Binge Drinking: Health Effects, Signs, and Prevention

We aren’t here to teach you how to stop but instead how to develop safe and healthy lifestyle habits and goals. In addition to your WHY, drinking in moderation can profoundly impact your bio psychosocial health and wellness. Your Sunnyside coach will offer proven personalized mindful drinking recommendations and targets for each week and help you customize the plan to align with your schedule and preferences. Spirits such as gin, vodka, whiskey, or brandy contain approximately 40% alcohol. Excessive alcohol use can make it harder for your body to resist disease, increasing your risk of various illnesses, especially pneumonia. Excessive drinking can affect your nervous system, causing numbness and pain in your hands and feet, disordered thinking, dementia, and short-term memory loss.

In addition to taking breaks for water, make a habit of slowly sipping your alcohol. Rather than https://ecosoberhouse.com/ chug your beer or mixed drink, take time to hold it in your mouth and appreciate its taste.

Risk factors

Consuming more alcohol than your liver can adequately process can cause inflammation and organ irritation. But the physical effects of Binge Drinking extend beyond the liver. Binge drinking has both short and long-term effects on your physical and emotional health. Some of the effects of binge drinking are felt within the first five to ten minutes as the alcohol is quickly absorbed into blood.

Although moderate drinking still requires the liver to process alcohol, the speed at which alcohol enters your system when you drink in moderation is more manageable for the liver. Instead of consuming multiple alcoholic beverages when you are out with friends, consider non-alcoholic alternatives or mocktails.

Binge Drinking Health Effects

Alcohol also affects your body’s blood sugar levels, so if you have diabetes, binge drinking may add to challenges for your body when it comes to regulating your blood sugar. Genetic, psychological, social and environmental factors can impact how drinking alcohol affects your body and behavior. Theories suggest that for certain people drinking has a different and stronger impact that can lead to alcohol use disorder. Since the adolescent brain is still developing, alcohol has different effects on teenagers compared to older adults. Prolonged alcohol use can affect brain functionality and potentially cause lifelong cognitive problems.

Stolle, Sack and Thomasius define binge drinking as episodic excessive drinking. ] as the “5/4 definition”, and depending on the source, the timeframe can vary.

Physical Health

Listen to relatives, friends or co-workers when they ask you to examine your drinking habits or to seek help. Consider talking with someone who has had a problem with drinking but has stopped. Percentage of high school students who drank five or more drinks of alcohol in a row, by sex, grade, and race/ethnicity—2015. The UK Department of Health advises that women who are pregnant or planning a pregnancy should not consume more than 1 or 2units once or twice a week, and they should avoid intoxication.