Motivation Daily by Motiversity - Alcohol Rewires Your Brain - What Most People Completely Misunderstand About Alcohol - Stop Drinking Motivation

Episode Date: January 28, 2026

People are becoming increasingly aware of how deeply alcohol affects both their bodies and their minds. What really changes when you stop drinking? Giving up alcohol often brings greater mental clarity, emotional balance, and a stronger sense of control over your life. Many people report feeling calmer, more focused, and more fulfilled once alcohol is removed from their routine.Special thanks to our partners, subscribe to them here:https://www.youtube.com/@lewishoweshttps://www.youtube.com/@TheDiaryOfACEOhttps://www.youtube.com/@JordanBPetersonhttps://www.youtube.com/@UCIHdDJ0tjn_3j-FS7s_X1kQ Speakers: Rich Rollhttps://www.youtube.com/@UCpjlh0e319ksmoOD7bQFSiw Jordan Petersonhttps://www.youtube.com/@UCL_f53ZEJxp8TtlOkHwMV9Q Dr. Andrew Hubermanhttps://www.youtube.com/@UC2D2CMWXMOVWx7giW1n3LIg Gary Breckahttps://www.youtube.com/@UCLHKyx7IhZ_esCs4TSWAjEg Dr. Daniel Amenhttps://www.youtube.com/c/DrDanielAmen_BrainHealthMike Thurstonhttps://www.instagram.com/mikethurston/?hl=enKristen Holmes https://www.instagram.com/drkristenholmes/Dr Wendy Suzuki https://www.instagram.com/wendy.suzuki/?hl=enDr Sara Wakeham https://www.massgeneralbrigham.org/en/about/newsroom/articles/how-alcohol-impacts-your-bodyGabor Mate Music: Ruiqi Zhao - The throne is mineMoments - Things gone wrongCleanmindsounds - Calm Cinematic AtmosphereLost Ghosts - Darkest Space instrumentalThird Age - Mystery instrumental Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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The link is in the description. Low risk is now defined as two or fewer standard drinks a week, any more than that, and the risks start climbing fast. Humans have drunk alcohol for thousands of years, and we're all pretty familiar with the effects. Are there health benefits or not? Is there a safe level or an okay amount of alcohol to drink? The science, the research, the data,

It just shows that alcohol is toxic to the body. There's no way to really get around that. From a health perspective, there really are no benefits to alcohol. The idea that I was never going to drink alcohol again, are you kidding me? Like, I have to go to a bachelor party in six months, and then I've got this thing in Vegas, and then I have to go to, you know, it's like, how am I going to get through those things without drinking, right? It's completely overwhelming.

Even moderate alcohol use has really been questioned, and I think that data is going to come out very strong in the next two to three years. Personally, I think alcohol is going to be the new cigarettes in the next five to ten years. I think there's going to be warning labels on alcohol, very similar to cigarettes. So I've been railing against alcohol for 34 years because I look at people's brains. And if you're a drinker, your brain looks older than you are. And they're like, hey, wait a minute. We've been told alcohol is a health food.

It was a lie. And it was based on some really faulty science. And alcohol kills so many people. I'm going to make some enemies here. But I have family members who will say, I need a drink. You know, people will say, I need a drink. That is a sign of somebody that can't regulate their nervous system. Right?

Like, I need a cup of coffee. And I'm not being disparaging of these statements. I've said, I need a cup of coffee. But what you're really saying is that your system requires this chemical to get a lift. It's not a crime for most people, but if you need a drink in order to relax, in my mind, you don't actually have control over your nervous system. Alcohol is notorious. It's a notorious drug. So it's the only drug we know of that reliably actually directly increases aggression. It's implicated in 50%. Half the people who murder are drunk and half the people who are killed are drunk. Right? It's without alcohol, there would be almost no domestic violence.

Alcohol is very bad. We all try to avoid poison in the air that we breathe, the water that we drink, the food that we're eating. You're voluntarily putting this thing and say what you want. People are like, well, I'm just having one drink. It's literally poison. And when you see somebody, Tom, stumbling and falling, and we all point and we laugh. Like, oh, look, he's twisted. He's faded.

No, no. He's poisoned, but he doesn't have enough to kill him. I mean, it's destroyed many people in my family's lives. and I'm so happy that I broke out of it but I think anything to try to limit it because think about the government, it's legal and they want you to be drinking it. They want you to be smoking.

They want you to be going down that path. I personally just think it's, I think it's a good thing to lessen anybody drinking especially if it's poisoning you. More people are waking up to the negative side effects of drinking alcohol, but it's still there's still a lot of people drinking.

I still have a lot of friends who are drinking. Yeah. But I just don't give a shit if I'm going to offend their feelings. I look at alcohol. You know, in what way is this supporting my values of growth and impact and presence and compassion and tolerance, you know, the things that are like core to who I want to be in this world? And I think when you look at it through that lens, the choices become really clear to me.

If you're honest with yourself and you have some degree of self-awareness, understand what you care about, I think choices become a lot clearer. like to live my life untampered. You know, the good times are the good times. I deal with the bad times accordingly. And with alcohol, people drink it both times. Yeah. To celebrate.

And when you're sad. And it's the one drug that your friends will encourage you to continue to do. What is going on there? What's causing the brain to deteriorate in such a way because of alcohol? Yeah, well, remember I said ethanol, which is the molecule, crosses the blood brain barrier. And so, especially when you're having these high levels of blood alcohol, that ethanol is sort of bathing your brain.

And if you think about what we talked about, inflammation and changes to cells and to DNA and proteins that is happening at the brain level, the other thing that can cause, accelerate the brain damage we see with alcohol is actually nutritional deficiencies. So people may be drinking a lot and they're actually not getting really crucial nutrients in their diet. And that can accelerate the process of brain damage. We can even see a very, like, sudden, onset amnesia from heavy alcohol use in the setting of not getting enough nutrients in your diet.

And it's worse if you do it before your brain is finished developing. And so if you think of fraternities and sororities, I'm not a fan of sending children away to college. And it's because you have all these underdeveloped brains or not fully developed brains and you put them all together without appropriate adult supervision and a lot of bad things happen. Long-term alcohol can cause significant and named brain diseases. Um, moderation, even moderation now as studies have shown, it is not very good. And the reason why it's not good is that alcohol disrupts your sleep, even though people drink it to go to sleep faster, the sleep is much more superficial and is not deep and it's not the

healthy sleep. So that is not good overall for your, for the, for sleep, depth and and health, and therefore, brain health. Alcohol is more of a sedative. Alcohol's main effect is to reduce the amount of activity in the forebrain, which is involved in planning and inhibiting. It's involved in the no-goes. Right. Right. It's also involved in the refrave the, uh, the, uh, the sense of self and your sense, your self-image, who you think you are in the world. It's kind of interesting. So when people have a drink or two, they feel less inhibited. They also, at least at the early stages of drinking, they tend to feel more confident. They tend to continue drinking. Then they tend to lose their self-image. They forget who they are. They can even go blackout drunk.

Alcohol is broken down into two things. Acetylalde, and acetate, not to give you a bunch of chemical names, but acetyl to aldehyde is what makes you feel good. when you're drinking, if you find that to be good. It's also what's toxic to every single cell in your body. So poison? 100%. And that is an undeniable fact. And acetate is basically empty calories.

If you don't burn the acetate, you're going to turn that into fat, essentially. So those are the two major components. So when we look at this from a stepwise fashion, number one, it's directly toxic to cells. Number two, additional acetate goes to fat. Where does that fat go? It's visceral fat, abdominal fat, driving this engine. Not to mention the fallout is typically speaking when you're taking an extra calories. When you're drinking, you're not mindful of what you're putting in your mouth.

We've all been guilty of such. You know, so your overconsumption then becomes more of an issue. So there's a lot of ramifications to alcohol. So you're saying what is the data in terms of low or moderate risk of drinking and cancer? Yeah. So the data is growing and really worrisome. So for breast cancer, so there's a few cancers that even at low risk limits, you see the risk begin to increase.

So where we would say there's kind of no healthy, or there's no even like low risk amount. So breast and esophageal cancer, two examples of that. So breast cancer, if you were to drink below those low risk limits, so in the U.S., that would be. fewer than seven drinks, but a drink in the U.S. is five ounces of wine, which is smaller than than that, or in the U.K. is below that 14 units, so it would be, you know, fewer than seven of that, that size glass of wine. We still see a slight increase in the risk of breast cancer. It's about a 5% increase. So that means your risk of breast cancer would increase by about

5%. And that's not huge. So I think, you know, percent increase is kind of hard to do the math on, but if you think in the U.S., for example, the average woman has a 13% likelihood of getting breast cancer in their lifespan. There's only a few cancers that the risk seems to increase even at that very low level, and breast cancer is one of those, and then esophageal cancer is one of those. So there are certain cancers where even a small amount of alcohol will increase your risk. Does it have an impact on thinking about cancers that are prominent in men? Yeah. So colon cancer, we're seeing that in a lot of young men. Liver cancer. Yeah, prostate cancer, which is obviously a male cancer, we don't think of as much

as being sort of an alcohol sensitive cancer, but most cancers, because the way alcohol impacts your risk of cancer is not really on a specific organ outside of the liver. It's really about how it changes our DNA. So it's about inflammation and what are called reactive oxygen species that sort of change our cells and increase the risk over time of the mutations that lead to cancer. Alcohol helps me socialize, and socializing is really important, and I can't socialize very easily because of the design of the modern world without having a drink. or I have great times when I drink, so I don't want to quit my alcohol use. And, you know, in some cases that they will be high and medium consumption alcohol drinkers.

What do you say to those people? Well, first, like, there's no judgment here. So a molecule of ethanol is not more moral or immoral than a molecule of glucose. You could say it the same thing about diet. We have lots of awareness now about processed foods and white flour and white sugar. That doesn't mean that everyone's going to live this, like, ascetic lifestyle where they never eat dessert. So I think it really is like, you need to go in with eyes wide open and understand what are the risks, what matters to you and how do you make that calculus. So if you decide it's a choice you want to make, you want to set yourself up for success.

So if you decide, like, I want to cut back on how much I'm drinking, but I'm going to go to happy hour every night with my friends and just try to like not drink while I'm there. You're probably not going to be very successful because you're going to be in a situation that's constantly like reminding you of alcohol use and everyone around you is using alcohol. So try to make some different sort of structural changes and how you set up your life and your life and your, week and your day. And you may find that actually you don't miss it that much, that you could cut out three or four days of drinking and still get that social pleasure two days out of the week and your overall health risk is going to go down significantly. If you need to drink in order to be able to enjoy a night out, you're choosing the wrong nights out. Like what you're saying is that the experience that you're going on is so bad that you have to anesthetize yourself. You have

to numb yourself to the experience. You're what I was like saying, I'm going to go and do this push you, I'm going to go stick needles through the skin on the back of my hand, but I'll take some painkiller so it doesn't hurt so much. We find that moderation typically is more successful. If people have abstained for long enough to kind of reset reward pathways, but even just reducing use can be a laudable goal. You're just like, I should stop drinking because drinking is bad for me. That's like a relatively vague goal, right? It's not really about anything that matters specifically to you and it's going to be hard to stick to that. If instead you think, okay, I, you know, I've started to realize that when I drink every

single night, I don't get the work done that I want to get done because I'm too tired and I fall asleep. I don't feel refreshed in the morning because I'm not sleeping very well. I'm not getting up early to exercise and not something that really matters to me. I'm not like as present with my family as I wanted to be. Then it's all these little micro goals that make it much easier and make it change. So you may decide, you know, I'm not going to drink. I'm only going to drink two days out of the week.

And when I do drink, I'm going to keep it to this amount. But the reason why is not some vague recommendation from some doctor. It's because, like, you're working really hard at work, and it feels good to be productive after dinner, and you're training for a race, and you want to get up in the morning and run. And so you actually notice those little steps, like, wow, it feels great. I woke up this morning, and I feel so refreshed. Like, you're reinforcing your goal right there. You're not working towards some abstract thing that doesn't really matter to you.

So you want to make these, like, really focused, personalized goals, and really anchoring it on what is your why. your why may be very different than my why or someone else's why. So alcohol has zero benefit, that's what I'm hearing you say. To the body of the brain. People might say, well, it helps me loosen up or it's a cultural thing. I can teach you diaphragmatic breathing and that will help you loosen up. I can teach you not to believe every stupid thing you think. And that will loosen you up.

Skills, not just pills. Skills, not just substances. If you need alcohol to bond or to, you know, form a connection, there's probably something else going on that is unaddressed. So what I'm saying is that addiction is never a choice, and it's not some kind of genetic disease, which is that is total nonsense. What it actually is is an attempt to solve a problem in your life. In your case, you're trying to solve the problem of being trapped,

which is based on your childhood trauma, which you publicly talk about. In my case, the workaholism was about trying to prove to myself that I had the right to exist. That it was important. You're worthy of love. That was worthy of love, exactly, acceptance. Now, that also came from my childhood experience. So addiction is never like either a disease as such.

You can behave like a disease, but it isn't a disease as such. It's also not a choice anybody makes. It's actually an attempt to solve a deep life problem. The first thing is you have to recognize and appreciate that for somebody who is truly an alcoholic, the shocking thing isn't when they relapse or drink. The shocking thing is that they actually wake up and go throughout their day and don't drink. Because the disposition of the alcoholic is to get drunk, right? So every day that goes by that they don't do that is like, wow.

And, you know, more people than not fall off the wagon and relapse and it's heartbreaking. And as somebody who is compassionate and empathetic towards that person who wants to help, it's a very delicate dance. You cannot compel somebody to change who doesn't want to change. That is a futile effort. So all you can do is be available to them and let them know that you're available to help them when they're ready to get help, and you can flex a little tough love here and there.

You can have healthy boundaries around that. Like, look, I love you. You know, I don't understand why you're drinking. When you're ready to get help, come and talk to me. But until then, like, I'm not available. Like, or because if that person is, if something's like either calling you up and they want money or they want you to pick them up

and they got arrested and they want you to go bail them out, like shit like that, like you have to have a healthy boundary around that. Removing alcohol for my life was probably the single most transformative decision I've made as an adult. That's great. There's no question about it. And for me, it is like this magic sauce of every day is the same. Every day is predictable. The most important thing to me is like staying sober, helping another alcoholic achieve sobriety.

If we wait to rely on our willpower alone, we will not make it, especially in this world of overwhelming overabundance. There are just too many temptations. Willpower is an exhaustible resource, meaning that it doesn't last forever, it eventually runs out. So we've got to actually create barriers between ourselves and our drug of choice so that we can have a little bit more time. And that little bit more time, that slowing things down,

is sometimes just enough to allow ourselves to surf the cravings, and get through them without actually using.