why is it that when an alcoholic stops drinking alcohol they become sick even though alcohol is incredibly bad for us, what is happening in our body that makes us sick for not having it?
In: Biology
Alcohol is understood to work mainly on receptors in your brain called GABA receptors. They deal with GABA, which is a chemical called a neurotransmitter. Your brain talks to different parts of itself using these neurotransmitters, different types have different functions.
Your brain produces GABA by itself naturally, and alcohol makes your brain make more than it normally would by telling the GABA receptors to step up production. When you drink alcohol every day and in large enough quantities, your brain figures that it needs to make less GABA by itself naturally because it gets used to having alcohol help with this process. This results in having to increase the dose to get the same effect, which is known as tolerance.
GABA, and neurotransmitters in general, are not particularly well understood by science. We know that it helps regulate our levels of anxiety and it is involved in humans not having seizures. When the brain doesn’t have enough GABA to sustain normal functioning, bad things happen like seizures, anxiety, and other symptoms of withdrawal. The brain needs to get used to making GABA by itself again before those symptoms will go away.
Another example in medicine is benzodiazepine drugs such as Xanax and Valium. These medications are used as anti anxiety and anti seizure drugs, among other things. When you have been on them for a long time and then stop taking them suddenly, you can have similar but generally more severe symptoms. As with alcohol, it is recommended that you reduce your dose slowly over a period of weeks or months to avoid these potentially lethal withdrawal symptoms.
Opiate withdrawals eg. Morphine and Heroin have a similar thing happen, but with different receptors and neurotransmitters involved.
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