The Varying and Damaging Side Effects of Alcoholism

The side effects of alcoholism are substantial because with time it destroys both your physical, mental and spiritual health. Describing how it destroys your spiritual health is probably the hardest part to quantify, because being spiritual is different for each of us so I’m not going to go into it a great deal here - other than to say it leaves you with a feeling of emptiness and worthlessness where you pretty much end up living in a dark, deep pit of dispair and meaninglessness.

Mental Alcoholism Side Effects

Prolonged alcohol abuse alters your fundamental brain chemistry, and with alcohol being a natural depressant leads to a range of potential psychological problems including depression, anxiety and in severe cases psychosis.

With depression and anxiety being common side effects, as your alcoholism progresses and these associated conditions worsen it becomes very difficult to participate in normal every day things from holding down a job, to maintaining successful relationships - and so alcoholics easily end up alienating all people that were close to them, and end up leading very isolated lives, which simply ends up perpetuating the cycle of addiction.

As you travel further down the pit of an addiction to alcohol, you also totally lose you sense of identity and self-respect, which again just feeds the cycle of addiction because why bother trying to get help for your addiction when you fundamentally don’t believe you deserve a better life? And so all these various negative mental threads and feelings tie together, which not only keep you stuck in a life of addiction, but you keep sinking deeper and deeper.

Alcoholism Physical Health Side Effects

For a detailed description of how alcoholism destroys your physical health and can lead to life threatening diseases, you need to read about the alcoholism effects on body where you’ll find out how alcoholism can be directly attributed to be a major cause in heart disease, especially hypertention which has the potential to cause heart attacks and strokes; a range of cancers most notably liver cancer which usually develops from potentially fatal alcohol related cirhossis; and pancreatitis which is often a precursor to diabetes.

Then you’ve got other alcoholism physical symptoms like malnutrition, erectile dysfunction memory loss, not to mention all the side effects related to going through alcohol withdrawal when you stop drinking like getting the shakes and DT's, which have the potential to be fatal if you try to quit drinking or go cold turkey after drinking for a long time, making it crucial that you detox in a professional and supervised environment.

Side Effects of Alcoholism on Your Family

Alcoholism doesn’t just effect the alcoholic in isolation but it has a massive impact on the family as well, with alcoholism as a result often being described as a family disease. So having an appreciation of the alcoholism effects on the family is also critical because it can totally destroy every last fibre that binds a family together, leaving lasting scars for all those affected. So when it comes to healing from alcoholism, it’s not only the alcoholic who has to heal, but the affected family members as well.

Alcohol addiction destroys lives, families and communities - so the more we do to educate ourselves on the various side effects of alcoholism, and what it takes to successfully recover from it, the better all our lives will become.