Sarah Wakeman

And in a normal heart, your electrical activity comes from the top of your heart, goes down to the bottom of your heart, and tells the heart to pump.

And so you get a single impulse that goes to the bottom of the heart, says pump, and that pumps blood out to your brain and your body and your organs and your liver.

In atrial fibrillation, the top of the heart is just kind of quivering with this abnormal electrical activity.

And so the heart can't pump in a normal way.

We actually, there's a term in medicine called holiday heart because we see sometimes people drink a ton over the holidays and will end up in this abnormal rhythm just from that binge drinking pattern.

And then over time, if you're drinking at high levels, your heart actually dilates and you can end up with congestive heart failure from a cardiomyopathy, which means the heart muscle gets kind of weak and thin and floppy and can't pump the way that it needs to.