There are many ways that alcohol misuse can affect our health and our social skills; After one or two drinks you start to feel more relaxed and more socialble as the alcohol reaches the brain and affects your cognitive abilities.
Alcohol consumption causes your heart rate to increase and you may feel a warm glow. This is caused by alcohol making the minute Veins in the skin widen, allowing blood to flow closer to the surface and lowers blood pressure.
Effects of Alcohol on your health
The effects of drinking excessive amounts of alcohol can be terrible. Alcohol health problems include slowed breathing and heartbeat, loss of consciousness, impaired judgment leading to accidents and injuries, anxiety, suffocation through choking on your own vomit and potentially fatal alcohol poisoning. Drinking too much alcohol can also effect you mentally (generally temporarily), making you feel guilt or anger for no apparant reason and even making you paranoid. You slurr your words, often don’t recognise your surroundings and drinking too much alcohol can result in memory loss.
Heavy drinking increases your calorie intake, resulting in it being partly responsible for adult obesity. In a medium-sized (175ml) glass of wine there are 125 calories and over 500 in a bottle. Thats approximately 1 quarter of the national guidline daily amount!
Hangovers – Headaches could be the least of your worries
Alcohol consumption can cause you to get a hangover the next morning, often being unpleasant to experience. You may get stomach ache, sickness, nausea and sometimes diarrhea, Alcohol abuse also has a dehydrating effect. Drinking alcohol can also make you feel depressed, guilty
.
consuming more than the recommended amounts regularly you are putting your health in damger. Consuming larger amounts of alcohol increases blood pressure.
Alcohol consumption is often linked with mental health problems. It has been found that people suffering from depression and anxiety were twice as likely to be problem drinkers.
Extreme levels of drinking can occasionally cause ‘psychosis’, a severe mental illness where the person beleives others are plotting against them. Heavy drinking may lead to isolation and sadness.
