Dr. Sarah Wakeman
speaker
484 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard May 2025
Dr. Sarah Wakeman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Yeah, you'll see a lot of really quick things. So when you'll sleep better and feel more restored, you may lose weight. There's a lot of calories in alcohol. So if your goal is to lose weight, you're drinking a ton of liquid calories. So you may find that that's better.
You may find that your exercise capacity goes up because you're resting more and you're not having hangovers and you're able to exercise in a way that feels different. You may find that you're less irritable and more present for your loved ones, that your mood is actually better over time. Your skin might look better. You're less dehydrated.
Your hormones are more regulated, so you may have less acne. So all of those benefits you can often see in a very short time, and that can be reinforcing as you decide what you want your long-term goals to look like to really see what life is like with less or without alcohol.
Yeah, this is, I think, an area of growing research and understanding. And I think people are really interested in sort of drinking during menopause as well and what to think about all of that. A couple things. I think many of the symptoms that people experience during menopause, like hot flashes, will be made worse by any amount of alcohol. Really? Yes, because alcohol dilates your blood vessels.
So you may have experienced if you drink a couple glasses of wine, you actually feel flushed. Yes. Well, it's just going to amplify the experience you're having during hot flashes. So if you're trying to not have hot flashes, drinking is going to be your enemy in that because it's just going to make that worse. Same things like sleep disturbance are really common in menopause.
Mood changes and alcohol may impact all of those. And it can be a tough cycle because you may be drinking because your mood is actually low and you're having a hard time falling asleep. But then alcohol is actually running counterproductive and making those symptoms worse over the long haul. Let's talk a little bit about sleep because. Yeah.
Doesn't alcohol impact your sleep in a very negative way? Yeah. And people may be surprised to hear that because it makes you fall asleep quicker. So often people are like, oh, alcohol helps me sleep because I fall asleep so quickly. But when we think about sleep architecture, there's different cycles to sleep. People are probably familiar with REM sleep is that deep, rapid eye movement sleep.
But there's different cycles that your body, your brain naturally cycles through in the night. And the balance of those cycles is really important to get restorative sleep, which is when your body rests and heals. And what alcohol does is it changes the makeup of those cycles. So you go more quickly into deep sleep and you have less time in sort of the normal phases of sleep.
And so your sleep architecture is disrupted and you don't get that same restful sleep. You may wake up at two in the morning, you know, after you've fallen asleep really quickly, but then you wake up and can't fall back asleep.
Or you may wake up in the morning and just feel not refreshed, even though you were completely, you know, asleep very deeply because your brain is not having the time to restore itself the way that it needs to. I have another question for you, Dr. Wakeman.
Yeah, hangover is fascinating, and I think people are still trying to understand exactly what is going on. Loosely defined, what we refer to as hangover often is a constellation of symptoms that include headache, feeling anxious, often actually having diminished exercise tolerance, so you don't have the same aerobic capacity that you did before, feeling irritable.
Those are all symptoms of hangover that people have probably experienced. There's an older school of thought that actually it was mild alcohol withdrawal. So withdrawal is when you are drinking so much that when you stop drinking, you actually get symptoms. Seems like that is likely not the case. The constellation of symptoms is quite different.
And so the thinking is that it's a combination of really two things. One is dehydration. So we already talked about how alcohol make you, you know, make you pee more. And so you get dehydrated.
And then the other is actually byproducts from the drink that you're drinking itself, either the sort of breakdown products of alcohol, or there are certain types of liquors and drinks that have other types of molecules, cogeners that can build up and make you feel even crummier. So for example, clear alcohol tends to cause less of a hangover than dark alcohol.
And that's probably because of the other substances that are in it. But it's really sort of toxic byproducts and dehydration, if I were to sum it up, of what's causing a hangover. Why is anxiety one of the biggest kind of symptoms of a hangover and alcohol withdrawal?
Yeah, it's probably the effect of these byproducts that then, you know, are still impacting the way your body functions, your brain, and it takes a long time for your body to excrete them. And so we can see just feeling that really anxious, restless, kind of gross feeling afterwards.
Yeah, it does, especially over time. And so what we see when people have been drinking over a long time is actually your body starts to adjust. because our bodies are very adaptable. So if your body's used to having three or four drinks every night, your body's going to start to accommodate to that. And so what we see is actually changes in the brain.
So you see changes in the amount of receptors you have, the amount of hormones you have, your dopamine levels, your stress hormone levels. Your brain is actually adapting to the effects of alcohol. So one thing you may see is that you actually don't get the same effect. So it used to be that two glasses of wine made you feel a certain way, and now you need three or four to feel
the same way that's a concept called tolerance that your body is adapting to having that alcohol around all the time and your brain's actually changing the reverse of that is if all of a sudden you stop drinking you're going to feel all out of sorts you're going to feel shaky you may have a headache you may feel anxious you may feel nauseous and that's because your body's gotten so adapted to always having alcohol on board that it takes time actually for those changes to reset
Yeah, there's a couple of really important things to know. First, alcohol itself can cause depression and anxiety. Even though you feel like in the moment it's helping relieve symptoms, there's actually something called a substance-induced mood disorder where you can look all the world like you have depression and it's actually caused by using alcohol heavily over time.
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