10 Psychological Effects of Alcohol Misuse You Should Be Talking to Your Patients About

The brain plays a critical role in regulating many essential body functions like decision making, behavior, movements, emotions, and sleep patterns. Therefore, it is important for anyone struggling with excessive alcohol use or alcohol use disorder to seek professional alcohol addiction treatment from a mental health professional. This can help to slow or reverse the effects of alcohol on the brain.

What alcohol does to the body?

Alcohol dulls the parts of your brain that control how your body works. This affects your actions and your ability to make decisions and stay in control. Alcohol influences your mood and can also make you feel down or aggressive.

Knowing the signs of an alcohol use disorder may help an individual get the treatment they need and avoid the long-term effects of alcohol use. The study confirmed that drinking alcohol, regardless of how much, led to poorer health. In fact, regularly downing a bottle of wine with dinner or indulging in multiple rounds at happy hour can seriously harm your body—now and later down the road, too. Genetic, psychological, social and environmental factors can impact how drinking alcohol affects your body and behavior.

Does Excessive Drinking Cause Cancer?

During fatty liver disease the cells in the liver become inflamed and damaged. It is a silent illness in that it rarely causes any noticeable symptoms. Alcoholic hepatitis occurs when the damage and inflammation get worse. It can cause noticeable signs, like jaundice, tenderness in the abdomen, fever, nausea, vomiting, fatigue, and weight loss.

The effect of alcohol on the hippocampus causes memory loss, blackouts, and learning deficits. Chronic alcohol consumption can have a permanent effect on memory and may contribute to alcohol-related dementia. Alcohol can have a serious effect on the https://ecosoberhouse.com/ developing brain, from fetal development to the end of adolescence. If a woman consumes alcohol during pregnancy, the child may be born with fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS). In 2015, this was believed to affect between 2 and 7 newborns in every 1,000.

Increased Risk of Gastrointestinal Cancers

Depending on your BAC, you can experience an array of side effects that range from minor complications to more severe ones. For example, lower BAC percentages tend to come with temporary side effects that subside within a few hours. However, as BAC percentages increase, the symptoms become long term effects of alcohol on the body much more serious and can be life-threatening. As the leader in addiction treatment American Addiction Centers specializes in helping people recover from alcohol addiction. People who have an alcohol dependency problem may lose their ability to think clearly and make rational choices.

  • Alcohol abuse increases the risk of alcoholism and other health problems.
  • It is also likely that alcohol abuse triggers or worsens mental illness and that mental illness can lead a person to use alcohol as an unhealthy way to cope.
  • If a person consumes large amounts of alcohol regularly, their tolerance can increase, and the body requires more alcohol to achieve the desired effect.
  • There are many short-term risks of drinking, and these increase with the amount a person drinks at once, and with frequency of drinking.

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