Why We Can Never Drink Again (Neuroplasticity and Permanent Changes)
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You may be tempted, or have been tempted in the past, to believe that after a certain amount of time you’ll be “cured” and able to moderate your drinking.
Why can’t I moderate my drinking?
Alcohol causes changes in the brain that are permanent, and once you’ve crossed the line and experience a loss of control around your drinking, you can’t regain control. Some people are able to moderate with strict rules, intense focus, and by willpowering their way through cravings but that is just because there is a spectrum of addiction.
Your brain doesn’t go from moderate drinking to addiction right away, it’s a slow progression. People that can force themselves to stop drinking before they are satisfied are still early in the path to addiction. Their brain has likely had some alcohol-induced changes, which is why they experience a lack of control, shame, and not being satisfied with 1 drink, but their brain hasn’t adapted as much as it could yet. Addiction is progressive, and the longer you drink the more able alcohol is to change your brain.
Neuroplasticity and alcohol addiction
Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to adapt to our current circumstances.
When we drink heavily for years we are consistently repeating the same behaviors.
Feel upset, drink.
Tough day at work, drink.
Anxiety or depression, drink.
Celebrating anything, drink.
Our brain adapts to this and starts to link these situations with drinking. Not everyone’s brain is as flexible and adaptive as others, and studies have found that having less plasticity in the prefrontal cortex is associated with using negative coping strategies like emotional eating, binge drinking, and getting in more arguments.
When someone is drinking too much and begins to have negative consequences, their brain is supposed to recognize that and make adjustments. However, when you have less plasticity, your brain isn’t able to adapt and change as well and the new information that’s coming in about the consequences from your drinking doesn’t have as big of an impact as it should.
When we drink repeatedly for years and use alcohol to cope with everything and to enhance every situation, we train our brain to build these pathways. These pathways may become dusty in sobriety, but they never go away and they can easily be reactivated.
Learn more about these pathways in episode 99
Gill discusses neuroplasticity. There’s an invisible line that we all cross, which marks the transition from social drinking into problematic drinking. The time it takes for you to cross the line depends on your genetics, how vulnerable your brain is to alcohol-induced changes, your life circumstances, how young you begin drinking, and more. Alcohol damages and changes our brains when we drink heavily for extended periods of time. Pathways are carved into the brain as we train our brains to rely on alcohol to socialize, relax, feel happy, or deal with hard times. In this episode she explains how alcohol changes the brain, why these changes are permanent, and how this influences relapse. She has some interesting studies to tell you about that looked at animal models of relapse after months of sobriety and how alcohol and other drugs encourage our reward system to have even more plasticity.
What to listen to next:
E46: Neuroplasticity Helps us Recover
E97: Why We Keep Believing it’ll be Different this Time
E62: Dopamine Deep Dive
E91: Do You Want to be Sober or Do You Want to Drink Without the Consequences?
E81: Why We Drink: Social Drinkers vs Problem Drinkers
Sources
Grimm, J., Hope, B., Wise, R. et al. Incubation of cocaine craving after withdrawal. Nature 412, 141–142 (2001)
Charles P. O'Brien (2009) Neuroplasticity in addictive disorders, Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, 11:3, 350-353
Madsen, H. et al. Neuroplasticity in addiction: cellular and transcriptional perspectives. Front. Mol. Neurosci. 2012.
Cite this episode
Tietz, G. Episode 99: Why We Can Never Drink Again (Neuroplasticity and Permanent Changes). Sober Powered. 2022.
