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Known as the “sober curious,” a growing number of people are selectively quitting alcohol. New converts boast increased energy, better sleep and an improvement in reasoning and memory.
“What we’ve found, which I have to say has surprised us, is that there’s a persistent change; but it can be changed back,” Crews says. “If we take animals and let them run and exercise, they can grow their brain back.
But if we just make them sit in a cage after the alcohol, they don’t.” Although the full picture of how the brain recovers from persistent, heavy drinking is not fully understood, one often-studied area is how alcohol use affects dopamine, a neurotransmitter tied to the brain’s reward system. Multiple studies have shown a relationship between the consumption of alcohol and an influx in dopamine — which essentially tells your brain that alcohol is a “reward.” When a person who drinks heavily stops abruptly, that rush of dopamine is also reduced. Eventually, the brain will try to recalibrate itself; and for the most part, it can restore its dopamine to more consistent levels.through his research seem to be positive and upbeat. He recalls checking into a North Carolina bed and breakfast one afternoon and observing a group of people singing around a piano. “I thought, ‘maybe this is a wild crowd.’ Then I realized they weren’t drinking at all — they were just having fun, and they were all in AA,” Crews says. “With therapy, people can completely restore their reward balance.” It’s promising science that a person in the throes of addiction can recover not only their lives but also their brains. Crews cautions, however, that research also indicates that on a biological level, some damage cannot be so easily reversed: “After heavy drinking, a lot of the immune genes in the brain stay persistently elevated and changed. We’re thinking those are causing a slow, progressive degeneration that in time might start to increase risks of dementia and Alzheimer’s with age.”As it turns out, that combination — aging and drinking — is one of the most damaging tonics for the brain. Marlene Oscar Berman, a professor emeritus in the Department of Anatomy & Neurobiology at Boston University School of Medicine, has spent her career studying the relationship between alcohol use disorder and its impact on neurobiology and neuropsychology. “Age, by and large, is more lethal than alcoholism,” she says. “And when you combine the two, you get a synergistic effect.” Berman’s research has also found that the effects of alcohol abuse differ between men and women. In a recent, she and other researchers studied the brains of 60 individuals who’d been diagnosed with alcohol use disorder and abstained from drinking for at least four weeks. Clinical assessments revealed that women had higher mood scores than their male counterparts during early sobriety. Through studying functional MRIs, Berman and her team also determined that women had an increased response to emotional stimuli compared to control subjects. Men, on the other hand, had less activation to emotionally charged images, including images of alcoholic beverages. Berman recalls that one of her research subjects, who had been sober for over a decade, pressed the panic button when she saw a picture of alcohol during her MRI. “The pictures of the alcoholic beverages brought back the craving and she wanted to drink,” Berman explains. “This is a really, really serious addiction.” Of course, all of this begs the question: Should anyone drink at all? “I recommend moderation, and I also recommend periods of abstinence,” says Crews, citing “Dry January” as an example. “It’s good to be dry for a while, because if you have trouble being dry, it suggests you’ve got a problem.”
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