Alcohol Use and Emotions: The Problem With Drinking to Numb Emotional Pain

People drink alcohol for different reasons, and if you’re doing it to numb emotional pain there are benefits to taking naltrexone but more is needed to address what’s causing the negative feelings.

What You’ll Learn:

• How emotions are felt when you’re drinking alcohol.

• Why drinking can make emotional pain worse.

• Factors that affect how you experience alcohol emotionally.

• What aspects of drinking naltrexone helps with.

• Why drinking to manage emotional pain or trauma requires additional treatment.

• How to get a complete treatment plan that addresses cravings, dependence and emotions that contribute to unhealthy alcohol use.

Our team of clinicians that prescribe naltrexone has heard every reason there is for drinking. It’s common for people to start drinking socially in college and continue drinking more regularly over the years. There are people who have one or two drinks a night to relax and want to dial it back so they aren’t drinking every day. Some people found work happy hours led to overindulging to the point that it hurt their productivity.

But a fair number of people start drinking alcohol to manage emotional pain. The initial euphoric buzz from alcohol’s dopamine release helps to ease the mind. As more alcohol is consumed it can get easier to forget worries.

The problem with this type of self-medicating is it provides temporary relief, and it doesn’t address the cause behind the emotional discomfort. What’s worse is that once the alcohol’s effects have worn off, emotional pain can be worse than it was before.

Someone can get caught in an unhealthy cycle of using alcohol regularly to numb the pain, eventually developing alcohol dependence that can lead to addiction.

How Emotions Are Felt When You’re Drinking Alcohol

Alcohol has profound effects on parts of the brain that are connected to emotions. People feel like alcohol “takes the edge off” because at first it will make a person feel:

• Less anxious

• Less self-conscious

• Emotionally numb or detached

• More socially connected

• Temporarily relieved

These feelings are the result of reward pathway neurons being altered by alcohol, particularly GABA, dopamine, serotonin and glutamate. Ramping up these brain chemicals creates a euphoric, relaxed feeling that provides temporary relief. For many, painful emotions are numbed the more they drink.

The result can be someone developing an emotional dependency on alcohol in addition to a physical dependency.

One of the downsides is that alcohol actually inhibits the brain’s ability to properly process emotions to resolve them. It can delay, distort and intensify emotions. When this happens you’re more likely to ruminate, act with emotional impulsivity, respond with anger and experience heightened sensitivity. All this happens while your emotional resilience is reduced.

Factors That Affect How You Experience Alcohol Emotionally

While experts agree that no one should use alcohol to numb emotional pain, exactly how a person responds emotionally can vary. The factors that cause variation include:

• Genetics

• Trauma history

• Attachment style

• Current mental health

• Amount of alcohol consumed

• Drinking frequency

• Whether the person is drinking alone or socially

• Medications

• Sleep quality

• Stress levels

There isn’t a universal response to alcohol that everyone experiences. While it’s common for alcohol to numb emotions, for some people it can actually intensify them.

Why Drinking Can Make Emotional Pain Worse

The problem with alcohol is that the emotional dulling effect is short-lived. As soon as the effects of the alcohol wear off the emotional pain will be back and harder to deal with than before. You’ll feel emotionally worse the next day, which makes you want to drink again, even if you know it will end with more emotional pain in the long run.

When you use alcohol to cope emotionally it leads to:

• Worse anxiety

• More depressive symptoms

• Emotional volatility

• Reduced stress tolerance

• Sleep disruption that affects mood

• Impaired relationship functioning

There are a number of reasons why long-term frequent drinking has these negative emotional effects:

Suppressing, Not Processing Emotions

Alcohol suppresses what you’re feeling. Emotions may be dulled, but everything is still there. Unless someone actually processes what they are feeling, the painful emotions will continue to cause problems because nothing is actually resolved.

Additional Negative Emotions

It’s common to feel negative emotions like embarrassment, shame and guilt about drinking alcohol. It gets layered on top of the emotional pain that’s already being felt. This will only make things harder to deal with when you’re sober.

Emotional Regulation is More Difficult

Continued use of alcohol doesn’t just add negative emotions. It also makes it more difficult to regulate your emotions. After repeated uses of alcohol to manage emotions, the brain begins to rely on alcohol for emotional regulation. It’s as if you subconsciously lose confidence in your ability to do it on your own.

It’s a Crutch That Delays Getting Help

If you drink to not think, that could be a crutch that keeps you from seeking out proper help. The temporary relief you get from drinking alcohol makes it bearable enough to continue on without actually addressing the emotions that are being felt.

Negative Rebound Effect When Alcohol Levels Drop

As the alcohol leaves your system, you’ll likely experience a negative rebound effect. The blood alcohol level drops and anxiety increases, stress ramps up and mood declines. All this makes the negative thoughts come back even stronger than before.

What Aspects of Emotional Alcohol Use Naltrexone Can Help With

People that are using alcohol to cope with emotional pain may recognize that it is an unhealthy coping mechanism and start taking naltrexone to get drinking under control. At first it may seem like the naltrexone isn’t working if the urge to drink is still there. But rest assured the naltrexone is doing its job.

You’re still benefiting from naltrexone even though it may not feel like it because naltrexone curbs the physical cravings for alcohol. It inhibits the opioid system from releasing dopamine while drinking so that you don’t get the buzz. This makes drinking alcohol less desirable and rewires the neural reward pathways so that there isn’t a connection between alcohol and feeling relief. But that rewiring process takes time.

That’s the first part of getting drinking under control. As noted earlier, repeated use often leads to a physical dependence on alcohol, which is what naltrexone helps to correct.

But the urge to drink can also be psychological. The desire to numb the emotional pain is separate from the physical dependence, though both contribute to unhealthy drinking. Once the neurological effects of alcohol aren’t there to mask things, the person is left feeling the difficult emotions.

That can leave a person wanting to feel the effects of alcohol and actually frustrated that naltrexone is doing what it’s supposed to. Or they may think that naltrexone isn’t working since they still want to drink.

Getting All the Help You Need to Quit Drinking Alcohol to Cope With Emotions

Those who are drinking to mask emotions must also address the psychological pain that motivated the unhealthy alcohol use. Combining therapy with naltrexone is what most people in this situation find that they need to fully address the dependence.

It may feel overwhelming, but getting the help you need is easier than you may think. At Choose Your Horizon we understand that you’re dealing with a lot, and our goal is to help you get to a better place.

You can find the resources you need through our telehealth platform. We have qualified clinicians that can prescribe naltrexone medication online and have it shipped directly to you. Our Connect program makes it easy to find therapists that specialize in alcohol use disorders and a variety of mental health conditions. There’s also an app to help you track your progress and get the motivation you need to keep making improvements day after day.

You don’t have to rely on alcohol to suppress painful emotions that are keeping you from living a full, happy life. There are solutions and you can get support every step of the way.

If you’d like to know more about naltrexone or need a prescriber that provides more support, take the Alcohol Use Assessment. From there you can schedule a time to talk with a caring clinician about creating a treatment plan that will fully address the contributing factors for unhealthy alcohol use.