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 .
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 .
Part of that effect we think is because of changes in this hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis . 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 , of course , there's going to be differences created by how quickly people are drinking , whether or not they're combining different types of alcohol , uh the types of alcohol , et cetera . But in general , that can predict whether or not you're somebody who has a predisposition for alcoholism or not . One also very interesting finding is that alcohol changes the relationship between what's called the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland and the adrenals .
You don't need to remember the names , but the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis maintains your physiological balance of what you perceive as stressful and what you don't perceive as stressful . People who drink regularly . So this again could be just one or two drinks per night or it could be somebody that drinks just on Fridays or just on Saturdays or maybe just on the weekend , 2 to 4 drinks .
