And as you'll soon learn changes in the neural circuitry that cause people to want to drink even more in order to get just back to baseline or the place that they were in terms of their stress modulation and in terms of their feelings of mood before they ever started drinking in the first place . So again , I don't wanna de demonize alcohol , but I do want to emphasize that there are long term plastic changes , meaning changes in neural circuitry and hormone circuitry that across a period of several months and certainly across a period of years of the sorts of drinking patterns I described which I think for most people are going to sound like pretty typical , right ? I I mean , nothing that I described so far was about drinking a case a night or , or about binging on alcohol in the way that we often hear about it in the news .
I certainly do not want that to be the message . What I'm saying is that if people are ingesting alcohol chronically , even if it's not every night , there are well recognized changes in neural circuits . There are well recognized changes in neurochemistry within the brain .
And as a consequence , they feel more stressed and more anxiety when they aren't drinking . This is a seldom talked about effect of alcohol because so often we hear about the immediate effects of alcohol and we've been talking about some of those effects effects like reducing the amount of stress . I mean , how many times have we heard ?
I I mean , nothing that I described so far was about drinking a case a night or , or about binging on alcohol in the way that we often hear about it in the news . These are pretty common patterns of of alcohol consumption . I mean , all you have to do is board a transatlantic flight or actually go to an airport on a Sunday afternoon in a sunny area of the US and , you know , people are having 3456 beers , et cetera .
So alcohol is kind of a double hit in this sense . It's causing changes in our brain circuitry and neurochemistry that at the time in which we're inebriated are detrimental and it's causing changes in neural circuitry that persist long past the time in which we're experiencing the feeling of being tipsy or drunk . Now again , I don't want to demonize alcohol .
