Alcohol has the ability to bring out a myriad of emotions for people, such as being happy and excited, while others feel anxious or depressed. Depending on the situation, alcohol can either be a stimulant or a depressant.
Scientifically, alcohol is known to be a depressant, but it’s more complex than that. You’ll have to dig deeper to understand what alcohol can really do to you. For example, if you were happy before drinking alcohol, it may enhance your mood and make you more excited when drinking. But if you were in a bad mood, angry, or sad before drinking, your mood might get worse.
Because alcohol is a powerful substance that can manipulate your mood and take it to the extremes, the only way to control your emotions with alcohol intake is by simply not drinking it.
If you’re curious about alcohol, keep reading. In this article, we’ll focus on topics like alcohol being a stimulant or depressant, its short term effects, and how drinking alcohol can affect your brain.
Is alcohol a stimulant or depressant?
One thing you should know about stimulants and depressants is that they both affect your nervous system and brain functions in various and opposite ways.
When you consume stimulants, they instantly excite your nervous system, increasing your blood pressure and heart rate, which ultimately gives you more energy. However, it may affect your behavior and sleeping patterns if you consume high doses, giving you insomnia and making you more jittery and impulsive.
Some examples of stimulants can be as mild as caffeine, and more potent substances would be prescription amphetamines or drugs like cocaine.
Meanwhile, if stimulants excite you and keep your heart rate up, depressants slow down your heart rate and blood pressure, making you feel relaxed or completely sedated. An example of a depressant is Benzodiazepines used to treat insomnia and anxiety, while opiates are more powerful alternatives.
Although some substances can be divided into two categories and either be a stimulant or depressant, some compounds and substances can have both characteristics. Some examples that can have both are nicotine and alcohol, and when consuming these, it’s best not to mix stimulant and depressant drugs since you may experience adverse side effects.
Alcohol is a stimulant
As mentioned earlier, alcohol has both stimulant and depressant effects. Those who consume alcohol experience higher heart rights and lower inhibitions, making them more energetic than normal. However, it’s not that easy to simply define what alcohol can do to your body because certain effects can happen in your system.
Alcohol has a way of giving you a burst of energy in a small amount of time, but when you start to settle in and go for your second drink, or maybe even your third, its depressant characteristics will begin to kick in. This will then make your body slower, you’ll lose energy, and you can quickly knock out and fall asleep anywhere.
- Stimulant effects
When you take the first few sips of alcohol, it will instantly send signals to your brain to release dopamine, making you feel more stimulated and energized. Besides that, the alcohol will increase your heart rate and make you more aggressive towards other individuals.
However, you should know that alcohol’s effects can vary for every individual and can be affected by numerous factors, such as your alcohol tolerance, body composition, sex, weight, and how much alcohol you’ve consumed.
Alcohol is a depressant
If you look at it from a scientific perspective, the compounds in alcohol say that it is, in fact, a depressant. When you drink more alcohol, it will quickly reduce your body’s functions, like slowing your heart rate and losing some motor skills. In some unfortunate cases, it can go as far as making you unconscious or decreasing your ability to breathe.
The instant pep and excitement you feel on your first drink of alcohol will only be short-lived as it won’t take long before alcohol’s depressant effects start to take over. For this reason, driving intoxicated with alcohol is incredibly dangerous because it reduces your ability to react quickly and make sound decisions, ultimately putting your life and those around you at risk.
- Depressant effects
After feeling the first stimulant effects, the depressant effects will begin to slow down your central nervous system and decrease your heart rate, blood pressure, and mental clarity. With high doses of alcohol, people may experience being disoriented or sedate and suppress dopamine production, making them feel sad or depressed.
When you’re experiencing depressant effects, and your blood alcohol concentration reaches 0.2 mg/l or greater, severe depressant effects will occur in your respiratory system, making it too powerful that it could be fatal.
Short-term effects of alcohol
Whether or not you’re abusing alcohol regularly, you can still experience its short-term effects on your mind and body. This is because your liver can metabolize about a serving of alcohol per hour, but again, this will depend on several factors, like your age, weight, liver function, and gender.
Normally, when you consume more than one serving of alcohol per hour, you’ll feel the effects of alcohol much quicker, and you’ll be intoxicated much faster, raising your blood alcohol content with every drink.
Some short-term effects that you may experience are the following:
- Skin flushing
- Poor social judgment
- Passing out
- Vomiting
- Loss of coordination
- Dulled vision
- Mood swings
- Raised blood pressure
- Reduced core body temperature
How alcohol affects the brain
Even if alcohol can enhance your mood and help you socialize at parties, it is still considered a depressant and will still negatively affect your central nervous system.
You’ll know that you’re experiencing depressant symptoms when you have slurred speech and poor coordination, preventing you from walking from one place to another. Although physical and external signs of intoxications are relatively easy to spot, alcohol’s internal effects aren’t as clear.
So how does alcohol affect your brain? Alcohol affects various receptor sites for neurotransmitters or chemical messengers known as glutamate, GABA, and dopamine. With high doses of alcohol, the GABA and glutamate sites result in physiological effects, like slurring of speech and slow movement. On the other hand, dopamine sends happy signals to your brain, which produces gratifying feelings that drive people to drink more alcohol.
How alcohol can impact your mood, behavior, and brain functions will still depend on how much alcohol content is in your system. Again, with a drink or two, you can feel more excited and energetic, but the more you drink, the more you lose control over movement and thinking.
Conclusion
Although drinking alcohol can be a fun experience, it’s always best to drink in moderation and in the right headspace to avoid any of these adverse effects. It could be all fun at first, but too much alcohol can put you in dangerous situations and deteriorate the quality of your life.
Now that you know how alcohol can affect your mood, behavior, and body functions, we hope that we share this information with other people and remind them to drink moderately and responsibly. If you know anyone suffering from alcohol addiction and needs help, don’t be afraid to approach and support them in getting better.
Sources:
https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohol-health/overview-alcohol-consumption/moderate-binge-drinking
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/you-illuminated/201006/your-brain-alcohol
