A recent study ranked alcohol as the most harmful drug ahead of heroin and crack, stating that far more lives are ruined by alcohol than by more infamous illegal substances.

We live in a world where drinking alcohol every week is considered normal for most of us, it’s our favorite form of escapism, it allows us to socialize and relax with friends, it allows us to come out of our shells, be less inhibited, and more. fun. But that’s how we convince ourselves because of the social norms that surround us.

Sadly, this escape drink can become our best friend when times are tough. Maybe we lose a loved one, maybe we lose our job, maybe we lose our partner and we are children. Loneliness can become less lonely with a drink by our side, many times people resort to the bottle to forget about bad memories. It prevents us from facing our fears, from facing reality head on.

Some people have drinking problems and some people are alcoholics, some people have a drinking habit in the sense that they have a couple of drinks every night and then drink a lot on the weekends. I know too many people who fit into the latter category, most of them graduate students, holdovers from the college era when students had money and spent it on music, alcohol, and drugs. The habits that are formed in these years fade to some degree and drug use usually stops altogether, but one thing I have noticed is that many of these people continue to drink above average and don’t seem to be more aware. because they know a lot of people who do it. . Although many of these have come from the same era.

Excessive alcohol consumption
And then there’s the dreaded weekend binge classed as anything over four pints or a bottle of wine. As a man I know how much stick you get if you don’t drink as much as everyone else and the culture of buying rounds makes for the perfect measuring tool for who has had what and how much. Peer pressure doesn’t stay on the playground and when a special occasion rolls around, the average 7 or 8 pint binge turns into 10 pints with several shots of tequila or sambuca.

The Dreaded Hangover – Ever wonder exactly why it happens?

I decided to face it and find out exactly what happens when I drink and I found 7 interesting facts that you may or may not know about the wonder of a hangover.

1. As alcohol or more precisely ethanol is a diuretic (like caffeine) it causes our body to expel more water than it should, leaving us dehydrated. Apparently as a result the rest of the body struggles to use what water we have left in the body, the brain gets the short end of the stick here and as the internal organs draw water out of the brain, the brain shrinks, causing the organs to shrink. filaments that hold the brain to the inside of the skull to scream and send pain signals, therefore severe headache and dry mouth.
2. If this wasn’t bad enough, alcohol is also a toxin, so when we drink we poison ourselves. If we haven’t drunk enough to kill us, the liver has to work to get rid of all this poison from the whole body. what makes us feel sick. The main problem is that the liver cannot break alcohol down into a harmless byproduct to excrete, the best it can do is convert it to acetaldehyde. Which is significantly more toxic than alcohol and similar to formaldehyde, it is a cancer-causing carcinogen.
3. chemical impurities. Most alcoholic beverages, with perhaps the exception of drinks like vodka and gin, have been distilled or fermented with other flavors, barley and peat in whiskey, barrel flavors, etc. these can react with each other or worse yet with other drinks to create a cocktail of congeners such as acids, aldehydes, arsenic or metals. The worst culprits for this are usually darker drinks, dark beers, red wine, dark rum, and the two worst culprits are brandy and port, so if you really want to punish yourself, mix the two!
4. evacuation of nutrients. The process of drinking not only means that we remove minerals and salts from the body, but so does the healing process. The sodium imbalance leaves us with nausea, fatigue, and loss of brain function. The other problem is that as the liver works hard to get rid of alcohol, it struggles to maintain glucose levels in the brain. So the brain runs out of the fuel it needs to function properly.
5. You are unconscious, not asleep. If you’ve collapsed into bed at 3 in the morning and been out, your body usually goes into an unconscious state that isn’t normal sleep. This means your body’s metabolic rate slows down and your body waits until you’re most active, meaning the morning until the cleansing process begins, so you want the world to swallow you whole when you wake up feeling like the bottom of an ashtray.
6. stomach irritation. Alcohol can damage the stomach and also the lover by causing an acid imbalance, which adds to the feeling of nausea the next day.
7. Finally, last but not least, the alcoholic descends, after the emotions and haunting of the night before, we suffer from mind control, paranoia of what we may or may not have done, self-reproach of the money we have spent, the how we have behaved and the fact that the next day will be spent recovering.
8. Although the most frightening thing I find is that if we damage our own brains through excessive alcohol consumption, just as someone with a senile deformity may not realize that they have mentally degraded, neither can we.

HOWEVER

Although this is a bit of a scary list, I have had some of the most fantastic times of my life under the influence of alcohol and although I know several people who have stopped drinking and are the best at it, I am not going to. leave it still. Instead, I’m going to look at those people except rock stars who don’t drink to excess and who have been successful because the extra time they’ve had to be productive instead of hungover has led to good things.