I'm on my second "break" since Coronavirus took us all by storm. I noticed I was drinking more heavily out of boredom during lockdown, and was starting to feel the bad effects on my body: fatigue, racing heart, etc.
I completed sober October without too much distress. The first week was terrible in terms of sleeping, but by the end of the month I was doing great. I decided to just let myself go back to drinking however things happened. For the first month or so I was moderate (less than 10 drinks per week I'd say) but slowly the tolerance rose and by the end of the year I was back to drinking too heavily.
I was planning on Dry January, but couldn't get going, so now I'm on Dry Lent. Five days in it's been much easier than October--no where near the difficulty sleeping, and I've just been reading before bed, which has been really nice.
I'd say the hardest thing about not drinking is that I feel "bored" in the evenings. I'm not a huge tv person. After about an hour I'm done. So I read. It doesn't feel exciting but my body is thanking me for it :)
Annie Grace really hammers into the drinking out of boredom concept.
If you look at the cognitive effects of alcohol, it doesn't relieve boredom in any way, so why do people drink when they are bored and think that it's fun??
Well, that comes down to the mechanism of addiction. The biggest high drinkers get from drinking is actually the endogenous neurological payoff from giving in to a craving, not from the alcohol itself.
If your brain becomes accustom to getting an alcohol hit after work, then it starts releasing dopamine a few hours before the event. Dopamine, contrary to previous understanding, isn't primarily responsible for feeling good, it's primarily responsible for wanting *more* of something.
Eating one chip and wanting more? Dopamine
Doing a great ski run and wanting another right away? Dopamine
Making out with someone and it rapidly escalating to wanting sex? Dopamine
Getting super excited while planning a vacation? Dopamine
Being used to having a drink at 5pm, and 4pm rolls around and has you vividly imagining pouring a glass of your favourite drink? Dopamine
A buildup of dopamine is actually uncomfortable to resist, and giving in to it creates a huge sense of excitement. So that's the thrill of having the evening drink, it's not really the direct effect of the alcohol, which really doesn't actually have many fun effects, it's the surge or dopamine and then the excitement of satisfying that dopamine craving.
If you didn't crave the alcohol in the first place, then drinking it wouldn't alleviate any boredom.
That's what I found with my most recent experiment.
I used to so look forward to my evening wine, and used to always lament that no second drink was ever as good as the first one.
I just didn't realize that the first drink was awesome, but it had nothing to do with the alcohol, it had to do with the internal brain chemistry that was rewarding me for giving in to the craving that the brain had for the alcohol.
The brain gets addicted to the alcohol even though the effects are generally no fun. It's addictive because it's addictive, not because it does anything good.
Our stupid brains have to flood us with our own, natural happy feeling chemicals to fool us into thinking that the booze is fun. It isn't, the brain is just extremely good at doing whatever it takes to get us to consume whatever it's become even mildly addicted to.
I had *zero* fun with my drinking experiment a few weeks ago. No dopamine, no craving to give in to, no fun from drinking. It was tedious and awful. Feeling buzzed without any addiction fueling it is in no way fun. That's why taking naltrexone takes all the fun out of it.
It's the same way I've known a lot of people who tried cocaine and thought "m'eh, that's it?" but cocaine addicts think it's the greatest high on the face of the earth. And the people who absolutely *loved* it the first time they tried it? They're the people who got addicted with their first use, and the ones most likely to develop a problem.
I've had this addictive experience with opiates. I've never found them overly pleasant, but I was once on oxy long enough to become dependent and by the end, I really looked forward to my dose. The same drug that made me feel woozy and kind of awful on day 1, felt dreamy and wonderful on day 10. How? Same drug...
It turns out *being* addicted creates the sense of enjoyment, not the primary action of the drug itself.
I had the exact same experience with sugar last year.
I haven't eaten much sugar for nearly a decade. I don't digest it well and didn't enjoy it much. I never craved it.
Then I quit alcohol and started having sugar in the evenings to deal with the cravings. Well, sugar is a very effective dopamine trigger. I got totally hooked, and for most of 2020, my cravings for sugar were far more powerful than my cravings for alcohol had ever been.
This is something I had never enjoyed, never craved, never thought twice about, and suddenly, after a few weeks of nightly consumption, all I could think about in the evenings was eating something sweet. It started tasting AMAZING. Nothing was too sweet, things I would have considered inedibly sweet became exquisite.
Now that I'm off sugar again, these things are gross again. I can objectively say that I find Oreo cookies to be sickly sweet and cannot consider them food. But 6 months ago, they were culinary perfection as far as I was concerned.
So my point is, your brain will manipulate your perception of anything it becomes addicted to in order to convince you that's it's SO AMAZING to consume it, when it's just a trick.
None of these things are objectively all that enjoyable unless your brain gets hooked on them.
So alcohol is boring. It does absolutely NOTHING to alleviate boredom. But your brain wants it, so it's giving you a boost of excitement in exchange for you giving it the poison it's mildly/moderately addicted to.
So consider that the next time alcohol seems like the answer to boredom. Contemplate where the sense of relief from boredom actually comes from, because I guarantee you, it's not from the alcohol itself.
