Most people know that drinking too much leads to a hangover, but what else? How does alcohol impact the body, and what are the short and long-term risks of too much?
What Happens to Your Body When You Drink Short-Term?
In the short term, when you first start drinking, the increase in your blood alcohol content causes several things to happen.
- At first, you start to feel relaxed, you feel physically warmer, and you have the release of certain neurotransmitters, including GABA and endorphins.
- As you drink more your speech will get louder, you will gesture more, and you’ll have reduced coordination as well as focus. You’ll also have more GABA and endorphins released.
- From there, you lose your coordination, have reduced reaction times, and have problems with things like balance and speech.
- Once you exceed the legal blood alcohol content, your reaction times and physical control are greatly reduced.
- Eventually, you’ll struggle with euphoria and coordination so poor that you will likely fall and find it difficult to walk. It is possible to experience vomiting at this stage with increased serotonin, dopamine, and GABA.
- After that, you’ll experience loss of your pain responses with disorientation and confusion, difficulty standing, blackouts, nausea, and vomiting.
What happens to your body when you drink is a little bit different based on the time of day. If you are already tired and it’s night time, it’s more likely that alcohol will put you to sleep quickly because of the sedatives. But a lot of alcohol is mixed with stimulants, even if that stimulant is just sugar, and for that reason, you might fall asleep quickly but then get up within a few hours.
Immediately After Drinking
So what happens after drinking?
Most people end up regretting the extra calories they consumed while they were drunk, and while scientists don’t know exactly why this is, one reason is that the production of sugar in your liver gets changed because of alcohol, so you get low blood sugar that leaves you feeling hungry. However, for other people, it could also be because they are trying to restrict their diet, eat healthy, or otherwise control what they are eating, and the loss of inhibition results in fast food consumption.
As alcohol is a sedative, it can put you into a very deep sleep, but it only works for an average of 4 hours, after which you’ll wake up feeling unhappy, with a headache, lights flashing, and unable to go back to sleep. This is usually what causes the hangover.
The Hangover
From there, you’ll start to experience the hangover. Consuming high quantities of alcohol causes a hangover because your neurotransmitters have been elevated during the time you were drunk, leading to an actual withdrawal of your neurotransmitters. You also activate an inflammatory response and mitochondrial dysfunction.
What Happens to Your Body When You Drink Long-Term?
Long-term, there are several ways that alcohol causes detrimental impacts.
Liver Problems
Alcohol is a poison, and your liver is responsible for breaking down and removing any types of poisons, including alcohol, but if you drink too much, it can cause your abdomen to swell and collect water, resulting in fatty liver disease.
Your liver gets fatty because the excess calories consumed in the form of alcohol get converted into fat and stored in your liver cells. This can result in problems with insulin resistance and diabetes.
It can also cause liver cirrhosis, which damages the regenerative capacity of your liver, and alcoholic hepatitis.
Cancer Risks
In addition to liver cancer, there are several other cancers for which you have a significantly higher risk when you consume alcohol, including oral cancer, breast cancer, cholesterol cancer, esophageal cancer, and nasal cancer.
Heart Problems
What happens to your body when you drink long-term? While most people think that all the liver issues above have the most detrimental impact, they are incorrect. It’s actually your cardiovascular health and your blood pressure.
Drinking damages your heart and can cause cardiomyopathies, damaging the physical heart muscle, which makes it less able to pump blood efficiently. It also causes hypertension or high blood pressure, which increases your chance of heart attacks and stroke.
Brain Damage
What happens to your body when you drink long-term beyond this? It can cause brain damage. Alcohol consumption is a leading cause of dementia.
Getting Help for Alcoholism
Alcohol rehab provides a chance to get help for addiction and prevent any of these short or long-term issues from developing or worsening. With Sequoia Recovery Centers, you can participate in several levels of care, not just for alcoholism but for co-occurring mental health disorders.
Our facility enables clients to move through different levels of care in a step-down approach, with inpatient, outpatient, and aftercare options. We provide access to several individual and group therapy systems to teach coping mechanisms so that managing things like triggers or cravings is much more feasible.
A big part of our program is providing clients with the education they need to better understand what happens to your body when you drink and how you can control that impact. Overall, a lot of things can happen short-term and long-term, but with the right type of treatment and detox service, you can work toward sobriety.
Call our team today to learn more about what happens to your body when you drink and how we can help.