This year I've been really rethinking my relationship with alcohol and so I decided to commit to dry January to really kickstart 2025 and just test myself.
Heineken 00 is the perfect companion for dry January because you feel like you're still participating when you're out for dinner with friends, out for drinks whilst you're still meeting your lifestyle goals.
I'm a big beer fan so I also love the taste of Heineken 00 plus being alcohol free you can enjoy whenever refreshment calls.
Heineken 00 is available at your local Heineken retailer or for delivery at Heineken .com you must be 21 plus to purchase, enjoy Heineken responsibly and good luck with the perfect companion for dry January because you feel like you're still participating when you're out for dinner with friends, out
for drinks whilst you're still meeting your lifestyle goals.
I'm a big beer fan so I also love the taste of Heineken 00 plus being alcohol free you can enjoy whenever refreshment calls.
Heineken 00 is available at your local Heineken retailer or for delivery at Heineken .com you must be 21 plus to purchase, enjoy Heineken responsibly and good luck with dry January.
Hello and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s, the podcast where we talk through some of the big changes and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology.
Well hello, thank you for tuning into the psychology of your 20s for this episode.
This week's topic we're going to be talking about alcohol and alcohol consumption in our 20s.
There is so much that we could talk about when it comes to drinking and the culture around drinking binge drinking, peer pressure, it would genuinely take I think a whole series of episodes to really uncover all the links between alcohol and psychology and our 20s.
So I thought for this episode we'd start pretty simple but we'd start strong and we talk about anxiety, so anxiety that you feel after you've been drinking.
I think that alcohol is such an important topic to discuss when we're thinking about our psychology and our well -being and how that interacts with other factors in our life in this decade.
Alcohol plays a pretty profound role I would say for those of us who choose to drink, especially in Australia where I'm from.
I think alcohol is kind of a central feature of a lot of social interactions, we go to the pub, we get drinks on a Friday, we drink after work, we drink on birthdays, we drink at the beach.
A lot of social elements all rest upon drinking and a pretty strong drinking culture especially.
I think that as well alcohol is something that a lot of us will start drinking in our late teens, but in our 20s when we can kind of access it more easily, when we have money to purchase alcohol, consumption kind of goes up and like I said it's a big part of our lives, a big part of our social lives.
So it's important to talk about and to talk about in a healthy way and in a nuanced way considering other things that it involves like our mental health.
I think drinking in particular is really takes a big, becomes a big feature of our lives when we go to uni or when we're in our early 20s and you start drinking in college or with friends that you've made in trades or from high school and there is a really big binge drinking mentality.
I especially found that at college you know there was no kind of limit, we didn't have a good understanding of how much it would take to get us really drunk and even if we did we'd probably still drink past that point and we've all had, I think for those of us who choose to drink, have stories about you
know when we've taken it too far, when we haven't eaten anything and then done a couple shots or had a few too many beers with our friends at the pub and there is a big culture around that.
So I think it's something to discuss especially in our 20s because it isn't all just fun and games.
There can be consequences both in the long term and on a really serious level like alcoholism or excessive drinking or doing shit that like really fucks up your life, getting injured, making mistakes but then there's also the kind of less severe more short -term impacts on our mental well -being and on our
psychology such as anxiety which is really important to have a discussion around.
As we mature you know I hopefully begin to learn healthier habits around alcohol.
I definitely have a lot of my friends and I have been discussing how we really can't drink the way that we did when we were 20 or 21 and you know going out like three nights in a row nowadays that's just completely out of the picture for me and I think a massive reason is because it doesn't, that excessive
drinking doesn't really fit well into the narrative I have around my mental health or my psychological well -being which has become more important to me than those kind of wild stories or getting home at 4am.
So there is a lot to talk about when we're discussing the intersections of the psychology and alcohol but of course I'm going to limit myself to anxiety.
Something I think we can all relate to if we drink especially if we've had a big night we're going to talk about why our brain reacts to alcohol in that way if you're someone who experiences anxiety, the consequences and also how to maybe limit it how to get over that weird anxious depressive period
the day after you've been drinking or the week after you've been drinking how to kind of move past that and have a healthier relationship with alcohol and with your body so that you don't have that kind of negative come down.
So I hope you all enjoy and we learned something today.
Okay so for those of you who don't know what anxiety is it's a pretty common term I don't know amongst my kind of friendship group if you haven't heard of it before if maybe you're from a different country where this isn't a term essentially it describes that kind of pretty common anxious feeling of dread
or nervousness after a night of drinking it might also be linked to a feeling of embarrassment or doom that you've done something really stupid as you're recovering from a big night or a big day.
Generally it's just describing a feeling or a state of heightened alertness and anxiety and stress or fear that we can directly link to a period or an episode of excessive drinking.
Now if you are someone who experiences anxiety or stress after you've been drinking a lot you are by no means the only one.
Anxiety during a hangover affects around 20 percent of people from some estimates and can pretty much vary in severity as many things do depending on the kind of person you are depending on other factors that are impacting your psychological state at the time that you were drinking but also the morning
after when you might be experiencing some of those hangover side effects.
So as the body recovers from a night of drinking from binge drinking a hangover can create a state of physiological stress so that might that often happens when the body is under pressure like after an illness or injury and alcohol can create the same kind of impact on us.
So this isn't so much about anxiety this is some of the physical effects that we might experience after a hangover so or after a big night of drinking you know the headaches the sweating nausea all of those things and anxiety kind of works the same way.
Not only does it cause changes to our immune system it also increases our cortisol levels that's known as the stress hormone our blood pressure our heart rate and then on a deeper level on a more psychological neurological level it also changes the neurochemicals and neurotransmitters being released
in our brain. And what does that feel like what does that anxiety feel like?
Well I kind of alluded to this but as I've gotten older obviously I'm not that old and still in my 20s but as I have had more things kind of common to my plate as I've matured as I've grown as I've had more responsibilities as my brain has kind of developed and formed as it often does in our early and mid
20s what I found is when I drink if I've had a really big night I haven't been watching what I've been drinking I had this happen recently at a work function the champagne was flowing and the next morning and especially the next day I was just feeling so panicky and nervous and stressed and flighty
even though I didn't feel like I'd done anything embarrassing I hadn't really done anything or nothing had happened that had given me a reason to feel anxious I could recognize that the amount of alcohol I drank the night before had actually caused changes in my body that were making me feel really
really shit and I've had so many friends who have told me similar things recently after big nights out not only do they have those normal hangover symptoms that we all kind of expect the sweating the nausea the headache feeling vile but they were also really anxious for no reason or for one reason which was that the amount
of alcohol they'd drunk had impacted their brain and created a sense of arousal and a sense of anxiety this can feel really terrible and I think a big reaction that I normally have is like I'm never drinking again I'm never drinking to that level again we all know that's not the case if you are someone
who drinks and drinks socially it's very easy for things to get out of hand especially if someone's buying drinks if it's a function so it is important to understand if you do continue drinking after a bad hang anxiety episode it's important to understand why this state of psychological arousal occurs
and how we can kind of bounce back from a big night without that terribly anxious feeling causing us to dread the future or dread our current state so yeah you're probably you know pretty familiar with the usual physical symptoms of a hangover but like I said it can have psychological symptoms as well
so anxiety is that link between our psychological state and having a hangover this can mean that when you are experiencing anxiety during a hangover where you're worried about something you did under the influence or maybe you're regretting things trying to remember the evening or maybe just feeling
a little bit off we can attribute this not so much to what we would see as the physical reactions to alcohol but the psychological neurological reactions to alcohol and if you already suffer from anxiety or depression even social anxiety experiencing a hangover can make those symptoms of anxiety a lot
worse even though alcohol can lessen feelings of anxiety whilst drinking which we're going to talk about a little bit later there is that rebound effect that may make you feel far worse and feeling beyond your normal symptoms of stress and anxiety the following morning and unfortunately experiencing
those uncomfortable emotions can make us feel like maybe we're not drinking enough alcohol to mask those feelings making you drink more and more especially if you know you've had a big day out in the town and you've kind of playing catch up and you've been drinking for a while and those feelings of anxiety
are coming up as you're still kind of in a social setting it can cause us to drink more and many people do use alcohol as kind of a social lubricant as a bit of liquid courage as my friends and I always say before one of us goes on a date you know a few shots of fireball kind of loosens you up and if you
live with anxiety particularly social anxiety you will find that having a drink or two before a big social event or when you arrive will help you relax and cope with anxious feelings and this is why this is why we have that initial reaction of feeling more calm more at ease perhaps more social and why
it actually is completely and inextricably linked to the anxiety you'll feel the next day so alcohol it is what we would class as a downer drug so we have uppers which is things like MDMA or caffeine and downers so basically downers reduce arousal and activity within our central nervous system by targeting
different receptors and neurotransmitters in our brain so alcohol in particular targets the gabber receptor so in our brain we have neurotransmitters which are those like tiny little hormonal chemical messages that get sent around things like dopamine and serotonin which we've talked about before and then
you have the parts of the neuron and one of those is a receptor and the receptor is kind of like the front door it's the thing that allows the neurotransmitters to come in but alcohol targets that receptor the gabber receptors which send signals through the brain and the central nervous system to inhibit
the activity of a nerve cell so basically alcohol kind of makes that receptor shut the door more frequently on other neurotransmitters coming in so put simply when you first start drinking it calms the brain and it reduces excitement by making fewer neurons fire so because alcohol targets or stimulates
gabber receptors this is why you if you have if you have anxiety or you know you're just a general person why you might start to feel relaxed and cheerful when you're a few classes in when you've had a you know you've had a few drinks and it kind of causes you to relax so when you've just started drinking
that kind of you into that blissful gabber induced state of chill it's kind of like your peak point but then as you keep drinking more when you get to your third or fourth drink another brain kind of slackening effect kicks in alcohol causes your brain to start blocking a neurotransmitter called glutamate
so glutamate is an excitatory neurotransmitter so it causes activity in your brain to occur more frequently and at a faster rate so more glutamate means more anxiety less glutamate means less anxiety so this is why when you get drunk we're less anxious than when we're just a tiny bit drunk it's why
our social inhibition goes down it's why we can kind of talk more easily because alcohol has blocked glutamate the kind the neurotransmitter that would normally make you feel kind of anxious or a little bit like suspicious of your words not only does alcohol reduce the chatter in your brain by stimulating
gabber but it further reduces your anxiety by blocking glutamate so that's why you feel really good you feel like you can have all those weird drunk chats with you know people outside the club or at the pub or in the bathroom why you always have like really deep and meaningful conversations with people
because normally glutamate would be telling your brain to kind of you know reel it in a little bit to stay alert but when that's not around as much wear more chilled out so the body registers this imbalance in brain chemicals and it kind of attempts to put things right so it's kind of like when you
eat a lot of sugar and your body starts producing a lot of insulin to process that sugar next to get your blood sugar levels back to normal but as soon as you've digested all of those marshmallows or chubby chubs or whatever you've eaten all that insulin causes your blood sugar to crash and then your
body has to try and get it back up to a normal level so when you're really drunk your body realizes that something isn't right a foreign substance alcohol has come into your body and it's kind of messing with your neurotransmitters and your GABA receptors and your glutamate levels so when you stop drinking
you will end up with unnaturally low GABA function and a spike in glutamate because your body and your mind is trying to compensate for the fact that the alcohol has kind of numbed you a little bit this is why we feel anxiety or have withdrawal from alcohol this is why we get anxiety so essentially
what's going to happen is that after you've been drinking your brain once there's less alcohol in your system is going to pick up that there isn't enough glutamate or the right status quo amount of glutamate to let us function so it's going to shoot production and release of those neurotransmitters
back up and we know that glutamate is associated with anxiety so to compensate for that deficit in glutamate from the night before it's going to produce a lot and so you're going to start feeling quite tense and anxious and it can take the brain a day or two to kind of return to its normal state and if you
drank for an awfully long time it can also sometimes take a week for your brain to re -adapt and the consequences of that and why it relates to anxiety is that during that time that your brain is trying to restore normal functioning you're going to feel really anxious and you're going to feel really
tense it's kind of the seesaw of emotion and psychological states where you're at one end right down the bottom and now you're out way up the other side and your brain is trying to find that balance so that you can get back to a normal state of functioning a normal state of arousal and your brain can recover
from a big night so imbalances in GABA and glutamate are not the only problem there are some deeper interactions that create anxiety and that feeling of anxiousness and stress after you've had a big night of drinking or alcohol okay so we've talked about GABA we talked about glutamate but alcohol can also cause
a rise in noradrenaline and this is known as our fight or flight hormone so noradrenaline suppresses stress when it's first released and it increases in withdrawal so severe anxiety is often associated with um a surge in noradrenaline in the brain let me kind of explain so sorry so yeah it's normally
associated with this a surge of noradrenaline so when you consume alcohol basically our brain suppresses this hormone so you feel less aroused less stressed but then once you stop drinking it tries to return to normal levels and that's another key cause of anxiety and another reason why we might feel
it and might be anxious the next day is because you might find that you're not able to remember some of the things that you've done whilst you're inebriated and that's because we need things like noradrenaline and glutamate and all of those kind of systems to remember things and consolidate memories
and we also need noradrenaline to tell us and tell our brain when something's really important and we should probably remember it so if we don't have normal levels of that our brain isn't able to kind of lay down memories in the same way so that it might also just be another underlying reason why you're
pretty anxious the next day because you're thinking back on your night there's things that you can't remember you're like did I say something embarrassing did I do something embarrassing or you can kind of only remember flashes of it and it's enough to make you feel stressed that's because of an imbalance
in your brain where your brain isn't able to consolidate memories as well and if that's ringing any bells it may be because anxiety associated with that and in general doesn't affect us all equally as revealed by this really interesting study that was published in a journal called personality and individual
differences so this was conducted in 2019 and it looked at I think around 100 people and what they wanted to measure is how does alcohol impact us differently based on our varying levels of social openness or shyness so researchers asked 50 of the participants to drink as they usually would in a social
situation and the other half of the participants to stay sober and then they measured the levels of anxiety before during and after the period where people were either drinking or they were sober and according to the authors the people who were more shy had much higher levels of anxiety the following
day than people who weren't shy and they also found a correlation between having bad anxiety and the chances of having an alcohol use disorder or using alcohol to kind of numb some of those feelings of social anxiety when you're going into a situation so the interactions that alcohol has with our brain isn't
just important for anxiety and feeling nervous the next day but it might also have a link with problematic drinking if you are someone who's anxious normally and one theory as to why shy people might be more at risk of anxiety and even sometimes alcohol problems is the possibility of that seesaw effect
on GABA levels and it being more pronounced in them so your baseline GABA levels when you're an anxious person might be lower to start with and it could also be a psychological effect people who are more highly anxious are more prone to rumination going over thoughts about the night before so that's
another potential mechanism also if your levels of those important hormones glutamate and noradrenaline are pretty high or low to start with the compensation that your brain has to make the days after drinking is going to be more pronounced and we know that as noradrenaline and glutamate levels are restored
anxiety and stress comes with it so if you're someone who's shy and you had lower levels of that to begin with or higher levels in some sense in some cases it kind of swings back around and can really knock you on your butt so the study also does have a lot of heart you know wider implications after all
I think a lot of us as drinkers or if you do drink at some point or another do lean on alcohol to kind of make us more easy going make friends easier and as a social lubricant to some degree in a lot of social settings but if you're someone who is repeatedly using alcohol for those reasons and drinking
to excess it might be because there is kind of an imbalance in your brain or you are experiencing more anxiety around social interactions in general so your brain is compensating and you're experiencing worse hangovers more anxiety the next day this type of anxiety it might not happen every time you
drink and although I have kind of said that people who are naturally shy or less socially kind of interested might experiencing anxiety more it isn't just confined to that group of people of course there are external and extraneous things and context in our lives that we need to think of and consider
when we're thinking about this reaction to alcohol if you're going through a difficult time in your life yes it might be a reaction to lean on alcohol as a crutch because it is a socially acceptable drug because it does make you feel better and if you're feeling anxious and stressed in the short term
you're going to feel amazing but if you have all those things if you've got something really stressed we're going on you'll probably be responding differently to alcohol than if you know you just come back from holiday or you're feeling really great or you're feeling really confident somebody who isn't
experiencing any issues with mood might also notice anxiety but it's probably going to be more physiologically based and more to do with what happened the night before rather than some kind of imbalance which is causing stress for no reason there's also the case of certain medications so if you're already
taking anxiety levels which are acting upon noradrenaline and serotonin and glutamate and your GABA receptors or even anti -inflammatory medications like ibuprofen i know before i went out people always like don't take any pen at all aspirin or anything like that because it will have an effect with alcohol
these will interact and your medications may be less effective which is why you might feel more anxious restless or agitated if you're taking a medication for anxiety people who've made that medication they're considering you being completely sober of course they've done studies to see the interactions
between that medication and alcohol but they're just trying to make it so that you can function on the daily when you're not drinking so excessive binge drinking is something that needs to be taken into account if you are choosing to take medications for an anxiety disorder or any other thing that you
might already have going on and some medications also carry a risk of other side effects like memory impairment which is another big reason why the next day you might be feeling a little bit of regret if you can't really figure out what actually happened and then of course there's the more serious things
like organ damage and ulcers especially if you're taking kidney or liver medication as well so if you do feel anxious the morning after it's important to recognize and understand why that might be the case before you kind of panic you need to be really kind to yourself um you should go for a walk breathe really
deeply talk to a friend whose judgment you can trust if you're nervous about something you've done the night before if that's why you're experiencing anxiety i love doing this with my friends having a bit of a debrief and it's probably the fact that there really isn't anything to worry about but we
also know that sometimes when we do drink too much you can become a bit disinhibited and our behavior might be we might do things that we otherwise wouldn't have wouldn't do and that's where and understanding the mind -body connection really is quite important if you're experiencing a lot of psychological
symptoms associated with a big night of drinking feeling physically well it won't completely resolve anxiety but it can make you better equipped to tackle some of those racing thoughts and those worries and those regrets and those feelings the first one is to rehydrate to drink our body is very finely
tuned and requires um a lot of upkeep and will tell you when things are not right one of those big things that you know i think we think about but not that often is levels of water in the body that that's really important for getting alcohol out of your bloodstream for detoxing your body but also um
diluting the impacts of alcohol um in the blood that will and the impact that will have on your brain so drinking a lot of water the day after it's we swear by it drinking a lot of water the night before it's going to make you feel better um i also have some friends who swear by exercising the next
day don't get it never been a fan like pretty much bottom of the list things that i want to do but kind of sweating it out and releasing some of that anxiety through exercise and through a healthy outlet is really amazing um of course you can always sleep it off wait until it's all passed that's a good
idea but you know if you've got a day if you've been drinking on a sunday you've got things to do the next day um sometimes it's not possible to stay in bed so um another solution that i sometimes do is just meditate deep slow breathing can help relax some of those physiological symptoms which will also connect
with your brain and relieve some of that anxiety as well um and meditation is so easy to do if you're someone who really suffers suffers from a heightened nervous system and heightened levels of arousal and rumination the next day you can do it on your bed you can do it lying down you can do it on the train um
but it really does help to just kind of close your eyes and focus on your thoughts how you feel physically and emotionally and don't try and judge those thoughts or unpack them simply just notice them as they come up into your awareness and move along there's so many good apps for this so so many do
a google the dare app amazing any meditation podcast on spotify excellent anything to help relieve the stress in your brain in a healthy way sometimes we might notice that having more alcohol if you're having a bit of a bender might make you feel good on the moment but often in the long run it's really
not going to make you feel that great because as we've talked about this whole phenomenon of feeling anxious the day after drinking or after binge drinking is because of the neurotransmitters in your brain being at an imbalance because your body has undergone physical stress much like an illness and it's
trying to do its job and make you feel better so it's not worried about whether you're going to like your brain that you can't control your conscious experience cannot control what your brain is doing you know beyond your control so if you're like oh you know it'd be really great if we just released
glutamate at a slower level so i don't feel anxious or if we you know just held off on getting my noradrenaline levels back to their normal level for a few days because i got a big work conference or something like that like your body doesn't care it just wants you to be back at that equilibrium as
fast as possible so it's about counteracting that impact and taking care of yourself in other ways by eating a good meal rehydrating exercising sweating it out or even meditating to kind release some of that tension um like i said if you're someone who has experience with anxiety i definitely do at the moment
you know after drinking i'm always like oh my god i just feel so terrible i need to talk to my friends about it have i done something silly often i have it it's just because there is a nervous arousal in my body that's telling me to look out for things that could be a threat um and i'd say just take
it easy on yourself maybe um try and stop after the third drink like i said um two to three drinks is that sweet spot but i also understand there's a lot of other things that come into our alcohol intake that isn't just um self -control you know there's peer pressure people buy you drinks sometimes you're
not noticing what you're drinking sometimes you feel like um you need to keep up with others or sometimes you just want to have a really good night you want to really let loose um but being aware of what that does to your psychological well -being and your psychological state in the long term and the morning
after is really really important well thank you so much for listening into this episode um like i said there are so many interactions between alcohol and psychology and our 20s i could talk about it for ages um so if you're interested in hearing some more episodes on the role of alcohol in this important
decade in our lives and how that impacts with our mental well -being reach out on instagram tell me what you want to hear i think peer pressure around drinking is another thing i really want to talk about um and also binge drinking uh alcohol as kind of a as an addictive substance is something that i
think i could tackle a little bit later on but it's just so important to be aware of if you choose to drink like i'm sure a lot of us do i definitely do um but knowing that even though it's a socially acceptable drug it does still impact us as i'm sure we've all figured out by now uh is really really
crucial so i hope that you have enjoyed this episode as always if you feel cool to do so if you learned something today if you think someone else might benefit from this episode or another one of the ones that i've made please leave us a review on either spotify or apple podcasts um chuck us a follow
on instagram it really helps the podcast to grow and it just makes me feel amazing lessens my anxiety when i see that people are enjoying this content and the work i put into it so thank you for those who have already done so i really appreciate it um and yes thank you so much for tuning in i will be
back next week with another episode i think we're gonna have a guest on so things to look forward to and have a lovely week this year i've been really rethinking my relationship with alcohol and so i decided to commit to dry january to really kick start 2025 and just test myself heineken 00 is the perfect
companion for dry january because you feel like you're still participating when you're out for dinner with friends out for drinks whilst you're still meeting your lifestyle goals i'm a big beer fan so i also love the taste of heineken 00 plus being alcohol free you can enjoy whenever refreshment calls
heineken 00 is available at your local heineken retailer or for delivery at heineken .com you must be 21 plus to purchase enjoy heineken responsibly and good luck with dry january do you want to see into the future do you want to understand an invisible force that's shaping your life do you want to experience
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