‘Have no fear of perfection, you’ll never reach it.’ –Salvador Dali
Well-meaning friends and family members may suggest that you have a couple of drinks after living through a stressful event. A friend of mine had a bike accident recently that sent her over a car door and miraculously left her with only a few bruises. Having a couple of drinks immediately after this will of course dull her nerves, since ethanol is an anxiolytic. But is it really a good idea to get tipsy (or worse) after living through a stressful event?
lt’s well known that acute stress modulates memory in a powerful way. People who have lived through a traumatic event will often either have either perfect photographic memory of the event or partial or total amnesia. Untreated, exposure to a traumatic event can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which causes long-term problems. There exist preventive treatments that, when applied immediately after the traumatic event, have been shown to decrease the likelihood of getting PTSD. This includes antagonists of adrenaline and NMDA receptors; this messes with the acquisition of memory.
Of course good ol’ beer will mess with the acquisition of memory; that’s why people get brownouts and blackouts. It is also an antagonist of NMDA receptors (among many other systemic effects). So given that alcohol is an anxiolytic and that it causes amnesia, it doesn’t seem such a stretch to think that having a beer right after very a stressful event (within the next, say, 6 hours) will decrease the likelihood of long-term negative consequences (say, developing a phobia of biking).
This is of course the sort of hypothesis that is very hard to get funding to test. We do know that PTSD sufferers frequently turn to alcohol after their trauma and that this negatively affects outcome. And drowning your sorrows is never the solution. To be clear, taking an anxiolytic and amnesiac acutely to avoid acquiring a potentially adverse memory of a traumatic event and taking it in a sustained way after the memory is consolidated to drown it out are two completely different things.
artwork { Joel Shapiro, Untitled, 1980 }
