How Does a Person Lose Control of Their Drinking
How does a person lose control of their drinking? How much is too much? What can a person do to regain control – or can they? Readers asking these kinds of questions have risen dramatically as drinking and relapse have escalated during the Covid-19 pandemic. But it’s not just readers worried about their own drinking or relapse. These same kinds of questions are being raised by readers experiencing secondhand drinking, defined as the negative impacts of a person’s drinking behaviors on others.
What Happens to Others When a Person Loses Control of Their Drinking
The simple answer. It’s secondhand drinking. As defined above, secondhand drinking refers to the negative impacts of a person’s drinking behaviors on others. Drinking behaviors occur when a person drinks more alcohol (which contains ethyl alcohol chemicals that change how the brain works) than their bodies and brains can process.
Drinking behaviors include:
- Verbally, physically or emotionally abusing someone – often a spouse, girlfriend, boyfriend or child
- Doing poorly at work or school because of the drinking or recovering from the effects of drinking
- Fighting with loved ones about the drinking
- Repeatedly breaking promises to stop or cut down
- Lying, covering up, deflecting, minimizing, blaming others or something else
- Being admitted to the emergency room with a high blood alcohol content (BAC)
- Experiencing blackouts
- Driving while under the influence
- Having unplanned, unwanted or unprotected sex.
Drinking behaviors, in turn, cause negative impacts to those exposed to them. These secondhand drinking-related impacts include:
- Deeply hurt feelings, loosing one’s self-esteem, walking on eggshells
- Having to deal with the fall-out of someone driving while impaired, whether that is death or injury or ticketed DUI, for example
- Recovering from a broken arm after a brutal beating or sexual assault
- Developing depression or anxiety, feelings of hopelessness or helplessness
- Taking medications for stomach ailments or sleep disorders
- Unable to concentrate at work or in school, worried about what happened or will happen
- Losing friends, dreading social events, trying to keep track of a constant stream of white lies and cover-ups
- Changed family dynamics, divorce
- Drinking to relieve the secondhand drinking-related stress
Given no one (certainly not anyone what I’ve met or worked with) wants to cause secondhand drinking-impacts for others, this next section is important to understand for both the drinker and the person experiencing secondhand drinking. The information allows the person drinking too much to identify why that may be happening and learn what they can do to change it. It also helps the person experiencing secondhand drinking identify whether a loved one’s drinking “really is a problem,” and from there takes steps to protect themselves and reclaim their lives.
How Does a Person Lose Control of Their Drinking – 6 Things to Know
1 The Power of the Brain
Just a 3 pound organ – 3 lbs! – our brain controls EVERYTHING we think, feel, say and do. If our brain doesn’t work, our heart can’t pump, our lungs can’t breathe, and our limbs can’t move. If our brain doesn’t work, drinking alcohol or experiencing ongoing stress would have no effect on our thoughts, feelings and behaviors. (If only, right?!)
The electro-chemical signaling process (aka neural circuitry, neural networks) is the process by which brain cells (neurons) “talk” to one another. Drinking more and ongoing stress can interrupt this process and thereby change a person’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
The brain exerts this control through what is called an electro-chemical signaling process, also called neural networks. This process is how brain cells (neurons) “talk” to one another and then to and from other neurons throughout the body via the nervous system. When something changes this process — like ethyl alcohol chemicals in alcoholic beverages or fight-or-flight stress response hormones — those somethings change brain health and function. And when those somethings are ongoing, they actually change brain wiring (the electro-chemical signaling process) and brain mapping. Check out this PDF excerpt from my latest book for more on these concepts.
Thus drinking more to relieve stress can actually remap the brain to “need” to drink more to relieve stress. And that’s the problem.
2 Stress & the Drinking More Connection
Staying at home, maintaining social distancing, only leaving one’s home for fresh air and essentials…. Working at home, children at home 24/7 under their own stress of online schooling and missing their friends…. Lost jobs, lost investment portfolio gains, lost health care…. A steady stream of things to worry about, conflicting news reports of when this is all going to end, and what you should be doing while going through it…. It’s endless, it’s unremitting, and it’s consistently hammering a person’s fight-or-flight stress response.
So where does drinking more come in to play?
It’s not uncommon for a person who drinks to drink more when under ongoing stress like that people are experiencing during this pandemic because the ethyl alcohol chemicals make a person feel good. Here’s how that works.
The ethyl alcohol chemicals in alcoholic beverages work on the chemical portion of brain’s electro-chemical signaling process that govern a person’s pleasure/reward system. This system is designed to give a person a pleasurable feeling as the reward for something they think, feels, say or do. Similarly, stress triggers activate hormonal signaling that activate the fight-or-flight stress response system. This system is designed to cause a cascade of physiological changes to prepare the body to fight or run (flight) when something threatens their sense of safety. Both systems can engage without conscious thought. Bam, they’re off and so are the accompanying thoughts, feelings and behaviors.
And that’s because both systems are located in an area of the brain called the Limbic System. It is this part of the brain that runs the whole show. That’s because the Limbic System’s neural networks control our survival instincts and functions, namely pleasure/reward and fight-or-flight. The brain defaults to whatever wires and maps in this part of the brain.
So, if a person is drinking more to relieve stress, they can train their brain to “want” to drink more when stressed.
3 How Much You/They Typically Drink
Are you aware of the concept of “standard drinks?” A standard drink means the amount and type of alcoholic beverage contains a single drink amount of ethyl alcohol chemicals (alcohol by volume). It is the ethyl alcohol chemicals in alcoholic beverages that change how the brain works, and it is these brain changes that change what a person thinks, feels, says and does.
The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) has a terrific website called “Rethinking Drinking.” To the right is their image of various standard drinks, meaning each “drink” contains the same amount of ethyl alcohol chemicals.
To learn more about standard drinks, click here, and to learn how many standard drinks are in common drink containers, click here, and in common cocktails, click here. You’ll likely be surprised there are more than you’d think.
4 How the Body Processes Alcohol
Alcohol is not processed like other foods and liquids through the digestive system. Instead it passes through the stomach and enters the bloodstream through the walls of the small intestine. Because alcohol dissolves in water, the bloodstream carries it throughout the body, which is 60-70% water, where it is absorbed into body tissue and organs high in water concentration and highly vascularized (meaning lots of blood vessels). One such organ is the brain.
Liver enzymes break down (metabolize) the ethyl alcohol chemicals so they can leave the body and can only metabolize a certain amount of ethyl alcohol per hour. This means alcohol leaves the bloodstream more slowly than it enters. This rate of metabolism explains why a person’s Blood Alcohol Content (BAC) can continue to rise long after that individual has stopped drinking or passed out.
Contrary to popular belief, we cannot rid our bodies of these ethyl alcohol chemicals by peeing, sweating, or vomiting. Similarly, drinking coffee, lots of water, eating a big meal or taking a walk around the block will not get rid of these chemicals. While “waiting their turn” out of the liver, these ethyl alcohol chemicals interrupt the brain’s normal cell-to-cell communication process. These changes, in turn, are what cause a person’s behaviors to change, such as: saying mean, hurtful things, getting into a fist fight, or being loving when drinking and not the next day. The only thing that can sober a person up is TIME.
5 What’s Considered “Normal” or “Low-Risk Drinking”
The NIAAA’s Rethinking Drinking website explains “low-risk” drinking as:
For women: no more than 7 standard drinks in a week AND no more than 3 on any one day
For men: no more than 14 standard drinks in a week AND no more than 4 on any day.
To more accurately determine how much you or the person you’re concerned about drinks, it’s helpful to measure the ounces in their “typical” drink and compare to the “standard drink” measurements in #3 and the “normal” or “low-risk” drinking limits in #5. Problematic drinking patterns are explained next in #6.
6 What It Takes to Change A Drinking Pattern
There is a range of drinking patterns. In other words, it’s not just “normal” or “alcoholic.” It can be binge drinking, heavy drinking, excessive drinking and the drinking pattern we commonly know as alcoholism. This range of drinking patterns are known as alcohol use disorders (AUDs), and within this framework, there are mild, moderate and severe alcohol use disorders.
- Mild AUDs include: occasional binge drinking, which is defined as 4 or more standard drinks during a single occasion for women and 5 or more for men, and occasional heavy drinking, which is defined as consuming 8 or more standard drinks a week for women and 15 or more for men. When you look back at the low-risk drinking limits you see that binge drinking exceeds the daily limit and heavy drinking exceeds the weekly limit.
- Moderate AUDs — what we commonly call alcohol abuse — includes regularly exceeding the daily or weekly limits, that is, regularly binge drinking or heavy drinking, for example. The American Psychological Association (APA) defines Alcohol Abuse as:
a drinking pattern that results in significant and recurrent adverse consequences. Alcohol abusers may fail to fulfill major school, work, or family obligations. They may have drinking-related legal problems, such as repeated arrests for driving while intoxicated. They may have relationship problems related to their drinking.
Of note – a person with moderate AUD can learn to “re-drink” and avoid crossing the line to severe AUD explained next.
- Severe AUDs — what we commonly call alcoholism or alcohol dependence — is a brain disease, also called a brain disorder, and therefore cannot be narrowly explained or defined by a drinking pattern like binge drinking or heavy drinking. The APA explains that…
People with alcoholism — technically known as alcohol dependence — have lost reliable control of their alcohol use. It doesn’t matter what kind of alcohol someone drinks or even how much. Alcohol-dependent people are often unable to stop drinking once they start.
The key risk factors for developing a severe alcohol use disorder (or other drug use disorder, aka addiction) include genetics, early use (drinking before 21), childhood trauma, social environment, and mental illness.
Of note – a person with alcoholism cannot drink any amount. This is because the ethyl alcohol chemicals will kick-start all the brain maps around the risk factors and characteristics of this brain disease. These characteristics include cravings, tolerance, physical dependence and loss of control.
For help and information on how a person loses control of their drinking
…consider the following resources:
National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), Drugs, Brains & Behaviors: The Science of Addiction
World Health Organization, Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT)
My latest book released, 10th Anniversary Edition If You Loved Me, You’d Stop! What you really need to know when your loved one drinks too much. The first half covers alcohol use disorders – what they are, how a person develops them and how they can be changed or treated. The second half is all about helping the family member or friend experiencing secondhand drinking – what that looks like and what they can do to improve their own lives (which often results in their loved one making the decision to address their drinking problem).
And if you have further questions…
feel free to contact me at lisaf@breakingthecycles.com to schedule a phone call. There is no charge.
©2020 Lisa Frederiksen
Lisa Frederiksen
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