The overall conclusion of the study is "We observe negative relationships between alcohol intake and global gray and white matter measures". But if you look at Figure 3, it is consistent with a J-shaped risk curve with risk equal to nondrinkers around 16 grams ethanol per day, like the 16.9 number found for 40-64 year old males in https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6.... So I would say this study adds another reason to not overdrink, and confirms that current drinking expectations are too high, but isn't a reason to abstain entirely.
Did they correct for individuals who currently intake no alcohol but have a past history of alcohol consumption? My understanding is this is one of the ways past studies have skewed the results, because some people quit cold turkey but then live with the consequences of moderate or heavy drinking for years (or an entire lifetime) after that.
(I skimmed to the introductory paragraph where they talk about confounders, but don't see alcohol history listed as a confounder.)
In the summary section they talk briefly about this:
"It is reasonable to expect that the relationship we observe would differ in younger individuals who have not experienced the chronic effects of alcohol on the brain. An additional limitation stems from the self-reported alcohol intake measures in the UK Biobank, which cover only the year prior to participation. Such estimates may not adequately reflect drinking prior to the past year and are susceptible to reporting and recall bias.
Further, our analyses do not account for individuals with a past diagnosis of AUD. Earlier studies have shown that the brain shows some recovery with the cessation of drinking in individuals with AUD, but this varies with age and sex, and recovery might be incomplete. Thus, a past diagnosis of AUD would likely influence our results. We hope future studies will shed light on how a history of AUD with prolonged recovery is associated with brain structure in middle-aged and older adults."
Some version of their code is listed here[1] and it doesn't look like former alcohol consumption was accounted for. (Interestingly they have code to toggle inclusion/exclusion of people based on former alcohol consumption.) I didn't see it mentioned in the main text or the supplement either.
>> Alcohol intake explains 1% of the variance in global GMV and 0.3% of the variance in global WMV across individuals beyond all other control variables (both p < 10−16).
Definitely shows there is some grey and white matter reduction... but the impact doesn't seem drastic? Do I use that 1%? Do other activities reduce my brain of 1%? I don't know the scale of volume they use. I could be wrong.
And looking at figure 2[1], age is also a major factor for change in white/grey volume (which they normalize).
You have to admit the same argument in other contexts is a little funny. Like if you were exposed to an industrial pollutant that was shown to reduce your brain mass by 1% I don't think many people would be saying 'do I really need that brain material?' Obviously this is more than a little influenced by enjoying the effects of a drug.
Other example: more than 3.5 million people die each year from outdoor air pollution. Yet nobody seems to be alarmed by it to the point that anything changes.
It's only when there is a direct short-term life-threat that people seem bothered to take action (see COVID).
> it’s not much my choice if some pollutant is dumped into the air
Aren't you enjoying the benefits of those pollutants ? The sheer fact that you are posting on HN means that you have access to a device that was produced thousands of miles away and got delivered to you. No one forced you to own one, that was your choice.
Just because you are not the one physically emitting the stuff does not mean you share no responsibility for it.
The reception your comment got says a lot about the HN community's ability to have adult discussion about subjects involving bodily harm.
The supply chain for our basic necessities of life maims and kills people but we consider putting food on plates to be well worth the tradeoffs. Having a blood diamond on your ring is not something we consider to be worth the tradeoffs. The tradeoffs made to get a smartphone or computer into a consumer's hand, along with the tradeoffs of consuming booze, exist somewhere in the nuanced continuum between those fairly extreme example points.
You are assuming that there is an explicit decision made wrt trade-offs.
A simpler explanation is - a "blood" diamond has a fairly explicit consequence, manufacturing consequences aren't so obvious or necessary.
I'd also note that it should be possible to police these things - diamonds without blood, tech without pollution - consumer boycotts aren't often so successful vs legal policy changes.
You certainly see arguments like “lowering the speed limit by X% would reduce road fatalities by 1%” and people saying “no thanks, I’ll take the risk”.
People genuinely don’t really care about air pollution in neighborhood’s broadly, actually. I mean, consider the fact brake pads can still be made with asbestos and are aerosolized every time a car brakes. But it genuinely hasn’t stopped cars.
Driving 1% of the variance is not the same as reducing your brain mass by 1%. Without knowing anything about the brain, Reducing your brain mass by 1% sounds pretty crazy to me, and probably has extreme negative effects very far before hitting 100% loss.
It’s not absurd to say the negative effects of air pollution on this specific outcome are mostly negligible but still not want air pollution for other reasons. Which is a hypothetical statement of course because we don’t have any data here.
The pollutant isn't being dumped into the environment for fun. It's almost always done in service of some sort of economic activity (eg. farming, power generation, resource extraction). In this context the upside is the associated economic activity.
Taking alcohol is my choice. I make that choice because I think the trade off is worth it, but I respect other people who think otherwise and do not drink. It is nobody’s choice to live in a polluted atmosphere and you cannot opt out.
Outdoor air pollution doesn't taste good and it's not my choice. There's a huge difference between "This is slightly dangerous" and "This is slightly dangerous but a lot of fun"
>Well, a pollutant has no use. That’s the difference.
Every piece of technology that carried your commentary from your fingertips to my eyeballs has a nonzero environmental impact. Some watershed in Asia had to be fractionally (after all, the mine likely supplied material for far more devices than yours and mine) poisoned so you could say that.
Is that sufficient purpose?
Keep in mind modern society exists at the end of a very, very, very long and interconnected supply chain so the raw material from the mine probably (fractionally, of course) finds its way into smoke alarms and pacemakers. Trying to define "purpose" is an unbelievably complex can of worms.
I'm considered by many folk to be a fairly heavy drinker, but 6 drinks a day, every day, is seriously indicative of what I'd call a real fucking drinking problem that one should get professional help for.
This is in a different measurement from a casual understanding of 6 drinks. It’s 6 daily alcohol units. UK’s NHS alcohol calculator says 2 pints of 5.2% beer is 6 units.
... I'm not sure if that made my 'easy' point well enough, obviously pints mess it up a bit (and you have to know a pint is 568ml - I've remembered ever since I went to study at Imperial, where the student bars include the well-named 'Metric' & '568') but 10ml is nice and round so it's fairly easy to get a rough idea or with rounder numbers - e.g. a whole 75cl bottle of wine at 12% is 3/4 * 12 = 9 units.
In my experience of knowing alcoholics, I'd say 6 a day really isn't that bad; it's the bottle of liquor a day types that I find impressive. Also, if they were the kind of people who could get access to professional help, they probably wouldn't drink so much to begin with.
6 cans/bottles/pints a day isn't terrible in the grand scheme of things, but its not good either, and it almost always escalates over time.
You can sustain a pretty serious drinking problem that will cause long term harm to your health while also remaining a functional member of society, even getting up to the bottle of scotch a day or more tier.
A fair amount of my professional peers are basically highly functional alcoholics, who have not yet reached a point where it causes sufficient impact on them to recognise the problem.
Most of those people may well have access to professional help, they just don't use it because they don't see a problem. Yet.
High-functioning might contradict calling it a problem? From the stories I read about Christopher Hitchens, he seemed like the definition of an unrepentant alcoholic and seemed to function quite well, but of course he died a bit young. I don't think many people are Christopher Hitchens though.
A friend of mine is a very talented and successful salesman. If he doesn't get some alcohol by 7 PM, his skin starts to crawl and he can barely keep it together. What do you call that?
The disease isn't defined by any outcome other than alcohol consumption and dependence.
I don't know. Many of us live with disease of one sort or another; I was just saying that in my personal experience, while a 6-pack a day might seem like a lot to some, it's really not the depraved, want-to-die-alcoholic consumption level.
To be exact: his was high functionning until he wasn't. From my understanding, he had a bad week (health troubles), which spiraled into a worse one at work. He took a month off, but was so nervous and on the edge that he beat his kid, and his ex-wife told him to put himself together or she would ask for full custody (basically you only see your child two weekend a week instead of half/half).
Don't know what happened then (i had taken my distance since the divorce). The day before he had to go back to work (or the day after, not sure), he killed himself.
[edit] This is my flawed understanding of the events. It probably did not happen like this exactly, most of it was discussions at the church and after the incineration (we usually have dinner with friends and family during those times where i live).
I'm sorry to hear that. It seems to be a theme in this thread that it's hard to make a causal association with alcohol, and your friend would seem to illustrate this. I would think death via alcohol would mean alcohol poisoning or cirrhosis (apparently this took a friend of a friend of mine last month who worked as a bartender at a popular venue in town) or other health condition more easily related to alcohol abuse.
Mostly I think unbinding basic health care in the US from employment would help with many issues. I don't know how people are supposed to be able to heal from illness while also putting in their efforts to a full time job.
I'm trying to understand. The impact reported by the study seems to compound with higher amounts (I would imagine as liver and kidney throughput is exceeded and the poison hits you more directly).
Standard Control:
GMV WMV
0–1 AU −0.030 −0.020
1–2 AU −0.127 −0.074
2–3 AU −0.223 −0.129
So cumulatively, 0-3 drinks is is GMV: -0.380, WMV: -0.223
What I don't know and can't seem to find with a quick search is the conversion method for IDP standard deviations in brain matter relate to absolute percentages of brain matter (which I assume is not linear?). If your comment is correct, then these numbers correlate to an absolute reduction of 2% of brain matter?
I also see that the third drink seems to do about 50% more standard deviation movement than the former 2 put together.
EDIT: Never mind it's been a while since I took statistics, I remembered that standard deviations _are_ a linear amount. I'd been thinking of percentile placement on a normal distribution.
The old mantra of people only use X% of their brain has been found to be hogwash. We use all of our brain, so I’d be very worried about a poison that even takes 1%.
> The notion that a person uses only 10 percent of their brain is a myth. fMRI scans show that even simple activities require almost all of the brain to be active.
What would happen if you disabled 1% of your cpu? People might say what’s a loss of 1% but I’m reminded of data from sports science where 1% more performance is an absolutely astounding amount that separates world class from the pack. I don’t want to be in the mind pack!
Did they control for all of the comorbidities associated with non-drinkers?
A lot of people who don't drink are not abstaining for some health augmentation or lifestyle choice, but because drinking any amount of alcohol would send them into a very early grave.
It seems like these hidden confounding factors are more plausible of an explanation that the "0 drinks per day" group has higher morbidity, compared to "alcohol is healthy in moderate amounts" explanation for the bottom of the J curve.
Very rough estimates say there are ~6 million Americans with Chron's or Ulcerative Colitis, none of whom have ANY business drinking ANY amount of alcohol.
That's just one group. There are other groups, I'm sure, but that's the one I'm painfully familiar with.
Yeah. And it's a daily average, so you can have 3 standard drinks every Saturday for example (aiming for the TMREL of 6g). I'm not sure about the maximum per day; there was a heart disease study that defined heavy drinking as 60g in a day,but I haven't seen any studies specifically on drinking patterns at this low intake.
Personally I'm far more more interested in questions about how correlated brain matter volumes are with real world outcomes and overall quality of life.
I'm vaguely familiar with the term "synaptic plasticity" to roughly mean the way the brain processes information and how it changes over time with varying life experiences.
It seems to me that one's risk-taking behavior may reduce brain matter volume, yet still improve quality of life because experience itself (literally the way the brain is wired) is worth far more. Some experiences are practically impossible without alcohol due to its social and cultural significance.
To make a dumb metaphor, consider the fact that the raw number of pixels contained in an image isn't necessarily correlated with its success. What is a life, but a meme?
The article mentions that the effects are particularly strong in the frontal lobe. This is the part of your brain that's involved with planning and self-control, amongst others.
So if chronic drinking damages that part of your brain most, the visible long term effects would be problems with planning and being less able to control your impulses and emotions.
I have to say that this matches my (few) experiences with chronic drinkers quite well. I've seen them become less inhibited and less self-aware and become more selfish over a couple of decades, even when they're sober.
My own experience with the so called "high functioning alcoholics" is they probably managed to both find the right level of moderation to slow this loss to a rate that they can handle and developed the coping strategy of keeping routines they cannot break.
It's like they become robots. While it's definitely bad for health, I'm not sure broader society really cares because good health isn't necessarily correlated with success in life past a certain point.
My somewhat more positive counterexamples roughly fall into the dichotomy of introverts and extroverts (yeah yeah I know).
On the introvert side, I've seen hard drinking make people into creatures of habit. Not necessarily "bad" habits, but habits nonetheless such as overworking themselves in a narrow field, deep hobbies, etc. "drunken masters" so to speak.
On the extrovert side, I've seen hard drinking train people to optimize for high charisma, handling crowds, and deep knowledge of conflict resolution to the detriment of being able to learn any other skills or really appreciate the world in any other way. The "life of the party" while being just as dead inside as the introverted example above.
They get trapped into a certain way of life from the brain damage. I'm definitely not advocating alcohol abuse just sharing my perspective. I'm pretty sure more people drink than abstain so this isn't a topic that can be dismissed as just purely bad.
If anyone knows of research on this kind of topic that would be amazing. Too often this is only discussed via movies, ads, and personal stories which are all strongly biased.
There's a really common saying / dark joke in AA "we were all high functioning once." When admitted alcoholics look back on their lives we usually find a period of years where we and even those around us considered our drinking "high functioning" but that's not really a stable position. Eventually some major life disruption will throw off whatever is keeping you balanced there and then it's on for real. It's better viewed as a stage of alcoholism rather than a type of it, if that makes sense.
Could it not also be that people who happen to have less grey matter in those "self-control" areas, will (statistically) tend to be prone to drink more alcohol? That is, the causality could run the other way. It takes some self-control and restraint to moderate one's consumption, after all.
"It seems to me that one's risk-taking behavior may reduce brain matter volume, yet still improve quality of life because experience itself (literally the way the brain is wired) is worth far more. Some experiences are practically impossible without alcohol due to its social and cultural significance"
Yes, sadly that might be. In my youth heavy drinking was the norm, all the cool kids and pretty girls did it and to connect to them, you had to do it, too. Those who did not, were the depressed loosers.
So to socialize, you had to poison yourself.
From an individual point of view that makes sense, but overal I believe it makes more sense, to change that culture around alcohol.
And luckily since then, I met people who can have crazy wild parties, without being wasted. I love dancing, but I hate to avoid uncoordinated drunk idiots on the dancefloor.
I mean, I still do like a beer or a coctail occasionally and I see nothing wrong with it. But needing alcohol to socialize or party is not healthy at all and I would like to see the obligatory drunkness to go away.
Not just because of drunk parties, but also because this culture gets people hooked into alcoholism and then families get destroyed.
I decided as a 14 year old to never drink. It’s been an interesting experiment in particular regarding peer pressure, group dynamics and societal norms.
Same here, though I grew up as a Mormon so it wasn't as much my own personal choice as it was a religious conviction. I'm an atheist now, so it is a personal choice now. I find it can be really enjoyable to be "the sober friend" at group outings—being the only one with my wits about me while my friends get super relaxed, outgoing, and nonsensical all of a sudden is pretty funny.
I don't think there's anything evil about drinking, I've just gotten this far in my life without it and figure "heck, might as well go for broke" at this point. I do believe that alcohol advertisements on TV and radio should be banned like tobacco ads were, though. The fact that I have been conditioned by ads since I was a kid to think that beer is delicious and harmless is unnerving to me.
Ideally, drinking ought to be a personal choice to exchange risk for pleasure. This only holds true when drinking is done responsibly, though. Irresponsible drinking can ruin lives, relationships, and hurt or kill people. Budweiser and Heineken may be required to say "drink responsibly" at the end of all their ads, but it's extremely obvious they don't actually care. At the end of the day, they make more money off alcoholics than responsible drinkers, so they and their marketing cannot be trusted. The incentives are too misaligned.
Well, I think it helped me strengthen my will power, that’s for sure.
Also watching people around you get drunk a couple of times early on was quite the turn off. It’s actually rather sad.
Often I am considered to ‘have excellent memory’ compared to my peers (I am 44 now).
There was no religious motivation to start and even though I was Buddhist for a few years I consider myself Atheist now. It was just an early aversion towards the taste and then a heightened sense of peer pressure that didn’t sit well with me. After that it became a game of ‘let’s see how long I can keep it up’. Now it’s second nature - but I do notice there is a deep seated aversion towards alcohol and probably a side effect of conditioning myself against it. That probably goes with all drugs (I don’t take any)
And finally yes, society is very hostile towards sobriety. Less so in the US. People always feel embarrassed and defensive, interestingly enough.
It also turns out to be a great example to people who struggle with alcohol and children, so I am rather happy having stayed away from the rat poison ;-)
If you really don’t want to explain, fill a beer bottle with water and drink that all night. I frequently have one or two beers then do this for the rest of a party, and feel great the next day.
My personal problem is that I can't help drinking that bottle in the lapses between conversation or whatever. So filling it with water is perfect for me.
Don’t mind that at all. It’s fascinating to see how people react to one’s explanation. Very polite people will actually ask if I am okay if they drink around me which of course is no issue whatsoever.
On the plus side, per-capita alcohol consumption does seem to be on the decline in many countries over the past few decades [1]. So hopefully in the future it will be less difficult for others to make a similar choice.
As in general with associative studies, it is hard to make a distinct conclusion on causation.
Do we know if alcohol decreases gray and white matter volumes? Could the causation run in the reverse direction? Bi-directionally? Or could there be some common cause (e.g., proneness to "risky" behavior) that leads to both?
Every study that comes through here somebody invariably trots out the old "correlation does not equal causation" argument. You're not wrong, but you know, sometimes it is causation.
Rather than disregard every study, I just sort of internally give it a 50% weight and move on. Maybe it's bogus, maybe it's not, but surely some of them are correctly identifying causation.
even with every disease cured and without aging, you still will die by some random event unless you hide away in a bunker - in which case the bunker will eventually collapse and you will still die
Indeed, we'd need an interventional study.
Forcing a random study group to drink for decades seems unethical and expensive, but I wish we had the results.
This seems to have been known for decades with respect to heavy users, now it's being found it lighter users. For background:
> "Partial recovery of brain function with abstinence suggests that a proportion of the deÆcits must be neurochemical in origin while neuronal loss from selected brain regions indicates permanent and irreversible damage. The factors influencing these two components are unknown..."
Kril, J. J., & Halliday, G. M. (1999). Brain shrinkage in alcoholics: a decade on and what have we learned? Progress in Neurobiology, 58(4), 381–387.
> "Various mechanisms underlie ethanol-induced cell death, with oxidative stress and endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress being the main pro-apoptotic mechanisms in alcohol abuse and FASD. Oxidative and ER stresses are induced by thiamine deficiency, especially in alcohol abuse, and are exacerbated by neuroinflammation, particularly in fetal ethanol exposure."
Yes, psychedelics and cannabis are safer recreational drugs than alcohol is, and maybe opiates and cocaine are not really any worse. Revising drug laws to account for such realities is long overdue - although banning marketing and promoting public health campaigns on risks and side effects are also good ideas.
> maybe opiates and cocaine are not really any worse
The negative health effects from moderate use of these are really not that bad, but it's very hard to moderately use them, they're a bit moreish.
Although alcohol is pretty moreish too, and the withdrawals can be really bad. (Your body develops a chemical dependence to the point that stopping cold turkey can actually kill you)
> Here, we show that the negative associations between alcohol intake and brain macrostructure and microstructure are already apparent in individuals consuming an average of only one to two DAUs (daily alcohol units), and become stronger as alcohol intake increases.
It should be noted that a single 'weak' 5% beer is 1.65 DAUs.
This helps, but it's still unintuitive that the "standard unit drink" is not the same as the actual standard drink that most people consume. 330ml @ 4.5-5% abv (a fairly typical mass market beer) would make way more sense to me.
A lot of people are going to assume that 1 standard drink === 1 glass of wine/beer. They're not going to read the fine print on government messaging.
Does anyone know the same-person variance in gray and white matter volume, and if it has any measurable dependence on other biological factors (hydration and/or electrolyte balance come to mind as plausible)? And if any temporary[0] same-person effects are directly attributable to alcohol and its short term effects, e.g. hangover?[1]
[0]I presume if permanent single-person shrinkage was observed it would have been a big enough headline to have been noticed.
[1]Unless accounted for in sampling, drinkers would be statistically more likely to be experiencing transiently smaller brains from alcohol consumption or accompanying dehydration - if an effect exists.
I gave up alcohol years ago after reading a few of these studies. I wasn't drinking often anyways, but does it ever feel good to never feel that morning after headache. I found even one pint in the evening could disrupt my sleep.
Saving on the restaurant, and eliminating the liquor store, bills was gravy.
I poured a 3/4 full bottle of scotch that I'd been gifted down the drain the other day. If there's booze in the house I'll have a drink several nights a week; I now routinely get a headache the next day with "just" two glasses of scotch, so it really isn't worth the damage it's doing to my body. My current plan is to have a beer or two when I'm out, but to completely cut out drinking at home.
Hm, I still have a fancy bottle of scotch I got as a gift, buried somewhere forgotten in the cupboards. That is it though. I brought the rest of my liquor cabinet to the office. The free booze was appreciated by the takers, although I admit I had mixed feelings about giving away what I deemed poison :). It was probably $600-700 worth.
Alcohol clearly lowers brain matter volumes I don't understand how any of you scientifically educated chaps can look at the figures and determine otherwise. It says literally "negative in every dimension" and that is not an exaggeration. Now, if you think alcohol is the only and best substance escape available, then maybe there is an internal rage against the sentiment. But alcohol is very low-tech and I encourage you all to explore the alternatives.
Why are they performing this study in the UK instead of comparing the (self-reported) drinking population from the UK against a known, never to have consumed population, from a Muslim country? That would control for previous drinkers and underreporting the habit.
Couldn't there be countless other differences due to environment, food, culture, genetics, etc that would be hard to separate? I'm no scientist but I was under the impression that the control group should be as close as possible a cohort other than what is being tested.
They may have gotten it backwards - more gray and white matter volumes could make the person more aware of the hopelessness of life in general and, therefore, induce alcohol consumption. ;-)
> Notably, the negative associations we observe with global IDPs are detectable in individuals who consume between 1 and 2 alcohol units daily. Thus, in the UK, consuming just one alcoholic drink daily (or two units of alcohol) could be associated with changes in GMV and WMV in the brain.
Did anyone find anything on lower levels of consumption? I've had a hard time finding evidence related to any potential harm from having 2 drinks/mo, for example. I could imagine this would be very different than 30 drinks/mo.
About a year ago I started drinking a glass of wine every night because of a self experiment I did suggesting it was good for my sleep (https://ja3k.com/blog/wine). The title concerned me but if you look at the graphs there's basically no difference between 0 and 1 for either gray or white matter.
Did it improve your sleep? I always found I fall asleep easily if I've been drinking in the evening but I invariably wake up in the middle of the night with anxiety or bad dreams
In my data my REM and deep sleep percentages both improved while my total time asleep went down (in my mind a win-win). Subjectively my sleep velocity also improved.
I don't have data for what happens when I have 2+ drinks but that definitely has a deleterious effect on my sleep. Especially after 3.
Even if we could be certain that the results of this study were infallible and meaningful it still ultimately depends on your goals and values, best possible health at all costs including the cost of enjoyment… I mean we’re all going to die no matter what, it’s really up to you.
I could die next year or even tomorrow and not cracking a few cold ones would have zero impact on that. I don’t mean this as an endorsement for endless boozing either, just sharing some perspective.
The standard response to that is 0 drinks per day includes abstainers who might be former alcoholics and therefore might be dragging the average down. Some of the data tables have a separate category for "excluding abstainers", but there's no line graph that has abstainers excluded.
Doesn't sound like they controlled for it or even considered it. While they did have a control group that excluded non-drinkers and heavy drinkers, that was solely to control for bias at the extreme ends, and not to control for sober alcoholics or health problems that preclude drinking.
> Our analyses comprise models that include two different sets of control variables. The standard set includes standardized age, standardized age squared standardized height, handedness (right/left/ambidextrous; dummy-coded), sex (female:0, male:1), current smoker status, former light smoker, former heavy smoker, and standardized Townsend index of social deprivation measured at the zip code level62. To control for genetic population structure, the models also include the first 40 genetic principal components63 and county of residence (dummy-coded)62. A second set of extended control variables includes all standard control variables and in addition standardized BMI, standardized educational attainment64, and standardized weight. To determine whether observations at the extreme ends of the drinking distribution bias the estimates of the relationship between alcohol intake and IDPs, we also estimate a model that excludes abstainers and a model that excludes heavy drinkers (i.e., women who reported consuming more than 18 units/week and men who consumed more than 24 units/week), both with standard controls.
Here they talk about the different groupings:
> we bin participants in the following six categories based on average alcohol intake: (1) abstainers, (2) individuals who drank less than one unit/day, (3) individuals who drank between one (included) and two (excluded) units/day (recommended maximal alcohol consumption based on the UK Chief Medical Officers “low-risk” guidelines32), (4) individuals who drank between two (included) and three (excluded) units/day, (5) individuals who drank between three (included) and four (excluded) units/day, and (6) individuals who drank at least four units/day.
Again no mention of sober alcoholics or health problems.
This study: https://www.massgeneral.org/news/press-release/large-study-c... found that while moderate drinkers had better cardiovascular health than non-drinkers, this was due to other lifestyle factors associated with moderate drinking, not the drinking itself.
There are way fewer alcoholics than any other category so even if you factor in sober alcoholics you are dominated by people who drank less and now abstain or have never drunk.
> and thinking is the most pleasurable thing in the world.
That is definitely something to be grateful for. I too, enjoy thinking deeply, and abstain from Alcohol when trying to solve problems.
But thinking can also be torture and sometimes I just want to drown out all the depression and anxiety. Alcohol is good for delaying that. Only problem is it’s a temporary fix, and the agony comes back stronger.
Alcohol is also good for dumbing yourself down to the same intellectual level as a social group.
The reason I’m working towards being a nondrinker is so I can confront my mental issues in a healthy way, and so my kids don’t see me destroy myself as they grow up.
You seem to be describing a misuse of alcohol, if anything. It's not the case that you either drink excessively or abstain completely. Enjoying a drink, even to relax, is not principally a way of coping with mental illness. It is enjoyable. Indeed, a drink (not too much; I'm not talking about drunkenness) can actually make you better at thinking (Ballmer peak comes to mind; there are some studies that corroborate this I remember seeing). Perhaps this is the result of relaxation.
Of course, if you find it adversely affecting you, then you owe it to yourself to abstain.
Sure, good points. I don’t mean to portray it as binary.
Back in my gigging days, we called it “the perfect buzz”. 1-2 drinks before performing worked well- but more than that did not.
I only share so much because for some of us it’s a very slippery slope. I used to not be aware of _why_ I was drinking so much.
I do really enjoy the taste of a craft beer, or a decent bourbon. The part I’m working on now is balance. I don’t want to get to where I _have_ to stop drinking.
Yeah, proper dosing of cannabis is tricky. I think used sparingly and in small doses it can be helpful for many creative practices. It is very easy to take too much or use it too often because the feeling of being high can be so pleasurable (except when you get paranoid and it's the absolute worst). It also can make you feel very inflated, which is a great feeling in the moment, but kind of embarrassing when you look back at the reduced quality of what you actually produce when high. Still, I think there is value in it since I have had useful insights while high that motivated me when I sobered up and was better able to execute on my inflated ambitions.
Alcohol, on the other hand, I have really not found especially helpful for creativity. YMMV.
Oh, the flights of fancy that cannabis inspires is painful because once the haze clears it's not likely to ever go further than that peak moment (all talk, no walk -- at least for myself)
Let's be real. Thinking is not the most pleasurable thing in the world. A certain class of people like to believe this but they're lying to themselves.
I see where this comment is coming from and partially agree with it.
A thought experiment I've put myself through is would I still be pursuing software if I has unlimited access to sex, drugs and entertaining people were magnetically attracted to me.
I don't know the answer to that question, but I've had moments of satiation with regards to those things and I end up learning and/or thinking deeply - and in those moments it is the most pleasurable thing.
This is probably different for everyone because after being satiated being alone and thinking is what I like to do. I've also completely stopped drinking for similar reasons as the grandparent comment.
It's mostly the same for everyone. Brains are mechanically hardwired according to evolution. And that is mostly what dictates what makes us happy. It's actually the scientific conclusion if you "think" about it.
But it's more then just drugs, sex and fame. Your children, the love of your wife, friends. That sort of thing can make you happy.
Just thinking though typically does not make anyone happy, and this can be verified. Happiness is associated with endorphins and part of your brain lighting up in an MRI.
Also if you "think" about it even further. If humans can actually "think" themselves into happiness, a lot of the stresses of the real world would magically disappear. Survival of the fittest does not allow this. A content human is not one positioned to compete and survive. We are wired to never be fully satiated, never to be happy for long. Our brains give us a taste of happiness so that we can spend most of our lives working to chase it. Because an unsatisfied person is a competitive person and that makes him evolutionarily more fit.
Being fully aware of our evolutionary nature actually hinders survival. Nature wants us to live in an illusion thinking we're chasing a goal with an endpoint that equates to contentment and happiness. If you "think" too much, as I have, you see past the illusion and you're now less likely to play the "game" so to say.
What I realized from "thinking" too much is that it actually makes you MORE unhappy. It makes you realize the horrible truth of most things and the pointlessness of many other things.
No offense to parent but what I see from his statement is basically someone who hasn't thought deeply about certain things too much.
You make good points and it's true, thinking alone may not have the same effect, but problem solving I'm sure releases endorphins as well.
People do attempt to think themselves into happiness with therapy see some benefit.
Just thinking - yes, probably not going to make anyone extremely happy.
But I still believe it's a plausible argument that after any cycle or combination of sex, drugs, fame, family, friends there may be a point where, for some people, thinking/problem solving may have it's place as the most pleasurable option in that moment.
And the winning combination for some people may be family, friends and problem solving, rather than family, friends and drugs. So it's possible they are not lying to themselves. It may maximize pleasure over time.
This isn't problem solving per say. It's success that triggers a dopamine release. Whether that be success in your career or success in solving a problem. Success though is typically fleeting. You need to climb the ladder higher to feel more happy.
You probably found a success niche via problem solving.. and interpreted the source of your happiness as "thinking through problems." If you continuously failed to solve problems while thinking you obviously wouldn't be happy so it isn't "thinking" or "problem solving" that triggers this... it's success. Thus there are other avenues to this version of happiness outside of problem solving, you just need to find something you're successful at. If problem solving is it, so be it.
Because it's not actually anyone's truth. If "thinking" was more pleasurable than, say, skydiving, or playing with a baby, or a drug-fueled orgy, than you'd see a lot more people dropping out of society to go be hermits than anything else.
Instead, we look around, and see that vices fall into a handful of categories: trick the brain into making the feel-good chemicals (risk-taking, sex, good food) or sticking the feel-good chemicals in there yourself (drugs, booze).
I'm not going to assert that I know the greatest pleasure possible. Someone's probably out here stretched out on MDMA while cliff-jumping into a volcano or some likewise truly insane shit. But I can assert that that person is experiencing pleasure unfathomable by anyone who asserts that the greatest pleasure is "thinking".
I don't know if it's so cut-and-dry. By that logic why doesn't everybody just do amphetamines all day.
Probably some integral of pleasure is part of the equation, and it depends on you preference for pleasure distribution. But maybe I'm blurring the line between pleasure and fulfillment.
The brain is made up of modules and happiness in essence comes from what can be characterized as two different modules. For alignment both modules need to register happiness.
The animistic or instinctual side of happiness triggered by drugs is not purely a module but it can be encapsulated into a concept called the the mesolimbic dopamine pathway. This pathway can be mechanically manipulated to make you feel a certain portion of happiness via drugs sex or the natural secretion of dopamine.
The thing about this module is that it lives separately from another module called the neocortex. The neocortex encompasses the higher functionality of your brain with things like higher order thoughts, perception and consciousness. The unique thing about the neocortex is that it can self actualize. It can see signals being sent by other parts of the brain and it can override or interpret those signals as false. This is what happens when you do something like exercise. One part of your brain tells you you're tired, but your neocortex overrides this and forces you to continue because you're aware that the feeling is an illusion. Exercise is actually healthy.
For someone to feel truly happy the mesolimbic dopamine pathway and the neocortex need to be in alignment. The dopamine hit must register AND the neocortex must validate that feeling as well. Signals of happiness from one module but not the other register as sort of an invalid false happiness.
For example when you're an addict and you're doing heroin the reward pathway sends a signal, but the neocortex denies it. The addict is generally unhappy even though he gets "high" all the time. For the parent poster, the neocortex is telling himself he's happy by "thinking" but there's no dopamine hit from the mesolimbic pathway. The in-congruence from both modules in the brain form a happiness that isn't quite real. To truly be happy you need both.
Also note that the brain additionally develops tolerance to dopamine so any feeling of happiness is relatively fleeting. You need to use different stimuli and go through long periods of "no dopamine" to feel happy. Humans are biologically designed this way by evolution.
I'm sorry to tell you this, because in general being aware of all of this generally makes people less happy. Ignorance is part of what makes all of this work, because it is your neocortex that is determining all of this. Knowledge of this influences how your neocortex chooses to override certain signals from the mesolimbic pathway... it's all very very meta.
No need to be sorry, I'm aware we answer to our biology (not that I have as deep of an understanding of it as you).
We may be splitting hairs because this stemmed from a comment saying thinking is the most pleasurable thing in the world and you said anyone who thinks that way is lying to themselves.
Through your biological lens I have no choice but to agree, the thing that is most pleasurable in the world is mesolimbic dopamine pathway and the neocortex alignment (or so I'm told).
But through a conversational lens I guess it's all how you get there. And thinking->problem solving->success is a plausible path to get there which is why I disagree with your statement that they are lying to themselves, ignoring the existential truth that we are always lying to ourselves.
>And thinking->problem solving->success is a plausible path to get there
Sure, if this is what he means, then he is correct. But what he wrote is just "thinking" which is false.
>which is why I disagree with your statement that they are lying to themselves, ignoring the existential truth that we are always lying to ourselves.
It is a bit. The success of problem solving usually comes with only a mild dopamine hit. There are way more situations that create a greater surge of dopamine. Parent stated "thinking" was the most pleasurable thing ever which obviously not the case for people in general.
For example it's much more pleasurable to win a billion dollars or successfully bed the hottest girl in the club or to dominate everyone else in some competition. Clearly our biology is geared towards giving huge rushes of dopamine for situations that aren't exactly tied to "thinking" or strictly "problem solving". I find it hard to believe that the parent is completely unaware of this. He must know on some level. That's why I claim he's lying to himself.
well you're wrong. My statement was categorically true. And if you follow the thread I reveal highly informative knowledge about it all. Your comment here is the one that is a casual dismissal and completely incorrect blanket generalization. Nothing is more casual then reciting the canned HN rules and not investigating further.
