You may already know about the damage alcohol causes. But in addition to damaging your liver and relationships, alcohol rewires your brain. When your addiction begins, you may feel more numb than usual, but that makes sense because alcohol is a suppressant. However, over time, you notice you can’t process stress, control your emotions, or respond to challenges like you used to.
If you’ve experienced these brain changes, it’s normal to wonder if they will last forever. You may worry that you have done permanent harm.
The good news is that your brain has the capacity to heal. The solution to your healing is sobriety and support. Luckily, alcohol abuse treatment centers are there to help you along the way. Read on to learn why alcohol affects your emotions and how to get your emotions back in check.
Mixed Up Brain Signals
Our brains are incredible. Right now, without even thinking about it, your brain is sending signals to keep your heart beating, eyes open, and lungs breathing. Along with those essential functions, your brain has built-in systems to handle the emotional stress you experience.
Through careful coordination, your brain releases chemicals like dopamine, serotonin, and cortisol to help regulate your mood and keep you steady amid life’s challenges. But alcohol throws off the balance. It leads to excessive production of dopamine and serotonin, which causes anxiety, depression, or stress to drift away momentarily. Your body stops producing as much dopamine, which means that when the alcohol wears off, you feel worse than you did before.
In an effort to chase the euphoric feeling of being drunk, you turn to alcohol as a coping mechanism. Feeling stressed, your brain leads you to drink. Suddenly, the coping mechanisms your brain had installed become obsolete. That’s why everyday stressors start to feel overwhelming, and why irritability and numbness are familiar sensations of those in active addiction.
The Emotional Fallout of Addiction
Paraphrased, emotional resilience is the ability to bounce back from setbacks without crumbling under pressure. It’s what allows you to manage stressful situations, navigate draining conversations and bad days at work, and cope with triggering experiences.
Alcohol steals your emotional resilience. Instead of facing your emotions head-on, you use alcohol to avoid feeling anything. You miss the chance to process your emotions properly. Discomfort is, well, uncomfortable, but experiencing discomfort helps you to grow stronger.
Without that experience, small triggers lead to big reactions. A missed call can spark a full-on panic. An offhand comment gets interpreted like an attack. A lack of your brain’s natural regulation means that your emotions are unpredictable. Because of that, you may start to feel like you’re constantly on edge or seconds away from falling apart.
What Are The Consequences of Poor Emotional Resilience?
As your addiction progresses, your emotional instability grows greater. Here are some side effects you might experience:
- Chronic anxiety. Even when there’s nothing specific to worry about, your nervous system is constantly on edge.
- Depression. Your brain’s wacky production of serotonin can lead to persistent sadness, hopelessness, or fatigue.
- Uncontrollable anger. You may snap quickly or feel rage that seems to come from nowhere.
- No motivation. It might start to feel impossible to get out of bed in the mornings, work, or perform basic tasks because of your brain’s messed-up reward system.
All of these symptoms are your body’s way of telling you that something is wrong. If you’re in this situation, seek help. Talk to a trusted friend or spiritual leader. Look into men’s or women’s substance abuse treatment centers or resources in your community. Why suffer alone when there is help available?
The Good News
As we mentioned before, our brains are amazing, and part of that is being amazingly flexible. Human brains are highly “plastic,” which means they can change or adapt. This means that your brain is not stuck in the alcohol affected state forever.
When you choose sobriety, not only are you recovering, but your brain is too. As you learn new coping strategies, your brain is rewiring altered pathways and chemical receptors. It takes time, so be patient, but take heart in knowing that your old self isn’t lost forever. You can regain emotional control.
What to Expect During Your First Few Weeks of Sobriety
Alcohol causes major imbalance throughout your body, so in the first few weeks of being clean from alcohol, you are going to experience a lot of different emotions and feelings. You might feel raw, moody, exhausted, numb, or depressed.
Navigating those feelings alone can be scary, and you might feel tempted to run back to alcohol. That’s the benefit of starting your sobriety in a treatment center. At a specialized care center, you can receive extra support while your emotional resilience is low. It makes it easier to avoid temptation and strengthen your resolve.
With time, support, and consistent recovery practices like therapy, your resilience will come back. In treatment, too, you get to talk through triggering situations, process past trauma, and prepare yourself for potential stressors. Practices such as these act as a “hard reset” for your emotional resilience.
Slowly but surely, you’ll start to notice subtle improvements. Your mind will be clearer, your mood more stable, and your sleep better. All of those signs mean that your brain and your emotional resolve are healing.
Build Your Emotional Toolbelt
Alcohol treatment sets you up for success inside and outside of treatment. In treatment, staff support means that slip-ups with alcohol are nearly impossible. But outside of treatment, there’s no one standing over your shoulder keeping you in check.
To prepare you for potential triggers, alcohol treatment centers give you an emotional toolbelt to help you learn to live with alcohol in everyday life.
They may offer:
- Therapeutic support: Working with a specialized addiction therapist helps you untangle old thought patterns and establish healthy coping mechanisms.
- Connection: Men’s and women’s support groups remind you that you’re not alone during your trials. Together, you can learn to process difficult emotions and stay accountable.
- Mind-body practices: Activities like deep breathing, stretching, grounding, meditating, or journaling help regulate your nervous system and center you during moments of stress.
Every time you choose to face your stressors head-on, you strengthen your brain’s ability to regulate your emotions.
Get Back Your Emotional Resilience
Getting back your emotional resilience doesn’t mean life gets easier; it means you are better able to handle the trials life throws your way. You learn to be more patient with your thoughts, more compassionate with your mistakes, and more confident in the face of triggers.
Your brain doesn’t have to be scarred by your addiction forever. Choose today to put yourself and your health first by choosing recovery. For more information, look into our alcohol treatment centers in St. George and the greater Salt Lake area and in Boise and Heyburn, Idaho.