Amongst the most frequently consumed substances, alcohol consumption remains active but their impact on human health is far from being clear. Social drinking in moderation sounds benign, until you realize that an alcohol habit could be devastating for your brain and body. We need to know these facts so we can understand the dangers associated with alcohol abuse or for those people, it may inspire them to get help before they do more permanent damage.

Immediate Effects on the Brain

Alcohol hits your bloodstream as soon as you take your first sip. Alcohol is a depressor of the central nervous system, which disrupts the communication network of the brain and alters how your brain processes information.

Disrupted Neurotransmitters: Alcohol directly influences neurotransmitter levels (chemical messengers between brain cells and throughout the body). It raises GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid), which quiets and lowers glutamate, which excites. It's this heady concoction which produces the feelings of relaxation and inhibition that come with drinking.

Reduced Cognitive Abilities: At anything over a minimal amount that's hidden from the taste, brain activity in areas that regulate balance, memory, speech ability and judgment becomes less able to work on your behalf. For this reason, drunk people slur their words, stumble around uncoordinated, suffer from impaired vision and lack of sound reasoning.

Memory Blackouts: Heavy drinking may lead to alcohol-induced blackouts — periods of time where individuals do not remember events that took place while intoxicated. They occur when alcohol temporarily prevents memories from being transferred from short-term to long-term memory storage within the hippocampus, the brain’s storage center for memory.

Long-Term Brain Damage

But drinking heavily over long periods of time doesn’t just change the way you act or feel; it changes how your brain works.” And what’s troubling about this new research is that these structural and functional abnormalities in the brains of former heavy drinkers may persist.

Your Brain Will Shrink: Long time overuse of alcohol can shrink your brain! Neuroimaging studies show the brains of such people have shrunken gray matter (which holds most brain cell bodies) and white matter (which connects one region of the brain to another via long axons). This loss of brain volume affects several cognitive abilities.

Loss of Mental Health: Long-term alcohol consumption can also affect areas of the brain that are important for verbal operating, retrieval memory and decision making, as well as for controlling impulses and focusing attention. These inadequacies can disrupt even the simplest activities and are often debilitating in work, relationships and life.

Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome: This is a severe brain disease caused by not getting enough thiamine (vitamin B-1) in long-term alcoholics. It’s a combination of Wernicke’s encephalopathy (confusion, vision disturbances and coordination problems) and Korsakoff syndrome (severe memory impairment). Individuals with the disorder are often incapable of establishing new memory or recalling recent events, but otherwise awake and alert.

Decline of the Mind: Heavy drinking can also cause depression, anxiety and other mental health problems. Altogether, alcohol hijacks the brain’s reward system and stress response, to the point where people go back to drinking in an attempt to feel better even if all it does is make them feel worse over time.

The Addiction Cycle

The brain's plasticity is related to how addiction develops. The substance of alcohol is capable of exerting strong reinforcing action through positive (pleasure centers stimulation) and negative emotional state reduction.

Tolerance: Repeated heavy drinking causes adaptation in the brain to alcohol exposure, which means that more and more must be consumed over time to produce the same effects. This high tolerance to THC feeds into increased patterns of use.

Dependency and Withdrawal: As the brain becomes reliant upon alcohol, ceasing or reducing consumption leads to withdrawal symptoms which include anxiety, irritability, shaking, nausea and in extreme cases seizures. This dependence is why quitting smoking is so difficult without medical help.

Motivation Shift: In the beginning, people drink for fun. The importance of negative reinforcement As drinking becomes compulsive, in common with the normal ‘positive’ motivation to seek out a positive reinforcer such as alcohol, so too does there develop a negative motivation: the desire not for pleasure but rather to avoid an inevitable bad feeling hyperkeratia (dysphoria or malaise), irritability and sleep disturbances.

Devastating Physical Effects

Outside the brain, alcohol causes damage to almost every organ system.

Liver Disease – The Liver is the organ that processes alcohol but overconsumption can cause fat to build up in your liver (fatty liver), toxins contained by alcohol to harm the liver leading to inflammation (alcoholic hepatitis), scarring of the liver from long term damage causes cirrhosis, or cancer can develop.

Heavy drinking can cause high blood pressure, an irregular heartbeat, cardiomyopathy (sagging, stretching and drooping of the heart muscle), stroke and other diseases.

Digestive System Damage: Chronic drinking is very abusive to the lining of the stomach, pancreas and intestines; it interferes with absorption of nutrients in a way that stimulates malnutrition throughout, creating damage to the brain.

Immune System Comes Down: Regular heavy drinking leaves you exposed to infections and diseases because of a weakened immune system.

Cancer: Alcohol use raises your risk of cancers of the mouth, throat, esophagus, liver, breast and colon.

Special Vulnerability in Youth

Teen brains are particularly vulnerable to the damaging effects of booze. The adolescent’s brain is still at a critical stage of installation as it were, and this binge drinking could tinker with the structure and physiology of their brain in such a way that we will see cognitive effects for many years to follow.

Young individuals who start to drink before the age of 14 have about a 50 per cent probability of becoming alcohol use disorder patients later in life, far lower for those who do not drink until they reach legal drinking age.

Hope for Recovery

But, despite the dire scenarios, not all is lost. For the most part, cognitive damage can either reverse or be greatly minimized up to a year after one stops drinking if they get the proper medical treatment and rehab. The same amazing plasticity of the brain that made possible the onset of addiction can provide for recovery once provided with an opportunity to heal.

If you or anyone you know suffers from alcohol addiction, professional help is available and it can make a world of a difference in preventing further harm and assisting your brain to heal.

If you or someone you know is struggling with addiction and wants to find a solution, the Lifeline Foundation's Nasha Mukti Kendra in Malerkotla is the best choice. Located in the beautiful mountains amidst nature, it offers the right treatment for a great recovery.