Of all the substances in the world, alcohol is the easiest to get addicted to. Sure, heroin and meth might addict people on the first dose. But those are much harder to come by than alcohol.

Not only is it easier to get your hands on alcohol, but you are far more likely to be encouraged to drink it. Drinking heavily is considered an ability in many circles. In much of corporate America, people won’t take someone seriously if they prefer sweet or low-alcohol drinks at bars.

But demonstrate your ability to ingest the most vile, bitter, alcohol-heavy drinks and you will impress tons of people. They will be the wrong people, but most people have little to no control over whether or not the people around them are good or bad, and some don’t even care.

To illustrate the dangers of getting addicted to alcohol, we are going to go over the top 10 reasons you should not get addicted to it.

It Costs a Ton of Money

Let’s start by being materialistic. Drinking costs money. Drinking often costs a lot of money. Getting dependent on alcohol will likely cost you your livelihood.

The thing about alcohol addiction is that drinks are not priced with it in mind. If you are addicted to $30 martinis, then being an alcoholic will leave you unable to pay bills or get groceries. You cannot negotiate the price of alcoholism, and it will leave you penniless eventually.

Your Liver Will Degrade

The liver is responsible for processing alcohol. But what you have to understand about the liver is that its ability to do this is limited. It’s like a muscle, and drinking is like working out. If you work out every day, you will get diminishing returns on the gains of your muscles.

Similarly, drinking every day will just result in your liver getting less effective.

Your Friends Will get Worse

For the most part, people start drinking socially. That means they go and get drinks with friends, not because they want to drink, but because they want to hang out with the friends. But here is the problem: Alcohol dependency can form even if you are not there for the drinks.

And when it does, you start to fraternize more with the people who enable your alcoholism than the people who might be able to pull you back from it.

Drinking is Physically Dangerous

And when we say “physically dangerous” we do not just mean health concerns. We mean that it has a bad habit of putting people into dangerous situations. Drunk driving accidents, bar fights, and sexual assault are all far more common for alcoholics than for sober people.

You Will Damage Your Brain

You may have heard that drinking kills brain cells. This is true. You might not know what that means, however. Brain cells are not just cells that help you think. They are the cells that constitute your brain. It’s not that you are pulling cars off the highway. By drinking, you are pulling the highway out from under the cars.

This can result in long-term damage, including a degraded frontal lobe, which is effectively a lobotomy. 

Emotions Will Become Harder to Handle

Another part of your brain that will suffer is the emotional core. This is made up multiple components, but our primary concern is the amygdala, which processes emotions.

You might start out feeling hysterical, like every emotion is huge and important. But as time goes on things will just go numb. You will feel no happiness and no sadness. Your amygdala will start reacting intensely, and then shut down as it gets exhausted.

Memory Will Fade Away Too

Another part of the emotional part of the brain is the hippocampus, which regulates memory. As you drink more, your ability to access this part of the brain will become less reliable.

It will also become slower. That means solving problems you have already solved, remembering how to do basic tasks, and even recalling people’s names will become more and more difficult.

Motor Functions Will Degrade

All of this brain damage extends to other nerve centers as well. Your sense of balance will become more sensitive, leaving you easily disoriented. Your sense of direction will also suffer due to this, though that hardly matters when your vision is blurry, and the room is spinning.

Your Personality Will Wither Away

With all of these degrading faculties, your personality will start to change as it is filtered through layer upon layer of suffering. The alcohol will seem to offer relief. The greatest damage alcoholism does is that it feels like you can only function while drunk.

But the truth is that the alcohol is chipping away at your ability to function.

Your Friends and Family Will be Hurt

And perhaps the worst part is that as your personality changes to reflect the constant struggle your dependency puts you through, your family will have a harder and harder time recognizing you. They will know you are in there somewhere, just trapped behind your addiction.

This is what makes addiction to alcohol seem so hopeless. Oftentimes alcoholics give up on themselves long before their friends and family give up on them. This creates a cycle of guilt that can only be broken by kicking the habit.

Conclusion

What is important to remember about all of this is that no matter how hopeless it seems, there is always a way home. Your liver can heal, your friends will come back to you, your money can be earned back, and even brain damage can be healed, amazingly enough.

But it will only get harder as your addiction goes on longer. So, do not be afraid to reach out for help. If you need more info on how to do that, consider a detox program or a therapist. Remember, nobody conquers addiction on their own.