The Irish Cultural Love of Booze
As an Irish person, it is almost a cultural more to consume a lot of alcohol in my country. When young Irish people drink on the weekend, we generally don’t do it with the sole aim of enjoying our drinks. Without wanting to speak for the few who are able to moderate, young Irish people tend to drink booze to get shitfaced. The enjoyment of what we’re drinking is a happy byproduct of that aim. Older people may or may not be just as bad at moderating their alcohol consumption.
Drinking booze heavily isn’t a problem limited to the people of Ireland. But in a country famed for its nightlife and the “craic” we have, it’s fair to say we are perhaps more known for heavy drinking than most other countries. The stereotype of an Irishman is a guy with a funny accent and a pint of Guinness in his hand at all times.
Personally, I’ve teetered on the edge of excess alcohol consumption for much of my 20s. I don’t drink every day but when I imbibe, I indulge heavily. I don’t stop at 2 or 3 beers; it’s more like 6 or 7…go hard or go home and all that jazz. In my early to mid-20s, it was often 9 or 10 drinks.
A big problem of drinking heavily is that drinking in excess leads to really bad hangover anxiety for some people the next day. I’m particularly prone to bouts of “hangxiety” that leave me unproductive and wanting to indulge in escapist behaviors like mindlessly surfing the Internet.
What is Hangxiety and Why Does Alcohol Cause It?
According to an article in The Guardian, hangover anxiety occurs because alcohol messes with the delicate balance of neurotransmitters in the brain. The relaxed feeling when we drink comes from alcohol’s dual impact of increased GABA and decreased glutamine. The more we drink, the more profound the impact on brain chemistry.
Wanting to get us back to homeostasis, the body tries to overcompensate for these altered levels of chemical messengers in the brain. GABA reduces and we get a spike in glutamate. The result is a quite debilitating physical and psychological anxiety that can last an entire day.
Most people, myself included, are fully aware that alcohol is ultimately a poison and isn’t very good for the human body in large amounts. I still continued to indulge throughout my 20s in full knowledge of this fact, and I think part of that was because of a subconscious feeling of invincibility that many twentysomethings feel. We think we can do all sorts of damage to our young bodies and we will withstand it.
There is also the perspective that living is ultimately bad for the human body because we all die regardless of whether a drop of wine ever crosses our lips. This leads to the somewhat hedonistic viewpoint that we might as well enjoy ourselves while we are alive.
Questioning the Value of Drinking Alcohol
It is only when a behavior begins to cause more problems than it’s worth that people start to question it. For much of my 20s, I considered the trade-off of losing an entire day worth it so I could have fun for a few hours the night before. When I truly considered how much of my life I was losing to hangover anxiety, I started to rethink why I drink. Borrowing happiness from the next day is not really a behavior that provides value to my life.
I also had a flash of insight one day while hungover. I told myself I had enjoyed my night out, but then when I tried to think back to the night before and what conversations I had, much of it was either mundane stuff or just a blank space of not being able to remember. The actual fun part was before the drinking when I played pool with a friend.
This is not to say that drinking alcohol is not fun; it most certainly is. It quells my overactive mind, it reduces inhibitions, it makes me feel way more talkative, and I become much more present. Oh, and Guinness tastes great! But if the net effect of those benefits is to make me miss out on 52 days (and the rest) each year, I started to wonder if it was worth it.
Living in congruence with your values is a pillar of building a content or happy life. If you say you value your health and then you go out and get shitfaced once or twice each week, a gap emerges between your values and your behavior that ultimately makes you feel unhappy.
Philosophers on Alcohol
When searching for wisdom and advice on a topic, I often find it is helpful to consider the perspectives and opinions of philosophers, whether past or present. I find philosophical insight useful because, well, philosophers are/were smarter people than me.
The first philosopher that springs to mind is Nietzche, who was very anti-booze. In a famous quote about the complacency and escapism alcohol encourages, Nietzche said,
But this [German] people has deliberately made itself stupid, for nearly a millennium: nowhere have the two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity, been abused more dissolutely.
It’s clear that to Nietzche, alcohol dulls us into a passive state of mind in which we are avoiding confronting life’s struggles. For Nietzche, confronting life’s struggles is the path to pursuing greatness; it’s where great works of art and great ideas come from.
The Roman Stoic Seneca had a different view on alcohol that is more in line with modern government recommendations on alcohol intake.
In his book, On The Shortness of Life, Seneca says, “There is a healthy moderation in wine…occasionally we should even come to the point of intoxication for it does wash away cares. But we must not do this often in case the mind acquires a bad habit.”
So, Seneca’s overall view is that we should have a few drinks now and then to turn off the relentless stream of thoughts and give the mind time to relax. He also thinks getting drunk occasionally isn’t too harmful but that we shouldn’t get drunk often. This is a slightly more relaxed view than most government recommendations on alcohol consumption, which advise moderation and refraining from binge drinking.
Let’s now consider the Buddha’s thoughts on alcohol. Gautama Buddha was a philosopher of the mind so I feel his opinions are worth considering. On his noble Eightfold Path to the cessation of suffering, the Buddha advises not trading in intoxicants in the fifth precept. But this is not an instruction to avoid alcohol.
Actually, different schools of Buddhism interpret this precept in different ways, probably reflecting that similar to the game of Chinese whispers, messages get distorted as they are heard and interpreted by different people with different schools of thought. Theravada, Tibetan, and Mahayana Buddhists all have different ideas on the fifth precept and what it means.
Coming back to the overall idea in Buddhism of The Middle Way, it’s probably fair to say that drinking alcohol to the point of intoxication isn’t advocated, but neither is complete abstention. The entire ethos of The Middle Way is to find that middle ground between the extremes of overindulgence in pleasurable things and completely denying yourself of any pleasure. In other words, everything in moderation.
Scientific Consensus on Booze
In a landmark epidemiological study published in The Lancet in 2018, researchers rather disappointingly found that there is no level of alcohol consumption that improves health.
A 2015 study on mental health and alcohol use in Finland found that frequent binge drinking leads to poor mental health and psychological distress. “Frequent” in this study was defined as binge drinking more regularly than once per month.
So, Should You Go Teetotal?
Ultimately, choosing whether to drink is a personal decision that involves weighing up what alcohol adds to your life versus what it takes away from it. I certainly am not against people having vices in life. Because I find it challenging to moderate my intake, I think my body needs a break so I can properly evaluate what I am missing out on.
I think if there is too much of a difference between the way someone feels while drinking compared to how they feel when sober, this is a warning sign that alcohol is being used as a coping mechanism for conditions that would be better treated with therapy or prescribed medication. And for obvious reasons that should go without saying, alcoholics need to get appropriate help and abstain for life.
I think if you can moderate your intake there is nothing too wrong with a glass of wine with dinner or a pint of beer while watching a football match. Getting tipsy, by which I mean that really enjoyable relaxed and buzzed feeling that happens after 2-4 drinks, is probably fine once in a while too. But drinking to get wasted and doing so every week? Probably not a good idea.
Try a 30 Day No Alcohol Challenge
I would advocate giving up alcohol for a decent stretch of time and carefully noting how your life changes. 30 days should be sufficient. Get a notepad or a journal and at the end of each day, jot down some observations about how your life is different. Ask yourself some of the following questions.
Do you waste less time? Do you become more productive? Do you feel more mental clarity? Does your physical health feel better? Is your social life more varied than just going out for pints? Do you feel more or less anxious?
If nothing much changes, you can always go back to booze. If you find 30 days without alcohol to be an enormously difficult task, that might be indicative of excess consumption.
Either way, as with fire, always remember that alcohol is a good servant but a bad master. Sláinte!