Why does alcohol make stress and depression “go away” almost instantly but is making it worse in the long run?
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Your body works hard to stay balanced (called homeostasis). When things get out of balance, your brain tries to counteract it to get back to balance. Get dehydrated, your body makes you thirsty so you’ll drink water. Not enough fuel to run your body, you get hungry so you’ll eat.
Alcohol disrupts this natural balance. It takes you from your position on the stress spectrum and pushes you waaay into the “idgaf, everything is great” side. But after the alcohol is gone that balance mechanism pushes you back to baseline normal.
The problem comes in the long run, when you drink too much too often. The more often you are exposed to the same thing, the less your brain responds to it (called attenuation).
So now you’re getting the same hard swing to the “Stress/Bad” side every time, but the drinking only gives you 1/2 as much push to the Happy IDGAF side. Which means on balance you’re left further to the Stress/Bad side than where your original balance point was.
Some people compensate by drinking more, to try to get the same Happy effect they got before. But as you repeat that process you slowly move your balance point bit by bit further into the Bad/Stress side, until eventually you’re so far on that end of the spectrum that you have to drink just to get yourself to what originally was Normal balance. This is addiction
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