Every Time You Get Drunk This Is What Happens To Your Body And Your Brain. It is quite unlikely that a person has no idea of what happens to a person who gets drunk. But making such a statement would be quite an exaggeration. Yes, agreed that many people know what happens to a drunk person from the outside - how they behave - but how many of us know what exactly happens on the inside? Not many.
So let's find out.
Anything you drink slithers down your esophagus, into the stomach, and then into the small intestines.
Consider them the waiting room en route to being drunk.
Your circulatory system is pretty speedy. So when it picks up the alcohol, it moves it around pretty rapidlyleading to you feeling drunk quite quickly.
Most of the alcohol get absorbed by the food in the stomach, and then digested and absorbed by the walls of the intestine in the form of useful energy. But there is some alcohol that manages to flow into the small intestine without getting absorbed by anything else. The walls of the intestine are very fine and porous, and so the alcohol gets absorbed into the blood stream and is carried around the whole body quite rapidly by the blood.
Not all the alcohol that goes in gets us drunk. It's only the portion of it that gets into our blood and comes back up into our systems that get us going wild.
The alcohol has undergone very little processing by your body at this pointthat's actually how breathalyzers work.
They're not measuring how much alcohol you put down your throat, they're measuring how much alcohol is seeping back into your lungs and then from your lungs into your circulatory system, hence the term "blood alcohol."
The liver is the detoxification centre of the body's blood. So it is busy detoxifying the blood that has got alcohol in it.
The liver tries to break the alcohol down into useful components that the body can use. But in the process, it creates a harmful byproduct called acetaldehyde - and this is what's the real culprit of our worst hangovers.
The next stop for the blood is the kidney, which picks up the leftover alcohol from the detoxed blood. That's why drinking causes you to pee so much.
The kidney's job is to direct the waste material to the bladder. But because there's harmful alcohol there now, the body needs to excrete it, in other words, the body needs to create an urge to pee. And so, the bladder is hydrated by bringing in water from other parts of the body. This is also why one gets headaches the next morning - it is because of the lack of water in the body that pains the brain.
Alcohol messes up the neurotransmitters that run around our brains and direct our conscious and subconscious emotions, actions, and motor skills. That's why a drunk person's speech becomes sluggish, and he loses balance. And that's also what cause the other physical abnormalities that are associated with a drunk person.
The cerebral cortex at the front of the brain simultaneously gets depressed by alcohol. Slowing things down there means less thinking clearly and less inhibitions to what you do and say.
It also means that your capability to process incoming information from your eyes, ears, and other sensors is stunted.
Wondering what causes a drunk to lose control over his inhibitions? Well, alcohol affects the hypothalamus and pituitary gland, which are responsible for hormone control. With them down, the hormones go crazy. At the same time, the dopamine released keeps our pleasure centres happy. And that wraps up the entire process that happens within the human body in the presence of alcohol.
