Why Alcohol Automatically Captures and Holds Your Attention (E228)
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If you’ve stopped drinking, have you noticed that when you walk into a room your eyes immediately go to where the alcohol is? Or how you keep track of how quickly everyone is drinking and what drink they’re on without any effort? Or how you never realized how much people in TV shows and movies drink until now? This is because alcohol can capture and hold our attention, leading to increased cravings that make it difficult to not drink. In this episode you’ll learn what’s going on in the brain to get our attention stuck on alcohol, how this makes it more difficult to quit drinking, what factors increase the ability for alcohol to grab and hold our attention, and how we can overcome this to be successful in sobriety.
What to listen to next:
E224: alcohol makes your brain stop working
E211: the anticipation of a drink
E197: making the decision to quit drinking
Resources I offer:
Community & Meetings: Living a Sober Powered Life
Listen here. The episode will automatically load in your preferred podcast listening app.
Cite:
Gillian Tietz. Why Alcohol Automatically Captures and Holds Your Attention (E228). Sober Powered. 2024
Please respect my intellectual property and properly credit me if you share my work.
Sources:
Gaspelin, N., Luck, S. The Role of Inhibition in Avoiding Distraction by Salient Stimuli. Trends Cogn Sci. 2018.
Miller & Fillmore, 2011. Persistence of attentional bias toward alcohol-related stimuli in intoxicated social drinkers. Drug & Alcohol Dependence.
Matt Field, Hannah Powell, Stress increases attentional bias for alcohol cues in social drinkers who drink to cope, Alcohol and Alcoholism, 2007
Field, M., & Quigley, M. (2009). Mild stress increases attentional bias in social drinkers who drink to cope: A replication and extension. Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology
