Life Features

Most of us have experienced the effects of having one to many drinks, but do you know what exactly makes you feel drunk?

Most of us know what it’s like to be drunk and we all know that it happens when we’ve had a few too many drinks. But what exactly goes on inside our bodies that makes us drunk?

Alcohol is a mood altering substance that affects your nervous system by slowing down the messages that your nerves send to your brain, and visa versa. Unsurprisingly, the effects are intensified the more you drink.

This is the reason why some people tend to get a bit livelier when they’ve had a few drinks more than everyone else, because alcohol hits the part of the brain responsible for self-control – some call it ‘Dutch Courage’.

However, the more you drink, the slower your reaction time becomes and as you continue to drink you may become uncoordinated or unsteady on your feet. This is around the time that you’ll start slurring your speech, knocking over your friend’s drinks and you may even start seeing double.

Why exactly does it happen? How does an alcoholic drink make you become so uncoordinated?

According to our mates over at drinkaware.ie, it’s all down to ethanol. You see, ethanol is the intoxicating part of your pint, your spirits or your wine, and it’s because the molecules that make up ethanol are so small that they can actually pass in between the gaps in your brain cells.

Once the alcohol has made it to your brain it interferes with the messages that it’s trying to send to the rest of your body, so that’s why you end up falling down three small steps, because to you they look like three massive mountains.

It gets dangerous if you begin to drink too much, too fast. If you have more than one standard drink per hour, then alcohol will flood the brain which can severely affect vital body functions.

There are some warning signs to watch out for if you think you, or one of your mates, is getting drunk:

You feel giddy
You start to lose the thread of what you're saying
You feel unsteady on your feet
You start seeing double

To avoid getting too drunk on a night out, make sure to eat something before you start drinking and pace yourself with a non-alcoholic drink in between each alcoholic one. At least this way you’ll be giving your body more time to break down the alcohol that’s already in your system.