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The Latest Findings on Why It’s So Hard to Quit Drinking
Scientists are using electrodes and lasers to uncover how compulsive drinking works in the brain
It sounded like the foot of God was coming down through the roof. But Wanda (name changed) soon realized she wasn’t hearing her upstairs neighbor stomping her ceiling to death. She was hallucinating from alcohol withdrawals. Wanda’s physical dependency on booze was causing delirium tremens (DTs), a life-threatening psychotic state driven by confusion, rapid heartbeat, seizures, and more.
“The scariest thing… was just this sense of impending doom, like you’re about to die,” says Wanda, a Boston textile artist in her thirties. While only about 5% of patients withdrawing from alcohol experience DTs, Wanda has undergone them at least five times, most recently this past summer. (These withdrawals can be deadly and should be treated by a medical professional.)
Wanda, who says she’s been sober since Christmas, has tried to stop drinking many times, but the compulsion is too often overwhelming. Once she starts, she drinks until she blacks out.
“There would literally be times where I’d be drinking directly from the bottle, crying, saying to myself, ‘I don’t want to be doing this,’” Wanda recalls. “But it was almost like being possessed.”
Six percent of Americans, including Wanda, suffer from alcohol use disorder, the medical term for what’s more commonly known as alcoholism — a brain disease characterized by the inability to stop or control alcohol use regardless of negative outcomes.
An estimated 88,000 people die from alcohol-related causes each year, and alcohol is the third leading preventable cause of death in the United States. But there’s still a lot scientists don’t know about why people keep drinking despite the negative consequences.
Inside the brain on booze
Part of the issue is that scientists still don’t fully understand how alcohol (also known as ethanol) works in the brain, thanks to how promiscuous the molecule is. When ethanol crosses the blood-brain barrier, it bounces all over the place like a shotgun blast, ricocheting off receptors, inhibiting some and exciting…
