When picturing someone struggling with alcohol addiction, it is common to imagine a disheveled, homeless person, or someone who has lost their home, family and other possessions due to their alcohol abuse. These stereotypes are only the end result of a much longer process, and they can mislead functioning alcoholics because their lives have yet to fit these stereotypes.
The reality is that a functioning alcoholic can still be controlled by their alcohol abuse. Alcoholism is a disease that slowly develops over time, not all at once. While everyone may experience this progression differently, there are four common stages people go through when becoming a functional alcoholic. The first stage of alcoholism is a general experimentation with the substance. Individuals in this stage may not be familiar with different types of alcohol, so they are more likely to test their limits.
This is how problem drinking starts. Usually, people in the first stage of alcoholism are not drinking every day, and they are still able to perform daily activities.
Although drinking may not consume their thoughts, they may need to drink more to reach the desired level of intoxication. During this stage, someone may believe they are still functioning because they have a job and they are successfully maintaining relationships.
The second stage of alcoholism is defined by the mental obsession with the next drink. The blood alcohol concentration BAC rises, and the feeling of drunkenness occurs, when alcohol is drunk faster than the liver can break it down. However, BAC does not correlate exactly with symptoms of drunkenness and different people have different symptoms even after drinking the same amount of alcohol.
NB - The legal drink driving limits for drivers 20 years and over are a breath alcohol limit of micrograms mcg of alcohol per litre of breath and a blood alcohol limit of 50mg of alcohol per ml of blood. The alcohol limit for drivers under 20 years is zero. Have a look at a table of the symptoms of effects at different levels of blood alcohol concentration BAC. In your blissed-out state, you will probably feel that this is all good — but you will be wrong. The body registers this new imbalance in brain chemicals and attempts to put things right.
It is a little like when you eat a lot of sweets and your body goes into insulin-producing overdrive to get the blood sugar levels down to normal; as soon as the sweets have been digested, all that insulin causes your blood sugar to crash. When you are drunk, your body goes on a mission to bring Gaba levels down to normal and turn glutamate back up. When you stop drinking, therefore, you end up with unnaturally low Gaba function and a spike in glutamate — a situation that leads to anxiety, says Nutt.
It can take the brain a day or two to return to the status quo, which is why a hair of the dog is so enticing. To add to the misery, the anxiety usually kicks in while you are trying to sleep off the booze. There's some sense that you're more open and connected with people. And like nervous theatre actors are told to imagine the audience naked, Wilson says nudity also helps break down barriers and disarm people. Far from being a moral collapse, Wilson says that the prince's behaviour is pretty much keeping in character.
It does display an extrovert trait in Harry but I think we all knew that about him anyway. But while Fox argues that getting naked in front of other people after drinking is not an uncommon thing among young British men, freelance men's magazine journalist Piers Hernu disagrees.
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