Your journey to recovery might be challenging, but it is necessary so you can regain control of your health and future happiness. You may experience withdrawal symptoms, including what they call “brain fog.” Brain fog from alcohol withdrawal can cloud your cognitive abilities and impact your daily life. Finally, alcohol can also disrupt our natural sleep cycle and reduce our overall quality of sleep. Even though alcohol helps us fall asleep faster — thanks in large part to its depressive effect — we typically experience more sleep disturbances as the night goes on. Quality sleep is important for nearly every aspect of our health, including our metabolism, mood, and cognitive function (attention, learning, and memory). After only one night of poor sleep, our cognitive functions and performance start to decline.

Timeline of Alcohol Withdrawal

Following addiction, this common symptom generally co-occurs with several other symptoms in the stage of recovery after acute withdrawal, known as Post Acute Withdrawal Syndrome (PAWS). Prenatal alcohol exposure can cause brain damage, leading to a range of developmental, cognitive, and behavioral problems, which can appear at any time during childhood. Alcohol can disrupt fetal development at any stage during a pregnancy—including at the earliest stages and before a woman knows she is pregnant.

Who Experiences Alcohol Withdrawal Symptoms?

While many people who drink alcohol initially experience relaxation or euphoria, these feelings are temporary. Negative emotions, poor judgment, and changes to your vision, hearing, coordination, and memory-making abilities often follow. Alcohol poisoning, or alcohol overdose, occurs when you drink more than your body can handle.

Psychological effects

In other cases, such as Wernicke-Korsakoff’s Syndrome, or after a severe brain injury, the symptoms will appear suddenly and may be quite severe. Symptoms may also appear when someone is withdrawing from alcohol. Read all our factsheets and publications on alcohol-related brain damage in one place.

Severe Symptoms

Alcohol can also impair our cognition by affecting our diet and vitamin absorption. It should be treated as a medical emergency and can be effectively treated with large doses of thiamine, if caught early. People with Wernicke’s Encephalopathy often appear drunk, even if they’ve had very little to drink. You don’t need to be diagnosed with alcohol use disorder in order to quit drinking. If alcohol is interfering with your health or your personal, financial, or professional life, consider quitting.

• People who drink regularly may notice that alcohol does not have the same effect on them as it used to.
• Histamine is a neurotransmitter that communicates important messages from your body to your brain.
• It is important to always consume in moderation and to seek care if you exceed your limits.
• This is due to the fact that alcohol addiction can damage the brain over time.
• However, comprehensive testing, including functional brain scans such as SPECT, can help determine its root causes.
• Lyme disease can later progress into multiple symptoms, including brain fog.

Boost Your Brain Health With Reframe

The fortunate takeaway for recovering addicts is that there are simple ways to feed and train your brain in order to regain mental clarity that is equal or close to where it was before addiction. Alcohol increases the effects of gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), for example. This causes sluggish movement, slurred speech, and slow reaction time when you are drunk. Alcohol also decreases the effects of glutamate, which regulates dopamine in your brain’s reward center.

How Does Heavy Drinking Affect the Brain Long-Term?

• Alcohol withdrawal symptoms range from mild but annoying to severe and life-threatening.
• Alcohol and caffeine exacerbate symptoms of anxiety and stress, which are also causes of brain fog as I discussed earlier.
• A person should check themselves into an alcohol detox program and receive medication to wean themselves off drinks.
• Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a mental disorder that typically begins during childhood or adolescence.

Avoiding triggers like anxiety, bright lights, and caffeine may help reduce the frequency of migraines. Medicines that alleviate migraine symptoms include ergotamine and triptan drugs and pain relievers. Fibromyalgia is a chronic disorder that causes widespread pain and fatigue. Fibromyalgia affects about 2% of adults in the United States and typically affects more women than men. Anyone can develop long COVID, though risk generally increases with COVID-19 symptoms severity. Vaccination helps decrease your risk of severe illness and, possibly, long COVID.

Can alcohol cause permanent cognitive impairment?

The recommended daily amount of B12 an adult should consume per day is 2.4 micrograms. This would explain why, during major hormone changes such as pregnancy and menopause, alcohol withdrawal brain fog brain fog occurs more often. Addressing your stress is just as big a part of your recovery from autoimmune disease as the first three pillars of The Myers Way®.

Read on to learn how alcohol affects the brain in the short- and long-term. “Specifically, when you’re younger, your brain is going through a lot of changes. A huge risk factor for people who develop alcohol use disorder is early-onset drinking. So, if you drink before the age of 14, there’s about a 50% chance you’re going to develop an alcohol use disorder in your adulthood,” explains Dr. Anand.