but you have a problem with it, nobody wants to know you.
It's a legal drug that changes your mood pretty quickly.
And 41% of us in the UK say that we drink alcohol because it helps us when we feel depressed or nervous. (Drinkaware/Yougov Jan 2018)
Some people call this psychological dependency. Others might say it's self-medication.
Whatever label you give it,
I would not be able to go out socially and not have a drink. I just...
Ever?
No.
We'll be hearing from you guys and we'll be introducing you to our new friends Gaba and Glutamate.
When people are saying to you: "Oh, just pull yourself together and sort it out",
you're battling chemicals in the brain.
When OCD is at it's worst, it's right up in your face,
whereas if you're drunk, it's over here.
Open a bottle of wine and that would be the only thing that would make me feel normal.
I'm India Rakusen and this week on Like Minds we're talking about alcohol and mental health.
What is the difference between using and abusing alcohol?
And what can you do about it if you're not sure where the line is?
This is Caroline. She’s used alcohol to cope with her anxiety in the past.
So we’ve come for a swim, because the water is her happy place.
You're so like, pool glam. You're one of those women I always see in the pool who's really glam.
Oh, really?
And I'm like: "Oh, God, I look like a child, in a paddling pool".
So this is your sanctuary that we're in at the moment.
It's just effortless, isn't it? It takes your weight.
I just love it. There's just something calming about water.
When did your anxiety begin?
About two and a half years ago I was going through a very stressful period in my life
and that resulted in suffering with really severe anxiety.
Where I'd suffer panic attacks and had all these awful symptoms,
I'd convinced myself that they weren't panic attacks and they were in actual fact
something severely wrong with me.
That's obviously super exhausting for your brain. How were you trying to cope with that?
The only way for me to relax was to open a bottle of wine
and that would be the only thing that would make me feel normal,
and also it would help me to sleep.
What do you mean by normal? You said help you feel normal or like me.
Just being able to come home from work and you know, do the normal things like
cook the dinner and put the washing on...
You needed a drink just to be able to do that?
Yeah.
Function?
Yeah.
We could do our best TV hello's, which I assume go like that.
Hiya....Hello!
This is Dr Julia Lewis. She's an addiction psychiatrist.
And this is her group therapy room in Newport where she works.
Human beings have liked using substances that lift their mood, we've done it since the dawn of time.
You're not going to turn around and say: "Nobody should ever use a substance or do anything to their minds".
What is the difference then between this kind of, coping grey area and dependency?
People who are using alcohol to cope, would essentially be dealing with
day-to-day stresses by reaching for alcohol.
So it's not like celebrating a massive job promotion with a glass of champagne,
or you know, terrible break up and you need a pint, that's OK?
It's more along the day-to-day, a little bit of disappointment on a Monday
and then the need to reward yourself on the Tuesday.
One particular warning sign, really, would be what if you didn't have alcohol that day?
Would you get irritable? Would you get anxious about it?
And that's when it starts to become a problem.
Were you drinking when you were going out? Or just meeting friends, things like that?
Oh God definitely. I would not be able to go out socially and not have a drink. I just...
Ever?
No.
After a couple of drinks I can become really quite chatty, funny, confident.
And that's the person that I want to be, but I can't necessarily be like that without having a drink.
You seem so relaxed and comfortable now.
I'm in the water.
Oh yeah. Of course.
I feel like this is inappropriate.
Cheers.
This is James and his lovely garden.
He started using alcohol to cope with his OCD and anxiety when he was at university.
So why do you think that habit started at uni?
Alcohol came hand-in-hand with being a student from day one, really.
It did kind of carry on after university as a normal way to suppress things.
What was it about alcohol that helped?
My intrusive thoughts are mainly self-harm. When I'm in kind of a bad episode of OCD,
it's 24/7. I kind of liken it to a broken CD, my brain just gets stuck on a loop.
When OCD is at it's worst, it's right up in your face,
whereas if you're drunk, it's over here.
You can kind of push it to one side for a few hours.
We asked you about your experiences of alcohol and mental health, and this is what you had to say.
It is self-medicating. Taking medication makes you better,
well that is exactly how drinking alcohol makes people who have problems, feel.
The drinking to cope drifted seamlessly into becoming dependent upon it.
What drives anxiety, depression is our inner dialogue,
and it tends to be quite negative so try mindfulness to silence your mind.
Get a coping mechanism, get something that you enjoy, that you're passionate about
and grab onto that.
What did it feel like when you had that first drink?
An immediate relaxation.
Just even opening that bottle of wine and it was like: Oh, any minute now I'm going to just feel relaxed.
That is it, isn't it? That is the thing about alcohol.
Takes 0.5 seconds. That's not scientific.
It takes 0.5 seconds for that feeling to just come over you.
Luckily for all of us Julia knows the actual science behind why alcohol seems to make us feel so good.
Alcohol causes a little spike of endorphins, and that lifts your mood
from your normal mood state up a little bit, and then it drops back down again
once you've stopped drinking.
The flip side of that is you get a little spike of something called the dynorphins.
Now, they work in the exact opposite way. Your endorphins give you that little happy spike,
and the dynorphins give you a little dip in mood.
When you start to drink on a regular basis, the endorphin spike gets smaller
but that little dynorphin dip, that gets much bigger.
Oh, that's so annoying.
And it doesn't come back to normal.
So that's your high mood and your low mood, what about the anxious feeling?
There's another system, and that's Gaba and Glutamate.
So Gaba's your major calming chemical, and it's virtually everywhere in the brain.
So when we drink, our Gaba levels are boosted and we get that calm effect.
Spreads through the brain.
It does, and it'll be more than calm because that's what slows down your reaction times,
that's what makes you sleepy.
Glutamate is your major stimulating chemical. The brain likes this calming side of it
to be in balance with the stimulating side of it.
Say you're drinking every day, that Gaba side is constantly being stimulated.
So what the brain does, is it boosts the Glutamate side.
And is that the thing that makes you feel more anxious overall, the Glutamate?
Yeah, because what then happens when you don't drink, is now the Glutamate's overactive.
And you're jittery and you're anxious and you think: "I have to have another drink".
Useful to just know it's not your fault. There's been an imbalance,
and everything's sort of working against that.
Yeah, so therefore when people are saying to you: "Oh, just pull yourself together and sort it out",
you're battling chemicals in the brain.
So obviously alcohol's like a quick release, but it's got the flip side, hasn't it?
I found that if I'd gone on a night out, I would wake up in the middle of the night
and my anxiety would be sky high. Heart palpitations, flashing images.
The obsessions would be...the alcohol had taken it away in the first instance
but the next day they really became more intense.
Are you aware of this in others now, do you look out for it?
Yeah, I think I do actually.
Do you ever bring it up?
I think I have before, yeah. But I try not to be patronising and, you know.
Well it's difficult territory isn't it, talking to somebody about their drinking.
I think I'd just, maybe take them aside and say: "Look, are you OK?
Is there a reason that you feel drinking this much is good for you?"
I've had that before. I felt really offended by it, because obviously if you're drinking
to cover something up and someone's questioning why you're drinking, I felt like,
offended and you know like I'd been kind of found out, in a way.
It's kind of a tricky one without offending someone.
If you do feel like you might be using alcohol to cope, what can you do about it?
Very often we don't realise something's becoming a habit. Maybe keep a little drinks diary.
Just day-to-day, record what you've drunk, under what circumstances
and maybe what was going on in your head at the time, and then you'll start to see patterns.
So if you're thinking about breaking the habit, what do you do, just stop?
I mean I think you need to take a bit of advice.
If you're using alcohol to cope with a mental health problem you've got two issues there,
you've got the alcohol issue and you've got the mental health problem,
and you can't deal with one in isolation from the other
because they're fuelling one another. So what you need to do is