I totally get beer goggles or being more extroverted when drunk, lower inhibitions, worse judgement and all that.
But how does it change why we want to do. If I’m sober i actively dislike the dancefloor, I don’t know what to do, and i don’t see the point? If I’m already drunk though, i absolutely love it?
Same thing with cigarettes, i have friends you couldn’t pay to smoke while sober. Or making plans you would never ever make while sober?
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It lowers your inhibitions and risk assessment skills. You don’t dance in public and your friends don’t smoke because your sober brains decided it is dangerous and they don’t want to. Drunk brain doesn’t give a fuck.
You kinda answered your own question. Your preference is because of inhibition.
There is a lot of research on this topic as you might imagine. Something I read recently made a lot of sense: alcohol reduces or eliminates your worries about the future. I’m sure I’m not saying this properly, but in essence what I took away from this was the alcohol makes you forget about the possible consequences of your actions.
I’ll approach this from another angle: what is a preference? I prefer a warm jacket in the cold, but it’s intolerable in the heat. Preferences are contextual. Alcohol in the brain? BIG change in context.
Why *should* your brain’s preferences be the same when sober versus drunk? You’ll do stuff you wouldn’t do normally because the situation isn’t normal; your brain isn’t normal.
Alcohol specifically reduces the function in your frontal cortex, among other things. It’s where you make big choices, think through things, consider options, assess risk. It’s probably where a lot of your conscious experiences take place, too; so in a way it is the “most you” part of the brain. A lot of your brain does stuff without telling you it’s happening, after all.
So it isn’t like alcohol reveals your “real” preferences. The things you do while drunk don’t have to align with what you normally like. The way humans come up with their identity is complicated. Some people think of their drunk self as part of their “real self,” and some people don’t identify with it as much.
Alcohol does not change your preferences, it just makes you care less about consequences. You obviously see a lot of people use alcohol as an excuse for their bad decisions, but if alcohol genuinely made you do things you didn’t want to do it would be far too dangerous to be permitted. Think about it, everybody would be a potential mass-murderer after a few drinks, yet most people go about drinking without hurting anyone.
Alcohol disinhibits your inhibitions by working on your front parts of your brain which are important for self control, logic and decision making. You may not dance when you’re sober because you’re afraid to look stupid or do it wrong, but with alcohol, those worries become less important .
2 reasons.
We often have a preference and am inhibition both. Think of the preference at a 2 and inhibition at 8 normally. More yuck than want. If you take away all the yuck there is still want.
We also often have related preferences. Without inhibition I may want to break rules. It’s not an urge to smoke but an urge to break a rule and the not smoking rule is right there.
Your personality is a combination of your short term and long term reward seeking, for example: you’re tired and your kid is annoying as heck so you could either react agitated and send it away because you want to sleep (short term pleasure) or you can bite the bullet and take care of whatever it is because you want to raise a good kid (long term pleasure).
When you drink alcohol however, you inhibit your prefrontal cortex, the place where your memory’s are stored and consequences are calculated, to the point where it shuts off and doesn’t form new memory’s anymore (black out the next day, you still know what you are doing that night, it’s just motivated by short term pleasure and you don’t store it). That happens at around 0.15BAC (oder 1.5 Promille für meine Almans) so you basically lose the ability to calculate consequences and start to react impulsive and emotional.
This is basically paraphrased from Malcolm gladwell – talking to strangers
For dancing because it lowers inhibition it allows you to enjoy something your self consciousness doesn’t.
For cigarettes, the nicotine hits differently/harder when drunk. I never smoke cigarettes unless I’m very tipsy. Feels good man.
There’s an old saying that goes “you wouldn’t have done it drunk if you’ve never WANTED to do it sober” while far more complicated than this, the statement does bear some truth. You might not strangle a bartender to death, but hey fuck it $80 worth of pizza right before my rent is due sounds like a great idea right now, screw the consequences!
It’s not so much a change of preference or that you choices are outside your control, it’s the lack of shits to give about the consequences, the choices you make are still yours and your responsibility.
Maybe it’s just me, but it never does in my case. If anything, I become a bit more risk adverse, since I know I can’t really evaluate things when in that state. There also seems to be two types of drunks — Those who become really extroverted with alcohol, and those who become or stay quiet. If anything I’m more the latter than the former, which is also why hitting a bar after a long hard and tiring week of work turns me more into a potato than a party animal.
That said, it does help me get out of my head a little, so I am less prone to overthink things before I say something or dwell on past events, but I’d never do something drunk that I wouldn’t do sober.
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