'Alcohol relaxes me': is it true?
Unpacking one of the biggest myths about alcohol
The power of belief
The belief that alcohol was relaxing me and relieving my stress was probably the biggest reason I was trapped by it for so many years. So many people believe this. So many people turn to a glass of wine (or three) at the end of stressful day of paid work or parenting. It’s a shortcut to relaxation, right? A reward for hard work. A chance to unwind and switch off.
It’s completely understandable that you formed this belief. Perhaps when you were a kid, you saw a parent regularly open a beer or bottle of wine after a stressful day at work. Movies and TV shows reinforce the idea that alcohol is the perfect way to unwind. And of course alcohol advertising sends us the message that alcohol is synonymous with relaxation, contentment, joy and belonging.
These beliefs become embedded in our subconscious, so that even when we come to realise that alcohol is harming us and we want to quit - we find it really hard. What we need to do is examine the beliefs we’re still holding onto, in our unconscious mind, about the benefits of alcohol. So I hope the information I’m about to share with you will help to answer the question: ‘alcohol relaxes me - is it true?’
I can tell that, without a shadow of a doubt, alcohol does not relax you. And here’s why:
1. The dynorphin cycle and diminishing returns
Your body is always trying to maintain homeostasis; a state of balance. When you get too hot, you sweat. If you’re too cold, you shiver.
Alcohol artificially over-stimulates the pleasure centre of your brain. This might sound good - but it’s not. Your body responds by trying to bring itself back into balance by releasing a chemical called dynorphin. Dynorphin is a natural sedative that turns down the pleasure perceived by your brain, to counteract the effect of the alcohol.
The consequence of this - and you may hardly notice it - is that after the 20 minute buzz from alcohol wears off, you feel a bit rubbish. A bit antsy, a bit low. And you want another drink to take the edge off these feelings. So your brain gets artificially stimulated again and, once again, your body releases dynorphin.
And the dynorphin increases and increases the more you drink. It’s one of the reasons it’s so hard to ‘just have one’ because after that one drink, you actually feel worse than you did before you had the first one. And you feel worse after every subsequent drink, although of course increasingly inebriated and numb. It’s a process of diminishing returns.
This is the reason we build tolerance over time to drinking i.e. we need to drink more in order to get any positive effects. When once one drink might have given you that brief buzz, now you find yourself needing two or three to feel that way (although of course, even that first one will bring relief as it quells the craving that causes us so much distress).1
2. Alcohol slows down your brain
This is the main reason we believe we are relaxed when we drink alcohol. Alcohol affects our neurotransmitters (specifically glutamate and GABA) resulting in slowed down thinking, sedation, reduced ability to reason, slowed speech, diminished reaction time, and slower movement.2
It also affects the prefrontal cortex - the part of our brain involved in decision making, planning and suppressing impulsive behaviour. When drinking, our decision making and ability to think clearly is inhibited, and we are more likely to behave impulsively and make decisions we regret once we’ve sobered up.
So it can seem like you’re relaxed when drinking because the stressful thoughts you were having have been artificially, and temporarily, slowed down by a drug. The thoughts are diminished and become less loud and powerful.
This was definitely a huge reason I drank: I didn’t have any other tools or knowledge to support myself when my thoughts were racing and my emotional pain was high. All I knew was how to numb myself and try to shut out the thoughts.
3. Alcohol raises stress hormones
Alcohol depresses your central nervous system and slows down brain activity. As this occurs, your body tries to get back into balance by releasing cortisol and adrenaline. Even as the apparently ‘relaxing’ affects of alcohol wear off, your body is full of these stress hormones.
Studies have shown that even people who drink moderately experience constantly raised levels of cortisol and adrenaline, meaning they feel stressed and anxious all the time, even when they’re not drinking. 3 Alcohol takes up to a week to be completely detoxed from your body, so even if you’re only drinking once or twice a week, this will be happening to you.
4. A temporary escape
Alcohol doesn’t fix our problems or build resilience to them. What it does do is temporarily numbs us, only to have to face the same stress and problems the next day. Except these problems often seem magnified because of the effects of broken sleep and raised stress hormones that alcohol causes (and these will be present even if you’ve only had one drink; even if you don’t feel hungover).
‘Drinking to treat your problems ensures you will not address the true source of your discontent. It ensures you will remain stuck, treating the symptoms of stress rather than their causes’.
- Annie Grace, This Naked Mind
I drank alcohol to escape temporarily from stress and painful feelings; to create a feeling of ‘I don’t care’. And yet, reliably I would wake at 3am full of anxiety, and only sleep fitfully for the rest of the night. The next day all my problems would still be there but with the added effect of feelings of hopelessness that come from a bad night’s sleep and the dynorphin and cortisol coursing round my body. Add on to that the symptoms of a hangover including dehydration, headache, nausea, dizziness and anxiety. Yep, after a night of drinking, I was on fighting form to solve all my problems! Or… was I just waiting til I could get home from work to have a drink to relieve all these horrible physical and mental symptoms?
5. You can’t selectively numb
What is the cost of numbing your feelings regularly with a few glasses of wine? As Brene Brown says in her book The Gifts of Imperfection:
“We cannot selectively numb emotions. When we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions.”
If you drink regularly, dynorphin is going to be ever-present, so your ability to feel pleasure from every day things becomes diminished. Overtime, alcohol becomes the main way, and eventually the only way your body can feel pleasure. The good news is, once you remove alcohol from your life, all of those feelings of pleasure can come back. You can once again feel joy at the simple, wonderful gifts of life.
Drinking to relieve stress also accelerates the path to addiction. It’s one of the reasons that some people seem to be able to control their drinking and others really struggle. If you use alcohol to self-medicate, this changes the way your brain works so significantly that your brain learns that alcohol is necessary to your survival and you cannot go without it.4
6. Even one drink messes up your sleep
Sleep is absolutely essential to our mental and physical health. Poor quality sleep causes you to feel stressed, irritable and anxious and have lower overall mood, as well as affecting memory and cognitive ability. If you’re a parent to young children you will know how brutal sleep disruption is and how precious good sleep is. What you might not know is how significant the impact of alcohol is on your sleep.
Just a single drink can decrease sleep quality by nearly 25% and more than one drink decreases sleep quality by nearly 40%.5 Alcohol might seem to help you sleep, but it actually messes up your sleep cycles and causes an increase in deep sleep at the beginning of the night. Your brain responds by trying to regain balance and floods your body with adrenaline. This is why you wake at 3am with a racing heart, and then only experience light sleep for the rest of the night. Even if you think you’ve had a good night’s sleep and you haven’t woken up a lot, alcohol will have disrupted your sleep cycles and you will not be getting the restful, essential sleep you body needs.6
7. Alcohol creates long-term stress
From Annie Grace in This Naked Mind:
‘If alcohol helped me achieve relaxation, wouldn’t it follow that I wouldn’t need so much of it? If alcohol cured my stress, wouldn’t I need less, not more of it, over time?
No, alcohol does not relax you. Rather, it inebriates you, which covers the pain for a short amount of time. As soon as it wears off your stress remains and, over time, multiplies.’
As I’ve explored here, drinking alcohol regularly builds up a tolerance so that you end up having to drink more and more to get the same buzz. It causes horrible withdrawal symptoms that you drink to escape from. You might be so used to feeling a bit crap all the time, you don’t even realise how much is being caused by alcohol. Even moderate drinkers have been shown to have raised cortisol levels and feelings of stress when they’re not drinking. Drinking alcohol relieves these symptoms - that alcohol caused in the first place!
Drinking also brings relief from the cravings we experience - it can feel so much easier to ‘give in’ to that voice that says ‘drink! you deserve it’ at the end of a hard day. And there’s such relief (I remember it well) in opening that bottle of wine and that aggressive command to drink quietening down.
But what a stressful existence that is! Drinking to escape from the stress and withdrawal symptoms largely caused by alcohol in the first place? Trying to moderate, trying to have alcohol-free days, or going a month without alcohol, but using willpower and feeling utterly deprived and miserable? So stressful. Surely a substance that was truly relaxing wouldn’t make you feel that way? It wouldn’t create a craving for itself? And it wouldn’t cause such horrible physical, mental and emotional symptoms after consuming it?
Practising the pause
If you believe alcohol is relaxing you, you’ll continue to drink to relax. What I hope is that the information I’ve shared here will help challenge that belief you have.
Once you no longer believe that alcohol is relaxing you, that creates the possibility if pausing. Of noticing when you’re stressed, noticing when you really need to relax and just asking yourself ‘will alcohol meet this need? will alcohol relax me?’
Remember what I’ve shared here about dynorphin, about your disrupted sleep, about the raised cortisol and adrenaline the next day, the increased anxiety. Is that drink worth it? For a brief period of numbness? And if you decide no, it’s not worth it, then this is the perfect opportunity to choose something else. Choose something loving. Choose something that will actually meet that need.
If you’re angry, do you need to scream into a pillow, do a workout or some angry dancing? (these are my go-tos!)
If you’re stressed, do you need to go for a walk in nature?
If you’re feeling lonely, do you need to ask your partner for a hug, or arrange to meet a good friend?
Journalling can be a great way to get everything out of your head onto paper, and I also find it can really help me get clarity on what I’m actually feeling when I’m not sure. I write and write and write and then see: oh, OK, I’m feeling really upset about this thing, or that familiar thought that I’ve got something wrong has come up, and that’s painful to feel. And then I practice self-compassion: acknowledging that it’s hard to feel that way.
If you still do want a bit of distraction - and that’s OK, sometimes we do- could you watch your favourite comedy show or a movie you love?
Try something loving first
Finally, something that really helped me was to reassure myself: you can still have that drink, but try something else first and see if it works. That helps to quieten the craving long enough to do something that’s actually loving and actually relaxing. More often than not, by the time you’ve done that thing, the craving will have passed and you’ll better.
And if you still need more love, try choosing something else. You can still have that drink afterwards. But first, see if something loving will meet your need for relaxation.
Over to you…
Was any of this information new to you? did any of it surprise you?
What do you find truly relaxing in your life?
Are there any beliefs or myths about alcohol you’d like to me to dive into next?
Let me know in the comments.
You might also be interested in
I learned all this thanks to Annie Grace through This Naked Mind. You can learn more in this video.
From This Naked Mind, p110, chapter ‘Liminal Point: I drink to relieve stress and anxiety’
I recommend reading William Porter’s book Alcohol Explained for more on how alcohol affects sleep and our ability to be resilient to stress.
So. Damn. True. Every word of it. I am on Day 6 and working my through…reading this helps reinforce why I’m doing it. Thank you.
Thanks for this educational article. It makes so much sense, just like smoking doesn’t actually relax you. We are victims of marketing!