This article is part of The Belief Bucket series, where we examine ten common beliefs about alcohol.
- Introduction: What is the Belief Bucket?
- Belief #1 – Relaxation (Alcohol helps me relax) ← you’re here
- Belief #2 – Happiness (Alcohol makes me happy)
- Belief #3 – Reward (Alcohol is my reward)
- Belief #4 – The Rosy Effect (Remembering only the good times)
- Belief #5 – Taste (Alcohol tastes amazing)
- Belief #6 – Social Ally (Alcohol helps me socially)
- Belief #7 – Sleep (Alcohol helps me sleep)
- Belief #8 – Moderate Drinking (Our obsession)
- Belief #9 – Boredom (Alcohol solves boredom)
- Belief #10 – The Buzz (Alcohol feels amazing)
A lot of us have spent years saying, “I drink to relax.” And we had what felt like plenty of proof.
The day had been long. We were tense, tired or still thinking about work. After the first drink, something eased.
Our shoulders might have dropped. Our thoughts slowed down. The pressure didn’t feel as sharp.
So we called that relaxation.
But if alcohol really relaxed us, why did so many of us wake up feeling anxious, restless or completely worn out? Why did we need more alcohol than we used to just to reach the same feeling?
The alcohol changed how we felt. That part was real. But did it really relax us?
Why the first drink can feel relaxing
The first drink often came when we were stopping for the day.
We closed the laptop, finished the last job, sat down or walked through the front door. And for the first time in hours, we let ourselves stop.
And we poured a drink at the exact same time. After doing that for long enough, it was easy to believe the drink was the reason we felt better.
Sometimes we started feeling better while we were still pouring it. The alcohol hadn’t had time to do much yet. But we knew the day was over and we could finally sit down.
The thing is, some of that relief may have come from stopping for the day as well.
Relief isn’t the same as relaxation
A drink can bring quick relief. Of course it can.
Alcohol slows things down and dulls what we’re feeling. If our head has been busy all day, that can feel like a break.
We might feel less bothered. That doesn’t mean our body has properly relaxed.
If we had to keep drinking to hold onto the feeling, it probably wasn’t much of a break. And after enough alcohol, it could turn into slurred words, forgotten conversations or more drinks than we planned to have.
We still had to recover afterwards.
The first drink may have been easing withdrawal
For those of us who drank heavily and regularly, there could have been another reason the first drink felt so calming.
As the alcohol wore off, we might have felt edgy, irritable, restless, shaky or just not right. We could have called it work stress or a bad mood without realising alcohol was involved.
The next drink made the withdrawal symptoms ease for a while.
Of course that felt like relief. But drinking had helped create the feeling we were now trying to get rid of.
So the drink felt like the answer, even though it was helping to keep the problem going.
What happens across the whole night
That first bit was only one part of the night.
Maybe we kept drinking because the first change didn’t last. The calm feeling passed and we became foggy. We fell asleep quickly but woke through the night or opened our eyes far too early with our mind already racing.
Alcohol may have helped us feel sleepy, but it could still disrupt our sleep and leave us tired the next day.
We carried that tiredness and tension into another day. By late afternoon, the thought of a drink sounded reasonable again.
That’s part of the homeostasis trap. We drank, our body adjusted, and then it had to adjust again as the alcohol wore off. That could leave us feeling even more restless afterwards.
We had a drink to relax, then spent part of the next day dealing with how it left us feeling.
How did we feel afterwards?
If alcohol really relaxed us, we should have felt better afterwards. Many of us didn’t.
We could read, walk, watch something, listen to music, use breathwork or just sit down for a while. Those things may not change how we feel as quickly as alcohol did. They also don’t leave us waking up having to recover from them.
At first, those things might not feel as immediate as a drink. We’d spent years expecting alcohol to change how we felt almost straight away.
Quick relief wasn’t the whole story.
Alcohol may have taken the edge off for a while. It could also leave us with poor sleep, more tension the next day and the feeling that we needed another drink to relax again.
But when we remember how the evening ended and how we felt the next morning, alcohol wasn’t doing a very good job of relaxing us.
The next article looks at “Alcohol makes me happy”.
— Brent
Next in the series: Belief #2 – Happiness (Alcohol makes me happy) →