What Are the Risks of Stressful Drinking in Women?
According to a recent study, stress alone can lead women to drink excessively.
Men under the same stress only drank excessively once they had already begun drinking.
Despite the fact that men misuse alcohol at higher rates than women, women are catching up. Additionally, women are more likely than men to experience issues with alcohol.
In a mock bar, participants drank alcohol while going through both stressful and non-stressful settings. Stress made women drink more than they meant, but not men, which shows the value of researching variations in alcohol use.
Stress may be a big part of life. In daily life, events might bring on various emotions, including sadness, rage, fear, anxiety, and excitement. Many people use alcohol as a coping mechanism when they are in difficult situations. The issue with that is that alcohol itself can stress the physiological balance of the body.
Alcohol has been shown to have negative psychological and physical impacts on the body, and it may even amplify the consequences of stress.
In the short term, drinking alcohol could seem to help, but if stressful situations persist over time, frequent drinking can cause physical and psychological issues as well as raise the chance of developing alcohol use disorders.
According to physiology, stress is anything that makes it difficult for the body to behave normally. The body can become stressed by illness, injury, or exposure to extremely hot or cold conditions. Psychological stress can result from activity as well as from grieving, melancholy.
To maintain a physiological equilibrium, or “homeostasis,” the human body has evolved a sophisticated and prolonged process of responding to damaging or dangerous events brought on by stress.
The neurological and endocrine systems of the body deploy a number of physiological and behavioural changes in response to stress, or even perceived stress, in order to preserve homeostasis and cope with stress.
Four major categories have been established by researchers as stress causes:
General Life Stressors
Major life changes like moving, beginning a new career, getting married or divorced are a few instances of common life pressures. Stress can also be greatly exacerbated by illness, a death in the family, troubles at home or at work, and other factors.
Catastrophic Events
According to studies, the intake of alcohol rises within a year of a significant natural or man-made disaster.
Childhood Stress
Childhood abuse or neglect, whether it be emotional, or physical, can have long-lasting repercussions and contribute significantly to all adult psychopathology.
Ethnic Minority Stress
Minority-related stress can range from mild to severe, and it can be emotional or physical. Stressors can include, for instance, getting passed over for a promotion at work or being the victim of a violent hate crime.
Coping
The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis is a complex system that regulates the amounts of hormone messengers throughout the body. When the body is under stress, it swiftly pushes its regular metabolic processes into high gear.
The body’s fight-or-flight response is triggered by the HPA axis system, which targets particular organs to get the body ready to either resist the stressor or run away from it.
The hormone cortisol is crucial in the body’s reaction to stress because it increases energy by raising glucose levels and increases food supply by accelerating the metabolism of fat and protein.
A healthy body’s reaction to stress involves a brief increase in cortisol levels, which are then quickly reduced after the threat or stress has passed.
Being resilient is being able to handle stress. Resilient people can adjust to the psychological and physical elements that have a role in the body’s stress reaction.
According to research, those with a cheerful outlook, adequate coping mechanisms, and problem-solving abilities typically manage stress well.
The following individuals are at risk for developing alcohol use disorders because they have poor stress management skills:
- Those having a history of alcoholism in their families
- Children whose pregnant mother drank alcohol
- individuals who experienced abuse or neglect as children
- People with additional mental illnesses
Even when someone stops drinking, stress might still have an impact. Alcohol withdrawal symptoms have been linked to the stress response system known as the HPA axis.
Many people who have just quit drinking start drinking again to numb the withdrawal symptoms. Therefore, in order to reduce the symptoms of alcohol withdrawal and aid in the prevention of relapse in recovering alcoholics, researchers are working to create drugs that will restore equilibrium to the body’s stress-response system.
In order to help patients, deal with how stress can lead them to drink, healthcare providers should use the study on the connection between stress and alcohol to identify those who are most at risk of relapsing during the first stages of recovery.
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