Liquid Courage Promises

Anyone who has ever heard an inebriated person make promises knows the truth about what science is now proving. According to Wired Science last week "Emptied Flask Makes for Empty Promises."

It may seem obvious to most of us that drunken promises don’t mean much, but apparently two German researchers weren’t so sure. Using 60 undergrads as guinea pigs, they designed a randomized control trial to test the effects of alcohol on a person’s commitment to unrealistic goals.

“People may indicate being determined to reach their goals after having consumed alcohol,” wrote the researchers in the August edition of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, “but once sober again, they do not walk the talk.”

The researchers set up a fancy study with a placebo to show what happens. After four drinks they asked both groups to make commitments. Four drinks, to an alcoholic, is barely a good evening out. But to non-alcoholics it is the point past which you don't like to go very often. It definitely puts you into the binge drinking category and almost certainly into too drunk to drive.

Well, in no surprise to me and anyone who has ever worked with alcoholics, the results were just what you would expect.

[D]runk people ignore reality and think they can do just about anything, a condition scientists have aptly labeled “alcohol myopia.”

The researchers say their results can help explain why people who don’t have high hopes for success are more likely to abuse alcohol.

In other words people who are low in hope use alcohol to find it. And it seems, they have as much success as those who try to find liquid courage. They don't talk about any of the possible reasons in the article at Wired Science but those who study the physical effects of alcohol know the easy reason for this.

The first place alcohol affects is the "higher" brain processes- thinking and judgment, rational decision making, and the ability to use logic in a logical way. The result is what we often call the lack of "inhibitions" that keep us on an even, sane path with at least some semblance of logic.

One of the difficulties is that the more this happens, the more people seem to give over the rational control to the non-rational. In other words, it appears that the illogical aspect that alcohol initiates actually becomes in certain settings and situations the "Normal" or "Default" approach. Hence the levels of denial and minimizing that are symptoms of alcoholism/addiction. Hence the inability to stop even when things are going south more quickly than we would want.

As I have said before, though, one of the aspects of recovery is that we can learn to be able to utilize the logical processes again. The brain re-wires itself, so to speak, to allow the rational parts to be able to seriously and eventually successfully, challenge the illogic. AA for example begins to work on this at first by getting people to change their behavior- to act their way into a new way of thinking. (Keep coming back- it works.)

Cognitive behavioral training works on the thinking process itself. (as does AA with its Twelve Steps and group support.) Cognitive behavioral work helps people to catch the illogical thinking based on the lack of inhibitions, to slow down the time from thinking of using to actually using.

Put together these two are probably the best opportunities to develop long-term sobriety. In spite of what critics on both sides say, they are no mutually exclusive. In fact the 12-steps are a behavior modification program based on a cognitive model developed before cognitive therapy was in any kind of use.

In short. it does work. And a thanks to the researchers who over and over again prove what many of us see anecdotally which gives us all a sense of relief that we may know what we are talking about.