What drinking alcohol does is it helps you relax in social situations, as your mind begins to blend. It makes most humans who can tolerate its taste, and accepts the hangover the next morning, feel pretty good about themselves, become bold, on a Friday night.
That very first sip, once the liquid hits your lips and enters your mouth, that refreshing chug of beer, wine, or whisky can be a relief.
What happens is the drink travels down your throat and into your stomach, eventually hitting your bloodstream, which immediately provides the woozy.
The alcohol makes its way around the entire body, including your brain which jump starts a better mood while tampering with your muscles and motor reflexes.
This process starts within just mere seconds of your first sip, which relaxes you.
The amount of alcohol you drink, which is filtered by the liver then enters the bloodstream, usually peaks anywhere from 45 to 90 minutes.
What The Booze Does
Once the alcohol is introduced to your body, it thinks it’s being poisoned by a foreign substance, which it is.
It doesn’t want to store it, so what it attempts to do is break it down and flush it out of the body. This is where the liquor meets the liver.
What the liver immediately does is it converts the alcohol into a number of different chemicals, so your body can absorb it better to get rid of it.
To do this, the liver uses an enzyme known as alcohol dehydrogenase, to convert the alcohol into what’s pretty much a toxic substance, acetaldehyde.
Most are familiar with the end result of this substance, as many know it as the dreaded hangover.
Sure I’ll Have Another
What acetaldehyde doesn’t make you feel is drunk, but instead works on dissolving the alcohol from your system.
The acetaldehyde is then further broken down into acetic acid, which is the common ingredient found in vinegar.
Beyond this, the process is to remove the alcohol from your system. It’s ultimately broken down into carbon dioxide, fatty acids, and water, all substances which the body is familiar with.
However, if you drink more alcohol than what your liver is able to process, the end result is the goal of getting drunk.
What happens is your blood-alcohol level begins to elevate, the level which determines the “drink-drive” limits.
Lets Get Drunker
On average, it takes a medium sized person approximately one hour to clear out between 15mg to 18mg of alcohol, per every 100ml of blood.
So what this means is for a legal limit of say .088.
• An average sized male would reach that limit by drinking 4 glasses of wine or around a pint of beer per hour, or
• 2 glasses of wine or half a pint of beer per hour for women
Bubbling To Your Head
How fast you drink, how empty your stomach is, and how you’re feeling alters the effects of what alcohol does to your body and brain.
If you ate a large meal before going out for drinks, doing so will slow down the effects of the alcohol.
The reason being, the food in your stomach absorbs the alcohol, resulting in less liquor being released into the bloodstream.
What the bubbly such as champagne or beer does is they’ll make you feel the effects of the alcohol quicker.
What the carbonated bubbles will do, is increase the pressure in your stomach, which forces the alcohol into the bloodstream faster.
Difficulty Holding Your Liquor
Another factor which can affect how alcohol is absorbed depends on your gender, based on the size of your body.
Women tend to get drunk quicker, because men generally has more muscle mass and tissue than women, who has more fat. What muscle contains is more water than fat.
The alcohol as a result gets diluted by the water and then thins out, while with fat, it’ll just bypass it and enter directly into the bloodstream.
Women also carry less of the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase, which is an agent which breaks down alcohol. Once combined with lower body weight, results in getting drunk quicker.
Age Can Tolerate Alcohol Better
Older individuals can process liquor much more efficiently. It’s suspected that the reason why, is because they’ve been exposed to alcohol more often.
Older people also have more of the alcohol killing enzymes built up, which is able to break down the liquor in the liver faster.
This is why those who drink more often has an increased tolerance to alcohol, not appear as drunk, since the liver is ready to cope with it a lot better.
If you’re experiencing high levels of stress, it also contributes to how quicker you will get drunk.
When stressed out, there’s an influx of different hormones which are activated in the body, especially cortisol, which forces the alcohol to metabolize much quicker.
Don’t Drink And Drive
It’s well known that drinking and driving doesn’t mix, it’s just asinine. What the alcohol does, is it directly affects the brain’s neurotransmitters.
These are the chemicals in the brain, which are responsible to out carry messages to all the different areas of the body, telling them what to do or how to react.
What alcohol does is it distorts these neurotransmitters, making them go haywire with increased liquor, which causes distress and confusion.
The one key neurotransmitter that’s responsible for this is Gamma-Aminobutryric Acid, or gaba. What gaba does is it slows down the natural bodily responses.
Once you drink and then go over a certain limit, what you’re doing is increasing the amount of gaba production.
What that does is slows down your brain cells, impairing your decision making, logic, and motor skills.