Within 5 minutes of consuming alcohol, it has reached your brain and begun impacting your cognitive functions.
The alcohol quickly starts interfering with your brain’s ability to communicate with your body.
Although your first drink of the evening may not obviously affect you, research tests can demonstrate that your reaction time is slowing down, your ability to pay attention is declining, and your judgment and decision-making abilities are becoming more impaired.
After 2 or 3 Drinks
As you continue drinking, higher concentrations of alcohol in your blood will have an increasingly stronger effect on your brain and mind.
With 2 or 3 standard-sized drinks, your blood alcohol content (BAC) will likely be around 0.05. This is generally felt as a mellow, relaxing buzz without significant impairment of function. You may even feel more confident and social.
While a few drinks on a rare, special occasion may not be too dangerous for your health, moderate amounts of alcohol on a regular basis can have a terrible impact on your brain and body.
Many people may believe that alcohol only becomes dangerous when you drink excessively, but recent research has shown that even light amounts of alcohol can substantially impact your health. Contrary to popular belief, there are no “safe” or “healthy” amounts of alcohol.
Even as few as four drinks per week elevate your risk of developing cancer and other chronic illnesses.This risk spikes much higher if your drinking escalates to more than ten drinks per week.
After 4 or 5 Drinks
If you drink 4 or 5 drinks on a single occasion (or even less for some people), your BAC will rise to 0.08 and higher. At this point, you are no longer legally allowed to drive.
Your vision will be blurred or disoriented. Concentrating or remembering things that happened a few minutes ago will be difficult. Your speech will sound slurred, and your conversations will become less coherent. Your coordination will be impaired—you may even lose your balance, stumble, or fall over while walking to the restroom.
If you continue drinking even more beyond this point, you’ll start to experience more serious impairments, such as loss of consciousness or compromised breathing and circulation.
Long-Term Effects of Alcohol
After a single evening of drinking, you’ll probably feel an unpleasant hangover the next day. After 24-48 hours, you will probably recover and return to your normal state without much damage done.
But if you drink regularly (more than four occasions per week, or more than ten standard-sized drinks per week), you are at high risk for developing life-threatening conditions.
You might not feel it right away, but after years of frequently consuming alcohol, its toxic effects will accumulate and erode away at your organs and tissues.
In your brain, researchers have noted significant shrinkage of the hippocampus region (responsible for memory and reasoning) associated with drinking alcohol. Even light or moderate drinkers showed three times the risk of shrinkage than non-drinkers. Heavy consumers had an even greater risk.
This manifests as reduced cognitive abilities and problem-solving skills and earlier development of age-related cognitive decline.
Quitting Allows Your Brain To Heal
Within just a few weeks of abstinence, brain tissue and hippocampal volume begin to increase in size and return to a healthier state. This suggests that the brain atrophy resulting from alcohol consumption may be more than just “brain cells permanently dying,” as formerly believed.
The sooner you reduce your alcohol consumption. The more your health will be able to improve.
