Although drinking too much can make you fall asleep more easily, it also reduces the amount of time that you spend in the rapid eye movement, or REM, stage. Because you need water for almost every bodily function, including blood circulation and lubricating joints, you may feel the effects of aging more intensely if you drink regularly. Heavy drinking over a long time can shrink brain cells and lead to narcissism and alcoholism alcohol-related brain damage (ARBD) and certain types of dementia.
Women who had 28 drinks or more per week had a 33 percent higher chance of developing the same syndrome. Drinking too much can cause wrinkly skin, redness, and a dry complexion–and that’s only the beginning. Learn more about our team’s approach. When combined with counseling, this approach is proven highly effective. Here is our guide to giving up (or cutting back) on alcohol.
Does Drinking Alcohol Actually Make You Age Faster?
- Alcohol can also cause a deficiency of nutrients like vitamin A, which helps with cell regeneration and collagen production — both of which are essential to youthful skin.
- And it can have some unhealthy indirect effects, as well.
- Therefore, you’re at a greater risk of developing a wide range of health problems, including the neurodegenerative conditions that affect your cognition and memory.
- While any amount of alcohol has been found to be harmful for certain markers of aging, long-term, heavy alcohol use and binge drinking are more likely to age you faster than low-to-moderate doses.
- Over time, this can lead to a loss of skin tone and a permanent red color.
Quitting alcohol completely can be a challenge, but there are more ways to do it than ever before. It may or may not line up with what we traditionally call ”alcoholism.”
- That condition, called arcus senilis, doesn’t typically occur until at least age 60.
- She said she just celebrated her 600th day of not drinking.
- According to a Northwestern Medicine study published in the journal Aging, scientists found that consuming certain types of alcohol over long periods of time as well as binge drinking both speed up biological aging.
- Drinking alcohol can pull more water out of your body and make your chances of dehydration even higher.
It Can Keep You Up at Night
The effects of alcohol are a significant factor in making you look much older. In addition, people with alcohol addiction tend to have nutritional deficiencies that can impact the eyes. These serious symptoms are believed to be related to alcohol being a neurotoxin, which can cause tissue damage. As a result, it becomes harder for the heart to pump blood throughout the body, leading to high blood pressure, heart disease, and even stroke. Alcohol is a vasodilator, which means it causes blood vessels to relax and widen. When you lack vitamin D, it affects the body’s ability to absorb calcium.
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If you drink too much, the blood vessels can burst, causing red spots and spidery splotches. Broken capillaries, the tiny blood vessels near the surface of the skin, tend to crop up as you get older. Even one night of heavy drinking can make your lines and wrinkles look more pronounced. You may not realize it, but alcohol and aging effects go hand-in-hand. Even if you don’t experience acute after-effects, alcohol can age you. Extrinsic aging is when your skin ages faster than it should because of your environment and how you live.
How Alcohol Affects Your Eyes
While the occasional drink with friends might not hurt, evidence suggests there is a strong relationship between alcohol and aging. Excessive drinking has numerous impacts on your body and mind, ranging from mild to severe. It’s never too late to cut back on our alcohol consumption. Reducing our alcohol consumption or eliminating it entirely is one of the simplest (and cheapest!) things we can do to protect our youth. This is significant because it further validates the changes we see occur on the surface in people who regularly consume alcohol.
This will in turn affect how you look. Alcohol doesn’t just affect you superficially. One of the most visible impacts alcohol can have is on your complexion.
Not only are boozy drinks often empty calories with little to no nutrients, but alcohol can cause people to eat more food. Drinking water between alcoholic beverages “will combat ethanol-induced dehydration, which will help your skin to look better the next day,” Koskinen said. While your skin can regain its supple and dewy complexion after several days of rehydration, broken blood vessels are a lot harder to fix.
What Alcohol Can Do to Your Biological Age
Identify your triggers — what’s giving you the urge to drink — and find ways to avoid them. Socializing without a beer in your own hand will help to break the mental link between having fun and consuming alcohol. She said the worst thing you can do during this process is isolate yourself. A 2017 study published in JAMA Psychiatry found the number of adults in the United States who regularly consumed alcohol went from 65 percent in 2002 to 73 percent in 2013. “Now I sleep well every night and work out vigorously, while before a couple of glasses of wine would make me want to eat pizza.
That’s mainly because our bodies gain fat and lose muscle in our senior years and it takes longer for us to break down alcohol and get it out of our system. So if you don’t drink, this isn’t a good reason to start. But too much can lead to an abnormal heartbeat and high blood pressure. If you drink it in moderation (about one glass a day), some studies show that it might be good for your heart. This can be especially serious for older people. Alcohol is linked to age in lots of ways.
Many people struggle with alcohol dependency, and it can be hard to know how to begin to cut back. Overall, the less you drink, the more energetic and youthful you will feel. And then there are the frequent hangovers from binge drinking.
Other Aspects of the Alcohol and Aging Dilemma
Sleep deprivation raises your level of ghrelin (the hormone that makes you feel hungry) and lowers your level of leptin (the hormone that regulates fullness). Lack of sleep can also impact your hunger-regulating hormones. “Alcohol may impair sleep quality, especially rapid eye movement (REM) sleep,” Alison A. Moore, MD, MPH, FACP, AGSF, director at the Sam and Rose Stein Institute for Research on Aging and the Center for Healthy Aging, told Health.
Another reason to limit your alcohol intake is that it’s one of the main culprits for those extra pounds you’ve mysteriously put on. Although free radicals play their own role in protecting your health, when they’re not kept in balance by antioxidants, they begin to damage your fatty tissue, DNA and proteins. When the liver is working hard to detoxify the body from alcohol, it creates more free radicals than the body’s antioxidants can handle, which leads to something called oxidative stress.
Broken bones from a stumble are a serious health issue for seniors. Mixing it with certain sleeping pills, pain medications, or anxiety drugs can be life-threatening. It can also lead to serious side effects.
That’s why you often have to urinate more frequently when you’re drinking. This helps prevent you from becoming dehydrated when you’re not drinking. Drinking alcohol may make you feel younger as you lose your inhibitions and gain some energy, but the hangover the next day can make you feel sick, sluggish, and downright old.
Alcohol reduces the amount of vasopressin that your body makes. Normally, the body creates a hormone called vasopressin, which helps your body retain water, limiting the amount of fluid that you excrete through the renal system. The substance is a diuretic, which means that it pulls fluid out of your body and eliminates it via urine. That can be particularly hard on seniors, who are already more likely to wake up often or have a sleep disorder like insomnia.