hormones. These tiny chemical messengers are involved in regulating and balancing all vital systems. The connection between alcohol and menopause is particularly significant because hormonal fluctuations during menopause can amplify the effects of alcohol on neurotransmitters and overall mental health.
If we do not have enough of the right kinds of these molecules, many pathways are disrupted and thrown out of whack. Some neurotransmitters which are known to be disturbed by alcohol are GABA, serotonin, and dopamine.
A very simplified analogy for thinking about this is: that alcohol breaks into the storehouse of neurotransmitters and releases them artificially, thereby cheating the system and spending them when we haven’t yet earned them.
An alcohol-induced GABA spike creates sedation, and a release of concentrated dopamine feels like pleasure. Sedation and pleasure are addictive, leading us to want to drink alcohol again and again. When the physical toxicity and negative emotional impacts of alcohol kick in, we are liable to want that borrowed pleasure and sedation even more.
The problem with breaking into the storehouse is that the required levels of these transmitters are gone when we need them for other bodily operations.
These molecules are supposed to be used for operating the body, as well as for natural reward and relaxation processes. They are ordinarily released as a cascade when we are doing life-affirming activities: after exercise, sleep, emotional connection, creativity, and procreation. Normally, we would feel pleasure as a reward for behavior that is good for life (our own and other people’s).
For example, the natural pleasure that a mother and her baby feel when a mother is nursing her newborn, or that two people feel when falling in love, or which a grandmother feels while gardening in the sun, are hormonal and neurotransmitter cascades saying “yes, this is good for you”.
If we deplete our supply of biological reward hormones and neurotransmitters through using drugs and alcohol, we eventually aren’t able to feel enjoyment naturally anymore. This can all be restored through a life of recovery, but it takes some time to replenish after addiction.
What influences alcohol’s impact on your brain?
How much influence alcohol will have on your brain depends on how much exposure you have had. The amount of alcohol you drink, how often you drink, how old you were when you began drinking, and for how many years total you have been drinking, are all predictors of how much impact alcohol will have on your brain. More alcohol over the same period of time means more impact. Also, the earlier in your development you start using alcohol, the greater the impact.
Another factor to consider is your baseline physical and mental health. If you have a physical or mental illness, then alcohol has a greater impact on you.
What parts of the brain does alcohol affect?
Alcohol affects multiple centers in the brain that are connected to mood, motor control, thought, sensation, and decisions.
Alcohol inhibits some brain functions and stimulates other functions. The frontal lobe, which moderates aggressive behavior, helps us make rational decisions and overrides impulsive urges, is inhibited by alcohol and can be damaged.
Alcohol also stimulates the limbic system, explaining why it can make people feel happy, affectionate, and connected in the short term, but also why sadness and other more difficult emotions exist in abundance in alcoholics.
In recent decades the impact of chronic alcohol abuse on the brain has been studied more closely. Brain imaging reveals what appear to be areas of damage in the brains of alcoholics, in key centers related to emotion. These areas of brain damage corroborate the already observable phenomena of extreme mood swings and out-of-control behavior in alcoholics.
Women are more at risk of alcohol-related brain damage than men, due to our physiological differences. We are also more prone to experiencing blackouts, which harm short and long-term memory, showing up as shrinkage in function-specific centers of the brain. What this generally means for women is chronic problems with anxiety, depression, and anger, as well as difficulty with memory and decisions.
How does alcohol affect your mental health?
Mental health is deeply disrupted by alcohol. For people who have no pre-existing mental health problems, alcoholism instills them, bringing on depression, anxiety, and in later stages, psychosis. For people who have a pre-existing or co-occurring mental health problem, including trauma-related disorders, alcohol makes these worse, deepening them and interfering with healing them.
People with severe and chronic mental health problems, such as bipolar disorder and major depression, often use alcohol to self-medicate, but its impact is very destructive in the long run, aggravating both mania and depression.
Overcome the emotional effects of alcohol today!
When our emotions are working as nature intended, we have vivid, active hearts. Our emotions guide and comfort us. When joy comes, we feel it fully. We can also tolerate and pass through the tenderness of sorrow. We play the full, grand piano range of emotional notes.
All that makes life worth living, is recognized by how it feels. Alcohol takes this birthright from us. It darkens our hearts.
Through sobriety, it’s possible to start over. Villa Kali Ma is a unique, women-only holistic treatment provider, specializing in recovery from addiction, co-occurring mental health disorders, and/or trauma. If you’re looking to recover your right to feel good in your own heart, body, and mind, we’d love to work with you!
