SOCIETY VS SOBRIETY
How Alcohol Steals Happiness From Tomorrow
It is important to understand how building a tolerance to alcohol reduces your capacity to experience happiness
During my drinking career, I was obsessed with cheap thrills. I turned to cheap dates, alcohol, and drug induced highs to increase my happiness. Little did I know, alcohol had destroyed my ability to feel anything, let alone be happy.
My tolerance for alcohol was sky high. I needed to drink more, to get the same buzz.
Your experiences may be the same.
Over time, your body becomes better at metabolising alcohol. Meaning you’ll have to drink more to get the same buzz. You end up chasing the dragon in an alcohol-driven sense. But you will never reach your desired high, no matter how much you drink.
Which is the reason alcoholics are never truly happy. They only numb themselves to the pain of reality.
Look, no one can deny that alcohol makes you feel good. Well, momentarily. Those feel-good chemicals flow around your body. It is this buzz that addicts crave! It is why everyone drinks, even if we know that alcohol is poison. In other words, getting drunk is the only socially acceptable way of getting high.
You know the saying, what goes up must come down.
When you come down from the buzz, you feel even more unhappy. Alcohol, after all, is a central nervous system depressant and a sedative. The body sees it as a threat and fights back, releasing hormones such as cortisol. A war is raging in your body. Feel-good chemicals fight against stress hormones and stimulants.
Those feel-good chemicals always lose. No matter how much you drink.
You will always come down, which is exactly why you wake up the next day feeling like crap.
You’re tired, irritated and anxious- which is why hangover days are spent in bed, suffering. It is why alcohol makes people feel unmotivated and depressed.
Drinking alcohol is a temporary source of happiness. It is instant gratification for delayed dissatisfaction.
But the thing is, alcohol steals this happiness from purer sources.
The momentary pleasure isn’t worth the hangover, regret, and dissatisfaction that follows.
In the end, finding more sustainable sources of happiness and pleasure will always be better. Activities that aren’t harmful to your body or mind like— sports, reading, hiking, cooking, learning, sleeping, sober sex.
These activities add significant pleasure to your life. Sobriety allows the colour to seep back into your life.
If you carry on drinking, your life will be black and white. Alcohol affects your dopamine receptors, causing you to become numb and depressed.
Alcohol abuse creates a complex imbalance of dopamine in the brain. Dopamine release is triggered when you engage in activities you find pleasurable, such as eating chocolate or playing sports, and it teaches your brain what actions to repeat, and eventually, to crave. Alcohol use overloads the brain with dopamine, while also reducing the brain’s dopamine receptors in the process.
The major problem with dopamine receptor down regulation isn’t isolated to the pleasures of drinking alcohol. It applies to all pleasures in life.
Meaning you’re going to have a harder time finding pleasure in anything else. You won’t be able to experience joy in the same way. Alcohol will have stolen your capacity for pleasure. You will no longer enjoy having a good meal, a delightful conversation, making love to your partner, or being out in nature with your children.
Sports, conversations with friends, sex, and good food bring joy; they will flood your brain with dopamine. But with down-regulated dopamine receptors, they feel less pleasurable than they did before you ruined your receptors. This is exactly why drunken life feels so dull.
Everything I experienced was in black and white. Alcohol had removed the colour and joy from me. I was stumbling through my life, a drunken, numb, shell of a human. Ordinary pleasures were boring. It trapped me in a horrible anhedonic state.
“Anhedonia is the inability to feel pleasure. It’s a common symptom of depression as well as other mental health disorders. Most people understand what pleasure feels like. They expect certain things in life to make them happy.”
Drinking, therefore, gives you a sense of pleasure in a dark, numb world. A temporary cure to a terrible burden.
A terrible cycle to exist in.
You should, however, know it is possible to reverse the damage. Time heals everything, even the brain. You will feel pleasure in the simpler joys in life.
Quitting is the best option. Yet drinking in moderation can also help replenish and restore your receptors. The colour of life has returned. It sounds cheesy. But I now genuinely appreciate the small things. I no longer need a drink to feel happy.
My quality of life has improved more than I ever imagined possible. Talking to my mum, going for a walk, cooking, and reading. I now love reading books. Those small pleasures add up to a fulfilling life.
I’m happy I became sober. I’m delighted that I reclaimed my happiness.
If you’re feeling numb to life and feel like alcohol is stealing your happiness, I urge you to stop and at least take a break.
Happiness is waiting for you if you stop allowing alcohol to steal it.
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