How Alcohol Actually Increases Stress Levels, Rather Than Relaxing You

00:00:00.000 | [Silence]

00:00:02.520 | When people drink, no matter who you are,

00:00:05.080 | initially there's that shutting down

00:00:06.480 | of those prefrontal cortical circuits.

00:00:08.500 | There's a gradual shutting down of the circuits

00:00:10.280 | that control memory,

00:00:11.540 | but then people divide into these two bins.

00:00:13.940 | And these two bins are the people who,

00:00:16.280 | after more than a couple of drinks, start to feel sedated.

00:00:20.160 | And the people who, after more than a few drinks,

00:00:22.300 | do not start to feel sedated.

00:00:24.600 | Now, of course, there's going to be differences

00:00:27.020 | created by how quickly people are drinking,

00:00:29.340 | whether or not they're combining different types of alcohol,

00:00:32.200 | the types of alcohol, et cetera.

00:00:34.120 | But in general, that can predict whether or not

00:00:36.320 | you're somebody who has a predisposition

00:00:37.680 | for alcoholism or not.

00:00:39.340 | One also very interesting finding

00:00:42.680 | is that alcohol changes the relationship

00:00:45.920 | between what's called the hypothalamus

00:00:48.360 | and the pituitary gland and the adrenals.

00:00:50.980 | Now, the hypothalamus is a small collection of neurons

00:00:53.220 | about the size of a large gumball

00:00:54.800 | that sits above the roof of your mouth.

00:00:56.200 | And it houses neurons that are responsible

00:00:58.020 | for some incredible aspects of our behavior and our mindset.

00:01:02.200 | Things like rage, things like sex drive,

00:01:05.440 | things like temperature regulation,

00:01:07.080 | very primitive functions,

00:01:09.120 | including appetite, thirst, et cetera.

00:01:11.640 | Alcohol, because it can go anywhere in the brain,

00:01:13.920 | remember, it's water and fat soluble,

00:01:16.160 | has effects on the hypothalamus.

00:01:18.360 | The hypothalamus normally provides very specific signals

00:01:22.760 | to what's called the pituitary gland.

00:01:24.240 | This is a little gland that actually sticks out of the brain,

00:01:27.320 | but it receives instructions from the hypothalamus.

00:01:31.220 | And then the pituitary releases hormones

00:01:33.420 | into the bloodstream that go and talk to your adrenals.

00:01:35.840 | Your adrenal glands sit right above your kidneys

00:01:38.700 | in your lower back.

00:01:39.980 | And the adrenals release, as the name suggests,

00:01:42.860 | adrenaline, also called epinephrine,

00:01:44.420 | and also a molecule called cortisol,

00:01:46.820 | which is involved in the kind of longer-term stress response

00:01:49.740 | has some healthy effects too on the immune system.

00:01:51.660 | Okay, so the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis.

00:01:55.580 | I know that's a mouthful.

00:01:56.740 | You don't need to remember the names,

00:01:58.220 | but the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis

00:02:00.660 | maintains your physiological balance

00:02:02.640 | of what you perceive as stressful

00:02:04.240 | and what you don't perceive as stressful.

00:02:06.280 | People who drink regularly.

00:02:09.220 | So this, again, could be just one or two drinks per night,

00:02:11.840 | or it could be somebody that drinks just on Fridays

00:02:14.360 | or just on Saturdays, or maybe just on the weekend,

00:02:16.800 | two to four drinks.

00:02:18.120 | Well, those people experience changes

00:02:19.840 | in their hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis

00:02:23.080 | that result in more cortisol,

00:02:24.980 | more of this so-called stress hormone being released

00:02:28.400 | at baseline when they are not drinking.

00:02:30.720 | This is really important.

00:02:31.960 | People who drink a bit, and when I say a bit,

00:02:35.100 | I don't mean one or two sips

00:02:36.320 | or even a glass of wine every once in a while.

00:02:38.800 | I mean, again, people that are maybe having

00:02:41.800 | one drink a night with dinner

00:02:43.640 | and maybe on the weekend, a few more.

00:02:45.880 | Again, I offer a bunch of different patterns

00:02:47.480 | to explain how it could also be

00:02:50.200 | two or three drinks on Friday

00:02:51.720 | or six drinks only on Saturday.

00:02:53.840 | Well, all of those groups experience increases

00:02:56.260 | in cortisol release from their adrenal glands

00:03:00.220 | when they are not drinking.

00:03:01.540 | And as a consequence, they feel more stressed

00:03:05.340 | and more anxiety when they aren't drinking.

00:03:08.660 | This is a seldom-talked-about effect of alcohol

00:03:12.180 | because so often we hear

00:03:13.420 | about the immediate effects of alcohol, right?

00:03:15.420 | And we've been talking about some of those effects,

00:03:17.280 | effects like reducing the amount of stress.

00:03:19.520 | I mean, how many times have we heard somebody say,

00:03:21.740 | "Oh, I need a drink," and then they have a drink,

00:03:23.500 | and they're like, "Calm down."

00:03:24.700 | Now they can shake off the thoughts about the day's work.

00:03:27.740 | They can start to think about things

00:03:29.120 | in a maybe more grounded or rational way,

00:03:31.360 | or at least they believe that,

00:03:32.500 | or they can somehow just relax themselves.

00:03:35.360 | Well, while that very well may be true,

00:03:38.120 | that it can relax them,

00:03:39.380 | when they are not drinking,

00:03:41.380 | that level of cortisol that's released at baseline

00:03:44.060 | has increased substantially.

00:03:46.280 | Again, this relates to a defined neural circuit

00:03:49.700 | between brain and body,

00:03:50.780 | and it has to do with the ratio of cortisol

00:03:53.320 | to some of the other hormones

00:03:54.980 | involved in the stress response.

00:03:57.100 | We'll provide a reference to the study

00:03:58.660 | that describes how all of this works

00:04:00.300 | for those of you that really want to delve into it.

00:04:02.300 | But let's go back to this issue

00:04:04.580 | of those who are prone to alcoholism

00:04:06.600 | versus those who are not.

00:04:08.100 | Remember, there are people who have genetic variants,

00:04:11.940 | meaning genes that they inherited from their parents,

00:04:14.860 | that make it more likely that they will become alcoholics.

00:04:17.980 | But there are also people who drink often,

00:04:21.140 | who start to experience this increase in alertness

00:04:24.000 | the longer they drink across the night.

00:04:26.820 | Part of that effect, we think,

00:04:28.980 | is because of changes

00:04:30.300 | in this hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis.

00:04:33.040 | So alcohol is kind of a double hit in this sense.

00:04:36.520 | It's causing changes in our brain circuitry

00:04:38.400 | and neurochemistry that,

00:04:40.520 | at the time in which we're inebriated, are detrimental,

00:04:44.040 | and it's causing changes in neural circuitry

00:04:46.220 | that persist long past the time

00:04:48.000 | in which we're experiencing the feeling

00:04:49.760 | of being tipsy or drunk.

00:04:51.820 | Now, again, I don't want to demonize alcohol.

00:04:54.100 | I'm not saying, oh, you know,

00:04:55.200 | if you have a glass of wine now and again,

00:04:56.760 | or you drink a beer now and again,

00:04:57.960 | or even have, you know, a mixed drink now and again,

00:05:02.400 | or a shot, that that's necessarily terrible for you.

00:05:05.000 | I certainly do not want that to be the message.

00:05:07.720 | What I'm saying is that

00:05:10.220 | if people are ingesting alcohol chronically,

00:05:12.420 | even if it's not every night,

00:05:14.240 | there are well-recognized changes in neural circuits.

00:05:19.180 | There are well-recognized changes

00:05:20.900 | in neurochemistry within the brain,

00:05:23.020 | and there are well-recognized changes

00:05:25.240 | in the brain-to-body stress system

00:05:28.680 | that generally point in three directions.

00:05:32.200 | Increased stress when people are not drinking,

00:05:35.340 | diminished mood and feelings of well-being

00:05:39.340 | when people are not drinking,

00:05:41.380 | and, as you'll soon learn,

00:05:44.380 | changes in the neural circuitry

00:05:46.540 | that cause people to want to drink even more

00:05:50.200 | in order to get just back to baseline

00:05:52.900 | or the place that they were

00:05:54.340 | in terms of their stress modulation

00:05:56.080 | and in terms of their feelings of mood

00:05:57.320 | before they ever started drinking in the first place.

00:06:00.520 | So again, I don't want to demonize alcohol,

00:06:03.240 | but I do want to emphasize

00:06:04.940 | that there are long-term plastic changes,

00:06:07.380 | meaning changes in neural circuitry and hormone circuitry,

00:06:10.200 | that across a period of several months,

00:06:12.880 | and certainly across a period of years

00:06:14.480 | of the sorts of drinking patterns I described,

00:06:16.600 | which I think, for most people,

00:06:18.280 | are going to sound pretty typical, right?

00:06:20.520 | I mean, nothing that I described so far

00:06:21.920 | was about drinking a case a night

00:06:23.400 | or about binging on alcohol

00:06:25.520 | in the way that we often hear about it in the news.

00:06:27.640 | These are pretty common patterns of alcohol consumption.

00:06:30.760 | I mean, all you have to do is board a transatlantic flight

00:06:33.880 | or actually go to an airport on a Sunday afternoon

00:06:36.280 | in a sunny area of the US,

00:06:37.600 | and people are having three, four, five,

00:06:40.000 | six beers, et cetera.

00:06:41.720 | Again, personal choice is personal choice.

00:06:43.960 | I'm not telling you what to do,

00:06:45.140 | but it's very clear that those sorts of drinking patterns

00:06:47.800 | are changing neural circuitry

00:06:49.280 | and they're changing hormone circuitry.

00:06:51.200 | And I'd love to be able to tell you

00:06:52.200 | that they're changing them for the better,

00:06:53.420 | but they simply are not.

00:06:55.180 | They're actually changing them for the worse.

00:06:56.680 | And worse is defined as making people

00:06:58.120 | less resilient to stress,

00:06:59.480 | higher levels of baseline stress,

00:07:01.280 | and lower mood overall.

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How Alcohol Actually Increases Stress Levels, Rather Than Relaxing You | Dr. Andrew Huberman

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