The Lies We Tell Ourselves About Alcohol With Author William Porter

welcome to the most show the mission of most days is to measurably increase quality of life globally by helping people change their habits this show is devoted to understanding how change happens we talk to authors neuroscientists psychologists Elite performers and leaders to understand human psychology and the habits that transform lives today we're speaking with William Porter author of alcohol explained his book that addresses the common misconceptions we have about alcohol this topic is particularly interesting as alcohol is so highly regarded in our societ and play such a central role in so many of our social situations however many of the assumptions we make about alcohol are simply incorrect we we tell ourselves that it can help with sleep or that it's a good social lubricant or that it's it takes the edge off after a tough day but as William points out these ideas are far from truth he takes a methodical approach to dispelling the myth surrounding alcohol and providing Clarity on what actually transpires in our bodies and Minds when we consume it whether you're reeval valuating or simply curious about your relationship with alcohol today's conversation with William is enlightening with his hyper Ral deconstruction William demystifies what alcohol truly is and isn't so regardless of your drinking habits or if you intend to change them I think this this episode can offer a fresh perspective at most days everything we do prioritizes the health and well-being of our members in order to successfully achieve this we rely on the financial support of members like you a business model dependent on advertising or some other third party that is not our members distorts incentives and creates a conflict of interest between pleasing advertisers and serving members that's why we refrain from calling our me our members users a term commonly used in traditional social networks where advertisers are the actual customers and users are exploited to serve their interests we 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inviting me this topic is one that um I've recently spent um a little bit more time thinking about so I think as some of our listeners will know my my I've spent a lot of time around addiction I went to rehab myself in my early 20s I was for a long time mostly familiar with the inpatient treatment and like the AA version of um basically stopping drinking or moderating drinking mean in that context it's not really moderation and then um I I saw an interview with this comedian Nikki Glazer who mentioned Alan Carr's book on on on quitting drinking which to me is in this category of unwinding the brainwashing we have around alol and it's in a different and much more rational approach than AA is and then I read your book and I really liked it because it feels like a very contemporary version of that um it feels like it's in that spirit and it's it's in that category you should correct us um if you if you feel differently but it's just it's much more contemporary and it's updated and it's got It's got a a a a different flavor to it but in that category I really love the category of wait let's understand what alcohol is and what addiction is and all of the misconceptions we have around it and just understanding those things I think can help us change our relationship with it so excited to dive in maybe before we do that will you give us a little bit um of your background and how you came to be the author I should say of of the of alcohol explained yeah absolutely um yes so so I started drinking and smoking when I was about 14 I think which I think these days probably feels very young but back in the sort of the ' 80s 90s it was fairly standard particularly over here in the UK and I funny you should mention Alan car because I I started smoking at 14 and I came across Alan Carl's book when I was 16 or 17 and I found it really really interesting and exciting because like you said he he brought this entirely new approach to sort of addiction if you like it was very much centered on smoking and nicotine but he just took this really rational approach to it which resonated with me I read his drinking book and and again that all started to really meld with me but I carried I stopped smoking but I carried on drinking and I drank for sort of 25 years I I was always a binge drinker so so the idea to me the idea of having like one or two drinks was just bizarre I couldn't see the point of it I would always go out we would always go out and get as drunk as we possibly could and then I ended up in the military and again there was that very hard drinking culture and I served out in Iraq um and that very much accelerated my drinking and when I left the military and went into sort of more normal employment I still had those drinking habits with me and they were sort of escalating as I was going through life and it it was in my late 30s that things were really starting to become unstuck and my binges were getting more and um longer and longer and I was suffering more and more coming out the other side of them when I say I was binge drinking what what I would do is drink a lot fall asleep wake up in the middle of the night with insomnia which drinkers do um and then I would drink more alcohol to get back to sleep and then I would wake up in the morning and I would drink again so so I would start drinking Thursday Friday drink through Friday Saturday Sunday wake up feeling awful on Monday ringing sick and then of course just carry on drinking again so it was becoming more and more unmanageable and that was if in fact so it was two February 2014 I sort of crawled out of a five or six day binge feeling absolutely Dreadful my wife had left me she'd taken the kids with her hadn't been into the work for the best part of a week I just thought I cannot keep doing this anymore so that was me quitting um and it was about a year after about a year or so maybe a bit less that I wrote alcohol explained um so so just the background to that is having having come across Alan car very early on I kind of taken that mindset and looking to understand the drug in this case alcohol and sort of applied it throughout my drinking years and was that kind of part of your process of stopping drinking like you you dive really deep into wait why am I drinking the way that I am what are all of the different mechanisms that are at work here because you write the book pretty quickly after I I don't know if you would use this term but after Like a Rock Bottom moment you know you've you've lost the family and you're not showing up at work was it was it an important part of your process of changing your relationship with alcohol yeah I think it was so so I I I was never a particularly sociable person um and I found alcohol very important in Social occasions but as my drinking wore on I'd find I was happy just sitting on my own drinking so I would go out have a few drinks with friends and i' just think you know what I just want to go home and sit on my own and drink and and so I spent an awful lot of time sitting on my own drinking and thinking about it thinking why I was doing it and when I woke up in the night and I'd be thinking hang on why am I doing this what what how do I feel now what do the drink make me feel like so so I was kind of analyzing it all the way through when I came to Quick drinking I had a pretty good idea of the mechanics and a lot of the psychology behind what I was doing and why but it was a period after that where I really started to learn a lot more about it um and how it all fitted together so I think yeah writing it was certainly very cathartic for me because that you know you quite often hear people say if you want to know a subject teach it I would say if you want to know a subject teach it or write about it because when you actually sit down to write about it you realize that there's things missing there's certain dots that need joining you have to go back to the drawing board so although I thought at the time I had a fairly good idea of it when I actually came to set it all out in writing it really helped me kind of complete the picture you adhered to the approach that you recommend in the book and what I like about your book and if I'm remembering correctly you know Allan Carr's approach does the same thing at the beginning of the book it's like hey if you're a drinker and you want to stop drinking but you're currently drinking you don't need to stop right now like try not to have too much while you're reading because you're not going to absorb but like no need to stop I think Allan Carr's like very explicit like you won't drink by the end of this book but you're drinking now and I think maybe that's an oversimplification but I think that's for somebody who is curious about changing their approach to something opening it up with like hey you know you don't need to stop immediately you can consume this book and and and and kind of see what happens but you do recommend um if you're going to be drinking and continue drinking do it alone because then you can be more reflective and aware of like what is happening to you as you as you consume the alcohol and as you kind of go through the the cycle of drinking not drinking drinking again yeah absolutely yeah that's quite right I mean I think the reason for saying to people they don't need to stop while they're reading the book is it's very simple it's you know if youve got something to do you prepare and then you do it so for me reading the book is the preparation you do that first and then you worry about the actual stopping afterwards um so so think that's kind of quite useful and also yeah what you've said we have a lot we we we put alcohol on a pedestal and it becomes responsible for the good times the bad add everything but what I think is important a lot of the time when we drink we tend to drink in Pleasant situations anyway so when we start drinking we we're drinking when we're in you know out with friends which is enjoyable anyway and then as our drinking progresses we still tend to a drink in enjoyable situation so we work all day we get home we open the wine we open a beer whatever that tends to be a pleasant situation anyway and it's very easy to just take it of face value that alcohol is wonderful and it makes you feel great but a lot of the time it's because we're doing it in these specific situations and it can be incredibly powerful to just stop for a minute and think hang on what is the great feeling I'm getting from this so Le let's maybe let's jump into I think it's a good segue into the like pleasure and anxiety cycle um which I think is very well laid out in terms of and and I think it it it it it also will transition nicely into the cognitive um cycle and why alcohol is addictive and so I don't think you call it the pleasure anxiety cycle I think that's the way that that I think of it but can you describe that cycle a little bit kind of the reason that we have the drink in the first place and then the corresponding anxiety and then how that kind of Cycles on itself yeah absolutely so so it's very simplest obviously alcohol is a drug um and it's a sedative a depressant um and when I'm using the word depressant I'm using it in its chemical sense as something that decreases or inhibits nerve activity so that's why when you take an alcoholic drink it makes you feel slightly dulled if you're nervous when you have it it can make you feel relaxed it's that sedating effect but of course the human brain creates and excretes a huge AR array of chemicals drugs and hormones that it creates itself these are naturally occurring things you know you and your listeners would have heard of like adrenaline cortisol endorphines dopamine all of this stuff that the brain creates and excretes now there's a lot we humans don't understand about this process but what we do know is the brain works by way of something called homeostasis which is a fancy word for basically just a chemical Balancing Act it's all of these chemicals drugs and hormones all balancing each other out and if they do balance each other out you generally feel like positive and quite resilient not to say you don't have bad days because everyone does and and of course we're all different some people's positive and resilient is going to be slightly less than someone else's but when your brain chemistry is is in Balance it's how you feel at your best now if you introduce alcohol which is a sedative your brain realizes that there's been a disturbance to that balance and it seeks to counter it so it it releases things like adrenaline and cortisol which is a stress hormone what that does it's trying to counter the sedating effects of the alcohol I often think of it as you know the oldfashioned bar weighing scales where you've got a bar and two baskets hanging on it imagine that's your brain chemistry and on the one hand you've got the sedatives that things that make you feel sleepy and relaxed and on the other hand you've got the stimulants the things that make you feel awake and alert imagine it's balancing out now when you take alcohol you dump a load into the sedative basket so the balance gets tipped so your brain counters that by stuffing a load into the stimulant basket but of course the problem then is when the alcohol wears off that feeling of anxiety is left hanging on for a bit so to go back to the basket analogy you know it's balanced you put something in the depressant side your brain puts something in the stimulant side but when the alcohol is released it tips over towards the stimulant side the short explanation is for every for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction so whatever sedating or dulling effect you get from alcohol there's a corresponding feeling of anxiety when it wears off of course the more you drink the more your brain's countering the sedating effects and the worse you feel when you wear off and this is why people wake up often 3:00 or 4 in the morning with their heart beating really fast unable to get back to sleep they might be absolutely exhausted but it's the equivalent of drinking loads of strong coffee they're overstimulated they can't sleep even though they desperately need to because of that chemical imbalance now it's not a pleasant feeling okay that that anxious feeling you know anxiety that's a colloquial term people use for it that anxious feeling you get when you're hung over it's not a pleasant feeling and there's two ways you can get rid of it one is to wait a few days for your brain chemistry to get back to normal but who wants to be miserable and tense for a few days because there's a much quicker way of doing it and that's to take another drink now when you take that other drink it's a wonderful feeling but it's no more than Rel in the anxiety that the previous dose caused when it wore off I sometimes explain it to people imagine you're in a car and your goal is to drive it exactly 30 m an hour okay it's a clear day there's no wind it's sunny you've got a lovely Flat Road no bends and it's just a straight line so you'll just sat there with your foot very specifically depressed on the on the accelerator you don't have to move it at all you're just cruising along quite happily at 30 m hour now if you suddenly go off the concrete road and you're going to to gravel and mud and wet your vehicle's going to slow down so you have to push down much harder on the accelerator to get up to 30 m an hour okay but what if you then go off the mud and grass and gravel and back onto the dry Road your car's going to burst ahead out of all control that's basically what happens when you stop drinking so that's and that also that that's the main pleasure that regular drinkers daily drinkers get from their glass of wine their beer their Spirits whatever it is that wonderful feeling of relaxation they get from that first drink is no more than just relieving the unpleasant feeling that the co previous doses caused it seems so obvious when you explain it but but I don't think that it's obvious it falls under this General category of there are no free lunches I was trying to explain to my my daughter she can get a little bit she's more likely to get a little sad after she like has ice cream or something and I was trying to explain this to her and it reminded me a little bit of alcohol which is hey you're kind of like using up a little a bunch of happy and then there's not that much happy left in the tank and so all you've got left in the tank is some sad and so that's what happens and so we don't want to consume too much sugar sugar is nice but it's not very good for us and it reminded me I mean it's a very you know she's seven so it's very simple but with alcohol it's like you're using up a bunch of your happy and then there's no happy left there's only sad left I mean it's you know in this case it's same principle yeah yeah it's it's a it's a similar principle you know it took me a long time to connect the waking up in the middle of the night it's like oh I pass out and then you wake up in the middle of the night and your heart is racing and you're just jacked and you can't go back to sleep but I like the gas pedal analogy it's like you're in cruise control if you press the brake you know while you're trying to maintain speed then you're going to have to press the accelerator and then what happens is is when the brake pedal's no longer on the Alcohol wear is off well okay then the then there's there's way too much you know gas um uh kind of accelerating you so will you talk about the reason that alcohol is addictive I think you do a really good job of explaining the disconnect between when you drink and the negative consequences that there's a delay there and that that's what and that confuses the subconscious and that's what makes it addictive will you walk us through that yeah yeah so so the subconscious because people talk a lot about the subconscious and they almost use it as a sort of coverall for anything going on in their brain they don't understand when I'm talking about the subconscious I'm talking about it in a very specific a very specific part of our brain and that's something that automates reactions okay so if you feed the same response into your body over and over again it will trigger a reaction to it the easiest way to explain it I think is for people who drive so if you're a driver um and you've been so if so if you're a driver and you're traveling as a passenger in a car and the driver is driving too fast or too close to the vehicle in front you know you can find your right leg keeps tensing they call it air braing obviously there's no logical reason for it because there's no break on the passenger side but it's just that automated reaction through however many hundreds of hours you've been driving your brain your subconscious has just absorbed that if you want to slow a vehicle down you tense your right leg you stra in your right leg so as soon as you perceive that you're going too fast or too close to the vehicle in front your brain is triggering that reaction so the subconscious if you do the same thing over and over again with the same result when your brain thinks it wants that result it will Tri trigger that action now with alcohol as I've covered off already every drink leaves a you know an unpleasant feeling that needs another drink to relieve now over the years your brain will start to link those two things together so that whenever you feel that uptight anxious feeling and it can be caused by lots of things it can be caused by an alcoholic drink wearing off but there's lots and lots of reasons why we humans feel T tense and anxious you know an argument with a partner a bill that you can't pay a bad day at work whatever over the years as you consume alcohol more and more your brain starts to link that that reaction so whenever you feel tense and nervous either because the last drink is wearing off and it's caused by that chemical reaction or because there's stresses and strains of everyday life your brain immediately jumps in and says oh I know how to get rid of that let's have an alcoholic drink that's learned behavior but it becomes very very deeply embedded in us and the problem is your subconscious only works by immediate cause and effect so what your brain is doing it's just think it's just looking at the situation saying okay if feel tent and nervous I have to get rid of that I have an alcoholic drink what it doesn't do is look at the overall picture and think that actually 15 20 minutes after that drink I see this increasing anxiety it stops me sleeping it has all these negative effects your subconscious literally is just immediate cause and effect so this very powerful part of your brain is constantly triggering you to reach for a drink reach for a drink reach for a drink despite the fact that you rationally know all these thousands of reasons why you shouldn't do so yeah so the immediate effect is positive and that's all that matters for that subconscious kind of Hab habitual Loop it says hey yeah when we when we drink this immediately we feel a little bit relaxed there's less anxiety there's maybe a little bit of feeling of euphoria and that's all that it cares about it has no way of taking into consideration The Hangover the anxiety the ruining of career and family or whatever the other consequences might be those are effectively Irrelevant in terms terms of the subconscious perception of alcohol it reminds me of I mean we talk about this in the context of habits almost all bad habits suffer from this they have an immediate reward and long-term consequence that's why it's so much easier to pick up a bad habit than it is a good habit it's just the way that you know that the chemistry of our brains works and then good habits tend to have little to no immediate reward like if you think about the classic apple a day but they've got long-term benefits and that's why um there's such a pain there's a little bit of of cognitive hacking that that needs to happen it's an interesting one because I was thinking of this the other day so so say you have an alcoholic drink you get maybe 15 minutes 10 minutes of the you know the so-call pleasurable effect of it then it Le wears off leaving that feeling of anxiety and that anxiety can hang on for like 24 hours afterwards the other important thing it does is ruin our sleep you're getting a very very short period of inverted commas pleasure followed by hours a day or so feeling well under par whereas if you compare it with something like exercise it's the other way around when you're doing it it may feel unpleasant you have to push yourself but when you're done you feel good it releases endorphins you're fitter and you feel better for hours and hours afterwards so although when you look at it rationally I can either have 15 minutes of pleasure followed by 24 hours of feeling rubbish or I can have 15 minutes of pain followed by 24 hours of feeling great it's no contest but when you when you allow that irrational part of your brain to jump in and make the decision before you know it you're sat there drinking a beer instead of going out for a run yeah it reminds me there's this Seinfeld episode where the main character Jerry for those who don't know it he says something that basically like nighttime Jerry doesn't care about morning Jerry like nighttime Jerry's having a great time and who cares morning Jerry will have to deal with you know we'll have to deal with this it's morning Jerry's problem you know and that's exactly what we're doing when we go out we're like oh yeah that's that's tomorrow Brent will have to worry about this but we're having a good time we're not gonna have to deal with this you yeah yeah and so can you speak to that I mean I think it's a it's a common misconception although I think people are a little bit more educated on this than they were a few years ago but I think people will say you know what just that glass of wine or whatever it helps me sleep can you speak to the misconception of alcohol is sleep aid yeah yeah absolutely so so that there's two parts to that there's there's the part about what alcohol actually does to our sleep so alcohol absolutely demolishes your ability to sleep a lot of people think that sleep is about drop onto the bed fall unconscious for a few hours and you're good to go it's far more complicated than that you have to go through specific sleep cycles in order to feel refreshed and ready to go so there's different sleep cycles so there's something called Deep Sleep where as you'd expect you're very deeply unconscious but there's another sleep cycle called RM sleep which stands for rapid eye movement the reason it's called rapid eye movement is when they monitor people in RM sleep that they eyes flicker um when they've attached sensors to people and monitored them in RM sleep their brain lights up almost as if they're fully awake it's where we dream so it's this odd sleep cycle but it's where we're almost fully awake when we go into it now because alcohol is are sedative it stops you being able to get into that remm sleep because you have to be almost a awake to do it and being sedated stops you from doing it so when you drink alcohol you massively reduce the amount of RM sleep you can get now they've done tests with rats where they've starved them of RM sleep and they've actually been dead within a few weeks um they've done voluntary studies with humans sounds like really good fun you go into a Sleep Center they attach centers to you and you fall asleep and as soon as you go into RM sleep they wake you up so they stop you going into RM sleep and people become very dis disorientated very depressed the mental health suffers massively so there's a lot we don't know about dreaming and and RM sleep but we do know it's absolutely essential for feeling good and waking up feeling rested so when you drink alcohol you massively reduce your body's AB your brain's ability to get into RM sleep so although alcohol may knock you out it's not allowing you to sleep properly I don't know if you've read Matt Walker's book why we sleep yes yes when he talks about alcohol and sleep he doesn't even call what we go into after we've been drinking alcohol as sleep he just says alcohol it's it what how do he put um it sedates you out of Consciousness but it doesn't actually put you into anything that we recognize as normal sleep cycles so when you're drinking alcohol you're dropping unconscious but you're not going through anything remotely like a normal sleep cycle which is why the the biggest reported symptom of a hangover is tiredness because you physically cannot sleep properly and unfortunately it's as true for one drink as many so even you know the so-called one glass of wine is good for you it isn't even that massively interrupts your sleep cycle and of course don't forget when you drink alcohol it wears off leaving a corresponding feeling of anxiety so if you're having a couple of glasses of wine it wears off after about 5 hours and it as I say it's the equivalent of drinking too much coffee you know when you have too much caffeine and you feel really anxious drinking alcohol for sleep I quite often say this to people imagine you need 8 hours sleep you go to bed at 11: and you wake up at 7 okay and that's you at your very best drinking alcohol is like setting an alarm for 300 or 4 in the morning waking up and drinking a couple of massive drugs jugs of strong black coffee and just lying there twitching and unable to sleep for the rest of the night that's what you're doing when you drink alcohol but the problem is and now I'll talk about the second part of it so where for example I don't drink alcohol so when I get get towards bedtime my brain naturally starts to close things down I feel sleepy and eventually drift into a hopefully restorative sleep and that's why we're told so much about good sleep hygiene it's just you know like don't have white light dim the lights read a book you know whatever it is it's just sending that message to your brain that it's bedtime soon so start closing things down the problem is when you drink alcohol in the evening which is a sedative your brain stops going through that process so your brain doesn't bother shutting things down because it knows there's a nightly dose of this very powerful sedative coming in that closes your brain down for it so that's what people find if they're drinking regularly and you're often told well you should have a night off drinking like once or twice a week so they cut out the alcohol they don't drink one evening they find it incredibly difficult to sleep and that's why it's because their brain isn't used to going through this shutting down process it's just relying on the alcohol if they actually stopped drinking for a few nights their brain would pick up the slack again and go back through that process but but the problem is their perception is I cannot sleep unless I have alcohol because they drink regularly and they can they can fall asleep certainly but as soon as they have a night off they find it incredibly difficult to sleep and again it's the same Dynamic alcohol isn't actually giving them anything it's taking away their ability to do something in this case fall asleep naturally and then restoring it only if they have alcohol so between these two things it creates this this really unpleasant thing because people are convinced that alcohol helps them sleep but it's actually doing the exact oppos opposite it's actually destroying their ability to sleep but their test you know they'll say hey I had a I had a night where I didn't drink and I slept worse because the alcohol is actually making it maybe a little bit easier to fall asleep it's destroying the night of sleep even though the like lay on the pillow and I don't know go unconscious might be slightly more straightforward and then because because their brain is used to that they're like hey I took a night off and I need the alcohol and it's like no you need to take a few nights off for your for your brain to adjust back and and get back to normal where it wasn't removing the the compensation it was like Hey the alcohol is doing the job so we don't need to do it and now you got to get back to normal the other thing I think that's interesting is the cycle that happens the next day and so you know I think this is for me at least I can think about like the Saturday to Sunday Cycle which is like okay a little bit too much to drink on Saturday night and then that follows with poor sleep and then the next day I'm tired and I'm a little anxious and maybe I'm a little Moody and on Sunday nights I don't do this anymore but when I did this like that glass of red wine was really good like I kind of didn't feel normal again until I had that glass of red wine and I think one thing that's counterintuitive that maybe you can speak to in like the okay the impact's the next day and how that can lead back into drinking is while drinking is a sedative and a depressant kind of get your energy back with that glass of red wine the next night after the night of drinking like I just feel a little normal the mood comes back and so there's an energy increase I think that happens with that first glass of wine so can you speak to like the effect of being a little bit tired and and hung over the next day yeah yeah absolutely so so there's there's two parts to this one alcohol is a sedative so if you're feeling tired it will take the edge off it but there's a there's a much more important one here and this is how we act when we're not feeling right okay so we humans and and in fact any animal when we're feeling ill the natural tendency is for our energy to massively reduce okay and and you know that that's just common sense it's just Evolution you know if an animal is ill or injured it needs to hide away and rest to give it its body a chance to get back on top of things whereas if we're feeling well and healthy you know we quite often feel energetic and we want to go and do things now I noticed I don't know if you've got you've got a young daughter haven't you I don't know if she what I find with my sons is they're so so they're slightly older than your daughter they're 10 and 12 but if they're not well they're really sluggish they don't want to do anything so so over here we've got something called CPO it's just paracetamol but in a syrup form so you give them the the paracetamol and they're really tired they're not well then you give them this and they start bouncing off the walls they're running around going absolutely berserk now what's happening there is they're ill so their body is saying to them stop rest don't move making them feel really lethargic but as soon as you give them this mild anesthetic it takes the edge off that and because they then feel better it gives them the burst of energy now what happens when you drink alcohol you're robbing yourself of sleep you're taking a poison and you're interrupting your brain chemistry so the next day you don't feel good so your brain your body is going into that survival mode it's going to that hide away don't do anything rest so that we can recover and get better when you take that alcoholic drink it's anzing the feelings of sickness or headache you've got it's correcting the brain chemistry um it's like I say it's anzing the tiredness and suddenly you feel a whole lot better now with that feeling better comes that burst of energy because like I say when when a human and an animal anything feels well and healthy it's energetic when it feels ill it's lethargic even though it's counterintuitive to think well am I taking a sedative why is it making me energetic it's because it has made you feel ill in the first place so you don't feel right so a lot of people get confused about this because they think that alcohol is actually a stimulant it isn't and it can never be chemically it is a sedative but it can affect us as a stimulant can in that situation yeah so it's exactly the thing that kind of caused the tiredness and the anxiety in the first place the unfortunate nature of this cycle is that's the Cure in some in some cases I mean it's it's the short-term cure it exacerbates the problem switching a little bit maybe if we if we dial back in the cycle to our Saturday night can you speak to to somebody who might say look alcohol is a really good social lubricant for me I really enjoy social situations much more more with alcohol like can you speak to the I think the myth that alcohol is some is some great social lubricant yeah yeah absolutely so um there's a simple fact so so I'm sure you've heard about endorphins it's a chemical that your brain releases that makes you feel really good now we get an endorphine Rush when we do lots of things um I kind of think of it as sort of like a survival of the species sort of thing because we get it when we're doing something either good for us or good for the species so we get an endorphin hit if we have a healthy meal when we're hungry we get an endorphine hit if we have sex we get an endorphine hit if we exercise so it's all of these things we do that we get an endorphine hit one of the interesting things is we get an endorphine hit when we are relaxed and socializing with people which I think is is a very interesting thought to think that humans are actually designed created in such a way or evolved in such a way that we're supposed to communicate with each other we're supposed to share ideas and emotions and all the rest of it but be that as it may if we are relaxed and talking to people socializing we get that endorphine hit we start to feel really good okay but we're all products of society okay and some of us more than others but most people when they go into a social situation will feel slightly nervous to start with because you know you're worried about what you look like you might say something stupid you don't know people what will I talk about you know some people more than others some people are very extroverted and they're straight in there most people to a degree have some kind of social anxiety so you have this Dynamic where you're going into a social situation feeling slightly nervous but if you relax and start to enjoy the conversation you really start to enjoy yourself because you get that endorphine hit okay now what happens when you introduce alcohol you're going into the situation feeling nervous you have an alcoholic drink and it aniz those feelings of anxiety so you start to relax a lot quicker and therefore your brain releases the endorphins quicker but this is one of the very interesting things and it goes back to what I'm talking about earlier when we start drinking it's usually in social situations what we think of this wonderful feeling we get from alcohol isn't an alcohol Buzz at all it's an alcohol plus indorphine Buzz okay it's a very different experience and this is why if people are drinking I encourage them to try drink you know we usually tell don't drink on your own it's not a good sign but actually to sit down with no friends no TV no music no nothing and to drink an alcoholic drink and just feel what it feels like on its own is a very different experience to drinking socializing so what normally happens so to go back to the dynamic of socializing anyway we have the alcoholic drink it makes us relax quicker we get that endorphine rush now in fact it actually takes from your evening because when you're drinking as I've already touched on the Alcohol wears off losing a corresponding feeling of anxiety so when you're out socializing you need to keep drinking to keep that anxious feeling away and as you're doing that you're becoming increasingly numbed and intoxicated so whereas if you go out without drinking might take you a bit longer to get that endorphine buzz but when you get it you enjoy it for the entire evening what you normally find when you're drinking is you get that feel-good feeling to begin with but as you're constantly drinking throughout the evening it starts to numb it and it's a very interesting thing if you go out as a non-drinker and watch people drink it you'll invariably find this Dynamic you'll find that the drink has become very animated and chatty and happy at the start of the evening but as it wears on that mood dips quite rapidly and that's why towards the end of the evening you get the tears sometimes arguments all the rest of it so that's basically what the dynamic is there yeah I think that you you outline it really well where okay you have a couple of drinks and you feel you feel good you're feeling the effects of two drinks and then those start to wear off so you need two more drinks to get back to that like two drink feeling but you're now four drinks intoxicated then those two wear off you need another two okay you're still at that feeling of two drinks but now you're six drinks intoxicated and that really I mean it's said really simply and it really resonates with me and I had an experience just this weekend so I'm in Boulder Colorado and this is probably not International news but we've got this football team here that's a very exciting National like it's this big exciting thing and we were the worst team in the league last year and now we're like one of the best we've got this flashy coach and there was an 8m game that I that we went to and it was a really exciting game and it went until like 1 in the morning and we didn't my wife and I didn't we didn't we didn't drink and we're leaving and people are like it's almost like if you like took a movie and slowed it down like wow can't you believe you know they're like very kind of slowed down and their eyes are all glassy I just had this moment reminded me of your work where I'm like there's no way they're having more fun than we had you know they're just they're dragging and they're like all slowed and so it is interesting to go out for because I don't do it very often like a full night where I'm still out at 1:30 in the morning but I haven't had a single drink and You observe people you know they're not as interesting as they think they are actually they kind of they look foolish at that point um and I was that person many times I don't I don't mean to judge but it's really Stark it was really at the end of that football game I just thought oh that does I'm so glad I'm not in that place right now it's interesting isn't it because they above all the thing that strikes me is they they're not enjoying themselves particularly you know a lot of the time the they're too intoxicated to really know what's going on but the funny thing is their memory of it the next day is the bit they remember is the first bit when they were relaxing and really enjoying it the rest of it is a bit blurry so they kind of assume well I enjoyed the first bit I must have enjoyed the entire night but it's not the case at all and that's why I think it's incredibly powerful if you if you're thinking about not drinking go out and watch drinkers because we have this idea that when you drink you have a really good night all night it it's not the case at all yeah and I really like this hey social situations they produce endorphins so you're kind of mistaking that feeling with the alcohol you're misattributing that feeling to the alcohol and so maybe it helps you get there a little bit more quickly it makes it a little bit easier to transition into this group setting But ultimately it's a numbing agent like if you know if there are feelings of pleasure that are happening in happening in the social situation just by definition you are reducing those feelings of pleasure with alcohol that's just the nature of um of the chemical what do you what do you say to people who say you know what I understand all of that but I just really like the taste of alcohol you know a really good glass of wine with the right meal for me you know it's a culinary experience it's about the taste what's the where where are those people maybe misunderstanding alcohol and the flavor of alcohol so so so alcohol as a chemical is repugnant to human beings and that's not that's not a question of taste that's true for everyone there's no one that can sniff neat alcohol without their eyes watering and without shying away from it if you try and taste neat alcohol it will make you vomit it will wret it's absolutely foul the only way we can take the drug is by diluting it in water and adding an awful lot of refined sugar to it um and that's basically what you end up with wine and beer now going back to a point about the subconscious now nobody when they first drink alcohol likes to taste of it you know if you see youngsters drinking it's foul and I certainly remember the first time I tried beer or wine it's just like oh it's absolutely horrible but you kind of persevere with it it's a very interesting thing and sometimes it's easier to think of with smoking and vaping okay so when you smoke or vape with nicotine in it there's this similar to alcohol obviously the other end of the scale it's a stimulant rather than a sedative so what happens is a lot of people when they first smoke or even Vape they cough okay and that's their body's natural reaction to breathing in a poisonous um gas is to cough it's your body forcibly exhaling what's in the lungs as quickly as possible but what happens immediately after that is quite interesting because some of the nicotine from the smoke will have got into the lungs and it will have hit the bloodstream and the immediate result of that is we feel more alert and awake so again the subconscious does that very narrow perception well what's happened here okay we breathed in some smoke or vape that we thought was poisonous but actually we feel pretty good for it because we now feel quite alert and awake so the next time you go and do it the body won't kick in with the cough mechanism because it starts to perceive the inhaling of smoke as a good thing or the inhaling of Vape is a good thing because it makes you feel immediately better that's what happens with alcohol it's the same with taste we can adapt our taste to different things people often talk about you know an acquired taste all an acquired taste is if you persevere with something long enough and your body gets a perceived benefit from it you will start to get used to and eventually enjoy that taste so again that's a basic survival mechanism there aren't many creatures on the planet whose food supply is safe enough that they might not at some point have to adapt to another food type and that's you know that that's a basic thing we have hunger so the more hungry you get the more desperate you are and eventually you'll eat anything you'll experiment with different things now if you eat something that may taste foul but actually it does have some nutritional value immediately afterwards you'll start to feel slightly better so your brain has this thing where if you consume something and you feel good for it you'll start to change your belie or change your perception of that taste and that's what happens with alcohol you know we've already talked about how it creates that feeling of anxiety you have another one and it relieves that feeling of anxiety so that's how your brain starts to approach you starts think well hang on this glass of wine for example that I thought was foul actually makes me feel a lot better therefore there's nutritional value in it therefore I'll change my perception of it because it's an interesting thing we often say to Children you know your taste buds change over time nobody's taste buds change taste is a chemical reaction between the food and receptors in your tongue nothing changes the only thing that can change is how your brain interprets that it reminds me there was a um I think this is a tweet there's a guy named Orin Hoffman who is an who's a Silicon Valley entrepreneur but tweeted something to to the extent of like wine is the ultimate long con and it really makes me wonder if like the fine wine industry and it's hard to say because I've had these enjoyable tasting dinners and like you know I've got people in my life who I love and respect who really who really love wine but it really makes me wonder like is it all [ __ ] like is it is it it's this story and there's you know so you're telling the story about the one wine and the brand and and the way in which it pairs with the food and then you're drinking the wine and you're getting this immediate this positive benefit from from the wine But ultimately at the end of the day like it's all [ __ ] it's just like somebody mixed that they took some grape juice they fermented it to give you that feeling they you know they made it in such a way that they've masked the taste of the alcohol and not only have they masked it just in terms of like what you're putting in your mouth but they're masking it this elaborate story of where it came from and you know the vines and what the temperature was and how the season was and you know I I wonder if we just wipe all that way and it's like actually it's just it's all total [ __ ] I'm sure you could get a different flavor from different types of amphetamine if you if you wanted to it wouldn't necessarily be something you want to indulge in too often though and then what about this notion that look I um life is hard I've you know something has happened in my life that's really diffic difficult or something happened to me as a child and you know I just I struggle to cope with that like for me alcohol is a good way to just get away from that for a few moments it's really nice I'm going through a hard time and you know for me alcohol is actually helpful for that what what's the response to that what what we need to remember is with alcohol it creates a feeling of followed by a feeling of anxiety okay so if you've got a problem that's this big and you have a drink it goes to this big but when it wears off it's this big okay and for people who are listening I I'm moving my hands here but your problem is a certain size you drink alcohol and it shrinks and then when it wears off it doubles and qu quadruples there's lots and lots of ways you can deal you know whether it's trauma mental health issues there's lots and lots of ways you you know you you can seek therapy you can take medication and I'm talking about you know properly describe medication you can go to CBT there's lots and lots of options alcohol and drugs as options should be right down the bottom of the scale because one there's that Dynamic where although it has the immediate effect of seemingly shrinking the problem it then exacerbates it massively when it wears off and of course the other massive thing we've just talked about is how alcohol impacts sleep and the knock on effect on your mental health for that alone is massive so if you have got something that you are grappling with the absolute worst one of the worst things you can possibly do is is destroy your ability to get natural and restorative sleep you're doing yourself a massive disfavor with it you you may find it's immediately helpful but my very strong advice would be find another way of managing it because as I say Alcohol and Other Drugs should be way down the bottom of the list of options for you they're only going to make it worse and it seems there's probably some delay in the processing of the issue that you know there's some certain amount of sober like acceptance and understanding and you know just kind of like cognitively dealing with whatever the problem is and that that that process is paused when you're using and so you're like delaying the time to kind of getting through the the process processing of the issue but in any case you're never you're not going to find any psychologist or therapist or psychiatrist who's going to say Hey you know for your particular circumstances I think alcohol is going to be pretty helpful for you terms there's there's an interesting Dynamic here where you find people who are going through the grieving process so there there is a very specific and recognized psychological process that you go through with grieving and obviously it's the extent of it is different from Individual to individual but the actual mechanics of it Remains the Same um and it can take longer or less time depending on how the person is affective and all the rest of it but what you find is when they drink alcohol they never go through that process because in preventing themselves being able to sleep which is when your brain assimilates and um absorbs a lot of information and experiences and just through atiz through it you actually stop yourself being able to go through the process so although you know if you lose someone very close to you life is never quite the same without them but you eventually get to a point of acceptance and being able to get on with your life when people drink they never get there it's as raw today as it was four years ago and that is not natural that's not a healthy thing to do at all you're actually elongating the entire thing and stopping yourself being able to get to come to terms with it and what about the opposite end of the Spectrum which is look for me alcohol it's it's a reward that I give myself I work really hard hard you know all week long I'm working I'm with my family I'm with the kids or whatever I'm exercising I'm I'm taking care of myself and Friday night is when I I give myself I allow myself to have that wine and relax and it's really it's really a reward for you know working so hard during the week what's what's the response to that so so I I do a similar thing because I work very hard all week and I've got a young family um and for me a reward should be something enjoyable and pleasant it wouldn't be something that would make me feel slightly sedated and then wearing off leaving a corresponding feeling of anxiety it certainly wouldn't be something that completely demolished my light sleep so no matter how long I was in bed for I'd be tired and lethargic the whole next next day that to me seems a bit ridiculous so it may be something you do but I I would don't see it as a reward I would see that as a punishment and I think that goes back to treating alcohol with a bit more realism rather than putting it on this pedestal that we have if you think that drinking aass one car syen with mixed with a load of refined sugar is a reward then I would say to rethink that for me sitting down at the end of the day relaxing is a reward it's an in incredibly pleasurable thing I open a book I maybe watch some TV play a game or something but taking a chemical that actually makes you feel a lot worse overall just to me is not a reward it goes back to this issue of it feels nice at first I I get it at 5:30 p.m. on Friday halfway through that that first glass um it feels good but the ROI is not positive William your book alcohol explained is excellent we haven't um you know kind of even really scratched the surface of the fullness of the book and so I would encourage um anyone who's interested to pick it up I really enjoyed it um and I'm I'm very deep on this and I loved the book and I think it's also a really helpful approach for the full spectrum of drinkers meaning if you're somebody who feels like I like I you know you know in your core I feel like I need to stop and stop permanently I think there's a really nice place for this book there but also just for reducing some of the brainwashing if you're somebody who just wants to moderate or just wants to be healthier and doesn't feel like it's ruining your life I think having an honest view of what is it what is it not and kind of dispelling some of these misconceptions can be really helpful in just having a much healthier relationship with it because I I don't think that abstinence is for everybody our culture makes it difficult but I think the book is awesome um for people in either camp and so thank you for coming on and thank you for writing the book and oh no thank you for inviting me I've enjoyed it thanks prent the most Day show is recorded in Boulder Colorado produced by Patrick Gino music by Patrick Lee and hosted by Yours Truly Brent Franson founder and CEO of most [Music] [Music] days

Channel: The Most Days Show

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Length: 54min 24sec (3264 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 06 2023