Can A Hangover Give You Anxiety?

Experts explain that post-party panic.

When you drink too much on a night out, you might fully expect the headache, exhaustion, dry mouth and general malaise. But there’s one less discussed symptom that frequently accompanies a hangover: anxiety.

In one 2012 study, 7.4 percent of those experiencing a hangover also suffered anxiety as a symptom. Another study showed heavy drinking “lowers mood, disrupts sleep, increases anxiety” and produces “physical” and “emotional” symptoms the morning after. Research published in 2015 also revealed many social drinkers experience emotions like shame, guilt and embarrassment following a drinking episode.

Why are the worries and emotions so hard to control during a hangover? Researchers are still figuring that out.

“You’d think we would totally understand the hangover at this point, but we don’t,” said Aaron White, senior scientific adviser to the director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Excessive drinking has been chronicled for centuries, even appearing in texts like the Bible, he noted.

Still, there’s plenty of speculation on why exactly you’re anxious in the aftermath of a drinking binge. Here are some leading theories:

Alcohol leads to poor sleep, triggering anxiety.

There are likely several reasons your body and mind feel so terrible, White said. Part of the problem is sleep. What you typically do when you’re out drinking, like going to bed late, sleeping in strange places and other “out of routine” behaviors, disrupts your regular sleep patterns.

“You go out drinking, you go home, you probably immediately pass out, and then you wake up four to five hours later feeling terrible,” White explained.

Alcohol can alter circadian rhythms, keep you from entering rapid eye movement sleep ― the last stage of sleep ― and lead to more bathroom trips throughout the night. And according to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, research has shown poor sleep can trigger anxiety, and vice versa.

Alcohol disrupts the brain’s delicate balance.

According to White, your brain is always trying to maintain homeostasis ― stability ― in its processes.

“Emotionally, there’s a balance too,” he said. “You have a normal level of anxiety, a normal positive affect and so on.”

When you consume alcohol, a depressant, White said, the substance “starts to dampen brain activity.” When your drink impacts the amygdala, the area of the brain responsible for emotional responses, you may feel more relaxed and at ease ― for a while, anyway.

Eventually, the alcohol exits your system and your brain will want to regulate its functioning, all the way back to your personal baseline.

“The alcohol pulls the amygdala in one direction,” he said. “But then the alcohol wears off, your brain starts to pull back to establish its normal, and sometimes it overshoots in the opposite direction.”

So, instead of feeling chill and calm, you suddenly feel nervous and stressed. Since the amygdala is also involved in other cognitive functions, White explained, you may also suffer impaired memory and attention problems in addition to increased anxiety.

A hangover causes you to feel sick and sensitive.

In general, a hangover makes you feel ill and off-kilter.

“Research shows cytokine levels in the body change after you drink,” White said. Cytokines are the body’s immune messengers, responsible for anti-inflammatory and inflammatory responses.


“This tells us [a] hangover involves disrupting the cytokine pathways and disrupting your immune response,” White said. “And a hangover looks a lot like ‘sick behavior.’” With those next-day effects, you may experience malaise, fatigue, vomiting or mood changes, including anxiety and depression. “These sick behaviors are your brain’s way of saying to retreat and heal,” White said.

Those prone to anxiety may also be more prone to drinking in excess, especially those who feel they need alcohol to loosen up at social gatherings.

“Because alcohol has sedative properties, it leaves you feeling the opposite the next day,” said Scott Bea, a psychiatrist at the Cleveland Clinic.

With sustained use, Bea said, alcohol can lead to a drop in the levels of serotonin, the “calming hormone” that may help reduce anxiety. You’ll also experience a drop in blood sugar with the drinking, as well as dehydration.

“Those with anxiety are very sensitive to physiological changes,” he said. “When the heart rate is elevated, when the body feels weird, it can set off a panic attack.”

So what to do?

Once you feel the nerves hit during a hangover, it’s nearly futile to stop the anxiety.

“Learn mindfulness,” Bea said. “Watch your thoughts and sensations rather than react to them.” The less you try to do about the panic, the more likely it is to go away.

And don’t forget, when you’re hung over, the body is exhibiting sick behavior because the brain wants you to rest.

“Alcohol is a toxin,” White said. “It’s one we enjoy, but a toxin to the body nonetheless. … When you feel that malaise and illness, your brain wants you to lay low. There’s little you can do except make yourself comfortable.”

Of course, if you’re prone to anxiety or experience it frequently with a hangover, sticking within “reasonable alcohol limits” is always a smart idea, Bea said. Drinking less is the best way to stop post-party panic from wrecking your day.

Origin : https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/why-you-feel-anxious-when-youre-hungover_us_5afdbc20e4b0a59b4e01c7af

Your Stomach Bug Probably Wasn’t Caused by the Last Thing You Ate

Which food can you no longer enjoy because you once threw it up? For me, it’s the pad Thai from Noodles & Company. Sorry, I know, that’s not where you get good pad Thai, but in the small central Illinois town where I attended college, Noodles & Company was a culinary highlight. Over the ten years since that memorably gory illness, I have told anyone who so much as mentions Noodles never to order the pad Thai, certain that to do so would be to incur the same fate. But now, a story in the New York Times tells me it probably wasn’t even the pad Thai that made me sick after all. According to gastroenterologist and Duke professor Dr. Deborah Fisher, “People tend to blame the last thing they ate, but it’s probably the thing before the last thing they ate.” (But what did I eat before I ate pad Thai sometime in the fall of 2006? Scientists may never know.)

Digestion patterns and timelines vary person to person, so if you want to know what you ate that made you sick, you have to get familiar with your intestines. Gastroenterologists like Fisher recommend an extremely gross experiment in which you eat corn and “[watch] for when the indigestible kernels appear in your stool.” If you see the corn kernels 36 hours later, for example, you’ll know what to blame the next time you suffer through what the CDC euphemistically calls an “acute gastrointestinal event”: whatever you ate 36 hours before. Something to try over the long weekend, perhaps.

It’s also important to remember that it isn’t always food that’s directly responsible for these, uh, “events.” Medications used to treat mental illness, allergies, and even acid reflux could be to blame, as could intense stress. Dr. Scott Gabbard, a gastroenterologist at the Cleveland Clinic, told the Times: “We’re starting to see more cyclic vomiting syndrome called cannabis hyperemesis because THC content of marijuana now is so high.” Cannabis hyperemesis! Put that way, seemingly endless barfing doesn’t sound quite so bad. “Cyclic vomiting syndrome” is another story.

Origin : https://www.thecut.com/2017/06/your-stomach-bug-wasnt-caused-by-the-last-thing-you-ate.html?utm_campaign=sou&utm_source=fb&utm_medium=s1

Exercise Does Not Necessarily Help With Weight Loss

We all know that in order to lose weight, we need to do more exercise to burn more calories, and eat controlled portions of the right foods. But it could be that too much of a good thing – in this case physical activity – might not be as advantageous as many had thought. Research suggests that as exercise increases, our bodies adapt and counteract the effects, meaning that they end up burning as many calories as those who are more sedentary.

When obese people increase their physical activity, it is often matched with significant weight loss, but this often declines after a few months. Even when some then increase the amount of exercise they’re doing, the pounds no longer seem to shift. What the researchers in this study claim is that there is a big jump in energy expenditure, or calories burned, from sedentary people to moderate exercisers, but no such shift in energy expenditure when people then participated in even more intense exercise.

Interestingly, this might also help to explain another curiosity noticed by biologists studying how hunter-gatherers’ bodies expend energy, as they lead incredibly active lives walking long distances and doing hard physical work. “Despite these high activity levels, we [find] that they [have] similar daily energy expenditures to people living more sedentary, modernized lifestyles in the United States and Europe,” explains Herman Pontzer, coauthor of the study published in Current Biology, in a statement. “That was a real surprise, and it got me thinking about the link between activity and energy expenditure.”

To examine this, Pontzer and his team measured the daily energy expenditure of over 300 men and women from five countries, for seven days. The data showed how there was a weak increase in energy expenditure when people first start on an activity regime, and that there is a “sweet spot” during moderate exercise where people are burning on average around 200 calories more than they would have been without this level of exercise. But they found that above this level of activity, they had nothing to show for it in terms of an increase in energy expenditure, as the body adapts to the extra work.

“Exercise is really important for your health,” continues Pontzer. “That’s the first thing I mention to anyone asking about the implications of this work for exercise. There is tons of evidence that exercise is important for keeping our bodies and minds healthy, and this work does nothing to change that message. What our work adds is that we also need to focus on diet, particularly when it comes to managing our weight and preventing or reversing unhealthy weight gain.”

The researchers say that their study just goes to show that we need to stop instantly assuming that more physical activity means more calories burned, as the relationship is not that simple.

Origin : http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/more-exercise-does-not-necessarily-mean-more-calories-burnt/