The Relationship Between Alcohol & Mental Health

No matter the reasons behind feeling anger when drinking alcohol, such behavior can be harmful. By consistently becoming angry or belligerent when you drink, you put yourself and others at risk. Therefore, seeking a solution for alcohol-related aggression is essential for your future health and safety. But the very elements of AA that attract so many — spirituality and a group setting where you’re expected to freely share your most private thoughts and emotions — repel others.

Combined with alcoholism, it can be very dangerous to your physical health as well. One allows you to escape from your other emotions, while the other allows you to escape further into anger. In a phrase, anger and alcohol abuse can feed off of each other if they both go unchecked. In fact, letting go of the acknowledging and dealing with anger is a crucial aspect of the Twelve Steps from Alcoholics Anonymous.

Reduce Your Alcohol Consumption

BetterHelp offers affordable mental health care via phone, video, or live-chat. Cocaine, amphetamines, synthetic drugs, and nicotine have stimulating intoxication effects that produce energy and alertness. Alcohol-related aggression has manifold social and neurobiological causes. As a whole, alcohol use naturally heightens emotions, and for people who are predisposed to aggressive tendencies, it can quickly make bad scenarios worse. Anger is an intense emotion you feel when something has gone wrong or someone has wronged you. Aggression refers to a range of behaviors that can result in both physical and psychological harm to yourself, others, or objects in the environment.

• When being treated without stress as a factor, alcoholism is treated with therapy, counseling, detox, and support groups.
• In a phrase, anger and alcohol abuse can feed off of each other if they both go unchecked.
• In other situations, alcohol is the main catalyst for anger and violence.
• Learning to understand how stress works and what triggers it can help you manage stress.
• Chronic alcohol intake increases the metabolites of serotonin in the raphe nuclei area, however reduces 5-HT2A protein levels in the mice cortex, indicating reduced serotonergic activity (Popova et al., 2020).

If this guide has revealed anything, it’s that the link between anger and alcoholism should be taken very seriously. If you find that that you are unable to control your drinking, your anger or neither – it may be time to seek out professional help to address alcohol depression and anger these issues. The best way to approach getting help is either through support groups or individual addiction counseling. Thankfully, there are a wide range of options when it comes to seeking out help for both anger issues and alcohol addiction.

Alcohol, Aggression, and Violence: Psychiatric Comorbidities

AA meetings are typically open to anyone who wants to attend, and offer a nonjudgmental and supportive environment to talk through the effects alcoholism has had on your personal life. It may be a great first step on the path to addressing how alcoholism has made you angry  – and vice versa. Aggression is promoted both by the cognitive deficits arising in connection with acute or chronic alcohol use and by prior experience of violence in particular situations where alcohol was drunk. On the other hand, alcohol abuse and dependence together constitute the second most commonly diagnosed cause of suicide (15–43%). Gene–environment interactions affecting the serotonergic and other neurotransmitter systems play an important role. Potential (but not yet adequately validated) therapeutic approaches involve reinforcing cognitive processes or pharmacologically modulating serotonergic neurotransmission (and other target processes).

Exercises being of any help, especially if alcohol is a factor, please reach out for help. Emotions themselves are harmless, even intensely uncomfortable ones such as anger, grief, or hopelessness. What gives emotions their power https://ecosoberhouse.com/article/10-useful-sobriety-sayings-that-can-help/ is how we process them, the stories we tell ourselves about them, and most importantly, how we react to them. If exercise or mediation isn’t your thing, you might want to consider working through your anger in a written way.

What Are Some Healthy Alternatives to Drinking to Deal with Stress?

If you or someone you care for are struggling with alcohol, reach out for help. Do so as soon as possible, because the longer unhealthy drinking habits continue, the more likely it is that dependence and addiction will develop. Either way, abusing alcohol on top of living with PTSD makes both problems worse, and exponentially increases a person’s likelihood of either inflicting or suffering from violence. “Child maltreatment” is defined as any form of physical, emotional, or sexual abuse, as well negligence or exploitation that results in actual or potential harm to the child’s health and/or well-being. There is an extremely close relationship between alcohol and intimate partner violence.

With the right kind of help, you can put anger and alcoholism behind you and move toward a happier, healthier life. Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is one of the leading causes of the global burden of disease and injury (WHO), despite the continuous discovery of novel pharmacotherapeutic agents (Pakri Mohamed et al., 2018). Various factors such as environmental, social, situational, and cultural context have distinctive consequences toward substance use and its effects on individuals (Latkin et al., 2017).

The individuals who had higher mental rigidity had lower empathy and perception of the severity of IPV. Additionally, they reported higher alcohol use and hostile sexism than those lower in mental rigidity. Specifically, it found that problematic drinkers may be more likely to attend to aggressogenic stimuli while intoxicated, and that is, they were more likely to experience certain cues as aggressive. In addition to receiving guidance from experienced professionals, support groups are effective for building relationships. Recovering from an alcohol use disorder can be isolating, especially when you consider how widespread drinking culture is in the United States.

Maladaptive reasons for drinking, such as drinking as a coping mechanism (e18), and the assumption that aggression is an acceptable form of social interaction (e19), also play a major role. Overall, exhibiting one or a combination of the above factors can increase your chances of becoming angry when intoxicated. Typically, anger will lead to aggression unless something happens to resolve the situation.