When I’m on a night out, I get to a point when I can’t drink anymore because it’ll make me sick… and then in the morning you can’t even look at drink!
How can people who are considered alcoholics keep drinking constantly and not get that feeling?
In: Biology
I’ll speak to alcoholism from experience, and leave the more scientific explanation to someone more educated in it.
Alcohol, for most people, affects them in the way you describe your experience: drink, get drunk, get sick, abstain. The cycle is broken each experience, and no dependancy is formed.
For those who abuse alcohol for myriad reasons (escapism, depression, pain, etc.) alcohol becomes just as necessary as food, and in serious cases, mostly replaces food. When you wake up in the morning, sure you’re sick, but you’re also ‘hungry’ for booze. Booze erases the sickness that booze created. You start every day *needing* to drink until you get to your base-line inebriation, which alcoholics call ‘functioning’. 6 or 8 drinks doesn’t get you plastered, it gets you started. It gives you the energy and will to go to work, go to school, etc. There are different types of alcoholics. Some don’t drink during the day, but drink every night. Some drink moderately throughout the day and night. And some drink heavily throughout the day and night, including overnight. It becomes like breathing. The longer you don’t have it, the more panicked your body and brain get. You get desperate, angry, delusional. And that’s because you *don’t* have booze. Once you have it, nothing else matters. Your body and brain has it’s medicine. And it’s medicine is also it’s poison. Hence the endless cycle that gets harder and harder to break. Furthermore, alcohol is the *only* substance that creates withdrawals that can kill you. Heroine, cocaine, meth – none of those will kill you if you go cold turkey. Booze withdrawals can literally kill you, and that is how powerful the stuff is.
So (tl:dr) to answer your question: alcoholics drink constantly and *do* get that feeling. But the only cure for that feeling becomes more alcohol. Lather, rinse, repeat.
It’s a form of tolerance like a callus on your foot from walking barefoot all the time.
Your body physically changes from the constant poisonings it is exposed to from the alcohol for people that drink regularly/often.
As it modifies itself to handle the constant poisonings it gets to a point that it needs alcohol to operate.
You wake up in the middle of the night shaking so bad that you have to have a drink to make it to the morning. As you dry out you go through horrible readjustments as the organs readjust to the lack of poison in them.Some have had success stopping by slowly tapering off but for the most part once you are at the level of shakes when not drinking most people just find it easier to just keep feeding the beast.
The liver takes the most of the damage trying to filter the poison out.
Two parts to your answer as there are actually more than one type of alcoholic. There’s functioning alcoholics who do as you noted, get drunk and then go to work the next day as if nothing has happened. This is primarily because they build up a tolerance to alcohol. So they can function during and the day after better than someone their same body mass who drinks the same amount. They get used to a certain level of tired and sickness and just feels like normal to them. They also don’t mix usually so that helps a bit. I think this is a level you reach from many reasons, happens in all levels of society and social circles, but essentially the person thinks it is normal and not damaging at all, and even if they are convinced now otherwise, it’s too late, they’ve become dependent and it’s part of their lives.
Then there’s the blackout drunk alcoholics. They don’t usually function. A bit of the above about building a tolerance, but these people usual have issues that they don’t want to face in their lives and drinking helps them numb the bad feelings. So even though they feel sick the next day, they do it all over again because to them it’s better than facing their reality
By developing a tolerance over time and letting the alcohol addiction build up with it.
A person doesn’t have to drink to the point of throwing up or passing out to be an alcoholic, either. Even just one drink a day is enough to form an addiction.
Same way any addiction works? A reliance on a substance i guess.
I’ve tried 1 cigarette in my life, hated it and so never tried again. But.. it gets its claws into people. Some people are more susceptible to addiction than others.
I would suggest you read the book “Under The Influence” by Milam. He goes into detail about this very issue. Explains it quite well.
I suppose I can’t speak to everyone, but by choosing the right drinks and spreading them out a person can mostly get around that limit. I personally went a whole week drunk my freshman year of college to prove a point. As a sidenote, never do this. Vodka interspersed with my normal daily food and drink – no hangovers and no limit. For an alcoholic I know, he just gets really drunk every other day. Hangover, drunk, repeat.
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