Take our Alcohol Use Test

Find a therapist to overcome addiction

Alcohol may provide short-term stress relief but it leaves stressors unresolved.

Drinking to cope can impair your brain’s ability to recover from and adapt to future stress.

Relying on alcohol to manage stress eventually creates its own unique and ongoing stress.

If you've ever watched Grey's Anatomy, you know the scene. Whether it was a patient dying, a surgery going wrong, or someone's marriage falling apart, nearly every emotionally devastating episode ends with the main characters gathering at Joe's Bar, decompressing over a few drinks. The unspoken message comes through the screen loud and clear: “Alcohol helps decompress stress.”

Drinking to cope with stress has been a normalized practice in our culture, whether it’s in TV shows or in real life. In my own life, it was once my go-to response whenever I felt stressed by anything that happened in life. Whether it was an approaching deadline, an unexpected bill, an unpleasant argument, or even the dirty dishes piling up in the sink at the end of the day, my default was to reach for the bottle. “Thank goodness for the drink; I wouldn’t know how to handle all this stress if it wasn’t for it,” I’d think to myself.

Now, looking back, I wish I had known sooner that while a drink can help make the stress feel more manageable in the moment, over time, it can keep us stuck in what I have come to call the stress-drinking loop.

In this post, I want to share with you the triple compound effect alcohol can have on our lives and how it........

© Psychology Today