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
When i drank and smoked foe over twenty years I was killing my self. But my body wanted more. I told my self if I wanted to see my kids grow up I had to stop. It took seven weeks taking meds to stop smoking and i stopped drinking the same day because smokes and beer always went together. After stopping it took another two months to get my mind straight, Alcohol can really grab you hard. I just said I have to do this if I want to live and did it. thing is I never went to AA meetings ever.
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.
If you’re drunk for lot of consecutive days your body/brain floods your bloodstream with adrenaline and cortisol basically to keep you alive because the alcohol is slowing down your heart and other systems. When you stop it takes several days for the brain to realize it can cut back production of adrenaline and cortisol to normal levels. This is major contributor to people shaking, heart racing , sweating and not being able to sleep., high blood pressure.
Other people explained the rest pretty well but I figured I’d mention that.
I get rotten hangovers that put me off drinking for weeks if I go too heavy. Do alcoholics not get the same sort of hangovers or are they just not reaching a comparable point of drunkenness due to becoming used to having alcohol constantly in the bloodstream?
Currently 2 weeks sober, drank about 4 pints every night for the past 12 years. feel much better in myself but good lord the headaches that I’ve had that come with the quitting are intense, I am still getting them, 1 more day of these headaches and I will need to see my doctor
The state of “Sick” is not that bad – it called detoxification. Yes, you feel bad but your body is cleaning out shit. When you continue to put there garbage, like alcohol, it is busy processing this garbage intake and not much time for cleaning.
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It’s adaption. You take in enough poison that the lack of poison throws your body chemistry off.
my father was a heavy alcoholic ,
if he stopped drinking for 48hrs he would get a fit, it would las few minutes when ambulance came they give him something and he’d be drowsy for rest of the day, next morning wake up like it was nothing
I drank heavily on a daily basis for about 6 years. I quit without doing any detox program, with no issues. In case there’s anyone here worried about quitting because they always hear about how ‘quitting alcohol can kill you’, be aware that is not the case for everyone, and see a doctor about it anyway.
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