SYDNEY: Alcohol has many negative effects on our health, some of which may surprise you.
These include short-term impacts such as waking up with a pounding head or anxiety, to long-term effects including cancer.
If you are thinking about taking some time off alcohol, you’ll find many quick wins and long-term gains for your health.
How long will you have to wait to feel the benefits? We’ve made a timeline based on scientific research that shows what you might feel in the first days, weeks, months and years after taking a break from alcohol.
Some benefits start immediately, so every day without alcohol is a win for your health.
What happens to your body when you stop drinking alcohol? After one day, Alcohol takes around 24 hours to completely leave your body, so you may start noticing improvements after just one day.
Alcohol makes you need to urinate more often, causing dehydration.
But your body can absorb a glass of water almost immediately, so once alcohol is out of your system alcohol dehydration is reduced, improving digestion, brain function and energy levels.
Alcohol also reduces the liver’s ability to regulate blood sugar.
Once alcohol leaves the system, blood sugar begins to normalise.
If you are a daily drinker you may feel a bit worse to start with while your body adjusts to not having alcohol in its system all the time.
You may initially notice disrupted sleep, mood changes, sweating or tremors. Most symptoms usually resolve in about a week without alcohol.
After one week, even though alcohol can make you feel sleepy at first, it disrupts your sleep cycle. By the end of an alcohol-free week, you may notice you are more energetic in the mornings as a result of getting better quality sleep.
As the body’s filter, the liver does much of the heavy lifting in processing alcohol and can be easily damaged even with moderate drinking. The liver is important for cleaning blood, processing nutrients and producing bile that helps with digestion.
But it can also regenerate quickly.
If you have only mild damage in the liver, seven days may be enough to reduce liver fat and heal mild scarring and tissue damage.
Even small amounts of alcohol can impair brain functioning.
So quitting can help improve brain health within a few days in light to moderate drinkers and within a month even for very heavy dependent drinkers. After one month alcohol can make managing mood harder and worsen symptoms of anxiety and depression.
After a few weeks, most people start to feel better. Even very heavy drinkers report better mood after one to two months. As your sleep and mood improve you may also notice more energy and greater wellbeing.
After a month of abstinence regular drinkers also report feeling more confident about making changes to how they drink.
You may lose weight and body fat. Alcohol contains a lot of kilojules and can trigger hunger reward systems, making us overeat or choose less healthy foods when drinking.
Even your skin will thank you.
Alcohol can make you look older through dehydration and inflammation, which can be reversed when you quit. Alcohol irritates the gut and disrupts normal stomach functioning, causing bloating, indigestion, heartburn and diarrhoea.
These symptoms usually start to resolve within four weeks.
One month of abstinence, insulin resistance — which can lead to high blood sugar — ignificantly reduces by 25%.
Blood pressure also reduces (by 6%) and cancer-related growth factors declines, lowering your risk of cancer.
After six months the liver starts to repair within weeks. For moderate drinkers, damage to your liver could be fully reversed by six months.
At this point, even heavy drinkers may notice they’re better at fighting infections and feel healthier overall.
After one year or more Alcohol contributes to or causes a large number of chronic diseases, including heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and seven different types of cancer, as well as mental health issues.
All of these risks can be reduced by quitting or cutting back on alcohol.
