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
I wouldn’t say “go away” either TBH.
There are plenty of incidents of people being in a terrible or stressed or angry or depressed mood, and then deciding to start drinking, and just becoming a much worse version of the day they were already having.
It dumbs you down to the feeling of racing thoughts and stress.
It makes you postpone the reckoning. Generally far longer than is advisable or you intend.
Then when you sober up, you feel like crap and can’t think clearly so you procrastinate more.
Just because you feel better for a while doesn’t mean the causes of your problems aren’t there anymore. It’s like anesthesia, you can inject it to numb a wound or a toothache, but if you don’t fix the source of the problem, then the pain returns once the anesthesia wears off, and the longer a problem persists, the worse it gets.
Because it makes you temporarily forget about the root of the problem without actually solving it.
Once you remember that afterwards, the realization sets in that nothing has changed from how it was before.
The stress & depression exist for real reasons.
Using alcohol only treats the symptoms & not the underlying issue.
Just drinking alcohol won’t make your problems worse & can be a useful tool in making them better, *if* you address the aggravating factors that make you vulnerable *or* invest in protective factors that make you more resilient.
Abusing alcohol will make your stress & depression worse because you’ve added another thing to be depressed & stressed about.
It’s debatable and depends on how much is being used. A couple glasses can be medicinal. While a half bottle or more can be a depressant. Moderation rules!
Not as detailed or scientific as some explanations, but it is a false escape. Sure, while you are drunk/high you are not concerned with your problems, but those problems don’t cease to exist and simply fester while you engage in escapism.
Think of it like sitting on a boat taking on water, you can bail or you can try to pretend you are not taking on water to put off the bailing. If you do, you still have all the original water to bail as well as whatever seeped in while you were avoiding the task.
A lot of people are going to talk about brain chemistry etc, but this misses the point that a lot of causes of depression and stress in the modern world are external. People are often stressed about a project at work they are responsible for, but don’t have any real control over. People are often depressed about things like not having enough money or living in an unpleasant house. Alcohol makes it hard to hold these idea in your head, and easy to forget the.
Alcohol does nothing to help you solve these problems. If you’re depressed that your call centre job doesn’t earn you enough money to move out from your parents place, drinking in the evening will make you forget / not care about that problem while you are drunk. However it will not solve the problem, and if anything make the situation worse, causing the depression to get worse in the long run.
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