What drinking alcohol does is it helps you relax in social situations, your mind begins to blend, it makes any human who can tolerate the taste or manage the aftereffects the following morning, feel pretty good about themselves, become bold, this in the short-term.
That very first sip, once the liquid hits your lips and enters your mouth, that refreshing chug of beer, wine, or rye, what happens is that the liquid travels down your throat and into your stomach, directly entering your bloodstream, which then immediately provides the woozy.
The alcohol then makes its way around the entire body, including your brain which affects your better mood while tampering with your muscles and motor reflexes. This process starts within just mere seconds of your first sip.
The level of alcohol that you drink, which is filtered by the liver and 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. It doesn’t want to store it, so what it attempts to do is break it down and then 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, this so your body could absorb it better to get rid of it.
To do this, the liver uses an enzyme known as alcohol dehydrogenase, this 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.
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 that your blood-alcohol level begins to rise, this the level which determines the “drink-drive” limits.
Lets Get Drunk
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 that for a legal limit of .08%, an average 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
What you do, how fast you drink, and who you are alters the effects of what alcohol does to your body and brain. If you eat a large meal before going out for drinks, doing so will slow down the effects of the alcohol.
The reason being that 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 alcohol quicker, as what the bubbles will do is increase the pressure in your stomach, which forces the alcohol into the bloodstream quicker.
Difficulty Holding Your Drunk
Another factor which can affect how alcohol is absorbed depends on your gender. 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.
It’s also thought that women carry less of the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase, which is an agent which breaks down alcohol, and this combined with lower body weight, results in getting drunk quicker.
Age Can Tolerate Alcohol Better
If older, one can process liquor much more efficiently. It’s suspected that the reason why is because of the fact that older individuals are exposed to alcohol more often, while having more of the alcohol killing enzymes which is able to break down the liquor in the liver faster.
This the reason why those who drink more often has an increased tolerance to alcohol, not appear as drunk, this since the liver has adapted and is ready to cope with it a lot better.
One’s stress level also plays a role in how quickly that you get drunk, this because during stressful situations, there’s an influx of different hormones which are activated in the body, especially cortisol, which forces the alcohol to metabolize much quicker.
Why 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 react. What alcohol does is it distorts these neurotransmitters, making them go haywire with increased liquor.
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, which slows down your brain cells, impairing your decision making, logic, and motor skills.