Alcohol and Stress: Can Alcohol Make Your Stress Worse?

In addition to April being Stress Awareness Month, it is also Alcohol Awareness Month. And more often than not, stress and alcohol go hand in hand.

Long days at the office, stress of staying at home with the kids, or just the chaos of the world can wreak havoc on the mind, body, and spirit. At the end of the day, we as humans like to kick back and relax with our favorite glass of wine or lagger. But did you know that alcohol doesn't actually help reduce stress?

In this day and age, the media portrays the sense of relaxation and peace when you sit down with a cold drink after a long and stressful day at work. However, while you may feel a temporary release or tension in the shoulders, alcohol can actual work against your body in fighting stress appropriately, resulting in dampened stress responses, increased cortisol levels, and a dependency on alcohol.

As we've mentioned before, Cortisol is your body's stress hormone. Produced by your adrenal glands, your body produces cortisol in response to stressors - this creation of the cortisol hormone initiates our body's "fight-or-flight" response. However, when the body experiences too much stress for a prolonged period of time, an overproduction of cortisol can occur triggering a multitude of issues in the body. Some issues due to elevated cortisol levels include increased abdominal fat or overall weight gain, mood swings, decreased libido, and cognitive changes.. just to name a few.

When these stressors occur in life, we naturally want to extinguish them and find a way to cope. While some people attend a Yoga class or have other ways to manage stress, the most common ways that humans cope with stress is through the consumption of alcohol. Alcohol is seen as a quick fix, a temporary numbing to the day's stressors. However, it is just that, temporary, and when the temporary release wears off, we find ourselves reaching for more alcohol more frequently, which then turns into a problem. Numbing stress with alcohol does not offer any long-term coping skills. In fact, it can create even more stress or issues in life.

Chronic drinking can increase cortisol levels in the body, further causing issues with your body's stress-response system. More alcohol = more cortisol = more stress = more alcohol.. it is a vicious cycle. Therefore, when you believe that the alcohol is helping the problem, you're actually just creating a bigger one.

Symptoms of chronic stress and alcohol use include:

• Anxiety and depression, or an increase if they are already experienced

• Physical concerns, such as headache or migraines, issues with digestion, heart disease)

• Trouble sleeping, which further affects cortisol negatively as it operates on a circadian rhythm, and

• Weight gain

The key to avoiding further damage to your body is to avoid reaching for the bottle and start implementing new coping mechanisms to manage your stress. Some recommendations on stress management include:

• Practicing mindfulness

• Regular exercise

• Meditation

• Talk therapy (even if with a friend)

• Journaling, and

• Actively practicing self-care

If you find that your stress levels and current coping skills are not working or are spiraling out of control, please consider seeking professional help. There is NO shame in needing help and guidance on finding what works best for you. This is YOUR life and you deserve to enjoy it.

So, ignore the shows that portray the carefree lives of those who manage their stress with alcohol. In the end, they are only making things worse and that is NOT a real life worth living.