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How Alcohol Causes Depression
It has been proven that alcohol causes depression. Depression is ongoing feelings of hopelessness, sadness, unhappiness, and causes a bleak outlook on life. And when you are suffering from depression you can't be at the top of your game. It is hard to function in high gear when you are fatigued and are experiencing a general lack of interest, also caused by depression. It may also be important to point out here that depression causes anxiety. So many who suffer from depression will also have episodes of anxiety.
Since alcohol is a known depressant, it stands to reason people with depression shouldn't drink. This applies to people suffering from manic depression as well. Studies have shown that doctors miss diagnosing correctly roughly 65% of people who are depressed.
The depression caused by alcohol actually starts with your physical body. First, alcohol lowers the serotonin and norepinephrine levels in your brain. These chemicals are the chemicals that give you your good feelings - a feeling of well being, and they help you to feel normal. The anti-depressant drugs were designed build these chemicals back up. After a long drinking career, since alcohol can take these brain chemicals down to ground zero, it can take a long time for the anti-depressants to bring these brain chemical levels back to where they need to be.
Alcohol also temporarily nullifies the effects of stress hormones. This is why after drinking you feel worse than ever, because alcohol depresses your nervous system and your brain. A study was done that followed people who were only drinking one drink a day and after these people stopped drinking for 3 months, their depression scores improved. And that is only at one drink a day, so it is easy to imagine the impact the kind of volume an alcoholic takes in every day can have.
Alcohol all but wipes out every vitamin in your system after a drinking session. A folic acid deficiency will contribute the brain aging and in older people, dementia. The folic acid deficiency also contributes to overall depression. Further, the alcohol in your system also breaks down and speeds the elimination of antioxidants in your blood. Antioxidants are critically important to our health because antioxidants fight free radicals and free radical damage causes diseases and aging. Our immune system actually creates the antioxidants which then neutralize the free radicals.
Alcohol can activate a gene that has been linked to depression and other mental issues. The result of this activation can cause not only depression, but seizures, and manic depressive episodes as well.
Although the majority of problem drinkers associate depression with their mental and emotional states, the fact is this kind of depression originates in your physical body's response to drinking alcohol.
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This probably came from here, but found it on another site. Good for a reread.
When you think it is the winter time blues, it could be your disease raising it's ugly head. Could be some of both. Always a good time to go back to basics.
When you find yourself grousing someone else out or your beating up on yourself, it is time to go to a meeting and pick up the phone and talk to your sponsor and complain to him/her. A sure sign for me is when I find myself cussing in what my mother use to call French. When a good Christian lady says, "Pardon my French, you know it is bad."
