a depression to the system

2 Comments » // April 26th, 2009

Ugh.  Seriously.  Ugh.  It’s been an odd past couple of days.  I am in a funk and can’t get out.  I need the LifeCall system in those old “Help, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” commercials.  But it would be a button that would call up good friends, my mom, healthy food, a walk, and a great movie…all to bring me out of my depression.

It’s weird how this funk got started, but I am realizing more and more that it makes perfect sense and that it’s ok.  At least that’s what I am trying to tell myself.  It started with what was going to be an awesome evening on Friday night.  My friends Annie and Jenny and I were on our way to the Flow Show to see many of our hoop friends perform.   It was a free show in a small venue, so we ended up not being able to get in.  We missed it by only a few people, but it just wasn’t going to happen.  We were devastated, to say the least.  I personally had been looking forward to this for months.  So we decided that we would wait around until the show was done to be able to hang out with everyone afterwards.

Cut to: us waiting in the only place near the venue…a bar.  A bar with no food.  We each had a couple of glasses of wine and were feeling pretty good.  Then the show was over, we talked to everyone a bit and found out that people were meeting up at this other place soon.  So, off we went to this place which ended up being a club.  I had thought maybe we were going out to dinner or something.  But I just wanted to see everyone, so we went in.  We bought more drinks, we danced, and I still hadn’t eaten.  Most of the people we had wanted to see never ended up showing up, but we had paid to get in, so we stayed.  Pretty soon, I was drunk.  Drunker than I had been in a long while.  You see, I don’t drink that much anymore and when I do, I don’t drink a lot.  I just don’t enjoy the effects that much anymore and the after-effects are definitely not worth it.  But every once in a while, I get caught off guard and end up drinking a bit…this was one of those evenings.  I mean, we had fun, but I was sick by the end of the night and that part was not fun and I felt bad for my girlfriend having to deal with it.  But she was an awesome friend and was totally there for me!

But Saturday was not so fun.  I wasn’t sick, but I just did not feel right.  I couldn’t do anything, eat anything and just felt straight-up depressed.  I am no stranger to depression as many of you know, but luckily I don’t experience it as often as I used to.  But this hangover just made me lazy and sad.  I have a ton to do and have not done much of anything.  So it got me thinking about how alcohol affects your system.  I have studied these kinds of things in a few of my Psych classes and found an article that explains it well:

“The depression caused by alcohol actually starts with your physical body. First, alcohol lowers the serotonin and norepinephrine levels in your brain. These chemicals are the chemicals that give you your good feelings – a feeling of well being, and they help you to feel normal.

Alcohol also temporarily nullifies the effects of stress hormones. This is why after drinking you feel worse than ever, because alcohol depresses your nervous system and your brain. A study was done that followed people who were only drinking one drink a day and after these people stopped drinking for 3 months, their depression scores improved. And that is only at one drink a day, so it is easy to imagine the impact the kind of volume an alcoholic takes in every day can have.

Alcohol all but wipes out every vitamin in your system after a drinking session. A folic acid deficiency will contribute the brain aging and in older people, dementia. The folic acid deficiency also contributes to overall depression. Further, the alcohol in your system also breaks down and speeds the elimination of antioxidants in your blood. Antioxidants are critically important to our health because antioxidants fight free radicals and free radical damage causes diseases and aging. Our immune system actually creates the antioxidants which then neutralize the free radicals.”

No wonder I feel down in the dumps.  It also doesn’t help that my boyfriend is out of town indefinitely and I miss him like crazy.  I also am coming to the end of a really hard semester at Berkeley and am nervous about my final projects and finals and my grades.  I am also struggling with a few other things…so yeah, it’s been a bit of a rough time, and probably not a time to be drinking a ton.  But isn’t that what a lot of people do when they are depressed?  And it actually makes the whole problem worse.  *sigh*

But I can say that reminding myself of the effects of alcohol on the body made me feel a bit better about feeling so sad.  As did writing about it…so thanks for reading.  I am now going to attempt to get over it all and write the few papers I need to write today.