Alcohol Is A Depressant

Hangovers are the results of hormones in the brain changing in response to the alcohol consumption. Drinking also leads to changes in a person's blood glucose levels, and alcohol tends to leave a person dehydrated. In addition, exhaustion can make the symptoms of a hangover much worse, and people who drink on successive days may find they are more tired than usual.

Often, the alcohol will bring out a violent temper and often, alcoholics abuse, physically and mentally, their friends and family. Drinking makes the drinker feel he is more confident. The drinker thinks he is in control, even if a little high, and he might get behind the wheel of his car and go for a drive. Drunk driving is deadly. Hundreds of thousands of people get killed every year due to drunk driving.(Castro 60) Other physical effects of drinking are vomiting, passing out and sometimes, if enough alcohol is consumed over a long enough period of time, or if mixed with other drugs, death.

"After drinking people usually feel pleasure and become talkative at first. These feelings are usually replaced by drowsiness as the alcohol is eliminated from the body, and the drinker may then become withdrawn. This pattern often encourages people to drink more to keep the buzz going." ( Net Biz Mentor ). When people get like that they usually get a little bolder and want to do normal tasks and routines like driving a motorized vehicle. The effects of alcohol result in poor coordination, slurred speech, double vision, decrease of self-control, lost of consciousness and maybe even death.

Alcohol impairs judgment, memory, concentration and coordination, as well as inducing extreme mood swings and emotional

Let’s start with alcohol. Alcohol fits in the category of a depressant. Depressants are drugs, such as alcohol, that reduces neural activity and slow body functions. Many people confuse alcohol as a stimulant because it can cause people to act more hyper but low amounts of alcohol relaxes the drinker by slowing the nervous system activity. Larger amounts of

As state in our class notes, “All drugs impact the nervous system and specific neurotransmitters; additionally, whenever alcohol is ingested, the neurotransmitter dopamine is initially released. Dopamine provides a feeling of euphoria as it is release into the nucleus accumbens. Next, alcohol looks for a specific receptor site to bind to. It is displacing the neurotransmitter which binds to the receptor site. Alcohol enhances the inhibitory effects of the neurotransmitter GABA by mimicking it causing sluggishness.” (class notes) Alcohol can alter the limbic system such as the orbitofrontal cortex. It is a part of the

Alcohol is both a depressant and a poison. A depressant is a substance that acts to depress, or slow down.

Depressants “depress” activity in the central nervous system. Depressants lowers your body basic functions as well as your neural activities. Alcohol a conscious altering drug slows down neural processing, disturbs REM sleep which is one of the five stages of sleep. Alcohol also lowers your heart rate, reaction time, as well as your ability to form memories.

Alcohol results in unstable movement, and it changes an individual’s awareness and doesn’t let them think clearly and distorts their judgment, black outs and impairs their vision and hearing. Depressants, back in the day were used as a sleep aid. An overconsumption of alcohol can lead to the substance becoming a depressant. There are many different forms and types of alcohol but the ethanol is what causes an individual to become addicted to drinking. The effects that alcohol has on the central nervous system starts When alcohol arrives in the brain it binds with the GABA receptors that are in charge of transmitting information from each synapse so it prevents the GABA from following through with transmitting information. And it also fixes itself with glutamate, thus causing the glutamate to not recycle through the cell. This slows everything down leading the individual to react slowly to things and causes decreased cognitive function, decreased reflexes, and decreased coordination. Which then causes the individual to have impaired judgment and decision making due the brains receptor sites being blocked by the alcohol (Sullivan, Harris, & Pfefferbaum, 2010). The larger the dose of alcohol the more extreme the effects are. With a larger dose of alcohol, the individual has very poor fine motor skills and is emotional and seizures are likely. The rest of the alcohol goes through the liver and metabolizes breaking down the toxicity within your body but the more alcohol that the individual drinks the harder it is on their liver which can also cause liver failure (Capuzzi & Stauffer,

Alcohol interferes with the brains communication pathways such as motor loss, memory loss, and impaired judgement.

Alcohol is classed as a depressant meaning that it slows down a vital functions that may lead

Alcohol is a depressant drug; it slows the activity of the brain and the spinal cord. Beer, ale, wine, and hard liquor

The effects associated with alcohol are produced by the ethanol in the alcohol. The severity of these effects is reflected by the concentration of alcohol in an individual’s blood, which is dictated by the amount of alcohol ingested, the volume of blood, the individual’s metabolism, and amount of time since ingestion. In large doses, alcohol acts as a depressant of the central nervous-system. A blood alcohol level of 0.1% affects some of the motor areas of the brain associated with speech, balance and manual dexterity. A blood alcohol level of 0.2% depresses all motor functions and the area concerned with emotions is depressed. At a blood alcohol level of 0.45% the entire section of the brain that handles perception is depressed and the individual becomes comatose. At a blood alcohol level of 0.7% the parts of the brain that control the heartbeat and breathing are depressed and the individual

Alcohol is a drug, just like any other type of drug it affects it affects the central nervous system (CNS). According to Banerjee (2014), “Alcohol interacts with several neurotransmitter system in the brain’s reward and stress circuit. These neural circuits include the dopaminergic, serotonergic, glutamatergic and GABaergic neural circuits. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter primarily involved in a circuit called the mesolimbic system, this circuit affects incentive motivation, how an organism reacts to incentive changes in the environment.” (p.22). Dopamine plays a key role in our reinforcement and motivational behavior, and it also an important neurotransmitter involved in reward mechanism in the brain. Chastain (2006) states, “ administration

Alcohol affects brain chemistry causing 2 neurotransmitters to malfunction. (“excitatory” neurotransmitters and “inhibitory” neurotransmitters) these Neurotransmitters show your emotions and behavior. Alcohol acts as a depressant in this way. Alcohol also releases dopamine in your body, this is like the reward center of the brain. By drinking alcohol, the brain thinks it is happy because of the release of dopamine however it also enhances the feeling of depression. It affects the cerebral cortex, the processing Centre of the brain impairing speed and edge of